The Coffee Line

At the end of the nineteenth century, philosopher John Dewey was astonished by the transformations wrought in the span of a lifetime. The United States had gone from being a respectable manufacturing nation to an industrial powerhouse, surpassing the production of Britain, France, and Germany combined. In an 1899 lecture, published the next year in The School and Society, Dewey listed the...

DURING the first decade of the twentieth century, American art was brazenly flaunting its delusions of grandeur...

With urban growth, all of society had to revise its image. Traditional manners and conventions were turned on their head by the new living conditions of city dwell-ers, who had to entirely rethink their social relations ...