In New York City, the entertainment capital of America, a Broadway play about a seductive woman with many lovers provokes a debate about public morality. When its star and director, Olga Nethersole, is arrested and charged with violating public decency, her trial becomes a national sensation. Seeking to escape the poverty and squalor of the city's tenements, millions head West to work in Pennsylvania's coal fields, Pittsburgh's steel mills, Chicago's stockyards. On the morning of May 1, a violent underground explosion kills more than two hundred coal miners in Scofield, Utah. There are only eight thousand cars and less than ten miles of concrete roads, but there is no income tax.
Vacations are a new part of American life.
Trains filled with Northerners head south in wintertime, and huge trans-Atlantic steamers carry thousands of Americans to the Paris Exposition, where several exhibits tout the racial superiority of white colonial powers. Nowhere is the issue of race more explosive than in the South, home to nine out of ten black Americans. A rift opens between black leaders Booker T. Washington, who calls for a focus on economic development, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who advocates greater political power for African Americans. Scott Joplin, a young composer from Missouri, popularizes a new musical style called ragtime. In June, at the Republican Party Convention in Philadelphia, delegates cheer as war hero Theodore Roosevelt is nominated as McKinley's running mate.