Title: They were ragtime
Description: 1892-1917: some of the most nostalically remembered years in the American population's collective memory. The Gay Nineties, the prosperity of the pre-war twentieth century when the great industrial fortunes were growing, beer gardens and Gibson Girls, the elegance of the drawing room and the dash of Teddy Roosevelt are all recalled as the magic of an era when life had grace and charm and style. But the years called Ragtime were also shot through with social turbulence. They were the years of labor riots and anarchists' bombs and grisly murders that spattered blood on silks and velvets. They Were Ragtime leads you through the entire era with detail drawn from newspaper and magazine accounts, contemporary biographers and personal memoirs -- Emma Goldman's life as an anarchist with her beloved Sasha, Admiral Peary's trip to the Arctic, the reflections of Freud as he lays the foundations of modern psychiatry, the dramatic career and equally dramatic death of architect Standford White, Thorstein Veblen and Mary Baker Eddy, and the fortunes of the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and the Fords.
Subjects: Social life and customs, United states, social life and customs, United states, history, History
Places: United States
Time periods: 1865-1918