The point of today’s class was to drive home the enormity of the technological revolution that took place in the 19th century. Outside of reruns of Little House on the Prairie, it was good to realize how limited pre-industrial life was. Most people never left 30 miles outside the place they were born. That’s one thing to hear, another to understand. The same goes for diet. Well, obviously they were more limited than we are now. But thinking about it and realizing how much their diets depended on the weather, the seasons, and how monotonous and repetitious it was leaves one with a kind of hollow feeling. With mechanization, the world was more interconnected; people, and food, could travel. With physical travel came telephones and the transformation of communication. Suddenly time mattered; time zones were established because they were never needed previously. In under two generations, most people in the United States experienced a displacement of space and time around them.

A corollary to this point was the obsession with standardization. Clocks everywhere would be in perfect alignment. Life would be regimented, displaced after centuries of custom to fit in a newly industrial and punctual world. F.W. Taylor was mentioned, a fetish of turn of the century Progressives. By the late 1920s Taylorism had become unfashionable.