nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of “big shoulders” beside Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. As Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood. “The American
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