Lost America: Everyday Life In the United States, 1890-1920

What was it really like to live in America before automobiles, radio, movies, and electricity transformed everyday life?

Lost America: Everyday Life in the United States, 1890-1920 opens a window onto a world that has almost completely disappeared.

Step inside an American home before the day began with the flip of a switch. Walk into the neighborhood general store, wait for the ice man, gather around the family piano, and spend a summer evening on the front porch. Follow a newsboy through crowded streets. Leaf through the Sears catalog. Watch the hometown nine take the field. Stop at the soda fountain, attend a traveling Chautauqua, peer into a penny arcade, hear a talking machine for the first time, and join the crowds heading downtown on Saturday night.

Then watch that world begin to change.

Across three remarkable decades, horses shared increasingly crowded streets with automobiles. Electric lights pushed back the darkness. Recorded music entered the home. Vaudeville filled theaters, moving pictures found an audience, and conveniences once considered luxuries gradually became part of American life.

Richly illustrated with historic photographs, advertisements, newspaper clippings, sheet music, catalog pages, and other period material, Lost America reconstructs the ordinary experiences that rarely make it into traditional histories.

This is not a story of presidents and battlefields. It is the story of kitchens and porches, shops and streets, work and leisure-the places where Americans actually lived their lives.

The world of 1890-1920 can seem impossibly distant. But the people who inhabited it laughed, worried, worked, shopped, entertained themselves, raised families, embraced new technology, and wondered what the future might bring.

Their America is gone.

It may be closer than it seems.