Lesson 39. The Arts and the Press

• Art, music, and writing flourished during the Gilded Age.
• Wealthy Americans desired to fill their homes with art and music, and show off their libraries.
• Their wealth led to more attention to the finer things in life.

Art

• Portraiture was a popular art form.
• Wealthy families commissioned portraits to preserve the memory of family members.
• Portraits were expensive and required the subject to sit still for hours.
• John Singer Sargent was a successful American portrait painter who lived in Europe.
• Sargent captured the thoughts and feelings of his subjects.
• Sargent painted portraits of John D. Rockefeller and President Theodore Roosevelt.
• Mary Cassatt grew up in Pennsylvania and studied art in Europe.
• Cassatt's paintings often depicted mothers and children.
• Winslow Homer was known for painting scenes from everyday life.
• Homer's work included children at school and play, country life, and coastal scenes.
• Louis Tiffany created stained-glass objects.
• Tiffany's mosaics and lampshades decorated wealthy homes.

Music

• Americans enjoyed various styles of music during the Gilded Age.
• Edward MacDowell wrote classical piano music, including "To a Wild Rose."
• Antonín Dvořák, a composer from Hungary, taught music in America.
• Dvořák wrote a symphony called From the New World.
• "From the New World" premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York.
• Marching music was also popular.
• John Philip Sousa wrote marches in the 1890s.
• "The Stars and Stripes Forever" is still a popular song.
• Ragtime became popular in the late 1800s.
• Ragtime combined classical music with African American music styles.
• Scott Joplin, a Black composer, wrote many ragtime songs.

Writing

• The Gilded Age is named after a book of the same name co-written by Mark Twain.
• Mark Twain wrote novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
• Louisa May Alcott's novels Little Women and Little Men also rose to fame.
• Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of poems.
• Very few people knew about her poems until after her death in 1886.
• Dickinson's poems are considered some of the greatest American poetry ever written.

Newspapers

• The press was powerful during the Gilded Age.
• People generally believed what they read in newspapers.
• Two New York newspapers became known for mixing fiction with news.
• Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst owned the papers.
• They each aimed to sell the most papers
• They embellished stories to make them more exciting.
• Sometimes, false reports in the papers hurt people.
• Newspapers helped raise money for important causes.
• Pulitzer raised over $100,000 toward a stand for the Statue of Liberty.
• The first comic strips were also published in newspapers in 1896.