Word: mid-19th
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...nearly 150 years, ever since a women's magazine called Godey's Lady's Book began championing the cause of an annual day of Thanksgiving, the topic has been drowning in a syrupy sea of treacle. Almost every Thanksgiving cliche was in place by the mid-19th century: snow-thatched New England farmhouses, menus of turkey and cranberry sauce, families bowing their heads in grateful prayer, and wayward children dramatically returning home for the occasion. Even Abraham Lincoln in ushering in the modern national Thanksgiving holiday could not rise above what a latter-day President might call "the banality mode...
...missionary spirit has always hovered over the U.S.'s relations with far- off, backward lands. In the mid-19th century, New England ministers went abroad to save souls. A century later, foreign aid technocrats preached the virtues of hydroelectric dams and other megaprojects. Now a new generation of globe-trotting officials is spreading the gospel of environmentalism...
...mid-19th century, the modern world was taking shape, in some respects the shape that photography gave it. The new art form fostered the trend by which the antique notion of fame was supplanted by the more salable idea of celebrity. And in the great age of imperial expansion, the camera was just the tool to bring home views of the exotic places that had been gathered in by the Western powers...
Since the 1960s we have had extraordinary freedom in this country, and we are seeing the good and the bad sides of the same coin. We've had tremendous prosperity. In many ways we have fulfilled the dream of the old utopian societies of the mid-19th century. But the other side of the coin of prosperity is money fever and the vanity that is the undoing of all the characters in Bonfire...
Based on Levine's account, the answer, in part, seems to be that American cultural behavior was genuinely different in the early to mid-19th century. Urban workers did spend their free time listening to theater performances which included magic tricks, physical comedy and Shakespearean soliloquys. Bands larger than current ensembles but smaller than full-fledged orchestras would perform both classical music and popular ditties. In the case of Shakespeare, Levine cleverly demonstrates how well people knew the Bard's works by providing examples of the careful, complex parodies of Shakespeare's plays that were performed in the mid-19th...