"...nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900."

"The American boy of 1854," wrote Henry Adams in the early twentieth century, "stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900." With those words the historian described the cataclysmic intellectual and social changes that marked the four decades after the Civil War. Like many of his contemporaries, Adams imagined the late nineteenth century as the first truly modern age, distinguished from earlier eras by an almost unbreachable chasm of thought and practice."

-- The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 99.