The correct answers are: new inventions and technologies, a new understanding of the physical universe, changing roles and expectations for women.
Indeed, American modernism started pretty much at the same time that Europe Modernism, at the end of the 19th century. This was an era when a new understanding of the physical universe led to the fast development of new technologies that transformed human understanding of the physical world. Albert Einstein had discovered that Newton’s postulates on gravity were erroneous and he completely revolutionized science with his General Relativity theory. In America, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford further advanced technology and Industrialism. New technological inventions started improving the quality of life exponentially and the new technological society changed the way people lived and behaved.
The times also changed the way people thought, namely women. Several American feminists were at the forefront of the fight for women’s rights. Margaret Higgins Sanger was a pioneer of birth control. Emma Goldman fought for both women’s rights and worker’s rights. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns campaigned for the Nineteenth amendment to the Constitution that enshrined the right to vote for all American women in 1919.
All of these changes also changed art, architecture and literature. Classical figurative art gave way to abstract, modernist art. Architecture became functional and modern with the American Skyscraper. Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scoot Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and other started new forms form prose and poetry that emulated the changes in society, science and culture.
