This article introduces and demonstrates a new conceptual approach to turn-of the twentieth-century US culture. It takes seriously the historiography of the last 40 years, which has foregrounded the way that the experience of rapid historical change differed according to the race, class and gender position of those involved. Instead of the standard and longstanding ‘cultural crisis’ model, it proposes a nuanced and theoretically rigorous model of ‘modernity’ as a temporal and spatial category that can bring together diverse experience, without reducing that diversity to either the lowest or highest common denominator.