There were two technological innovations that profoundly changed daily life in the 19th century. They were both “motive powers”: steam and electricity. According to some, the development and application of steam engines and electricity to various tasks such as transportation and the telegraph, affected human life by increasing and multiplying the mechanical power of human or animal strength or the power of simple tools.

Those who lived through these technological changes, felt them to be much more than technological innovations. To them, these technologies seemed to erase the primeval boundaries of human experience, and to usher in a kind of Millennial era, a New Age, in which humankind had definitively broken its chains and was able, as it became proverbial to say, to “annihilate time and space.” Even the most important inventions of the 19th century that were not simply applications of steam or electrical power, such as the recording technologies of the photograph and the phonograph, contributed to this because they made the past available to the present and the present to the future.
The 1850 song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm,” written by Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., of the Hutchinson Family Singers, captured this sense that a unique historical rupture had occurred as a result of scientific and social progress:

Our fathers gave us liberty, but little did they dream
The grand results that pour along this mighty age of steam;
For our mountains, lakes and rivers are all a blaze of fire,
And we send our news by lightning on the telegraphic wires.

Apart from the technological inventions themselves, daily life in the 19th century was profoundly changed by the innovation of reorganizing work as a mechanical process, with humans as part of that process. This meant, in part, dividing up the work involved in manufacturing so that each single workman performed only one stage in the manufacturing process, which was previously broken into sequential parts. Before, individual workers typically guided the entire process of manufacturing from start to finish.

This change in work was the division or specialization of labor, and this “rationalization” (as it was conceived to be) of the manufacturing process occurred in many industries before and even quite apart from the introduction of new and more powerful machines into the process. This was an essential element of the industrialization that advanced throughout the 19th century. It made possible the mass production of goods, but it also required the tight reorganization of workers into a “workforce” that could be orchestrated in various ways in order to increase manufacturing efficiency. Individuals experienced this reorganization as conflict: From the viewpoint of individual workers, it was felt as bringing good and bad changes to their daily lives.

On the one hand, it threatened the integrity of the family because people were drawn away from home to work in factories and in dense urban areas. It threatened their individual autonomy because they were no longer masters of the work of their hands, but rather more like cogs in a large machine performing a limited set of functions, and not responsible for the whole.

On the other hand, it made it possible for more and more people to enjoy goods that only the wealthy would have been able to afford in earlier times or goods that had never been available to anyone no matter how wealthy. The rationalization of the manufacturing process broadened their experiences through varied work, travel, and education that would have been impossible before.

Fundamentalism, in the narrowest meaning of the term, was a movement that began in the late 19th- and early 20th-century within American Protestant circles to defend the "fundamentals of belief" against the corrosive effects of liberalism that had grown within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Liberalism, manifested in critical approaches to the Bible that relied on purely natural assumptions, or that framed Christianity as a purely natural or human phenomenon that could be explained scientifically, presented a challenge to traditional belief.

A multi-volume group of essays edited by Reuben Torrey, and published in 1910 under the title, The Fundamentals, was financed and distributed by Presbyterian laymen Lyman and Milton Stewart and was an attempt to arrest the drift of Protestant belief. Its influence was large and was the source of the labeling of conservatives as "fundamentalists."

Useful for looking at this history of fundamentalism are George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville: Unusual Publications, 1986), and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

Lately, the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" has expanded. This has happened in the press, in academia, and in ordinary language. It appears to be expanding to include any unquestioned adherence to fundamental principles or beliefs, and is often used in a pejorative sense. Nowadays we hear about not only Protestant evangelical fundamentalists, but Catholic fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Buddhist fundamentalists, and even atheist or secular or Darwinian fundamentalists.

Scholars of religion have perhaps indirectly contributed to this expansion of the term, as they have tried to look for similarities in ways of being religious that are common in various systems of belief. Between 1991 and 1995, religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby published a 5-volume collection of essays as part of "The Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago, which is an example of this approach. Appleby is co-author of Strong Religion (2003), also from the University of Chicago Press that attempts to give a common explanatory framework for understanding anti-modern and anti-secular religious movements around the world.

Sears Roebuck, like its competitor Montgomery Ward, built its business as a mail-order company. Consequently, many of its customers were farmers or at least lived far away from big cities. The majority of Sears Roebuck customers also ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

In the early 1920s, many of Sears Roebuck's rural mail-order customers wrote to the company asking them to set up a way for trappers to sell their furs. Beginning in late 1925, Sears Roebuck & Company, through the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services, began buying furs from independent, rural trappers. Trappers would mail packages of their prepared muskrat, mink, otter, raccoon, fox, badger, beaver, weasel, skunk, and opossum pelts to a Sears depot. At first there was only one in Chicago, but the company soon increased the number of depots around the country, including ones in Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Sears would grade the pelts and either promptly send the trappers a check or give them credit toward purchases from its general merchandise catalog. If the trapper was unsatisfied with the value Sears gave him, he could return the check and the company would return the furs. The vast Sears catalog carried a line of Victor, Oneida, and Gibbs traps, scents, and pelt stretchers, as well as firearms, ammunition, decoys, and a wide selection of farm equipment and supplies.

In this way, Sears Roebuck became one of the largest fur buying companies in the country. The trappers generally found the company's fur grading to be accurate and the prices paid to be fair, especially for good, large skins. The company had found a way to help their rural customers by giving them a market for their furs that was as close as their mailboxes. Farmers trapped for sport and recreation, but also to control the wildlife population that threatened their crops.

Sears Roebuck mailed more than 7 million copies of an annual publication, Tips to Trappers, a magazine of about 30 pages in length, written and edited by "Johnny Muskrat" (a trapper, as well as a Sears spokesman) "and his trapper friends."

Tips to Trappers had articles and photographs showing the best ways to find and trap animals and prepare their pelts, as well as letters from readers, techniques from renowned trappers, information on state trapping seasons and limits, news on the fur market, and instructions on how to prepare and mail pelts to Sears. Included in each issue were shipping tags for mailing packages to a Sears raw fur depot.

Sears Roebuck also ran the National Fur Show in different cities around the country each year from 1929 to 1958. Pelts that had been submitted to Sears depots during the year were judged at the shows and cash awards (and even new cars) were given for the "best prepared" pelts, regardless of their ultimate value. This helped promote and teach the company's suppliers and clients about the best ways to handle pelts.

Johnny Muskrat also had a regular radio show during the 1920s and 1930s on Sears' own Chicago-based radio station WLS ("World's Largest Store"), and then elsewhere in the country through station affiliates. He and his occasional trapper guest would talk about how to set traps, dry pelts, and other techniques. Muskrat also discussed fur market conditions, tips on camping and hunting, and pioneer life in general, as well as reading letters from his listeners.

Radio station WLS was the voice of the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, which Sears began in 1924 as a means to increase its outreach to American farmers. The programming on WLS was a mix of music and entertainment (such as its annual sponsorship and broadcast of the "National Barn Dance") designed to appeal to a rural audience, as well as regular shows for farm listeners that were devoted to growing, harvesting, and selling crops.

The Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation offered advice and instruction by mail to farmers and their wives who wrote to the company. The Foundation also supported rural agricultural agents, farmers' markets, cooperative associations, 4-H and FFV chapters, agricultural demonstration projects, and scholarships to agricultural colleges.

Sears Roebuck and Company's second president, during the 1920s and 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, was a true philanthropist who viewed the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation not just as a way to capture customers for Sears, but as a means to improve the lives of Americans living in rural communities. He was, for example, responsible for Sears' extensive support for Historically Black Colleges, especially in the South, and for the establishment of almost 5,000 schools for African American children in the region.

After 34 years in the fur buying business, Sears Roebuck decided in 1958 to focus on urban customers and retail stores, and so discontinued, among other things, the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services and the publication of Tips to Trappers.

Political, social, economic, and cultural forces were at work at the time, but Roosevelt's actions, undertaken consciously and intentionally, had important consequences as well.

The conventional wisdom that America was generally "isolationist" until the end of the 19th century has some severe limits. It is only true if it means that the United States was reluctant to become involved in European politics (as opposed to European business, manufacturing, and trade relationships, which the U.S. was not so reluctant to engage in, despite the imposition of protectionist tariffs).

The reluctance derived from the fact that European immigrants to America, from the very beginning, had often fled to escape Europe. For them, America was a place apart, free of the "entangling alliances" (Jefferson's phrase) of entrenched interests, monarchies, and religious restrictions. The idea was fortified by geography, with oceans separating the Old World and the New.

The problem with the idea of "American isolationism," however, comes when it is taken to imply that the policy of the U.S. during this time was "peace with each other and all the world" (as President Polk said during his inaugural address) or that it was guided exclusively by the simple desire not to interfere with other peoples' lives. If the U.S. relationship with North American indigenous peoples is not evidence enough to the contrary, its relationship with Mexico throughout the 19th century—well before the Spanish-American War—should demonstrate that the U.S. did not refrain from interfering with other peoples' lives or other country's policies or from exercising military power over them.

The Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War and the consequent abolition of slavery, appeared to justify the use of state power to impose solutions to social problems, to demonstrate that social progress could be engineered by the state. This was the essence of "Progressivism," and, as a political or social philosophy, it was a departure from the deep-rooted American suspicion of, and aversion to, a strong central state power. Progressives sought first to uplift and re-order America, but then turned their view outward, especially with the emergence of a popular view that the valued American pioneer "spirit" would diminish as the westward settling of the continent reached the Pacific Ocean.

The Progressives contemplated doing unto other lands what they were already doing to their own; or, as Mark Twain sarcastically put it, "extending the blessings of civilization to our brother who sits in darkness."

Nevertheless, if we limit ourselves to considering American actions overseas, then a sea change of sorts did occur toward the end of the 19th century. America deliberately fashioned itself into a formidable naval power. U.S. Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan encapsulated the rationale for this in his highly influential book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, published in 1890.

Not surprisingly, America's overseas reach was made possible by a large effort to expand and modernize the U.S. Navy, which began under President Chester A. Arthur in 1882, 16 years before the Spanish-American War. President Arthur also negotiated with the Kingdom of Hawaii the right to use Pearl Harbor as a coaling station for U.S. Navy ships.

It was also in 1882 that young Theodore Roosevelt published his first historical book, The Naval War of 1812. He was friends with Mahan and shared his view of the need for the U.S. to develop its navy. President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. He resigned the following year to fight in the Spanish-American War.

Counting the value of foreign commerce in the leading commercial nations from 1870 to 1890, the U.S. ranked 4th behind the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

From 1850 to 1890, the dollar value of U.S. total imports and exports rose from $318 million to $1.3 billion, an increase of 400 percent. As America's own industries grew in the 2nd half of the 19th century, the percentage of manufactured goods (as opposed to raw materials) exported also grew.

Just as important, America's direct investment overseas increased, placing more American businesses in situations in which they operated within local conditions around the world. These businesses dealt directly with local foreign markets, governments, labor pools, and raw material suppliers.

During this period, American business entrepreneurs in the Pacific and in Central and South America began to venture deeply into local political and even military affairs. Actions sometimes reached far beyond mere business activities, including the organization of "free lance" military expeditions called "filibusters" against governments in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

American companies, such as the United Fruit Company, came to own vast plantations in these countries and operated them as agricultural colonies. They often pressured the U.S., especially throughout the 1st half of the 20th century, to intervene militarily in countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti when their interests were threatened by local wars and revolutions.

The pattern of American commercial interests supported by American military power had already been set by the beginning of the 20th century. Hawaii was first annexed to the U.S. in February 1893, after immigrant businessmen and politicians from the U.S., including Sanford Dole (his cousin James would become the "Pineapple King") ousted the Hawaiian royalty, with the backing of U.S. diplomats and soldiers. The annexation was withdrawn, but was re-instituted under President McKinley in 1898, with an eye toward using Hawaii as a naval base in the Pacific to fight Spain in Guam and the Philippines.

In the Spanish-American War of 1898, naval power was decisive to the U.S. victory. Quasi-colonial competition between the U.S. and Spain was one factor in the war, as well as an ambivalent notion in the U.S. that it was expelling Old World domination (Catholic and monarchical) from the New World. This in theory helped to free the hemisphere for democratic revolution and republicanism, while at the same time advancing U.S. economic and political power over the same region.

The end of the war saw the U.S. emerge as a fully-fledged, although ideologically conflicted, colonial power. That ideological conflict regarding the destiny and direction of American foreign policy would continue through the 20th century. This new era of foreign involvement was underway before Theodore Roosevelt held any national elected office.

Practically speaking, of course, the U.S. had no way to become militarily entangled in Europe—even if it had wished to—until it had a navy and commercial fleet capable of protecting its own shores, but more importantly, capable of transporting troops and supplies across the Atlantic.

As the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1900 campaigning for McKinley's second term, Roosevelt publicly argued in favor of the annexation of the Philippines, contending that both the Philippines and the U.S. would benefit.

After McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Roosevelt became President, he built the "Great White Fleet," four battleship squadrons of new naval ships. He then dispatched them around the world from 1907-1909 on a mission of friendship and goodwill, but with a subtext of demonstrating that the U.S. had come of age as an international naval power.

Roosevelt also strengthened and extended the Monroe Doctrine in his 1904 address to Congress. He claimed that the U.S. had the right to intervene—to exercise "international police power"—in the economic affairs of Central American and Caribbean nations in order to stabilize them. This claim became known as the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine.

Roosevelt had wide support in the U.S. for his foreign policy bullishness, although strong and significant opposition existed against actions that appeared to be at odds with the country's own republican ideals.

He quickly recognized the legitimacy of Panamanian rebels to separate from Columbia, and he committed the U.S. to protect their independence. But this (and the U.S.'s negotiated lease for the Canal Zone) suggested an action quite at odds with the country's refusal to allow states to secede from the Union during the Civil War.

Roosevelt, however, was convinced that a canal would be built across the Isthmus of Panama and that the U.S. must control it. During the war, American ships fought in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Transferring the fleets from one ocean to the other meant sending ships around Cape Horn, a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming operation. When the canal was finished, thought Roosevelt, only if American controlled it, could the U.S. ensure its ability to defend both of its own coasts.

All of Roosevelt's actions fortified the outward-looking expansive trend in U.S. foreign policy. Roosevelt's decisions, such as undertaking the Panama Canal project and strengthening the Navy, had long term consequences for the U.S.

Trench warfare was not an innovation of World War I, but it was never so prevalent in any other war before or since.

One reason that World War I became a massive trench war on the Western Front was that western Europe was densely populated. The opposing armies in the west were so vast that they could be deployed across the entire European continent, forming a continuous front. Early in the war, the opposing armies engaged in mobile tactics in an effort to outflank each other, but were countered as opposing troops were brought in to extend their lines.

Throughout late 1914, after the first battle of the Marne, units of the opposing sides were deployed north and south of the already-entrenched armies and attempted to outrace each other and, in so doing, to turn their enemies' flank before the extending lines reached the sea. These attempts resulted in a series of battles, but neither side achieved a decisive breakthrough. From that point, the war on the Western Front devolved into filling in gaps in the lines, fortifying them, and experimenting with new tactics and weapons in order to break through.

The trench lines had the effect of turning Western Europe into two fortresses whose armies laid siege to each other along a single border.

In the east, the geography worked against entrenchment. The battle lines were much longer and the ground was harder. Trenches were more difficult to dig, and they could not be easily defended because forces could not be deployed along vast distances without making defensive lines easy to break. In the west, railroad lines were well established and could be used to shuttle forces back and forth rapidly in order to meet challenges along the front, but the transportation infrastructure in the east was much less developed.

The other reason that trench warfare dominated the conflict in World War I had to do with technological developments in weaponry, communications, and transportation, whose net effect was to strengthen the ability to conduct defensive operations and to make successful offensive operations much more difficult.

In previous wars, massed infantry and cavalry forces advanced or defended against each other across open ground. The small arms and other field weapons that had been available could certainly inflict losses on an advancing force as it came into range, but with enough men and horses, an advancing commander could hope to reach the defending army's lines and overwhelm them.

By World War I, however, small arms were much more lethal. They could fire accurately at far greater distances and they could be fired much more rapidly. Soldiers were now equipped with bolt-action rifles, hand grenades, and machine guns, and their field artillery was equipped with high explosive shells. The advancing army could also be slowed through quickly deployed lines of barbed wire, or through the use of flamethrowers or poison gas.

The advancing army's movements could also be tracked more efficiently. Airplanes did this job, and details of opposing troop movements were relayed to line commanders by rapidly strung phone lines.

The result was that an attacking force could no longer have much hope of surviving an advance over open ground against a defending force, especially an entrenched one. The opposing armies therefore fell into defending their territories along roughly parallel lines separated by a lethal "no man's land" between them.

The technology and tactics that could break this stalemate were not fully developed until the very end of the war and so were not effectively employed until the outbreak of World War II. They resulted in the use of highly mobile offensive forces that integrated infantry troops with newly improved tanks and close air support. This allowed an attacking force either to penetrate a defender's lines or to bypass entrenched fortifications altogether.

Is this scene set in the Twilight Zone? According to historian Jon Butler, Huguenots died out as a distinct religious and ethnic group during the 18th century.

In the five years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, the Huguenot population in France declined from 1 million to less than 75,000, most of whom converted to Catholicism under duress. Huguenot emigrants traveled primarily to England, Germany, and Holland. Most of the Huguenots who arrived in British North America had emigrated first to England. Butler estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 Huguenots came to America by 1700.

The American Huguenots, like the Huguenot emigrants to European nations, quickly assimilated into their host communities. In Massachusetts, South Carolina, and New York, the colonies to which the majority of Huguenots migrated, many attained material success and married outside of their church. Butler blames the disintegration of Huguenot communities in part to “the indelible pathology of 17th-century French Protestantism,” as Huguenot clerics “were poorly prepared to exercise the instruments of church government in exile.” The French Protestant Church in the quarter century prior to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had existed in a weakened state due to the abandonment of national synods, which had left the group without “experience in making decisions beyond the local and provincial level.” Butler also notes that group cohesion in America was especially difficult because the size of the group that migrated was very small.

Sources from the 19th century repeat a story that Huguenots from South Carolina prepared a petition for Louis XIV asking permission to settle in Louisiana when it first was colonized at the end of the 17th century. Louis’ supposed response—that he wanted Louisiana as “a dominion of true believers not a republic for heretics”—is considered by historian Bertrand Van Ruymbeke as “most likely apocryphal.” Van Ruymbeke notes that Huguenots were allowed to migrate to Louisiana, but that the very few who did settle there had to convert to Catholicism.

Following the acquisition of the territory by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase, religious restrictions for immigrants to Louisiana were removed, and the first Protestant church in New Orleans was established in 1805. If a Protestant from France had immigrated to Louisiana in 1901, he or she would have found that large communities of Protestants from areas other than France had settled in the northern portion of the state, and that most of Louisiana’s inhabitants had remained Catholic.

Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was a small fishing community of approximately 300 residents during the period of the Wright experiments with kites, gliders, and manned aircraft between 1900 and 1908. Located on sandy and marshy beach terrain in the Outer Banks, a narrow strip of land separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Currituck and Albemarle Sounds, and the mainland of North Carolina across the sounds, Kitty Hawk was relatively isolated from much of the modern world.

The closest landing point across Currituck Sound, Point Harbor, was unreachable by large commercial vessels because of a sand bar. The nearest railroad station from Point Harbor was located some 38 miles north in the town of Snowden, where the Norfolk and Southern Railroad stopped. Elizabeth City, some 30 miles northwest up the Albemarle Sound and the connecting Pasquotank River, was known simply as "Town" to inhabitants of the Outer Banks and served as the nearest port town to buy consumer goods, connected as it was by rail with Snowden and points north.

One observer of life in the Banks in the 1880s noted that fishermen and employees of the coastal lifesaving stations often took furloughs during the off-season to "Town" for a fling, usually lasting a day or two, before returning home adorned with current accoutrements of modern life—"a new suit and some jewelry . . . Dyed mustaches, oiled hair, tin-types and [an] oiled shirt." By 1909, gasoline boats made triweekly trips between Point Harbor and Elizabeth City, with small schooners carrying freight and passengers on an occasional basis.

The landscape of Currituck County—in which the village of Kitty Hawk resided prior to its annexation to adjoining Dare County in 1919—was "covered with a growth of short leaf pine, oak, hickory, dogwood, holly, etc.," according to a guidebook published by the state in 1896. The coastal beach area was interspersed with sand dunes with gums and cypresses growing in the damp areas between the dunes, according to a 1912 essay on the physiology of the locality, a study which adds the following to the list of trees in the dunes area: maple, cedar, sassafras, elm, locust, beach, persimmon, and sycamore. After their earliest experiments just outside Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers moved a few miles south to Kill Devil Hills to take advantage of sandy beach terrain replete with shifting dunes that reached heights of 100 feet or more from which they could launch their crafts.

There were more hogs than people in Currituck County, with the number of cattle, sheep, and horses about one-half, one-third, and one-fifth, respectively, the number of people, in addition to a smaller contingent of mules and goats. In a letter to his sister, Orville Wright observed, "You never saw such poor pitiful-looking creatures as the horses, hogs, and cows are down here." By contrast, he noted, "The only things that thrive and grow fat are the bedbugs, mosquitoes, and wood ticks."

Prior to the Wright Brothers fame, Kitty Hawk was noted to the outside world primarily for three reasons: the treacherous nearby Atlantic shoals that posed a threat to passing ships during the violent storms that hit the coastal areas with marked frequency in late summer and fall; the village's lifesaving and U.S. Weather Bureau stations, part of a string of such facilities along the coast that alerted residents and ships in the vicinity of threatening storms and rescued shipwrecked vessels, in addition to collecting and transmitting data on weather conditions; and as an attractive spot for wealthy sports fishermen and hunters of waterfowl.

Numerous shipwrecks occurred over the years near Kitty Hawk, the most well known being that of the war steamer, the U.S. Huron, which ran aground near Kitty Hawk on November 24, 1877 during a hurricane. More than 100 officers and men died in the accident, including crew from the Kitty Hawk lifesaving station. Established in 1874, the station had not been properly manned at the time of the accident because funds appropriated that year by Congress for the operation of stations had not been sufficient and stations in Virginia and North Carolina were temporarily closed.

Shortly thereafter, new telegraph lines were run from Kitty Hawk to other North Carolina stations and a post office was established in the village. In 1900, the year that the Wright Brothers arrived in Kitty Hawk, 15 men living in the vicinity were listed in the U.S. Census as surfmen working 10 months annually for the lifesaving service, with the station keeper employed the entire year.

During the late 1850s, Kitty Hawk Bay, along with the whole of the Currituck Sound, began to acquire a reputation among wealthy northerners as a "Mecca for Sportsmen," in the words of a headline in a Washington, DC newspaper a half century later. After the Civil War, the number of private shooting clubs located along the water and marsh fronts of the sound increased to at least 25, with members arriving during the summers from New York, New England, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. They bought or leased beach fronts and islands, and acquired the exclusive right to hunt and fish in adjacent waters.

The Kitty Hawk Bay Sportsmen's Club, formed around 1881, soon became "a monster affair," according to Forest and Stream magazine, spending "large sums of money to acquire "all the desirable points" in the vicinity. The club posted the lands and patrolled them, threatening arrest and rigorous prosecution of local hunters or other poachers. Forest and Stream, which praised the club as a model for its orderly endeavors, charged that during October 1880, thousands of canvas back and redhead ducks had been slaughtered by "natives and market-shooters" only to decompose in barrels before they reached a commercial market.

The magazine viewed the onset of private hunting clubs "as a progressive and timely movement toward the preservation of our choicest varieties of wild fowl and the rarer species of game fish." The clubs functioned, in addition to "afford hunters and anglers rare sport, combined with opportunities for mental repose and bodily invigoration so much needed by the overworked in all our large cities." By October 1881, the Kitty Hawk Club, which most likely was located across the bay from the village of Kitty Hawk, reportedly controlled 300 miles of waterfront and more than 200,000 acres of land.

The "shooting club system," as the newly organized way of hunting came to be known, was responsible for the employment of local residents as employees. Although "plain, everyday sportsmen . . . seldom obtain the privilege" of hunting and fishing on posted property, a 1902 article noted, some local hunters found work as superintendents of the clubs. In October 1881, the Kitty Hawk Club hired about 30 local hunters as waiters and boatmen. In the 1900 U.S. Census, four heads of household living in the vicinity were identified by occupation as "Hunter of Wild Fowl."

Despite the threats of arrest for poaching, Orville Wright indicated that the people living in Kitty Hawk "pay little respect to what few game laws they have." Local historian David Stick related that commercial hunting by locals became "widespread toward the end of the nineteenth century" and remained so until the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 prohibited the sale of migratory waterfowl. William J. Tate, the Wright Brothers' most important contact in Kitty Hawk, believed that in 1911 some 350 to 400 people in Currituck County hunted for a living.

The poet Robert Frost, as a 19-year-old, joined a group of visiting wealthy hunters on a trip to the Outer Banks in 1894, recalling years later that the "rough crowd of—of gentlemen who had invited him "were drinking all the time . . . and shooting in all directions." Frost confessed being "afraid for my life." A short story published in Atlantic Monthly in August 1899 displayed the local hostility to interloping sportsmen with its description of a fishing boat as having been hired as a private yacht for the summer to "predatory tourists who annually invade the beautiful south tidewater regions, armed with rod, reel, and trolling line."

Tourists with more moderate incomes did not flock to the Outer Banks until after 1930, when the Wright Memorial Bridge connected Kitty Hawk with Point Harbor, and state highways were constructed south past Nag's Head leading to bridges that crossed Roanoke Sound and connected Roanoke Island with the mainland. Even with these improvements, the population of Kitty Hawk remained "fairly static" in the decades that followed at around 300 inhabitants.

The 1900 U.S. Census listed 66 households in Currituck County's Atlantic Township, where Kitty Hawk was located. Approximately 55 consisted of two-parent families. Fifteen of the households had no children. For families with children, the median number of offspring then living with their parents was three. Fifty-two households consisted solely of nuclear family members, while 14 housed extended family members, boarders, and in one case, a servant.

Forty-four families shared a surname with at least one other family in the township. The last name of Perry was most common, with nine households and 49 residents, nearly one sixth of the township, sharing that name. Four households were headed by women, all of whom were widows. The median age of male heads of households was 36; the median age of wives or widows was 30. Couples on average had been married 12 years.

The population was overwhelmingly homogeneous in origin. Only six of the inhabitants had been born outside of North Carolina, three of whom were from neighboring Virginia. Only one resident, a 67-year-old woman from England, was an immigrant. Of the rest, only two had a parent who had been born outside the state. Only one head of a household rented. All were white.

Kitty Hawk historian Bill Harris, whose ancestors had lived in the village when the Wright Brothers arrived, stated that while some families were descended from migrants to the area in the 1700s, many had arrived there only during the latter half of the 19th century. He noted that the community was divided by its main road into two sections: the "up the roaders" and the "down the roaders." The first group were Baptists, the second Methodists. Church, Harris related, was the "social center of the community." Each section, in addition to having their own church, had a school and general store.

Residents farmed and fished for the most part. Thirty of the households were listed as farms. Forty-two men worked as fishermen, most of them unemployed for seven months of the year. Five men were sailors, two were grocers, one a general store merchant, two were farm laborers, one a farmer, two were listed as carpenters, one as a physician, and one as a preacher. One of the widows was a dress maker. The Bureau of Labor Statistics of North Carolina 1899 report included only one business listing for the town of Kitty Hawk, the general merchandise store.

Forty-four adults over the age of 21 could not write and 37 could not read. Forty children attended school from one to eight months of the year, with four months the average length. Public schools were free to all children between the ages of six and 21, but not compulsory. At least one school per district was to be maintained for at least four months a year. They were segregated by race, according to the law, which insisted "there shall be no discrimination in favor or to the prejudice of either race."

The lack of a law making school attendance compulsory had become a political issue by that time in North Carolina as well as elsewhere in the South. Parents who objected to such a law argued that it was their right, not the state's, to make decisions concerning their children's education, and many citizens opposed raising the taxes that would be needed to support compulsory education. In 1902, the state superintendent of public instruction reported that more than half of the several hundred schools that had been allocated money in order to keep them open for four months had less than 65 students.

Reformers, including a manufacturers' organization and a child labor committee, pushed for some sort of compulsory school law. In 1902, the State Commissioner of Labor and Printing published a report in which he advocated a law permitting school districts, townships, or counties to adopt a compulsory school law by a majority vote. The report noted that 80% of those queried favored a compulsory school law and included a letter from a school committeeman in Colington, a community across Kitty Hawk Bay, who attested that while his community had hired good teachers in the past, without a compulsory law, they had been hamstrung in their efforts.

The committeeman reported that "for the first few days they have a good attendance and then they begin to drop off until there is scarcely enough to call roll for." Without a law to force children to attend school, he contended, "we might as well have no school." He charged that "not more than one third of the inhabitants in my community can read and write, and the rest are indifferent as to whether their children go to school or not."

In 1907, the North Carolina legislature passed a measure that gave each school district the right to vote for compulsory school laws applying to their own community, in addition to a law that disallowed employment by children under the age of 13 unless they had attended school for four of the preceding 12 months. In July 1919, a statewide compulsory school law took effect that required every child between ages of eight and 11 to attend school for a term of six months each year. In 1924, residents in the Kitty Hawk school district voted for a $7,000 bond issue to build a new combined grammar and high school.

Residents in the area made attempts to mitigate their state of relative isolation from markets elsewhere in the state and country. In 1909, 71 farmers, fishermen, and merchants in Point Harbor petitioned the Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the channel in the sound so that steamboats could enter their harbor and thus "put us in touch with the commercial world." The petitioners characterized the area as "strictly a trucking section, and, as you know, truck (early fruits and vegetables) must be marketed in season or else it is a total loss."

Smaller boats that could enter the harbor were "inadequate to move our truck and only about one-thirty-sixth of our available trucking land is utilized," they argued. In addition, the residents complained that "fishermen often suffer great loss on account of faulty transportation." With an adequately deepened channel, the petitioners speculated, the Norfolk and Southern Railroad would be inclined to extend a branch of their line to Point Harbor in order to compete with water transportation for their business. The Army Chief of Engineers, however, concurred with a report by a major of the Corps "that this locality is not worthy of improvement by the General Government."

Letters that the Wright Brothers wrote from Kitty Hawk offered personal observations about the life of the people they met there. Upon his arrival in the fall of 1900, Wilbur Wright noted that residents "attempt to raise beans, corn, turnips, etc." on land that "is a very fine sand with no admixture of loam that the eye can detect." He noted, however, "Their success is not great but it is a wonder that they can raise anything at all." Wright observed, "The people make what little living they have in fishing. They ship tons & tons of fish away every year to Baltimore and other northern cities."

With regard to living conditions, Wilbur Wright described the house of William J. Tate—whom he identified as the postmaster, notary public, and county commissioner of Currituck County—as "a two-story frame with unplanned siding, not painted, no plaster on the walls, which are ceiled with pine not varnished." Tate, Wright related, "has no carpets at all, very little furniture, no books or pictures." Putting Tate's dwelling into the context of the community, Wright judged, "There may be one or two better houses here but his is much above average." Regarding wealth and income, Wright observed, "A few men have saved up a thousand dollars but this is the savings of a long life. Their yearly income is small. I suppose few of them see two hundred dollars a year." Despite the paucity of income, Wright concluded, "I think there is rarely any real suffering among them."

The community seemed resistant to consumer culture. Orville reported that "Mr. Calhoun, the groceryman," a man who had come to the area to recover his health, "is striving to raise the tastes of the community to better goods, but all in vain. They never had anything good in their lives, and consequently are satisfied with what they have. In all other things they are the same way, satisfied in keeping soul and body together." Calhoun soon sold his store, calling his decision to come to Kitty Hawk "the greatest mistake of my life." Wright stated that Calhoun had not been "greatly beloved by Kitty Hawkers."

The "Bankers," William Tate later wrote in a reminiscence, were a "practical, hard-headed lot who believed in a good God . . . a hot hell . . . and, more than anything else, that the same good God did not intend man should ever fly!" Prior to their arrival in Kitty Hawk, Tate had assured Wilbur Wright that he would find "a hospitable people when you come among us." The Wrights indeed found the people to be "friendly and neighborly," as Wilbur reported. Orville agreed, noting to his sister that "Every place we go we are called Mr. Wright."