Richardson's William James and American Modernism

My reading of Robert D. Richardson' biography of William James was interrupted by my trip to Los Angeles. The book was one of several I did not have room for on the flight now that airlines charge for baggage. Bummer.

William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience came out at the turn of the twentieth century. From Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism:

The world at the turn of the century was becoming mechanized. A Packard accomplished the first automobile trip across the United States, going from San Francisco to New York in fifty-two days. Electric trolleys began running on city streets, Henry Ford organized the Ford Motor Company, and Roosevelt intervened in a coal strike on behalf of the miners. Motor taxis appeared in London, and in North Carolina the Wright brothers made the first manned flight at Kitty Hawk. As if in protest, the first Tour de France bicycle race was held.

American music was changing. In 1903, when Picasso was in his blue period, a band leader named W. C. Handy heard a man at a train station in Mississippi playing slide guitar and singing what Handy called "the weirdest music I ever heard," soon to be called the blues. The dramatic contrast between the onrushing present and the fast-vanishing past struck Henry Adams, who polarized it in contrast between thirteenth-century worship of the Virgin and modern worship of the dynamo or generator. In 1902 the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium taht year, and the next year won the Nobel. Around that time Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Lein's What Is to Be Dne? were published. The Bolsheviks appeared in 1903, and the Russian Revolution began in 1905. Sun Yat-sen was stirring in China and organizing to expel the Manchus.

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asked the fifteenth-century poet Francois Villon. Modernity's cold response, it could be said, was formulated in 1905 by Einstein: E=mc2. Einstein's equation for the equivalence of mass and energy, and James's assertion of the equivalence of thought and thinker, forged, together with modern art and modern music, a new world, a world James both lived in and  helped bring about.

Very, very interesting.