A Death in the Family briefly alludes to America's emerging role as a world power. Other developments are explored more fully as the novel progresses: tensions between city and countryside in an increasingly urban society, and between secular and religious lifestyles in an age of growing skepticism. Behind these issues lay the backdrop of racial tension, as both blacks and whites in the South lived with the legacy that slavery had left on racial relations in the region.
Mass production. No single feature characterizes the modern world better than mass production, the use of standardized parts and techniques to make large numbers of inexpensive and identical consumer items. Quintessentially American, this method of manufacturing in fact had its roots in the American Revolution, when firearms were in such short supply that cheap and rapid ways of making them had to be devised. (When English firearms manufacturers adopted such techniques in 1855, they called them "the American method.") Pioneered by Eli Whitney and others, by the end of the nineteenth century mass production had become firmly established in American industry.
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