Not unlike today.......................

       Nostalgic scribes would name it the Gay Nineties, the decade in which Napoleon Hill became aware of a world outside the mountains and valleys of Appalachia and Wise County.  But it was more a decade of growing pain than gaiety for America.  Like Napoleon, the country was lurching toward majority in uncoordinated spurts, different parts of her anatomy growing at different rates.  Like an adolescent, she was fueled with boundless energy and enthusiasm to compensate for a lack of experience.  Thus, through the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, America careened breathlessly forward from one unrecognized economic, social, and political barrier to the next dodging and leaping a few, crashing violently into many.

-Michael J. Ritt, Jr. and Kirk Landers,  A Lifetime of Riches:  The Biography of Napoleon Hill