Perhaps the best known fictional nineteenth-century American engineer is Hank Morgan, the main character in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Heroes in the culture, of course, become heroes in literature as well, and while the town-taming sheriff and the Indian fighter are among the most obvious cultural heroes who made the transition from real life to American popular literature in the late nineteenth century, the engineer made that transition as well. Such men, for most of them were men, carried the Industrial Revolution forward in western Europe and North America in particular. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the inventor and, especially, the mechanical engineer were heroic figures in the American cultural worldview.
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May 2023
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