Ever-increas­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, rapid tech­no­log­i­cal change, the cre­ation of dom­i­nant cor­po­ra­tions con­trolled by a small busi­ness elite, politi­cians in the pock­et of big busi­ness lead­ers, and the rise of pop­ulism and nativism. These are all fea­tures of Amer­i­can life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in the Gild­ed Age, which ran from the 1870s through the late 1890s. Above, we have a free two-hour doc­u­men­tary on the Gild­ed Age cre­at­ed by PBS. They write:

In the clos­ing decades of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, dur­ing what has become known as the Gild­ed Age, the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States dou­bled in the span of a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion. The nation became the world’s lead­ing pro­duc­er of food, coal, oil, and steel, attract­ed vast amounts of for­eign invest­ment, and pushed into mar­kets in Europe and the Far East. As nation­al wealth expand­ed, two class­es rose simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, sep­a­rat­ed by a gulf of expe­ri­ence and cir­cum­stance that was unprece­dent­ed in Amer­i­can life. These dis­par­i­ties sparked pas­sion­ate and vio­lent debate over ques­tions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best dis­trib­uted, and by what process? Does gov­ern­ment exist to pro­tect pri­vate prop­er­ty or pro­vide balm to the inevitable casu­al­ties of a churn­ing indus­tri­al sys­tem? Should the gov­ern­ment con­cern itself chiefly with eco­nom­ic growth or eco­nom­ic jus­tice? The bat­tles over these ques­tions were fought in Con­gress, the courts, the polling place, the work­place and the streets. The out­come of these dis­putes was both uncer­tain and momen­tous, and marked by a pas­sion­ate vit­ri­ol and lev­el of vio­lence that would shock the con­science of many Amer­i­cans today. The Gild­ed Age presents a com­pelling and com­plex sto­ry of one of the most con­vul­sive and trans­for­ma­tive eras in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.

To a cer­tain degree, this doc­u­men­tary will help you make bet­ter sense of our own fraught times and per­haps feel more opti­mistic about where we might end up. (It’s worth keep­ing in mind that the dis­rup­tions of the Gild­ed Age even­tu­al­ly gave way to the reforms of the Pro­gres­sive Era.) What’s more, if you’re watch­ing the excel­lent HBO series, The Gild­ed Age, the film pro­vides his­tor­i­cal back­ground that will direct­ly add to your appre­ci­a­tion of the show. You can watch the film online above, or find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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From today’s van­tage, the first decade of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry can look like an even more dis­tant peri­od of his­to­ry than it is. In many cor­ners of urban civ­i­liza­tion, the cabarets, tea­rooms, and oth­er near-par­a­lyt­i­cal­ly man­nered insti­tu­tions of the Belle Époque were very much going con­cerns. To those who lived in that era, it must have been easy enough to believe that the ways of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry-style aris­toc­ra­cy and empire could per­pet­u­ate them­selves for­ev­er. Yet those were also the years of Georges Méliès Le Voy­age dans la Lune, the Wright broth­ers’ first flight; the pro­lif­er­a­tion of auto­mo­biles and sub­way trains; Rus­si­a’s loss in war to Japan and first rev­o­lu­tion; Ein­stein’s dis­cov­ery of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, and Brown­ian motion; and Picas­so’s Les Demoi­selles d’Av­i­gnon.

The world as it was, in oth­er words, was giv­ing way to the world as it would be. Such is the con­text of the doc­u­men­tary footage col­lect­ed — and col­orized, and upscaled — in the video at the top of the post. Begin­ning in a bustling work­ing-class street in Hollinwood, Eng­land, this tour of the nine­teen-hun­dreds con­tin­ues on to places like Spain, India, Chi­na, New York, Japan, Brazil, Den­mark, Aus­tria, and Ger­many.

One aspect of all this footage liable to catch the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry eye is all the myr­i­ad forms of trans­porta­tion on dis­play, some run­ning on sole­ly ani­mal or even human mus­cle, and oth­ers pro­pelled by the kind of engines then at the heart of indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions the world over. (You can even catch a glimpse of Wup­per­tal’s sus­pend­ed Schwe­be­bahn, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

All this gives us a clear­er sense of why so many con­tem­po­rary observers expressed feel­ings of civ­i­liza­tion­al whiplash, espe­cial­ly if, as was becom­ing more and more com­mon, they’d emi­grat­ed from a less tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced soci­ety to a more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced one. For those liv­ing at the edge of progress, the shape of things to come (a phrase lat­er used as a book title by one such observ­er, the pro­lif­ic H. G. Wells) was any­one’s guess, and it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that so many for­ward-look­ing philoso­phies, ide­olo­gies, and art move­ments would arise from such a fer­ment. Still, it would have tak­en a pre­scient mind indeed to fore­see the ascen­dance of com­mu­nism, Nazism, the Amer­i­can empire, and mass broad­cast media just ahead, to say noth­ing of two world wars. William Gib­son had yet to be born, let alone to utter his now-famous quote, but as we can see, the future was already here in the nine­teen-tens — and uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.