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The American Renaissance was the progressive and uplifting sense of self-confidence that Americans had in the period ca 1880 - 1914, a feeling that the United States was the heir to Greek democracy, Roman law, and Renaissance humanism. The preoccupation with a national identity could be expressed by modernism and technology as well as academic classicism. It found its cultural outlets in both Prairie School houses and in Beaux-Arts architecture and sculpture, in the " City Beautiful" movement, and high-minded American interference in the internal affairs of other states. Americans felt that their civilization was uniquely the modern heir, and that it had come of age. Politically and economically, this era coincides with the the Gilded Age and the New Imperialism.

The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893 was a demonstration that impressed Henry Adams, who was of the mind that in the future people would:

"talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St Gaudens, Burnham and McKay and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were quite forgotten."

— The Education of Henry Adams.

In the dome of the reading room at the new Library of Congress, Edwin Blashfield's murals were on the given theme, The Progress of Civilization.

The exhibition American Renaissance: 1876 - 1917 at the Brooklyn MuseumThe Brooklyn Museum located at 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, New York City, is the second largest art museum in the City and one of the largest in the United States. Opened in 1897, the Brooklyn Museum building is a steel frame structure built in the appe, 1979, encouraged the revival of interest in this movement.