At the advent of the twentieth century, America stood as the most prosperous nation in the world. William S. McKinley was well regarded as President; photographs replaced illustrations in newspapers, and coal was the fuel of choice. There was a strange amalgamation of old and new: horse and buggy and the automobile; covered wagon and locomotive. In Europe, modern art eschewed realism for the abstract, as Sigmund Freud challenged the way people thought about behavior. For those who could indulge in such pleasures, there was the phonograph, the theatre, and vaudeville entertainments. But by 1895, a new curiosity emerged that would slowly but surely inflict profound, controversial, and sometimes curious changes in the moral sensibilities, cultural life, and social order of human society. That new curiosity was the moving picture.

Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in a scene from the film The Silence of the Lambs.

The...