The first threshold in the chronicle of Americanism corresponds to the discovery of an already advanced industry by the confirmed chemist Dimitri Mendeleïev and the young structural engineer Vladimir Choukhov, often regarded as a Russian Gustave Eiffel. In 1877, they jointly visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and brought back enthusiastic reports urging their compatriots to stop focusing on England, France or Germany and look to America for models of industrial development. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and while technical, political and educational works such as those by Vladimir Korolenko and Ivan Ozerov were proliferating, the country's modernization relied on companies such as Singer and Westinghouse, while the Donbass mining basin seemed to represent this "new America", at once exhilarating and disquieting.
The contrast couldn't have been more radical with the reaction of Maxim Gorky, whose vengeful account of his disastrous 1905 trip across the Atlantic would long form the paradigm of anti-American discourse, the permanent double of celebratory attitudes.
In the more specific field of architecture, from 1880 onwards, professional journals regularly chronicled the development of American cities and the buildings they featured, starting with the first skyscrapers in Chicago and New York.
