Frédéric Chopin was a Polish composer and pianist of the early Romantic period who wrote almost entirely for solo piano. He left Warsaw in 1830, just before the November Uprising, and settled in Paris at 21. Instead of concert halls, he preferred the intimate atmosphere of salons, giving only about 30 public performances while earning a living from composing and teaching. His works include nocturnes, waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises, études and ballades, and he drew on Polish folk music as well as Mozart and Schubert. He expanded what the piano could do, with a sensitive and nuanced touch. His relationship with the writer George Sand and his early death at 39 made him a symbol of Romanticism.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.