Phocion Howard Examines the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1873

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Saum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Black Hills ◽  
Pacific Railroad ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Northern Pacific ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Moment

Editor's note: In its October 2004 issue, this journal published a vivid account by Lewis Saum, the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century press, of the dispatches and misadventures of Chicago reporter James “Phocion” Howard during the Black Hills gold rush of 1875. A complete product of an age when news correspondents made no pretence of detachment and no effort to avoid becoming part of their stories, Howard, through what he wrote and what he did, was the sort of reporter who contributed mightily to the image of the post-Civil War era as a Gilded Age. This brief account follows Howard back a little in time, to 1873, when he was noisily bursting illusions along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad just at the moment when that line's bankruptcy hurled the country into its worst economic collapse in decades.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 234-242
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Calvo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Full Century

Summarizing the developments in nineteenth-century academic economics, this chapter draws comparisons and discovers new connections between America’s first full century of economists. German historical economics is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century protectionism and industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age. Parallels are found between antebellum and post–Civil War expressions of opposition toward finance. And special attention is paid to the evolution of conservative economics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately the ascendancy of laissez-faire capitalism in the conservative economic mind.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Civil War Era

The epilogue to the book gestures toward the destiny of enthusiasm in the post-Civil War era. In the wake of the trauma of war, the end of slavery, and the birth of a technologically-oriented culture of disenchanted realism, political enthusiasm no longer seemed necessary or viable. At the same time, the final lesson of Walt Whitman circa the centennial of the American Revolution is not so much that political enthusiasm has come to an end but that it must take on new, unheard-of forms specific to its historical era—in Whitman’s view, that meant a struggle for the rights of labor against the corruptions of capitalism (what he called the “tramp and strike question”). As one indication of how literatures of enthusiasm continued to operate in the late nineteenth century, the chapter discusses Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and Whitman’s contemporaneous interest in anti-capitalism. Enthusiasm is finally what Whitman calls the “latent right of insurrection,” a “quenchless, indispensable fire” in the convulsive context of political tyranny.

scholarly journals Book Review: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Historical Exploration of Literature

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Civil War Era

One of the latest volumes in ABC-CLIO/Greenwood’s “Historical Explorations of Literature” series, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a useful and interesting introduction to framing key literary works of this time period in their historical context. Each volume in the series presents a discussion of four or five representative works of a historical era, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicano Movement, the Jazz Age, and the Civil War Era.

Response to Rebecca Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Offense”

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-583
Author(s):  
Laura F. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil War Era

I applaud Scott's contributions. In this comment, I would like to take them up and push them further. Doing so points to a very different understanding of people's relationship to law and the legal system in the nineteenth century than is now current in much of the historiography. That perspective, I argue, can transform our understanding of the law and legal change in the Civil War era and in the nineteenth century more broadly.

Petersburg to Appomattox

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political History ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Moment

The last days of fighting in the Civil War's eastern theater have been wrapped in mythology since the moment of Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House. War veterans and generations of historians alike have focused on the seemingly inevitable defeat of the Confederacy after Lee's flight from Petersburg and recalled the generous surrender terms set forth by Grant, thought to facilitate peace and to establish the groundwork for sectional reconciliation. But this volume of essays by leading scholars of the Civil War era offers a fresh and nuanced view of the eastern war's closing chapter. Assessing events from the siege of Petersburg to the immediate aftermath of Lee’s surrender, Petersburg to Appomattox blends military, social, cultural, and political history to reassess the ways in which the war ended and examines anew the meanings attached to one of the Civil War's most significant sites, Appomattox. Contributors are Peter S. Carmichael, William W. Bergen, Susannah J. Ural, Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, William C. Davis, Keith Bohannon, Caroline E. Janney, Stephen Cushman, and Elizabeth R. Varon.

The Bible in the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Standard Mode ◽  
Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era expressed considerable certainty about how biblical passages applied to the dramatic contemporary events of 1861‒1865. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their often apocalyptic prognostications. As with the battle for the Bible in the slavery controversy, however, the standard mode of biblical exegesis for mid-nineteenth-century Protestants, common-sense realism, provided such a plethora of answers about the meaning of contemporary events that there was no clear answer. The Bible did not speak plainly. More than just about any theologian or minister, Abraham Lincoln understood that and articulated it in 1865.

Writing African American Migrations

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Jack S. Blocker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Future Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Philadelphia Negro

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois'sThe Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson'sA Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser'sSea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

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