Word: 1830s
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...mothers. But as industrialization began to separate home and work, fathers could not be in both places at once. Family life of the 19th century was defined by what historians call the feminization of the domestic sphere and the marginalization of the father as a parent. By the 1830s, child-rearing manuals, increasingly addressed to mothers, deplored the father's absence from the home. In 1900 one worried observer could describe "the suburban husband and father" as "almost entirely a Sunday institution...
Travel too was also incredibly faster. The first primitive railroads started here and there in the 1830s, but during the '40s, "railroad mania" had kicked in--four times as much track was laid in 1848 as the year before. Everyone spoke of the resulting "annihilation of time and space," and in a journal called the Quarterly Review a writer predicted that "as distances [are] thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city...
...1830s, evidence began to accumulate that the extended solitude was leading to emotional disintegration, certainly in higher numbers than in communal prisons. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, deploring solitary confinement for the "semi-fatuous condition" in which it left prisoners. The case was narrow enough that its effect was merely to overturn a single law in a single state, but the court's distaste for the idea of solitary was clear. "The justices saw it as a form of what some people now call no-touch torture," says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history...
...some social disapproval. In fact, opium, in the form of laudanum, was in widespread use, and cough mixtures including a little of it could be bought over the counter in England as late as the 1950s.The Chinese government’s own attitude seemed ambivalent. Even in the later 1830s, the emperor’s advisers were divided between enforcing prohibition and legalizing, regulating, and taxing opium imports. Only in 1839 did the emperor opt for a strict prohibition, sending the admirable Commissioner Lin to Canton to see to it. Lin ordered the surrender of every last ounce of opium...
...later said, that the "leading object" of government was to "lift artificial weights from all shoulders--to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all--to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life." When a depression hit the state in the late 1830s, however, his plans were stopped in midstream. As a major proponent of the costly system that had contributed to his state's travails, Lincoln received a significant share of the blame. Now, beyond sadness over a lost love, he carried the added burden of a damaged reputation and forlorn hopes...