Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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American museums in the 1840s were not like their sophisticated counterparts in Paris or London. They did not exhibit fine works of art and science. Instead they featured stuffed birds and animals, mammoth bones and skeletons, along with the portraits of famous Americans. Europeans who visited were appalled by the poor taste of the American public, much as they are now reacting to the phenomenon of Court TV. The American public, however, reveled in its entertainment. As Professor Neil Harris explains in his biography of Barnum, American society was extremely puritanical and viewed the theater with antipathy. It infected their...
Kimball's mermaid proved to be another huge success for Barnum. In the 1840s, Barnum apparently stumbled upon the mermaid. In reality, Barnum worked for weeks to prepare his New York audience for the arrival of the creature...
...McCarthy brought out Blood Meridian, an apocalyptic epic, his Moby Dick, about a scalp hunter in the 1840s; to read it is to say goodbye to peace. Few did read it. McCarthy continued to live close to the bone in El Paso, a close-to-the-bone kind of town, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico. He golfed, shot pool, ate modest portions of simple food at a cafeteria nearby and at a clattery coffee shop, hung with a couple of lawyers, an artist, an academic and a Nobel-prizewinning physicist next door in New Mexico, saw some...
...social life. At 17, he enrolled at West Point where he studied military leadership with many other future generals of the Civil War, including both Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. With a number of his former classmates, Longstreet gained real battlefield experience in the Mexican War during the 1840s. As the Civil War broke out in 1861, Longstreet, like Lee and other Southern officers, recognized his primary allegiance to the South and resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederacy...
...bias. (Curiously, it was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census took note of where Americans were born.) Apart from slaves, Asians (principally the Chinese) suffered most from this prejudice. Seeking fortune and escape from the turmoil of the Opium Wars, Chinese first began arriving in California during the 1840s. Initially, they were welcomed. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese were working in the state's gold fields, many of them as prospectors. As the ore gave out, former miners were hired to build the Central Pacific Railroad; others dug the irrigation canals that poured fertility -- and prosperity -- into...