Word: 1860s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...compacts" of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which members passed letters from hand to hand, adding a little more at each turn. David Sewell, an associate editor at the University of Arizona, likens netwriting to the literary scene Mark Twain discovered in San Francisco in the 1860s, "when people were reinventing journalism by grafting it onto the tall-tale folk tradition." Others hark back to Tom Paine and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers, or even to the Elizabethan era, when, thanks to Gutenberg, a generation of English writers became intoxicated with language...
...French deals with an incident in 1798, and Tenants begins with uprisings in the 1860s; the foreknowledge of history merely colors these works with an agreeable wash of irony. The End of the Hunt seems more tragic because the political failures it describes lead directly to the recent bloody decades, when the balladmakers have given up but the bombers are still at work...
...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 the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys...
...historian knows that crime waves, in fact, are cyclical. Earlier ones occurred in the 1830s, the late 1860s and the 1920s. The question is, What causes the cycles, and what affects their timing? Crime was abnormally low in the 1940s and 1950s and began to rise around 1963 and peaked in the late 1970s. The increase in crime from 1963 to 1980 was enormous -- and it occurred in a period of general prosperity. Part of the explanation is that the population got younger, because of the baby boom -- and younger men are more likely to commit crime than older ones...
Peter Svenson's Battlefield fulfills its image in the preface as "one small niche of Americana, peopled with real individuals and placed in a real setting." Splitting his narrative between the 1860s and 1980s, with several historical stops along the way, Svenson creates a personal and historical reflection. He tells essentially two stories while uniting them behind one central idea. Battlefield reminds us that real history exists beneath the "polemics." It may not put Cross Keys on the popular map of American History, but it does restore a sense of that history as a continuum of past, present and future...