Word: 1860s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...judgment, please do your homework. Ask the Chinese in Nanjing and the Jews of Poland and Russia what they thought of the 1930s, the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the 1940s, the U.S. soldiers in the Hanoi Hilton of the 1960s - not to mention all Americans of the 1860s - and the list goes on. Philip Katz Rockville Centre...
Demonstrations such as these against the nation's military adventures have cropped up at nearly every important conflict in U.S. history. The Peace Democrats of the 1860s became pejoratively known as Copperheads - after a Southeastern snake that attacks without warning - for their opposition to the Civil War. Peace Democrats were mainly recent settlers of the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana and Illinois) with Southern roots and an interest in maintaining the Union, and they made common cause with Northern groups who opposed emancipation and the draft. The antidraft riots of 1863 - dramatized in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York...
...miniseries starts in the mid - 19th century, when nature lovers began urging that the expanding nation set aside areas of wilderness to remain undeveloped and unspoiled. Their cautionary tale was Niagara Falls, which by the 1860s was "almost ruined" - overrun by hucksters and tourist traps, with nearly every good view privately owned. Unless the government acted, advocates like naturalist John Muir warned, Yosemite and Yellowstone would end up the same way. "To Europeans," reads narrator Peter Coyote, Niagara "was proof that the United States was still a backward, uncivilized nation...
...differentiate it from vegetable oil or animal fat) was sopped up with rags, wrung out and peddled as a cure for everything from headaches to deafness. Spurred by demand for lamp fuel as whale blubber grew scarce, derricks popped up all over Pennsylvania's oil region in the 1860s, although subsequent overproduction drove prices so far down that at one point, a wooden barrel was worth twice as much as the oil it contained, according to Daniel Yergin's definitive tome on oil, The Prize...
...wretched refuse she allows in the door, but Americans haven't always been so hospitable. Immigrants from Ireland landed in the U.S. in the 1850s only to find shop windows festooned with signs reading "No Irish Need Apply." The Chinese toiled to build our transcontinental railroad in the 1860s only to see the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act signed in 1882, suspending further immigration. The unwritten rule was simple: pretty much anyone was welcome, except the newest group - or at least the one arriving in the greatest numbers - who would have a harder go of things...