This chapter places Pope in her 19th-century era and presents the major themes including immigration, westward expansion, the rise of industrial America, the growth of political democracy, women’s rights, temperance, public education, slavery, the Civil War, and more. The three periods of time—early, middle and late 19th century—show women’s advancement in the educational arena and their “call to teach.” The histories of Mount Holyoke and Oberlin are succinctly offered.
The Grant Monument, popularly known today as Grant's Tomb, was comparable in sheer size and costliness to only two other memorials erected in 19th-century America-the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. When General Grant died in the summer of 1885 it was anticipated that a shaft of some kind would be built over his grave. This had been the usual choice for the nation's major memorials in the post-Civil War period. The issue was widely debated and other suggestions were advanced. In an official competition for the monument in 1888/1889 a shaft was selected. The results of the competition were subsequently set aside and John Hemenway Duncan's very different proposal for a classical mausoleum was chosen in a second, decisive competition in 1890 (Fig. 1). The Grant Monument thus became the most significant of a growing number of memorials to be modeled after classical sources, indicating in part the development of more sophisticated architectural tastes, as well as the rising sense of nationalism in the last decades of the 19th century. Within this framework, classical monuments, with their aura of ancient glory, seemed to express forcefully and didactically the importance of the nation's heroes and the grandeur of its history.
Rapid changes in American society at the late 19th century bred social ills which required solving with the use of all available resources of the era. One of the tools, developed by the Children’s Aid Society of New York, was the “Orphan Trains” program. It focused on the “street Arabs,” poor kids of New York tenements who in large numbers were relocated to Midwestern farms to be Americanized, taught to work and saved from destitution. The scheme is viewed through its central metaphor of “home” which refers not only to the homes found for the orphans but also the homes of the emerging bourgeois class as well as the tenement dwellings. The work attempts to show that saving innocent victims tried in fact to ensure stability of American society at large as it addressed growing economic disproportions, grave shortage of labor on farms and a threat to American participatory democracy caused by influx of unskilled foreigners. Moreover, the scheme of relocation employed community based, self-help solutions which drew on the traditional American values of family, home and hard work and attempted to address new ills with well-established methods of indentured work. Simultaneously, it implemented modern ideas concerning childhood, child care or charity.
As the Civil War ended and U.S. leaders sought ways to reconstruct a devastated nation, many turned to westward expansion as a mechanism to give northerners and southerners a shared goal. Simultaneously, though, the abolitionists and activists who had fought long and hard for an end to slavery saw this moment as one for a new racial politics in the postwar nation, and their ideas extended to include Native communities as well. These two competing agendas came together in a series of debates and contestations in the late 19th century to shape the way the federal government developed policies related to Native landholding and assimilation. Far from a unified and direct movement across the 19th century, from removal to reservations to land allotment, Indian policy after the Civil War was characterized by intense battles over tribal sovereignty, the assimilation goals, citizenship, landholding and land use, and state development. During this era, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) became a meeting ground where policymakers and reformers debated the relationship between the federal government and its citizens and wards.
This study provides a historical examination of firearms in policing to understand how weapons have evolved within the American field. A search was conducted of historical newspaper databases and a small number of books and journal articles for information on the different firearms used in policing since their inception. The evidence demonstrates that US police officers have been using revolvers since the Civil War, but there were no agency standards until the late 19th century. The notion of ‘risk’ has been a consistent justification for arming police officers, including their possession of semiautomatic pistols, shotguns, and rifles.
‘Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans’: Convergence Culture and Periodical Culture in Late 19th-Century America