Nineteenth Century America
From the Archives: Rural Free Delivery
Over the last several months, I have been working my way through a stack of “get out the vote” postcards: writing as legibly as possible. (Always a challenge for me.) Now I’m at the deadline and writing a little more quickly and a little less legibly. * Since I am under a bit of…
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The Wreck of the Sultana
On April 23, 1865, only a few weeks after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrender his troops to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, the steamship Sultana docked in Vicksburg. The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat—about two-thirds of the length of a football field and half as wide.* Built…
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From the Archives: The Mother Jones Monument
It’s Labor Day here in the United States. One of the things I do to celebrate is to share a post from the past about major players in the early American labor movement. I think it’s important to remember that the labor movement fought hard for many things we shouldn’t take for granted, like a…
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