Nineteenth Century America
1815: A Year in Review
This summer the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo dominated Historyland: a real life reenactment in Belgium, a real time reenactment on-line, thousands* of new books on the subject, and a gazillion Waterloo-related blog posts on topics as large as the Congress of Vienna and as small as false teeth. It was a big, flashy…
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From the Archives: Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Immigration Law of 1924
America has always been a nation of immigrants, fueled by a constant stream of those with the energy and imagination to leave the familiar in search of something more. And it has always had people who wanted to keep out the immigrants who came a generation or two after they themselves arrived. Between 1880 and…
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“Our Army Nurses”
About a million years ago, I wrote a study guide to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage for a reference book called The Literature of War. In the course of my research, I was introduced to the flood of material produced about the American Civil War some twenty or thirty years after it ended:…
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