Transcript Division, Reconciliation, and Expansion

 North-
Education, Banking, Science and
Reform movements
 South- Slow paced, Rural, with
Agricultural movements
 Controversy of slavery influenced the
literature of the day.
 Lincoln
elected, South Carolina and 6
others seceded from union to form
Confederate States of America.
 War lasts 4 years, North wins, 620,000
dead.
 Lincoln is assassinated on April 15, 1865
½
million farmers (including many
emancipated slaves) move west due to
Homestead Act
 Miners
moved west aided by completion
of Transcontinental Railroad in 1869
 1890-
Frontier seized to exist as
Westward expansion grew
 Native
Americans were forced into
territories set aside by Congress
 Electricity
sparked many new inventions
 Immigration increased the population by
15 million in just 20 years
 Many urban families were poor and had to
result to child labor, while some
Corporation owners made large fortunes.
 Mark Twain dubbed this the “Gilded Age”
 Laborers, African Americans, and Women
pushed for more rights and labor reforms.
 Slaves
developed a unique type of music
called “Spirituals”
 Frederick
Douglass published his
autobiography “Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass” that was also an
indictment of slavery
 Thousands
of Diaries, letters, and
journals were published from the war
 Many
of President Lincoln’s speeches and
letters were published such as the
Gettysburg Address
 As
westward expansion grew, more
literature was rising from the West and
Midwest
 Mark Twain
grew up in Missouri but
moved to Nevada during the civil war
 Not
all frontier writings for European
settlers, Mexican Americans also
published many songs and ballads.
A
reaction to romanticism that reflected
the harsh reality of frontier life and the
author’s reactions to the civil war
 Realism began shortly after the civil war
 The
loss of U.S. lives shattered the
nation’s idealism
 Young writers turned away from
romanticism focusing on “real life”
Writers began focusing on life as
ordinary people lived it
 They attempted to show characters and
events in an honest, objective, almost
factual way
 Loneliness and cultural isolation are a
common theme

 Naturalist
writers also depicted real
people in real situations, but they
believed that forces larger than the
individual shaped our destiny
 Forces: nature, environment, fate,
heredity
 Naturalists depicted harsh realities
because their hardships influenced their
writing and artistic vision
 Social
discontent grew out of our nation’s
industrialization
 Kate Chopin: wrote about women’s desire
for equality and independence
 Naturalists saw industrialization as a
force against which individuals were
powerless
 By 1914 America and it’s literature had
grown up and traded it’s ideals for
pragmatism (practicality)
 30
Thousand copies of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn were released in 1885
 He
used 7 different dialects to portray the
speech patterns of different characters
 Twain
held very strong opinions of a
variety of subjects
 Twain
was one of the first authors to
capture the every day speech of
characters, and not the more formal,
standard English that other writers used