About The Site
The Long Century is a history site focused on the United States from 1850 to 1900, a period of upheaval, conflict, and rapid change. The site looks at the Civil War, Reconstruction, westward expansion, labor unrest, politics, industrial growth, and the social pressures that shaped the country in the late nineteenth century.
The goal is to make this era readable without flattening it. These articles are meant to be long-form, direct, and grounded in the people and events that made the period. Some pieces focus on major turning points. Others look at smaller subjects, forgotten figures, or details that are usually left out of the standard summary.
What to expect here is a mix of narrative history and close reading. Some articles will follow a single event or person. Others will connect larger themes across several decades. The site is meant to be a place for writing that takes its time, follows the evidence, and leaves room for complexity.
About The Blogger
I'm Nick Burchett. I write about the second half of the nineteenth century in America, roughly 1850 to 1900, because it's where the country we live in now actually got built. Not the founding mythology version, the real one. The mess, the contradictions, the people who didn't make it into the marble statues.
I came to history the long way. BA in history, but before that, the Army. Spending time in uniform changes how you read about other people who wore one...Union, Confederate, cavalry on the plains, doesn't matter. You stop seeing them as figures in a painting and start seeing them as guys who were tired, scared, bored, homesick, and mostly just trying to get through the next week.
The eras I keep coming back to are the Civil War, the Viking Age, and medieval Europe. There's an obvious thread, periods where the old order is cracking and something new is shoving its way in. That's also what 1850 to 1900 is. The country goes from arguing about slavery in Congress to fighting the bloodiest war in its history, then tries to put itself back together while railroads, factories, and a flood of immigrants quietly remake everything. By 1900 it's a different place. Most of the people alive in 1850 wouldn't have recognized it.
That's what Long Century is about. The Civil War is the obvious centerpiece, but it's not the only thing here. Reconstruction, the Indian Wars, the Gilded Age, labor fights, the West, the way industry and immigration rewired American life... all of it. I'm interested in the soldiers and the politicians, but also in the people whose names didn't make the books.
Outside of this, I play music, mess around with retro computing and old BBS-era technology, and read a lot of philosophy. I think a lot about why civilizations rise and why they fall, which probably tells you more about me than anything else on this page. I'm also genuinely curious about AI and what it's doing to how we work and think... but that's a different blog.
If something here makes you want to argue, agree, or send me down a research rabbit hole, get in touch. That's most of the reason I'm doing this.