The Rise of Baseball as America's Pastime
How baseball grew from local amateur clubs into a professional game celebrated, commercialized, and contested across nineteenth-century America.
A complete list of articles published on The Long Century.
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The Vanishing Frontier: Why Americans Were Obsessed with Its "Closing" in 1890
On the afternoon of July 12, 1893, a thirty-one-year-old history professor from Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner stood in a hot lecture hall at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and read a paper called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Attendance was thin.
The Machine That Talked Back - Thomas Edison Invents the Phonograph
Thomas Edison wasn't trying to invent sound recording... he was trying to speed up the telegraph. What he built instead, almost by accident, was the first machine in history that could hold on to a human voice, though it would take him another decade to make one anyone could actually use.
The Transcontinental Railroad: Engineering Marvel and Human Cost
On May 10, 1869, a telegraph operator at Promontory Summit, Utah, tapped out a single word: "Done." Cities heard it within minutes. San Francisco fired a hundred-gun salute, and Chicago ran a parade seven miles long, with church bells ringing out from Philadelphia to New York. Six years earlier, crossing the country meant six months by wagon train, a sea voyage around Cape Horn, or a shorter but still miserable crossing through the jungle at Panama. Now it took about a week.
The Buffalo’s Near-Extinction and Its Impact on Plains Tribes
For thousands of years, the buffalo, more accurately called the American bison, stood at the center of life on the Great Plains. For many Plains tribes, it was not simply an animal to be hunted. Buffalo provided food, clothing, shelter, tools, trade goods, and a place in ceremony and story. Their movements shaped seasonal life. Their abundance made it possible for communities to live across a hard, open country.
The Spanish-American War of 1898: America Becomes an Empire
The phrase "splendid little war" comes from a letter John Hay wrote to Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898, while the fighting was still going on. Hay was U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time. He would soon be Secretary of State. The phrase stuck because Americans wanted it to stick.
Dodge City: Queen of the Cowtowns
At the end of the Civil War, the American frontier did not suddenly become peaceful. The fighting between North and South had ended, but the movement west continued, and with it came a new set of conflicts. Wagon trains still crossed the plains. The Santa Fe Trail still carried freight, mail, soldiers, and settlers. The U.S. Army still needed supply points and defensive posts as it fought the Plains tribes and tried to keep traffic moving across the region. That was the setting for Fort Dodge.
General Order No. 11 and the Missouri-Kansas Border
There were many atrocities that occurred during the American Civil War that were perpetrated by the Federal government and its soldiers. One edict, General Order Number 11, would become notorious for its treatment of rural Missouri residents.
The Rise of the American City: From 1850 to 1900
In 1850, the United States was still mostly a rural country. Most Americans lived on farms, in small towns, or in settlements tied to local trade. Cities mattered, of course. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Cincinnati were already important places. They handled trade, printed newspapers, received immigrants, and gave politics a louder stage.
The New York Mafia: How the First Criminal Syndicates Formed
New York did not invent organized crime. But by the late nineteenth century, it gave it a very good place to grow. The city had the ingredients: crowded immigrant neighborhoods, weak labor protections, corrupt ward politics, saloons, docks, gambling rooms, police on the take, and whole blocks where people trusted their own countrymen more than they trusted the law.
The Evolution of Coffee and Bread
Between 1850 and 1900, coffee and bread changed from household staples into industrial products. That sounds simple, but it was a real shift in daily life. For much of the early 19th century, people still lived close to the older food world.
Native American Resistance: The Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance was not a war dance. That is one of the first things worth saying, because so much of the story has been told through the fear of the people who misunderstood it. To many Native people in the late 1800s, the Ghost Dance was a religious movement, a ceremony of hope at a time when hope had been nearly beaten out of them.
The 1890 Census: What 'Frontier' Meant
How a single sentence in an 1890 Census report, and a definition almost nobody bothered to read, became the basis for an American myth about the closing of the West.
When the Shooting Stopped: The Rise of Gangs and Outlaws After the Civil War
"Be wary of thieves and assassins that infest the place." When Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April of 1865, most Americans assumed that the violence of the past four years would simply fade away. It did not.
The Pony Express: The End of the Line
The Pony Express lives in American memory as a story of speed, danger, and hard riding across open country. A young rider changes horses in the dark. A leather mochila is thrown over a fresh saddle. The horse is gone again before the dust has settled.
The Gilded Age Economy: Why the Wealth Gap Is Similar Today
The Gilded Age was a time of astonishing wealth and astonishing poverty. Railroads crossed the continent. Steel mills rose. Oil refineries, banks, stock exchanges, and factories helped make the United States one of the most powerful economies in the world.
General Sherman: Hero or Monster?
Was this famous general a hero or villain? Let's take a closer look at General William Tecumseh Sherman and his actions during the Civil War.
John Muir and the Preservation of National Parks
John Muir did not invent the American national park, but he helped give the idea its moral force. Before Muir, many Americans saw mountains, forests, and valleys mainly as resources.
Social Impact of the New York Draft Riots
A brief overview of the draft riots that erupted in New York during the American Civil War in response to Congress passing a law of conscription and its bias towards the wealthy.
Bloody Bill Anderson: Missouri's Bushwhacking Devil
Overview of the notorious and complicated Missouri bushwhacker, William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson
Price and McCulloch: The fueling of guerrilla warfare in Missouri
After the victory at Wilson's Creek in August of 1861, southern forces in Missouri under the command of Missouri Militia General Sterling Price and Confederate Brigadier General Benjamin McCulloch found a new sense of purpose in Missouri.
Bleeding Kansas and the Missouri/Kansas Border War
The beginnings of the American Civil War have roots much deeper than the shots fired on Ft Sumter on April 12, 1861. Tensions between the north and the south can be traced back to the signing of the United States Constitution and the threat of secession became heated during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson
Problems with the Homestead Act of 1862
The Homestead Act of 1862 was introduced and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War on May 20, 1862 as a way to accelerate the settlement of the areas west of the Mississippi River out to the Pacific Ocean.
John Armstrong and the Underground Railroad in Kansas
John Armstrong was the closest free-stater living north of Albert Stokes on the northwest quarter of Section 28, located on Washington Creek.
Families Torn Apart: The Civil War in Southwest Missouri
Of those who suffered the most during the Civil War, the family is clearly at the top of the list. Not only were there sectional divides between North and South, but citizens of towns against each other, friendships lost over the divide, and families torn apart.
Animosity, Division and Hatred in Civil War America - Part 1
The animosity and division present in both Missouri and Kansas, prior to and during the Civil War, that led to guerrilla warfare in both states was a representation of the divide gripping the entire nation, pushing it towards inevitable war
Samuel J. Reader - Life of a Kansas Farmer and Soldier
Samuel James Reader was born in 1836 in Pennsylvania and settled in Kansas Territory in 1855. His diary, drawings, and wartime experience left a firsthand record of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas.
Animosity, Division and Hatred in Civil War America - Part 2
The animosity and division present in both Missouri and Kansas, prior to and during the Civil War, that led to guerrilla warfare in both states was a representation of the divide gripping the entire nation, pushing it towards inevitable war