The United States, 1850-1900
A complete list of articles published on The Long Century.
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.
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.
"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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Overview of the notorious and complicated Missouri bushwhacker, William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson
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.
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
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 was the closest free-stater living north of Albert Stokes on the northwest quarter of Section 28, located on Washington Creek.
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.
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 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.
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
