Events and Politics
The Victorian era began in 1837, with the accession of Britain's Queen Victoria, and endured throughout upheavals such as the American Civil War, until Queen Victoria's death in 1901. Slavery was a major political issue in the early Victorian era in the United States, and a regional one at that, with the American South generally favoring it and the Northeast and Midwest opposing it. The Civil War broke out, at least partially due to this issue, in 1860, and it was a time of awareness and change in American culture. 750,000 Americans died during the war out of a population of 31 million. Among men aged 18–35, about 20% had died by the end of the war. The industrial Northern states defeated the rebellious Southern states, leading to the period called Reconstruction.
Immigration picked up during the Victorian era in America, as dissatisfied Europeans fled the poverty and politics of their homelands for the New World. This led, in turn, to a surge in ethnocentrism and racism, and the forming of ethnic neighborhoods in major cities. The American West, an enormous land sometimes known as the "frontier", attracted settlers. Laws, such as the Homestead Acts, helped Europeans and their descendants take lands used by Native Americans.
Read more about this topic: Victorian America
Famous quotes containing the words events and, events and/or politics:
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)