BiblioVault - Books about 1860

Creating a National Home

Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900

Patrick J. Kelly

Harvard University Press, 1997

For tens of thousands of Union veterans, Patrick Kelly argues, the Civil War never ended. Many Federal soldiers returned to civilian life battling the lifelong effects of combat wounds or wartime disease. Looking to the federal government for shelter and medical assistance, war-disabled Union veterans found help at the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Established by Congress only weeks prior to the Confederate surrender, this network of federal institutions had assisted nearly 100,000 Union veterans by 1900. The National Home is the direct forebear of the Veterans Administration hospital system, today the largest provider of health care in the United States.

Kelly places the origins of the National Home within the political culture of U.S. state formation. Creating a National Home examines Congress's decision to build a federal network of soldiers' homes. Kelly explores the efforts of the Home's managers to glean support for this institution by drawing upon the reassuring language of domesticity and "home." He also describes the manner in which the creators of the National Homes used building design, landscaping, and tourism to integrate each branch into the cultural and economic life of surrounding communities, and to promote a positive image of the U.S. state.

Drawing upon several fields of American history--political, cultural, welfare, gender--Creating a National Home illustrates the lasting impact of war on U.S. state and society. The building of the National Home marks the permanent expansion of social benefits offered to citizen-veterans. The creation of the National Home at once defined an entitled group and prepared the way for the later expansion of both the welfare and the warfare states.

[more]

Editorializing "The Indian Problem"

The New York Times on Native Americans, 1860-1900

Robert Hays. Foreword by: Paul Simon

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Drawing on four decades of New York Times editorials, Robert Hays demonstrates the magnitude of the conflict between Native American and white European cultures as settlers and adventurers spread rapidly across the continent in the post–Civil War period.

From 1860 through 1900, the Times published nearly a thousand editorials on what was commonly called “the Indian problem.” Selecting some of the best of these editorials, Hays gives readers what current accounts cannot: contemporary writers’ perspectives on the public images of Native Americans and their place in a nation bent on expansion. Some editorials express the unbridled bitterness and raw ambition of a nation immersed in an agenda of conquest, while others resonate with the struggle to find a common ground. Still others evince an attitude of respect, which set the tone for reconciling national ambition with natural rights.
American history demonstrates time and again the price of Manifest Destiny.

Many of the issues confronting nineteenth-century Native Americans remain alive today: unemployment, infant mortality, suicide, crime, alcoholism, and poverty. In presenting the authentic and urgent voices of a national newspaper’s daily record, Hays illuminates the roots of our current challenges.

[more]

A Race at Bay

New York Times Editorials on "the Indian Problem," 1860 - 1900

Robert G. Hays. Foreword by Paul Simon

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Robert G. Hays chronicles the "Indian problem" precisely as it was explained to Americans through the editorial columns of the New York Times between 1860 and 1900, the years when battles between white settlers and Native Americans split a nation and its spirit apart.

Covering the final forty-one years of the nineteenth century, Hays’s collection of Times editorials gives readers what current accounts cannot: perspectives by contemporary writers with unique insights into the public images of Native Americans and their place in a nation bent on expansion. The authentic voices of a national newspaper’s daily record speak with an urgency both immediate and real.

These editorials express the unbridled bitterness and raw ambition of a nation immersed in an agenda of conquest. They also resonate with the struggle to find a common ground. Some editorials are patronizing and ironic: "Yet it seems pitiful to cage so fine a savage among a herd of vulgar criminals in a penitentiary." Others include a willingness to poke fun: "Many persons on the platform were astonished to find that an ‘illiterate barbarian’ could handle the weapon of sarcasm. The truth is that the Indians spoke far better than ninety-nine out of a hundred members of congress." And yet others evince an attitude of respect, which set the tone for reconciling national ambition with natural rights.

In some instances, the Times allowed Native Americans to tell their own stories, as in this eloquent, moving account of the testimony of Satanta, the warrior chief of the Kiowas: "A certain dim foreboding of the Indians’ fate swept across his mind, and in its passage lit his eyes up with a fierce light, and his voice rose to a pitch of frenzy as he exclaimed: ‘We don’t want to settle—I love to roam over the prairie; there I am free and happy."

History demonstrates that the costs of owning one’s soil and one’s destiny remain without measure. Many of the problems blocking the progress of Native Americans continue unsolved: unemployment, infant mortality, suicide, crime, alcoholism, and poverty. Following such works as Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Hays looks back on the records of national history for the roots of our challenges today.

[more]

Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900

Roger Lane

Harvard University Press, 1986

In the late nineteenth century, life became more stable and orderly for most American city dwellers, but not for blacks. Roger Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Philadelphia serves as test case because of the richness of the data: Du Bois’s classic study, The Philadelphia Negro, newspapers, records of the criminal justice system and other local agencies, and the federal census. The author presents numerical details, along with many examples of the human stories—social and political—behind the statistics.

Lane reveals how social and economic discrimination created a black criminal subculture. This subculture, overlooked by those histories depending on often inaccurate census materials, eroded family patterns, encouraged violence, discouraged efforts at middle-class respectability, and intensified employment problems by adding white fear to the white prejudice that had helped to create it.

Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years to the 1980s. Lane not only charts Philadelphia’s story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.

[more]