 North- Education, Banking, Science and Reform movements  South- Slow paced, Rural, with Agricultural movements  Controversy of slavery influenced the literature of the day.

 Lincoln elected, South Carolina and 6 others seceded from union to form Confederate States of America.  War lasts 4 years, North wins, 620,000 dead.  Lincoln is assassinated on April 15, 1865

 ½ million farmers (including many emancipated slaves) move west due to Homestead Act  Miners moved west aided by completion of Transcontinental Railroad in 1869

 Frontier seized to exist as Westward expansion grew  Native Americans were forced into territories set aside by Congress

 Electricity sparked many new inventions  Immigration increased the population by 15 million in just 20 years  Many urban families were poor and had to result to child labor, while some Corporation owners made large fortunes.  Mark Twain dubbed this the “Gilded Age”  Laborers, African Americans, and Women pushed for more rights and labor reforms.

 Slaves developed a unique type of music called “Spirituals”  Frederick Douglass published his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” that was also an indictment of slavery

 Thousands of Diaries, letters, and journals were published from the war  Many of President Lincoln’s speeches and letters were published such as the Gettysburg Address

 As westward expansion grew, more literature was rising from the West and Midwest  Mark Twain grew up in Missouri but moved to Nevada during the civil war  Not all frontier writings for European settlers, Mexican Americans also published many songs and ballads.

 A reaction to romanticism that reflected the harsh reality of frontier life and the author’s reactions to the civil war  Realism began shortly after the civil war  The loss of U.S. lives shattered the nation’s idealism  Young writers turned away from romanticism focusing on “real life”

 Writers began focusing on life as ordinary people lived it  They attempted to show characters and events in an honest, objective, almost factual way  Loneliness and cultural isolation are a common theme

 Naturalist writers also depicted real people in real situations, but they believed that forces larger than the individual shaped our destiny  Forces: nature, environment, fate, heredity  Naturalists depicted harsh realities because their hardships influenced their writing and artistic vision

 Social discontent grew out of our nation’s industrialization  Kate Chopin: wrote about women’s desire for equality and independence  Naturalists saw industrialization as a force against which individuals were powerless  By 1914 America and it’s literature had grown up and traded it’s ideals for pragmatism (practicality)

 30 Thousand copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were released in 1885  He used 7 different dialects to portray the speech patterns of different characters

 Twain held very strong opinions of a variety of subjects  Twain was one of the first authors to capture the every day speech of characters, and not the more formal, standard English that other writers used