Document Type

Book

Publication Date

1981

Abstract

“The young men were scattering in all directions,” says Van Wyck Brooks of the United States in the 1870s (New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915, p. 184). Having survived the Civil War, the Union appeared vital in body and spirit. Railroads and telegraph lines spread across the country, binding the resource-rich territories of the American West with the rapidly industrializing East. Armed with the confidence that we now call "nineteenth-century optimism," and justified by what the Andrew Carnegies and John D. Rockefellers of the day thought of as "progress” shored by Social Darwinism, men scrambled for their share of nature’s treasure chest.

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