Civil War Dbq

During this era, there was much history that was yet to be written. The Civil War is a great example of this. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, and ended on May 9, 1865. It divided the United States, separating it into the Union and the Confederate States of America. The four years that this war raged was filled with destruction and bloodshed, with more than 600,000 soldiers killed. It left the South in an economic disaster and while the Union was preserved, it was left in a fragile state (Holt, 379-381, 391-395). The first big battle was at Bull Run in North Virginia on July 21, 1861. Here, almost 800 men were killed in this Confederate victory. Another important battle was the Battle of Antietam, where General McClellan and the Army

began its westward expansion during the 1830’s because of the depression America was going through at the time. The West was considered “the last home of the freeborn American.” The land in the West was readily available and the settlement and economic exploitation promised to prevent the U.S. from following the same path as Europe (Foner, 352). Until the 1840s, people in the West had been limited to fur traders and explorers, and from 1840-1845, there was a spark that drove 5,000 people to travel 20,000 miles to the West by wagon trails. Then by 1860, over 300,000 people risked disease, starvation, the Rocky Mountains and Indian attacks to get to Oregon, California, and Utah. The land in the West was desirable because population and land prices were rising in the old states, and young men wanted cheap land to prosper on. This whole expansion intensified the belief that God intended the Americans to reach all the way to the Pacific Ocean (Foner, 493). The literary period in which Henry James wrote is the realistic period. Realism took root in Europe and was well into that country before it even sprouted in the U.S. The writers of this period tried to accurately represent the environment and manners of everyday life and they way people lived, dressed, thought, felt, and talked. They sought to explain why ordinary people behave a certain way. Realism writers relied on sciences such as biology, psychology, and sociology; as well as their own insights and observations of life (Holt 379-381,