Showing results by author "Richard Fox" in Politics & Social Sciences

The Johnstown Flood of 1889 was a disaster of epic proportions. When the dam broke, the ensuing flood destroyed towns, washing away thousands of families and their homes and businesses. Trains were blasted from the tracks and buried, entire towns and the ground beneath them scoured clean and dark pits filled with human bodies. It was a disaster that rocked the world. This narrative was written in the days immediately after the disaster....

Nineteenth-century African Americans felt deep affection for their "liberator" as a "homely" man who did not hold himself apart; Southerners felt a nostalgia for Abraham Lincoln as a humble "conciliator". Later, educators glorified Lincoln as a symbol of nationhood to help assimilate poor immigrants. Monument makers focused not only on a gigantic body but also on a nationalist "union", downplaying "emancipation". Among both Black and White liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Lincoln was derided or fell out of fashion.