Mathew Brady
Mathew B. Brady was one of the earliest photographers in American history, best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York in 1844, photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, among other public figures; when the Civil War started, his use of a mobile studio and darkroom enabled vivid battlefield photographs that brought home the reality of war to the public. Thousands of war scenes were captured, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict, though most of these were taken by his assistants, rather than by Brady himself. After the war, these pictures went out of fashion, the government did not purchase the master-copies as he had anticipated. Brady's fortunes declined and he died in debt. Brady was born on May 18, 1822, in Warren County, New York, near Lake George, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents and Samantha Julia Brady.
He himself said that he was born in Ireland. At age 16, Brady moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met portrait painter William Page, became Page's student. In 1839, the two traveled to Albany, New York, to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, with Page's former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerreotype invention of capturing images. At first, Brady's involvement was limited to manufacturing leather cases, but soon he became the center of the New York artistic colony. Morse opened offered classes. In 1844, Brady opened his own photography studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York in 1844, by 1845, he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans, including the likes of Senator Daniel Webster and poet Edgar Allan Poe. In 1849, he opened a studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. where he met Juliet Handy, whom he lived with on Staten Island.
Brady's early images were daguerreotypes, he won many awards for his work. In 1850, Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures; the album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady's work and artistry. In 1854, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures became a popular novelty. In 1856, Brady placed an ad in the New York Herald offering to produce "photographs and daguerreotypes." This inventive ad pioneered, in the US, the use of typeface and fonts that were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements. At first, the effect of the Civil War on Brady's business was a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to departing soldiers. Brady marketed to parents the idea of capturing their young soldiers' images before they might be lost to war by running an ad in The New York Daily Tribune that warned, "You cannot tell how soon it may be too late."
However, he was soon taken with the idea of documenting the war itself. He first applied to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, for permission to travel to the battle sites, he made his application to President Lincoln himself. Lincoln granted permission with the proviso that Brady finance the project himself, his efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the dangers, financial risk, discouragement by his friends, Brady was quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he avoided capture. While most of the time the battle had ceased before pictures were taken, Brady came under direct fire at the First Battle of Bull Run and Fredericksburg, he employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C.
Roche, seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady stayed in Washington, D. C. organizing his assistants and visited battlefields personally. However, as author Roy Meredith points out, "He was the director; the actual operation of the camera though mechanical is important, but the selection of the scene to be photographed is as important, if not more so than just'snapping the shutter.'"This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady's eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s. Many of the images in Brady's collection are, in reality, thought to be the work of his assistants. Brady was criticized for failing to document the work, though it is unclear whether it was intentional or due to a lack of inclination to document the photographer of a specific image; because so much of Brady's photography is missing information, it is difficult to know not only who took the picture, but exactly when or where it was taken
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American short story writer, biographer and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, his historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Islamic prophet Muhammad, George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th century Spain that deal with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, the Moors. Irving served as ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846, he made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. He moved to England for the family business in 1815 where he achieved fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. serialized from 1819–20. He continued to publish throughout his life, he completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death at age 76 in Tarrytown, New York.
Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe. He was admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Francis Jeffrey, Walter Scott, he advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. Washington Irving's parents were William Irving Sr. of Quholm, Orkney and Sarah of Falmouth, England. They married in 1761, they had eleven children. Their first two sons died in infancy, both named William, as did their fourth child John, their surviving children were William Jr. Ann, Catherine, John Treat and Washington; the Irving family settled in Manhattan and were part of the city's merchant class when Washington was born on April 3, 1783, the same week that New York City residents learned of the British ceasefire which ended the American Revolution, Irving's mother named him after George Washington.
Irving met his namesake at age 6, when George Washington was living in New York after his inauguration as President in 1789. The President blessed young Irving, an encounter that Irving commemorated in a small watercolor painting which continues to hang in his home; the Irvings lived at 131 William Street at the time of Washington's birth, but they moved across the street to 128 William St. Several of Irving's brothers became active New York merchants. Irving was an uninterested student who preferred adventure stories and drama, he sneaked out of class in the evenings to attend the theater by the time he was 14. An outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan in 1798 prompted his family to send him upriver, he stayed with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York, it was in Tarrytown that he became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, with its Dutch customs and local ghost stories. He made several other trips up the Hudson as a teenager, including an extended visit to Johnstown, New York where he passed through the Catskill Mountains region, the setting for "Rip Van Winkle".
"Of all the scenery of the Hudson", Irving wrote, "the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination". Irving began writing letters to the New York Morning Chronicle in 1802 when he was 19, submitting commentaries on the city's social and theater scene under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle; the name evoked his Federalist leanings and was the first of many pseudonyms that he employed throughout his career. The letters brought Irving moderate notoriety. Aaron Burr was a co-publisher of the Chronicle, he was impressed enough to send clippings of the Oldstyle pieces to his daughter Theodosia. Charles Brockden Brown made a trip to New York to recruit Oldstyle for a literary magazine that he was editing in Philadelphia. Irving's brothers became concerned for his health, so they financed an extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806, he bypassed most of the sites and locations considered essential for the social development of a young man, to the dismay of his brother William who wrote that he was pleased that his brother's health was improving, but he did not like the choice to "gallop through Italy… leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right".
Instead, Irving honed the social and conversational skills that made him one of the world's most in-demand guests. "I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness", Irving wrote, "and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner". While visiting Rome in 1805, Irving struck up a friendship with painter Washington Allston and was persuaded into a career as a painter. "My lot in life, was differently cast". Irving returned from Europe to study law with his legal mentor Judge Josiah Ogden Hoffman in New York City. By his own admission, he was not a good student and passed the bar examination in 1806, he began socializing with a group of literate young men whom he dubbed "The Lads of Kilkenny", he created the literary magazine Salmagundi in January 1807 with his brother William and his friend James Kirke Paulding, writing under various pseudonyms, such as William Wizard and Launcelot Langstaff. Irving lampooned New York culture and po
Cabinet card
The cabinet card was a style of photograph, used for photographic portraiture after 1870. It consisted of a thin photograph mounted on a card measuring 108 by 165 mm; the carte de visite was displaced by the larger cabinet card in the 1880s. In the early 1860s, both types of photographs were the same in process and design. Both were most albumen prints, the primary difference being the cabinet card was larger and included extensive logos and information on the reverse side of the card to advertise the photographer’s services; however into its popularity, other types of papers began to replace the albumen process. Despite the similarity, the cabinet card format was used for landscape views before it was adopted for portraiture; some cabinet card images from the 1890s have the appearance of a black-and-white photograph in contrast to the distinctive sepia toning notable in the albumen print process. These photographs have a neutral image tone and were most produced on a matte collodion, gelatin or gelatin bromide paper.
Sometimes images from this period can be identified by a greenish cast. Gelatin papers were introduced in the 1870s and started gaining acceptance in the 1880s and 1890s as the gelatin bromide papers became popular. Matte collodion was used in the same period. A true black-and-white image on a cabinet card is to have been produced in the 1890s or after 1900; the last cabinet cards were produced in the 1920s as late as 1924. Owing to the larger image size, the cabinet card increased in popularity during the second half of the 1860s and into the 1870s, replacing the carte de visite as the most popular form of portraiture; the cabinet card was large enough to be viewed from across the room when displayed on a cabinet, why they became known as such in the vernacular. However, when the renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady first started offering them to his clientele towards the end of 1865, he used the trademark "Imperial Carte-de-Visite." Whatever the name, the popular print format joined the photograph album as a fixture in the late 19th-century Victorian parlor.
Early in its introduction, the cabinet card ushered in the temporary disuse of the photographic album which had come into existence commercially with the carte de visite. Photographers began employing artists to retouch photographs by altering the negative before making the print to hide facial defects revealed by the new format. Small stands and photograph frames for the tabletop replaced the heavy photograph album. Photo album manufacturers responded by producing albums with pages for cabinet cards with a few pages in the back reserved for the old family carte de visite prints. For nearly three decades after the 1860s, the commercial portraiture industry was dominated by the carte de visite and cabinet card formats. In the decade before 1900, the number and variety of card photograph styles expanded in response to declining sales. Manufacturers of standardized card stock and print materials hoped to stimulate sales and retain public interest in card photographs. However, the public demanded outdoor and candid photographs with enlarged prints which they could frame or smaller unmounted snapshots they could collect in scrapbooks.
Owing in part to the immense popularity of the affordable Kodak Box Brownie camera, first introduced in 1900, the public began taking their own photographs, thus the popularity of the cabinet card declined. Introduced: 1860. First used for horizontal views eventually adapted for portraits. Peak popularity: 1880s. Although not uncommon in the 1870s, the cabinet card did not displace the carte de visite until the 1880s. Decline: 1890s; as snapshot and personal photography became commonplace among the public, the popularity of the cabinet card and cabinet card specific albums waned. Unmounted paper prints and the scrapbook albums started replacing them. A variety of other large card styles of various names and dimensions came about for professional portraits in the 1880s and 1890s. After 1900, card photographs had a much larger area surrounding the print quite with an embossed frame around the image on heavy, gray card stock. Last Used: The cabinet card still had a place in public consumption and continued to be produced until the early 1900s and quite a bit longer in Europe.
The last cabinet cards were produced in the 1930s. When attempting to determine the date of creation for a cabinet card, clues can be gathered by the details on the card; the type of card stock or whether it had right-angled or rounded corners can help to determine the date of the photograph to as close as five years. However, it has to be noted that these dating methods aren't always 100% accurate, since a Victorian photographer may have been using up old card stock, or the cabinet card may have been a re-print made many years after the photo was recorded. Card stock 1866–1880: square, lightweight mount 1880–1890: square, heavy weight card stock 1890s: scalloped edgesCard colours 1866–1880: thin, light weight card stock in white, off white or light cream. 1880s on: Large, ornate text for photographer name and add
The Courtship of Miles Standish
The Courtship of Miles Standish is an 1858 narrative poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the early days of Plymouth Colony, the colonial settlement established in America by the Mayflower Pilgrims. The Courtship of Miles Standish is set in the year 1621 against the backdrop of a fierce Indian war and focuses on a love triangle among three Mayflower passengers: Miles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, John Alden. Longfellow claimed that the story was true; the ballad was popular in nineteenth-century America. Standish is memorialized in a low relief sculpture of six characters from Longfellow's epic poems executed by Daniel Chester French and installed at Longfellow Park, in Cambridge, located in front of Longefellow's former home, now a U. S. National Historic site maintained by the National Park Service; the poem was a literary counterpoint to Longfellow's earlier Evangeline, the tragic tale of a woman whose lover disappears during the deportation of the Acadian people in 1755.
Together and The Courtship of Miles Standish captured the bittersweet quality of America's colonial era. However, the plot of The Courtship of Miles Standish deliberately varies in emotional tone, unlike the steady tragedy of Longfellow's Evangeline; the Pilgrims grimly battle against disease and Indians, but are obsessed with an eccentric love triangle, creating a curious mix of drama and comedy. Bumbling, feuding roommates Miles Standish and John Alden vie for the affections of the beautiful Priscilla Mullins, who slyly tweaks the noses of her undiplomatic suitors; the independent-minded woman utters the famous retort, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" The saga has a surprise ending, one full of optimism for the American future. A debate persists as to whether the tale is fiction. Main characters Miles Standish, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins are based upon real Mayflower passengers. Longfellow was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins through his mother Zilpah Wadsworth and he claimed that he was relating oral history.
Skeptics dismiss his saga as a folktale. At minimum, Longfellow used poetic license. Scholars have confirmed the cherished place of romantic love in Pilgrim culture, have documented the Indian war described by Longfellow. Miles Standish and John Alden were roommates in Plymouth. Standish's first wife, Rose Handley, died aboard the Mayflower in January 1621. Two years Standish married a woman named Barbara in Plymouth in 1623; the union of Alden and Mullins yielded the first European colonist born on American soil, their daughter Elizabeth Alden Pabodie. The Standish and Alden families both moved from Plymouth to adjacent Duxbury, Massachusetts in the late 1620s, where they lived in close proximity and remained close for several generations; the Standish family burial ground and John Alden house in Duxbury are separated by a short walking distance. The first reference to the poem recorded in Longfellow's journal is dated December 29, 1857, where the project is referred to as "Priscilla". By March 1 the next year, it was renamed The Courtship of Miles Standish.
It was published in book form on October 16, 1858, it sold 25,000 copies after two months. 10,000 copies were sold in London in a single day. Courtship of Miles Standish is written in dactylic hexameter, the same meter used in classical epic poetry such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid. Longfellow used the same meter in his poem Evangeline; the Courtship of Miles Standish The Courtship of Miles Standish, Other Poems, 1858 edition, at books.google.com. The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at Project Gutenberg — includes this poem. Plot summary and historic background The Courtship of Miles Standish public domain audiobook at LibriVox
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, lawyer and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had served as the second vice president of the United States from 1797 to 1801; the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy and individual rights motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation. Jefferson was of English ancestry and educated in colonial Virginia, he graduated from the College of William & Mary and practiced law, with the largest number of his cases concerning land ownership claims. During the American Revolution, he represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration, drafted the law for religious freedom as a Virginia legislator, served as the 2nd Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, during the American Revolutionary War, he became the United States Minister to France in May 1785, subsequently the nation's first secretary of state under President George Washington from 1790 to 1793.
Jefferson and James Madison organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party during the formation of the First Party System. With Madison, he anonymously wrote the controversial Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 and 1799, which sought to strengthen states' rights by nullifying the federal Alien and Sedition Acts; as president, Jefferson pursued the nation's shipping and trade interests against Barbary pirates and aggressive British trade policies. He organized the Louisiana Purchase doubling the country's territory; as a result of peace negotiations with France, his administration reduced military forces. He was reelected in 1804. Jefferson's second term was beset with difficulties at home, including the trial of former vice president Aaron Burr. American foreign trade was diminished when Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act of 1807, responding to British threats to U. S. shipping. In 1803, Jefferson began a controversial process of Indian tribe removal to the newly organized Louisiana Territory, he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807.
Jefferson, while a planter and politician, mastered many disciplines, which ranged from surveying and mathematics to horticulture and mechanics. He was an architect in the classical tradition. Jefferson's keen interest in religion and philosophy led to his presidency of the American Philosophical Society. A philologist, Jefferson knew several languages, he corresponded with many prominent people. His only full-length book is Notes on the State of Virginia, considered the most important American book published before 1800. After retiring from public office, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Although regarded as a leading spokesman for democracy and republicanism in the era of the Enlightenment, Jefferson's historical legacy is mixed; some modern scholarship has been critical of Jefferson's private life, pointing out the contradiction between his ownership of the large numbers of slaves that worked his plantations and his famous declaration that "all men are created equal." Another point of controversy stems from the evidence that after his wife Martha died in 1782, Jefferson fathered children with Martha's half-sister, Sally Hemings, his slave.
Despite this, presidential scholars and historians praise his public achievements, including his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in Virginia. Jefferson continues to rank among U. S. presidents. Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at the family home in Shadwell in the Colony of Virginia, the third of ten children, he was of English, Welsh and was born a British subject. His father Peter Jefferson was a surveyor who died when Jefferson was fourteen. Peter Jefferson moved his family to Tuckahoe Plantation in 1745 upon the death of William Randolph, the plantation's owner and Jefferson's friend, who in his will had named him guardian of his children; the Jeffersons returned to Shadwell in 1752, where Peter died in 1757. Thomas inherited 5,000 acres of land, including Monticello, he assumed full authority over his property at age 21. Jefferson began his childhood education beside the Randolph children with tutors at Tuckahoe. Thomas' father, was self-taught, regretting not having a formal education, he entered Thomas into an English school early, at age five.
In 1752, at age nine, he began attending a local school run by a Scottish Presbyterian minister and began studying the natural world, for which he grew to love. At this time he began studying Latin and French, while learning to ride horses. Thomas read books from his father's modest library, he was taught from 1758 to 1760 by Reverend James Maury near Gordonsville, where he studied history and the classics while boarding with Maury's family. During this period Jefferson came to know and befriended various American Indians, including the famous Cherokee chief, who stopped at Shadwell to visit, on their way to Williamsburg to trade. During the two years Jefferson was with the Maury family, he traveled to Williamsburg and was a guest of Colonel Dandridge, father of Martha Washington. In Williamsburg the young Jefferson met and came to admire Patrick Henry, eight ye
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major political parties in the United States. The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had expanded slavery into U. S. territories. The party subscribed to classical liberalism and took ideological stands that were anti-slavery and pro-economic reform. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president in the history of the United States; the Party was dominant over the Democrats during the Third Party System and Fourth Party System. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. After the 1912 election, many Roosevelt supporters left the Party, the Party underwent an ideological shift to the right; the liberal Republican element in the GOP was overwhelmed by a conservative surge begun by Barry Goldwater in 1964 that continued during the Reagan Era in the 1980s. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party's core base shifted, with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic.
White voters identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s. Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party made opposition to abortion a key plank of its national party platform and grew its support among evangelicals. By 2000, the Republican Party was aligned with Christian conservatism; the Party's core support since the 1990s comes chiefly from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States and rural areas in the North. The 21st century Republican Party ideology is American conservatism, which contrasts with the Democrats' liberal platform and progressive wing; the GOP supports lower taxes, free market capitalism, a strong national defense, gun rights and restrictions on labor unions. The GOP was committed to protectionism and tariffs from its founding until the 1930s when it was based in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, but has grown more supportive of free trade since 1952. In addition to advocating for conservative economic policies, the Republican Party is conservative.
Founded in the Northern states in 1854 by abolitionists, modernizers, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers, the Republican Party became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the popular Know Nothing Party. The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states; the Northern Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil. The first public meeting of the general anti-Nebraska movement, at which the name Republican was suggested for a new anti-slavery party, was held on March 20, 1854 in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin; the name was chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party. The first official party convention was held on July 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. At the 1856 Republican National Convention, the party adopted a national platform emphasizing opposition to the expansion of slavery into U. S. territories. While Republican candidate John C.
Frémont lost the 1856 United States presidential election to James Buchanan, he did win 11 of the 16 northern states. The Republican Party first came to power in the elections of 1860 when it won control of both houses of Congress and its candidate, former congressman Abraham Lincoln, was elected President. In the election of 1864, it united with War Democrats to nominate Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket. Under Republican congressional leadership, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—which banned slavery in the United States—passed the Senate in 1864 and the House in 1865; the party's success created factionalism within the party in the 1870s. Those who felt that Reconstruction had been accomplished, was continued to promote the large-scale corruption tolerated by President Ulysses S. Grant, ran Horace Greeley for the presidency; the Stalwart faction defended Grant and the spoils system, whereas the Half-Breeds pushed for reform of the civil service. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed in 1883.
The Republican Party supported hard money, high tariffs to promote economic growth, high wages and high profits, generous pensions for Union veterans, the annexation of Hawaii. The Republicans had strong support from pietistic Protestants, but they resisted demands for Prohibition; as the Northern postwar economy boomed with heavy and light industry, mines, fast-growing cities, prosperous agriculture, the Republicans took credit and promoted policies to sustain the fast growth. The GOP was dominant over the Democrats during the Third Party System. However, by 1890 the Republicans had agreed to the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission in response to complaints from owners of small businesses and farmers; the high McKinley Tariff of 1890 hurt the party and the Democrats swept to a landslide in the off-year elections defeating McKinley himself. The Democrats elected Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892; the election of William McKinley in 1896 was marked by a resurgence of Republican dominance that lasted until 1932.
McKinley promised that high tariffs would end the severe hardship caused by the Pa
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.
