Song in America |
Politics & Culture
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Politics |
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Culture |
Civil War & Reconstruction (1860 - 1875) |
| 1860 | 1860
- Garibaldi proclaims unified Italy
- George F. Root: Belshazzar's Feast (cantata)
- Louis Gottschalk: Escenas campestres (chamber opera)
- Wagner: Lohengrin
- Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
- Frederic Edwin Church paints Twilight in the Wilderness
- Anton Chekov born
- Folk artist Grandma Moses born
- Gustav Mahler born
- Hugo Wolf born
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| 1861 | 1861
- Abraham Lincoln inaugurated
- Civil War begins with the Battle of Bull Run
- Emancipation of Russian serfs
- Yale University gives the first Ph.D. in America
- Italian unification begins with the crowning of Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia
- John Philip Sousa receives his first musical instruction
- Verdi: Rigoletto
- Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
- Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
- Feodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
- Frederic Remington born
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| 1862 | 1862
- Otto von Bismarck elected Premier of Prussia
- Debut of Boston conductor B.J. Lang
- Walt Whitman goes to the Civil War front
- Mathew Brady's photographs of the Civil War
- Victor Hugo: Les Misérables
- Claude Debussy born
- Gustav Klimt born
- Maurice Maeterlinck born
- William S. Porter (O. Henry) born
- Edith Wharton born
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| 1863 | 1863
- Emancipation Proclamation takes effect
- Battle of Gettysburg
- President Lincoln proclaims the last Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day
- Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens
- Manet paints Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
- Bierstadt begins paintings of the American West
- Edvard Munch born
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| 1864 | 1864
- Sherman's march to the sea takes place in Georgia
- Henri Toulouse-Lautrec born
- Richard Strauss born
- Giacomo Meyerbeer dies
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1865- Henry Clay Work: "Marching Through Georgia"
- Pease: “Stars of the Summer Night” (Longfellow)
- The spiritual "Go Tell It on the Mountain" is collected in a hymnal by John W. Work
- The anonymous hymns "Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen" and "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" are published in African American hymnals
- Whitman publishes Drum-Taps
- Madison Cawein born
- Arthur Symons born
| 1865
- Abraham Lincoln is assassinated; he is succeeded by Andrew Johnson
- Civil War ends
- Reconstruction begins
- 13th Amendment abolishes slavery
- Ku Klux Klan is formed by six ex-Confederate soldiers
- Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Wagner premieres Tristan und Isolde
- Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County
- Thomas Carlyle completes Frederick the Great
- General William Booth founds Salvation Army--part of the second wave of revivalist Great Awakening
- William Butler Yeats born
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| 1866 | 1866
- The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is passed, declaring that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of slavery or indentured servitude (Native Americans living on reservations are not included)
- Feodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
- Ambroise Thomas: Mignon
- American composer J. P. Webster composes The Great Rebellion, a cantata about the Civil War
- Ferruccio Busoni born
- Vasili Kandinsky born
- Erik Satie born
- Friedrich Rückert dies
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| 1867 | 1867
- Seward's Folly: U.S. acquires Alaska
- John D. Rockefeller forms the Standard Oil Company
- Joseph I becomes Emperor of a new Austrian-Hungarian Empire
- Canada becomes a state in the British Commonwealth
- Karl Marx: Das Kapital
- Henrik Ibsen: Peer Gynt
- Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick is serialized and launches his popularity
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: May-Day and Other Pieces
- Sidney Lanier: Tiger Lilies
- Johann Strauss: "Blue Danube Waltz"
- Frank Lloyd Wright born
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1868- Dudley Buck publishes his first song, “Where Are the Swallows Fled?” (text by Adelaide Proctor). Buck is known mostly for his cantatas and works for organ.
- Charles E. Pratt and W. H. Lingard write the popular song "Walking Down Broadway" about the vibrancy of New York life in the mid-19th-century
- Henry F. Gilbert born
| 1868
- Andrew Johnson is impeached but not convicted
- 14th Amendment grants citizenship to former slaves
- 8-hour day instituted for government employees
- Rail lines begin to offer dining car service
- Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem
- Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
- Louisa May Alcott: Little Women
- Feodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot
- W. E. B. DuBois born
- Scott Joplin born
- Gioacchino Rossini dies
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| 1869 | 1869
- Ulysses S. Grant inaugurated
- Transcontinental railroad completed
- Suez Canal opens
- Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore's National Peace Jubilee in Boston, which brought together more than 12,000 musicians, including 10, 926 singers
- Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad
- Johannes Brahms: Liebeslieder Waltzes
- Modest Mussorgsky: Boris Goudunov
- Peter Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Julliet
- Richard Wagner: Siegfried
- Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
- Paul Verlaine: Fêtes Gallantes
- Kensett paints Lake George
- Henri Matisse born
- Hector Berlioz dies
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1870- “John Henry,” the folk song pitting a hero against a modern machine, is written in the 1870's
- Henry Clay Work: "Georgie Sails To-morrow!"
- Howard Brockway born
| 1870
- Women vote in Utah
- First black member of Congress: Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi
- Moody and Sankey begin to conduct Revivalist meetings
- Jules Verne: Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
- Charles Dickens dies
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| 1871 | 1871
- Great Chicago Fire
- Boss Tweed's corruption is exposed by The New York Times
- The Paris Commune, a brief, pro-worker government
- New York Herald journalist Henry Stanley finds David Livingstone in Africa, coining the legendary phrase "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
- Winston Churchill born
- Louisa May Alcott: Little Men
- Giuseppe Verdi: Aida
- Charles Darwin publishes The Descent of Man
- Marcel Proust born
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| 1872 | 1872
- Yellowstone National Park created
- First celebration of Arbor Day in Nebraska
- George Frederick Bristow: The Pioneer (secular cantata)
- Peter Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2, "Little Russian"
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Frank H. Murdoch: Davy Crockett (play)
- Ivan Turgenev: A Month in the Country (play)
- Sergei Diaghilev born
- Ralph Vaughn Williams born
- American artist George Catlin dies
- Samuel B. Morse dies
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1873- Daniel Kelley sets the text "Oh Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam" by Dr. Brewster Higley. The song "Home on the Range" will become the state song of Kansas in 1947.
- The popular songwriting team of Edward Harrigan (lyricist) and Dave Braham (composer) write "The Mulligan Guard." They will remain popular for the next two decades for their musical theater pieces and songs, often using humor to depict the ethnic neighborhoods of New York.
- Willa Cather born
- John Rosamond Johnson born
- Walter de la Mare born
| 1873
- The cable car is introduced in San Francisco
- Theodore Thomas, influential conductor and impresario, founds the Cincinnati May Festival
- Thomas Aldrich: Marjorie Daw
- Thomas Hardy: A Pair of Blue Eyes
- Arthur Rimbaud: Une Saison en Enfer
- Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days
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| 1874 | 1874
- Barbed wire changes life on the Great Plains
- Richard Wagner completes his Ring Cycle
- Georges Bizet: Carmen
- Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus
- Giuseppe Verdi: Requiem
- Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung
- First Impressionist exhibition in Paris
- Sholes and Glidden's typewriter establishes the QWERTY keyboard
- Gustav Holst born
- Arnold Schoenberg born
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| 1875 | 1875
- The Paris Opera's Palais Garnier opens
- Eakins paints The Gross Clinic
- Daniel Chester French's statue The Minute Man
- Thomas Mann born
- Maurice Ravel born
- Rainer Maria Rilke born
- Hans Christian Anderson dies
- Georges Bizet dies
- Charles Kingsley dies
- Edward Mörike dies
- Alexei Tolstoy dies
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