"It is now eleven years since the fever was epidemic in Galveston, and the citizens believe that with proper attention to sanitary precautions they need never suffer again." Referring to an epidemic of the yellow fever in 1867, an article in the Scientific American used Galveston, Texas, as an example for sanitation standards when quarantining the yellow fever in 1878. The article continued to claim, "the value of such sanitary care was particularly tested in 1878, when the disease was very fatal in Memphis, Shreveport, and in Texas." In the wake of numerous epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and the like, people throughout the country called for sanitary reform and regulation. The rapid urbanization experienced during the nineteenth century had highlighted the insufficient methods for disposing of waste and refuse. As exclaimed in the New York Daily Times: "we need nothing but noses to know that there is something rotten in the street."

The initial push for sanitary reform came in the 1840s, yet would not culminate in any significant changes until the 1870s and 1880s. In the early stages of urban development, city-dwellers practiced private-lot waste removal, in which, as Peterson describes, they "discharged their wastes upon the land adjoining their dwellings and shops, principally within the confines of the private lot but also into the streets." In reaction to similar problems in England during the 1840s, British reformer Edwin Chadwick developed an innovative system of water-carriage sewerage, in which pressurized water was passed through small, egg-shaped pipes to carry solid wastes away from the city. Chadwick also accepted the filth theory, which held "that gases or miasmas emanating from decaying organic matter caused disease." However, not much progress was made in sanitary reform in America before the Civil War; as Peterson remarks, "only Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Chicago, in fact, attempted major works before the Civil War. Not until after the war and the return of cholera in 1866 did many cities introduce systematic sewerage." At that point, American pioneers followed Chadwick's suit, installing comprehensive and integrated sewer systems in major cities across the nation. Legislation was passed to provide for the administrative reform of sanitation. Boards of Health began cropping up in cities around the country. The American Public Health Association, which Peterson claims, "became the principal voice of American sanitary reform," was formed in 1872. Sanitary survey planning emerged as a useful practice, as it "required the study of every street, lot, and building in a city to determine the precise location of any prevalent and all suspect environmental conditions."

The impact of American sanitary reform was most readily observed in the comprehensive reconstruction plan developed for Memphis, Tennessee in response to a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1878, which claimed 5,150 lives out of its population of approximately 45,000. A National Board of Health was created in March 1879 to deal with the problem. It conducted an exhaustive, citywide survey and made nine proposals to improve the city's sanitation. George E. Waring was chosen to construct an innovative and controversial sewage system in the city. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Waring's "pipes were much smaller than customary, were for house sewage only, without manholes, well ventilated, and were flushed every twenty-four hours by means of automatic flush tanks." Although the plan only pertained to health matters and not to the city's future growth, the sanitary reform conducted in Memphis considerably improved the city's sanitation and proved to be a significant step towards the eventual practice of city planning.

However, in the 1880s and 1890s, German and French bacteriologists soon discovered the microscopic pathogenic organisms responsible for diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera, among others. Peterson states, "As this new public health approach gradually took hold, it shifted attention away from the root premise of sanitary reform - that most infectious disease had its source in the visible environment." Thus, preventative measures such as isolation, immunization, disinfection, and antitoxins became more important than sanitary reform. Sanitary scientists developed methods of filtration and chlorination of water, allowing polluted water to become purified. Although sanitary reform eventually lost momentum in the face of microorganisms and filtration, the movement sparked valuable innovations in sewerage and city planning as methods to control the byproducts of urbanization during the nineteenth century.

On September 12, 1865 President Andrew Johnson signed a full pardon of offenses committed under rebellion for Basil Manly, Sr. of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Included in Manly's offenses was the prayer at Jefferson Davis' inauguration to the presidency of the confederacy in February 1861. As part of a special group of ex-confederates who could not sign the typical oath of allegiance, Manly needed a Presidential pardon. Individuals like Manly had to submit a petition to Andrew Johnson to be pardoned. Following the petition, Manly had to obey five terms to become and remain a United States citizen. First, he took the oath of allegiance as established by President Johnson on May 29, 1865. Manly then had to pay any costs owed from any proceeding and disclaim property or proceeds from the sale of confiscated property. He was instructed to notify the secretary of state to legitimize the pardon upon its arrival, and if Manly used slave labor of any kind in the future, the pardon would be void. On October 19, 1865 Manly received two more official letters signed by Secretary of State William H. Seward: the first stated that he had taken the oath of loyalty, and the second professed the first letter was a valid copy of the letter Seward had on his file. At age 67, just three years before his death, Manly Basil, Sr. was once again a citizen of the United States.

At the end of the Civil War, Lincoln (and later Johnson) was faced with the task of reintegrating those who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. Lincoln designed a plan that included an oath of allegiance readily available to the masses, but required leaders of the Confederacy to ask him for a pardon directly. By not forcing anyone to take the oath, Lincoln encouraged a feeling of amnesty when the war ended. After Lincoln's death Johnson adopted a similar plan, but included a greater number of people in the "exceptions" who must ask for presidential pardon. Manly's role in establishing the confederacy meant that he fell within the fourteen categories of exceptions which included those rebels who had served in political office, held a high ranking military position, or owned property valued at over twenty thousand dollars. With so many people requiring special consideration, there was a significant influx of petitions for pardon between July and October of 1865 from those who wanted to attend the upcoming state conventions. Basil Manly's petition for pardon coincided with press reports claiming President Johnson was giving pardons more freely than before. Lincoln's hope of rebuilding the nation by granting citizenship to large numbers of ex-confederates set up an interesting dichotomy. While Radical Republicans grew increasingly angry at Johnson's laxness on those they saw as traitors, Southern Democrats slowly began fighting to reassume power in the South. Instead of finding a unified nation, the two factions continued the struggle for power until after Reconstruction ended.

The Mill Bill, with the support of women and the Democratic Party, hoped to reduce the tariff on wool, while simultaneously allowing for workers in the clothing industry to gain a better standard of living. According to the New York Times in July of 1888, there was "a vast army of men and women and a few children in New York engaged in making clothes." Historically, the clothes industry had undergone many tariff protections. For instance, all the parts of a woman's dress or a man's suit were "protected" by astronomical tariffs: on such items as "raw wool, the cotton yarn, the print cloth, the thread, the buttons, linings, trimmings and woolen cloth." The article, "Clothes Makers and the Tariff," argued for the Mill Bill, a bill that would allow for laborers to enjoy higher wages and, consequently, a better and cheaper standard of living. This piece of legislation hoped to encourage these positive alterations by making wool "free," like cotton, which already enjoyed freedom from large duties.

In 1888, cotton's rate of duty was approximately 40 percent, compared to the 69 percent experienced by the wool industry. The New York Times discovered that this increase in duty did not benefit the wage earners. Instead, it merely added to the profits of the companies. Meanwhile, there were large numbers of people smuggling foreign goods into the country, which only further increased the problems instilled by the current duty. The Mill Bill hoped to take positive actions to "excel" in the worldwide clothing manufacturing market, a foreign idea in the "cloth making business" in the late 19th century. Instead, countries such as England dominated in these areas because of the United States' high duties.

The factories, which should have been filled with the "music of contented labor," were instead filled with the miserable sounds of the "poverty-stricken." The introduction of the Mill Bill would allow factories to become happier places, with lower costs to the manufacturer and lower costs of materials. With the reduction of duties as proposed by this bill, the United States and New York City would be able to compete with foreign competitors, have happier employees, and extend the clothing market.

The sentiments expressed through both this article and the Mill Bill were supported by the women and the Democrat Party's campaign throughout 1888 and 1892. Women worked in these clothing factories in an 11:1 ratio of females to males, and shopping and consumerism had continually become a female duty. The Democratic Party and the tariff reform movement involved both working-class women and middle-class women, whose voices strove to be heard through the ballots of their husbands. The Democratic Party employed moral arguments for economic reforms as Democratic women argued that these tariffs were stealing incomes from hard-working families, and they blamed the Republicans for this insanity. Through reforms such as the tariff reform, women gained their political voice as they marched their husbands to the ballot boxes. As reported by the Woman's Tribune, "political parties [began] to take note of what will be women's wish." In the 1890 election, women's influence and the tariff issue seemed to dominate the Democrat's "sweeping victories," as women gained political power through the ballots of their men and under the pretext of tariff reform and legislation, such as the Mill Bill.

December of 1832 saw another sale of lands that were the rightful property of Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia. The Native Americans of Georgia were forced from their homes and lands because the state government saw the land as being underused and mismanaged by the Indian tribes. This act of selling Indian lands was known as the Georgia Land Lottery and in 1832 it again sold off native lands to white Georgia citizens.

The land sales started in 1805 as a way for the state of Georgia to grant land to qualifying citizens, white males. This was an effort to try and stimulate the states economy and settle lands that the government had little to no real control over because they were occupied by Native Americans. The system of selling land in a lottery format was unique to Georgia. In 1814 the land sales came to a dramatic event when Creek Indians resisted land sales. The conflict was won by Andrew Jackson and land sales continued. In 1829 gold was discovered on land sold in the lottery and a gold rush followed which made the 1832 sale more dramatic.

Prior to the 1832 sale of lands, the Cherokee people filed and won a Supreme Court case which ruled that Cherokee lands could not be taken from the Natives and sold by the state of Georgia without compensation. President Jackson who had fought the Creek over the Georgia land lottery decided to ignore the Supreme Court ruling and continue with the land sales in the state.

A December 1832 article in the Columbian Star newspaper calls the sales of land in Georgia the "Gold Lottery." In the years prior to this particular land sale, gold had been discovered on the Cherokee and Creek lands resulting in a gold fever that Georgia was happy to spin into state profit. Unfortunately for the state, the profits from the land sales only covered the actual costs of selling the land and little to no profit was actually made. In 1832 Georgia sold 40 acre parcels dubbed "gold lands" capitalizing on peoples gold frenzy but not guaranteeing the lands would contain gold. The obvious result of the land sales in December of 1832 was the displacement of hundreds and thousands of Cherokee Indians and the creation of a greater refugee population in the state of Georgia.

The state and federal government solved the growing refugee problem with one of the most infamous Indian relations acts in United States history, the Trail of Tears. This event was in response to the great displaced Cherokee population that resulted from land sales. There is no doubt that the Trail of Tears was the result of greed by white people, and future Indian removal programs would end in equal tragedy.

A wood engraved image of the Hocking Valley Miners' Strike was published on October 25, 1884 in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. It depicted four officers leading a miner through a large crowd of women. In the picture some women held clubs that were raised in threatening positions, while the rest had faces that were contorted with rage. Joseph Becker sketched this scene in Buchtel, a mining town in Hocking County, Ohio during the Hocking Valley Miners' Strike of 1884. Miners, women and men, from forty-eight mines in Hocking Valley arranged the strike in order to dispute high living costs and decreased wages. The miners had hoped to expand their rights as a worker by means of peaceful demonstrations with the organized political support of the Knights of Labor. Nine months later, the striking miners were unable to come to an agreed compromise with the mine operators and returned to the mines.

The women of the Hocking Valley miners were a familiar image, which grabbed the publics' attention toward the miners' plight during the 1880s. Their struggle for economic balance and the stability of their employment could only be recognized, because of the image of working class mothers and wives engaged in a united front. Hocking Valley Miners were not only assisted by the image of their fellow workers in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, but became connected through the family oriented association of the Knights of Labor. This association was a national working class group that tried to end "industrial capitalism" by incorporating new ways to oppose unjust industrial policies. The Knights of Labor was the first organized labor group to successfully attempted to change basic working conditions for all workers despite race , gender, position, age, and regardless of their experience. This large union would eventually assist the Hocking Valley mining families through two strikes during the 1880s.

One of the biggest issues during these strikes was the rivalry of appearing levels in working class. Miners had been hired as individual groups, led by a selected manager. Most of the time family members would form a "family system of production". The necessity of many hands versus the few, children and women were part of the company. This unit method allowed miners to work at an individual pace, but work was limited by the price of coal per ton. With the advancement of technology and the change in safety, job description changed the way workers were viewed as employees. The emergence of the change between manual labor and skilled labor created a strained working force in the mines. Wages and restrictions limited workers by age, gender, and skill sets, rather than the longevity of their employment. Job description was not a common term until the Knights of Labor and other Mining groups created the unity of workers. No longer would miners receive the benefit of selected associates, but an organized layer of employees, based on their skills or experience.

The sketch of the miners' women in Hocking Valley is an image that fueled the miners' progress toward the creation of a company that would unite under the protection of the United Mine Workers of America in 1890. The image relays the importance of the labor union to the worker as standardizing the work force. The uniqueness of the Hocking Valley Miner's Strike is that the workers' struggle was a family action. Women were used by the newspapers to express the unfair working conditions and the poor pay of the Hocking miners. Due to the efforts of the mining families in Hocking Valley and publicized notice in newspapers, miners succeeded in obtaining stable wages and equal opportunities, but the creation of the mining unions created a clear definition in skilled workers, manual laborers, and family working units.

On December 29, 1876 Mr. J. E. Burchell was traveling on the Pacific Express train headed toward Chicago during a heavy snow storm. As the first engine, "Socrates" crossed the two hundred foot bridge, the iron trusses broke, causing the bridge to collapse. His eye-witness account describes the accident as the second engine and eleven cars were tipped into the creek seventy feet below and the wood and cast iron frame of the bridge twisted. He recalled, he heard cracking in the front of the car, "then came a sickening oscillation and a sudden sinking, and I was thrown stunned from my seat. I heard the cracking, and splintering, and smashing around me." When the train reached the frozen creek at the bottom of the ravine, cars closest to the engine burst into flames. Burchell describes people attempting to escape the raging fire by smashing windows or crawling out of the shattered cars. He also witnessed several people die horrible deaths in the blaze, because they were unable to free themselves from the debris. Rescue efforts were abandoned when the strong wintery winds caused the fire to escalate. Passengers and crew on the train by J.E. Burchell's estimate was as many as two hundred fifty people. Ninety-two people died due to injuries sustained from the crash or from the fire that plagued the wreck.

J. E. Burchell's account was published in the Chicago Daily Tribune on December 30, 1876, the day after the accident. The next day his story ran in the New York Times. Both of these newspapers were able to advertise the severity of the death rate and damage from the accident, because of the personal account of one of the survivors. The Ashtabula Bridge Disaster caused the public to wonder about the stability of the Railroad Companies and their constructional efforts to connect railway systems throughout the East Coast, and toward the West. The New York Times completed a follow up story at the request of their readers to address reasons why it had collapsed; "the result of defects and errors made in designing, constructing, and erecting it; that a great defect, and one which appears in many parts of the structure, was the dependence of every member for its efficient action on the probability that all or nearly all the others would retain their positions." People were horrified that Railroad Companies, in hast of construction, neglected to administer safety codes or inspection.

By the 1870s the American public was use to iron bridges collapsing, but the railroad was more of a public commodity, then in its earlier days. The more deaths caused by the railroad, the more people expected payment for their losses. Some railway companies sought to avoid having to pay the damages by sticking with wooden trusses, but the application of cast iron was cheap and easy to get then. The Ashtabula Disaster awakened the feeling of national shock. The reality that ninety- four people had died in the horrific accident and forty-three passengers of the Pacific Express were burnt beyond recognition became a catalyst for the government to eradicate these problems. In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed by Congress to ensure safer methods of construction. Ashtabula Bridge Disaster became one of the most publicized bridge collapses. The distress the event caused the public assisted in the shift of power from privately owned railroad companies to government sponsored corporations.

According to the Boston Daily Globe of August 18, 1889, "Too Good to Lose Are Boston's Surplus Women." This article pertains to a matter of utmost importance, the eligible bachelors of the Wild West heroically discovering a solution for the "marriageable femininity" and the "confoundly delicate matter" of the over 80,000 surplus of women in Massachusetts. Belle Eyre even reports that these men are so "self-sacrificing that they would solve the problem by marrying the whole 80,000." Belle Eyre also graciously published a letter, in the form of a poem, from ten dressmakers sending their solitude to the gentlemen of Tacoma Washington for the "lovely life in that far-off part of this great and glorious land," and promising to "Olympia there, ere summer does close," all with the post script "We are all white women."

Perhaps, though, the real heart of the matter comes towards the end of Belle Eyre's investigation when Gov. Andrew of Oregon expressed his views on the matter. Should women be "driven to the competition of the market force with men, or where men are left unsolaced by the presence of women, society is alike weakened and demoralized." Hence, should men continue to desire their place at the head of the households, they should take immediate action to curb this surplus of women, should these women get out of hand and act rashly, such as trying to secure their right to vote, or other such nonsense. Hon. M. M Cunniff says though he doubts there actually is any danger of a surplus of women in Massachusetts, he should be glad for there to be double their present number. In fact, he adds, he would willingly give women "greater opportunities than they have now," but he doubts this is what they actually wants; he sees their personal missions as producing "men, not measures."

Sarah Deutsch, in her book Women in the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940, finds women's roles in Boston in the late 19th century to be quite different than Belle Eyre's account. She discovers that Boston women, in fact, were not merely passive women, looking for domestic roles and adventure out west as mothers and wives, but active women who deeply cared about staking a claim in their male-dominated city. These women insisted upon creating an urban space that could meet their needs as individuals, in a society, which historically, denied these interests. Through her accounts of women through all socioeconomic stratifications, Deutsch expresses how these women formed female associations, overcame ethnic and racial diversity, expanded all conventional boundaries, advocated for playgrounds and settlement houses, and crossed all gender boundaries to create their own city in the spirit of "urban femininity." Deutsch's study of Boston, M.A. throughout this pivotal time period, displays a character of the Boston women who, unlike Belle Eyre's account in the Boston Globe, chose to invest their faith and determination within their city, to create a modern city that could, in deed, meet the needs of a gender whose opportunity for equality and respect had finally come.

The South was up in arms. On November 23, 1860, the Richmond Daily Dispatch reported an account from the New York Journal of Commerce about the manufacturing and selling of "Arms to the South." Before directly quoting the New York Journal of Commerce, the Richmond editor mentioned that the makers and sellers of arms were perhaps the only ones "gathering any advantage from the present crisis." According to the New York account, a firm in New York received anywhere from twenty to fifty orders for arms from South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama daily. The writer for the New York Journal of Commerce also mentioned that while those who did not know better might call the South's credit and financial dependability into question, the South actually concludes all business transactions with cash within thirty days. Adding significance to this article, the writer noted that all the orders came from Southern states, but "but mainly from those in which secession is regarded as the only remedy for Southern grievances."

The author of this article refers to the "Colt's revolvers and rifles [sold] to Georgia," the arms for "1,800 men…sent to Savannah," and the order of one thousand "death-dealing weapons" for Alabama. The New York Journal of Commerce ended this article with another seemingly biased statement that, "the wholesale houses and agencies in the city [New York City] have been hard pressed to supply the orders for every imaginable species of weapons." These figures seem slanted towards Unionist and Northern sentiments, but perhaps these astronomical figures and seemingly exaggerated sentiments by Northerners were not as far-fetched as they first appear.

At the onset of the Civil War, the South struggled to provide adequate arms for Confederate troops. Records exist, however, of these several thousand modern small arms that were shipped to the Southern states and that were provided by Northern industries pre-Civil War. When these supplies were cut off at the start of the Civil War by orders of the U.S. government, smaller Confederate states began to produce and manufacture small arms, but they never were able to catch up with the production by the Northern states. It was at this point that the Confederacy turned to Caleb House in Europe in 1861 and 1862 for their weaponry and supplies. Despite the constant gaining and losing of arms in various battles during the Civil War, at the end of the war, the Confederacy, provided by Chief of Ordinance Josiah Gorgas, reported that they possessed 1,306 field artillery pieces, 921,441 rounds of artillery ammunition, 323,231 infantry arms, and 72,413,854 small arms cartridges. So, while the North was not the sole provider of the arms for Confederate armies, their early supplying of Confederate weaponry provided the basis for the Southern states to never lack in arms and ammunition, even though the conditions of these Confederacy arms was negotiable.

On 19 February 1820, the Boston Recorder published an article on an incident that occurred overseas in Australia. A pilot at Port Dalrymple was bitten by a venomous snake and thought to be a goner by onlookers. However, a native stepped in and turned what appeared to be a man awaiting death into a healthy human being once again. He allegedly rubbed the wound with an unknown bark, palpated the leg, then cut away the skin at the site of the bite and sucked at the venom. Not long after the patient was proclaimed healthy.

At the onset of the nineteenth century, Americans were still locked in a power struggle with Native Americans over land. As a result, superstitions surrounding shamanism ran rampant. However, superstition also often showed itself in the practice of medicine, where doctors practiced very little of what we today consider to be "real science." The mysticism of shamans and the exotic and foreign world they represented were often intriguing to Americans, who at the time embodied the sentiment of adventure. The Boston Recorder's publication of this article highlights the American interest in the subject of exotic peoples and their rituals.

1Thomas Scott was about to be one step closer to his ultimate dream. The President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, Scott had an ambition to build a second transcontinental railroad, and even though he would never achieve this dream on Oct. 30 1873 talks began on a deal that would hand over the rights of the California and Texas Railway Company to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. For 10 days now rumors had been swarming about a merger but they were not confirmed by officials until yesterday. They hope to come to an agreement that will benefit both parties equally. 2The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was in the height of its prosperity and a new and long awaited investment opportunity to build a second transcontinental railroad had just presented itself. All of this was part of a railroad boom in the post-Civil War era that would come to be known as the "age of the railway" in American History.

3Scott played an important role in the Civil War leading up to this time. He was appointed Assistant Secretary of War to oversee transportation in 1861. He would later resign and then serve another term as a colonel for Major-General Hooker's forces in 1863. Scott was able to lay the foundation for a wartime mobilization scheme that would eventually win the war. He would later become Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company in 1861 but act as president until he acquired the title in 1870. Scott presided over the "greatest period of expansion in the country's history." Under his control the company became a major railroad trust that had many holdings all over the United States. These holdings even listed the Southern Security Railway Company which strived to connect Richmond and Atlanta with one continuous line. This line would eventually create the I-85 corridor, relevant to the 21st century.

2The growth of the railroads in the 19th century not only furthered American transportation for the time but also helped further the economy by creating tens of thousands of jobs for local and immigrant workers. State funding for railroads would quickly dry up as states demanded more and more control over the railroads that the railroad company's retained. Regional tensions over where the second trans-continental railroad should be laid caused the dream to die at least for the time. The railroad provided economic booms for local cities that had been previously unimportant but they also cause economic disasters on a national level. The railway company's have even been blamed for some economic depressions such as the one in 1873, triggered by the failure of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Also the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Companies contributed to the Panic of 1893. "Regardless the attitudes, railroads became the dominant form of transportation and a major business enterprise." It is clear now in hindsight that due to the work of great industrialists like Thomas Scott the railroad ruled America for over 50 years after the Civil War, and it continues to serve a pivotal role in 21st century America as well.