In a country where education had no pull in society, one school dared to break the mold. Every morning, between fifty and sixty students between the ages of three and five made their way to a school in central Bermuda that was established in 1831. Mostly the offspring of slaves, the children were given an opportunity at improving their quality of life. Students were taught the basics of education:...
In April of 1830 in Boston, Sarah Josepha Hale made a speech about boarding schools that would change how women were educated. She said that it was good to have women learn their domestic duties, but it was not enough. A woman must learn morals and have mental capacity in order to interact with other people, and mothers who teach their daughters, teach the opposite because they have not learned...
A Cholera epidemic struck the citizens of the United States of America in 1831. Doctors all over the Nation treated its victims without much success. Many doctors published their feelings and findings in medical journals. A Doctor Smith from Boston wrote about his voyage to Russia that year to compare their epidemic to the one in America. Dr. Smith was horrified to see so many helpless poor Russian...
In an 1836 lifestyle manual for women, entitled The Young Lady’s Friend, John Farrar outlined the expectations for an American Christian women’s behavior in a particular chapter entitled Dress a Test of Character. In this chapter he discussed the appropriateness and significance of a nineteenth century women’s dress in relation to how she was viewed by society. According to Farrar, “Christian...
In 1834, the growing unrest and instability between American natives and Irish immigrants was approaching the point of violence. In 1834, the Boston Evening Transcript reported an act of arson that broke the line between civil unrest - in the form of protest - and violence, when the Charlestown Convent was burned to the ground. Near eleven o’clock on 11 August, arsonists gave warning to the inhabitants...
“You son of a bitch: If you ever send such papers here again, we will come and give you a good Lynching…” wrote the Lynch Club of Charleston, South Carolina, to newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison, “So you had better keep them at home.” This was one of two letters that Garrison published in his paper, The Liberator, on February 15, 1839, sarcastically titled, “Polite Letters from...