Background

Some prominent events rise the realism, Began from the American Civil War, widely
known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was a
civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence
for the Confederacy. The Confederacy, often simply called the South. In the 1860 presidential
election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, plan to eventually abolish
slavery.Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it.
From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the system of
slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United
States. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment to stop the expansion and thus
put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South
denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional rights. Southern whites
believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy because of the
alleged laziness of blacks under free labor. Slavery was illegal in the North. It was fading in
the border states and in Southern cities, but was expanding in the highly profitable cotton
districts of the South and Southwest.Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social
structure, customs and political values of the North and South.

It increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out
of existence, industrialized, urbanized and built prosperous farms, while the deep South
concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence farming
for the poor whites. Southern slave-holding states, because of their low cost manual labor,
had little perceived need for mechanization, and supported having the right to sell cotton and
purchase manufactured goods from any nation. Northern states, which had heavily invested in
their still-nascent manufacturing, could not compete with the full-fledged industries of
Europe in offering high prices for cotton imported from the South and low prices for
manufactured exports in return.The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and
even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. The North and
West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political
power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended. Historians are less sure about the
results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially regarding the second class citizenship of the
Freedmen and their poverty. The Civil War raised some prominent event related to the
American development and literature.
 Prominent evens

First transcontinental telegraph

The first transcontinental telegraph (completed in 1861) was a line that connected an
existing network in the eastern United States to a small network in California by a link
between Omaha and Carson City via Salt Lake City. It was a milestone in electrical
engineering and in the formation of the United States of America.[1] It served as the only
method of near-instantaneous communication between the east and west coasts during the
1860s. The federal contract authorized through the Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860 was
awarded to Hiram Sibley, the president of the Western Union Company. He then formed a
consortium between Western Union and the telegraph companies in California: to share the
efforts of constructing the overland telegraph, to split up the federal and state subsidies, and
to share any profits from operation of the line. The newly consolidated Overland Telegraph
Company of California built the line eastward from Carson City (the eastern terminus of their
lines), using the newly developed central route though Nevada and Utah. At the same time,
the Pacific Telegraph Company of Nebraska was formed by Sibley.

It constructed a line westward from Omaha, essentially using the eastern portion of the
Oregon Trail. The lines met at a station in Salt Lake City. Materials for the line were collected
in late 1860, and construction proceeded during the second half of 1861. Major problems in
provisioning the construction teams were overcome, and there was a constant shortage of
sources of telegraph poles on the plains of the Midwest and the deserts of the Great Basin.
The line from Omaha reached Salt Lake City on October 18, 1861, and the line from Carson
City was completed on October 24. The telegraph line immediately made the Pony Express
obsolete, and it officially ceased operations two days later. The overland telegraph line was
operated until 1869, when it was replaced by a multi-line telegraph that had been constructed
alongside the route of the Transcontinental Railroad.

The First Transcontinental Railroad

The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific

Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,907-mile (3,069 km)
contiguous railroad line constructed in the United States between 1863
and 1869 west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to connect the Pacific
coast at San Francisco Bay with the existing eastern U.S. rail network at
Council Bluffs, Iowa. Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869 with the
ceremonial driving of the "Last Spike" (later often called the "Golden
Spike") with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit, the road established
a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized
the settlement and economy of the American West by bringing these
western states and territories firmly and profitably into the "Union" and
making goods and transportation much quicker, cheaper, and more
flexible from coast to coast.

Education in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was a time of rapid economic growth and

urbanization, an era of institution building, and education was shaped by
these developments. Schools became instruments of reform, intended to
help redress pressing social problems. State and city systems of schooling
came into view, although local prerogatives continued to dictate most
educational practices. It was a time when schools and education gradually
assumed greater importance, and came to reflect prevailing social
divisions and patterns of inequality in American life. Education was linked
to questions of poverty and destitution, crime and social conflict.
Industrialization posed challenges to education. With the advent of child
labor, the factory became a school by default, although its lessons were
usually quite harsh. While some states passed laws requiring factory
owners to arrange for teaching child employees, such measures often
were honored in the breach. Some reformers rejected the idea of industry
altogether and attempted to establish ideal agrarian societies in isolated
communities dotting the countryside. The best known of these communal
experiments was Robert Owen's socialist cooperative in Indiana, called
New Harmony. Established on principles of shared work and property, and
an education system predicated on performing useful tasks without the
imposition of discipline, New Harmony was a challenge to long-standing
conventions. Although other communal experiments persisted
considerably longer than Owen's, their collective influence on the
educational system was limited.

Industrial and technological advances

The United States became a world leader in applied technology. From

1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued for new inventionsover ten
times the number issued in the previous seventy years. George
Westinghouse invented air brakes for trains (making them both safer and
faster). Theodore Vail established the American Telephone & Telegraph
Company and built a great communications network. Thomas Edison, in
addition to inventing hundreds of devices, established the first electrical
lighting utility, basing it on direct current and an efficient incandescent
lamp. Electric power delivery would spread rapidly during the Gilded Age,
replacing oil and gas lighting for indoor and outdoor illumination. The time
also saw a switch over from direct current to alternating current, which
had the advantage of being able to be transformed to high voltage for
long distance transmission with low power loss and then "stepped-down"
for use in indoor illumination. Electric power systems began to incorporate
other features such as heating and electric motors to run street cars and
factories. Because of this more electric utilities were able to offer day time
service because lighting was no longer the primary use of power. Oil
became an important resource, beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields.
The U.S. dominated the industry into the 1950s. Kerosene replaced whale
oil and candles for lighting. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil
Company and monopolized the oil industry which mostly produced
kerosene before the automobile created a demand for gasoline in the 20th
century.

Social Change

The Civil War had seemed to secure the triumph of a world of small
producers and the values of free labor, individualism, and contract
freedom. Many Americans desperately wanted to believe that those
values survived and still ensured success within the new industrial society.
Sometimes they attached the old values to new theories. Herbert Spencer,
the British writer and philosopher, had many American disciples, of whom
William Graham Sumner of Yale was probably the most prominent.
Spencer and his disciples tried to understand human social change in
terms of Darwinian evolution, utterly obfuscating the mechanisms of
biological evolution in the process.Other Americans simply tried to portray
the new economy as essentially the same as the old. They believed that
individual enterprise, hard work, and free competition in open markets still
guaranteed success to those willing to work hard. An evolving mass print
culture of cheap newspapers, magazines, and dime novels offered
proselytizers of the old values new forms of communication. Horatio Alger,
whose publishing career extended from the end of the Civil War to the end
of the century, wrote juvenile novels that reconciled the new economy
with the old values of individualism. In his novels, an individuals fate was
still in his hands.

Characteristics of Literature
Realism 1861- 1914 (American Realism 1865-1890): An artistic
movement begun in 19th century France. Artists and writers strove for
detailed realistic and factual description. They tried to represent events
and social conditions as they actually are, without idealization. This form
of literature believes in fidelity to actuality in its representation. Realism is
about recreating life in literature. Realism focused on the truthful
treatment of the common, average, everyday life. Realism focuses on the
immediate, the here and now, the specific actions and their verifiable
consequences. Realism seeks a one-to-one relationship between
representation and the subject. This form is also known as mimesis.
Realists are concerned with the effect of the work on their reader and the
reader's life, a pragmatic view. Pragmatism requires the reading of a work
to have some verifiable outcome for the reader that will lead to a better
life for the reader. This lends an ethical tendency to Realism while
focusing on common actions and minor catastrophes of middle class
society. Realism aims to interpret the actualities of any aspect of life, free
from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. It is in direct
opposition to concerns of the unusual, the basis of Romanticism. Stresses
the real over the fantastic. Seeks to treat the commonplace truthfully and
used characters from everyday life. This emphasis was brought on by
societal changes such as the aftermath of the Civil War in the United
States and the emergence of Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its effect
upon biblical interpretation.

Characteristics:

Emphasis on psychological, optimistic tone, details, pragmatic,

practical, slow-moving plot

Rounded, dynamic characters who serve purpose in plot

Empirically verifiable

World as it is created in novel impinges upon characters. Characters

dictate plot; ending usually open.

Plot=circumstance

Time marches inevitably on; small things build up. Climax is not a
crisis, but just one more unimportant fact.

Causality built into text (why something happens foreshadowed).

Foreshadowing in everyday events.

Realists--show us rather than tell us

Representative people doing representative things

Events make story plausible

Insistence on experience of the commonplace

Emphasis on morality, usually intrinsic, relativistic between people

and society

Scenic representation important

Humans are in control of their own destiny and are superior to their
circumstances
 Prominent Authors
1. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 April 21, 1910),

better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and
humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great
American Novel". Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the
setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with
a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the
newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a
riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in
Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining,
turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his
humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was
published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp,
California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story
brought international attention, and was even translated into classic
Greek.[4] His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from
critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists,
and European royalty.

2. Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902)

Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 -May 5, 1902) was an American
author and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners,
gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a
career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays,
lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to
fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he
incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold
Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.
"Tennessee's Partner", first published in The Overland Monthly in 1869.
The Tales of the Argonauts, a volume of short sketches published in
1875.Plain Language from Truthful James, first published in The Overland
Monthly in 1870 as The Heathen Chinee, was a satire of racial prejudice in
northern California, but was embraced by the American public as a
mockery of Chinese immigrants, and shaped anti-Chinese sentiment more
than any other work at the time.

3. Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 November 14, 1915)

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 November 14, 1915) was

an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of
the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant
leader in the African-American community. Washington was from the last
generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the
leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were
newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow
discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He mastered the nuances of the
political arena in the late 19th century, which enabled him to manipulate
the media, raise money, strategize, network, pressure, reward friends and
distribute funds while punishing those who opposed his plans for uplifting
blacks. His long-term goal was to end the disenfranchisement of the vast
majority of African Americans, who still lived in the South. The Future of
the American Negro 1899.Character Building 1902.

References:

American Civil War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

First transcontinental
telegraphhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_telegraph
Educationhttp://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/education.aspx
Gilded Agehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
Mark Twainhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
Bret Hartehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Harte
Booker T. Washington
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington#Works