Late Nineteenth Century Events:
The American Civil War 1861-65
Foundation of Red Cross, First Geneva Convention 1863-64
American Reconstruction 1865-77
Austro-Prussian War 1866
First transcontinental railroad in US opened 1869
Suex Canal opened 1869
Franco-Prussion War 1870-71
Second Industrial Revolution 1876-1914; the "Gilded Age"
Russo-Turkish War 1877-78
Anglo-Zulu War 1879
War of the Pacific 1879-84
Boer Wars 1880-1902
Sino-French War 1884-85
Circassion Russian War 1886
Battle of Wounded Knee 1890
Olympic Games Revived 1896
Big Names in Science:
Boas, Curie, Darwin, Doppler, Edison, Faraday, Foucault, Freud, Humboldt, Kelvin, Mendel, Nobel, Pasteur, Tesla.
Big Names in Philosophy:
Comte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Joseph Smith/Brigham Young, Baha'u'llah.
Big Names in Politics:
Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria.
Other chapters of Berlin's book to see how composition teaching has evolved.
Late Nineteenth Century Music:
Types: Romantic symphonic, opera, waltz, ballet, operetta, Impressionist symphonic.
Big Names: Berlioz, Bizet, Saint-Saens, Offenbach, Delibes, Debussy, Bruckner, Wagner, Strauss, Strauss Jr., Brahms, Verdi, Smetana, Franck, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gilbert and Sullivan.
No television of course but big names in the art world were:
Cassatt, Cezanne, Degas, Morris, Munch, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Turner.
Late Nineteenth Century Literature:
Popular Literary Genres:
The novel, the essay, poetry.
Big Names:
Charlotte/Emily/Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Swinburne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson.
Education:
The Nineteenth Century was a productive time in the university. The English Department was created as part of the "New American University." Harvard became the prototype for this type of English department that emphasized classical rhetoric and oral communication.
Yet the English class changed during this period going from a course of years to one single course. The classical curriculum also lessened in popularity.
During the Nineteenth Century, many universities opened including Johns Hopkins, an institution focusing on graduate education and research. Universities with a liberal arts emphasis and schools for women and African-Americans also opened.
All thoughts reflected in the education part of the interest section and comments from the two professors are derived from James A Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.