Name: _________________________________ Date: ________________ Block: ___
Guided Notes for Age of Realism
1850-1914
“From Agriculture to Industry”
 Prelude to the Civil War
o The North
 Commerce ruled—______________________________
 Expanded __________________ turned towns into ________
 _____________, banking, _______________, reform—all important issues
 Large tide of _________ and ____________ immigrants coming, mainly between
___________ and _____________
o The South
 Slower paced land of ______________ and small _______________
 ___________, sugar, rice, _____________ are key crops
 Not much of a _______________/__________________ revolution
 No discussion of the _________________ issues revolving around the
______________ revolution
 Main issue: ______________
o Slavery & Fugitive Slave Act
 Passed in _________
 Required all citizens—______________________________, free state and slave
state—to help catch ______________ slaves
 South saw it as ___________; North saw it as an ______________
 KS-NE Act opened up the _____________ to __________ and became a hotly
contested political action
o The Union is Dissolved
 Lincoln elected ______ President of the U.S. in ______—brings the slavery battle
to a head
 Lincoln was a member of the newly formed _______________ party, which had
dedicated itself to halting __________ ___________________ said it would secede if Lincoln was elected, and it did
 ____________ more states followed and in ___________ the secessionist states
formed the _________________- States of America
 An Expanding America
o _____________ defines _______________________
o ______________ defines the years that follow
o In the ____________ years after the war, America underwent a ____________ and
_______________ expansion that transformed the __________________,
__________________, and ____________________ identity
o ___________________ of 1862 promises ______________ to anyone who would live on
the land for a certain period of time and make ________________ improvements
 This shifted _____________________________/movement into high gear
 500,000 farmers, including many _________________ slaves, staked claims on
the _____________________
Name: _________________________________ Date: ________________ Block: ___
 ____________________ headed west by the thousands
 Expansion was aided by the completion of the first
_______________________________________ in 1869
 The expansion left ___________________ in its path
 wild _______________ were gone
 Open plains _______________
 Indian nations were ____________, ________________, and forced onto
______________________.
 Folk-heroes comes out of this era, such as __________________.
 Life on the Plains
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Had to be strong to __________________
Few _____________ and major ___________________
_______________ had to make clothes, soap, quilts, candles, and other goods by hand
Women also worked as make-shift ________________, doctors, and _______________
The wives of the _________________ kept this country alive
As farmers spread across the _______________, fewer areas where left to be settled
________________ was one of the last major land rushes
April 1889- 100,000 land seekers waited on the ______________ border to claim free
land starting on April 22
o As the “________________” moved in they discovered that the “______________” had
snuck onto the land early and claimed the best parts
 Changing Society: 1880-1900
o Electricity
 __________________ becomes a normal part of society in the 1880s and replaces
steam power in the _________________ industry
 America in introduced to _______________ light, telephones, cars,
_______________________ and phonographs during this period
 Mass ___________________- leads to the first boom in __________________
o Immigration
 Immigration _____________ in the county
 In 20 years the population grows from ______________ to ________________
 Almost 10 million of these new American are ___________________
 Most settle in large ______________, which leads to an inexhaustible supply of
______________________I for industry
o Industrial Boom
 Industrial boom leads to great extremes in ________________ and
__________________ in the county
 _________________ becomes the norm, as wages are so low it takes the whole
family working to make a living
 Meanwhile, the owners of the big industries—_________________,
___________________, ___________________—live like kings and only grew
more and more wealthy
 Twain called it “________________________________”. This was a satirical
comment on the great disparity between the rich and poor.
Name: _________________________________ Date: ________________ Block: ___
 Literature of the Age of Realism
 “Oh, Freedom!”
 Slave narratives, ______________________,
 Unique mix of ________________ culture and _________________
ideas/imagery
 Wartime Voices
 _______________, letters, journals
 Everyone wrote, from the ______________ citizen to the
________________
 _____________, Lee, Grant, _______________ are some of the most
important voice of this time
 Frontier Voices
 First dose of writers from the _____________________ Willa Cather-My Antonia, Bret Harte-”Outcast of Poker Flats”, Mark
Twain-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 A large influx of _____________________ authors appear at this time in
the SW
 Often filled with the __________, _____________,
___________________—a precursor to magical realism
 Jose Griego y Maestas- “The Indian and the Hundred Cows”
 Realism and Naturalism
 Harsh reality of the ______________ + reaction to _____________ =
Realism
 The _____________ cost of the war caused writers to turn away from the
___________________ focus on the natural and beautiful
 Focus on “real life” as ordinary people lived it and attempted to survive day
in and day out
 Aimed to show their characters in an honest, objective, and almost
________________ way
 Naturalism
 Offshoot of _____________________
 Focused on “real life” but believed that forces bigger that the
___________________—fate, nature, heredity—shaped individual
________________
 Literature of the Discontent
 Literature of this period often focused on _________________, as authors set out
to _________________ the social ills of the time—______________,
_______________, _________________, etc.
 Local Color Realism
 Setting often ________________ and usually __________ to the story;
 Characters-more concerned with the character of the region than individualquaint, _________________;
Name: _________________________________ Date: ________________ Block: ___
 Narrator-educated observer from ____________________ who’s often
deceived
 Emphasis on _______________
 Use of __________________ characters
 Plot-nothing much happens, revolves around the community and its
________________
 Themes in Local Color Realism
o Dislike of ______________, nostalgia for an always-past Golden
Age;
o ________________ trickster or Trickster tricked;
o ________________ tradition-conflicts described humorously, larger
than life