Thursday, March 12, 2020

History- civil war exhibit essays

History- civil war exhibit essays A House Divided exhibition in the Chicago Historical Society Museum is a showcase of the causes and components of the Civil War. However, most importantly this exhibit places slavery, the peculiar institution, as the root cause for this devastating domestic war that erased more than 600,000 New World citizens from the earth. The title itself suggests a difference of opinions and they lie between the North and South. The difference between the two was only amplified by changing people and economies. The arrival of the transportation revolution, the immense land ownership opportunities in the West, and the industrialization of our nation found the North changing and the South staying the same. This exhibit was adorned with many relics from the Lincoln era. It was organized in a circular way so that everything centralized around the most vital pieces of the exhibit, Lincolns denunciation of slavery and the abolitionists movements relics. It can be viewed much like a book would be read, background in the beginning, rising action, a climax and ultimately a resolution. By the 1830s the Northerners religious beliefs and free-labor society ideals didnt include the institution of slavery and that posed a very big problem in relation to the expansion of the U.S. westward and the fear of slavery going that way as well. The election of Lincoln was vested in course of ultimate extinction, speaking of his plan to halt slaverys expansion and existence. Initially one sees a huge picture of Lincoln titled The Railsplitter, circa 1860, as he/she walks in. It is about 12X7 feet, and Lincoln is illustrated as a young, common man, shirt unbuttoned, splitting wood at the dawn of a misty summer morning. Behind him is a placid lake, and even further back, a blurred vision of the White House. This painting represented that a common citizen can rise to lead the nation,...