Saturday, March 10, 2007

An Elegy to the Father of the Victorians

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1 comment:

My Frontier Thesis said...

We, children of the 20th century, mock our 19th-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders.... By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages.

In the late nineteenth American West, you could see it all, the broad range of humanity, from the scum of the earth to the most giving and charitable philanthropists. Off hand, I'm thinking of Teddy Roosevelt hunting like a maniac in the 1880s Dakota badlands, and later in life appealing before Congress to consider the importance of conserving the natural treasures of our nation.

3/10/2007 1:27 PM

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