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By admin

For my final project, I’m currently toying with the following 3 ideas, but to anyone reading this, I warmly welcome any other correlated ones.

Firstly, I think it would be interesting to examine the recruitment/membership rates of certain political groups throughout this period of history and see when certain ideologies peaked in general interest, and to try and narrow down the cause of them.

Secondly, I think literacy and education standards across America at this time could be a great topic to investigate. I can’t help but imagine that the proportion of literate people to illiterate people in certain states would say something about their societies, and I think it would be interesting to look for trends in ideologies or ways of life in less literate/educated areas vs more literate/educated ones. I’m not too sure what trends I would like to look for, but I think looking into literacy could provide some interesting insight into why people felt a certain way, or more importantly whether or not information could reach largely illiterate areas.

And finally (and this, I admit, is a very broad one), but I am interested in looking into the impact of the railroad in terms of how it changed where the new hotbeds of communication arose. I am sure that areas with the most transport to one another became larger and more replete with educated and influential individuals, but I still think there is something fascinating to be learned in the evaluation of the places that were the hubs of American social and political discourse before and after the introduction of the Railroad and whether or not they remained the same, or whether or not some fell out of fashion and any new ones came into the fray.