Is it me? Or is it really the 1870's?

[devilgrrl]

Every time I look out my window, I see the motor vehicle I drive but still I wonder.

[leftofthedial]

the robber barons won

[Demeter]

1. Why the 1870's?

1950's I could understand....

[Virginia Dare]

2. Yes, welcome to the gilded age...

part deux, complete with corrupt empires, familial dynasties, robber barons and xenophobic paranoia.

[catmandu57]

3. More like Dicksonian England

Every day the similarities are growing.

[meegbear]

4. OK, I give up ....

what are you talking about?

[dipsydoodle]

5. If it 's 1870 then

my house is 27 years old and it's one of less than 10 in the whole road. There are no cars ! The church opposite is 13 years old and the park at the back of my house is a farm.
At the end of the back garden <yard to you> there is a blacksmith and forge. My how times have changed.

If only we'd known - Blair and Bush could both have been aborted prior to birth.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. Ah, the Gilded Age

with corrupt Republican politicians in the pockets of Big Business, which is busily conglomerating itself (though no longer called "trusts"), the little man squeezed, an unholy bargain made with the hate mongers in the South-yep, its deja vu all over again.

[Snow]

8. And don't forget the "Great Revival"

fundies gone nuts - even the Society of Friends split into progressives & fundies -, in reaction to Darwin, Huxley, the changeover from rural small farm life to urban factory life, and that frightening means of rapid communication, the internet of the 1870s, the telegraph. The more things change, blablabla. Even further back, look at the upwelling of religious conservatism in Albany the year the Erie Canal was completed.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

9. The Millerites

who took to trees awaiting the rapture, only to come down again...they were the forebears of Jehovah's Witnesses and their ilk.

[Historic NY]

7. Not unless your having......

a "Little House on the Prairie" moment....you know working from sun up to sun down just so you can eat or put fuel in your car.

[ArnoldLayne]

10. I could actually get to meet and talk with real veterans

of the Battle of Gettysburg.

[genie_weenie]

11. Because this is another era of crushing Americans

rights and killing innocents?

It might as well be any year during our glorious history.

The Dorr "Rebellion" 1841, Haymarket Square 1886, Espionage Act 1918, Alien & Sedition Acts 1798, the crushing of the Bonus Army in 1932, Ludlow 1914, Second Seminole War 1832-1841, Wounded Knee 1890, Phillipines Insurrection 1899-1902, Kent State 1970, The Civil War 1861-1865, The Whiskey Rebellion 1794...

I could go on...