Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska
This interactive website explores the development of towns and cities on the Great Plains through the lens of a murder case in the 1890s that evolved into a fascinating story that drew the attention of nearly everyone in town and people from across the region and country.
Continue Reading http://gildedage.unl.edu-
Interlinking text with images, photographs, maps, and documents, we hope to present the spatial and material world that reflected the economy, society, politics, and culture in which all the key actors and players in this drama lived and worked. We hope this will help the reader imagine what it was like to live and work in such a city — always an imaginative goal in history.
At a deeper level, this site also seeks to explore the theoretical nature of historical explanation. Though most historical narratives rely on a linear understanding of cause and effect that runs through them, historians are certainly aware that any series of related events on one level of reality is affected by a range of other developments in other areas of activity. The connections made possible by non-linear presentation facilitate this kind of "structural" or "non-linear" thinking.
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