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The article provides information concerning the glorious memorial to a regiment in the U.S. The homage of Augustus Saint-Gauden to the 54th Massachusetts continues to gain fame as an evocative reminder of how black soldiers helped change the history. 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment in the war's Eastern theater.

The article offers information on the visitation figures at historic sites and museums throughout the U.S. and the personal observations of the people running them. Visitation figures at sites reveal that American are increasingly less inclined to actually visit historic sites and museums. Waite Rawls, executive director of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, says that museums shows a decline in visitation because of many effective alternative forms of entertainment.

For the traveler in mid-19th century U.S., finding a place to relax and find refreshment was far more difficult than for the modern sojourner, who can find a hotel or restaurant on practically every corner. In the mid-1800's, inns and taverns often served as the sole places of rest, comfort, and congregation on stagecoach routes, along rail lines, and in isolated towns and villages. Such establishments took on even greater prominence during the American Civil War, when they became increasingly important as meeting places, dwellings, and, in a few cases, the sites of battles. An inn is a place where travelers can spend the night, while a tavern is an establishment for eating and drinking. Just the same, in the 1860's their functions frequently overlapped, so the terms were often used interchangeably.

Americans of the 1860s knew nothing of high definition television, pay-per-view programs, the Internet, movie theaters, or even radio. Civil War-era entertainment was much less passive than today, often requiring people to play a firsthand role in their amusements. By the time of the Civil War, spectator sports were especially popular in the North, particularly horseracing, boxing and baseball. Music halls, theater, minstrel shows and other forms of largely urban live entertainment took many forms during the 19th century.

By the time the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, weapons technologies had raced into an age of deadly efficiency. But as the first battles produced the first casualties, it became clear that the art of healing had not kept pace with the art of inflicting harm. Necessity inevitably proves to be the mother of invention, however, and by the end of the war, medicine had advanced dramatically in the U.S. in terms of education, theory, practice and scale. Medical advances included improvements in anesthesia, convalescence, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics and treatment. Modern hospital design traces its origins to the Civil War, as do the use of photography to record and study wounds and medical conditions, the concept that medical personnel were neutrals who should not be attacked and the modern profession of embalming.

Much of our knowledge about what people thought and experienced during the Civil War comes from the letters they wrote. Thousands of literate Civil War-era people recorded their perceptions of their lives and times. Many of those letters survived to become historical documents. In 1823, Congress had designated the navigable waters of the United States as post roads, adding them to the growing system of roads and highways already used to carry mail to the various states.

Focuses on the life of people living in the U.S. during the Civil Wars. By the mid-1800s, urban neighborhoods of the U.S. could be clearly differentiated by the affluence of their residents. Wealthy families tended to live in exclusive enclaves near the city centers, or on suburban estates located near the ends of urban rail lines. Set in neighborhoods that included boulevards, parks, and museums, urban estates included expansive lawns, sculpture gardens, and numerous outbuildings, such as carriage houses. Homes of this sort were enjoyed by a relatively small proportion of city dwellers. Middle-class urban families, depending on their level of affluence, might live in anything from elegant brownstone townhouses inside the city to modest wood-frame dwellings in large suburban neighborhoods built along the commuter lines that carried them to their jobs in the cities.

This article reports that America's increasing shift toward industrialization — particularly in the North — had led to greater and greater crowding in urban areas. The absence of running water and sewage systems led to the uncontrollable use of storm drains for disposal of human waste, which in turn contaminated lakes, rivers, and tidal estuaries. Even as the Industrial Revolution created problems, however, it also provided solutions. The invention of the steam engine meant that by the early 19th century, pumps could be used to maintain water pressure in municipal water supply systems. Reliable water delivery and wastewater treatment systems brought significant improvements to the quality of American city life. In the 137 years since the end of the Civil War, municipal water and sewage systems have become universal in America, using technologies that rank among the best in the world.

Discusses food habits of Americans during the Civil War. Effect of climate on the availability of food items; Difference between food habits of urban and rural people; Description of the food eaten by Civil War era people during breakfast, dinner and supper; Popularity of tea and coffee in the Civil War era.

Most 19th-century communities of the U.S. of village size or larger had some sort of facility for incarcerating prisoners and Thoreau's was probably fairly typical. Depending on their intended purposes, actual use and local custom, such places were officially termed jails, prisons, penitentiaries or reformatories. Prison styles included the Ghent-Auburn design, which featured rectangular buildings full of back-to-back interior cellblocks facing toward the exterior walls and windows and the Saint Michael-Pennsylvania design, which had radiating wings of cells with heavily barred windows built into outside walls and facing into central corridors.

Focuses on the use of paper money as a means of funding war efforts of the government in the U.S. civil war. Authorization of bank notes for the U.S. Union government by the Congress in 1862; Description of the notes issued by the Union government; Issues of paper currency by the government of the Confederate states of U.S. from 1861 to 1864; Rates of trading of Confederate and Union paper currency.