xvii Preface This installment of the Daily Life encyclopedia series bridges the gap between two other volumes, The World of the American Revolution and The World of the Civil War. Appropriately, two of the nation’s major defining wars bracket a dynamic period that historians call the antebellum era, a time when the ideals of the Revolu- tion coalesced and were engaged with great optimism while at the same time the freedom gained by it started fissures that would lead to division in the 1860s. The world of antebellum America (1815–1860) has always intrigued me as a scholar, and I have been fortunate to teach, research, and write within that period. When the project managers at ABC-CLIO asked me to take on this project, I was excited to dive back into that world, which was familiar yet also strangely new. Around every corner, my team of authors offered new insight into the topics that they chose. The period of 1815–1860 has been called the antebellum era because scholars have the hindsight to see how the events of that era led to the Civil War, but the period is more than just 45 years of time before the war. Millions of people raised families, worried about them, found ways to spend their leisure time, and created recipes for “American” food. They adapted their efforts to the innovations that changed their work, finding value in or contesting the demands on their labor. Some of these people lived a life of leisure off the backs of slave men, women, and children, while others ignored, supported, or violently rejected slavery. As I told the thousands of students whom I taught over the past dozen years, these were living, breathing people at one time with different styles of hair and vocabulary but the same emotions of hope, fear, love, and resentment. This mobile nation took those feelings and their cultures into western lands, rolling over the cultures of others at times. They saw the world as it fit them, not necessarily as “antebel- lum” but as their lives that represented millions of minor and major decisions that, in turn, created what was America at the time. The way they voted, to where they moved, and how they thought were the bits and pieces that made up their lives and what we study as history. We will never be able to re-create it as they lived it, but we should keep in mind that before it was ours to study, it was theirs to experience.
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