For my first set of words, I chose to look at two names connected to a major 19th century event: Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. Today, Booth’s name seems to be known almost equally as well as Lincoln’s, for it is impossible to know about Lincoln without knowing about his public assassination. I felt it would be interesting to look at the names comparatively during the century of the assassination and see how well the names were known in their time. Looking at the Ngram graph, I was largely unsurprised by the popularity of Lincoln throughout the century. I found it incredibly interesting that the largest spike occurred in 1865, the year of his assassination. Booth also spiked in 1865 from almost no popularity, but I was incredibly surprised by how unpopular his name seemed to be compared to current standards. It seems like the 19th century did not have the fascination or the focus on Booth’s crime that we do today.
For my second set of words, I looked at another popular 19th century debate: slavery and abolition. In America, slavery vs. abolition is a major theme in 19th century history. Like Lincoln and Booth, both are taught fairly equally in schools today so I had expectations that they would be fairly close together on the graph. I was slightly shocked to find that they were not at all! Slavery dominated, peaking in 1863, the middle of the Civil War. Abolition remains fairly consisted throughout the century. This suggests to me that either the Abolitionists were a smaller group that the pro-slavery folks, that slavery was being used in a wider array of situations and/or perhaps abolition was termed or described differently in the 19th century.