For my Google Ngram I chose very broad words, war and peace. I had a very hard time finding words that I wanted to compare. I settled on war and peace for a few reasons, I enjoy history, they are broad words, and I couldn’t really find anything else. After choosing the words I was not sure what the differences would be. From high school I only knew an overview of history from the 19th century, but after doing further research I discovered a lot of interesting material.
The 19th century was full of wars and battles all over the world. I decided to search up how many there were and was shocked to see some I have never even heard of. The list went on and on, battles for land, wars for independence, drug wars…etc. One of the biggest events and most know was the American Civil War, which happened from 1861-1865. Around 1850-1860 is when the word war started shooting up in the Ngram, while peace stated fairly stagnant. I would assume the use of the word war rose not only because of the Civil War, but because of the disputes between the British and Colonists leading up to it.
The words peace and war in the graph were fairly even until the 1850’s, which I thought was intriguing. I have always though as peace as an ideal and war as a reality, so when I saw that they were fairly even I was shocked What I mean by that is that war is something occurring in our lives all the time, while peace is something you only really see mentioned in a book. The Civil War definitely explains the spike, but what explains the evenness between them? I am sure if I needed to I could find the reason why, but for now I shall leave it a mystery.