The rise and fall between cars and horse and buggies is that the rise of use of cars is far greater then the use of horse and buggy. When you drive a car is more convenient because a car is a dispensable item in which if a part in the car fails you can easily replace it. If there was something wrong with the horse and buggy its another story. Sure it is easy to fix the buggy but if something is wrong with the horse you have to find another one or have a veterinarian check it out, which could be more money. Another reason why the car was way more successful then the horse and buggy is because people care so greatly about their image in the view others in society. Also when it comes to cold weather you have to keep the horse or horses inside of a barn, while if you had a car you can just leave it outside. The use of horse and buggies died out because cars made things easier to transport items as well as more people. Horse and buggies were only meant to transport maybe one to two people and if lucky maybe three depending on the size of the buggy. When looking at the graph between cars and horse and buggy the cars has a constant increase with some drops. While the horse and buggy line looks like it is flat lining with little to no increase. What I saw for horse and buggy was surprising because there was a slight rise towards the end of the 1800’s going into the 1900’s. Aside from the horse and buggy people also rode the horses without the buggy attached but that required a great amount of skills as supposed to attaching the horse to the buggy.

With the Google Ngrams I had the honor of looking up the words Cricket, Hurling and Croquet. Since I am a sports fan I had to think of sports that were popular in the 1800’s because there is no way that they had soccer, football and baseball during that time. So I thought back to when I went to Ireland and what type of sports I played with my host family and what they talked about, and that’s how I came up with Cricket, Hurling, and Croquet.
With Cricket it was the highest of them all, I was wondering why and it seemed to be the oldest of them all, being invented in 1300 but it started international play in 1844, so that would make sense into why after 1845 it just kept increasing rather than having an inconsistent like graph.
It was at around 1846 when hurling and cricket were at the same percentage but not even a year later they were back to normal with cricket being very high and hurling back to normal level. Over all hurling stayed constant not moving as much cricket but still moving, the reason I think it is not as popular is because hurling was mainly popular in Ireland not really everywhere around Europe.
Now wit Croquet I have notice from 1860 to 1880 there are a huge peak and then it went back down. It was around 1873 that it was at its highest and that I believe was because only starting in 1867 they started to have matches with it. But when it stated to die down in the late 1870’s that was due to the increase popularity of tennis. Tennis hit a spark in the late 1870’s early 1880’s.
Overall the popularity of each of these sports were due to the popularity and demands of the towns people, such as that when they were fads and when they were not.

 

 

For my ngram I chose commodities. This was a rather broad subject and it did lead to a rather predictable amount of word spikes, however, they were all very informative and a few surprising bits of information associated with them poped up. My words were cotton, tea, silk, and whales.

Cotton was the most predictable since it spiked right around the beginning of the Civil War and then again at the rise of World War I. This is really rather apparent considering the vast amount of uniforms and war materials being made out of cotton.

The surprising thing was the use of silk went up during the time of WWI (I extended my search to 1920).

Apparently silk postcards and handkerchiefs were bought as souvenirs by soldiers on the western front and became a source of income for families in Belgium and France. This turned into an entire cottage industry due to the war. We have to remember that the total amount of casualties for both sides combined was ten million men so this amounts to a lot of silk being used. The other interesting spike I found was in the word “whales”.

As one can see there is a rather large spike in the use of the word “whales” around 1820. Whale oil was the fuel of choice before kerosene, unfortunately for the whales, and the animals were hunted near to the point of extinction. When most of the northern whaling stations had begun to run out of whales to hunt a new whaling ground was opened up in Japan and Australia for the British fleet. Another reason for this spike was the incident that inspired Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. In 1820, a sperm whale sank The Essex whaling vessel and the twenty-man crew spent months at sea until finally having to resort to cannibalism to survive. Eight men were finally rescued from the doomed ship. The Essex was considered a “lucky” ship to be on.

I found Ngrams to be a lot of fun and it was enjoyable to be able to try to dig up the secrets of the words. It was elementary.

The words I chose were “opium” and “cocaine”. I chose those words because addiction was very prevalent in the 19th Century. People didn’t actually know how the human body worked at that time, and that you could actually become addicted to substances. Their lack of education led to open and widespread use of drugs.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, opium is “A reddish-brown strongly scented addictive drug prepared from the thickened dried latex of the unripe capsules of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, used illicitly as a narcotic, and occasionally medicinally as a sedative and analgesic.” From our readings in class, I discovered what opium dens were – they were these meeting places, basically living rooms where a bunch of people took the drug together, and would get uncontrollably high and even pass out there for a few days. The dictionary also found that the word started being used in 1398, but the first English use or citation of the word was in 1615: G. Sandys Relation of Journey 66: The Turkes are also incredible takers of Opium. I think the quote from this could relate to the empire that Britain would become. One website, victorianweb.com, states that “By 1830, the British had become the major drug-traffickers in the world.” This word contains several drops and rises, but its highest peak was late 1870’s. I believe this has to do with the Opium Act of 1878,which “strengthened the role of opium as a cornerstone of the British imperial economic policy in the Far East.”

Cocaine is defined by oed.com as “An important alkaloid obtained from the leaves and young twigs of the coca plant, valuable as a local anæsthesiant, and also used as a stimulant.” Victorianweb.com states that cocaine was first extracted in 1860 from coca leaves by a German chemist, but that the commercial production of cocaine was delayed until the 1880’s when it became popular in the medical field. The graph reflects this because the word isn’t in use until the early 1880’s (using the English corpus – using the British English corpus didn’t make much of a difference with either words.) The dictionary’s earliest citation of the word is from 1874, from a chemistry book which explained the chemical make up of the drug and from where it derived. Another citation from 1886:  Brit. & Col. Druggist 31 July: The valuable alkaloid cocaine, whose properties as a local anæsthetic have created almost a revolution in ophthalmic and other branches of surgery. This shows how people also used this substance medically (from oed.com: 1887 Braithwaite Retrospect Med. XCV. 11 Cocaine Cotton for toothache.) Another quote from victorianweb.com verifies this: “Cocaine lozenges were recommended as effective remedies for coughs, colds and toothaches in the Victorian era. It was believed in the nineteenth century that cocaine had therapeutic effects and it was often prescribed in the treatment of indigestion, melancholia, neurasthenia. Cocaine was also used as an anesthetic.”

From the early 1800s and onward until the end of the Victorian period, there was an influx in literature among the masses as reading became more of a widespread pleasure that was something many could enjoy. With industrialization making its way from London to the world, new things were rapidly becoming a muse for writing. With a newer realistic focus, where did that leave room for the fantasy genre during this time? Through a few choice words, we can go back and see what seemed to stick with the Victorians, and why so much emphasis was placed on one word in particular.

Mythical creatures have a strong history, and most of them seem to be timeless with age. Whether it be angels or centaurs or some other mystical being, the imagination and belief in the lore of these things seems to be something that holds well throughout the ages. During this time, for a seemingly inexplicable reason, the theme of fairies seems to have an incredible popularity over other magical creatures such as unicorns and mermaids. Fairies have had a well established place in the fantasy genre for hundreds of years, with Shakespeare bringing them into a greater popularity in the 1500-1600s. History tends to repeat itself – after researching the Branch Collective to find out why there was such a drastic continuous spike in the popularity of fairies, I found that multiple popular pieces of literature and art were being spurn from the more fantastical side of the Victorian Age. Mermaids and unicorns barely had any written works on them during this time, and seem to go down in popularity even after the Victorian Age – all while the interest in fairies continues to rise.

In a fortunate creative turn, the next century shows an uptake in popularity for all three mythological creatures.

According to this ngram chart, there was a rise in Musical Theatre in Victorian England, specifically between 1840-1860 and 1870-1875, with major spikes in 1874 and 1853. Now according to branch collective.org, that chart activity has a lot to do with play activity o the east end. For example in 1847 (according to Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, of branch collective.org), Victorian playwright, George Dibdin Pitt wrote the first Sweeney Todd dramatization for Brittanica of London’s east end and fit the melodrama to the specific audience and the acting to the company’s individual talents.” Also, in the winter of 1942, a man named John Curwen started “Tonic Sol-fa” which is a method to teach singing. Curren thought that this”would improve individual and national morality” and later in the century, this had come to help a thousands of singers practice, and even began to compete with singing by means of sight-reading and “promoted a way of managing behavior that worked alongside rational recreation and newly introduced institutional surveillance strategies.”-Phyllis Weliver. So the awareness of new plays, and new singing methods created a type of interest in musical theatre. Keeping up with the trend of seeing shows on the East End since they were very popular was a big part of life. As stated above, in the excerpt about Sweeney Todd, the script was tailored to a specific audience, which in the east end was populated mainly by working class and impoverished individuals. The victorian english loved to be entertained, and specifically enjoyed gory spectacles and freak shows, which in that case, would make Sweeney Todd a very popular, and a very heavily demanded production  on the east end. So whatever shows were suited exceptionally well for that type of audience would create a spike in the popularity of musical theatre at the time. Tt really depended on what shows were being put on or put out then.

I’m interested on the difference in cultural views on sex in the Victorian Era and so I thought Google Ngram’s would help me find an answer to that. (I know this is redundant but for the comparisons of data purposes but,) in our day and age, abortion is fully legal and is done quite frequently but is still a hot topic. The split on whether it’s moral or not is what causes tension against it. But as for birth control, condoms or general contraception, it is highly recognized and appreciated. Although in some cases and in some specific areas, if a woman is on birth control she’s predicted to get around a lot, or if a married woman is using birth control there’s something wrong because she should be having children. But from what I can tell of the graph it’s very different.

The most activity is from abortion, which from what I read has been a well known practice for many centuries.  But the Catholic church denounced it and condemned it as a sin. So that made it a taboo subject, and illegal in many Christian nations for a while, including the British Empire in the 1800-1900s (Joffe). What I’m interested in is why the spark in the late 1840s? What made the word come up more? My thoughts are that it became a serious topic of discussion then. But what’s interesting is that although there is not a lot of activity for the words condom, birth control and contraception, they all do spark up around the same time, which leads me to believe that the beginning of typical and most importantly safe,  birth control was starting to make it’ debut in this time period (Hanson). As for condoms, they were the most popular of the contraceptives, and were promoted quite often after sexually transmitted diseases were spread in the after mass of the American Civil War, and England followed suit. What was encouraged often was DIY condoms, which came with instruction manuals (Collier).

But what is most interesting of this graph is that when the contraceptives spark, the abortion line goes down, and I’m sure if the graph were to continue from 1800-2000, the line would have gradually declined. It’s really interesting to see how it worked out like that.

(Apparently this is a Victorian postcard satirizing birth control)

http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-green-fields-and-running-brooks/

 

Works Cited

Collier, Aine (2007). The Humble Little Condom: A History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-556-6.

Hanson, S.J.; Burke, Anne E. (21 December 2010). “Fertility control: contraception, sterilization, and abortion”. In Hurt, K. Joseph; Guile, Matthew W.; Bienstock, Jessica L.; Fox, Harold E.; Wallach, Edward E. The Johns Hopkins manual of gynecology and obstetrics (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 382–395. ISBN 978-1-60547-433-5.

Joffe, Carole (2009). “1. Abortion and medicine: A sociopolitical history”. In M Paul, ES Lichtenberg, L Borgatta, DA Grimes, PG Stubblefield, MD Creinin. Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy (PDF) (1st ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-4443-1293-5. Archived from the original on 21 October 2011.

For some reason, I find what people ate and their diets back then very interesting. It might just be that my sweet tooth acts up and makes me want to learn more about Victorian desserts and how the desserts have changed and morphed into the modern desserts we have now. It is intriguing to discover the unexpected timeline of these desserts however. So I decided to compare three desserts that seem popular today as well as popular during the 1800’s-1900’s. Pie, cake, and biscuit looked appropriate enough for the time period, but instead of using cookies like I originally planned I used biscuits because the word cookie didn’t really come about until later on.According to the graph, cake is by far the winner! It could possibly be obvious to some people that cake is above the rest when it comes to dessert popularity since it’s presented on so many holidays and special occasions nowadays. However, pie was actually mentioned the most for a good portion of this chart! All of the desserts have a long history and background to mark their always changing recipes.

Cake might be the most popular dessert from the 1800-1900 time period, but pie has a much longer history that dates back to the Egyptian Neolithic period (the New Stone Age) and is mentioned in 1301 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. These pies consisted of oats, wheat, rye or barley and usually contained honey for the inside treat, it wasn’t until 5th century BC where fruit was added. Cake also has an expansive history as well, it’s origins have been traced back to the 13th century. Pie definitely wins in longevity, but what about biscuits (cookies)? Actual confectionery biscuits (cookies) didn’t come about until 7th century AD, so biscuits have cake beat too, but they are mentioned in literature around the same time. Cake most likely took the lead when the first dry cake mixes were produced in England around the 1840’s. This lead to a much faster and less time consuming way to bake a dessert that excluded several ingredients from the traditional recipe, making this process very convenient.

Work Cited:

“Food Timeline: Cakes” foodtimeline.org Web. 7 Oct. 2015

Strdaley, Linda “History of Pie-Pie History” whatscookingamerica.net Web. 7 Oct. 2015

Stradley, Linda “History of Cookies-Cookie History” whatscookingamerica.net 7 Web.7 Oct. 2015

 

For this assignment, I used Google Ngrams to track the use of words relating to technology developments in the 19th century.

The first term I decided to search for was “buggy”. Particularly, I was thinking of a horse and buggy. Over time, I hypothesized that these terms would become more and more popular with developments in technology favoring quicker and more advanced transportation, such as buggies. 

 

As I predicted, you can clearly see the gradual rise of the use of “buggy” over the course of the 19th century. As buggies began to rise in popularity, so did it’s usage in literature as well.

 

The second term I chose to search was “rifle”. At first, I expected another gradual rise in usage over time as the technology developed, just like “buggy” did. However, I was even more surprised by what I wound up finding.

I was shocked to see such a significant spike in the results! Then upon further research, I quickly found out why. After seeing what events took place during this time period, the real reason for this spike wast the start of the Civil War in 1861. This directly correlates with my findings, with the usage of “rifle” peaking in 1862.

Lastly, I decided to research the term “urban” using Google Ngrams. As I anticipated, the term significantly increased over time.

The gradual slope was even more evident than my first search, further supporting the concept that as technology develops, civilizations grow, populations rise and cities form. The urbanization of society is directly reflected in the usage of the term “urban” itself in 19th century literature.

 

Overall, this was one of my favorite projects we have worked on in this class. I really found this to be interesting, I have always been looking for a tool like this to notice trends and word usage over time, and now I’ve finally found it! (In literature, at least.) I would love if this same analytic technology could be applied to the usage of certain keywords on the internet over time in shorter time periods, ie. a trending “hashtag” or slang. I’m sure the technology exists- and I will definitely be looking after this exercise to find that as well!