I have had entirely too much fun playing with Google’s Ngram tool over the last few days. I’ve played with everything from the trending history of my children’s names to the popularity of mythical creatures. What a fun little tool it is. However, it also has interesting applications for historical thought. In the case of my project for this course, I’ve decided the most interesting charts are these two comparing the usage of the words “wounded” and “soldier” in American English to the usage of those same words in British English:
In American English these words have a very notable spike around the years of the Civil War, and a lesser, but still significant spike around 1812, when we would have been fighting the War of 1812. There are also very small bumps around the years of the two World Wars.
In Britain, however, those World War years have huge spikes, equal to those of Civil War American English. Particularly during the First World War, for some reason the second war ranks a much less marked increase.
To me, the interesting fact about this comparison is that it shows that here in America the Civil War was comparable in national attention to the attention Europe paid to the wars that tore it apart in the next century. Certainly it occupied American attention more than those other wars did, and with good cause as the fatalities from the Civil War far outnumbered those Americans suffered during the World Wars. Putting myself back into Marvin’s story, this explains how a young farm boy who, other than his war years, never lived more than a few miles from the home he was born in, was swept up into this great national drama. It illustrates how this war dominated American thought and culture during the years it raged.
Note: If the full diagrams are not viewable in your browser window, please click here and here for the full versions.
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