What’s the connection among the following things:
- Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton, 14th Governor of Indiana
- “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”
- 19th-century exhibitions
- Cincinnati
- The first steam-powered fire engine
- Hertford County, N.C.
- The United States Patent Office
- The burning of Washington in the War of 1812
- Amateurism
- The lyceum movement
- Scientific American
- Clara Barton
- Lincoln’s second inaugural ball
- The closing of the western frontier
- Macadam
- Personal reinvention
- Manifest Destiny
- St. Louis
- John Sutter
- Samuel Colt
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Filth
- Railroads
- Henry Benjamin Whipple
- Steamboats
- Smallpox
- Steamboat explosions
- American medical education
- Patent medicines
- Reuben Samuel, stepfather of Jesse James
- Indianapolis
- Abraham Lincoln’s interest in gadgets
- The Red Badge of Courage
- Lieutenant Colonel James W. Ripley
- General Benjamin F. Butler
- The 1863 draft riots
- Lincoln’s visit to Richmond in 1865
- The surrender at Appomattox
- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show
- Signatures
- Hartford
- The 1914 German invasion of Belgium
- Swords
- Imperialism
- J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan’s charitable impulses
- Mass consumer culture