The Eclipse That Made America Great
Historians have identified the period between 1861 and 1877—from the beginning of the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction—as the era that created the America we recognize today, when a continental power finally coalesced north and south, ocean to ocean. At the time of the 1878 total solar eclipse, the country was still adjusting to this new reality.
Like an ungainly teenager after a growth spurt, the United States was settling into its larger, more muscular body, and it was beginning to exert its strength. Soon it would project its military might overseas, interpreting Manifest Destiny on an ever-grander scale as it grabbed possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and by 1900 this brawny empire would overshadow its European rivals economically, outperforming Britain, France, and Germany in industrial production. Around that same time, America would start eclipsing the Old World in another realm: the pursuit of science—an eventuality that, a few generations earlier, many in Europe thought would never come to pass.
“It must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker, after his visit to America in 1831. “Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality; and they have thought that, if a democratic state of
