Back to the Eighties: The 1880's Through the Eyes of Two Country Newspapers

This compendium of newspaper articles, taken from three local Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia, newspapers (The Washingtonian, The Mirror, and The Loudoun Telephone), offers a different sort of look at this period in our nation s history. Major news is covered, but more importantly, one gets a feel for the culture of the times through a description of the local happenings, opinion, humor and advertisements of those years. This first-generation material is copied directly from the microfilm but is cleaned up for easy reading. The articles move in a rough chronological manner. The ads are all from the decade of the 1880's but they do not necessarily accompany the news items on the same page. The period itself was a rather benign one in our nation's history - twenty years after the great Civil War and over a decade before the next conflict. The so-called "gilded age" in this community it was not. The selected articles encompass the local as well as the national, the mundane as well as the significant, the humorous as well as the somber, the little guy as well as the important person. This approach offers the reader a feel for the era as well as a simple knowledge of the incidents