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Proposal

During the Crimean War (1853–1856), France and Britain sided with the Ottoman Empire to curb Russian expansion. Though an ocean away, the American public was not only aware of this conflict but often held strong opinions on the war and its participants. American media representations of the Crimean War are indicative of this, and a systematic examination reveals some significant trends in reporting, aligning closely to and providing nuance for larger trends in American history.

The most significant trend in newspaper reporting of the Crimean War was a North-South geographical divide. Northern states supported Britain and France throughout the conflict, primarily for ideological and moral reasons, and aligned closely with the viewpoints of those Americans that were in or near the theater of conflict (their words immortalized in the memoirs they penned). Southern states were less clear, expressing a wide variety of opinions at first, but this slowly coalesced into support for Russia, which can be connected to underlying economic causes, most notably, an increased demand in Russia for American cotton (this was aligned with American foreign policy). This North-South divide ties in with larger trends in American history during the period: these differences were symptomatic of larger tensions (the same that would break out into the Civil War less than a decade later), as well as the domination of American foreign policy by Southern slaveholding interests. This, along with various other trends and analyses, marks the place the Crimean War holds in American media history.

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