in Christian society; failure to defend the practice might, in fact, threaten a church's very survival. Conversely, many leading abolitionists of the era were Quakers or other religious figures from the North who charged that the practice of slavery was an abominable violation of the tenets of the Christian faith. Free blacks, meanwhile, weary of discrimination in both the South and the North, formed their own "African" churches. These were primarily Baptist or Methodist denominations. At the same time that this growth in religion was taking place, American audiences of the nineteenth century became fascinated by science and technological advancement, which they saw as key weapons in the battle to tame nature and construct better lives for themselves. Attempts to understand the human mind and other intangible aspects of existence received great attention as well. This interest contributed to the popularity of phrenology, a practice wherein a person's character could allegedly be determined by an examination of the form and shape of the person's head. The theory of evolution espoused in Englishman Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), meanwhile, set off a huge controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. Inventions proved to be of tremendous importance as well. Steam locomotives chugged across the nation's rail lines by the 1830s, accelerating the development of America's transportation infrastructure, and 1839 marked the first appearance of vulcanized rubber, the invention of Charles Goodyear. Other notable inventions included Samuel Morse's telegraph (1844), Elias Howe and Isaac M. Singer's sewing machines (1846 and 1850), and the Bessemer method of steel production (1856) developed by English inventor and industrialist Henry Bessemer. Perhaps no era in America history has left so indelible a mark on the nation's psyche as the Civil War that tore through the country from 1861 to 1865. For years the Northern and Southern regio...
