ABSTRACT
With increasing literacy and prosperity, the readerships of periodicals were expanding, including growing numbers of women and of skilled, urban workers. As a result, an increasing proportion of the population could learn about the major events of the day and the latest trends in the arts and sciences if not, necessarily, at a terribly sophisticated level. The post-mid-century decades saw the gradual emergence of specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, or, as the French like to say, and perhaps more accurately for this period, the human sciences. Even as the human science disciplines were becoming specialized and separated from one another, they were increasingly based on common core ideas of progress and empirical investigation. The high point of artistic realism, the quarter-century after 1850, was also a boom time for photography, as a technological innovation the collodion process made photography cheaper and faster than the previously used method of daguerrotypes.
