The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war: "At present we have no country.... The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in."[9] The war shook America awake, it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the truth of life. A new spirit--social, dramatic, intense--took the place of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened. The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill. IV The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic fiction. America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contemplation of Europe, woke up and discovered America. In a kind of astonishment she wandered from section to section of her own land, discovering everywhere peoples and manners and languages that were as strange to her even as foreign lands. Mark Twain and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild regions and wilder society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas; Eggleston pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told the romance of the Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of the Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana; Page and Harris and F.H. Smith and others caught a vision of the romance of the old South; Allen told of Kentucky life; Miss French of the dwellers in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange people in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty years every isolated neighborhood in America had had its chronicler and photographer.