Perhaps no presidential election can rival that of 1860 for importance. The country was being split over the issue of slavery, and a lawyer from Illinois who had recently become an overnight star in New York City gained the nomination of the young Republican Party.

Abraham Lincoln's ascent to the White House was brilliantly executed, from his finely crafted oratory to a political gimmick involving rails he'd split for a fence 30 years earlier. The election campaign was all about the newcomer from Illinois, who won in a four-way race that had ominous implications. Lincoln didn't carry a single southern state, and the nation was soon plunged into a secession crisis and, of course, the Civil War.

Illustration: Abraham Lincoln, from the cover of campaign sheet music from the 1860 campaign/Library of Congress

The term "maverick" is being tossed around a lot these days, from campaign stump speeches to Tina Fey's brilliant sketches on "Saturday Night Live." And the New York Times looks back at how the word came into the language in the 1800s.

The original maverick, it turns out, was Samuel Augustus Maverick, a noteworthy figure in the early days of the state of Texas. Maverick, for whatever reason, didn't like to brand his cattle, and livestock he owned wandered about unmarked. And so the word maverick came to mean cattle that bore no man's brand, and, ultimately, people who were utterly independent.

An irony in all this is that the original Maverick's descendants are horrified to hear presidential candidate John McCain appropriating the word to describe himself. Samuel Maverick's granddaughter, a progressive Texan, explains, "He's a Republican. He's branded."

With all the news about the current financial crisis, I thought it would be interesting to do some research on financial panics of the 19th century. What I discovered is that some of the startling news this past week sounds eerily similar to what people were reading and hearing in 1819, 1837, 1873, or 1893.

The financial panics of the 1800s could be triggered by crop failures, currency problems, or rampant speculation in railroad stocks. But they all tended to dry up credit and create the same business problems we're hearing about today. Banks failed, businesses went under, even railroads stopped operating. Fortunes were lost and millions of workers lost their jobs. And the safeguards we have today simply didn't exist, making matters that much more devastating.

The depressions of the 1800s are often overlooked, perhaps because few people look back beyond the Great Depression of the 1930s. And, of course, looking back at depressions is, well, depressing. But perhaps learning the basic facts behind the parade of financial panics of the 1800s can be reassuring. If you think about it, the people enduring the Panic of 1819 or the Panic of 1837 had it far worse than we do.

Image: Worried investors in the Panic of 1873/Library of Congress

The Crimean War was fought in an obscure place, and the complicated reasons for the conflict were little more than pretexts. It was almost as Britain and France wanted to ally themselves to fight Russia, so they did.

It's thought of as the first modern war, but it was known mostly for blunders. The most famous incident, the Charge of the Light Brigade, was an attack launched against the wrong position. And perhaps the most noteworthy figure in the war wasn't even a direct participant, but rather Florence Nightingale, the legendary British nurse.

When it was all over, more troops had died of disease than combat, and bitter controversies raged over what exactly had been accomplished.

Image: Lord Raglan, British commander in the Crimean War/Library of Congress