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| - William Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois on March 19, 1860, to Silas Lillard Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth (Jennings) Bryan. Until age ten, Bryan was home-schooled, finding in the Bible and McGuffey Readers support for his views that gambling and liquor were evil and sinful. To attend Whipple Academy, which was attached to Illinois College, Bryan was sent to Jacksonville, Illinois in 1874. Mary became a lawyer and collaborated with him on all his speeches and writings. He practiced law in Jacksonville from 1883 to 1887, then moved to the boom city of Lincoln, Nebraska.
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abstract
| - William Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois on March 19, 1860, to Silas Lillard Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth (Jennings) Bryan. Until age ten, Bryan was home-schooled, finding in the Bible and McGuffey Readers support for his views that gambling and liquor were evil and sinful. To attend Whipple Academy, which was attached to Illinois College, Bryan was sent to Jacksonville, Illinois in 1874. Following high school, he entered Illinois College, graduating as valedictorian in 1881. During his time at Illinois College, Bryan was a member of the Sigma Pi literary society. He studied law at Union Law College in Chicago. While preparing for the bar exam, he taught high school and met Mary Elizabeth Baird, Paulo E. Colletta, a cousin of William Sherman Jennings. He married her on October 1, 1884, Paulo E. Colletta and they settled in Salem, which at the time had a population of two thousand. Mary became a lawyer and collaborated with him on all his speeches and writings. He practiced law in Jacksonville from 1883 to 1887, then moved to the boom city of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the Democratic landslide of 1890, Bryan was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, from Nebraska's First Congressional District. The growing prohibitionist movement entered the election of 1890 with its own slate of candidates. In the three-way race in the First Congressional District, Bryan received 6,713 more votes than his nearest opponent. This was a plurality of the vote and was 8,000 votes short of a majority of the vote. Nonetheless, Bryan was elected and was only the second Democrat to be elected to congress in the history of Nebraska.
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