How did people buy airline tickets before the internet?

In 1989, before no-frills airlines, online check-in, and price comparison sites had taken off, airline tickets were generally impenetrably complicated paper documents - laboriously hand written by a travel agent, with several sheets of carbon paper inserted between the leaves.

Explanation:

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation: “All persons held as slaves within any States…in rebellion against the United States,” it declared, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” (The more than 1 million slaves in the loyal border states and in the Union-occupied parts of Louisiana and Virginia were not affected by this proclamation.) It also declared that “such persons [that is, African-American men] of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States.” For the first time, black soldiers could fight for the U.S. Army.

Black soldiers had fought in the Revolutionary War and—unofficially—in the War of 1812, but state militias had excluded African Americans since 1792. The U.S. Army had never accepted black soldiers. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was more progressive: There, African-Americans had been serving as shipboard firemen, stewards, coal heavers and even boat pilots since 1861.

Explanation: