Apparently an autograph album is “is a book for collecting the autographs of others. Traditionally they were exchanged among friends, colleagues, and classmates to fill with poems, drawings, personal messages, small pieces of verse, and other mementos.”
They were popular among university students from the 15th to mid-19th century, but have since been replaced by yearbooks.
Everything else you said sounds true, but in Illinois and Ohio where Condo (and presumably Everett) lived, this barely registered as a possibility. Even in Europe, the general consensus was that another European war would be as brief as the Franco-Prussian War (6 months), if not the Austro-Prussian War (5 weeks).
This isn't my area, but I think a lot of the stresses that Everett react to are due to the rapid urbanization that the US was experiencing at the time. Specifically, people moving from farms to cities, and immigrants arriving principally from Europe; cities growing larger and people having to learn new ways of getting along.