# data[].attributes.body
Picture of modern day FT. Sumter

# data[].attributes.body
Fort Sumter
Appomattax Court House
Battle of Gettysburg

Emancipation Proclomation

# data[].attributes.body
10 Percent
Wade-Davis Bill
Amendments
Plessy v Ferguson

# data[].attributes.body
Gold Rush
Homestead and Morril Acts
The Long Walk
The Massacre at Wounded Knee

# data[].attributes.body
Start at 5:19

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Civil War
April 7, 1865 - Grant writes to Lee. April 9, 1865. Lee sends word that he will surrender. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant meet at Appomattox to work out the terms of the surrender. The formal surrender comes three days later. In Washington, Lincoln quietly rejoices. A few blocks away, John Wilkes Booth plots.

Aired: 09/06/15

Rating: NR

From:

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Civil War April 7, 1865 - Grant writes to Lee. April 9, 1865. Lee sends word that he will surrender. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant meet at Appomattox to work out the terms of the surrender. The formal surrender comes three days later. In Washington, Lincoln quietly rejoices.

# data[].attributes.body
ARTICLE NOT VIDEO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emancipation Proclamation - Definition, Dates & Summary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Issued after the Union victory at Antietam on September 22, 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation carried moral and strategic implications for the ongoing Civil War. While it did not free a single enslaved person, it was an important turning point in the war, transforming the fight to preserve the nat…

# data[].attributes.body
Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Battle of Gettysburg: Summary, Facts & Casualties | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Battle of Gettysburg, fought over three hot summer days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, is considered the most important engagement of the American Civil War. The South lost the battle—and many men—and it marked a turning point in the bloody war that left the South mostly on the defensive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find a summary, definition and facts about President Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan for kids. The aims of the Ten Percent Plan. Information about Ten Percent Plan for kids, children, homework and schools.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wade-Davis Bill: Wade-Davis Bill, (1864), unsuccessful attempt by Radical Republicans and others in the U.S. Congress to set Reconstruction policy before the end of the Civil War. The bill, sponsored by senators Benjamin F. Wade and Henry W. Davis, provided for the appointment of provisional military governors in

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sound Smart: Plessy v. Ferguson | History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Lady's Life in the Gold Rush

'Really, everybody ought to go to the mines just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world,' Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp wrote from the mines in California, to her sister Molly in New England. She penned 23 letters in all, from September 13, 1851, through November 21, 1852, describing life at Rich Bar and nearby Indian Bar, on the 'East Branch of the North Fork of Feather River,' roughly 120 miles northeast of Sacramento, in present-day Plumas National Forest.

Louise Clapp's letters were published as a series, from January 1854 through December 1855, under the nom de plume 'Dame Shirley,' in Ferdinand Ewer's short-lived literary journal: The Pioneer: or California Monthly Magazine. Ewer informed readers that the letters 'were not (originally) intended for publication, and have been inserted with scarcely an erasure from us.' Among those who read the series was Bret Harte (see August 1995 Wild West). Harte was influenced by the Shirley letters when he wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp and other California Gold Rush stories. Nineteenth century historian, philosopher and writer Josiah Royce said the Shirley letters 'form the best account of an early mining camp that is known to me.' And in the 20th century, when the Book Club of California invited 16 leading authorities to list the 10 best primary sources on the California Gold Rush, 13 named the Shirley letters. No other source received that much recognition.

Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith was born on July 28, 1819, in Elizabeth, N.J., the daughter of Moses and Lois (Lee) Smith. Her father was the schoolmaster at the local academy. The family eventually moved back to her father's hometown of Amherst, Mass., where Moses died in 1832, at age 47. Louise was 13 at the time. Lois followed her husband to the grave five years later, leaving seven orphans. Louise was entrusted to an attorney and family friend in Amherst, Osmyn Baker. He sent her to school at the Female Seminary in Charlestown, Mass., and the Amherst Academy. Her closest sibling was Mary Jane, or 'Molly,' to whom she later wrote her now famous letters. Louise may have met Amherst residents Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt (Jackson), but Louise, as historian Rodman Wilson Paul notes, was 11 years older than her literary neighbors.

Someone with whom Louise did exchange letters was Alexander Hill Everett. They met by chance in August 1839 while traveling by stagecoach in southern Vermont. Louise Smith was then a delicate, bright, golden-haired 20-year-old student. Alexander Everett was a widely traveled diplomat 30 years her elder. She was fascinated by him, in an academic way. He was infatuated with her. As her literary mentor, he advised, on October 31, 1839: 'If you were to add to the love of reading the habit of writing you would find a new and inexhaustible source of comfort and satisfaction opening upon you.' She accepted his advice, rejected his love. Everett died in Macao, China, in June 1847, the same year he received a letter from Louise announcing her engagement to a young doctor.

The man Louise Smith married was five years her junior. Fayette Clapp had graduated from Brown University in 1848 and was a medical student and doctor's apprentice when he met Louise. Both Louise and Fayette Clapp longed to go west, so when they heard that gold had been discovered in California, the newlyweds packed their trunks and boarded the schooner Manilla. They sailed out of New York Harbor in August 1849, arriving in San Francisco about five months later. The foggy, damp bay weather did not agree with Fayette. He suffered from bilious attacks, fever, ague and jaundice while in San Francisco. Louise, on the other hand, liked the hilly city. She wrote: 'What with its many-costumed, many-tongued, many-visaged population: its flashy looking squares, built one day and burned the next; its wickedly beautiful gambling houses; its gay stores where the richest productions of every nation can be found; and its wild, free, unconventional style of living, it possesses, for the young adventurer especially, a strange charm.'

For health reasons, Fayette Clapp moved inland with his wife, settling in Plumas City, a place Louise described as 'a was-to-have-been city' of 'vanishing splendors.' Built near the Feather River, between Sacramento City and Marysville, Plumas City no longer exists.

On June 7, 1851, Fayette set out with a friend to Rich Bar, hoping the pure mountain air would be good for his health. He also hoped that good mining investment opportunities existed at the camp, and that there was a shortage of doctors. In many other places in California, doctors and lawyers were already in abundance. Luckily for young Dr. Clapp, prospects at Rich Bar were good on all counts. Once he had successfully established himself, he returned for his wife in September. Since Louise was provided with a cook and a laundress, she had plenty of time for writing.

There were few women at Rich Bar. Louise found only four besides herself. The mining camp had no brothel, although the Empire, a combination inn, restaurant and general store, had originally been constructed with a brothel in mind. The venture had failed and the gamblers who had invested $8,000 - building and furnishing the two-story structure with its 'elegant mirror,' glass windows, monte tables, and 'bedsteads so heavy that nothing short of a giant's strength could move them' - sold out to Curtis and Louise Bancroft for a few hundred dollars.

Louise Bancroft (referred to in the letters as 'Mrs. B-') was the first woman Louise Clapp met at Rich Bar. The writer describes her as 'a gentle and amiable looking woman, about twenty-five years of age.' When Louise Clapp entered the Empire, Mrs. Bancroft 'was cooking supper for some half-a-dozen people, while her really pretty boy, who lay kicking furiously in his champagne basket cradle and screaming...had that day completed just two weeks of his earthly pilgrimage.'

The other women at the camp included 'Mrs. R-,' whose name has not yet been decoded by historians. She lived with her husband in a three-room canvas house she kept exceptionally clean. Louise dubbed her 'the little sixty-eight-pounder queen.' In her fifth letter, she quotes a miner who praised Mrs. R- enthusiastically. 'Magnificent woman that,' the miner said. 'A wife of the right sort she is. Why, she earnt her old man nine-hundred dollars in nine weeks, clear of all expenses, by washing! Such women ain't common I tell you; if they were, a man might marry and make money by the operation.'

Mrs. Nancy Bailey was also tiny. She shared a dirt floor cabin with her husband and three children, but she fell sick and died weeks after Louise arrived. 'I have just returned from the funeral of poor Mrs. B-,' Louise wrote, 'who died of peritonitis, a common disease in this country.' The body was placed in a coffin and carried, with a monte tablecloth for a pall, to a mountainside cemetery, where the gravestone still stands.

The first woman to arrive at Rich Bar ran the Indiana Hotel with her father. She was called the Indiana Girl. Louise wrote about her in her second letter:

The sweet name of girl seems sadly incongruous when applied to such a gigantic piece of humanity....The far-off roll of her mighty voice, booming through two closed doors and a long entry, added greatly to the severe attack of nervous headache under which I was suffering when she called. This gentle creature wears the thickest kind of miner's boots, and has the dainty habit of wiping her dishes on her apron! Last spring she walked to this place and packed fifty pounds of flour on her back down that awful hill - the snow being five feet deep at the time.

All the same, several men, including Yank, keeper of a log cabin store farther up the bar, were'smitten with the charms of the Indiana Girl,' Louise admits in her ninth letter. Yank himself was a character. His aspiration was to be a dandy grafter. 'He takes me largely into his confidence, as to the various ways he has of doing green miners,' Louise wrote. As for his log cabin store, she described it as 'the most comical olla podrida [potpourri] of heterogeneous merchandise that I ever saw. There is nothing you can ask for but what he has - from crow bars down to cambric needles; from velveteen trowsers up to broadcloth coats of the jauntiest description....His collection of novels is by far the largest, the greasiest, and the 'yellowest kivered' of any to be found on the river.'

In her seventh letter, Louise describes the log cabin Fayette acquired for her on the sparsely populated Indian Bar, upriver from Rich Bar but within walking distance:

Enter my dear; you are perfectly welcome; besides, we could not keep you out if we would, as there is not even a latch on the canvas door....The room into which we have just entered is about twenty feet square. It is lined over the top with white cotton cloth....The sides are hung with a gaudy chintz, which I consider a perfect marvel of calico printing. The artist seems to have exhausted himself on roses...from earliest budhood up to the ravishing beauty of the 'last rose of summer.' A curtain of the above described chintz divides off a portion of the room, behind which stands a bedstead....The fireplace is built of stones and mud, the chimney finished off with alternate layers of rough sticks....The mantle piece...is formed of a beam of wood, covered with strips of tin procured from cans, upon which still remain in black hieroglyphics, the names of the different eatables which they formerly contained....I suppose that it would be no more than civil to call a hole two feet square in one side of the room, a window, although it is as yet guiltless of glass.

The path between Indian Bar, where the Clapp cabin stood, and Rich Bar, where Fayette had his office, was somewhat precarious. Footbridges across the river were felled logs still wrapped in bark and moss. Large rocks and countless mining pits, 6 or more feet deep, with accompanying gravel heaps, had to be skirted. One pit was only a few feet from their cabin door.

On the way to Indian Bar, Louise recorded: 'The first thing that attracted my attention, as my new home came in view, was the blended blue, red and white of the American banner...suspended on the Fourth of July last, by a patriotic sailor, who climbed to the top of the [cedar] tree to which he attached it, cutting away the branches as he descended, until it stood among its brethren, a beautiful moss-wreathed Liberty pole, flinging to the face of Heaven the glad colors of the Free.'

She also glimpsed the 'artificial elegance' of a hotel:

Over the entrance...is painted in red capitals...the name of the great Humboldt spelt without the d. This is the only hotel in this vicinity, and as there is a really excellent bowling alley attached to it, and the bar-room has a floor on which the miners can dance, and, above all, a cook who can play the violin, it is very popular. But the clinking of glasses, and the swaggering air of some of the drinkers, reminds us that it is no place for a lady.

Louise Clapp enjoyed being a 'lady,' but she sometimes showed an unladylike willfulness, describing herself as the sort of 'obstinate little personage, who has always been haunted with a passionate desire to do everything which people said she could not do.' Taking up residence in a mining town was an adventure most ladies avoided. So was panning for gold. When Louise washed a single pan of dirt, she found $3.25 in gold placer. She also discovered it was hard, dirty work, and she did not repeat the experiment, not for years. But she did observe and write about the gold miners. The methods they used, as well as the claim system that governed them, is the subject of her 15th'severely utilitarian' letter:

First, let me explain to you the 'claiming' system. As there are no State laws upon the subject, each mining community is permitted to make its own. Here, they have decided that no man may 'claim' an area of more than forty foot square. This he'stakes off' and puts a notice upon it....If he does not choose to 'work it' immediately, he is obliged to renew the notice every ten days; for without this precaution, any other person has the right to 'jump it'....There are many ways of evading the above law. For instance, an individual can 'hold' as many claims as he pleases if he keeps a man at work in each....The laborer...can jump the claim of the very man who employs him...[but] generally prefers to receive the six dollars per diem, of which he is sure...[rather than] running the risk of a claim not proving valuable....The labor of excavation is extremely difficult, on account of the immense rocks...[in] the soil. Of course, no man can work out a claim alone. For that reason...they congregate in companies of four or six, generally designating themselves by the name of the place from whence the majority of the members have emigrated; for example, the 'Illinois,' 'Bunker Hill,' 'Bay State,' etc., companies. In many places the surface soil, or 'top dirt,' 'pays' when worked in a 'Long Tom.'

Some companies discarded top dirt and chose instead to hunt for gold in bedrock crevices. They dug 'coyote holes' into the sides of surrounding hills, creating tunnels 'that sometimes extended hundreds of feet,' in order to get at the bedrock. A large company of miners pooled resources and built a wing dam and flume that diverted water from the riverbed, where they expected to find 'rich diggings' in the bedrock. Of 'the dreadful flume,' as Louise calls it, she wrote: 'The machinery keeps up the most dismal moaning and shrieking, painfully suggestive of a suffering child.'

In her third letter, Louise paints a picture of the setting in which the miners worked, describing Rich Bar as 'a tiny valley, about eight-hundred yards in length and thirty in width...hemmed in by lofty hills, almost perpendicular, draperied to their very summits with beautiful fir trees; the blue bosomed 'Plumas' or Feather River...undulating along their base.' Here, the mining town sprang up suddenly, 'as if a fairy's wand had been waved above the bar.' There were 'about forty tenements...round tents, square tents, plank hovels, log cabins, etc. - the residences varying in elegance and convenience from the palatial splendor of 'The Empire' down to a 'local habitation,' formed of pine boughs and covered with old calico shirts.'

The people populating Rich Bar and Indian Bar varied as much as their houses. Besides white Americans and Californios (the Spanish-speaking residents who Clapp called 'Spaniards'), there were Swedes, Chilenos, Frenchmen, Mexicans, Indians, Hawaiians, Englishmen, Italians, Germans, American blacks and mulattos. The mulattos included Humbolt-owner Ned 'Paganini' (as Louise nicknamed him) and the legendary mountain man and trailblazer Jim Beckwourth. Louise describes Beckwourth in her eighth letter:

He is fifty years of age, perhaps, and speaks several languages to perfection. As he has been a wanderer for many years and for a long time was a principal chief of the Crow Indians, his adventures are extremely interesting. He chills the blood of the green young miners, who, unacquainted with the arts of war and subjugation, congregate around him [to hear] the cold-blooded manner in which he relates the Indian fights that he has been engaged in.

Unlike Jim Beckwourth, most men at Rich and Indian bars could not speak more than one language fluently, although some Americans seem to have tried. In her 14th letter, Louise wrote: 'Nothing is more amusing than to observe the different styles in which...Americans talk at the unfortunate Spaniard.' She adds that 'mistakes made on the other side are often quite as amusing.' Fayette's colleague, Dr. Canas, told Louise of a Chileno who heard an American use the words'some bread' when purchasing said item, and immediately afterward informed his friends that the English word for bread was the same as the Spanish word for hat - sombrero. Unfortunately, the humor in such misunderstandings was often overlooked. Alcohol, gambling losses, and envy of a neighbor's mining success contributed to ill will. Yet things remained relatively peaceful through the winter of 1851-52.

In February 1852, provisions were becoming scarce. The rancheros who had been driving beef herds into the valley and the mule drivers who brought in onions, potatoes, butter and coffee could not get through the deep snow that covered the hills surrounding the bars. So the Clapps and their neighbors lived for three months on flour, dark ham, salted mackerel, and rusty pork. And when the snow finally melted, spring floods commenced, sweeping away flume machinery, log bridges, long toms, cradles, a newly finished sawmill and several men. By mid-May, the waters calmed down and fresh provisions arrived. So did a large number of mostly American newcomers. On May 25, Louise noted: 'Hundreds of people have arrived upon our Bar within the last few days; drinking saloons are springing up in every direction; the fluming operations are rapidly progressing, and all looks favorably for a busy and prosperous summer.' Some of these newcomers had fought in the Mexican-American War and tended to perceive Spanish-speaking people as enemies.

Meanwhile, Mexicans at the mines expressed growing frustration over the lack of justice where they were concerned. In her 16th letter, Louise writes sardonically:

A few evenings ago, a Spaniard was stabbed by an American. It seems that the presumptuous foreigner had the impertinence to ask very humbly and meekly of that most noble representative of the stars and stripes, if the latter would pay him a few dollars which he had owed him for some time. His high mightiness, the Yankee, was not going to put up with any such impertinence, and the poor Spaniard received, for answer, several inches of cold steel in his breast, which inflicted a very dangerous wound. Nothing was done and very little was said about this atrocious affair.

She goes on to explain that at Rich Bar, 'they have passed a set of resolutions...one of which is to the effect that no foreigner shall work the mines on that Bar. This has caused nearly all the Spaniards [Californios] to immigrate upon Indian Bar.' Two years earlier, the California Legislature had passed a law requiring all foreigners to pay a $20-a-month tax (later reduced to $4) for the right to stake a claim and mine it.

On the Fourth of July, tensions between Californios and Americans exploded. While Dr. and Mrs. Clapp joined other sober Americans in celebrating Independence Day with speeches, poetry, music and dancing at the Empire on Rich Bar, drunken celebrants made the rounds at Indian Bar. When the Clapps returned to their cabin at Indian Bar, a man gave them an 'excited account' of an American who had been knifed during a melee. Louis Clapp wrote about it in her 19th letter:

He said...Domingo - a tall, majestic-looking Spaniard, a perfect type of the novelistic bandit of Old Spain - had stabbed Tom Somers, a young Irishman, but a naturalized citizen of the United States,...[and while] brandishing threateningly the long bloody knife with which he had inflicted the wound upon his victim...[had paraded] up and down the street unmolested. It seems that when Tom Somers fell, the Americans, being unarmed, were seized with a sudden panic and fled. There was a rumor (unfounded, as it afterwards proved) to the effect that the Spaniards had on this day conspired to kill all the Americans on the river. In a few moments, however, the latter rallied and made a rush at the murderer, who immediately plunged into the river and swam across to Missouri Bar; eight or shots were fired at him...not one of which hit him.

In the meanwhile,...Spaniards who...thought that the Americans had arisen against them...barricaded themselves in a drinking saloon, determined to defend themselves against the massacre which was fully expected would follow....In the bake shop, which stands next to our cabin, young Tom Somers lay straightened for the grave...while over his dead body a Spanish woman was weeping and moaning in the most piteous and heart-rending manner. The Rich Barians, who had heard a most exaggerated account of the rising of the Spaniards against the Americans, armed with rifles, pistols, clubs, dirks, etc., were rushing down the hill by hundreds. Each one added fuel to his rage by crowding into the little bakery, to gaze upon the blood-bathed bosom of the victim....Then arose the most fearful shouts of 'Down with the Spaniards'....'Don't let one of the murderous devils remain.'

The more sensible and sober of the Americans partly quieted the angry crowd. Still, Fayette Clapp wanted his wife to join two other women who lived on a nearby hill, where things would be safer should a serious fight erupt. Louise said she wanted to stay where she was, but finally, 'like a dutiful wife,' she went up the hill.

We three women, left entirely alone, seated ourselves upon a log overlooking the strange scene below. The Bar was a sea of heads, bristling with guns, rifles, and clubs....All at once, we were startled by the firing of a gun, and...saw a man [being] led into the log cabin, while another was carried, apparently lifeless, into a Spanish drinking saloon....Luckily for our nerves, a benevolent individual...came and told us what had happened.

It seems that an Englishman, the owner of a house of the vilest description, a person, who is said to have been the primary cause of all the troubles of the day, attempted to force his way through the line of armed men which had been formed at each side of the street....In his drunken fury, he tried to wrest a gun from one of them, which being accidentally discharged in the struggle, inflicted a severe wound upon a Mr. Oxley and shattered in the most dreadful manner the thigh of Sr. Pizarro....This frightful accident recalled the people to their senses....They elected a Vigilance Committee and authorized persons to go...arrest the suspected Spaniards.

The first act of the Committee was to try a Mejicana who had been foremost in the fray. She has always worn male attire, and on this occasion, armed with a pair of pistols, she fought like a very fury. Luckily, inexperienced in the use of fire-arms, she wounded no one. She was sentenced to leave the Bar by day-light....The next day, the Committee tried five or six Spaniards....Two of them were sentenced to be whipped, the remainder to leave the Bar that evening; the property of all to be confiscated....Oh Mary! Imagine my anguish when I heard the first blow fall upon those wretched men. I had never thought that I should be compelled to hear such fearful sounds, and, although I immediately buried my head in my shawl, nothing can efface from memory the disgust and horror....One of these unhappy persons was a very gentlemanly young Spaniard, who implored for death in the most moving terms. He appealed to his judges in the most eloquent manner - as gentlemen, as men of honor; representing to them that to be deprived of life was nothing in comparison with the never-to-be-effaced stain of the vilest convict's punishment to which they had sentenced him. Finding all his entreaties disregarded, he swore a most solemn oath, that he would murder every American that he should chance to meet alone, and as he is a man of the most dauntless courage, and rendered desperate by a burning sense of disgrace...he will doubtless keep his word.

The above account probably inspired the flogging scene in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, by Yellow Bird, aka John Rollin Ridge. Historian Joseph Henry Jackson notes in his book Bad Company that the Shirley letters were in Ferdinand Ewer's possession when Ridge researched his book, and that he frequently visited Ewer's office.

Not long after the floggings, Louise reported that a hanging and an attempted suicide had occurred at the mines. The first involved a man accused of murdering and robbing his employer. The second involved a Henry Cook, who apparently slit his own throat. After Dr. Clapp tended his wound, Cook decided to accuse Ned, owner of the Humbolt, of attempted murder. Ned's friends came to his defense, and the charge was dropped, but tempers were high. Dr. Clapp was nearly mobbed for having bound the wound of a man they, according to Louise Capp, 'insisted upon shooting...reasoning [that]...'a man so hardened as to raise his hand against his own life will never hesitate to murder another!" In the end, the vigilantes decided to exile Cook instead.

Meanwhile, Señor Pizarro's wounded leg festered. It was amputated, but he did not regain his strength. Sick with dysentery, he died soon afterward. Oxley remained bedridden for weeks but eventually recovered, no thanks to 'the Moguls,' whom Louise Clapp refers to as'sleep killers.' The Moguls, actually members of the Vigilance Committee, apparently believed they were above the law. They began to 'parade the streets all night, howling, shouting, breaking into houses, taking wearied miners out of their beds and throwing them into the river....Nearly every night they built bonfires fearfully near some rag shanty, thus endangering the lives (or I should rather say the property - for as it is impossible to sleep, lives are emphatically safe) of the whole community. They retire about five o'clock in the morning; previously...posting notices to the effect, and that they will throw anyone who may disturb them into the river.'

In fall, the population began to decline swiftly. Louise noted that the flume miners, who had spent $2,000 to build a wing dam'six feet high and three-hundred feet in length, upon which thirty men labored nine days and a half,' had collected $41.70 in gold; 'nearly every person on the river received the same treatment from Dame Nature....Shopkeepers, restaurants, and gambling houses...were in the same moneyless condition.' Fayette had lost $1,000 in a prospecting investment, causing Louise to call mining 'Nature's lottery.'

Few people wanted to brave another winter on the bars, including the Clapps. In her last letter, dated November 21, 1852, Louise couldn't help 'fretting...at the dreadful prospect of being compelled to spend the winter here.' Yet when the day of departure came, she hesitated. 'My heart is heavy at the thought of departing forever from this place. I like this wild and barbarous life; I leave it with regret....Yes, Molly, smile if you will at my folly; but I go from the mountains with a deep heart sorrow. I look kindly to this existence, which to you seems so sordid and mean. Here, at least, I have been contented....You would hardly recognize the feeble and half-dying invalid, who drooped languidly out of sight, as night shut down between your straining gaze and the good ship Manilla...in the person of your now perfectly healthy sister.' Fayette Clapp, too, was perfectly healthy, but San Francisco again did not agree with him.

In 1853, Fayette sailed to Hawaii without Louise. In 1854, he showed up in Massachusetts. A year later, he headed west again, this time to Illinois. Louise chose to remain in San Francisco, where she taught school. She filed for divorce there in 1856. Although she kept Fayette's last name, she apparently added an 'e' to it, making her Louise A.K.S. Clappe. By the time the Civil War broke out, Fayette had moved to Columbia, Mo., and remarried.

Louise retired from teaching in 1878 and went to live in New York City, where she continued to write and lecture until 1897, when she moved into a retirement home founded by Bret Harte's nieces, Anna and Nina Knault, in Hanover Township, N.J. She died there on February 9, 1906. Although the California Gold Rush, which started 150 years ago, produced its share of heartfelt letters, the 'Dame Shirley' letters remain the biggest bonanza in the bunch.

This article was written by Lori Lee Wilson and originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of Wild West.p>For more great articles be sure to subscribe to magazine today!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'Really, everybody ought to go to the mines just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world,' Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp wrote from the mines in California, to her sister Molly in New England.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Homestead Act of 1862 Explained: US History Review

# data[].attributes.body
Picture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Wounded Knee, located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was the site of two conflicts between Native Americans and representatives of the U.S. government, including the U.S. Army and, later, the FBI. An 1890 massacre left some 150 Native Americans dead, in what was the final clash between federal troops and the Sioux tribe. In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days to protest conditions on the reservation.

Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull

Throughout 1890, the U.S. government was worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Native Americans had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs.

Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, whom they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge in South Dakota.

Did you know? Nearly half of the Sioux killed at the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre were women and children.

Wounded Knee Massacre

On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under Big Foot, a Lakota Sioux chief, near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it's unclear from which side.

A brutal massacre followed, in which an estimated 150 Indians were killed. (Some historians put this number at twice as high.) Nearly half of them were women and children. The U.S. cavalry lost 25 men.

The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle-the Army troops involved were later rewarded with Medals of Honor-but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it's unlikely that Big Foot's band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876.

Whatever the motives, the massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was one of the last major confrontations in the Indian Wars, America's deadly series of wars against the Plains Indians and other Native Americans.

American Indian Movement

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 in an effort to stop police harassment of Indians in the Minneapolis area. Borrowing some tactics from the Vietnam war protests of the era, AIM soon gained national notoriety for its flamboyant demonstrations. However, many mainstream Indian leaders denounced the youth-dominated group as too radical.

In 1972, a faction of AIM members led by Dennis Banks and Leonard Peltier sought to close the divide by making alliances with traditional tribal elders on reservations. They had their greatest success on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, after a group of young white men murdered a Sioux man named Yellow Thunder.

Although Yellow Thunder's attackers received only six-year prison sentences, this was widely seen as a victory by the local Sioux accustomed to unfair treatment by the often racist judicial system. AIM's highly visible publicity campaign on the case was given considerable credit for the verdict, winning the organization a great deal of respect on the reservation.

Wounded Knee Siege

AIM's growing prestige and influence, however, threatened the conservative Sioux tribal chairman, Dick Wilson. When Wilson learned of a planned AIM protest against his administration at Pine Ridge, he retreated to tribal headquarters where he was under the protection of federal marshals and Bureau of Indian Affairs police.

Rather than confront the police in Pine Ridge, some 200 AIM members and their supporters decided to occupy the symbolically significant hamlet of Wounded Knee, site of the 1890 massacre. Wilson, with the backing of the federal government, responded by besieging Wounded Knee.

During the 71 days of the siege, which began on February 27, 1973, federal officers and AIM members exchanged gunfire almost nightly. Hundreds of arrests were made, and two Native Americans were killed and a federal marshal was permanently paralyzed by a bullet wound.

The leaders of AIM finally surrendered on May 8 after a negotiated settlement was reached. In a subsequent trial, the judge ordered their acquittal because of evidence that the FBI had manipulated key witnesses. AIM emerged victorious and succeeded in shining a national spotlight on the problems of modern Native Americans.

Trouble Continues at Pine Ridge

The troubles at Wounded Knee, however, were not over after the siege. A virtual civil war broke out between the opposing Indian factions on the Pine Ridge reservation, and a series of beatings, shootings and murders left more than 100 Indians dead. When two FBI agents were killed in a 1975 gunfight, the agency raided the reservation and arrested AIM leader Leonard Peltier for the crime.

The FBI crackdown coupled with AIM's own excesses ended its influence at Pine Ridge. In 1977, Peltier was convicted of killing the two FBI agents and sentenced to life in prison. To this day, Peltier's supporters continue to maintain his innocence and seek a presidential pardon for him.

And in 2021, members of the U.S. Congress petitioned President Joe Biden to revoke the Medals of Honor soldiers received for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

HISTORY Vault: Native American History

Sources

Disaster at Wounded Knee. Library of Congress.
What really happened at Wounded Knee, the site of a historic massacre. National Geographic.
Warren, Merkley, Kahele Lead Bicameral Letter Urging Biden to Rescind Medals of Honor Awarded to Soldiers who Perpetrated Wounded Knee Massacre. Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senate.
Wounded Knee Massacre. Encyclopedia of the Great Plains.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wounded Knee: Massacre, Memorial & Battle - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wounded Knee in South Dakota was the site of an 1890 Indian massacre by U.S. Army troops, and a deadly 1973 occupation by Native American activists.

# data[].attributes.body
Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"If a Western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and awakened in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands that the railroads had touched. Bison had yielded to cattle; mountains had been blasted and bored. Great swaths of land that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat. Nation-states had conquered Indian peoples, slaughtering some of them and confining and controlling most of them. Population had increased across much of this vast region, and there were growing cities along its edges. A land that had once run largely north-south now ran east-west. Each change could have been traced back to the railroads." - Richard White, Railroaded

Unprecedented Urbanization

Between 1820 and 1860, the visual map of the United States was transformed by unprecedented urbanization and rapid territorial expansion. These changes mutually fueled the Second Industrial Revolution which peaked between 1870 and 1914. Between the annexation of Texas (1845), the British retreat from Oregon country, and The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) which cemented Mexican cession of the Southwest to the United States, territorial expansion exponentially rewrote the competing visions free-soilers, European immigrants, industrial capitalists, and Native Americans held for the future of the American Empire.

Need for Railroads

The need for massive industry was obvious: in order to reach California's burgeoning port cities like San Francisco and to expedite the extraction of gold from the mines, railroad tracks would need to be laid across the plains to reach the Pacific and open up trade networks. Questions abounded about the character this new American territory would take: would it be reliant on slave labor and fulfill Jefferson's original vision of an agrarian republic? Would corporations or the federal government lay down the required infrastructure to 'tame the West'? Still, others wondered if turning over the bison laden Plains to New York based corporations would stifle the American dream for America's second and third sons. Still, others believed the technological innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution was the unstoppable culmination of modern civilization propelling the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. Questions of this nature were not new in American history. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans were forced to adjust to the implications of the First Industrial Revolution. 1750 to 1850 marked a century of heightened industrial activity centered around textiles. After the invention of steam power and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, cotton could be shipped from the American South by New England ships to the vast textile factories of Great Britain, producing a reverse triangle trade around a single global commodity. These developments were hailed by some as "progress," but the pace, scale, and reliance of slave labor on these developments instilled in others a great sense of anxiety and fear.

Although the economic and social problems of the first Industrial Revolution distressed many, these concerns were set aside during the nation's bloody Civil War (1861-1865).

The following maps demonstrate the advancement of the railroad before the Civil War (as always, click to enlarge image):

American Economic Growth

In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the American economy grew considerably as it entered "The Second Industrial Revolution," generally recognized as the period between 1870 and 1914. The U.S. was awash in an abundance of natural resources from its newly acquired territories, a growing supply of labor immigrating from Europe, and the migration of emancipated African Americans North and West, an expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of capital for investment.

The Second Industrial Revolution took local communities and their new products out of the shadow of large regional agricultural based economies which was assisted by new labor forces and production techniques. During the Second Industrial Revolution, innovations in transportation, such as roads, steamboats, the Eerie Canal, and most notably railroads, linked distant, previously isolated communities together.

Transporting Products

For the first time, goods from the American interior could be shipped directly to the Atlantic, and vice versa. Being able to ship products great distances transformed the nature of economic activity in the United States. Before the development of this elaborate transportation and communication system, economies were localized and often based on a barter system. The transportation revolution opened up new markets for farmers, industrialists, and bankers who could now bring crops cotton in the Mississippi River Valley, wheat in the Midwest, and manufactured goods in upstate New York into a global market based on credit. Similarly, the expansion of the railroad brought a dramatic reduction in the time and money it took to move heavy goods, creating new opportunities for wealth at a time when two-thirds of all Americans still resided on farms.

Government Involvement

The federal government actively participated in this growth by promoting industrial and agricultural development. High tariffs were enacted to protect American industry from foreign competition, land was granted to railroad companies to encourage construction, and the army was employed to forcibly remove Indians from western land desired by farmers and mining companies. The rapid growth of factory production, mining, and railroad construction all boosted the new industrial economy and stood in stark contrast to the previous small farm and artisan workshop economy of the pre-Civil War era.

By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world's industrial out put-more than the total of Great Britain, France, and Germany combined. The living standards and the purchasing power of money increased rapidly, as new technologies played an ever-increasing role in the daily lives of working- and middle-class citizens. Between 1870 and 1920, almost 11 million Americans moved from farm to city, and another 25 million immigrants arrived from overseas. By 1920, for the first time in American history, the census revealed more people lived in cities than on farms.

Interconnected Growth

Inventions during the Second Industrial Revolution were interconnected. The railroad spurred the growth of the telegraph machine. Telegraph lines and railroad lines inextricably bound together as telegraph polls dotted the distance of railroad lines. The telegraph, and later the telephone, ushered in the era of instant communication and brought about, in the words of cultural historian Stephen Kern, "the annihilation of distance." This was a profound change for Americans. The "local" shot outward to the "national" and even "international" as a new sense of world unity was established through these new technologies. These technologies also increased the pace of life and the manner in which people worked and lived.

Major Technological Advances of the Second Industrial Revolution:

* 1870s - Automatic signals, air brakes, and knuckle couplers on the railroads; the Bessemer and then the open-hearth process in the steel mills; the telephone, electric light, and typewriter.
* 1880s - The elevator and structural steel for buildings, leading to the first "skyscrapers."
* 1890s - The phonograph and motion pictures; the electric generator, contributing to modern household items such as refrigerators and washing machines and gradually replaced water and steam powered engines; and the internal combustion engine, which made possible the first automobiles and the first airplane flight by the Wright brothers in 1903.

Unstable Growth

The economic growth during this time period was extraordinary but unstable. The world economy experienced harsh depressions in 1873 and again in 1897. Businesses competed intensely with each other and corporations battled to gain control of industries. Countless companies failed and others were bought up by larger corporations which eventually ruled the marketplace.

For those who were able to capitalize on these technological advancements, the Second Industrial Revolution was highly profitable. During the Depression of 1873, the soon-to-be industry giant, Andrew Carnegie established a steel company which controlled every phase of business from raw materials to transportation, manufacturing, and distribution.

Carnegie Fortune

By the 1890s, Carnegie dominated the steel industry and had accumulated a fortune worth millions. His steel factories were the most technologically advanced in the world, although this honor came at a price for his workers. Carnegie ran his companies with a dictatorial hand; his factories operated around the clock and workers were burdened with long hours. Yet, at the same time, Carnegie believed that the rich had a moral obligation to promote the advancement of society and he distributed much of his wealth to various philanthropies, especially towards the creation of public libraries throughout the country.

Like Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller also accumulated enormous amounts of wealth, although his came through domination of the oil industry.

Beating the Competition

Rockefeller annihilated rival oil firms through committed competition, secret deals with railroad companies, and fixed prices and production quotas. He bought out competing oil refineries and managed all aspects of the operation, including drilling, refining, storage, and distribution. Before long, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company controlled a majority of the nation's oil industry. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller publicly supported a number of philanthropies, yet privately domineered over his workers and bitterly fought their efforts to organize and unionize.

The Second Industrial Revolution fueled the Gilded Age, a period of great extremes: great wealth and widespread poverty, great expansion and deep depression, new opportunities and greater standardization. Economic insecurity became a basic way of life as the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s put millions out of work or reduced pay. Those who remained in the industrial line of work experienced extremely dangerous working conditions, long hours, no compensation for injuries, no pensions, and low wages. But for a limited minority of workers, the industrial system established new forms of freedom. Skilled workers received high wages in industrial work and oversaw a great deal of the production process. Economic independence now required a technical skill rather than ownership of one's own shop and tools. It was labeled "progress" by its proponents, but those who worked the floor at the factory knew it came at a price.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Second Industrial Revolution, 1870-1914 - US History Scene

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"If a Western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and awakened in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands that the railroads had touched. Bison had yielded to cattle; mountains had been blasted and bored. Great swaths of land that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat.

# data[].attributes.body
2nd Industrial Revolution
Inventions Telephone, Lightbulb, Airplane
The Rise of Big Busniess
Inventions Cars
The Rise of Labor Movement

# data[].attributes.body
Airplane, Light bulb and telephone first article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Science Lesson: Learn About Inventions

The Telephone & Alexander Graham Bell

What if the only way you could communicate with someone living in another city was by mailing them a letter, one that might take weeks to get delivered? (Even with our modern technology, it still takes at least two weeks for mail to get to some countries.) The telephone is certainly one of the greatest inventions in the history of communication!

The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, was born in Scotland in 1847, the same year as Thomas Edison. He went to university in Edinburgh and London, then immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the U.S. a year later. There he used visible speech (a type of phonetic notation that shows the position of the throat, mouth, and tongue to make different sounds) to teach deaf-mute people how speak.

When he was a young man, Bell became interested in transmitting speech, the way a telegraph transmitted messages. In 1874 he developed the idea for the telephone and successfully created and patented one two years later. (Just two hours after he applied for his patent, Elisha Gray filed his intention to apply for a patent for a very similar device.) His first transmitted sentence was to his assistant: 'Watson, come here; I want to see you.' Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Expo and in 1877 organized the Bell Telephone Company.

So how does this amazing invention work? How can you talk to someone miles away and hear them as though they were in the same room with you? It's actually a fairly simple process. At its most basic, a telephone consists of a switch, a receiver, and a microphone. The switch connects your phone to the telephone network; the receiver changes electrical signals into sound waves so you can hear the other person, and the microphone changes the sound waves you make into electrical impulses to send to the other end of the line.

The microphone contains carbon granules and a thin metal diaphragm. When you speak, the sound waves (vibrations in the air) hit the diaphragm and cause it to move, compressing the carbon granules behind it. A louder sound will compress the granules more than a soft sound. When the carbon is compressed, an electrical current can flow through it more easily. A battery (either in your handset or at the telephone company) sends an electric current through your phone; when you speak, the compression of the carbon varies the intensity of the current.
Experiment with electricity and sound transmission with this kit for kids!
This process is reversed at the other end of the line by the receiver. The electrical current flows through an electromagnet in the receiver, producing a magnetic field. This magnetic field attracts the thin metal diaphragm in the receiver, causing it to move in and out. As it does so, it pushes and pulls the air, creating sound waves. These waves reach your ear with the same intensity as they were spoken, allowing you to hear what the other person said.

The process hinges on the ability to have a variable electrical current. Unlike the telephone, a telegraph operates on a constant electric current - the messages are transmitted not by changing the current, but by repeatedly turning it on and off in a distinct pattern. Because the human voice doesn't start and stop sound waves in the same way as tapping Morse code does, the current must be able to adjust for variation in volume and frequency. The carbon microphone allows for this variation, giving us the ability to transmit speech electrically.

Bell probably couldn't have imagined the kind of communication we have today. Not only do we have long-distance telephone networks all over the world, we also have cellular phones that use radio frequencies to allow us to talk wirelessly wherever we are. Communication was changed forever by the telephone and continues to develop rapidly today.
Return to top
The Light Bulb & Thomas Edison

Perhaps one of the most important inventions of all time is the electric light bulb. We could get by with candles or lanterns in our homes, but imagine trying to shop at the mall, work in a large office complex, or travel at night by car or plane without electric lighting!

Thomas Alva Edison, one of the developers of the modern light bulb, is also one of the most famous as well as prolific inventors in history. He patented over 1000 inventions in his lifetime. Edison was born in Ohio in 1847. As a child, he received less than a year of formal schooling, but was educated at home. His parents allowed him to set up a laboratory in their basement and his mother gave him books about chemistry and electronics. Edison credits his mother as being 'the making' of him.

When he was 12, Edison got a job selling newspapers on a train that made day trips between his hometown of Port Huron, Michigan and Detroit. He took his laboratory along in the baggage car so that he would be able to experiment during layovers. This worked until one day some of his chemicals spilled and started a fire! Also while working on the train, Edison saved the child of one of the station masters, and as a reward was taught how to use a telegraph machine. He became a telegraph operator and began making improvements to the telegraph's functionality. He later invented a way for multiple telegraph messages to be transmitted simultaneously (rather than one at a time).

As a young man, Edison moved to New York City and eventually established a laboratory. In 1877 he invented the phonograph, which used a record made of tinfoil to play back sound. In 1879 he created a successful incandescent light bulb. This was his hardest project - from 1877 to 1880, Edison and his assistants tried around 3000 experiments to perfect their light bulb design. By the end of 1880, Edison had produced a bulb that lasted 1500 hours. (This has a moral: don't worry if some of your own science experiments aren't a success the first time you try them!)
Experiment with electricity with our student-friendly kit!
Edison was not the first person to make a working light bulb: In the 1860s another English scientist, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, began experimenting. He made a light bulb that used carbonized paper for a filament. But Swan lacked a strong enough vacuum inside the bulb; a design problem that he corrected at almost the same time Edison did. After a legal battle between the two inventors, Edison and Swan teamed up and created the company Ediswan to market their invention.

How exactly do light bulbs work? For being such an important part of our lives, they have a fairly simple design. The base contains two metal contacts, which connect to an electrical circuit. These contacts are attached to two wires, which are in turn attached to the filament in the middle of the bulb (the filament is usually supported by a glass mount). A power supply sends an electric current from one contact to the other, traveling up through the wires and the filament. As the current passes through the filament, it "excites" the atoms that make up the filament material, causing them to give off energy in the form of heat and light. Edison tried thousands of different materials for his filaments, but most of them produced light for only a short time. He finally tried a carbonized cotton thread, which burned for many hours. Eventually, light bulbs were made using the metal tungsten for the filament. Tungsten works well because it has an unusually high melting point. This is important because metal must be heated to extreme temperatures to give off enough light.

The danger of running electrical current through the filament is that the resulting high temperatures may cause the filament to combust, or catch on fire. This will only happen if oxygen is present, so Edison sucked all the air out of his glass bulbs to create a vacuum. This method worked fine to prevent combustion, but it allowed filament atoms to evaporate, shortening the life of the bulb. In modern bulbs, the glass is filled with an inert gas, such as argon. This prevents combustion, and also helps prevent tungsten atoms from evaporating.

For over a century we have read and worked by the light of Edison's incandescent bulb. Other light sources, such as fluorescent bulbs and LED, have gained popularity in recent years because of their efficiency. The incandescent bulb releases most of its energy in the form of heat, not light, thus wasting electricity. Fluorescent and LED, however, are much cooler, and release most of their energy as visible light. These light sources have replaced the incandescent bulb for many functions.

Although almost all of Edison's discoveries were technological rather than strictly scientific, his invention credits include an alkaline storage battery, microphone, mimeograph (a copy machine), and a kinetoscope for viewing moving pictures. He also created the first 'talkie,' a movie that had sound, using his kinetoscope and phonograph. He continued to improve not only the incandescent light bulb, but some of his other inventions like the phonograph as well.
Return to top
The Airplane and the Wright Brothers

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew the first powered, heavier-than-air airplane, propelling himself and his older brother Wilbur into world history. It took the brothers years of preparation to get to that cold and windy day in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Wilbur (born in 1867) and Orville (born in 1871) grew up in Dayton, Ohio, the son of a United Brethren minister. Both of their parents had college educations, and they fostered intellectual curiosity and experimentation in their children. Bishop Wright sparked his young sons' interest in flight early on by bringing them a special toy - a flying top. This toy was essentially a rubber-band powered helicopter. The boys flew it until it fell apart, and then Wilbur built his own. As they grew older, the boys spent much of their time designing, building, and selling kites.

As young adults, Wilbur and Orville capitalized on the booming popularity of bicycles by starting their own bicycle sale and repair shop. Eventually they started building their own bicycles, which was excellent training for their next enterprise: building a flying machine.

Wilbur and Orville read everything about flight that they could get their hands on in Dayton. To get more information, Wilbur wrote the Smithsonian asking for up-to-date materials on the study of flight. With the Smithsonian's help they studied Sir George Cayley's work with the four forces of flight (lift, gravity, thrust, and drag), others' experiments with gliders, and the attempts at flight made by the Smithsonian's secretary, Samuel Langley. All the work these men had done, even when they failed, proved indispensable to the Wrights' efforts. After carefully studying, Wilbur and Orville began their own scientific analysis of what was needed for flight, and began designing their own gliders. They didn't just want to put an airplane in the sky; they wanted controlled flight, and for this they needed to master the three axes of motion: pitch, roll, and yaw.

Pitch is the up and down motion of the airplane's nose (climbing or diving). Roll is the airplane rolling from side to side, causing its wings to tilt up or down. This is especially necessary for turns. When an airplane turns left, it doesn't just remain level; the left wing will dip down and the right wing will be raised up. The last of the three axes is yaw, which is the airplane's right and left movement.

Orville and Wilbur realized that birds control pitch, roll, and yaw by adjusting the shape of their wings. The brothers tried to mimic this by developing what they called 'wing warping,' a system of wires and pulleys that manipulated the glider wings to allow banking turns to the left and right. At first the wing warping was controlled with the pilot's feet, but eventually they designed a hip cradle, which was easier to use. The pilot shifted his hips right, the wires pulled the left wingtips up, and the glider banked to the right. Wing warping took care of roll; their front elevator controlled pitch, and eventually the brothers controlled yaw by connecting wires from a rudder to the hip cradle.

In the autumn of 1900, the Wrights packed up a glider and set up camp at a deserted and windy beach outside of Kitty Hawk, NC. For three weeks they flew their glider as a kite, before trying to pilot it. Though they didn't achieve as much lift as they expected based on the lift tables established by aviation researchers, they were very happy with the results of their first Kitty Hawk visit. Their best flight lasted 15 seconds and covered 300 feet.

1901 saw the brothers back at Kitty Hawk, this time with an upgraded glider. The flight tests did not go as they had hoped. The new glider proved much more difficult to control, and they simply could not get the amount of lift they were trying for. They went home to Dayton discouraged and ready to give up. Men will certainly fly, they thought, but not in our lifetime. In the end, they decided to persevere. The lift tables widely accepted by the other pioneers in flight must be wrong. The Wrights decided to test the tables; they built their own wind tunnel in the back of their bicycle shop, and observed its effects on 200 different types of miniature wings.

With the information they gathered from their wind tunnel experiments, the brothers built yet another glider for testing in 1902. This was the first flying machine that had controls for all three axes of motion. It flew smoothly, was controlled easily, and glided more than 600 feet several times. They had a maneuverable aircraft; now they needed power.

True to form, the Wrights decided to build their own engine for their plane (named 'The Flyer'). The finished product put out 12 horsepower and weighed 180 lb (the entire plane weighed 605 lbs). Then came the real challenge: designing propellers. One of their greatest contributions to aviation turned out to be their pioneer research on propellers. Their final product had 70% efficiency, which is nearly as good as modern propel ers! Back at Kitty Hawk in the fall of 1903, they began assembling The Flyer. Bad weather and damage to the plane delayed flying for several months, but finally in mid-December they were ready. Because wheels would make the plane too heavy, the Wrights constructed a wooden track for the plane to move on when taking off. On December 17th, Orville climbed onto The Flyer and started the engine. It moved down the track and lifted into the air. That first flight last only 12 seconds and covered 120 feet, but it was still the first-ever controlled, heavier-than-air flight. The brothers flew the plane four times that day, and the fourth time Wilbur flew for 59 seconds, covering 852 feet.

After this breakthrough the Wrights continued to improve their plane. Now that they weren't dependent on the winds for power, they left the beaches of Kitty Hawk and moved their work to an Ohio field. By 1905, Wilbur was flying laps around the field: 24.5 miles in 39 minutes. In spite of this success, the brothers couldn't find a buyer for their invention. They decided to stop flying until they could get a sales contract. Three years later, in 1908, they received offers from the French and from the U.S. Army. Wilbur packed up a plane and went to France, where he became something of a celebrity by flying figure eights and taking up passengers (this later model had two seats). Orville demonstrated his plane for the U.S. Government and impressed them with his altitude of 300 feet, hour-long flights and average speed of 42.58 miles. They paid him $30,000 for the plane.

The age of aviation had 'taken off,' so to speak. Just 44 years after that first powered flight, airplanes began flying faster than the speed of sound; in another 14 years men were flying in space; another eight years after that they were walking on the moon. The Wright brothers' passion and perseverance laid the foundation for this astonishing and speedy technological advance.
Return to top
Science Projects: Technology Experiments

Make a Light Bulb

Thomas Edison tried thousands of experiments when he was inventing the incandescent light bulb. You can experiment too, and find out how a light bulb really works, by making your own! You will need a glass canning jar with a lid, three feet of insulated copper wire, a 6-volt battery, and thin iron wire (unraveled picture hanging wire works great).

Cut the copper wire into two equal sections. Strip at least one inch of insulation off the ends of each length of wire. Next, punch two holes in the jar lid (you can use a nail for this). Thread a wire through each hole in the lid. Make a hook at the end of each wire (the end that will be inside the jar when you put the lid on). Twist two or three strands of iron wire together, then twist the ends around the hooks in the copper wire. The iron wire will act as your filament.

Place the lid (with the filament) in the jar and carefully connect the free ends of the copper wire to the 6-volt battery. Once both ends are connected, the current should start flowing, causing the filament to heat up and give off a bright orange glow. Your homemade light bulb is working! (Note: once your filament is burned out, don't touch it right away - it will be very hot.)

For full instructions on making and experimenting with propellers, read the rest of this science project!
Return to top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learn about Inventions: Airplane, Light Bulb, Telephone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What if the only way you could communicate with someone living in another city was by mailing them a letter, one that might take weeks to get delivered? (Even with our modern technology, it still takes at least two weeks for mail to get to some countries.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Unlike many other major inventions, the original idea of the automobile cannot be attributed to a single individual. The idea certainly occurred long before it was first recorded in the Iliad, in which Homer (in Alexander Pope 's translation) states that Vulcan in a single day made 20 tricycles, which

Leonardo da Vinci considered the idea of a self-propelled vehicle in the 15th century. In 1760 a Swiss clergyman, J.H. Genevois, suggested mounting small windmills on a cartlike vehicle, their power to be used to wind springs that would move the road wheel. Genevois's idea probably derived from a windmill cart of about 1714. Two-masted wind carriages were running in the Netherlands in 1600, and a speed of 20 miles (30 km) per hour with a load of 28 passengers was claimed for at least one of them. The first recorded suggestion of wind use was probably Robert Valturio's unrealized plan (1472) for a cart powered by windmills geared to the wheels.

Other inventors considered the possibilities of clockwork. Probably in 1748 a carriage propelled by a large clockwork engine was demonstrated in Paris by the versatile inventor Jacques de Vaucanson.

The air engine is thought to have originated with a 17th-century German physicist, Otto von Guericke. Guericke invented an air pump and was probably the first to make metal pistons, cylinders, and connecting rods, the basic components of the reciprocating engine. In the 17th century a Dutch inventor, Christiaan Huygens, produced an engine that worked by air pressure developed by explosion of a powder charge. Denis Papin of France built a model engine on the vacuum principle, using the condensation of steam to produce the vacuum. An air engine was patented in England in 1799, and a grid of compressor stations was proposed to service vehicles. An air-powered vehicle is said to have been produced in 1832.

Steam propulsion was proposed as early as the 16th century, and in 1678 Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian Jesuit missionary to China, made a model steam carriage based on a principle suggestive of the modern turbine.

In the 18th century a French scientist, Philippe Lebon, patented a coal-gas engine and made the first suggestion of electrical ignition. In Paris, Isaac de Rivas made a gas-powered vehicle in 1807; his engine used hydrogen gas as fuel, the valves and ignition were operated by hand, and the timing problem appears to have been difficult.

The age of steam

Most historians agree that Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot of France was the constructor of the first true automobile. Cugnot's vehicle was a huge, heavy, steam-powered tricycle, and his model of 1769 was said to have run for 20 minutes at 2.25 miles (3.6 km) per hour while carrying four people and to have recuperated sufficient steam power to move again after standing for 20 minutes. Cugnot was an artillery officer, and the more or less steam-tight pistons of his engine were made possible by the invention of a drill that accurately machined cannon bores. A replica of Cugnot's second vehicle, partially original, is preserved in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Cugnot's successors were soon at work, notably in England, although the first post-Cugnot steam carriage appears to have been built in Amiens, France, in 1790. Steam buses were running in Paris about 1800. Oliver Evans of Philadelphia ran an amphibious steam dredge through the streets of that city in 1805. Less well known were Nathan Read of Salem, Massachusetts, and Apollos Kinsley of Hartford, Connecticut, both of whom ran steam vehicles during the period 1790-1800. In March 1863 the magazine Scientific American described tests of a vehicle that weighed only 650 pounds (about 300 kg) and achieved a speed of 20 miles (30 km) per hour. Another American, Frank Curtis of Newburyport, Massachusetts, is remembered for building a personal steam carriage to the order of a Boston man who failed to meet the payment schedule, whereupon Curtis made the first recorded repossession of a motor vehicle.

English inventors were active, and by the 1830s the manufacture and use of steam road carriages was flourishing. James Watt's foreman, William Murdock, ran a model steam carriage on the roads of Cornwall in 1784, and Robert Fourness showed a working three-cylinder tractor in 1788. Watt was opposed to the use of steam engines for such purposes; his low-pressure steam engine would have been too bulky for road use in any case, and all the British efforts in steam derived from the earlier researches of Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen.

Richard Trevithick developed Murdock's ideas, and at least one of his carriages, with driving wheels 10 feet (3 metres) in diameter, ran in London. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, the first commercially successful steam carriage builder, based his design upon an unusually efficient boiler. He was not, however, convinced that smooth wheels could grip a roadway, and so he arranged propulsion on his first vehicle by iron legs digging into the road surface. His second vehicle weighed only 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) and was said to be capable of carrying six persons. He made trips as long as 84 miles (135 km) in a running time of 9 hours and 30 minutes and once recorded a speed of 17 miles (27 km) per hour.

Gurney equipment was used on the Gloucester-Cheltenham service of four daily round trips; under favourable conditions the equipment could complete the 9 miles (15 km) in 45 minutes. Between February 27 and June 22, 1831, steam coaches ran 4,000 miles (6,400 km) on this route, carrying some 3,000 passengers. The equipment was noisy, smoky, destructive of roadways, and admittedly dangerous; hostility arose, and it was common for drivers to find the way blocked with heaps of stones or felled trees. Nevertheless, numerous passengers had been carried by steam carriage before the railways had accepted their first paying passenger.

The most successful era of the steam coaches in Britain was the 1830s. Ambitious routes were run, including one from London to Cambridge. But by 1840 it was clear that the steam carriages had little future. They had much to contend with, including the anti-machinery attitude of the public and the enmity of the horse-coach interests, which resulted in such penalties as a charge of £5 for passing a tollgate that cost a horse coach only three pence. The crushing blow was the Locomotives on Highways Act of 1865, which reduced permissible speeds on public roads to 2 miles (3 km) per hour within cities and 4 miles (6 km) per hour in rural areas. This legislation was known as the Red Flag Act because of its requirement that every steam carriage mount a crew of three, one to precede it carrying a red flag of warning. The act was amended in 1878, but it was not repealed until 1896, by which time its provisions had effectively stifled the development of road transport in the British Isles.

The decline of the steam carriage did not prevent continued effort in the field, and much attention was given to the steam tractor for use as a prime mover. Beginning about 1868, Britain was the scene of a vogue for light steam-powered personal carriages; if the popularity of these vehicles had not been legally hindered, it would certainly have resulted in widespread enthusiasm for motoring in the 1860s rather than in the 1890s. Some of the steamers could carry as few as two people and were capable of speeds of 20 miles (32 km) per hour. The public climate remained unfriendly, however.

Light steam cars were being built in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark during the same period, and it is possible to argue that the line from Cugnot's lumbering vehicle runs unbroken to the 20th-century steam automobiles made as late as 1926. The grip of the steam automobile on the American imagination has been strong ever since the era of the Stanley brothers -one of whose "steamers" took the world speed record at 127.66 miles (205.45 km) per hour in 1906. The car designed by them and sold as the Locomobile became the first commercially successful American-made automobile (about 1,000 were built in 1900). It is estimated that in the early 21st century there were still some 600 steam cars in the United States, most of them in running order.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Automobile - Invention, Evolution, Impact

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Automobile - Invention, Evolution, Impact: Unlike many other major inventions, the original idea of the automobile cannot be attributed to a single individual. The idea certainly occurred long before it was first recorded in the Iliad, in which Homer (in Alexander Pope's translation) states that Vulcan in a single day made 20 tricycles, which Leonardo da Vinci considered the idea of a self-propelled vehicle in the 15th century.

# data[].attributes.body
Picture not article!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are fewer raised fists these days. Labor power from www.shutterstock.com

Editor's note: this is the first in a weekly series of articles on organized labor, to culminate on International Workers Day on May 1.
The US labor movement was once the core institution fighting for average workers. Over the last half century, its ranks have been decimated. The share of the private sector workforce that is organized has fallen from 35% to approximately 6.5% today.

An expanding body of research demonstrates just what this loss has meant: the growth of economic and political inequality, stalled progress on racial integration and the removal of an established pathway for immigrant populations to assimilate economically.

Yet despite their decline, unions in the US retain some power in certain pockets of the country. Recent successes by these organizations reveal the importance of a revitalized labor movement for the nation's economic and civic health.

What went wrong?

By the mid-1950s, unions in the US had successfully organized approximately one out of every three non-farm workers. This period represented the peak of labor's power, as the ranks of unionized workers shrank in subsequent decades.

The decline gained speed in the 1980s and 1990s, spurred by a combination of economic and political developments. The opening up of overseas markets increased competition in many highly organized industries. Outsourcing emerged as a popular practice among employers seeking to compete in a radically changed environment. The deregulation of industries not threatened by overseas competition, such as trucking, also placed organized labor at a disadvantage as new nonunion firms gained market edge through lower labor costs.

Simultaneously, US employers developed a set of legal, semi-legal and illegal practices that proved effective at ridding establishments of existing unions and preventing nonunion workers from organizing. Common practices included threatening union sympathizers with dismissal, holding mandatory meetings with workers warning of the dire consequences (real or imagined) of a unionization campaign and hiring permanent replacements for striking workers during labor disputes.

A sharp political turn against labor aided these employer efforts. President Reagan's public firing of striking air traffic controllers vividly demonstrated to a weakened labor movement that times had changed. Anti-union politicians repeatedly blocked all union-backed efforts to re-balance the playing field, most recently in 2008-2009, with the successful Senate filibuster of the Employee Free Choice Act. EFCA would have made private sector organization efforts somewhat easier. The last major piece of federal legislation aiding unions in their organization efforts passed in 1935.

Rail workers from www.shutterstock.com

Why does it matter?

At its peak, the US labor movement stood alongside powerful business leaders and policymakers as key institutions shaping the nation's economy and polity. Union workers enjoyed healthy union "wage premiums," or increases in pay resulting directly from working under a union-negotiated contract.

But nonunion workers also benefited from a strong labor presence.

In research by Harvard University's Bruce Western and myself, we compared nonunion workers in highly organized locales and industries to nonunion workers in segments of the labor market with little union presence. After adjusting for core determinants of wages, such as education levels, we found that nonunion workers in strongly unionized industries and areas enjoyed substantially higher pay. Thus the economic benefits of a powerful labor movement redounded to unorganized workers as well as union members.

Early 20th-century unions - especially craft unions - engaged in a range of sometimes violent discriminatory practices. As a result, in 1935, the year that President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act, less than 1% of trade unionists were African American. While the Wagner act extended basic organizing rights to private sector workers, millions of minorities remained unable to enjoy its protections by the actions of unions themselves. But throughout the second half of the 20th Century, many unions shed these racist and xenophobic legacies.

In so doing, they opened up their organizations to African Americans eager to escape explicitly racist policies and practices common to many nonunion workplaces. African Americans soon had the highest organization rates of any racial or ethnic group, peaking at more than 40% for African American men and nearly 25% for African American women in the private sector.

These exceptional organization rates helped narrow racial pay disparities by raising African American wages. Had no union decline occurred from the early 1970s on, black-white wage gaps among women would be between 13% and 30% lower, and black males' weekly wages would be an estimated US$50 higher. Meanwhile, many immigrants and their children, echoing pathways taken by newcomers in generations past, such as the predominantly female, predominantly immigrant population of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), used the labor movement as a springboard into the nation's middle class.

Unions' equalizing impact was not limited to the economic realm. A large body of research has found that union membership spurs civic participation among non-elite Americans. Voting, for example, is a practice strongly graded by income and education. More of either and Americans are much more likely to turn out to vote. Unions helped to counteract class-based inequality in political participation, ensuring that elected officials heard the policy desires of millions of non-elite Americans.

What now for labor?

The labor movement now finds itself in a peculiar period.

On the one hand, ongoing attacks by anti-union forces have crippled unions' organizational models in what were labor strongholds, including Wisconsin and Michigan. Many of these attacks have taken dead aim at what remains of labor's real strength: its public sector membership base.

Abetted by recent court decisions, efforts to defund and defang public sector unions are growing in size and sophistication by right wing policymakers and lobbying groups.

Curiously, despite serving as a primary source of votes and finances for the Democratic Party for much of the 20th Century, labor finds itself with few political allies.

On the other hand, unions have enjoyed a series of recent successes at the state and local level. Movements to raise the minimum wage, offer paid sick leave to employees and pressure the largest private sector employer - Walmart - to raise its base compensation have all, of late, succeeded. These victories can be attributed, in part, to labor unions.

Unions provided much of the organizational and financial support that helped deliver these victories to millions of working Americans. Yet none of these wins translate directly into new dues-paying members.

Further successes on behalf of America's working- and middle-class appear limited unless unions discover a means to maintain its funding base. And without a revitalized labor movement, it is likely our inequality levels will remain at record highs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The rise and fall of US labor unions, and why they still matter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Editor's note: this is the first in a weekly series of articles on organized labor, to culminate on International Workers Day on May 1. The US labor movement was once the core institution fighting for average workers. Over the last half century, its ranks have been decimated.

# data[].attributes.body
Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Imperialism Explained: U.S. History

# data[].attributes.body
Arcticle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Between 1880 and 1900, cities in the United States grew at a dramatic rate. Owing most of their population growth to the expansion of industry, U.S. cities grew by about 15 million people in the two decades before 1900. Many of those who helped account for the population growth of cities were immigrants arriving from around the world. A steady stream of people from rural America also migrated to the cities during this period. Between 1880 and 1890, almost 40 percent of the townships in the United States lost population because of migration.

Industrial expansion and population growth radically changed the face of the nation's cities. Noise, traffic jams, slums, air pollution, and sanitation and health problems became commonplace. Mass transit, in the form of trolleys, cable cars, and subways, was built, and skyscrapers began to dominate city skylines. New communities, known as suburbs, began to be built just beyond the city. Commuters, those who lived in the suburbs and traveled in and out of the city for work, began to increase in number.

Many of those who resided in the city lived in rental apartments or tenement housing. Neighborhoods, especially for immigrant populations, were often the center of community life. In the enclave neighborhoods, many immigrant groups attempted to hold onto and practice precious customs and traditions. Even today, many neighborhoods or sections of some of the great cities in the United States reflect those ethnic heritages.

During the final years of the 1800s, industrial cities, with all the problems brought on by rapid population growth and lack of infrastructure to support the growth, occupied a special place in U.S. history. For all the problems, and there were many, the cities promoted a special bond between people and laid the foundation for the multiethnic, multicultural society that we cherish today.

To find additional sources in American Memory on this general topic, use such keywords as city, neighborhood, immigration, industry, urbanization, transportation, suburbs, slums, tenements, and skyscrapers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
City Life in the Late 19th Century - American Memory Timeline- Classroom Presentation | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Between 1880 and 1900, cities in the United States grew at a dramatic rate. Owing most of their population growth to the expansion of industry, U.S. cities grew by about 15 million people in the two decades before 1900. Many of those who helped account for the population growth of cities were immigrants arriving from around the world.

# data[].attributes.headline
Political Corruption and Government Reforms

# data[].attributes.subject
Political Corruption and Government Reforms

# data[].attributes.body
Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The American voting public of the early 1900s was accustomed to the tenet that the best government was the least government. Progressive era politics changed that belief when government corruption became commonplace. Reformers like Teddy Roosevelt in Washington and Governor Hiram Johnson in California responded to an epidemic of political and civic corruption by expanding the role of government in regulating the economy and in giving citizens, for the first time, direct access to the legislative process.

Between 1910 and 1914, under Governor Hiram Johnson's political leadership the California legislature expanded state government first by breaking the economic and political power of the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP). The reform legislature passed the Stetson-Eshelman Act, which increased the state Railroad Commission's authority and power to fix passenger and freight rates; thus ending Southern Pacific Railroad's (SP) crushing monopolistic practices. With the Public Utilities Act and the creation of the Public Utility Commission (PUC), the agency's commissioners had the authority over the railroads as well as all public utilities.

The legislators also halted the political power of SP with the passage of reform mechanisms giving voters direct access to government and the legislative process. The initiative allowed voters to pass legislation; the referendum allowed the public's veto of existing legislation; and the recall permitted the removal of elected officials. The direct primary, the popular election of U.S. senators, and cross-filing for Republican and Democratic candidates changed the control over who got elected from party bosses to the voters. In passing these measures, Governor Johnson and the legislature had achieved the political goal of engaging ordinary citizens in participatory democracy. The systemic power of SP was over, but the government's role in shaping its citizens' quality of life was still growing.

In order to address workers' fears of losing their livelihood through sickness or job-related accidents, the legislature passed the Workmen's Compensation, Insurance, and Safety Act in 1913, which in turn set up an Industrial Accident Commission and State Compensation Insurance Fund. This was ground-breaking work by government, which had only recently been in the business of protecting only business interests. Setting additional precedents, the legislature curtailed child labor, and also set an 8-hour day and minimum wage for female industrial workers.

In the field of education, Hiram Johnson's reform government called for teacher pensions, free textbooks for public school children, the creation of a comprehensive curriculum, and mandatory kindergartens. The kindergarten movement, begun in Germany in the 1830s, found a ready American enthusiasm by women reformers who believed that kindergarten was as important an educational experience as college. By 1878, the first free public kindergarten was established in San Francisco. Enthusiastic financial support led to still more kindergartens, so that by 1894, 235 more of them were set up nationally and globally, based on the California model. Public university education also received the attention of reform initially through the generosity of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of publisher William Randolph Hearst. In the 1890s her financial support of the University of California, Berkeley made possible the construction of the outdoor Greek Theater, a women's gymnasium, a university museum and the Department of Anthropology. The University of California continued its academic growth through the appointment of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who, over a 19-year period, established twenty new departments.

Neither progressive politicians nor unions helped minority laborers in the nation and in California. Blacks were excluded from union membership. Chinese were excluded from immigrating to the U. S. In 1907 Japan agreed through a Gentlemen's Agreement reached with President Roosevelt not to issue passports to Japanese workers, thus also eliminating Japanese from the American work force. Japanese in California, through the passage of the Alien Land Law, were prohibited from owning land in the state. Women, however, fared better. In addition to legislation improved their working conditions, they also received the right to vote. While Governor Johnson did not openly endorse the Amendment that would grant suffrage, he did help get it on the ballot. It passed by 3,587 votes.

Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson all promoted political, economic, social, and moral reforms on the national front. Passage of several acts expanded the Interstate Commerce Commission. Taft created the Department of Labor. Two economic regulatory agencies were created: the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission. Four constitutional amendments were also ratified: the 16th introduced a federal income tax, the 17th allowed for the direct election of U.S. Senators. The 18th established prohibition, and the 19th allowed women the right to vote. Such economic and political reforms under the aegis of an expanded government were necessary, the progressives argued, to restore the values of the American dream for all Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Progressive Era: 1890-1920s: Progressive Political Reform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The American voting public of the early 1900s was accustomed to the tenet that the best government was the least government. Progressive era politics changed that belief when government corruption became commonplace.

# data[].attributes.body
Picture

# data[].attributes.body
Womens Rights
American Imperialism
Immigration Growth
Political Growth

# data[].attributes.body
Assassination Of Franz Ferdinand
Technology of WWI
The Rise of Automobiles
How Peace was established
18th Amendment
Americas Role

# data[].attributes.headline
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

# data[].attributes.subject
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Deeply in love, Ferdinand chose to marry Sophie Chotek in 1900 despite the opposition of his uncle, Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, who refused to attend their wedding. Though not exactly a commoner, Sophie came from a family of obscure Czech nobles and not from a reigning or formerly reigning dynasty of Europe. As a result, her and Ferdinand's children were declared ineligible for the throne. Sophie also became the victim of countless petty slights. At imperial banquets, for example, she entered each room last, without an escort, and was then seated far away from her husband at the dinner table.

His marriage notwithstanding, Ferdinand remained Franz Josef's heir and inspector general of the army. In that capacity, he agreed to attend a series of June 1914 military exercises in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary had just annexed these provinces a few years earlier against the wishes of neighboring Serbia, which likewise coveted them. Ferdinand believed the Serbs to be "pigs," "thieves," "murderers" and "scoundrels." Yet he had opposed annexation for fear that it would make an already turbulent political situation even worse. Formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia-Herzegovina's population was roughly 40 percent Serb, 30 percent Muslim and 20 percent Croat, with various other ethnicities making up the remainder.

Upon learning of Ferdinand's upcoming visit, the Young Bosnians, a secret revolutionary society of peasant students, began plotting to assassinate him. In May, Gavrilo Princip, Trifko Grabez and Nedeljko Cabrinovic traveled to the Serbian capital of Belgrade, where they received six handheld bombs, four semi-automatic pistols and cyanide suicide capsules from members of the so-called Black Hand, a terrorist group with close ties to the Serbian army. After practicing with their pistols in a Belgrade park, the three men journeyed back to Bosnia-Herzegovina, receiving help from Black Hand associates to smuggle their weapons across the border. To this day, it remains unclear whether the Serbian government participated in the scheme.

Ferdinand and Sophie departed their estate for Bosnia-Herzegovina on June 23. Having received multiple warnings to cancel the trip, the archduke knew that danger potentially awaited them. "Our journey starts with an extremely promising omen," he purportedly said when the axles on his car overheated. "Here our car burns, and down there they will throw bombs at us." After arriving at a spa town a few miles outside of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina's capital, Ferdinand attended two days of military exercises while Sophie visited schools and orphanages. On a whim, the couple drove in one evening to check out Sarajevo's bazaars. While there, they attracted a crowd of onlookers, including Princip, but were apparently treated with warmth and politeness.

Following a banquet with religious and political leaders, only one day of events remained before Ferdinand and Sophie were to return home. That morning, June 28, the archduke sent a telegram to his eldest son congratulating him on his latest exam results. He and Sophie then boarded a train for the short ride into Sarajevo. For once, Sophie was permitted to walk alongside Ferdinand during a brief troop inspection, after which the couple got in an open-topped car for a motorcade ride to city hall. The car in front of them was supposed to carry six specially trained officers but instead had only one, plus three local policemen. In fact, throughout the trip, Austro-Hungarian officials allegedly focused more attention on dinner menus than security details.

Meanwhile, seven Young Bosnians had fanned out along the Appel Quay, a main avenue in Sarajevo running parallel to the Miljacka River. When the motorcade passed by, its route having been published in advance, Cabrinovic asked which car carried the archduke. He then hurled his bomb at the car, only to watch it bounce off the folded-up roof and roll underneath the wrong vehicle. The subsequent explosion wounded two army officers and several bystanders but left Ferdinand and Sophie essentially unharmed. Cabrinovic jumped into the mostly dry riverbed and made a half-hearted attempt to kill himself before being apprehended. "I am a Serbian hero," he purportedly shouted as the police led him away. At least two other Young Bosnians also had good looks at the archduke but apparently lost the nerve to attempt an assassination.

Rather than immediately flee Sarajevo, Ferdinand decided to continue on to the planned event at city hall. Upon finishing that up, he insisted on visiting the wounded officers in the hospital. In order to dissuade any other bomb throwers, the motorcade zipped down the Appel Quay at high speeds. By mistake, however, the first three cars turned onto a side street right where Princip happened to be standing. As the cars attempted to reverse back onto the Appel Quay, Princip whipped out his pistol and fired two shots at the archduke from point-blank range, piercing him in the neck and also striking Sophie's abdomen. "Sophie, Sophie, don't die-stay alive for our children," Ferdinand murmured. Within minutes, though, both had passed away. Princip, a slender, 19-year-old Serbian army reject, later admitted to killing Ferdinand but said he had not meant to hit Sophie. Three weeks too young for the death penalty, Princip was given a 20-year sentence, but contracted tuberculosis and died in jail in April 1918, at the age of just 23.

With tensions already running high among Europe's powers, the assassination precipitated a rapid descent into World War I. First, Austria-Hungary gained German support for punitive action against Serbia. It then sent Serbia an ultimatum, worded in a way that made acceptance unlikely. Serbia proposed arbitration to resolve the dispute, but Austria-Hungary instead declared war on July 28, 1914, exactly a month after Ferdinand's death. By the following week, Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, Montenegro and Great Britain had all been drawn into the conflict, and other countries like the United States would enter later. Overall, more than 9 million soldiers and nearly that many civilians would die in fighting that lasted until 1918.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 100 Years Ago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deeply in love, Ferdinand chose to marry Sophie Chotek in 1900 despite the opposition of his uncle, Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, who refused to attend their wedding. Though not exactly a commoner, Sophie came from a family of obscure Czech nobles and not from a reigning or formerly reigning dynasty of Europe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
World War I was less than one year old when British writer H. G. Wells lamented the fate of humanity at the hands of "man's increasing power of destruction" (H. G. Wells, "Civilization at the Breaking Point," New York Times, May 27, 1915, 2). Although considered a father of science fiction, Wells was observing something all too real-technology had changed the face of combat in World War I and ultimately accounted for an unprecedented loss of human life.

[Detail] "Huge siege guns of the Central Powers used in the smashing of forts." War of the Nations, 110.

Infantry warfare had depended upon hand-to-hand combat. World War I popularized the use of the machine gun-capable of bringing down row after row of soldiers from a distance on the battlefield. This weapon, along with barbed wire and mines, made movement across open land both difficult and dangerous. Thus trench warfare was born. The British introduced tanks in 1916; they were used with airplanes and artillery to advance the front. The advent of chemical warfare added to the soldier's perils.

"French, British, and German Types of Battle Tanks." War of the Nations, 167.

Sea and airborne weapons made killing from a distance more effective as well. Guns mounted on ships were able to strike targets up to twenty miles inland. The stealth and speed of German submarines gave Germany a considerable advantage in its dominance of the North Sea. Although airplanes were technologically crude, they offered a psychological advantage. Fighter pilot aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, Germany's "Red Baron," became celebrities and heroes, capturing the world's imagination with their daring and thrilling mid-air maneuvers.

[Detail] "The Insidious and Deadly Gas That Creeps Noiselessly Down Toward the Foe." War of the Nations, 210.

Newspapers charted the public's reaction-horror and vengeance-to these technological advancements. A few weeks after the Germans first used poison gas in Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, a London newswire to the New York Times described the brutal details of the attack and the immediate effects on the soldiers, concluding: "It is without doubt the most awful form of scientific torture." Yet a Daily Chronicle [London] editorial urged Britain to retaliate with poison gas use of its own (quoted in New York Times, May 7, 1915, 2). In fact, Germany claimed that the Allies were already using mines charged with poison gas. So horrified were people by chemical warfare that the use of poison gases was banned for future wars, although not until 1925.

When Germany's plan for a swift military victory went unrealized, the pace of war bogged down. Both sides tried to break this stalemate through the use of force. In previous wars, victory was achieved through territorial supremacy; in World War I it was accomplished by simply outlasting the opponent-a "war of attrition." When fighting first broke out in August 1914, many hoped the war would be short-lived; few predicted a conflict that would last for more than four years and scar an entire generation with its unprecedented brutality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Military Technology in World War I | Articles & Essays | Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914-1919 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
World War I was less than one year old when British writer H. G. Wells lamented the fate of humanity at the hands of "man's increasing power of destruction" (H. G. Wells, "Civilization at the Breaking Point," New York Times, May 27, 1915, 2).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Were Cars Invented?

The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials.

Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour. By 1909, with the most integrated automobile factory in Europe, Daimler employed some seventeen hundred workers to produce fewer than a thousand cars per year.

Nothing illustrates the superiority of European design better than the sharp contrast between this first Mercedes model and Ransom E. Olds ' 1901-1906 one-cylinder, three-horsepower, tiller-steered, curved-dash Oldsmobile, which was merely a motorized horse buggy. But the Olds sold for only $650, putting it within reach of middle-class Americans, and the 1904 Olds output of 5,508 units surpassed any car production previously accomplished.

The central problem of automotive technology over the first decade of the twentieth century would be reconciling the advanced design of the 1901 Mercedes with the moderate price and low operating expenses of the Olds. This would be overwhelmingly an American achievement.

Henry Ford and William Durant

Bicycle mechanics J. Frank and Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, had designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893, then won the first American car race in 1895, and went on to make the first sale of an American-made gasoline car the next year.

Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies entered the business in the next decade. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and William Durant founded General Motors.

The new firms operated in an unprecedented seller's market for an expensive consumer goods item. With its vast land area and a hinterland of scattered and isolated settlements, the United States had a far greater need for automotive transportation than the nations of Europe. Great demand was ensured, too, by a significantly higher per capita income and more equitable income distribution than European countries.

Model T

Given the American manufacturing tradition, it was also inevitable that cars would be produced in larger volume at lower prices than in Europe. The absence of tariff barriers between the states encouraged sales over a wide geographic area. Cheap raw materials and a chronic shortage of skilled labor early encouraged the mechanization of industrial processes in the United States.

This in turn required the standardization of products and resulted in the volume production of such commodities as firearms, sewing machines, bicycles, and many other items. In 1913, the United States produced some 485,000 of the world total of 606,124 motor vehicles.

The Ford Motor Company greatly outpaced its competitors in reconciling state-of-the-art design with moderate price. Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal called the four-cylinder, fifteen-horsepower, $600 Ford Model N (1906-1907) "the very first instance of a low-cost motorcar driven by a gas engine having cylinders enough to give the shaft a turning impulse in each shaft turn which is well built and offered in large numbers." Deluged with orders, Ford installed improved production equipment and after 1906 was able to make deliveries of a hundred cars a day.

Encouraged by the success of the Model N, Henry Ford was determined to build an even better "car for the great multitude." The four-cylinder, twenty-horsepower Model T, first offered in October 1908, sold for $825. Its two-speed planetary transmission made it easy to drive, and features such as its detachable cylinder head made it easy to repair. Its high chassis was designed to clear the bumps in rural roads. Vanadium steel made the Model T a lighter and tougher car, and new methods of casting parts (especially block casting of the engine) helped keep the price down.

Committed to large-volume production of the Model T, Ford innovated modern mass production techniques at his new Highland Park, Michigan, plant, which opened in 1910 (although he did not introduce the moving assembly line until 1913-1914). The Model T runabout sold for $575 in 1912, less than the average annual wage in the United States.

By the time the Model T was withdrawn from production in 1927, its price had been reduced to $290 for the coupe, 15 million units had been sold, and mass personal "automobility" had become a reality.

Automotive Industry Growing Pains

Ford's mass production techniques were quickly adopted by other American automobile manufacturers. (European automakers did not begin to use them until the 1930s.) The heavier outlays of capital and larger volume of sales that this necessitated ended the era of easy entry and free-wheeling competition among many small producers in the American industry.

The number of active automobile manufacturers dropped from 253 in 1908 to only 44 in 1929, with about 80 percent of the industry's output accounted for by Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, formed from Maxwell in 1925 by Walter P. Chrysler.

Most of the remaining independents were wiped out in the Great Depression, with Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard hanging on only to collapse in the post- World War II period.

The Model T was intended to be "a farmer's car" that served the transportation needs of a nation of farmers. Its popularity was bound to wane as the country urbanized and as rural regions got out of the mud with passage of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act and the 1921 Federal Highway Act.

Moreover, the Model T remained basically unchanged long after it was technologically obsolete. Model T owners began to trade up to larger, faster, smoother riding, more stylish cars. The demand for basic transportation the Model T had met tended increasingly in the 1920s to be filled from the backlog of used cars piling up in dealers' lots as the market became saturated.

Car Sales Stall

By 1927 replacement demand for new cars was exceeding demand from first-time owners and multiple-car purchasers combined. Given the incomes of the day, automakers could no longer count on an expanding market. Installment sales had been initiated by the makers of moderately priced cars in 1916 to compete with the Model T, and by 1925 about three-quarters of all new cars were bought "on time" through credit.

Although a few expensive items, such as pianos and sewing machines, had been sold on time before 1920, it was installment sales of automobiles during the twenties that established the purchasing of expensive consumer goods on credit as a middle-class habit and a mainstay of the American economy.

GM Introduces 'Planned Obsolescence'

Market saturation coincided with technological stagnation: In both product and production technology, innovation was becoming incremental rather than dramatic. The basic differences that distinguish post-World War II models from the Model T were in place by the late 1920s-the self-starter, the closed all-steel body, the high-compression engine, hydraulic brakes, syncromesh transmission and low-pressure balloon tires.

The remaining innovations-the automatic transmission and drop-frame construction-came in the 1930s. Moreover, with some exceptions, cars were made much the same way in the early 1950s as they had been in the 1920s.

To meet the challenges of market saturation and technological stagnation, General Motors under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., in the 1920s and 1930s innovated planned obsolescence of product and put a new emphasis on styling, exemplified in the largely cosmetic annual model change-a planned triennial major restyling to coincide with the economics of die life and with annual minor face-liftings in between.

The goal was to make consumers dissatisfied enough to trade in and presumably up to a more expensive new model long before the useful life of their present cars had ended. Sloan's philosophy was that "the primary object of the corporation ... was to make money, not just to make motorcars." He believed that it was necessary only that GM's cars be "equal in design to the best of our competitors ... it was not necessary to lead in design or to run the risk of untried experiments."

Thus engineering was subordinated to the dictates of stylists and cost-cutting accountants. General Motors became the archetype of a rational corporation run by a technostructure.

As Sloanism replaced Fordism as the predominant market strategy in the industry, Ford lost the sales lead in the lucrative low-priced field to Chevrolet in 1927 and 1928. By 1936 GM claimed 43 percent of the U.S. market; Ford with 22 percent had fallen to third place behind Chrysler with 25 percent.

Although automobile sales collapsed during the Great Depression, Sloan could boast of GM that "in no year did the corporation fail to earn a profit." (GM retained industry leadership until 1986 when Ford surpassed it in profits.)

World War II and the Auto Industry

The automobile industry had played a critical role in producing military vehicles and war matériel in the First World War. During World War II, in addition to turning out several million military vehicles, American automobile manufacturers made some seventy-five essential military items, most of them unrelated to the motor vehicle. These materials had a total value of $29 billion, one-fifth of the nation's war production.

Because the manufacture of vehicles for the civilian market ceased in 1942 and tires and gasoline were severely rationed, motor vehicle travel fell dramatically during the war years. Cars that had been nursed through the Depression long after they were ready to be junked were patched up further, ensuring great pent-up demand for new cars at the war's end.

Detroit's Big Three carried Sloanism to its illogical conclusion in the postwar period. Models and options proliferated, and every year cars became longer and heavier, more powerful, more gadget-bedecked, more expensive to purchase and to operate, following the truism that large cars are more profitable to sell than small ones.

Rise of Japanese Automakers

Engineering in the postwar era was subordinated to the questionable aesthetics of nonfunctional styling at the expense of economy and safety. And quality deteriorated to the point that by the mid-1960s American-made cars were being delivered to retail buyers with an average of twenty-four defects a unit, many of them safety-related. Moreover, the higher unit profits that Detroit made on gas-guzzling "road cruisers" were made at the social costs of increased air pollution and a drain on dwindling world oil reserves.

The era of the annually restyled road cruiser ended with the imposition of federal standards of automotive safety (1966), emission of pollutants (1965 and 1970), and energy consumption (1975); with escalating gasoline prices following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979; and especially with the mounting penetration of both the U.S. and world markets first by the German Volkswagen "Bug" (a modern Model T) and then by Japanese fuel-efficient, functionally designed, well-built small cars.

After peaking at a record 12.87 million units in 1978, sales of American-made cars fell to 6.95 million in 1982, as imports increased their share of the U.S. market from 17.7 percent to 27.9 percent. In 1980 Japan became the world's leading auto producer, a position it continues to hold.

U.S. Carmakers Retool

In response, the American automobile industry in the 1980s underwent a massive organizational restructuring and technological renaissance. Managerial revolutions and cutbacks in plant capacity and personnel at GM, Ford and Chrysler resulted in leaner, tougher firms with lower break-even points, enabling them to maintain profits with lower volumes in increasingly saturated, competitive markets.

Manufacturing quality and programs of employee motivation and involvement were given high priority. The industry in 1980 undertook a five-year, $80 billion program of plant modernization and retooling. Functional aerodynamic design replaced styling in Detroit studios, as the annual cosmetic change was abandoned.

Cars became smaller, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and much safer. Product and production were being increasingly rationalized in a process of integrating computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing.

Legacy of the U.S. Auto Industry

The automobile has been a key force for change in twentieth-century America. During the 1920s the industry became the backbone of a new consumer goods-oriented society. By the mid-1920s it ranked first in value of product, and in 1982 it provided one out of every six jobs in the United States.

In the 1920s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands.

The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 inaugurated the largest public works program in history.

The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenities-most important, better medical care and schools-to rural America (while paradoxically the farm tractor made the traditional family farm obsolete). The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is a product of the automobile and trucking.

The automobile changed the architecture of the typical American dwelling, altered the conception and composition of the urban neighborhood, and freed homemakers from the narrow confines of the home. No other historical force has so revolutionized the way Americans work, live, and play.

In 1980, 87.2 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 51.5 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic car sales were for replacement. Americans have become truly auto-dependent.

But though automobile ownership is virtually universal, the motor vehicle no longer acts as a progressive force for change. New forces-the electronic media, the laser, the computer, and the robot probably foremost among them-are charting the future. A period of American history that can appropriately be called the Automobile Age is melding into a new Age of Electronics.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials. Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Treaty of Versailles, What Did the Big Three Want? 1/2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
News > Spokane
UPDATED: Wed., Feb. 20, 2019, 9:12 a.m.

Prohibition was declared on a nationwide scale when the U.S. Congress formally enacted the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported on Jan. 29, 1919. The newspaper also reported that the Wobblies and other radical groups had set "the day" when they intended to "overthrow" the U.S. government and declare a Soviet system. (Spokesman-Review archives)

The national "death warrant" for John Barleycorn (alcohol) was finally signed.

Prohibition was declared on a nationwide scale when the U.S. Congress formally enacted the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.

The impact was minor in Washington state, which had begun statewide prohibition in 1916. Nevertheless, it was considered the ultimate victory in the long battle of the "wets" vs. the "drys."

It was not, in fact, the ultimate victory. The 18th Amendment would be repealed in 1933.

From the Wobbly beat: The Spokane Daily Chronicle breathlessly reported that the Wobblies and other radical groups had set "the day" when they intended to "overthrow" the U.S. government and declare a soviet system.

However, police did not know which day would be "the day."

The Chronicle said that Spokane's Commissioner of Public Safety J.H. Tilsley had uncovered numerous references to "the day" in papers seized in a Wobbly raid.

Tilsley said that he had received information that "a serious attempt is being made to form 'soviets,' " in Portland, Seattle and Tacoma, and that "Spokane is included in the program of organization." One of the organizers, said Tilsley, tried unsuccessfully to create such a "soviet" two weeks earlier at a Spokane socialist forum.

None of the Wobblies arrested in the Spokane raid was willing to tell authorities what date "the day" might refer to.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
100 years ago: Prohibition goes nationwide with passage of 18th Amendment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
News > Spokane UPDATED: Wed., Feb. 20, 2019, 9:12 a.m. The national "death warrant" for John Barleycorn (alcohol) was finally signed. Prohibition was declared on a nationwide scale when the U.S. Congress formally enacted the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. The impact was minor in Washington state, which had begun statewide prohibition in 1916.

# data[].attributes.body
4:55

# data[].attributes.body
Black Tuesday
Causes of Great Depression
Hoovers plan for recovery
Dust Bowl
US involvement
Totiltarianism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stock Market Crash: 1929 & Black Tuesday | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Stock Market Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, as some 16 million shares were traded on Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, wiping out many investors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
National Archives, Washington, D.C. (12573155)

The Great Depression of the late 1920s and '30s remains the longest and most severe economic downturn in modern history. Lasting almost 10 years (from late 1929 until about 1939) and affecting nearly every country in the world, it was marked by steep declines in industrial production and in prices (deflation), mass unemployment, banking panics, and sharp increases in rates of poverty and homelessness. In the United States, where the effects of the depression were generally worst, between 1929 and 1933 industrial production fell nearly 47 percent, gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 30 percent, and unemployment reached more than 20 percent. By comparison, during the Great Recession of 2007-09, the second largest economic downturn in U.S. history, GDP declined by 4.3 percent, and unemployment reached slightly less than 10 percent.

There is no consensus among economists and historians regarding the exact causes of the Great Depression. However, many scholars agree that at least the following four factors played a role.

The stock market crash of 1929. During the 1920s the U.S. stock market underwent a historic expansion. As stock prices rose to unprecedented levels, investing in the stock market came to be seen as an easy way to make money, and even people of ordinary means used much of their disposable income or even mortgaged their homes to buy stock. By the end of the decade hundreds of millions of shares were being carried on margin, meaning that their purchase price was financed with loans to be repaid with profits generated from ever-increasing share prices. Once prices began their inevitable decline in October 1929, millions of overextended shareholders fell into a panic and rushed to liquidate their holdings, exacerbating the decline and engendering further panic. Between September and November, stock prices fell 33 percent. The result was a profound psychological shock and a loss of confidence in the economy among both consumers and businesses. Accordingly, consumer spending, especially on durable goods, and business investment were drastically curtailed, leading to reduced industrial output and job losses, which further reduced spending and investment.

Banking panics and monetary contraction. Between 1930 and 1932 the United States experienced four extended banking panics, during which large numbers of bank customers, fearful of their bank's solvency, simultaneously attempted to withdraw their deposits in cash. Ironically, the frequent effect of a banking panic is to bring about the very crisis that panicked customers aim to protect themselves against: even financially healthy banks can be ruined by a large panic. By 1933 one-fifth of the banks in existence in 1930 had failed, leading the new Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to declare a four-day " bank holiday" (later extended by three days), during which all of the country's banks remained closed until they could prove their solvency to government inspectors. The natural consequence of widespread bank failures was to decrease consumer spending and business investment, because there were fewer banks to lend money. There was also less money to lend, partly because people were hoarding it in the form of cash. According to some scholars, that problem was exacerbated by the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates (further depressing lending) and deliberately reduced the money supply in the belief that doing so was necessary to maintain the gold standard (see below), by which the U.S. and many other countries had tied the value of their currencies to a fixed amount of gold. The reduced money supply in turn reduced prices, which further discouraged lending and investment (because people feared that future wages and profits would not be sufficient to cover loan payments).

The gold standard. Whatever its effects on the money supply in the United States, the gold standard unquestionably played a role in the spread of the Great Depression from the United States to other countries. As the United States experienced declining output and deflation, it tended to run a trade surplus with other countries because Americans were buying fewer imported goods, while American exports were relatively cheap. Such imbalances gave rise to significant foreign gold outflows to the United States, which in turn threatened to devalue the currencies of the countries whose gold reserves had been depleted. Accordingly, foreign central banks attempted to counteract the trade imbalance by raising their interest rates, which had the effect of reducing output and prices and increasing unemployment in their countries. The resulting international economic decline, especially in Europe, was nearly as bad as that in the United States.

Decreased international lending and tariffs. In the late 1920s, while the U.S. economy was still expanding, lending by U.S. banks to foreign countries fell, partly because of relatively high U.S. interest rates. The drop-off contributed to contractionary effects in some borrower countries, particularly Germany, Argentina, and Brazil, whose economies entered a downturn even before the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. Meanwhile, American agricultural interests, suffering because of overproduction and increased competition from European and other agricultural producers, lobbied Congress for passage of new tariffs on agricultural imports. Congress eventually adopted broad legislation, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), that imposed steep tariffs (averaging 20 percent) on a wide range of agricultural and industrial products. The legislation naturally provoked retaliatory measures by several other countries, the cumulative effect of which was declining output in several countries and a reduction in global trade.

Just as there is no general agreement about the causes of the Great Depression, there is no consensus about the sources of recovery, though, again, a few factors played an obvious role. In general, countries that abandoned the gold standard or devalued their currencies or otherwise increased their money supply recovered first (Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, and the United States effectively devalued its currency in 1933). Fiscal expansion, in the form of New Deal jobs and social welfare programs and increased defense spending during the onset of World War II, presumably also played a role by increasing consumers' income and aggregate demand, but the importance of this factor is a matter of debate among scholars.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What brought about the worst economic downturn in modern history?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hoover and the Great Depression | 5 Minute Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
student expectation (se) us 7a: identify reasons for u.s. involvement in world war ii

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
german and japanese dictatorships and their aggression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Student Expectation (SE) US 7A: Identify reasons for U.S. involvement in World War II, including Italian, German and Japanese dictatorships and their aggression, - ppt download

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fascism = A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. SE : US.7A: identify reasons for U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rise of Totalitarianism: AP European History