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the great awakening and the enlightenment in the colonies

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The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment in the Colonies - ppt video online download

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The Enlightenment Science and mathematics begin to overthrow ideas of religion and miracles. Earth is not the center of the universe as expected. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Rejection of religion These ideas traveled from Europe to the Colonies BEN FRANKLIN- Obtain truth through experimentation and reason Lightning Experiment!

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Paleoindian Map | Pueblo Indian History for Kids

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This map shows how people first entered the Americas via Siberia.

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Native American societies before contact (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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What does "Renaissance" mean?

When did the Renaissance happen?

What is Renaissance art?

What does "Renaissance man" mean?

Renaissance, (French: "Rebirth") period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages and conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

A brief treatment of the Renaissance follows. For full treatment, see history of Europe: The Renaissance.

Origins and rise of humanism

The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century, a revival in which they felt they were participating. Indeed, the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier. Events at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 12th century, set in motion a series of social, political, and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance. These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual and material life, the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies, the development of national languages, and the breakup of the old feudal structures.

While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism. Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy. Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy. Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Coluccio Salutati. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship.

Humanism had several significant features. First, it took human nature in all of its various manifestations and achievements as its subject. Second, it stressed the unity and compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and systems, a doctrine known as syncretism. Third, it emphasized the dignity of man. In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert mastery over nature. Finally, humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom. In the course of striving to recover it, however, the humanists assisted in the consolidation of a new spiritual and intellectual outlook and in the development of a new body of knowledge. The effect of humanism was to help men break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy, to inspire free inquiry and criticism, and to inspire a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.

From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of Europe, aided by the invention of printing, which allowed literacy and the availability of Classical texts to grow explosively. Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled. By the end of the 16th century the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe's energy and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of the Enlightenment.

Artistic developments and the emergence of Florence

It was in art that the spirit of the Renaissance achieved its sharpest formulation. Art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge, valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of God and his creations as well as with insights into man's position in the universe. In the hands of men such as Leonardo da Vinci it was even a science, a means for exploring nature and a record of discoveries. Art was to be based on the observation of the visible world and practiced according to mathematical principles of balance, harmony, and perspective, which were developed at this time. In the works of painters such as Masaccio, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian; sculptors such as Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Michelangelo; and architects such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Andrea Palladio, Michelozzo, and Filarete, the dignity of man found expression in the arts.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important "proto-renaissance" in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis of Assisi had rejected the formal Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around them. The work of the most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto (1266/67 or 1276-1337), reveals a new pictorial style that depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface again until the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1401-28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The succeeding generation of artists- Piero della Francesca, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Andrea del Verrocchio-pressed forward with researches into linear and aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was underwritten by wealthy merchant families, chief among whom were the Medici family.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes ( c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand, central Italian painters began to adopt the oil medium soon after The Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

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Renaissance | Definition, Meaning, History, Artists, Art, & Facts

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The Renaissance was a period in European civilization that immediately followed the Middle Ages and reached its height in the 15th century. It is conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents and numerous important inventions.

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The First Migration:
https://www.crowcanyon.org/EducationProducts/pueblo_history_kids/paleoindian_map.asp
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The Earliest North American Societies:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/precontact-and-early-colonial-era/before-contact/v/native-american-societies-before-contact
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Native American Culture Areas:
http://www.native-languages.org/culture-areas3.gif
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The European Renaissance:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Renaissance

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The Spanish claim to territories that are today the United States rested upon the 16th century exploits of Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.

St. Augustine in Florida was established as a Spanish fort in 1565, the first permanent settlement in what would become the United States. The impact of this settlement was slight, however, since it served primarily as a base camp for other exploratory ventures and also as the center of efforts to convert the area's natives to Roman Catholicism. A handful of Spanish settlements was established in outlying areas, but they soon fell prey to Indian attacks or economic insufficiency.

Greater progress was made by Spanish colonizers on the other side of the continent. In 1598, Don Juan Oñante led 500 men from Mexico northward into Pueblo lands in present-day New Mexico. The invaders brought with them a labor system known as the encomienda, which had originally developed in Spain.

Under this scheme, large New World land grants were made by the Crown to favored Spanish individuals. The grantees were responsible for the protection and Christian instruction of inhabitants of the lands, and those natives were required to pay tribute - often in the form of crops and labor - to the grantee.

Understandably, the Pueblo deeply resented the entire system - invasion of their lands, suppression of their religion, payment of tribute, and enforced loyalty to a foreign monarch.

The encomienda was used throughout Spanish America. Its application differed sharply from one area to another, being relatively benign in some regions, but virtually enslaving in others. Reform of the system was sought by a Spanish missionary, Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Oñante, fired by a passion for precious metals, launched a series of explorations eastward into present-day Kansas and Oklahoma, and westward to the Gulf of California. In some instances, he retraced Coronado's steps and was equally unsuccessful in discovering gold and silver.

New settlements were erected at Santa Fe in 1609 and nearby Taos in 1615.

Relationships between the colonists and the Pueblo improved as they cooperated in livestock raising (mostly cattle and sheep), but an undercurrent of resentment remained strong. In 1680, a major revolt broke out under native leader Papé. Hundreds were killed on both sides in the fighting and order was not restored until 1692.

As the 17th century drew to a close, Spanish colonial administrators finally realized that, given their minority status in so many parts of New Spain, policy reform was necessary. In the coming years, the Pueblo were allowed to resume the practice of their religion, own land, and be free from forced labor.

From a material standpoint, the Spanish ventures in the northern portions of their realm were far less successful than those to the south.

- - - Books You May Like Include: ----

Commanches by T.R. Fehrenbach.
Authoritative and immediate, this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T.R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' ris...
The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous empire rose to dominate the f...
The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution by William R. Polk.
In this provocative account of colonial America, William R. Polk explores the key events, individuals, and themes of this critical period. With vivid ...

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The Spanish claim to territories that are today the United States rested upon the 16th century exploits of Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. St. Augustine in Florida was established as a Spanish fort in 1565, the first permanent settlement in what would become the United States.

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chapter 2 section 4: the race for empires.

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Chapter 2 Section 4: The Race For Empires. - ppt video online download

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The Protestant Reformation Events in Europe Wars in Europe led to competition for land and power overseas. The Protestant Reformation Religious protest movement that split the Christian church and led to conflict across Europe. Martin Luther criticized the Catholic church for it's wealth and abuses of power. He helped start the protestant movement.

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The Vikings:
https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-columbus-to-america
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1492: Voyages of Christopher:
https://u.osu.edu/christophercolumbusproject/files/2017/10/89956-004-9851B885-1yqnf8r.gif
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The Spanish Empire In North America:
https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h438.html
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Race for Empires in North America:
https://slideplayer.com/slide/10575238/

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Colonists Affected by the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

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Colonists Affected by the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

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the great awakening and the enlightenment in the colonies

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The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment in the Colonies - ppt video online download

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The Enlightenment Science and mathematics begin to overthrow ideas of religion and miracles. Earth is not the center of the universe as expected. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Rejection of religion These ideas traveled from Europe to the Colonies BEN FRANKLIN- Obtain truth through experimentation and reason Lightning Experiment!

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The Navigation Acts were trade rules that governed commerce between Britain and its colonies. The first of the Navigation Acts existed for almost two centuries and was repealed in 1849. The laws were designed to protect British economic interests in colonial trade and to protect its industry against the rapidly growing Dutch navigation trade.

The purpose of the Molasses Act was to protect British West Indies exports to the American colonies from the more fertile French and Spanish islands of Martinique and Santo Domingo. It was not designed to raise revenue but it was used as a trade barrier. The duty was set at 6p per gallon of imported foreign molasses, corruption became endemic and illegal trade was widespread. In its first year it collected £330 sterling and during the period of 1738-1741 it collected £76 a year. Not until 1763 was the collection of the duty enforced when the duty was lowered to 2d a gallon and in 1764 it was replaced by the Sugar Act.

The Currency Act of 1751 prohibited the issue of new bills of credit by New England colonies: Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Parliament decided to enact the Currency Act of 1751 to control currency depreciation against silver and sterling and to ensure its value for payments of debt to British merchants. A subsequent Currency Act enacted in 1764 extended the policy to all British colonies in the Americas increasing more tension between Britain and America.

It amended the existing 1733 Molasses Act. The Act increased the duty of molasses from 2d to 3d of gallon of imported molasses. It enforced the Navigation Acts by prohibiting vessels to directly transport cargo to the colonies. Vessels had to unload its cargo in Britain, pay duties and reload its cargo before sailing to the colonies. The Sugar Act imposed a £7 a ton on wine imported from Madeira, the Azores and Canary Islands. It added hides, skins, potash and other products to the list of commodities that could be legally exported. The act was strictly enforced through the Vice-Admiralty Courts.

The Stamp Act intended to raise revenue by requiring the purchase of stamps to be placed on public documents, there were 55 documents subject to the duty. Violators were to be prosecuted in the vice-admiralty courts. For the first time the British had levied an explicit tax on the colonist for the purpose of raising revenue, previous taxes were seen as trade taxes and tolerated by colonial residents. Opposition to the tax was widespread as it represented an infringement on their rights. Opposition groups such as the Sons of Liberty sprung everywhere. The Act was nullified in March 1766.

The act required colonial assemblies to provide housing, food and drink to British troops stationed in their towns with the purpose of improving living conditions and decreasing the cost to the crown. Soldiers were to be housed in barracks or empty public buildings and not in private residences. It was the duty of local legislatures to fund the expenses. In 1766 the New York assembly refused to raise the money and in 1767 Parliament passed the New York Suspending Act on July 1767 which suspended the assembly until they complied with the new law.

The Declaratory Act was passed on March 18, 1766, at the same time as the repeal of the 1765 Stamp Act. The act was used as a justification for the repeal of the Stamp Act and as a face saving action. The 1766 Declaratory Act stated that the colonies are subordinate and dependent on the Imperial Crown and Parliament of Britain and that Parliament had the authority to pass laws.

The Act imposed import duties on 72 items including paint, tea, glass and paper. The revenue raised from it was to provide for the salaries of colonial officers and its administration. It also authorized the Supreme Court to issue writs of assistance for violators, established the American Customs Board and expanded Admiralty Courts. Protests against the Townshend Acts led to the Boston Massacre.

The Tea Act of 1773 granted the East India Company exclusive license to import and distribute tea to the American colonies. Tea was sold in America at 10s per pound, half its previous price and less than the cost of smuggled tea. Despite the economic benefit to end consumers of tea, the law damaged the position of independent shippers, smugglers and local shopkeepers. On December 1773 Bostonians dumped 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in an event known as the Boston Tea Party.

As retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, Britain imposed the Coercive Acts in 1774. The Coercive Acts were a package of five laws: Boston Port Act, Massachusetts Government act, Administration of Justice Act, Quartering Act and Quebec Act.

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The Navigation Acts were trade rules that governed commerce between Britain and its colonies. The first of the Navigation Acts existed for almost two centuries and was repealed in 1849. The laws were designed to protect British economic interests in colonial trade and to protect its industry against the rapidly growing Dutch navigation trade.

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December 17, 1773 to April 19, 1775: "The Aftermath"

Many of the Boston Tea Party participants fled Boston immediately after the destruction of the tea to avoid arrest. George Hewes remembered, " We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates... There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months." Only one member of the Sons of Liberty, Francis Akeley, was caught and imprisoned for his participation. He was the only person ever to be arrested for the Boston Tea Party. No one died during the Boston Tea Party. There was no violence and no confrontation between the Patriots, the Tories and the British soldiers garrisoned in Boston. None of the members of the crews of the , , or were harmed. This was the first organized act of rebellion against British rule and the Sons of Liberty were very careful about how the Boston Tea Party was planned and executed.

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Many of the Boston Tea Party participants fled Boston immediately after the destruction of the tea to avoid arrest. George Hewes remembered, " We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates...

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English Settlement in North America:
https://slideplayer.com/slide/8422598/
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Colonists Affected by the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment:
http://www.stamp-act-history.com/british-taxation-colonial-america/list-of-british-acts/
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Acts Passed Against Colonists:
https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/the-aftermath
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Colonists Response:
https://alphahistory.com/americanrevolution/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/13colonies.jpeg

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Paul Revere's Ride/Lexington and Concord

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Paul Revere's Ride/Lexington and Concord

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Battles of Saratoga, in the American Revolution, closely related engagements in the autumn of 1777. The Battles of Saratoga are often considered together as a turning point of the war in favour of the Americans.

The British campaign of 1777

The failure of the American invasion of Canada in 1775-76 had left a large surplus of British troops along the St. Lawrence River. In 1777 these troops were to move south for an attack on Albany, New York. Gen. John Burgoyne, coming down from Canada via Lake Champlain and Lake George, was to meet at Albany a much smaller British force under Col. Barry St. Leger, who was to advance from Oswego along the Mohawk Valley. Coming up the Hudson from the south, Gen. Sir William Howe's army was to serve as the third prong of this complex offensive campaign. With Albany and the Hudson Valley in British hands, the patriot hotbed of New England would be effectively severed from the mid-Atlantic colonies.

American Revolution Events

Burgoyne, with some 9,000 men, including seven regiments of British regulars and 3,000 Germans, reached Fort Ticonderoga (July 1), which was evacuated by its weak garrison (July 5). He then marched his army through the woods and swamps to Fort Edward on the upper Hudson. The fort was evacuated by the American commander, Gen. Philip Schuyler, on July 31. Schuyler retreated across the Hudson to Stillwater, 20 miles (32 km) north of Albany; on August 19, Schuyler was relieved of command and replaced by Gen. Horatio Gates.

Burgoyne's laborious march involved the construction of 40 bridges and required a long halt at Fort Edward. A German detachment was sent to Bennington, Vermont, to seize horses and supplies, but on August 16 it was surrounded and almost completely annihilated by a force under Gen. John Stark and Col. Seth Warner. Burgoyne now became uneasy. He had left nearly 1,000 men to garrison Ticonderoga, and St. Leger was held up before Fort Schuyler (unbeknownst to Burgoyne, St. Leger had retreated on August 22). Most troubling of all, Howe had notified Burgoyne of his intention to abandon the New York campaign entirely and invade Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Burgoyne considered himself bound by his orders to press on to Albany. Having collected 30 days' rations, he crossed the Hudson on September 13 and camped near Saratoga, New York. Gates, one of the more experienced and trusted officers in the colonial ranks, was encamped 4 miles (about 6 km) away, on Bemis Heights, with 12,000 men. Gates, unlike Burgoyne, was receiving daily reinforcements.

Battle of Freeman's Farm

On September 19 Burgoyne moved south and engaged the Continental forces at the Battle of Freeman's Farm, also called the First Battle of Saratoga. Early in the battle, many British officers were killed in the open fields by Col. Daniel Morgan 's sharpshooters, who were concealed in the thick woods. As the disheartened British advance guard began to break, the main British force arrived, followed soon after by German reinforcements that struck the American troops forcefully. The Continentals stood fast, however, and heavy fighting lasted for several hours, but at dusk they withdrew. Despite losing the field, the Americans had suffered just 90 killed and 240 wounded, compared with 440 killed and nearly 700 wounded for the British.

On September 21 Burgoyne received notice from Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, who had been left in command of British forces at New York, that Clinton was about to launch an attack up the Hudson Valley. Burgoyne sent a dispatch to Clinton, asking for orders, on September 27. The answer was never received. In the meantime, Howe had captured the colonial capital of Philadelphia, but this victory proved almost meaningless in the larger context of the war. On October 3 Clinton headed north with a force of some 4,000 men and quickly captured two forts on the west bank of the Hudson, but he never had any intention of pressing on to Albany. Burgoyne was now awaiting reinforcements from Clinton that would never come. Gates took this time to strengthen his positions as more American units arrived.

Second Battle of Saratoga

Burgoyne's army had dwindled to perhaps 5,000 combat-ready troops, and he estimated that he had two weeks of supplies left. On October 7 he decided that he could wait no longer and launched an attack without the reinforcements. This engagement was called the Battle of Bemis Heights, also known as the Second Battle of Freeman's Farm or the Second Battle of Saratoga. Burgoyne first sent in a reconnaissance force, using 1,500 troops in three columns, while leaving the main body of his troops closer to the heights. Brig. Gen. Simon Fraser, tasked with probing the American left, was met by a body of Continental infantry, including Morgan 's riflemen. They opened fire on the exposed British, fatally wounding Fraser as he attempted to cover a British withdrawal.

Just as the American attack began to falter, Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold appeared on horseback with a fresh brigade behind him. This drove the British troops back to their redoubts at Freeman's Farm. The Germans in their redoubt stubbornly resisted American assaults, but they were finally overwhelmed. On October 8 Burgoyne began to retreat, but Gates, who now had 20,000 men, surrounded him at Saratoga. On October 17 Burgoyne surrendered his troops under the Convention of Saratoga, which provided for the return of his men to Great Britain on condition that they would not serve again in North America during the war.

Aftermath

The American victory in the Battles of Saratoga helped persuade the French to recognize American independence and to openly provide military assistance. It also increased Gates's popularity-so much so that he was being considered to replace George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. That notion was squelched, however, and Washington retained his position until he received the British surrender in 1781.
Kate Lohnes The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Battles of Saratoga | Facts, Casualties, & Significance

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Battles of Saratoga, in the American Revolution, closely related engagements in autumn 1777. The American victories led the French to recognize the colonies' independence and to provide them with military assistance. This marked the turning point of the war, virtually ensuring ultimate victory for the colonies.

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Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris [ushistory.org]

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Paul Revere's Ride/Lexington and Concord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWaYbei5WMc
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The Declaration of Independence:
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/images/declaration.jpg
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Battle of Saratoga:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battles-of-Saratoga
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Battle of Yorktown/Treaty of Paris:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/11i.asp

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View the original text of history's most important documents, including the Articles of Confederation

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The Great Compromise helped determine how each of the US states was to be represented in the Congress.

What Was The Great Compromise?

The Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, the Great Compromise of 1787, or the Sherman Compromise, was an agreement made between large and small states which partly defined the representation each state would have under the United States Constitution, as well as in legislature. It occurred in 1787. The Connecticut Compromise resulted from a debate among delegates on how each state could have representation in the Congress. The Great Compromise led to the creation of a two-chambered Congress. Also created was the House of Representative which is determined by a state's population. The agreement retained the bicameral legislature, but the upper house had to change to accommodate two senators to represent each state. The deal reshaped the American government structure striking a balance between the highly populated states and their demands while at the same time taking into consideration the less-populous state and their interests.

Overview And Background

The United States underwent painful years in the 1780s. The 1781 ratification of the Articles of Confederation provided an inadequate governmental structure. It failed to regulate trade, levy taxes, and draft soldiers. Also, it failed to solve the slavery issue which polarized the Northwest Territory. The country's economy which had severely plummeted following the Anglo-American Revolution struggled to rebound. Debt, especially the accumulated war debts became an enormous issue in the US. Many citizens found it increasingly difficult to generate enough income to pay for their daily expenses as well as taxes. As much as the people looked up to the state for help, no social welfare relief developed. Furthermore, the contentious politics also divided the citizens. This instability called for a delegation in 1785, proposed by Alexander Hamilton which would address a national reform. James Madison responded with support and asked other states to send their delegates to Annapolis, Maryland for a conference. However, only five states representatives attended, but even so, they approved a plan in whichever state would send delegates to the 1787 Philadelphian convection. In May 1787, 55 delegates representing 12 states, Rhodes Island was absent, met in Philadelphia to discuss the limitations of the Articles of Federation. The Constitutional Convention started later on when Madison proposed the Virginia Plan which Patterson countered with the New Jersey Plan.

What The Great Compromise Involved?

Before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, larger states like Virginia favored congressional representation based on a state's population. On the other hand, smaller states wanted equal representation. Edmund Randolph and James Madison proposed the Virginia Plan on May 29, 1787. This plan outlined that the government should comprise of three branches the legislature, executive, and judiciary. The three branches would serve a two-housed legislature. The population was to elect the members of the lower house and they, in turn, would elect representatives in the Upper House. In other words, both houses included a population proportional representation. Madison also proposed that Congress get a veto for all state laws. The New Jersey Plan, put forward on June 15, 1787, by William Patterson, called for equal representation of each state like it was in the Articles of Confederation system but sought to increase Congress power. It called for a one-house legislature, equal representation of each state, and popular elections. Patterson also proposed a lifetime Supreme Court appointed by executive officers. He focused on the probability that the national government would violate the sovereignty of the states. At this point, the less populous states representatives feared that the agreement would result in larger states drowning the voices and interests rendering them useless in the national scale. Madison, on the other hand, argued that the most important states were very different from each other. Hamilton pointed out that each state was an artificial entity made up of individuals. He thus accused smaller states of being power hungry.

As such, the two sides rejected each other's plans. The disagreements called for reflection leading to a negotiation on how to determine the future of the US government. Roger Sherman, a Connecticut delegate suggested a plan that eventually turned out as the Great Compromise. His plan included a two-legislative form of government in the US, the Senate and the House of Representatives. For every 300,000 citizens, a state received one member to serve in the House of representative and two senators. On July 16, 1787, despite Benjamin Franklin efforts to block equal voting rights of the smaller states, the proposal did pass even though by only one vote. Thus the name compromise was conjured, and it paved the way for the constitutional final passage and became an important stepping stone in the creation and development of the United States.

Upon deciding on the representation issue, the debate focused on the slaves existing in a state's population and which led to the formation of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Under this agreement, each state had to count three-fifths of its slaves into its total population. Before this agreement, slave-holding states called for an increase in their representation in Congress by counting all slaves as part of the community. On the other hand, opponents argued that since slaves were not citizens they thus had no rights. Counting them in the context of the population was not necessary.

The Results Of The Great Compromise

The most significant effect of the Great Compromise was the change in the American Government structure. The agreement focused on working out the interests of large states like Virginia and New York, and the smaller states such as New Hampshire and Rhodes Island, striking a balance between proportional and general representation. The most visible term achieved under the compromise was that each state would split congressional delegates between; representatives who would then be elected by district so as to serve in the lower house and senators to represent individual states in the Upper House. The practical effect was in the creation of a two-tiered system that could address the needs of the people in the lower house, and the upper house could handle the interests of states. The Electoral College and Presidential elections formation splinted from this split between direct and indirect representation.

The Great Compromise of 1787 gave larger states representation in the lower house according to population, and the smaller states attained equal representation in the upper house. Many delegates called for proportional representation in both houses while the smaller state delegates decided not having a constitution was better than having Madison's proposed system. As such the compromise balanced the needs of both the smaller states which wanted a unicameral legislature and the larger states that were rooting for a bicameral legislature, paving the way for constitutional development. Ultimately, the Connecticut Compromise kept the Convention together and led to the system of bicameral Congress in which the lower House is based on proportional representation, and each state has equal representation in the Upper House.

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The Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, the Great Compromise of 1787, or the Sherman Compromise, was an agreement made between large and small states which partly defined the representation each state would have under the United States Constitution, as well as in legislature. It occurred in 1787.

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Federalism in the United States. Exclusive and concurrent federal and state powers.

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The US Constitution (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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The Bill of Rights is one of the three founding documents. It was strongly influenced by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason as well as English documents such as the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the English Bill of Rights, and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties.
PDF: Bill of Rights
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Second Amendment
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Third Amendment
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fifth Amendment
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Sixth Amendment
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Seventh Amendment
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Eighth Amendment
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Ninth Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Who Wrote the Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. James Madison wrote the amendments as a solution to limit government power and protect individual liberties through the Constitution. For example, the Founders saw the ability to speak and worship freely as a natural right protected by the First Amendment. Congress is prohibited from making laws establishing religion or abridging freedom of speech. The Fourth Amendment safeguards citizens' right to be free from unreasonable government intrusion in their homes through the requirement of a warrant.

Why was the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution?

The Constitution lacked limits on government power. Federalists advocated for a strong national government. They believed the people and states automatically kept any powers not given to the federal government. Anti-Federalists wanted power to remain with state and local governments and favored a bill of rights to safeguard individual liberty.

Madison, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, altered the Constitution's text where he thought appropriate. However, several representatives, led by Roger Sherman, objected, saying that Congress had no authority to change the wording of the Constitution. Therefore, Madison's changes were presented as a list of amendments that would follow Article VII.

The House approved 17 amendments. Of these, the Senate approved 12, which were sent to the states for approval in August 1789. Ten amendments were approved (or ratified). Virginia's legislature was the final state legislature to ratify the amendments, approving them on December 15, 1791.

Primary Source by James Madison, George Mason (1791)

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Bill of Rights: The 1st Ten Amendments - Bill of Rights Institute

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The Bill of Rights is a founding documents written by James Madison. It makes up the first ten amendments to the Constitution including freedom of speech and due process.

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The Articles of Confederation:
http://www.ushistory.org/documents/confederation.htm
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The Great Compromise:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-great-compromise.html
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Federalism:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-government-and-politics/foundations-of-american-democracy/relationship-between-states-and-the-federal-government/v/federalism-in-the-united-states
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Separation of Powers
https://www.peo.gov.au/uploads/image_gallery/the-law/PEO_0701_separation-powers.jpg
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The Constitution:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/road-to-revolution/creating-a-nation/v/the-us-constitution
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The Bill of Rights:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/bill-of-rights/

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The Rise of Political Parties:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUwjicwxbTg
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The Louisiana Purchase:
https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/louisiana-lewis-clark/the-louisiana-purchase/
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The Corps of Discovery:
http://www.edgate.com/lewisandclark/expedition.html
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The War of 1812:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5E2y1-m898
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The Monroe Doctrine:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Monroe-Doctrine
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Nationalism vs. Sectionalism:
https://images.slideplayer.com/32/10004436/slides/slide_1.jpg

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Growth of Political Parties: Federalist & Democratic-Republican APUSH Review

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A look at Jefferson's role in the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the young American republic.

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On March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery started on the long journey back the way they had come. They had some conflicts with some of the Indians on the lower Columbia, whom they accused of charging high prices for food, trying to steal from the travelers, and interfering with their progress. But when they reached the friendly Nez Percés, they found their horses alive and cared-for, though scattered on open range.

The group was back across the mountains by June and decided to split up into smaller parties for a while so as to explore some of the territory more thoroughly. Lewis took a more northerly route, and it was during this trip that the explorers had their first and only violent conflict with Indians. A group of Blackfeet apparently tried to captured horses and guns, and Lewis's party killed two of them.

At about that same time, Clark, on a southerly route, discovered an unusual, large stone formation on the Yellowstone River. He named it "Pompy's Tower," after the nickname of Sacagawea's son, now in his second year (certainly one of the most remarkable childhoods in American history). There on that formation, Clark left an inscription, "Wm. Clark July 25th 1806," which can still be seen today.

The separate parties rejoined in August back on the Missouri River, at the mouth of the Yellowstone. They continued on down the river, dropping off Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and little Jean-Baptiste at the Mandan villages. Traveling quickly, they reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

The men of the expedition were welcomed as heroes. They had been gone so long that the nation feared they were dead. Remarkably, only one member of the group died. This was Sergeant Charles Floyd, who probably died of a ruptured appendix as the Corps of Discovery traveled up the Missouri River on its way to the Mandan villages.

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Lewis and Clark : The Expedition of the Corps of Discovery

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On March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery started on the long journey back the way they had come. They had some conflicts with some of the Indians on the lower Columbia, whom they accused of charging high prices for food, trying to steal from the travelers, and interfering with their progress.

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Why was the Monroe Doctrine important?

What were the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine?

What motives were behind the Monroe Doctrine?

Who worked on the Monroe Doctrine?

How did the Monroe Doctrine change over time?

Monroe Doctrine, (December 2, 1823), cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy enunciated by Pres. James Monroe in his annual message to Congress. Declaring that the Old World and New World had different systems and must remain distinct spheres, Monroe made four basic points: (1) the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of or the wars between European powers; (2) the United States recognized and would not interfere with existing colonies and dependencies in the Western Hemisphere; (3) the Western Hemisphere was closed to future colonization; and (4) any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States:

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense....

With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

The origin and framing of the Monroe Doctrine

The doctrine was an outgrowth of concern in both Britain and the United States that the Continental powers would attempt to restore Spain's former colonies, in Latin America, many of which had become newly independent nations. The United States was also concerned about Russia's territorial ambitions in the northwest coast of North America. As a consequence, George Canning, the British foreign minister, suggested a joint U.S.-British declaration forbidding future colonization in Latin America. Monroe was initially favourable to the idea, and former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurred. But Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued that the United States should issue a statement of American policy exclusively, and his view ultimately prevailed.

American History and Politics Quiz

The first draft of the message included a reproof of the French for their invasion of Spain, an acknowledgment of Greek independence in the revolt against Turkey, and some further indications of American concern in European affairs. Adams argued for the better part of two days against such expressions, which were finally eliminated from the message.

Adams noted in his diary,

The ground that I wish to take is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of the European powers by force in South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe; to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.

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Monroe Doctrine | History, Summary, & Significance

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Monroe Doctrine, U.S. foreign policy enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823 that the U.S. would not interfere in European affairs and wars or with existing colonies in the Western Hemisphere. European intervention in the hemisphere (closed to future colonization) would be seen as a hostile act against the U.S.

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Jacksonian Democracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDXJny0bMmQ
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Native American Removal:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears
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Trails West:
https://unitedstateswestwardexpansion.weebly.com/uploads/1/6/9/2/16929308/986163417_orig.jpg
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Texas Becomes a Nation
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/a/annexing-texas
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Manifest Destiny:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/29.asp
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Mexican-American War:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7AXuxcUleY

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Quickly following Texan independence, the United States admitted Texas into the republic as a slave state.

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In the 1850s trains were leaving Washington for the West twice daily.

Expansion westward seemed perfectly natural to many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the Massachusetts Puritans who hoped to build a "city upon a hill, "courageous pioneers believed that America had a divine obligation to stretch the boundaries of their noble republic to the Pacific Ocean. Independence had been won in the Revolution and reaffirmed in the War of 1812. The spirit of nationalism that swept the nation in the next two decades demanded more territory. The "every man is equal" mentality of the Jacksonian Era fueled this optimism. Now, with territory up to the Mississippi River claimed and settled and the Louisiana Purchase explored, Americans headed west in droves. Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset.

A symbol of Manifest Destiny, the figure "Columbia" moves across the land in advance of settlers, replacing darkness with light and ignorance with civilization.

The religious fervor spawned by the Second Great Awakening created another incentive for the drive west. Indeed, many settlers believed that God himself blessed the growth of the American nation. The Native Americans were considered heathens. By Christianizing the tribes, American missionaries believed they could save souls and they became among the first to cross the Mississippi River.

Economic motives were paramount for others. The fur trade had been dominated by European trading companies since colonial times. German immigrant John Jacob Astor was one of the first American entrepreneurs to challenge the Europeans. He became a millionaire in the process. The desire for more land brought aspiring homesteaders to the frontier. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the number of migrants increased even more.

At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior, and efforts to "civilize" them had been widespread since the days of John Smith and Miles Standish. The Hispanics who ruled Texas and the lucrative ports of California were also seen as "backward."

In 1840, the entire southwestern corner of the United States was controlled by foreign powers (shown in orange), and the territorial dispute over the Oregon Territory (light green) had not been settled. By 1850 the U.S. had control of lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific, covering almost all of today's continental United States.

Expanding the boundaries of the United States was in many ways a cultural war as well. The desire of southerners to find more lands suitable for cotton cultivation would eventually spread slavery to these regions. North of the Mason-Dixon line, many citizens were deeply concerned about adding any more slave states. Manifest destiny touched on issues of religion, money, race, patriotism, and morality. These clashed in the 1840s as a truly great drama of regional conflict began to unfold.

Prairie Schooner
Americans began exploring Oregon Country in the early 1800s, and the Overlanders began arriving in the 1840s. Read their stories on this website, loaded with images and fascinating detail.

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Levi-Strauss
The most famous '49er of all did not make his fortune by finding gold, rather he sold pants - his name was Levi-Strauss.

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In the 1850s trains were leaving Washington for the West twice daily. Expansion westward seemed perfectly natural to many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the Massachusetts Puritans who hoped to build a "city upon a hill, "courageous pioneers believed that America had a divine obligation to stretch the boundaries of their noble republic to the Pacific Ocean.

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Coal, Steam, and The Industrial Revolution: Crash Course World History #32

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The typical factory worker in the late nineteenth century worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Unskilled workers were paid between $1.00 and $1.50 a day; skilled workers might make twice as much, while women (who became a significant percentage of the labor force after the Civil War), children, and African‐Americans were paid considerably less. Workplace accidents were common, and the idea of compensating workers injured on the job was unheard of at the time. To help each other through illness, injury, and deaths, workers formed mutual benefit societies (often organized along ethnic lines), but the assistance these groups provided was minimal. The most serious problem for factory workers was unemployment. It was common for a worker, particularly an unskilled one, to be out of a job at least part of the year.

Early labor unions. Skilled workers, such as cigarmakers, iron molders, and hat finishers formed the first labor unions before the Civil War. Several of these craft unions (so named because they organized workers within specific craft industries) joined together to form the National Labor Union (NLU) in 1866. Although the organization advocated an eight‐hour workday, it did not support strikes to achieve that goal. The NLU was also concerned with social reform, including equal rights for women, establishing worker cooperatives, and temperance. The union, along with organized labor in general, declined sharply in the wake of the depression of 1873 but not before influencing Congress to enact the eight‐hour day for federal employees (1868).

The Knights of Labor, organized in 1869, is considered to be the first industrial union, open to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and African‐Americans. This inclusive policy contributed to its growth, and the union boasted more than 700,000 members by the mid‐1880s. The program of the Knights of Labor was a combination of reform ideas and specific worker demands. Along with setting up cooperative workshops and calling for the regulation of the railroads, the union wanted an eight‐hour workday, legislation protecting the health and safety of workers, and an end to child labor (for children under the age of 14). To achieve these goals, political action and arbitration between employers and labor representatives were preferred over strikes. The decline of the Knights of Labor after 1886 was due to several factors: the failure of several unauthorized strikes, the growing dissatisfaction of craftsmen who felt the union favored the interests of unskilled workers, and the public perception in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot (1886) that the Knights supported violence.

On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting of workers was called in Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest the death of a striker at the McCormick Harvester plant. When the police tried to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb that killed seven policemen and injured several more. The riot that followed resulted in additional deaths on both sides. Although it was one of the three unions on strike at McCormick, the Knights of Labor had nothing to do with the events in Haymarket Square. This fact did not prevent the union from becoming a victim of the antilabor sentiment that swept the country, and its membership declined rapidly over the next four years.

The American Federation of Labor. Founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a federation of skilled workers in national craft unions that maintained their autonomy while working together to promote labor legislation and support strikes. In contrast to its predecessors, the new union focused exclusively on basic labor issues - the eight‐hour workday, higher wages, better working conditions (particularly plant safety), and the right of workers to organize. To Gompers, who began his career in the cigarmakers union, only craftsmen that could not be easily replaced had the leverage necessary to either bargain effectively with employers or go on strike. The AFL had little more than disdain for unskilled workers or blacks, skilled or not, and did not seriously try to organize women. Although he was an immigrant himself, as were many local union men, Gompers nevertheless strongly supported restrictions on immigration to prevent new arrivals from competing with American workers for jobs. Even though it excluded most of the working class, the AFL became the largest single labor organization in the country by 1900 with over one million members.

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The typical factory worker in the late nineteenth century worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Unskilled workers were paid between $1.00 and $1.50 a day; skilled workers might make twice as much, while women (who became a significant percentage of the labor force after the Civil War), children, and African‐Americans were paid considerably less.

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A Revolutionary Invention

The cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton seeds from cotton fiber. Invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, it was an important invention because it dramatically reduced the amount of time it took to separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber. Prior to Whitney's invention, cotton seeds had to be removed by hand or with other primitive tools, making it a tedious and time consuming process. It took one person approximately ten hours to remove one pound of lint from the seeds.

Whitney's cotton gin was a machine consisting of a cylinder that was wound by hand. Attached to the cylinder were rows of small 'teeth' that pulled the fiber through a grid. In this way, the machine, 'combed out' the seeds, leaving only the lint fiber. Whitney's cotton gin went through numerous variations over the years, but the basic operating principle remained the same.

Eli Whitney

The inventor of the mechanical cotton gin, Eli Whitney, was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, in 1765. He graduated from Yale College in 1792 and invented the cotton gin just a year later.

Although he received a patent for the cotton gin in 1794, imitations of his device were widespread, and he was not able to profit from his revolutionary machine. Legal troubles plagued Whitney. Some people even charged that Catherine Littlefield Greene, the wife of Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene, instructed Whitney on how to make the cotton gin. Loopholes in the patent law prevented him from winning the rights to his patent until 1807. By that time, however, it was too late, and imitation cotton gins were readily available.

In addition to inventing the cotton gin, Whitney also helped popularize interchangeable machine parts and was among the first to develop the milling machine. Whitney died in 1825 at the age of 58.

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history & impact - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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The Cotton Gin: Definition, History & Impact - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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The cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton seeds from cotton fiber. Invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, it was an important invention because it dramatically reduced the amount of time it took to separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber.

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Revolution Rebellion

The Slave Coast was the main slave trading area in Africa, located in West Africa between the Senegal River and the Congo River. Each of the major slave trading nations would keep 'factories' where captured slaves were kept prisoner until a ship could come to take them across the ocean. Slaves would be purchased from African slave-traders or captured there and then packed on boats for the voyage to other parts of the world.

Conditions on the passage to America were terrible. Sometimes half the cargo would die from starvation, dehydration, or simply from suicide. At times the slave merchants would throw sick slaves overboard, because their insurance would pay for slaves lost at sea, but if brought to land alive they would be sold for less than the cost of carrying them. In one famous case a British court agreed that this was a perfectly legal and acceptable practice.

Enslaving Indians was also common, but the practice was declining in the Americas by the time of the Revolution. Indian slaves could escape and return to their people, but Africans could hardly swim home across the ocean. Without somewhere to escape, they had little choice but to remain in slavery. In addition, many slave owners considered African slaves to be better workers than Indians.

Upon arrival in America, sick slaves would be sold first. Most people who bought these 'junk slaves' received them at a reduced rate and tried to nurse them back to health. If they succeeded they could sell them at a large profit. Certain slave traders in the south specialized in this sort of 'recycling'.

Sometimes slaves would be sold at a negotiated price, often through newspaper ads. On other occasions, the slaves would be inspected and put up for auction with the highest bidder receiving the slave.

Once the slaves were purchased they were the absolute property of the slave owner. They were assigned to any work their owner decided upon. Many worked at hard field labour while others worked as domestic servants or were trained in skilled professions. Sometimes masters with skilled slaves would rent out their slaves to others and keep the wages for themselves.

Slaves had no right to education, health care, or religious instruction. They could be beaten any way their master saw fit. It was common for them to be whipped until their skin was raw and have salt rubbed into their wounds. Some developed other methods of torture, and a few thought that slaves could be made more docile and co-operative by treating them gently. Slaves had no right to traditional family ties, as their spouses and kin could be sold to another owner at any time.

Near the beginning of the American Revolution, slave labour had become central to the economy in many places. Most whites in the southern colonies owned slaves for their cheap labour, and the large plantations we know from Civil War era America were becoming established. This caused great concern since some places had more slaves than white citizens. There was constant fear of an uprising. This threat was so strong that North Carolina placed a tax on importing slaves in hope of slowing the population growth.

By the 1770's there were probably about 350 000 African slaves in the American Colonies, about ¾ of which were in the southern colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

Revolution Rebellion

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Revolution Rebellion The Slave Coast was the main slave trading area in Africa, located in West Africa between the Senegal River and the Congo River. Each of the major slave trading nations would keep 'factories' where captured slaves were kept prisoner until a ship could come to take them across the ocean.

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The Industrial Revolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhL5DCizj5c
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Interchangeable parts:
https://nvaughn.weebly.com/interchangeable-parts.html
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The Rise of Organized Labor:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/history/us-history-ii/industrial-america/the-rise-of-organized-labor
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The Transportation Revolution:
http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-Transportation-Revolution_.pdf
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Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-cotton-gin-definition-history-impact.html
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The life of a Slave:
http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/story/revolution/slavery.htm

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800s

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800s

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International Stock Food Factory, between 1900 and 1910
Detroit Publishing Company

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy.

Industrial growth transformed American society. It produced a new class of wealthy industrialists and a prosperous middle class. It also produced a vastly expanded blue collar working class. The labor force that made industrialization possible was made up of millions of newly arrived immigrants and even larger numbers of migrants from rural areas. American society became more diverse than ever before.

Not everyone shared in the economic prosperity of this period. Many workers were typically unemployed at least part of the year, and their wages were relatively low when they did work. This situation led many workers to support and join labor unions. Meanwhile, farmers also faced hard times as technology and increasing production led to more competition and falling prices for farm products. Hard times on farms led many young people to move to the city in search of better job opportunities.

Americans who were born in the 1840s and 1850s would experience enormous changes in their lifetimes. Some of these changes resulted from a sweeping technological revolution. Their major source of light, for example, would change from candles, to kerosene lamps, and then to electric light bulbs. They would see their transportation evolve from walking and horse power to steam-powered locomotives, to electric trolley cars, to gasoline-powered automobiles. Born into a society in which the vast majority of people were involved in agriculture, they experienced an industrial revolution that radically changed the ways millions of people worked and where they lived. They would experience the migration of millions of people from rural America to the nation's rapidly growing cities.

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Overview | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy. Industrial growth transformed American society.

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements.

The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair. The Founding Fathers clearly demonstrated their opposition to the intermingling of politics and religion by establishing the separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution.

In part because religion was separated from the control of political leaders, a series of religious revivals swept the United States from the 1790s and into the 1830s that transformed the religious landscape of the country. Known today as the Second Great Awakening, this spiritual resurgence fundamentally altered the character of American religion. At the start of the Revolution the largest denominations were Congregationalists (the 18th-century descendants of Puritan churches), Anglicans (known after the Revolution as Episcopalians), and Quakers. But by 1800, Evangelical Methodism and Baptists, were becoming the fasting-growing religions in the nation.

The Second Great Awakening is best known for its large camp meetings that led extraordinary numbers of people to convert through an enthusiastic style of preaching and audience participation. A young man who attended the famous 20,000-person revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1802, captures the spirit of these camp meetings activity:

The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others on wagons ... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. A peculiarly strange sensation came over me. My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lips quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.

This young man was so moved that he went on to become a Methodist minister. As this quotation suggests, evangelical ministers reached their audience at an emotional level that powerfully moved large crowds.

In 1839, J. Maze Burbank presented this image to the Royal Society in London with the caption: "A camp meeting, or religious revival in America, from a sketch taken on the spot."

The evangelical impulse at the heart of the Second Great Awakening shared some of the egalitarian thrust of Revolutionary ideals. Evangelical churches generally had a populist orientation that favored ordinary people over elites. For instance, individual piety was seen as more important for salvation than the formal university training required for ministers in traditional Christian churches.

The immense success of the Second Great Awakening was also furthered by evangelical churches innovative organizational techniques. These were well suited to the frontier conditions of newly settled territories. Most evangelical churches relied on itinerant preachers to reach large areas without an established minister and also included important places for lay people who took on major religious and administrative roles within evangelical congregations.

Religion was a central theme of the 1830s; American Protestants branched off into many different denominations, holding in common the need for meetings and revivals.

The Second Great Awakening marked a fundamental transition in American religious life. Many early American religious groups in the Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings and believed they could only be saved through the grace of God. The new evangelical movement, however, placed greater emphasis on humans' ability to change their situation for the better. By stressing that individuals could assert their "free will" in choosing to be saved and by suggesting that salvation was open to all human beings, the Second Great Awakening embraced a more optimistic view of the human condition. The repeated and varied revivals of these several decades helped make the United States a much more deeply Protestant nation than it had been before.

Finally, the Second Great Awakening also included greater public roles for white women and much higher African-American participation in Christianity than ever before.

Evangelicalism as a Social Movement
Why did so many people flock to evangelicalism in the early 19th century? The Second Great Awakening was more than just a religious movement; it provided a new social outlet. There was an excitement to it, and a sense of belonging. People even changed denomination if they felt one preacher was more interesting than the last. This essay puts a social twist on early evangelicalism.

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Peter Cartwright on Cane Ridge and the New Lights
No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid... -from Autobiography of Peter Cartwright. What were revivals really like? Find out from someone who was there! Peter Cartwright was about 16 years old when he went to the Cane Ridge Camp Meeting. He went on to become a Methodist preacher and lead his own revivals.

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What makes Methodism different from other Christian denominations? Find out at the homepage of the United Methodist Church.
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Jonathan Edwards was a big name in the First Great Awakening, which began in the 1740s. His writings were also instrumental in the Second Great Awakening, more than 30 years after his death.
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religious transformation and the second great awakening

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Religious Transformation and the Second Great Awakening [ushistory.org]

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements. The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair.

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Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War

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Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War

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The Compromise of 1850 Explained: US History Review

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The Kansas-Nebraska Act Explained: US History Review

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Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories.

The slavery extension question had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise nearly 40 years earlier. The Mexican War, however, had added new territories, and the issue flared up again in the 1840s. The Compromise of 1850 provided a temporary respite from sectional strife, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854-a measure Douglas sponsored-brought the slavery extension issue to the fore once again. Douglas's bill in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise by lifting the ban against slavery in territories north of the 36°30′ latitude. In place of the ban, Douglas offered popular sovereignty, the doctrine that the actual settlers in the territories and not Congress should decide the fate of slavery in their midst.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act spurred the creation of the Republican Party, formed largely to keep slavery out of the western territories. Both Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty and the Republican stand on free soil were seemingly invalidated by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court said that neither Congress nor the territorial legislature could exclude slavery from a territory.

When Lincoln and Douglas debated the slavery extension issue in 1858, therefore, they were addressing the problem that had divided the nation into two hostile camps and that threatened the continued existence of the Union. Their contest, as a consequence, had repercussions far beyond determining who would win the senatorial seat at stake.

When Lincoln received the Republican nomination to run against Douglas, he said in his acceptance speech that "A house divided against itself cannot stand" and that "this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Douglas thereupon attacked Lincoln as a radical, threatening the continued stability of the Union. Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of debates, and the two eventually agreed to hold joint encounters in seven Illinois congressional districts.

The debates, each three hours long, were convened in Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Douglas repeatedly tried to brand Lincoln as a dangerous radical who advocated racial equality and disruption of the Union. Lincoln emphasized the moral iniquity of slavery and attacked popular sovereignty for the bloody results it had produced in Kansas.

At Freeport Lincoln challenged Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. Douglas replied that settlers could circumvent the decision by not establishing the local police regulations-i.e., a slave code-that protected a master's property. Without such protection, no one would bring slaves into a territory. This became known as the " Freeport Doctrine."

Douglas's position, while acceptable to many Northern Democrats, angered the South and led to the division of the last remaining national political institution, the Democratic Party. Although he retained his seat in the Senate, narrowly defeating Lincoln when the state legislature (which then elected U.S. senators) voted 54 to 46 in his favour, Douglas's stature as a national leader of the Democratic Party was gravely diminished. Lincoln, on the other hand, lost the election but won acclaim as an eloquent spokesman for the Republican cause.

In 1860 the Lincoln-Douglas debates were printed as a book and used as an important campaign document in the presidential contest that year, which once again pitted Republican Lincoln against Democrat Douglas. This time, however, Douglas was running as the candidate of a divided party and finished a distant second in the popular vote to the triumphant Lincoln.

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Lincoln-Douglas debates | Summary, Dates, Significance, & Facts

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Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories. The slavery extension question had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise nearly 40 years earlier.

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800s
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/immgnts/
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Second Great Awakening:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/22c.asp
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Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War:
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/abolitionist-movement
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Women's Rights Movement in the 1800s:
https://thedevelopmentofwomensrights.weebly.com
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Compromise of 1850:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvlUqV1vwTc
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Kansas/Nebraska Act:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phir7DPWTrM
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Lincoln/Douglas Debates:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Lincoln-Douglas-debates
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Election of 1860:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/32d.asp

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Emancipation Proclamation - Definition, Dates & Summary

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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…

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Learn about Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross who led the organization for 23 years.

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The Battle of Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg was the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought in North America. During the first three days of July 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia turned a small town in Southern Pennsylvania into the site of a struggle for the future of the United States. More than 50,000 men fell as casualties (men listed as killed, wounded, or missing/captured), a scale of suffering never seen before or since on American soil. According to many historians, Gettysburg was the turning point of the American Civil War. It was the Confederacy's best chance to achieve victory, and it breathed new life into the Union war effort.

Confederate Invasion

In the spring of 1863, Confederate forces under the command of General Robert E. Lee achieved a tremendous victory over Major General Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia. The victory was so tremendous that Lee believed it could propel his army to undertake a bold strategic move.

Hundreds of miles away, Union soldiers under the command of Ulysses S. Grant were closing in on Vicksburg, Mississippi, a crucial point on the Mississippi River. If Vicksburg should fall, Union forces would have complete control of the Mississippi, effectively cutting the Confederacy in two. Lee knew that no matter what he did in the East, he likely could not help Vicksburg directly. Thus, he had to act quickly to offset Vicksburg's possible surrender. The Confederate general decided to repeat his strategy from the previous September, when he had invaded Maryland in an attempt to strike a war-winning blow. Lee decided it was time for his second excursion north of the Potomac River.

Lee began moving his army north in early June 1863. On June 9, while near Culpepper, Virginia, Confederate cavalry forces under Major General Jeb Stuart became engaged with Federal cavalry in the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest cavalry battle of the Civil War. By mid-June, Lee's army was north of the Potomac and headed toward Pennsylvania.

While Lee's army moved northward, the Army of the Potomac was struggling with the aftermath of defeat. Joseph Hooker was still in charge of the army, but the Lincoln Administration in Washington had little confidence in him. While Hooker moved north, he and General-in-Chief Henry Halleck argued over the status of Union troops stationed at Harpers Ferry. The dispute ultimately led Hooker to submit his resignation, which Halleck and Lincoln accepted.

On June 28, Major General George Gordon Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac. At this point, Lee's army was already in Pennsylvania, and Union forces were in Maryland moving north as quickly as possible.

Showdown at Gettysburg

When Lee learned of the quick Union advance, he began to consolidate his disparate columns together. Since Confederate cavalry Commander Jeb Stuart was not present with the army and was instead riding through the Northern countryside on reconnaissance and foraging missions, Lee did not have an accurate understanding of Union positions or strength. This ultimately led to the initial fight at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.

While Confederate forces had already been in Gettysburg, it was on the morning of July 1 that the battle began in earnest. That morning, Union dismounted cavalry under the command of Brigadier General John Buford took position west of the town. Buford intended to hold any advancing Confederates long enough for Union infantry to arrive and take position at Gettysburg. That morning, a division of Confederate infantry advanced toward Buford, attempting to discern what sort of Union presence was in the town. Without Lee's full knowledge and approval, the Battle of Gettysburg was about to begin.

By mid-morning, while Buford's cavalry fought the Confederate infantry, the First Corps, Army of the Potomac, had arrived on the field, providing reinforcements for Buford's tired dismounted cavalry. Soon, the Federal Eleventh Corps had arrived on the field as well, taking position north of the town. With the battle quickly intensifying, Lee decided to fully commit his army to the action at Gettysburg.

By early afternoon, the rest of Lieutenant General A.P. Hill's Third Corps, along with Lieutenant General Richard Ewell's Second Corps, began attacking the Federal positions. This overwhelming force caused the Union positions north of town to begin to crumble. By nightfall, Federal forces had fallen back through the town of Gettysburg and taken position on Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, just south of Gettysburg. While July 1 had been a Confederate tactical victory, it ultimately forced Federal troops to strong defensive ground.

Day 2

Having achieved great success the day before, Lee decided to continue his attack on July 2, 1863; however, that morning, as more and more Federal forces arrived, the Union position had assumed the shape of a fishhook, occupying high ground south of Gettysburg. This formidable defensive ground caused Lee to consider attacking the Federal flanks. Lee decided to use Lieutenant General James Longstreet and the majority of his First Corps to move south and then attack north directly into what he believed to be the unprotected Union left flank.

On the opposite end of the Union line, Richard Ewell was to send attackers against Union positions on Culp's Hill. Lee's hope was that, with these two attacks, Longstreet would be able to roll up the Union flank, pushing Federal forces toward the bend in the line, pinching the Federal army between the two Confederate attacks; however, the day did not play out as Lee had planned.

The Confederate attack on July 2 did not begin until nearly four in the afternoon. By that time, something very important had occurred on the battlefield. Major General Dan Sickles, the commander of the Third Corps, Army of the Potomac, had advanced his men forward from their original position, occupying ground near the Emmitsburg Pike. Sickles made this move without orders from George Meade. Yet, before Meade could correct Sickles, the Confederate attack occurred, slamming directly into the altered Federal lines. Since the Confederate attack overlapped the Union flank, elements of Longstreet's corps soon found their way moving toward Big Round Top and Little Round Top, two hills that held the key to the southern edge of the battlefield.

Thanks to quick thinking by Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, Union troops were rushed to the top of Little Round Top just in time to repel the Confederate advance. Other Union forces were thrust into the middle of the Confederate attack, fighting in places made famous by the level of killing that occurred there, such as the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, and Devil's Den.

While the fighting raged on the Federal left flank, Confederate forces under Richard Ewell tested the Union right on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill. After several determined attacks, the onset of darkness brought the fighting to a close. Across the battlefield that day, Confederates had come very close to victory, almost breaking the Union lines in several places. In the roughly seven hours of fighting that took place that afternoon, there were as many as 19,000 casualties, a staggering toll; however, George Meade's Army of the Potomac had held on.

Day 3

The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg was destined to endure in history. It was the day of the most famous assault of the entire American Civil War. Robert E. Lee began that fateful Friday, July 3, 1863, knowing that his men had come close to breaking the Union lines the day before. Lee's original plan that morning was to continue with the attacks on the Federal flanks; however, because of mixed communications, Confederate commanders did not proceed as Lee initially hoped. Thus, the Confederate General formulated a new plan.

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summary & significance - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Battle of Gettysburg: Facts, Summary & Significance - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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The Battle of Gettysburg was the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought in North America. During the first three days of July 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia turned a small town in Southern Pennsylvania into the site of a struggle for the future of the United States.

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Kids learn about the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War including the commanders, why it was important, dates, results, and interesting facts.

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Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

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Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

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General Lee on the Road

After Confederate General Robert E. Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond on April 2nd, 1865, he began to guide his troops west, hoping to eventually join up with more Confederate forces, regroup, and continue to offer resistance to the Union. He started toward Amelia Court House, about thirty-five miles west of Petersburg, thinking there would be much-needed rations there for his nearly-starving men.

He was wrong. There was no food at Amelia Court House. Even foraging parties found very little to eat anywhere in the area. Lee was forced to order his hungry men to continue their march, now moving toward Rice's Station.

Along the way, Lee's army started to spread out. General James Longstreet's soldiers were in the lead, followed by General Richard Anderson's men, General Richard Ewell's forces, and General John Gordon's troops. Pretty soon, the thin gray line developed several gaps as the distance increased between Longstreet and Anderson, and Gordon took a wrong turn, splitting off from Ewell. This was a dangerous situation, for General Ulysses S. Grant's Union army was quickly closing in.

The Battle of Sailor's Creek

By April 6th, the Confederates were nearly surrounded. Union General Philip Sheridan was riding parallel to the Confederate column, striking now and then. General George Custer pushed his men into the gap between Longstreet and Anderson. General Horatio Wright sneaked up behind Ewell. Then the Union attacked.

The resulting battle at Sailor's Creek was actually fought on three fronts, and while the exhausted, hungry Confederates fought fiercely for a while, they didn't stand much of a chance. Soon, the long gray line broke. Some men fled. Others, who could hardly even move anymore, were taken prisoner.

Lee watched from a height overlooking the battlefield and remarked, 'My God! Has the army dissolved?' When it was all over, the Union had captured over six thousand Confederates, including Ewell and seven other generals. Lee turned sadly away and guided his remaining army toward Farmville, hoping once again to find food.

Toward Appomattox

On April 7th, Lee ordered a division of his men to burn a bridge over the Appomattox River. He was trying to buy time, to hold off the enemy just a little while longer. The soldiers failed, burning only four of the bridge's twenty-one spans. The men tried valiantly to prevent the Union force from crossing the river, but exhausted, they had to pull back. Lee continued to move with the Union army pressing closely behind.

Lee began to seriously consider surrender. He knew his options were limited, and his men were becoming weaker and hungrier as the days progressed. He had even received a letter from Grant, asking for his surrender, but Lee wasn't quite ready yet. If he could just get to Appomattox Station, there were provisions there, for certain this time. Grant knew about the supplies, too, and he was determined to keep Lee's troops away from them. Nevertheless, Lee sent a note back to Grant asking for his terms of surrender.

On April 8th, Grant replied that his only requirement was that those who surrendered could not take up arms again until they were formally exchanged. Lee was surprised at the ease of these terms, but he wasn't quite ready to give up. He wanted to meet with Grant to talk things over. Grant refused; the only meeting he would have with Lee was to accept his surrender.

On the morning of April 9th, Confederates under General Gordon made one last stand when they bumped into Union forces at Appomattox Court House. The Union quickly rolled over these Southerners and turned to attack Longstreet's men. Lee knew what he had to do, 'There is nothing left me but to go see General Grant, and I had rather die a thousand deaths.'

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general robert e. lee's surrender at appomattox courthouse: terms & conditions video with lesson transcript | study.com

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General Robert E. Lee's Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse: Terms & Conditions Video with Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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After Confederate General Robert E. Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond on April 2nd, 1865, he began to guide his troops west, hoping to eventually join up with more Confederate forces, regroup, and continue to offer resistance to the Union.

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The Fall of Ft. Sumter:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/fort-sumter
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The Emancipation Proclamation :
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/emancipation-proclamation
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Clara Barton and the American Red Cross:
https://www.redcross.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/clara-barton.html
_____________________________________
The Battle of Gettysburg:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/battle-of-gettysburg-facts-summary-significance.html
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The Battle of Vicksburg
https://www.ducksters.com/history/civil_war/siege_of_vicksburg.php
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Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/general-robert-e-lees-surrender-at-appomattox-courthouse.html

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The 13th Amendment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HAmJMnBf0w
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The 14th Amendment:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fourteenth-Amendment
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The 15th Amendment:
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fifteenth-amendment
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The Election of 1876:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/1876_Electoral_Map.png/650px-1876_Electoral_Map.png
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Plessy v. Ferguson:
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson

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The 13th Amendment Explained: The Constitution for Dummies

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Fourteenth Amendment, amendment (1868) to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." In all, the amendment comprises five sections, four of which began in 1866 as separate proposals that stalled in legislative process and were later amalgamated, along with a fifth enforcement section, into a single amendment.

This so-called Reconstruction Amendment prohibited the states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and from denying anyone within a state's jurisdiction equal protection under the law. Nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment, the section of the Constitution apportioning representation in the House of Representatives based on a formula that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person was replaced by a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment specifying that representatives be "apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." The amendment also prohibited former civil and military office holders who had supported the Confederacy from again holding any state or federal office-with the proviso that this prohibition could be removed from individuals by a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress. Moreover, the amendment upheld the national debt while exempting the federal government and state governments from any responsibility for the debts incurred by the rebellious Confederate States of America. Finally, the last section, mirroring the approach of the Thirteenth Amendment, provided for enforcement.

The full text of the amendment is:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Among those legislators responsible for introducing the amendment's provisions were Rep. John A. Bingham of Ohio, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, Rep. Henry Deming of Connecticut, Sen. Benjamin G. Brown of Missouri, and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. The Congressional Joint Resolution proposing the amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on June 16, 1866. On July 28, 1868, having been ratified by the requisite number of states, it entered into force. However, its attempt to guarantee civil rights was circumvented for many decades by the post-Reconstruction-era black codes, Jim Crow laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court's "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Fourteenth Amendment | Definition, Summary, Rights, Significance, & Facts

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Fourteenth Amendment, amendment (1868) to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States.'

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The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, within a few years numerous discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. It wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied any Americans their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

What Is the 15th Amendment?

The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Despite the amendment's passage, by the late 1870s dozens of discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South.
READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
Reconstruction

In 1867, following the American Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. The act divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new governments based on universal suffrage for men were to be established.

With the adoption of the 15th Amendment in 1870, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies in the Southern states to elect the Republican Party to power, which brought about radical changes across the South. By late 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and most were controlled by the Republican Party thanks to the support of Black voters.
WATCH: Yohuru Williams on the 15th Amendment
In the same year, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Natchez, Mississippi, became the first African American to sit in the U.S. Congress when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Although Black Republicans never obtained political office in proportion to their overwhelming electoral majority, Revels and a dozen other Black men served in Congress during Reconstruction, more than 600 served in state legislatures and many more held local offices.

Did you know? One day after it was ratified, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first Black person to vote under the authority of the 15th Amendment.

Poll Taxes and Literacy Tests

By the late 1870s, the Southern Republican Party vanished with the end of Reconstruction, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (passed in 1868, it guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to Black Americans) and the 15th amendment, effectively stripping Black citizens in the South of the right to vote.

In the ensuing decades, a range of discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests-along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation, threats and outright violence-were used to prevent Black men from exercising their right to vote.
READ MORE: Reconstruction: A Timeline of the Post-Civil War Era
Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, aimed to overcome all legal barriers at the state and local levels that denied Blacks their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

The act banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the non-white population had not registered to vote and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.

In 1964, the 24th Amendment made poll taxes illegal in federal elections; poll taxes in state elections were banned in 1966 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and it often was ignored outright, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of Black citizens in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo.

Still, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave Black American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout.

Sources

The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. National Geographic.
15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.

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The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, within a few years numerous discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South.

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context

After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.

Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.

As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and Black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for "Negro" or "colored" passengers.

Florida became the first state to mandate segregated railroad cars in 1887, followed in quick succession by Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and other states by the end of the century.

Black Resistance to Segregation

As Southern Black people witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the Black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance.

At the heart of the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson was a law passed in Louisiana in 1890 "providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races." It stipulated that all passenger railways had to provide these separate cars, which should be equal in facilities.

Homer Adolph Plessy, who agreed to be the plaintiff in the case aimed at testing the law's constitutionality, was of mixed race; he described himself as "seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood."

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a ticket on a train from New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a vacant seat in a whites-only car. After refusing to leave the car at the conductor's insistence, he was arrested and jailed.

Convicted by a New Orleans court of violating the 1890 law, Plessy filed a petition against the presiding judge, Hon. John H. Ferguson, claiming that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

Over the next few years, segregation and Black disenfranchisement picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. Congress defeated a bill that would have given federal protection to elections in 1892, and nullified a number of Reconstruction laws on the books.

Then, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson. In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not "social rights" (sitting in the railroad car of your choice).

In its ruling, the Court denied that segregated railroad cars for Black people were necessarily inferior. "We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy's] argument," Justice Henry Brown wrote, "to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

John Marshall Harlan's Dissent

Alone in the minority was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky. Harlan had opposed emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves during the Reconstruction era-but changed his position due to his outrage over the actions of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Harlan argued in his dissent that segregation ran counter to the constitutional principle of equality under the law: "The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution," he wrote. "It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."

Plessy v. Ferguson Significance

The Plessy v. Ferguson verdict enshrined the doctrine of "separate but equal" as a constitutional justification for segregation, ensuring the survival of the Jim Crow South for the next half-century.

Intrastate railroads were among many segregated public facilities the verdict sanctioned; others included buses, hotels, theaters, swimming pools and schools. By the time of the 1899 case Cummings v. Board of Education, even Harlan appeared to agree that segregated public schools did not violate the Constitution.

It would not be until the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the majority of the Supreme Court would essentially concur with Harlan's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson..

Writing the majority opinion in that 1954 case, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" in public education, calling segregated schools "inherently unequal," and declaring that the plaintiffs in the Brown case were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Sources

C. Vann Woodward, " Plessy v. Ferguson: The Birth of Jim Crow," American Heritage (Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964).
Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court - The First Hundred Years.
Louis Menand, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Limits of Law," The New Yorker (February 12, 2001).
Today in History - May 18: Plessy v. Ferguson, Library of Congress.

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate But Equal Doctrine | HISTORY

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Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.

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On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America's long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians 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, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge.

On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot 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 it's estimated almost 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, 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 the last major confrontation in America's deadly war against the Plains Indians.

Conflict came to Wounded Knee again in February 1973 when it was the site of a 71-day occupation by the activist group AIM (American Indian Movement) and its supporters, who were protesting the U.S. government's mistreatment of Native Americans. During the standoff, two Indians were killed, one federal marshal was seriously wounded and numerous people were arrested.

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U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded Knee

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On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America's long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Throughout 1890, the U.S.

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The homestead act was passed May 20, 1862. This act allowed for US citizens to get 160 acres of land out in the west for free. They had to be adults of course, and they also had to have been loyal to...

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The Transcontinental Railroad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQyBcbHJkg
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Massacre at Wounded Knee
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-army-massacres-indians-at-wounded-knee
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Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887
https://iloveancestry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dawes2-general-allotment-ac.jpg
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The Homestead & Morrill Acts
https://into-the-westah1.weebly.com/homestead-act-and-morrill-land.html

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The Bessemer Process
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vrlb5vm7MQE/TOz4VZzjx3I/AAAAAAAAADk/HV-bxkBYWLs/s1600/bessemer-converter.jpeg
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Growth of Invention - late 1800s
https://americanhistory.si.edu/american-stories/1870-1900-industrial-development
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The Rise of Big Business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVn_23WpJM8
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The Antitrust Movement
https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/1912/trusts/TheAntitrustMovement
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The Labor Movement
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/the-early-labor-movement/

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After the Civil War, the United States rapidly transformed into an industrial, urbanized nation. Technological innovation, economic growth, development of large-scale agriculture, and the expansion of the federal government characterized the era, as did the social tensions brought about by immigration, financial turmoil, federal Indian policy, and increasing demands for rights by workers, women, and minorities.

This group of objects highlights innovation and industrialization in the late 1800s, and the benefits as well as detriments of becoming an economic and industrial power.

Century Vase, 1876

Made by Union Porcelain Works, Greenpoint, New York

The American Industrial Revolution transformed the nation from a scattering of isolated communities into an economic and industrial giant, in part due to the country’s wealth of natural resources. Forests, minerals, waterways, and huge tracts of arable land for farming and ranching provided the raw materials that fueled growth and development, often at the expense of the environment.

This vase celebrates 100 years of American progress and depicts now-vanished icons of the American landscape such as bison, a wooden reaper, and a steamship.

Railroad Spike, 1869

Commemorative of the final spike that completed the transcontinental railroad

Railroads were the basis of the nation’s industrial economy in the late 1800s, creating new markets, carrying billions of tons of freight to every corner of the country, and opening up the West for development. Thanks in part to the railroad providing access to new land for farming, agricultural production doubled in the 1870s, which in turn increased railroad traffic.

Gift of Union Pacific Railroad, Mr. A. E. Stoddard, President

Stock Ticker, about 1900

Made by the Western Union Telegraph Company

The U.S. economy grew rapidly after the Civil War, fueled by an astounding rise in wealth, wages, production, and corporate mergers, along with limited government regulation. The volume of stocks traded rose sharply with corporations’ need for investment capital and the development of new technologies. The 1867 invention of the stock ticker, transmitting up-to-the-minute share prices over telegraph lines, modernized the stock exchange.

Gift of Western Union Corporation

Incandescent Lamp, about 1891

Made by Edison General Electric Company

Many inventions in the late 1880s helped speed urban growth, allowing for taller buildings, more efficient factories, and better transportation. One of the most dramatic improvements occurred in artificial lighting. Thomas Edison’s development of an electric lamp that did not rely on open flames made lighting more practical for factories, offices, and homes, and transformed city life.

Gift of General Electric Lighting Company, through Terry K. McGowan

Tinfoil Phonograph, 1878

Invented by Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Edison helped usher in an age of organized research in support of commerce and industry that reshaped American life. Vowing to turn out inventions on a regular basis, Edison and his team of scientists, engineers, draftsmen, and laborers developed or improved over 1,000 patents, from huge electric generators to this early phonograph.

Gift of American Telephone and Telegraph Company

Alexander Graham Bell's Big Box Telephone, 1876

One of the first commercially available telephones

Telegraph lines could carry only one coded message per wire at a time, which became a hindrance as the volume of communication increased. To overcome this problem, Alexander Bell used his knowledge of acoustics to devise a method of sending multiple tonal messages over a wire. This led to the telephone, and a communication revolution that transformed business and daily life.

Gift of American Telephone and Telegraph Company

Cross, 1875–99

Made by a Hispanic Catholic in New Mexico

New Mexico has experienced many cultural encounters since the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s. Following the United States’ 1848 annexation of the area at the end of war with Mexico, the population of the territory boomed, bringing together Catholics of Spanish descent, indigenous tribes, Protestant missionaries, and Anglo American settlers. Though often in conflict, these communities forged a distinctive regional identity that survives to the present.

Silver Presentation Cup, about 1900

Presented to Susan B. Anthony on her eightieth birthday

Although American women fought for black suffrage, they were unable to vote in federal elections themselves until 1920. As suffragists moved out of the parlor and into the streets, they challenged the notion that a woman’s place was solely in the home. Susan B. Anthony shocked the nation when she was jailed in 1872 for illegally trying to vote.

Gift of National American Woman Suffrage Association

Print, 1870s

Black politicians during Reconstruction

With the end of the Civil War, hard-won constitutional amendments abolished slavery and established citizenship and voting rights for black Americans. But during and after Reconstruction, blacks were often treated as second-class citizens. Southern states continued to restrict black voting, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan led to decades of violence.

From the Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana

Statue, late 1800s

Made by the Union Porcelain Works, Greenpoint, New York

In the late 1800s, black Americans gained citizenship and the vote, while immigrants from Europe and Asia came to the country in record numbers. As these minorities strove for economic prosperity and social justice, some white Americans reacted to the rapidly changing social order with apprehension and hostility. The relationship of the three figures in this statue captures this tension.

Gift of Mrs. Franklin Chace

Singer Sewing Machine Patent Model, 1889

Factory machine for making buttonholes

American goods were increasingly made in factories as companies adopted large-scale, standardized production methods in the late 1800s. Specialized machines took the place of manual tasks—such as sewing buttonholes for ready-made clothing—speeding up the work to meet the growing demands of a nation of consumers. The advent of more simply constructed women’s apparel in the 1890s gave a further boost to the clothing industry.

Sholes & Glidden Typewriter, 1873

Made by E. Remington & Sons

The development of corporations after the Civil War led to the creation of multiple layers of office management. The vast demand for professional managers and clerical staff encouraged education and the growth of the middle class. The introduction of the typewriter gave women the opportunity to enter the corporate workplace.

Gift of Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict

John Brown Lennon's Delegate Badge, 1893

From the Journeymen Tailors’ Union convention

Rapid industrial development in the late 1800s changed where and how Americans worked. By 1900, U.S. factories employed 4.5 million people, most working long hours for low wages in often unhealthful conditions. Workers organized local and national unions in response, leading to an intense period of political activity, strikes, and sometimes violent clashes in the fight for labor rights.

Gift of D. E. Lennon

Jeans, 1873-96

Made by Levi Strauss & Co., San Franscisco

Between 1870 and 1900 over 430 million acres were settled in the United States, most of them in the West. Mining, ranching, and farming drew waves of settlers, and cities and commerce followed. In 1873 San Francisco merchant LeviStrauss and tailor Jacob Davis patented a designfor rugged workers’ pants for western wear—the first jeans, advertised at right in 1875.

Gift of Walter Haas Jr.

Winchester Rifle, 1881

Captured from Sioux when Chief Low Dog surrendered in Montana Territory

Through most of the 1800s, Americans viewed the nation’s westward expansion as a symbol of its providence as a land of wealth and progress. But Indian tribes resisted the encroachment of settlers in their territories, setting off decades of violence. The federal government gradually pushed the tribes to more isolated areas, offering U.S. citizenship, but few opportunities, to those who agreed to accept allotments of land on reservations.

Man's Gown, about 1896

Ordered from China by Lee B. Lok in 1896

With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, thousands of Chinese laborers were left jobless in the western United States. Unwelcome in California, where it was feared they competed for low-paying jobs, many moved to the East Coast. Lee Lok emigrated from China to San Francisco in 1881 and then moved to New York City’s Chinatown where he worked in a general store. Although he could not become a U.S. citizen, his children could, and did.

Gift of James Edgar Mead and Virginia Lee Mead

The objects below are no longer on view

Harvester and Self-Raking Reaper Patent Model, 1877

Patented by William Whiteley

Increasingly mechanized farming meant fewer laborers were needed on farms, releasing them to work in urban industrial jobs. As the cities grew, demand increased for agricultural goods in turn. Inventors looked for new ways for farming to be more efficient and profitable, including making improvements to existing technology such as the mechanical reaper first developed by Cyrus McCormick in 1834.

Creeping Baby Doll, 1870s

Patented by Robert J. Clay

In the 1870s, changing notions of childhood meant that Anglo American parents had only recently accepted crawling, or creeping, as a natural stage in a baby’s development rather than a bad habit.  Prior to this, generations of American children had been prevented from crawling on all fours, an activity then associated with animals and the insane.

Child's Dress, 1876

Made from fabric purchased at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition

Celebrating innovations in industry and the arts, the international Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution, embodied Americans’ confidence in the future, and revealed the country’s potential to the rest of the world. Among the crowds attending the centennial was Henry Fletcher, who purchased the patriotic fabric his wife used to make this dress for their first child, born in 1876.

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After the Civil War, the United States rapidly transformed into an industrial, urbanized nation. Technological innovation, economic growth, development of large-scale agriculture, and the expansion of the federal government characterized the era, as did the social tensions brought about by immigrati…

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Industrial Growth and the Rise of Big Business

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Concern about "the trusts" and the rise of big business was not new in 1912. The trust issue went back at least to the 1880s.

Americans were often ambivalent about "the trusts" and the phenomenon of the rise of big business. On the one hand, Americans admired the efficiencies that large businesses provided. Department stores, for instance, grew at the expense of small merchants because department stores were popular. The large stores provided attractive spaces for customers, as well as a wide range of different goods arranged in "departments" such as clothing for women and men, dry goods, appliances, hardware, and so forth.

On the other hand, Americans worried that the growth of large firms eliminated many opportunities for individuals to go into business. The limitation of those opportunities seemed somehow to lessen freedom itself and to have potentially dangerous implications for republican society and democratic government. Here the department store appears as a pig, keeping out the hungry small business person.

Frank Beard and other cartoonists expressed this ambivalence well before 1912. The ambivalence resulted in a long history of antitrust activity before the election of 1912.

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Concern about "the trusts" and the rise of big business was not new in 1912. The trust issue went back at least to the 1880s. Americans were often ambivalent about "the trusts" and the phenomenon of the rise of big business. On the one hand, Americans admired the efficiencies that large businesses provided.

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The industrial revolution stands out as a time of great prosperity and expansion as America entered the modern era. But what were the pitfalls of such rapid growth and who turned out to be the victims of the country's success?

Between 1860 and 1910 the population of the US tripled, and so too did the industrial work force. New types of commercial enterprise sprung up to stand alongside the pre-Civil War textile factories.

Naturally the demand for workers was high, but in this time of heightened immigration the supply of laborers keen to make their way in a new country was even higher. This helped empower industry bosses and meant working conditions were far from ideal.

However there were many who were unwilling to accept the way big business was run, especially since it was making profit at the expense of the little people. The first organization acting as a federation to encompass American unions was the National Labor Union which truly came into force after the Civil War but was reasonably short-lived.

The largest union of the time was the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin. Representing the shoe industry, the Order attempted to halt the rising trend for the mechanical or unskilled production line which looked set to replace master cobblers.

Inevitably the march of progress prevailed and the faster, more efficient machines soon took their place in the industry. The Knights of Labor union founded in 1869 took the movement to a new level drawing a national membership.

The ethos of the Knights was to include anyone involved in production, which helped its numbers swell. The union was well organized under the control of Terence Powderly and enlisted politics to help fight its various causes.

Events took a turn for the worse in 1886 when the Haymarket riot saw the message of the Knights overshadowed by the death of a police officer in a bomb blast. Public opinion turned against the anarchist movement in general and the union collapsed.

It was only after the advent of the American Federation of Labor, set up by Samuel Gompers in 1886 and acting as a national federation of unions for skilled workers, that the labor movement became a real force to be reckoned with and took on more of the shape we see today.

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The Early Labor Movement | History Detectives | PBS

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The industrial revolution stands out as a time of great prosperity and expansion as America entered the modern era. But what were the pitfalls of such rapid growth and who turned out to be the victims of the country's success? Between 1860 and 1910 the population of the US tripled, and so too did the industrial work force.

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The Rise of Immigration - late 1800s
http://www.campsilos.org/excursions/grout/one/chart_act2.gif
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The Growth of Cities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpBbnL3pMRA
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Tenement Life - Causes and Effects
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements
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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s
https://www.onecallnow.com/blog/02/evolution-of-communication-1800s-and-1900s/

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Urbanisation and the growth of global cities

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings-many of them concentrated in the city's Lower East Side neighborhood-were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation. By 1900, some 2.3 million people (a full two-thirds of New York City's population) were living in tenement housing.

The Rise of Tenement Housing

In the first half of the 19th century, many of the more affluent residents of New York's Lower East Side neighborhood began to move further north, leaving their low-rise masonry row houses behind. At the same time, more and more immigrants began to flow into the city, many of them fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, or Great Hunger, in Ireland or revolution in Germany. Both of these groups of new arrivals concentrated themselves on the Lower East Side, moving into row houses that had been converted from single-family dwellings into multiple-apartment tenements, or into new tenement housing built specifically for that purpose.

Did you know? By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built in New York City. They housed a population of 2.3 million people, a full two-thirds of the city's total population of around 3.4 million.

A typical tenement building had five to seven stories and occupied nearly all of the lot upon which it was built (usually 25 feet wide and 100 feet long, according to existing city regulations). Many tenements began as single-family dwellings, and many older structures were converted into tenements by adding floors on top or by building more space in rear-yard areas. With less than a foot of space between buildings, little air and light could get in.

In many tenements, only the rooms on the street got any light, and the interior rooms had no ventilation (unless air shafts were built directly into the room). Later, speculators began building new tenements, often using cheap materials and construction shortcuts. Even new, this kind of housing was at best uncomfortable and at worst highly unsafe.

Calls for Reform

New York was not the only city in America where tenement housing emerged as a way to accommodate a growing population during the 1900s. In Chicago, for example, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 led to restrictions on building wood-frame structures in the center of the city and encouraged the construction of lower-income dwellings on the city's outskirts.

Unlike in New York, where tenements were highly concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, in Chicago they tended to cluster around centers of employment, such as stockyards and slaughterhouses. Nowhere, however, did the tenement situation become as dire as it was in New York, particularly on the Lower East Side. A cholera epidemic in 1849 took some 5,000 lives, many of them poor people living in overcrowded housing.

During the infamous New York draft riots that tore apart the city in 1863, rioters were not only protesting against the new military conscription policy; they were also reacting to the intolerable conditions in which many of them were living. The Tenement House Act of 1867 legally defined a tenement for the first time and set construction regulations; among these were the requirement of one toilet (or privy) per 20 people.

"How the Other Half Lives"

The existence of tenement legislation did not guarantee its enforcement, however, and conditions were little improved by 1889, when the Danish-born author and photographer Jacob Riis was researching the series of newspaper articles that would become his seminal book "How the Other Half Lives."

Riis had experienced firsthand the hardship of immigrant life in New York City, and as a police reporter for newspapers, including The Evening Sun, he had gotten a unique view into the grimy, crime-infested world of the Lower East Side. Seeking to draw attention to the horrible conditions in which many urban Americans were living, Riis photographed what he saw in the tenements and used these vivid photos to accompany the text of "How the Other Half Lives," published in 1890.

The hard facts included in Riis' book-such as the fact that 12 adults slept in a room some 13 feet across, and that the infant death rate in the tenements was as high as 1 in 10-stunned many in America and around the world and led to a renewed call for reform.

Two major studies of tenements were completed in the 1890s, and in 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law-which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced-pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities.

Life After the Tenements

By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects. The next decade saw the implementation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which would transform low-income housing in many American cities through programs including slum clearing and the building of public housing.

The first fully government-built public housing project opened in New York City in 1936. Called First Houses, it consisted of a number of rehabilitated pre-law tenements covering a partial block at Avenue A and East 3rd Street, an area that had been considered part of the Lower East Side.

Among the trendy restaurants, boutique hotels and bars that can be found in the neighborhood today, visitors can still get a glimpse into its past at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 Orchard Street.

Built in 1863, the building is an example of an "old-law" tenement (as defined by the Tenement House Act of 1867) and was home over the years for some 7,000 working class immigrants. Though the basement and the first floor have been renovated, the rest of the building looks much the same as it did in the 19th century, and has been designated a National Historic Site.

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.

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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Evolution of Communication is our latest ebook that explores the development of human communication methods from prehistoric times until today. This is the second of a three-part blog series that highlights the in-depth information available in that publication.
Can you imagine not being able to reach anyone, no matter their location, at a moment's notice? Until just a few centuries ago, communications were limited by distance. Once we entered the 19 th century, our communications methods advanced with innovations that made communications simpler and able to happen over longer distances than previously possible (remember the methods we talked about in our previous post?.

The 1800s: A Major Leap
During the 19 th century, signal lamps, newspapers, and the electric telegraph made it possible to transmit information farther and to more people at once than ever before. First known to be available around 1867, signal lamps were used to transmit Morse code between towns, between ships at sea, and from land to sea.

By the late 1800s, many small town and cities published their own newspaper which allowed for passing along information to very large groups of people at a time. People could learn about events in towns and cities from all over by subscribing to papers from other places. The electric telegraph led to many additional telegraph innovations including the trans-Atlantic telegraph, the acoustic phonograph, and wireless telegraphy.

The telegraph played a major role in the development of communication; in 1858, the completion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable marked a new era in communication between Europe and the United States. Of course, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of all time may be the telephone, which became a prime method of communication between individuals starting 1876. No discussion of communication would be complete without mention of the radio, which became publicly available in the late 1800s.

The 1900s: Technology Soars
America was already going mobile by the early 20 th century. Believe it or not, the first experimental videophone was available around 1936, and telephone service for automobiles was available shortly after that, though availability was limited.

Television changed the landscape of communication forever when it was first introduced in 1927. A few decades later, many families would have their own television sets, making it possible for the latest news and information to come directly into an individual's home almost as soon as it happened. Though many forms of communication have come and gone, television remains one of the most widely used inventions. People all around the world still depend on TV for up-to-date information, as well as entertainment.

Do these inventions sound more familiar? Go ahead and breathe a sigh of relief at the familiarity of these more common methods of communication. They are here and we are no longer relying on a pigeon to transmit our messages (probably). While many of these came out less than a century ago, they have already been improved quite a lot in the years following their inventions.

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Evolution of Communication: 1800s and 1900s | OCN

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Evolution of Communication is our latest ebook that explores the development of human communication methods from prehistoric times until today. This is the second of a three-part blog series that highlights the in-depth information available in that publication. Can you imagine not being able to reach anyone, no matter their location, at a moment's notice?

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

The rapid growth of American cities in the 19th century, a result of both immigration and migration from rural areas, created huge problems for city governments, which were often poorly structured and unable to provide services. In those conditions, political machines-such as Tammany Hall, run by boss William Magear Tweed (1823-73) in New York City -were able to build a loyal voter following, especially among immigrant groups, by performing such favours as providing jobs or housing.

Political machines are characterized by a disciplined and hierarchical organization, reaching down to neighbourhood and block organizers, that enables the machine to respond to the problems of individual neighbourhoods, or even families, in exchange for loyalty at the polls. The term refers to their ability to elect candidates or enact measures with mechanical efficiency and predictability.

Although the primary goal of a political machine is keeping itself in power rather than providing good government, machines have been responsible for restructuring city governments to centralize authority, improving facilities and services, helping to assimilate immigrant groups, and encouraging the growth of business and industry. Supporters of political machines say that they "work" and that consolidating power in the hands of a boss, like Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-76) of Chicago, guarantees city governments the power and authority that they need to cope with urban problems effectively. However, because political machines in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Kansas City have also been responsible for many abuses of power, the term carries a pejorative sense.

Organizers who "deliver" the votes are often rewarded with patronage jobs. However, patronage can result in poorer service to the citizens because appointees may be neither qualified for their jobs nor interested in performing them. Control of both elective and appointed posts also gives a machine control of government salaries and revenues, which can be used to enrich the party at the public's expense. For example, the machine may accept donations or kickbacks from businesses in return for such favours as tax or zoning concessions or the award of lucrative public-works contracts. In some cities, machine business dealings have included accepting money from organized-crime syndicates in exchange for protection from legal interference.

In cities whose neighbourhoods are divided along ethnic or racial lines, machine patronage may aggravate hostilities by awarding most jobs and services to those people of the same background as the city's power elite. In practice, this made machine politics the last defense of white neighbourhoods against growing black populations, while black politicians who anticipated power viewed their constituents as merely the latest in a series of ethnic or racial groups that had benefited from the machine.

Since the 19th-century heyday of machine politics, civil service reforms limiting the number of patronage jobs, the institution of direct primaries rather than party nomination of candidates, the municipal operation of public utilities, and judicial review by state and federal courts have all reduced the power of political machines. The steady exodus of city residents to the suburbs since World War II and a more mobile population with fewer ties to particular neighbourhoods have also weakened the social base that once made political machines synonymous with city government.

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Political machine | Definition, History, & Facts

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

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The Progressive Era: Crash Course US History #27

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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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The Labor Movement in the United States | History

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Women’s Suffrage & the Temperance Movement (Late 1800s/Early 1900s)

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Women’s Suffrage & the Temperance Movement (Late 1800s/Early 1900s)

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During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Temperance Movement fought to reduce consumption of alcohol. The movement began in the 1820s, rooted in Protestant churches, led by clergy and prominent laymen, and powered by women volunteers. More women were involved in temperance than any other cause in US history up to that point. Women's involvement seemed natural since the movement targeted men's alcohol abuse and how it harmed women and children. At first, the Temperance Movement sought to moderate drinking, then to promote resisting the temptation to drink. Later, the goal became outright prohibition of alcohol sales. This shift coincided with a large wave of immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and some temperance advocates echoed the concerns of nativists as they objected to immigrants' "wet" cultures and drinking customs. In addition, temperance advocates regarded urban saloons as hosts to a range of immoral behaviors beyond drunkenness, such as gambling, adultery, prostitution, profanity, and corruption.

Women rose to leadership roles with the founding of the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874. Temperance became known as the "Woman's Crusade," and women staged peaceful demonstrations of prayer at businesses that served alcohol. These methods reflected the gentle moral guidance expected from women of the era. Later, the Temperance Movement changed its goals and tactics, and it became a powerful political force which sought to prohibit alcohol entirely. Carrie (or Carry) Nation, a radical temperance advocate, gained both support and notoriety through raiding saloons and using a hatchet to smash their liquor bottles. In the 1890s, the Anti-Saloon League rose to prominence as an influential prohibition lobby, using methods from business and government rather than the church. The League fueled the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, or Prohibition, in 1920, which banned production and consumption of alcohol nationwide until 1933, when it was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment. While the movement aligned itself with privileged white femininity, many women who participated in the Temperance Movement also contributed to other forms of social activism, such as abolition, women's suffrage, and equal rights for women and people of color.

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During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Temperance Movement fought to reduce consumption of alcohol. The movement began in the 1820s, rooted in Protestant churches, led by clergy and prominent laymen, and powered by women volunteers. More women were involved in temperance than any other cause in US history up to that point.

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Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government's duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary. In other words, they believe in U.S. leadership of the world. The Federalists were the original American imperialists. Being Anglophiles, they looked to Great Britain as the role model for American foreign policy. Federalists desired strong financial and commercial ties to Europe and an economy based on overseas trade. Power needed to be concentrated in a strong federal government in order to speak with one voice to the governments of other nations. A strong military was needed to protect the interests of American bankers and businessmen. An admirer of Caesar and Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton desired an imperialistic foreign policy for the new nation. In 1799, Major General Hamilton "was a man who dreamed dreams, and in his imagination he was already leading his army into Louisiana, the Floridas and points south. 'We ought,' he said, 'to squint at South America.'" The ideological division in early American public policy is clear: "Hamilton longs for empire, opulence, and glory for the nation, whereas Jefferson seeks virtue, freedom, and happiness for the social individual." Hamilton was "very opportunistic about international diplomacy" and distrusted "moralizing in foreign policy." 1

Isolationists believe that the American government should be predominantly concerned about the needs and desires of its own citizens. They do not believe our government should be potentially involved in every conflict around the globe. They do not believe our government should attempt to control the governments of other nations. In other words, they believe in national self-determination. The Anti-Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were the original American isolationists. They believed in decentralized politics, agrarian-based economics, no standing army, staying out of Europe's continual bloodshed, and friendship with the people of other nations but non-alliance with those people's governments. Isolationists are often characterized as provincial bumpkins. This characterization hardly fits the nation's premier isolationist. Jefferson was a diplomat and a student of language, science, and philosophy. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he nonetheless opposed national involvement in overseas political and military conflicts. Referring to a controversy about the West Indies, in a 1791 letter to an American diplomat, he stated, "If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest." In 1799, Jefferson wrote, "I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance..." In his first inaugural address (1801), President Jefferson urged "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." He held this view throughout his life. 2

Using the word isolationism to describe Jefferson's foreign policy is an oversimplification. Setting aside the negative images with which it is saddled due to 70 years of imperial propaganda, the term is still problematic because it does not express the full range of Jefferson's thought. In addition to the obvious forswearing of entangling alliances, Jeffersonian isolationism involved support for a republic rather than an empire, for national sovereignty, for ethical conduct, for human rights, and for popular control of foreign policy. These five beliefs could be thought of as causes, components, or concomitants of isolationism. Jefferson "vigorously rejected the view that only individuals are bound by a moral code, and that nations are free to act in accordance with self-interest without any restraints." Writing to James Madison in 1789, he remarked, "I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion but not in the latter." Despite his belief in the importance of moral conduct in foreign relations, Jefferson was not nave in his view of the world. He had, for example, a realistic assessment of foreign governments. In 1812, Jefferson condemned both the French and British governments for trying to "draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations." Three years later, he called Napoleon "the wretch...who has been the author of more misery and suffering to the world, than any being who ever lived before him. After destroying the liberties of his country, he has exhausted all its resources, physical and moral, to indulge his own maniac ambition, his own tyrannical and overbearing spirit." He did not, however, have a favorable view of the British government and other opponents of Napoleon. Jefferson condemned the imperialism of all the leading countries of Europe: "The will of the allies? There is no more moderation, forbearance, or even honesty in theirs, than in that of Bonaparte. They have proved that their object, like his, is plunder." 3

Isolationism is a problematic word. It is an epithet, it is anachronistic when applied to Jefferson, and it fails to indicate the full range of thought involved. Admittedly, it is a flawed term, but it may be the best term available. Non-interventionism is a non-definition that merely calls attention to another undefined term, the word continentalism never caught on after being proposed by scholar Charles Beard, and neutrality is too vague. To some, isolationism may imply ostrich-like, willful ignorance of the rest of the world, but this was never the case with its most famous practitioners. The isolation is not one of intellect, trade, or travel, but one of entangling alliances, military conflict, and imperial domination. For isolationists, national self-determination for colonies and national sovereignty for America are closely-related principles emanating from a common source: a commitment to democracy, freedom, and decentralization. Isolationism is the foreign policy of traditional liberals. As Robert Morss Lovett noted in 1924 in his Progressive Party statement for the elite journal Foreign Affairs,

It is historically characteristic of governments devoted to conservative measures and the maintenance of the status quo in domestic affairs to develop an aggressive policy in foreign affairs, and similarly for governments whose chief outlook is toward the progressive improvement of existing conditions to seek to disembarrass themselves from the complications of foreign policy.

This progressive tradition was first manifested in power through the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

Isolationism may be an unfortunate term in some ways, but it describes a real, deep, and honorable tradition in American politics. Prior to the 1930s, the ideological underpinning of our approach to the world lacked a distinct label because it was simply accepted as traditional U.S. foreign policy. In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, "As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions..." In 1796, George Washington's Farewell Address noted, "The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible....It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world..." The Independence Day speech of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821 indicated that isolationism was still taken for granted 25 years later. Referring to America, he reminded the House of Representatives, "She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings...She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." The Monroe Doctrine acted as an isolationist bulwark for many years, until it was corrupted by the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary (1904) and virtually set aside by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The Doctrine asserted,

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so....It is impossible that the allied powers [of Europe] should extend their political system to any portion of either [American] continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord....It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the [Latin American] parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.

In opposing the annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1870, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner (R-MA) argued that Caribbean islands "should not be absorbed by the United States, but should remain as independent powers, and should try for themselves to make the experiment of self-government....To the African belongs the equatorial belt and he should enjoy it undisturbed." Things began to change dramatically in 1898. With the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, we were well on our way to becoming an empire with extensive political and military ties to the rest of the world. As a result, traditional foreign policy fell into disfavor among U.S. elites and was eventually disparaged by the dismissive term isolationism. Meanwhile, when the word imperialism fell out of favor, it was exchanged for the more euphemistic internationalism.

The Best of Jeff Taylor

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Imperialism and Isolationism: Contrasting Approaches to Foreign Policy - LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

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DIGG THIS Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government's duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary.

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RIse of Political Machines
https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-machine
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Progressive Reform (Late 1800s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Q4zPR4G7M
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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewu-v36szlE
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Election of 1912
https://cdn.britannica.com/28/73728-050-DE1541AC/election-Results-Candidate-American-Votes-Sources-Woodrow-1912.jpg
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Women's Suffrage & the Temperance Movement
https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/women-and-the-temperance-movement
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Isolationism vs. Imperialism
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/11/jeff-taylor/imperialism-and-isolationism-contrasting-approaches-to-foreign-policy/

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
https://www.history.com/news/the-assassination-of-archduke-franz-ferdinand-100-years-ago
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New Technology of World War I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7v3cq1ZJjM

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President Wilson’s 14 Points
https://theworldwar-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/s3fs-public/1982.170.18_excerpt.jpg

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Treaty of Versailles
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/treaty-of-versailles-1

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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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.

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The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 100 Years Ago

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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.

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Tech Developments of World War I | History

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The Fourteen Points

In a speech to Congress in January 1918, Wilson laid out his idealistic vision for the world after World War I, which was at the time sometimes referred to as "the war to end all wars."

In addition to specific territorial settlements based on an Allied victory, Wilson's so-called Fourteen Points emphasized the need for national self-determination for Europe's different ethnic populations.

Wilson also proposed the founding of a "general association of nations" that would mediate international disputes and foster cooperation between different nations in the hopes of preventing war on such a large scale in the future. This organization eventually became known as the League of Nations.

When German leaders signed the armistice ending hostilities in World War I on November 11, 1918, they believed Wilson's vision would form the basis for any future peace treaty. This would not prove to be the case.

Paris Peace Conference

The Paris Peace Conference opened on January 18, 1919, a date that was significant in that it marked the anniversary of the coronation of German Emperor Wilhelm I, which took place in the Palace of Versailles at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

Prussian victory in that conflict had resulted in Germany's unification and its seizure of Alsace and Lorraine provinces from France. In 1919, France and its prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, had not forgotten the humiliating loss and intended to avenge it in the new peace agreement.

Treaty of Versailles Terms

The " Big Four" leaders of the victorious Western nations-Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France and, to a lesser extent, Vittorio Orlando of Italy-dominated the peace negotiations in Paris. Germany and the other defeated powers-Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey-were not represented at the Paris Peace Conference. Also absent was Russia, which had fought as one of the Allied powers until 1917, when, following the Russian Revolution, the country's new Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace with Germany and withdrew from the conflict.

The Big Four themselves had competing objectives in Paris: Clemenceau's main goal was to protect France from yet another attack by Germany. He sought heavy reparations from Germany as a way of limiting German economic recovery after the war and minimizing this possibility.

Lloyd George, on the other hand, saw the rebuilding of Germany as a priority in order to reestablish the nation as a strong trading partner for Great Britain. For his part, Orlando wanted to expand Italy's influence and shape it into a major power that could hold its own alongside the other great nations.

Wilson opposed Italian territorial demands, as well as previously existing arrangements regarding territory between the other Allies; instead, he wanted to create a new world order along the lines of his Fourteen Points. The other leaders saw Wilson as too naive and idealistic, and his principles were difficult to translate into policy.

In the end, the European Allies imposed harsh peace terms on Germany, forcing the nation to surrender around 10 percent of its territory and all of its overseas possessions. Other key provisions of the Treaty of Versailles called for the demilitarization and occupation of the Rhineland, limited Germany's army and navy, forbade it to maintain an air force, and required it to conduct war crimes trials against Kaiser Wilhelm II and other leaders for their aggression.

Most importantly, Article 231 of the treaty, better known as the " war guilt clause," forced Germany to accept full responsibility for starting World War I and pay enormous reparations for Allied war losses.

How Did the Treaty of Versailles Lead to World War II?

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, sparking the outbreak of the war. Though the treaty included a covenant creating the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preserving peace, the harsh terms imposed on Germany helped ensure that peace would not last for long.

Germans were furious about the treaty, seeing it as a diktat, or dictated peace; they bitterly resented the sole blame of war being placed at their feet. The nation's burden of reparations eventually topped 132 billion gold Reichsmarks, the equivalent of some $33 billion, a sum so great that no one expected Germany to be able to pay in full; in fact, economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted the European economy would collapse if it did.

Keynes was not the only prominent critic of the Treaty of Versailles: The French military leader Ferdinand Foch refused to attend the signing ceremony, as he thought the treaty didn't do enough to secure against a future German threat, while the U.S. Congress failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and later concluded a separate peace with Germany. The United States would never join the short-lived League of Nations.

November Criminals

In the years following the Treaty of Versailles, many ordinary Germans believed they had been betrayed by the "November Criminals," those leaders who signed the treaty and formed the post-war government.

Radical right-wing political forces-especially the National Socialist Workers' Party, or the Nazis-would gain support in the 1920s and '30s by promising to reverse the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty.

With the onset of the Great Depression after 1929, economic unrest destabilized the already vulnerable Weimar Republic government in Germany, setting the stage for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's fateful rise to power in 1933.

Sources

The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian.
"The Treaty of Versailles: An Uneasy Peace," WBUR.org (excerpt from Michael Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History), August 13, 2017.
Treaty of Versailles. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Chateau de Versailles.

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Treaty of Versailles: Definition, Terms, Dates & WWI - HISTORY

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The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 and set harsh terms for Germany's surrender to Allied powers after World War I, setting the stage for World War II.