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Zach King (Founding of America-French and Indian War)

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Zach King (Founding of America-French and Indian War)

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Columbus "finds" the America's in 1492

First Governor of the Indies

Traveled Under Spain

"Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492"

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Founded by John Smith in 1607

Funded by The Virginia Company

First PERMANENT British Settlement.

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The English arrive at Jamestown.
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On December 6, 1606, the journey to Virginia began on three ships: the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. In 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. On May 13 they picked Jamestown, Virginia for their settlement, which was named after their King, James I. The settlement became the first permanent English settlement in North America.

The site for Jamestown was picked for several reasons, all of which met criteria the Virginia Company, who funded the settlement, said to follow in picking a spot for the settlement. The site was surrounded by water on three sides (it was not fully an island yet) and was far inland; both meant it was easily defensible against possible Spanish attacks. The water was also deep enough that the English could tie their ships at the shoreline - good parking! The site was also not inhabited by the Native population.

Once the spot was chosen the instructions sent by the Virginia Company, with the list of the council members (chosen by officials in England), was read. The names were kept in a sealed box on the ship (each ship had a sealed copy). The first President of the new Virginia colony was to be Edward Maria Winfield. The other six council members were: Bartholomew Gosnold, Christopher Newport, John Martin, John Ratcliffe, George Kendall, and John Smith.

By June 15, the fort was completed. It was triangle shaped with a bulwark at each corner, holding four or five pieces of artillery. The settlers were now protected against any attacks that might occur from the local Powhatan Indians, whose hunting land they were living on. Relations had already been mixed between the newcomers and the Powhatan Indians. On June 22, Captain Newport left for England to get more supplies for the new settlement.

Not long after Captain Newport left, the settlers began to succumb to a variety of diseases. They were drinking water from the salty or slimy river, which was one of several things that caused the death of many. The death tolls were high. They were dying from swellings, fluxes, fevers, by famine, and sometimes by wars. Food was running low, though then Chief Powhatan starting to send gifts of food to help the English. If not for the Powhatan Indians help in the early years, the settlement would most likely have failed, as the English would have died from the various diseases or simply starved.

By late 1609, the relationship between the Powhatan Indians and the English had soured as the English were demanding too much food during a drought. That winter of 1609-10 is known as the "Starving Time." During that winter the English were afraid to leave the fort, due to a legitimate fear of being killed by the Powhatan Indians. As a result they ate anything they could: various animals, leather from their shoes and belts, and sometimes fellow settlers who had already died. By early 1610 most of the settlers, 80-90% according to William Strachey, had died due to starvation and disease.

In May 1610, shipwrecked settlers who had been stranded in Bermuda finally arrived at Jamestown. Part of a fleet sent the previous fall, the survivors used two boats built on Bermuda to get to Jamestown. Sir Thomas Gates, the newly named governor, found Jamestown in shambles with the palisades of the fort torn down, gates off their hinges, and food stores running low. The decision was made to abandon the settlement. Less than a day after leaving, however, Gates and those with him, including the survivors of the "Starving Time," were met by news of an incoming fleet. The fleet was bringing the new governor for life, Lord Delaware. Gates and his party returned to Jamestown.

Harvesting Tobacco.
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In 1612, John Rolfe, one of many shipwrecked on Bermuda, helped turn the settlement into a profitable venture. He introduced a new strain of tobacco from seeds he brought from elsewhere. Tobacco became the long awaited cash crop for the Virginia Company, who wanted to make money off their investment in Jamestown.

On July 30, 1619, newly appointed Governor Yeardley called for the first representative legislative assembly. This was the beginning of representative government in what is now the United States of America.

In that same year, the first documented Africans were forcibly captured and brought to Virginia to work the tobacco fields. It is contested whether, at the time, these people were considered indentured servants or enslaved peoples however, historical evidence suggests they were often treated in a manner that more closely resembles enslavement as we understand it today.

Also in 1619, the Virginia Company recruited and shipped over about 90 women to become wives and start families in Virginia, something needed to establish a permanent colony. Over one hundred women, who brought or started families, had arrived in prior years, but 1619 was when establishing families became a primary focus.

Peace between the Powhatan Indians and the English, brought about by the conversion and marriage of Pocahontas (kidnapped by the English in 1613) and John Rolfe in 1614, ended in 1622. In March of that year the paramount chief, then Opechancanough, planned a coordinated attack against the English settlements. He was tired of the English encroachment on Powhatan lands. Jamestown escaped being attacked, due to a warning from a Powhatan boy living with the English. During the attack 350-400 of the 1,200 settlers were killed. After the attack, the Powhatan Indians withdrew, as was their way, and waited for the English to learn their lesson or pack up and leave. Once the English regrouped they retaliated and there was fighting between the two peoples for ten years, until a tenuous peace was reached in 1632.

On May 24, 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was revoked by King James I due to overwhelming financial problems and politics, and Virginia became a royal colony, which it remained until the Revolutionary War. This shift in control did not change the English policy towards the Powhatan Indians. Despite peace being declared in 1632, English encroachments on Powhatan lands continued undiminished as more settlers arrived in the Colony.

In April 1644, Opechancanough planned another coordinated attack, which resulted in the deaths of another 350-400 of the 8,000 settlers. The attack ended when Opechancanough was captured in 1646, taken to Jamestown, and shot in the back by a guard - against orders - and killed. His death brought an eventual death to the Powhatan Chiefdom; it was reduced to tributary status. His successor signed the first treaties with the English, which made the Powhatan Indians subjects of the English.

Bacon's Rebellion.
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Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, saw more struggles in Jamestown. The settlers were unhappy about their tobacco being sold only to English merchants due to the Navigation Acts, high taxes, and attacks on outlying plantations by American Indians on the frontiers. Nathaniel Bacon got about 1,000 settlers to join him and take care of the "Indian Problem." Bacon forced Governor Berkeley to give him an official commission to attack the American Indians to blame. Bacon and his followers, however, did not differentiate between those tribes responsible for the attacks and those who were loyal to the English. Governor Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel and civil war erupted in the colony. In September, Bacon and his followers set fire to Jamestown, destroying 16 to 18 houses, the church and the statehouse. Not long after, in October, the Rebellion began its end with the death of Nathaniel Bacon of the "bloody flux." Eventually, many of the rebels were captured and 23 were hanged by Governor Berkeley.

As a result of Bacon's Rebellion, another treaty was signed between the English and the Virginia Indians. More tribes were part of this treaty than the one of 1646. The treaty set up more reservation lands and reinforced a yearly tribute payment of fish and game that the tribes had to make to the English.

In 1698, fire struck Jamestown again. The fire was evidently started by a prisoner awaiting execution in the nearby prison. The fire destroyed the prison and the statehouse, though many of the public records were saved. In 1699, the government and capital were moved from Jamestown to Middle Plantation, renamed Williamsburg. People continued to live on Jamestown Island and owned farm lands, but it ceased to be a town.

Today, Jamestown Island is a historic site, though there is still a private residence on the island. It is preserved by the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia for visitors to learn about the importance of Jamestown and what was born out of its being the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Bibliography

Egloff, Keith and Deborah Woodward. First People: The Early Indians of Virginia. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1992.

Haile, Edward Wright (editor). Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: The First Decade: 1607-1617. Chaplain: Roundhouse, 1998.

McCartney, Martha W. Jamestown: An American Legacy. Hong Kong: Eastern National, 2001.

Price, David A. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2003.

Kelso, William M. and Beverly Straube. Jamestown Rediscovery 1994-2004. Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, 2004.

Wood, Karenne (editor). Charlottesville: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2007.

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A Short History of Jamestown - Historic Jamestowne Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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On December 6, 1606, the journey to Virginia began on three ships: the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. In 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. On May 13 they picked Jamestown, Virginia for their settlement, which was named after their King, James I.

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He was a tobacco smuggler in the Caribbean.

Married Pocahontas

Brought tobacco to Virginian Swamps

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Early Years

Little is known of Rolfe's parentage or early life. While historians and genealogists have generally maintained that he was baptized in Heacham, Norfolk County, England, on May 6, 1585, and was the son of John Rolfe and Dorothy (Dorothea) Mason Rolfe, this is unlikely to be true. John Rolfe (the father) died in 1595, and Dorothy Rolfe later married Robert Redmayn (Redmaine), but none of the various wills and papers associated with her, her second husband, or their daughter ever mention the Rolfes. The Heacham parish records also fail to mention Henry Rolfe, a Virginia Company of London investor who is known to be the brother of the John Rolfe who married Pocahontas. Records also suggest that the grandmother of John Rolfe and Pocahontas's son, Thomas Rolfe, was alive in 1645, the year Dorothy Mason Rolfe Redmayn died.

Bermuda, Virginia, and Tobacco

In 1609, John Rolfe was among the passengers on the Sea Venture, one of nine ships sent to Virginia to resupply the colonists there. Caught in a storm, the ship wrecked off the islands of Bermuda, where Rolfe's wife, whose name is unknown, soon delivered a daughter named Bermuda. With Captain Christopher Newport and William Strachey serving as witnesses, the girl was christened by the Reverend Richard Bucke on February 11, 1610, but she died soon after. Rolfe's wife also died, either just before or after their arrival in Virginia on May 24, 1610.

The following year, Rolfe began to experiment with cultivating tobacco. Introduced to England perhaps as early as 1565, tobacco had found a ready market there by the 1610s, making it a tempting crop for Virginia farmers. Rolfe, who reportedly was a committed smoker himself, easily could have purchased the leafy plant from Virginia Indians, but Strachey described the native variety, Nicotiana rustica, as being "poore and weake, and of a byting tast." This did not recommend it to English smokers, who preferred high-quality Spanish tobacco from the West Indies. As a result Rolfe looked south, obtaining from a shipmaster seeds from Trinidad and Caracas, Venezuela, so that by July 1612 he was growing the Spanish tobacco Nicotiana tabacum. The exact location of Rolfe's crop is unknown but likely was at Jamestown. It's possible, however, that he farmed his first tobacco at Bermuda Hundred, where he reportedly held property.

Captain Robert Adams of the Elizabeth delivered samples of Rolfe's tobacco to England on July 20, 1613, and although considered to be of excellent quality, it was still not comparable to the Spanish product. Nevertheless, Rolfe believed that "no doubt but after a little more tryall and expense in the curing thereof, it will compare with the best in the West Indies." He was proved correct in 1617, when 20,000 pounds of his tobacco arrived in England, and in 1618, when the amount delivered there doubled. Rolfe's success in growing a profitable tobacco crop transformed the colony, leading directly to Virginia's most successful cash crop and forming the basis of the colony's economy.

Pocahontas and England

John Rolfe met Pocahontas sometime after April 1613, when she was taken prisoner and transported to Jamestown. Reputedly the favorite daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief of Tsenacomoco, Pocahontas was held for ransom, providing the English leverage in their ongoing war with the Algonquian-speaking Indian groups. In Jamestown she lived for a time in the household of the Reverend Richard Bucke, and, after indicating a desire to convert to Christianity, she studied with the Reverend Alexander Whitaker in Henricus.

Pocahontas eventually was baptized and christened Rebecca, and on or about April 5, 1614, she and Rolfe married, with the approval of Powhatan and Virginia deputy governor Sir Thomas Dale.

The marriage was a diplomatic coup for the English, helping to bring an end to the First Anglo-Powhatan War and suggesting, to the English at least, that Virginia Indians were ready to accept an English way of life. In an undated letter to Dale, Rolfe acknowledged that Pocahontas's "education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed," and he worried about the Bible's admonition against "marrying strange wives." Still he explained that his intentions toward Pocahontas had not been influenced by "the unbridled desire of carnall affection: but for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely Pokahuntas."

Sometime between 1614 and 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas had a son, whom they named Thomas for the deputy governor. In 1616, Rolfe, Pocahontas, and, depending on his birth date, Thomas sailed to England with Dale and a group of Virginia Indians to raise money for the Virginia Company of London. Pocahontas was well received at Court, meeting King James I and the bishop of London, and, presumably, improving the colony's image among discouraged company investors. While in England, Rolfe penned an encomium to Virginia, published in 1617, titled A True Relation of the state of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale Knight in May Last 1616. In it, Rolfe discussed the various settlements in Virginia-at Jamestown, Henricus, and Bermuda Hundred-enumerated the farmers and workers at each site along with the livestock, and gave a picture of a colony likely to succeed despite its many setbacks and high death toll.

In March 1617, however, the company experienced another setback when, as Rolfe's party began its return journey to Virginia, Pocahontas became ill and then died at Gravesend. Rolfe left the infant Thomas, who was also ill, with Sir Lewis Stukely, and returned alone to Virginia. Stukely was to entrust the baby to the child's uncle Henry Rolfe until such time as Thomas recovered enough to undertake the arduous voyage to Virginia.

Return to Virginia

Prior to leaving for England, Rolfe had held public office in Virginia. In 1614, the same year he married Pocahontas, he assumed the offices of secretary and recorder general of the colony, and also became a member of the governor's Council. Upon his return, he penned a letter to Virginia Company of London official Sir Edwin Sandys, dated June 8, 1617, justifying his decision to leave Thomas in England and requesting that Sandys "contynue your noble favor and furtherance even for my childe sake, being the lyving ashes of his deceased Mother." In particular, Rolfe hoped for a continuation of the stipend that the company had allotted Pocahontas to be used for the support of their son. Apparently the answer came in the fact that John Rolfe received a patent for 400 acres near Hog Island on the south bank of the James River and with William Peirce (sometimes Pierce) and others an additional 1,700 acres near Mulberry Island on the north side of the James sometime thereafter. In the meantime, Rolfe left his positions as secretary and recorder general in 1619, perhaps because his term of office had expired. He remained on the Council until his death in 1622.

In addition to his work in government and tobacco farming, Rolfe continued to write, composing "A relation from Master John Rolfe, June 15, 1618" on the current status of the colony, which was published in Captain John Smith's 1624 edition of his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles . The short portion that survives noted that relations with the Indians were still peaceful and that building and planting were going forward without hindrance. An addition to the document is dated 1619, after Sir George Yeardley had become deputy governor of the colony. In it Rolfe noted that he had been named to Yeardley's governor's Council and then listed a number of ships that had arrived in Virginia, how industrious the colonists were in raising tobacco and corn, how well the trade with the Patawomeck Indians was going, and that people were contributing to the establishment of the college at Henricus, among other topics. Rolfe concluded that if every officer of the company were to "live well in his Office, without oppressing any under their charge ... then we may truly say in Virginia, we are the most happy people in the world."

Rolfe is also responsible for the first mention of Africans in Virginia. In a letter to Sandys in January 1620, Rolfe noted that late in August 1619 the Dutch ship White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, at what is now Fort Monroe, with "20. and odd Negroes" on board. Four days later, the English ship Treasurer arrived with additional Africans, the lot having been captured from a Portuguese ship carrying slaves en route from Luanda, Angola, to the West Indies. (The Treasurer was partly owned by Samuel Argall and was the same ship on which Argall had transported Rolfe and Pocahontas to England.) Rolfe's letter is the first extant mention of Africans in Virginia, although there may have been others in the colony before then.

Sometime in 1619 or 1620, Rolfe married for a third time, to Joane Peirce, daughter of William Peirce, with whom he had acquired the patent at Mulberry Island. John and Joane Rolfe became the parents of a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1621. In his will, Rolfe left his estate to his wife and two children, Thomas and Elizabeth. No mention is made in the will of any land at Bermuda Hundred. He bequeathed to Thomas a parcel of land he had acquired by patent from the king's Council for Virginia in the country of "Toppahannah between the two Creeks over againste James Citty," and to his wife Joane Rolfe for the benefit of their daughter, Elizabeth, his share of the patent at Mulberry Island.

John Rolfe described himself as "of James Citty in Virginia Esquire beinge sick in body, but of perfecte minde and memory" when he dated and signed his will on March 10, 1622. He died, probably of natural causes, soon thereafter, although the wording of that passage could have been standard for a will. Word of Rolfe's death had reached London by May 3, 1622. On that date a deposition concerning a voyage Rolfe was part of in 1618 mentioned Rolfe's subsequent death. It could be mistakenly interpreted to indicate that Rolfe had died en route to England in the spring of 1622 if the events of the 1618 voyage are ignored. An undocumented supposition that he died in Opechancanough's attack on March 22, 1622, probably arose from the absence of Rolfe's name on any Virginia documents or lists of inhabitants compiled after that date, especially of those who died in the uprising. Because Jamestown was not attacked, however, it is unlikely that he died in that event.

John Rolfe has been overshadowed by his wife Pocahontas. Nevertheless, he is still important for establishing Virginia's main cash crop, the tobacco Nicotiana tabacum, for their marriage, which ended the First Anglo-Powhatan War, and for his writings about the colony that helped to promote settlement and investment and recorded one of the few accounts of Virginia in the 1610s.

Major Works

A True Relation of the state of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale Knight in May Last 1616 (1617)

"A relation from Master John Rolfe, June 15, 1618" (1624; in Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles by John Smith)

Captain Christopher Newport and William Strachey serve as witnesses to the christening of John Rolfe's daughter, named Bermuda after the group of islands on which they are stranded. The girl and her mother both die.

The party of Virginia colonists headed by Sir Thomas Gates, now aboard the Patience and Deliverance, arrives at Jamestown. They find only sixty survivors of a winter famine. Gates decides to abandon the colony for Newfoundland.

Samuel Argall captures Pocahontas, who is held by Sir Thomas Dale as a guarantee of peace with her father, Powhatan. Dale also helps to direct her conversion to Christianity.

John Rolfe serves as a member of the governor's Council.

John Rolfe serves as secretary and recorder general of Virginia.

On or about this day, Pocahontas and John Rolfe marry in a ceremony assented to by Sir Thomas Dale and Powhatan, who sends one of her uncles to witness the ceremony. Powhatan also rescinds a standing order to attack the English wherever and whenever possible, ending the First Anglo-Powhatan War.

Sometime during this time, either in Virginia or in England, Thomas Rolfe is born to Rebecca (née Pocahontas) and John Rolfe.

The Virginia Company of London sponsors a voyage to England. Led by Sir Thomas Dale, other passengers include Pocahontas, her husband John Rolfe, their son Thomas, a retinue of young Indigenous women, and the priest Uttamatomakkin, a brother-in-law of Pocahontas's father Powhatan. Samuel Argall commands the ship.

Twenty thousand pounds of John Rolfe's tobacco arrives in England.

After two months of delay due to bad weather, Pocahontas, her husband John Rolfe, Uttamatomakkin, and the rest of their traveling party embark from England on the Virginia-bound George. Pocahontas soon takes ill, however, and is taken ashore at Gravesend, where she dies.

John Rolfe writes a letter to Virginia Company of London official Sir Edwin Sandys justifying his decision to leave his infant son in England after the death of Pocahontas and asking for a continuation of the stipend that the company had allotted Pocahontas.

Approximately 40,000 pounds of John Rolfe's tobacco arrives in England, twice the amount shipped the year before.

Sometime during this period, John Rolfe marries his third wife, Joane Peirce.

The White Lion, captained by John Colyn Jope, arrives at Point Comfort, where Jope sells "20. and odd Negroes" in exchange for food. These are the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony. Four days later, the Treasurer arrives and its captain, Daniel Elfrith, sells two or three of the enslaved Africans aboard.

Elizabeth Rolfe, daughter of John Rolfe and Joane Peirce Rolfe, is born.

John Rolfe dates and signs his will, describing himself "of James Citty in Virginia Esquire beinge sick in body, but of perfecte minde and memory."

A deposition in London concerning a voyage that John Rolfe was part of in 1618 mentions Rolfe's death.

Carson, Jane. "The Will of John Rolfe." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 58 (1950): 58-65.

Hamor, Ralph. A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia. Reprinted from the London edition, 1615, with an introduction by A. L. Rowse. Richmond: The Virginia State Library, 1957.

Hotten, John Camden, ed. The Original Lists of Persons of Quality... 1600-1700 ... London, England, 1874; reprint, Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1983.

Kingsbury, Susan Myra. The Records of the Virginia Company of London: The Court Book, from the Manuscript in the Library of Congress 3, no. 72, 105-106. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. "John Rolfe." American National Biography, 18:785-786. Edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

"A relation from Master John Rolfe, June 15, 1618," in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) in Three Volumes. Edited by Philip L. Barbour, 2:265-269. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1986.

Rolfe, John. A True Relation of the state of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale Knight in May Last 1616. Charlottesville: Published by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities by the University Press of Virginia, 1971.

Thorndale, William. "Two Rolfe Negatives: John Rolfe." Virginia Genealogist 34 (1990): 209-213.

Waterhouse, Edward, A Declaration of the State of the Colony of Virginia, 35-43. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970.

APA Citation:

Salmon, Emily. John Rolfe (d. 1622). (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/rolfe-john-d-1622.

MLA Citation:

Salmon, Emily. "John Rolfe (d. 1622)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 01 Feb. 2024

Last updated: 2021, December 22

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John Rolfe (d. 1622) - Encyclopedia Virginia

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Early Years Little is known of Rolfe's parentage or early life. While historians and genealogists have generally maintained that he was baptized in Heacham, Norfolk County, England, on May 6, 1585, and was the son of John Rolfe and Dorothy (Dorothea) Mason Rolfe, this is unlikely to be true.

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War between France and Great Britain.

Colonists are forced to side with England.

"7 Years War"

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The French and Indian War, the North American phase of the larger Seven Years' War, began after a series of incidents in the upper Ohio River valley, which the French and British governments both claimed as their territory. Military forces assembled by both imperial powers built forts in the region and attempted to capture each others' forts. These skirmishes, which included an expedition led by George Washington, ultimately led to the escalation of a wider, full-scale war between Great Britain and France.

Wanting to limit British influence along their frontier, the French built a string of forts from Lake Erie towards the forks of the Ohio (present-day Pittsburgh).

Since the colony of Virginia also claimed this region, Virginian lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie sent Major George Washington with a small expedition to order the removal of the French forts in late 1753. Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf, about 15 miles inland from present-day Erie, Pennsylvania, and delivered his message. The commander of the fort, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, received Washington and his men courteously, but denied the validity of English claims to the contested region. Washington then returned hastily to Virginia, arriving in early 1754, and delivered the French reply to Governor Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie and the legislature agreed that French rejection of British demands constituted a hostile act, and that the French must be driven from their frontier forts on British-claimed land. Dinwiddie sent Captain William Trent of the Virginia militia to construct a fort at the strategically important forks of the Ohio River and to convince the local Indians to ally against the French. Dinwiddie also promoted Washington to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and ordered an expedition to compel the French to surrender their forts.

While French and British officials maneuvered military forces about, they also attempted to curry favor with American Indians living in the region. The most important group, the Mingoes, were part of the Iroquois Confederation, which was allied with Great Britain. British officials claimed the Iroquois Confederacy had granted a Native American named Tanaghrisson the title of 'Half-King' over the Mingoes and other Native communities under Iroquois rule. However, many Indians in the upper Ohio Valley were concerned about British colonists encroaching upon their land, and did not acknowledge either British or Iroquois authority. Although many of them also feared French power and bore grudges against the French from previous wars, the Indians of the upper Ohio valley believed a French alliance to be the lesser of two evils. Consequently, they were amenable to supplying French forces with additional men and intelligence about British movements.

Aided by such reports, the French soon learned of the British fort that William Trent and his small group of men were constructing, and French forces moved swiftly to compel its surrender on April 17, 1754. The French destroyed the unfinished fort, building in its place the much more formidable Fort Duquesne.

Further south, George Washington, accompanied by Tanaghrisson, surprised an encampment of French soldiers in southwestern Pennsylvania on May 24, 1754. A brief fight ensued, and afterwards the wounded French leader, Ensign Joseph de Jumonville, attempted to explain through translators that the French expedition was on a peaceful mission to warn British forces about their incursions into French-claimed territory. Although accounts of the incident differ, it seems that Tanaghrisson, who bore an intense personal hatred of the French stemming from earlier war experiences, intervened in the negotiations and killed Jumonville. Expecting further French incursions, Washington then hastily constructed a fort and prepared to defend his forces, but a combined French and Indian force forced his surrender on July 3.

Once he heard of Washington's defeat, Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie immediately passed on the news to his superiors in London and called for aid from neighboring colonies. Only North Carolina responded, but refused to make any expenditures outside its own borders. However, British Prime Minister Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, reacted swiftly to the news, and planned a quick strike against the French forts before they could be reinforced. King George II approved Newcastle's plan to send General Edward Braddock to quickly seize French frontier forts.

Other political leaders wanted a bigger war, and so they publicly announced Newcastle's plans and changed the original plan so that Braddock would command more forces and order the fractious North American colonies to provide additional support against the French. Once the plans had been publicly announced, the French government moved quickly to dispatch reinforcements to North America and further pursued negotiations to diplomatically isolate the British government by winning over its traditional European allies. Once military forces were under way, war was inevitable.

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Milestones: 1750-1775 - Office of the Historian

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5. What causes the size of the Colonies to increase after the Fr and In War?

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5. What causes the size of the Colonies to increase after the Fr and In War?

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After the French and Indian War, the colonies win

Treaty Of Paris (1763) Gives the colonies Westward land in the Americas

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Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations - Office of the Historian

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6. What eventually causes England to give up on the Americas? 

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6. What eventually causes England to give up on the Americas? 

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National Debt

Just after the F and I war, their National Debt was doubled from 70 M Euros to 140 mill

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7. How many original colonies were there? 

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7. How many original colonies were there? 

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There were 13 Original Colonies

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Introduction
The 13 colonies were a group of settlements that became the original states of the United States of America. Nearly all the colonies were founded by the English, and all were located along the East Coast of North America. In 1776 the 13 colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. The names of the colonies were Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia.

Establishment of the Colonies
In 1607 English settlers founded Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, and in 1624 Virginia became a royal colony. The Puritans known as the Pilgrims founded Plymouth, the second English colony in America, in 1620. New Hampshire was settled in 1623, but it did not gain its name until 1629.

In 1630 another group of Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Massachusetts controlled New Hampshire from 1641 to 1679, and in 1691 Plymouth was joined with Massachusetts.

Some colonists from Massachusetts settled in Connecticut in the 1630s. It became an official colony in 1662. Another group from Massachusetts founded Rhode Island in 1636. That group was led by the minister Roger Williams, who disagreed with the religious rules of Massachusetts. A group of Roman Catholics founded Maryland in 1634.

Settlers from other countries founded colonies as well. The Dutch founded New Netherland in 1624. The Swedish settled in Delaware, part of New Sweden, in 1638. The Dutch and the Swedish also moved into what is now New Jersey.

In the 1650s the Dutch took over the Swedish lands, but in 1664 the English took over all the Dutch territory. From that time to independence, all the colonies were ruled by the kings and queens of England. New Netherland was renamed New York by the British, and that colony governed New Jersey until 1738.

In 1681 an English Quaker leader, William Penn, set up the colony of Pennsylvania. Delaware became part of Pennsylvania the next year. Delaware formed its own government but remained under Pennsylvania's control until independence.

The Carolina region had become an English colony in 1663. In 1729 Carolina was split into North and South Carolina. Georgia-the last of the original 13 colonies-was settled in 1733.

The Colonies and Britain
For most of the time that the colonies were under British rule, the monarchy allowed them a great deal of freedom. Most of the colonies set up forms of self-government. The colonists also developed their own society and economy.

Relations between Britain and the American colonies grew worse after the French and Indian War (1754-63). The British wanted the colonists to pay taxes to help pay for the war, but the colonists did not want to pay taxes without being represented in the British Parliament. These disagreements led to the American Revolution.

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The 13 colonies were a group of settlements that became the original states of the United States of America. Nearly all the colonies were founded by the English, and all were...

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8. Why were European countries seeking the Americas?

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8. Why were European countries seeking the Americas?

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"God, Gold, Glory"

Resources was a leading factor in Euro countries seeking the Americas.

Religious persecution brought the pilgrims into the Americas.

Columbus was seeking glory with the Monarchs of Spain, along with the riches to come.

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Historians generally recognize three motives for European exploration and colonization in the New World: God, gold, and glory.

Religious motivations can be traced all the way back to the Crusades, the series of religious wars between the 11th and 15th centuries during which European Christians sought to claim Jerusalem as an exclusively Christian space.

Europeans also searched for optimal trade routes to lucrative Asian markets and hoped to gain global recognition for their country.

The Crusades: increased religious intolerance and forceful religious conversion

The year 622 brought a new challenge to Christianity. Near Mecca, Saudi Arabia, a prophet named Muhammad claimed he received a revelation that became a cornerstone of the Islamic faith. The Koran, which contained the revelations received by Muhammad, identified Jesus Christ not as God but as a prophet. Islam spread throughout the Middle East and into Europe until 732.

Soon thereafter, European Christians began the Crusades, a campaign of violence against Muslims to dominate the Holy Lands -an area that extended from modern-day Turkey in the north along the Mediterranean coast to the Sinai Peninsula-under Islamic control, partially in response to sustained Muslim control in Europe. The city of Jerusalem is a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; evidence exists that the three religions lived there in harmony for centuries. But in 1095, European Christians decided not only to reclaim the holy city from Muslim rulers but also to conquer the entire surrounding area.

The Crusades provided the religious ideology for the Reconquista, which in turn inspired Atlantic colonization. The Reconquista, or reconquest, refers to the 800 years of violence and expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula after the failed Crusades. The Crusades and the Reconquista cemented religious intolerance, and the Christians looked to colonization partly as a means of continuing religious conquests. Particularly in the strongly Catholic nations of Spain and Portugal, religious zeal motivated the rulers to convert Native Americans and sanctify Christian global dominance.

The lure of gold: finding new routes to trade Eastern goods

Despite the consequent religious polarization, the Crusades dramatically increased maritime trade between the East and West. As Crusaders experienced the feel of silk, the taste of spices, and the utility of porcelain, desire for these products created new markets for merchants.

Merchants' ships brought Europeans valuable goods, traveling between the port cities of western Europe and the East from the 10th century on along routes collectively labeled the Silk Road. However, transporting goods along the Silk Road was costly, slow, and unprofitable. Muslim middlemen collected taxes as the goods changed hands. Robbers waited to ambush treasure-laden caravans.

As well as seeking a water passage to the wealthy cities of the East, sailors wanted to find a route to the exotic and wealthy Spice Islands in modern-day Indonesia, whose location was kept secret by Muslim rulers. The lure of profit pushed explorers to seek new trade routes to the Spice Islands and to eliminate Muslim middlemen.

A thirst for glory: European competition for global dominance

Competition between the Portuguese and the Spanish motivated both nations to colonize quickly and aggressively. Prince Henry the Navigator spearheaded Portugal's exploration of Africa and the Atlantic in the 1400s. Portuguese sailors successfully navigated an eastward route to West Africa, where they established a trading foothold. Portugal then spread its empire down the western coast of Africa to the Congo, along the western coast of India, and eventually to Brazil and the Atlantic islands. Although the Portuguese did not rule over an immense landmass, their strategic holdings of islands and coastal ports gave them almost unrivaled control of nautical trade routes.

The travels of Portuguese traders to western Africa also acquainted the Portuguese with the African slave trade, already widely in practice in West Africa and funded by sugar production on the newly colonized Atlantic islands. Upon discovering the immense global market for sugar, the Portuguese began to trade enslaved people across the Atlantic to toil on the sugar plantations. The Portuguese fort Elmina Castle, located in modern-day Ghana, became more of a holding pen for enslaved Africans from the interior of the continent than a trading post, as the markets for slave labor in both Europe and then the New World boomed.

Portuguese colonization in the 1400s inaugurated an era of aggressive European expansion across the Atlantic. The Spanish, threatened by the Portuguese monopoly on enslaved Africans and expansion in the Atlantic, started their own colonization project with Christopher Columbus in 1492. The competition between the two nations continued and drew more and more Europeans to the New World.

What do you think?

How did the Crusades influence European colonization projects?

Explain the relationship between religion, commerce, and conquest at the beginning of European exploration and colonization.

Imagine you are a European explorer in the 1400s. Do you think you would be most motivated by religious conversion, global market opportunities, or competition with other European nations? Why?

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Motivation for European conquest of the New World (article) | Khan Academy

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Historians generally recognize three motives for European exploration and colonization in the New World: God, gold, and glory. Religious motivations can be traced all the way back to the Crusades, the series of religious wars between the 11th and 15th centuries during which European Christians sought to claim Jerusalem as an exclusively Christian space.

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9. Were there people already in the Americas?

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9. Were there people already in the Americas?

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Of course, there was!

Tribes of Native Americans are already living here when people come to the Americas from Europe.

Each tribe has its own cultures, religions, and languages.

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10. Is there evidence of European conquests to the Americas before Columbus?

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10. Is there evidence of European conquests to the Americas before Columbus?

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Along with the Spanish already being in places like Florida, there is also evidence if Norse or viking settlement in the Americas long before Columbus.

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Kara Swearingen (United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

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Kara Swearingen (United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

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1. What was Americas role during World War 1? 

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1. What was Americas role during World War 1? 

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America helped turn the tide in favor of Britain and France in order to defeat Germany and Austria.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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World War I Changed America and Transformed Its Role in International Relat

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The American Expeditionary Forces arrived in Europe in 1917 and helped turn the tide in favor of Britain and France, leading to an Allied victory over Germany and Austria in November 1918. By the time of the armistice, more than four million Americans had served in the armed forces and 116,708 had l…

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2. What was women's suffrage and the 19th amendment about?

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2. What was women's suffrage and the 19th amendment about?

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The women's suffrage movement was a journey to earn women the right to vote. The first convention was held in 1848, then continued to hold conventions throughout time and finally ended in 1920.

The 19th amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources
Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
Teaching Activities

Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women's voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women's rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage - the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 - they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women's access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women's clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women - victims of racism as well as sexism - needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement's leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman's Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners - comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany - speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment - the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

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The U.S. stock market crashed in 1929 causing a financial crisis till 1941.

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                      by 
Gary Richardson

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The longest and deepest downturn in the history of the United States and the modern industrial economy lasted more than a decade, beginning in 1929 and ending during World War II in 1941.

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The New Deal was a set of domestic policies enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt that dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in the economy in response to the Great Depression.

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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, he enacted a range of experimental programs to combat the Great Depression.

The New Deal was a set of domestic policies enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt that dramatically expanded the federal government's role in the economy in response to the Great Depression.

Historians commonly speak of a First New Deal (1933-1934), with the "alphabet soup" of relief, recovery, and reform agencies it created, and a Second New Deal (1935-1938) that offered further legislative reforms and created the groundwork for today's modern social welfare system.

It was the massive military expenditures of World War II, not the New Deal, that eventually pulled the United States out of the Great Depression.

Origins of the New Deal

The term New Deal derives from Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 speech accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for president. At the convention Roosevelt declared, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." Though Roosevelt did not have concrete policy proposals in mind at the time, the phrase "New Deal" came to encompass his many programs designed to lift the United States out of the Great Depression.

The New Deal created a broad range of federal government programs that sought to offer economic relief to the suffering, regulate private industry, and grow the economy. The New Deal is often summed up by the "Three Rs":

Roosevelt's New Deal expanded the size and scope of the federal government considerably, and in doing so fundamentally reshaped American political culture around the principle that the government is responsible for the welfare of its citizens. As one historian has put it: "Before the 1930s, national political debate often revolved around the question of whether the federal government should intervene in the economy. After the New Deal, debate rested on how it should intervene."

The First New Deal (1933-1934)

At the time of Roosevelt's inauguration on March 4, 1933 the nation had been spiraling downward into the worst economic crisis in its history. Industrial output was only half of what it had been three years earlier, the stock market had recovered only slightly from its catastrophic losses, and unemployment stood at a staggering 25 percent.

The First New Deal began in a whirlwind of legislative action called " The First Hundred Days." From March through June 1933, at Roosevelt's behest, Congress passed legislation aimed at addressing the banking crisis, unemployment, and weak industrial performance, among other problems, through an "alphabet soup" of new laws and agencies. Among these, some of the most important were:

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which boosted agricultural prices by offering government subsidies to farmers to reduce output.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which employed young, single men at federally funded jobs on government lands.

The Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA), which gave federal grants to states that funded salaries for government workers as well as local soup kitchens and other direct-aid to the poor programs.

The National Recovery Act (NRA), which sought to boost businesses' profits and workers' wages by establishing industry-by-industry codes that set prices and wages, as well as guaranteeing workers the right to organize into unions.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which guaranteed individuals that money they deposited in a bank would be repaid to them by the federal government in the event that their bank went out of business.

In 1934, Roosevelt supported the passage of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which brought important federal government oversight and regulation to the stock market.

The Second New Deal (1935-1938)

The second phase of the New Deal focused on increasing worker protections and building long-lasting financial security for Americans. Four of the most notable pieces of legislation included:

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions of Americans in public works projects, from constructing bridges and roads to painting murals and writing plays.

The Wagner Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively.

The Social Security Act, which required workers and employers to contribute-through a payroll tax-to the Social Security trust fund. That fund, in turn, makes monthly payments to retirees over the age of 65, as well as to the long-term disabled.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which mandated a 40-hour work week (with time-and-a-half for overtime), set an hourly minimum wage, and restricted child labor.

The legacy of the New Deal

Roosevelt's New Deal sought to reinvigorate the economy by stimulating consumer demand. The New Deal embraced federal deficit spending to promote economic growth, a fiscal approach that came to be associated with the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes argued that government spending that put money in consumers' hands would allow them to buy products made in the private sector. Then, as employers sold more and more products, they would have the money to hire more and more workers, who could afford to buy more and more products, and so on. In this way, Roosevelt and his supporters theorized, the Great Depression's downward economic spiral could be reversed.

The New Deal was only partially successful, however. The Supreme Court ruled against several New Deal initiatives in 1935, leading a frustrated Roosevelt to suggest expanding the Supreme Court to as many as fifteen Justices (a political misstep that would haunt him for the rest of his career). Despite the New Deal's lofty dreams, the United States only fully recovered from the Great Depression due to massive military spending brought on by the Second World War.

Nevertheless, key elements in the New Deal remain with us today, including federal regulation of wages, hours, child labor, and collective bargaining rights, as well as the social security system.

What do you think?

How was the New Deal's approach to the crisis of the Great Depression different from previous responses to economic slumps in American history?

Which do you think played a larger role in ending the Depression: the New Deal or World War II? Why?

What aspects of the New Deal, if any, do you see in American society today?

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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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5. What was America's role during World War II?

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5. What was America's role during World War II?

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During World War II, the United States began to provide significant military supplies and other assistance to the Allies in September 1940, even though the United States did not enter the war until December 1941.

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Milestones: 1937–1945 - Office of the Historian

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A nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans and for an end to racial segregation and exclusion across the United States.

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Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 1965

In the middle of the 20th century, a nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans and for an end to racial segregation and exclusion arose across the United States. This movement took many forms, and its participants used a wide range of means to make their demands felt, including sit-ins, boycotts, protest marches, freedom rides, and lobbying government officials for legislative action. They faced opposition on many fronts and fell victim to bombings and beatings, arrest and assassination. By the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had brought about dramatic changes in the law and in public practice, and had secured legal protection of rights and freedoms for African Americans that would shape American life for decades to come.

A few key moments include:

Brown v. Board of Education The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, spent decades fighting against racial segregation in education. This long campaign culminated when the U.S. Supreme Court heard Brown v. Board of Education, which gathered together five separate cases related to school segregation with Marshall leading the arguments before the Court. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," legally ending racial segregation in public schools and overruling the "separate but equal" principle set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1889.

Rosa Parks arrested On December 1, 1955, civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger. The arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and was a defining moment in Parks' long career as an activist. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also saw the rise to prominence of a young Montgomery minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little Rock school integration crisis After the Brown v. Board, Supreme Court decision, state and local officials in a number of states resisted school integration. In September of 1957, nine African American students attempted to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor ordered the state's National Guard to surround the high school, and the Black students were harassed and kept from entering the building. President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent U.S. troops to protect the students and enforce the desegregation order of the federal courts.

Birmingham campaign In the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a large-scale campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the city's brutal segregation policies. Many of the protestors and leaders were jailed, and while behind bars, Dr. King wrote a long public letter that explained his philosophy of non-violent protest. This document, which became known as "The Letter from Birmingham Jail," went on to be widely republished and regarded as a classic defense of the principles of civil disobedience.

The March on Washington On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people arrived in Washington, D.C., for the largest non-violent civil rights demonstration that the nation had ever seen: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was organized in a few months, coordinated by veteran strategist Bayard Rustin, and was meant to demonstrate an urgent need for substantive change. The demands in the event program began with "Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress" and included the end of discrimination in education, housing, employment, and more. Leaders and organizers met with members of Congress and with President John F. Kennedy, while the march ended at the Lincoln Memorial with music and speeches, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Selma civil rights marches On March 7, 1965, a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, led by 25-year-old activist leader John Lewis, was attacked by state troopers and sheriff's deputies as the marchers attempted to cross the city's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Coverage of the marchers being beaten, tear-gassed, and trampled by police horses prompted outrage across the nation, and activists, religious leaders, and everyday citizens flooded into Selma to lend their support. On March 9, a second group of marchers, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., approached the bridge, prayed there, and returned to church. On March 21, thousands of marchers crossed the bridge, this time protected by federalized National Guard troops, and headed to Montgomery.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 The two most significant pieces of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction were passed within two years of each other. Between the two, these Acts outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They banned discrimination in public accommodations, public education, and employment, and prohibited race-based restrictions on voting. Such sweeping legislation had been a longtime goal of the civil rights movement, and it brought many of the laws and practices of the Jim Crow Era to an end.

Documents

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The Civil Rights Movement | The Post War United States, 1945-1968 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The United States was rocked by a nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans.

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This was a series of events that led to action for gender equality.

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" Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. " That was Margaret Mead's conclusion after a lifetime of observing very diverse cultures around the world. Her insight has been borne out time and again throughout the development of this country of ours. Being allowed to live life in an atmosphere of religious freedom, having a voice in the government you support with your taxes, living free of lifelong enslavement by another person. These beliefs about how life should and must be lived were once considered outlandish by many. But these beliefs were fervently held by visionaries whose steadfast work brought about changed minds and attitudes. Now these beliefs are commonly shared across U.S. society.

Another initially outlandish idea that has come to pass: United States citizenship for women. 1998 marked the 150th Anniversary of a movement by women to achieve full civil rights in this country. Over the past seven generations, dramatic social and legal changes have been accomplished that are now so accepted that they go unnoticed by people whose lives they have utterly changed. Many people who have lived through the recent decades of this process have come to accept blithely what has transpired. And younger people, for the most part, can hardly believe life was ever otherwise. They take the changes completely in stride, as how life has always been.

The staggering changes for women that have come about over those seven generations in family life, in religion, in government, in employment, in education - these changes did not just happen spontaneously. Women themselves made these changes happen, very deliberately. Women have not been the passive recipients of miraculous changes in laws and human nature. Seven generations of women have come together to affect these changes in the most democratic ways: through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and nonviolent resistance. They have worked very deliberately to create a better world, and they have succeeded hugely.

Throughout 1998, the 150th anniversary of the Women's Rights Movement is being celebrated across the nation with programs and events taking every form imaginable. Like many amazing stories, the history of the Women's Rights Movement began with a small group of people questioning why human lives were being unfairly constricted.

Today we are living the legacy of this afternoon conversation among women friends. Throughout 1998, events celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Women's Rights Movement are looking at the massive changes these women set in motion when they daringly agreed to convene the world's first Women's Rights Convention.

Within two days of their afternoon tea together, this small group had picked a date for their convention, found a suitable location, and placed a small announcement in the Seneca County Courier. They called "A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman." The gathering would take place at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848.

In the history of western civilization, no similar public meeting had ever been called.

In this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton carefully enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly. Eighteen was precisely the number of grievances America's revolutionary forefathers had listed in their Declaration of Independence from England.

Stanton's version read, "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world." Then it went into specifics:

Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law

Women were not allowed to vote

Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation

Married women had no property rights

Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity

Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women

Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation in the levying of these taxes

Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they were paid only a fraction of what men earned

Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law

Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university would accept women students

With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the church

Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men

Strong words... Large grievances... And remember: This was just seventy years after the Revolutionary War. Doesn't it seem surprising to you that this unfair treatment of women was the norm in this new, very idealistic democracy? But this Declaration of Sentiments spelled out what was the status quo for European-American women in 1848 America, while it was even worse for enslaved Black women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's draft continued: "Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, - in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States."

That summer, change was in the air and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was full of hope that the future could and would be brighter for women.

The First Women's Rights Convention
The convention was convened as planned, and over the two-days of discussion, the Declaration of Sentiments and 12 resolutions received unanimous endorsement, one by one, with a few amendments. The only resolution that did not pass unanimously was the call for women's enfranchisement. That women should be allowed to vote in elections was almost inconceivable to many. Lucretia Mott, Stanton's longtime friend, had been shocked when Stanton had first suggested such an idea. And at the convention, heated debate over the woman's vote filled the air.

Today, it's hard for us to imagine this, isn't it? Even the heartfelt pleas of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a refined and educated woman of the time, did not move the assembly. Not until Frederick Douglass, the noted Black abolitionist and rich orator, started to speak, did the uproar subside. Woman, like the slave, he argued, had the right to liberty. "Suffrage," he asserted, "is the power to choose rulers and make laws, and the right by which all others are secured." In the end, the resolution won enough votes to carry, but by a bare majority.

The Declaration of Sentiments ended on a note of complete realism: "In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country."

In ridicule, the entire text of the Declaration of Sentiments was often published, with the names of the signers frequently included. Just as ridicule today often has a squelching effect on new ideas, this attack in the press caused many people from the Convention to rethink their positions. Many of the women who had attended the convention were so embarrassed by the publicity that they actually withdrew their signatures from the Declaration. But most stood firm. And something the editors had not anticipated happened: Their negative articles about the women's call for expanded rights were so livid and widespread that they actually had a positive impact far beyond anything the organizers could have hoped for. People in cities and isolated towns alike were now alerted to the issues, and joined this heated discussion of women's rights in great numbers!

The Movement Expands
The Seneca Falls women had optimistically hoped for "a series of conventions embracing every part of the country." And that's just what did happen. Women's Rights Conventions were held regularly from 1850 until the start of the Civil War. Some drew such large crowds that people actually had to be turned away for lack of sufficient meeting space!

The women's rights movement of the late 19th century went on to address the wide range of issues spelled out at the Seneca Falls Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and women like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth traveled the country lecturing and organizing for the next forty years. Eventually, winning the right to vote emerged as the central issue, since the vote would provide the means to achieve the other reforms. All told, the campaign for woman suffrage met such staunch opposition that it took 72 years for the women and their male supporters to be successful.

As you might imagine, any 72-year campaign includes thousands of political strategists, capable organizers, administrators, activists and lobbyists. The story of diligent women's rights activism is a litany of achievements against tremendous odds, of ingenious strategies and outrageous tactics used to outwit opponents and make the most of limited resources. It's a dramatic tale, filled with remarkable women facing down incredible obstacles to win that most basic American civil right - the vote.

Among these women are several activists whose names and and accomplishments should become as familiar to Americans as those of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of course. And Susan B. Anthony. Matilda Joslyn Gage. Lucy Stone. They were pioneer theoreticians of the 19th-century women's rights movement.

Esther Morris, the first woman to hold a judicial position, who led the first successful state campaign for woman suffrage, in Wyoming in 1869. Abigail Scott Duniway, the leader of the successful fight in Oregon and Washington in the early 1900s.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell, organizers of thousands of African-American women who worked for suffrage for all women.

Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone's daughter, who carried on their mothers' legacy through the next generation.

Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the early years of the 20th century, who brought the campaign to its final success.

Alice Paul, founder and leader of the National Woman's Party, considered the radical wing of the movement.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a Supreme Court Justice, learned the story of the Women's Rights Movement. Today she says, "I think about how much we owe to the women who went before us - legions of women, some known but many more unknown. I applaud the bravery and resilience of those who helped all of us - you and me - to be here today."

After the Vote was Won
After the vote was finally won in 1920, the organized Women's Rights Movement continued on in several directions. While the majority of women who had marched, petitioned and lobbied for woman suffrage looked no further, a minority - like Alice Paul - understood that the quest for women's rights would be an ongoing struggle that was only advanced, not satisfied, by the vote.

In 1919, as the suffrage victory drew near, the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconfigured itself into the League of Women Voters to ensure that women would take their hard-won vote seriously and use it wisely.

In 1920, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor was established to gather information about the situation of women at work, and to advocate for changes it found were needed. Many suffragists became actively involved with lobbying for legislation to protect women workers from abuse and unsafe conditions.

In 1923, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman's Party, took the next obvious step. She drafted an Equal Rights Amendment for the United States Constitution. Such a federal law, it was argued, would ensure that "Men and women have equal rights throughout the United States." A constitutional amendment would apply uniformly, regardless of where a person lived.

The second wing of the post-suffrage movement was one that had not been explicitly anticipated in the Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments." It was the birth control movement, initiated by a public health nurse, Margaret Sanger, just as the suffrage drive was nearing its victory. The idea of woman's right to control her own body, and especially to control her own reproduction and sexuality, added a visionary new dimension to the ideas of women's emancipation. This movement not only endorsed educating women about existing birth control methods. It also spread the conviction that meaningful freedom for modern women meant they must be able to decide for themselves whether they would become mothers, and when. For decades, Margaret Sanger and her supporters faced down at every turn the zealously enforced laws denying women this right. In 1936, a Supreme Court decision declassified birth control information as obscene. Still, it was not until 1965 that married couples in all states could obtain contraceptives legally.

The Second Wave
So it's clear that, contrary to common misconception, the Women's Rights Movement did not begin in the 1960s. What occurred in the 1960s was actually a second wave of activism that washed into the public consciousness, fueled by several seemingly independent events of that turbulent decade. Each of these events brought a different segment of the population into the movement.

First: Esther Peterson was the director of the Women's Bureau of the Dept. of Labor in 1961. She considered it to be the government's responsibility to take an active role in addressing discrimination against women. With her encouragement, President Kennedy convened a Commission on the Status of Women, naming Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. The report issued by that commission in 1963 documented discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life. State and local governments quickly followed suit and established their own commissions for women, to research conditions and recommend changes that could be initiated.

Then: In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique evolved out of a survey she had conducted for her 20-year college reunion. In it she documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. The book became an immediate bestseller, and inspired thousands of women to look for fulfillment beyond the role of homemaker.

Next: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, religion, and national origin. The category "sex" was included as a last-ditch effort to kill the bill. But it passed, nevertheless. With its passage, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established to investigate discrimination complaints. Within the commission's first five years, it received 50,000 sex discrimination complaints. But it was quickly obvious that the commission was not very interested in pursuing these complaints. Betty Friedan, the chairs of the various state Commissions on the Status of Women, and other feminists agreed to form a civil rights organization for women similar to the NAACP. In 1966, the National Organization for Women was organized, soon to be followed by an array of other mass-membership organizations addressing the needs of specific groups of women, including Blacks, Latinas, Asians-Americans, lesbians, welfare recipients, business owners, aspiring politicians, and tradeswomen and professional women of every sort.

During this same time, thousands of young women on college campuses were playing active roles within the anti-war and civil rights movement. At least,that was their intention. Many were finding their efforts blocked by men who felt leadership of these movements was their own province, and that women's roles should be limited to fixing food and running mimeograph machines. It wasn't long before these young women began forming their own "women's liberation" organizations to address their role and status within these progressive movements and within society at large.

New Issues Come to the Fore
These various elements of the re-emerging Women's Rights Movement worked together and separately on a wide range of issues. Small groups of women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots projects like establishing women's newspapers, bookstores and cafes. They created battered women's shelters and rape crisis hotlines to care for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. They came together to form child care centers so women could work outside their homes for pay. Women health care professionals opened women's clinics to provide birth control and family planning counseling - and to offer abortion services - for low-income women. These clinics provided a safe place to discuss a wide range of health concerns and experiment with alternative forms of treatment.

With the inclusion of Title IX in the Education Codes of 1972, equal access to higher education and to professional schools became the law. The long-range effect of that one straightforward legal passage beginning "Equal access to education programs...," has been simply phenomenal. The number of women doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually limiting women's enrollment in graduate schools were outlawed. Athletics has probably been the most hotly contested area of Title IX, and it's been one of the hottest areas of improvement, too. The rise in girls' and women's participation in athletics tells the story: One in twenty-seven high school girls played sports 25 years ago; one in three do today. The whole world saw how much American women athletes could achieve during the last few Olympic Games, measured in their astonishing numbers of gold, silver, and bronze medals. This was another very visible result of Title IX.

In society at large, the Women's Rights Movement has brought about measurable changes, too. In 1972, 26% of men and women said they would not vote for a woman for president. In 1996, that sentiment had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for men. The average age of women when they first marry has moved from twenty to twenty-four during that same period.

But perhaps the most dramatic impact of the women's rights movement of the past few decades has been women's financial liberation. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married women were not issued credit cards in their own name? That most women could not get a bank loan without a male co-signer? That women working full time earned fifty-nine cents to every dollar earned by men?

Help-wanted ads in newspapers were segregated into "Help wanted - women" and "Help wanted- men." Pages and pages of jobs were announced for which women could not even apply. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled this illegal in 1968, but since the EEOC had little enforcement power, most newspapers ignored the requirement for years. The National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the issue all the way to the Supreme Court to make it possible for a woman today to hold any job for which she is qualified. And so now we see women in literally thousands of occupations which would have been almost unthinkable just one generation ago: dentist, bus driver, veterinarian, airline pilot, and phone installer, just to name a few.

Many of these changes came about because of legislation and court cases pushed by women's organizations. But many of the advances women achieved in the 1960s and '70s were personal: getting husbands to help with the housework or regularly take responsibility for family meals; getting a long-deserved promotion at work; gaining the financial and emotional strength to leave an abusive partner.

The campaign for state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment provided the opportunity for millions of women across the nation to become actively involved in the Women's Rights Movement in their own communities. Unlike so many other issues which were battled-out in Congress or through the courts, this issue came to each state to decide individually. Women's organizations of every stripe organized their members to help raise money and generate public support for the ERA. Marches were staged in key states that brought out hundreds of thousands of supporters. House meetings, walk-a-thons, door-to-door canvassing, and events of every imaginable kind were held by ordinary women, many of whom had never done anything political in their lives before. Generous checks and single dollar bills poured into the campaign headquarters, and the ranks of NOW and other women's rights organizations swelled to historic sizes. Every women's magazine and most general interest publications had stories on the implications of the ERA, and the progress of the ratification campaign.

But Elizabeth Cady Stanton proved prophetic once again. Remember her prediction that the movement should "anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule"? Opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, feared that a statement like the ERA in the Constitution would give the government too much control over our personal lives. They charged that passage of the ERA would lead to men abandoning their families, unisex toilets, gay marriages, and women being drafted. And the media, purportedly in the interest of balanced reporting, gave equal weight to these deceptive arguments just as they had when the possibility of women winning voting rights was being debated. And, just like had happened with woman suffrage, there were still very few women in state legislatures to vote their support, so male legislators once again had it in their power to decide if women should have equal rights. When the deadline for ratification came in 1982, the ERA was just three states short of the 38 needed to write it into the U.S. constitution. Seventy-five percent of the women legislators in those three pivotal states supported the ERA, but only 46% of the men voted to ratify.

Despite polls consistently showing a large majority of the population supporting the ERA, it was considered by many politicians to be just too controversial. Historically speaking, most if not all the issues of the women's rights movement have been highly controversial when they were first voiced. Allowing women to go to college? That would shrink their reproductive organs! Employ women in jobs for pay outside their homes? That would destroy families! Cast votes in national elections? Why should they bother themselves with such matters? Participate in sports? No lady would ever want to perspire! These and other issues that were once considered scandalous and unthinkable are now almost universally accepted in this country.

Women's reproductive rights. Whether or not women can terminate pregnancies is still controversial twenty-five years after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade affirmed women's choice during the first two trimesters.

Women's enrollment in military academies and service in active combat. Are these desirable?

Women in leadership roles in religious worship. Controversial for some, natural for others.

Affirmative action. Is help in making up for past discrimination appropriate? Do qualified women now face a level playing field?

The mommy track. Should businesses accommodate women's family responsibilities, or should women compete evenly for advancement with men, most of whom still assume fewer family obligations?

Pornography. Is it degrading, even dangerous, to women, or is it simply a free speech issue?

Sexual harassment. Just where does flirting leave off and harassment begin?

Surrogate motherhood. Is it simply the free right of a woman to hire out her womb for this service?

Social Security benefits allocated equally for homemakers and their working spouses, to keep surviving wives from poverty as widows.

Today, young women proudly calling themselves "the third wave" are confronting these and other thorny issues. While many women may still be hesitant to call themselves "feminist" because of the ever-present backlash, few would give up the legacy of personal freedoms and expanded opportunities women have won over the last 150 years. Whatever choices we make for our own lives, most of us envision a world for our daughters, nieces and granddaughters where all girls and women will have the opportunity to develop their unique skills and talents and pursue their dreams.

In the world of work, large numbers of women have entered the professions, the trades, and businesses of every kind. We have opened the ranks of the clergy, the military, the newsroom. More than three million women now work in occupations considered "nontraditional" until very recently.

We've accomplished so much, yet a lot still remains to be done. Substantial barriers to the full equality of America's women still remain before our freedom as a Nation can be called complete. But the Women's Rights Movement has clearly been successful in irrevocably changing the circumstances and hopes of women. The remaining injustices are being tackled daily in the courts and conference rooms, the homes and organizations, workplaces and playing fields of America.

Women and girls today are living the legacy of women's rights that seven generations of women before us have given their best to achieve. Alice Paul, that intrepid organizer who first wrote out the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, said, "I always feel the movement is sort of a mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end." Women, acting together, adding their small stones to the grand mosaic, have increased their rights against all odds, nonviolently, from an initial position of powerlessness. We have a lot to be proud of in this heroic legacy, and a great deal to celebrate on the occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the founding of the Women's Rights Movement.

© By Bonnie Eisenberg and Mary Ruthsdotter, the National Women's History Alliance. 1998

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History of the Women's Rights Movement - National Women's History Alliance

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Living the Legacy: The Women's Rights Movement (1848-1998) "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." That was Margaret Mead's conclusion after a lifetime of observing very diverse cultures around the world.

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Peace activism in the United States between 1945 and the 2010s focused mostly on opposition to U.S. foreign policy, efforts to strengthen and foster international cooperation, and support for nuclear nonproliferation and arms control.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

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Peace activism in the United States between 1945 and the 2010s focused mostly on opposition to U.S. foreign policy, efforts to strengthen and foster international cooperation, and support for nuclear nonproliferation and arms control.

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9. Development of Computers and Information Systems

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9. Development of Computers and Information Systems

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The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Baby, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption

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Information technology ( IT) is a set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages and data and information processing and storage. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system ( IT system) is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system - including all hardware, software, and peripheral equipment - operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system.

Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the earliest writing systems were developed, the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing, the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making, and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.

The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones. Several products or services within an economy are associated with information technology, including computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, internet, telecom equipment, and e-commerce.

Based on the storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC - 1450 AD), mechanical (1450 - 1840), electromechanical (1840 - 1940), and electronic (1940 to present).

Information technology is also a branch of computer science, which can be defined as the overall study of procedure, structure, and the processing of various types of data. As this field continues to evolve across the world, its overall priority and importance has also grown, which is where we begin to see the introduction of computer science-related courses in K-12 education.

Zuse Z3 replica on display at Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Zuse Z3 is the first programmable computer.

This is the Antikythera mechanism, which is considered the first mechanical analog computer, dating back to the first century BC.

Ideas of computer science were first mentioned before the 1950s under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, where they had discussed and began thinking of computer circuits and numerical calculations. As time went on, the field of information technology and computer science became more complex and was able to handle the processing of more data. Scholarly articles began to be published from different organizations.

Looking at early computing, Alan Turing, J. Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly were considered some of the major pioneers of computer technology in the mid-1900s. Giving them such credit for their developments, most of their efforts were focused on designing the first digital computer. Along with that, topics such as artificial intelligence began to be brought up as Turing was beginning to question such technology of the time period.

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick. The Antikythera mechanism, dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered the earliest known mechanical analog computer, and the earliest known geared mechanism. Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until the 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed.

Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanical Zuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. During the Second World War, Colossus developed the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages. Although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring. The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Baby, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison, the first transistorized computer developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version.

Several other breakthroughs in semiconductor technology include the integrated circuit (IC) invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Laboratories in 1959, and the microprocessor invented by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima, and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. These important inventions led to the development of the personal computer (PC) in the 1970s, and the emergence of information and communications technology (ICT).

By the year of 1984, according to the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review, the term information technology had been redefined as "The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (...generally known in Britain as information technology)." We then begin to see the appearance of the term in 1990 contained within documents for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Innovations in technology have already revolutionized the world by the twenty-first century as people were able to access different online services. This has changed the workforce drastically as thirty percent of U.S. workers were already in careers in this profession. 136.9 million people were personally connected to the Internet, which was equivalent to 51 million households. Along with the Internet, new types of technology were also being introduced across the globe, which has improved efficiency and made things easier across the globe.

Along with technology revolutionizing society, millions of processes could be done in seconds. Innovations in communication were also crucial as people began to rely on the computer to communicate through telephone lines and cable. The introduction of the email was considered revolutionary as "companies in one part of the world could communicate by e-mail with suppliers and buyers in another part of the world..."

Not only personally, computers and technology have also revolutionized the marketing industry, resulting in more buyers of their products. During the year of 2002, Americans exceeded $28 billion in goods just over the Internet alone while e-commerce a decade later resulted in $289 billion in sales. And as computers are rapidly becoming more sophisticated by the day, they are becoming more used as people are becoming more reliant on them during the twenty-first century.

Ferranti Mark I computer logic board

Punched tapes were used in early computers to store and represent data.

Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, which was based on a standard cathode ray tube. However, the information stored in it and delay-line memory was volatile in the fact that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.

IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007, almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years.

Database Management Systems (DMS) emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. An early such system was IBM's Information Management System (IMS), which is still widely deployed more than 50 years later. IMS stores data hierarchically, but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows, and columns. In 1981, the first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was released by Oracle.

All DMS consist of components, they allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity. All databases are common in one point that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema.

In recent years, the extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems, it is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort." As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine- and human-readable.

IBM card storage warehouse located in Alexandria, Virginia in 1959. This is where the government kept storage of punched cards.

Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception. It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.

XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP, describing "data-in-transit rather than... data-at-rest".

Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years.

Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analyzed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited". To address that issue, the field of data mining - "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data" - emerged in the late 1980s.

The technology and services it provides for sending and receiving electronic messages (called "letters" or "electronic letters") over a distributed (including global) computer network. In terms of the composition of elements and the principle of operation, electronic mail practically repeats the system of regular (paper) mail, borrowing both terms (mail, letter, envelope, attachment, box, delivery, and others) and characteristic features - ease of use, message transmission delays, sufficient reliability and at the same time no guarantee of delivery. The advantages of e-mail are: easily perceived and remembered by a person addresses of the form user_name@domain_name (for example, somebody@example.com); the ability to transfer both plain text and formatted, as well as arbitrary files; independence of servers (in the general case, they address each other directly); sufficiently high reliability of message delivery; ease of use by humans and programs.

Disadvantages of e-mail: the presence of such a phenomenon as spam (massive advertising and viral mailings); the theoretical impossibility of guaranteed delivery of a particular letter; possible delays in message delivery (up to several days); limits on the size of one message and on the total size of messages in the mailbox (personal for users).

A software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to search for information on the Internet. A search engine usually means a site that hosts the interface (front-end) of the system. The software part of a search engine is a search engine (search engine) - a set of programs that provides the functionality of a search engine and is usually a trade secret of the search engine developer company. Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. Improving search is one of the priorities of the modern Internet (see the Deep Web article about the main problems in the work of search engines).

Companies in the information technology field are often discussed as a group as the "tech sector" or the "tech industry." These titles can be misleading at times and should not be mistaken for "tech companies;" which are generally large scale, for-profit corporations that sell consumer technology and software. It is also worth noting that from a business perspective, Information technology departments are a " cost center" the majority of the time. A cost center is a department or staff which incurs expenses, or "costs", within a company rather than generating profits or revenue streams. Modern businesses rely heavily on technology for their day-to-day operations, so the expenses delegated to cover technology that facilitates business in a more efficient manner are usually seen as "just the cost of doing business." IT departments are allocated funds by senior leadership and must attempt to achieve the desired deliverables while staying within that budget. Government and the private sector might have different funding mechanisms, but the principles are more-or-less the same. This is an often overlooked reason for the rapid interest in automation and Artificial Intelligence, but the constant pressure to do more with less is opening the door for automation to take control of at least some minor operations in large companies.

Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers, networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. Companies have also sought to integrate IT with business outcomes and decision-making through a BizOps or business operations department.

In a business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems".[page needed ] The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded, and replaced.

Information services is a term somewhat loosely applied to a variety of IT-related services offered by commercial companies, as well as data brokers.

The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include:

Breaches of copyright by those downloading files stored without the permission of the copyright holders

Employers monitoring their employees' emails and other Internet usage

Unsolicited emails

Hackers accessing online databases

Web sites installing cookies or spyware to monitor a user's online activities, which may be used by data brokers

Research suggests that IT projects in business and public administration can easily become significant in scale. Work conducted by McKinsey in collaboration with the University of Oxford suggested that half of all large-scale IT projects (those with initial cost estimates of $15 million or more) often failed to maintain costs within their initial budgets or to complete on time.

1. ^ Cosker, Glynn (2023), "What Is Information Technology? A Beginner's Guide to the World of IT", Technology Blog, Rasmussen University.

2. Leavitt, Harold J.; Whisler, Thomas L. (1958), "Management in the 1980s", Harvard Business Review, 11.

3. ^ Chandler, Daniel; Munday, Rod (10 February 2011), "Information technology", A Dictionary of Media and Communication (first ed.), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199568758, Commonly a synonym for computers and computer networks but more broadly designating any technology that is used to generate, store, process, and/or distribute information electronically, including television and telephone..

4. ^ Slotten, Hugh Richard (1 January 2014). The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780199766666.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-976666-6.

5. Henderson, H. (2017). computer science. In H. Henderson, ^ Facts on File science library: Encyclopedia of computer science and technology. (3rd ed.). [Online]. New York: Facts On File.

6. ^ Schmandt-Besserat, Denise (1981), "Decipherment of the earliest tablets", Science, 211 (4479): 283-285, Bibcode:1981Sci...211..283S, doi:10.1126/science.211.4479.283, PMID 17748027.

7. ^ Enticknap, Nicholas (Summer 1998), "Computing's Golden Jubilee", Resurrection (20), ISSN 0958-7403, archived from the original on 9 January 2012.

8. ^ Cooke-Yarborough, E. H. (June 1998), "Some early transistor applications in the UK", Engineering Science & Education Journal, 7 (3): 100-106, doi:10.1049/esej:19980301, ISSN 0963-7346.

9. Information technology. (2003). In E.D. Reilly, A. Ralston & D. Hemmendinger (Eds.), ^ Encyclopedia of computer science. (4th ed.).

10. Stewart, C.M. (2018). Computers. In S. Bronner (Ed.), ^ Encyclopedia of American studies. [Online]. Johns Hopkins University Press.

11. Northrup, C.C. (2013). Computers. In C. Clark Northrup (Ed.), Encyclopedia of world trade: from ancient times to the present. [Online]. London: Routledge.

12. ^ "Early computers at Manchester University", Resurrection, 1 (4), Summer 1992, ISSN 0958-7403, archived from the original on 28 August 2017.

13. ^ Khurshudov, Andrei (2001), The Essential Guide to Computer Data Storage: From Floppy to DVD, Prentice Hall, ISBN 978-0-130-92739-2 .

14. ^ Hilbert, Martin; López, Priscila (1 April 2011), "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information", , 332 (6025): 60-65, Bibcode:2011Sci...332...60H, doi:10.1126/science.1200970, PMID 21310967, S2CID 206531385.

15. ^ "Americas events - Video animation on The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information from 1986 to 2010". The Economist. Archived from the original on 18 January 2012.

16. ^ Lauren Csorny (9 April 2013). "U.S. Careers in the growing field of information technology services". U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Allen, T.; Morton, M. S. Morton, eds. (1994), Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s, Oxford University Press.

Gitta, Cosmas and South, David (2011). Southern Innovator Magazine Issue 1: Mobile Phones and Information Technology: United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation. ISSN 2222-9280.

Gleick, James (2011).The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books.

Price, Wilson T. (1981), Introduction to Computer Data Processing, Holt-Saunders International Editions, ISBN 978-4-8337-0012-2 .

Shelly, Gary, Cashman, Thomas, Vermaat, Misty, and Walker, Tim. (1999). Discovering Computers 2000: Concepts for a Connected World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Course Technology.

Webster, Frank, and Robins, Kevin. (1986). Information Technology - A Luddite Analysis. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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Information technology ( IT) is a set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages and data and information processing and storage. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT).

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10. What was the Works Progress Administration?

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10. What was the Works Progress Administration?

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Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943.

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On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The WPA employed skilled and unskilled workers in a great variety of work projects-many of which were public works projects such as creating parks, and building roads and bridges, and schools and other public structures.

Bridgeton, New Jersey. Seabrook Farm. Cannery Workers. John Collier, photographer, June 1942. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division

The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was one of several projects within the WPA created to employ people with skills in the arts. Other arts projects included the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). When these projects were created, they were known collectively as Federal Project Number One-or more informally, "Federal One."

Among the well-known writers employed by the Federal Writers' project were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, and Richard Wright. During the Project's early years, FWP writers produced a series of state guidebooks that offer a flavorful sampling of life in the United States. Now considered classics of Americana, these guides remain the Federal Writers' Project's best-known undertaking.

But the Federal Writers' Project also left a hidden legacy. In the late 1930s, Federal Writers recorded the life stories of more than 10,000 men and women from a variety of regions, occupations, and ethnic groups for the FWP's Folklore Project. Nearly 3,000 of these manuscripts are now available online as part of the collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940.

For more on the Federal Writers' Project, view the special presentation Articles and Essays, which includes stories and photographs of Americans during the Depression era. Search the collection for the names May Swenson, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren to find interviews conducted by these famous writers. Or, select a place name to find interviews recorded in a region of your choice.

The WPA Federal Theatre Project (FTP) employed out-of-work actors, musicians, vaudevillians, and theater technicians in performances of classical and modern plays, such as Orson Welles' production of . The collection also includes production notebooks, playbills, posters, photographs, and stage and costume designs for three plays performed by the Federal Theatre acting units. Please note: This collection is not searchable by keyword.

Costume Design from New York production of Dr. Faustus, staged by Orson Welles, New York City, 1937. The New Deal Stage: Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939. Music Division

For more information about the Library of Congress' collections of WPA-era materials, consult the essay: " Amassing American Stuff: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Projects of the 1930s," and also, " New Deal Programs: Selected Library of Congress Resources.

Learn More

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938 - a collection of digitized materials produced by the FWP which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. This elaborate New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration.

The collection Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937 to 1942 combines sound recordings and manuscript materials from four discrete archival collections made by Work Projects Administration (WPA) workers from the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, the Federal Writers' Project, and the Federal Music Project from 1937-42. This online presentation provides access to 376 sound recordings and 106 accompanying materials, including recording logs, transcripts, correspondence between Florida WPA workers and Library of Congress personnel, and a proposal to survey Florida folklore by Zora Neale Hurston.

Posters: WPA Posters - 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of the Federal Art Project, a WPA relief project for visual artists. For an overview of the types of posters included in the collection, browse a selection of representative images.

Additional collections with materials created by other work relief projects during the New Deal include:
The Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives collection comprises some of the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II.

The Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey collection records America's built environment in multi-format surveys comprising more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.

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On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943.

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10th U.S President, Andrew Jackson, granted a forced removal of the Native Americans that lived West of the United States.

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Native American Removal from the Southeast

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This was the name of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, where many Native American families were forced to leave their homes as the U.S migrated West to Indian Territory, what is now known as Oklahoma.

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we remember so we never forget

By Finn Sanner and Jordan Zandonatti

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was when many Native American nations were removed from their home and forced to relocate in Indian Territory which is in present day Oklahoma. Many Native American nations were relocated including the Cherokee, Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. The Native Americans thought that it was unfair that they were being removed from their homes and forced to move to eastern Oklahoma. During the Westward Expansion many Native American nations were forced from their home and relocated, this act was given the name Trail of Tears.

Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation on their route to their destination. 60,000 of 130,000 relocated Cherokee died during their relocation and many more from other nations. Intermarried and accompanying European Americans and 2,000 African American Slaves free blacks and slaves (owned by the Cherokee) also participated in the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek and Seminole forced relocations. The Choctaw were the first to be removed in 1831, following by Seminole in 1832, then the Muscogee Creek in 1834, then the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838. After the Native Americans were removed some remained in their former homeland which was now 25 million acres for the predominantly white settlements.

Most of the trails that are part of the Trail of Tears went through Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and ended in Oklahoma. According to legend, a Cherokee rose, the state flower of Georgia, grew in every spot a tear fell on the Trail of Tears. Today the flowers grow along many of the trails that the Native Americans took West. Most of the tribes of Native Americans did not stand up for what they believed in and were forcefully moved, The Cherokees of Georgia, on the other hand, used legal action to resist. The Cherokee people were by no means frontier savages. By the 1830s they developed their own written language, printed newspapers and elected leaders to representative government.

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Trail of Tears Commemorative Motorcycle Trail History

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Chronology is understanding time and place of any historical event in sequential order.

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Let us simplify the 'Timeline of Indian History'. This is a journey of the history of one of the greatest civilizations that the Indian Subcontinent has been. The Indian history timeline is the easiest way to understand the history of an ancient civilization with huge diversity.

This timeline covers all the major events and aspects of history that defines the Indian Subcontinent today. Furthermore, this is not only the history of India but also the timeline of the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Indian History Timeline Chart

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters (30000-7000 BC)

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters

The earliest records of the Indian subcontinent history exist in the form of the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka. It's an archaeological site in central India that spans the prehistoric paleolithic and mesolithic periods, as well as the historic period.

It shows the earliest traces of human life on the Indian subcontinent and evidence of Stone Age starting at the site.

Some of the Bhimbetka rock shelters feature prehistoric cave paintings and the earliest are about 30,000 years old.

These shelters are situated on the southern edge of the central Indian plateau, in the foothills of the Vindhyan Mountains.

There are five groups of rock shelters, each of them decorated with paintings that are believed to date from the Mesolithic Period right through to the historical period.

The Bhimbetka site has the oldest known rock art in the Indian subcontinent, as well as is one of the largest prehistoric complexes.

Mehrgarh Culture (7000 BC to 3300 BC)

Mehrgarh is one of the most significant sites belonging to the Neolithic Age. At the same time, it is one of the oldest sites that indicate the introduction of the concept of farming and herding.

Mehrgarh, sometimes also anglicized as Mehergarh or Mehrgar, is located near the Bolan Pass on the Kacchi Plain of Balochistan, Pakistan, to the west of the Indus River valley

The site of Mehrgarh, spread over an area of 495-acre, was discovered in the year 1974.

Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BC to 1700 BC)

The Indus Valley Civilization was discovered in the 1920s. This is one of the most significant periods in the history of India. Indus Valley Civilization is divided into 6 significant phases.

Early Harappan Phase (3300 BC to 2600 BC)

The early Harappan Phase lasted for approximately 700 years, starting with the Ravi Phase.

It is one of the three earliest urban civilizations and made use of an early form of the Indus script, known as Harappan script, for writing purposes.

Around 2800 BC, the Kot Diji phase of the Indus Valley Civilization started.

Mature Harappan Phase (2600 BC to 1700 BC)

The Mature Harappan Phase started around 2600 BC. Large cities and urban areas started emerging and the civilization expanded to over 2,500 cities and settlements.

Urban planning, excellent sewage and drainage system, system of uniform weights and measures, knowledge of proto-dentistry, etc are some of the other elements that characterize the mature phase.

Late Harappan Phase (1700 BC to 1300 BC)

The Late Harappan Phase began around 1700 BC and came to an end around 1300 BC. However, one can find many elements of the Indus Valley Civilization in later cultures.

Vedic Period/Age (1700 BC to 500 BC)

The Vedic Period or the Vedic Age refers to the time of the compilation of the sacred Vedic Sanskrit texts in India.

Situated on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the Vedic Civilization formed the basis of Hinduism and the Indian culture. The Vedic Period can be divided into the following two phases:

Early Vedic/Rig Vedic Period (1700 BC to 1000 BC)

Early Vedic Period represents the time period when the oldest of all Vedas, Rig Veda was compiled.

During this period, the king was believed to be the protector of the people, who took an active part in the government.

The caste system started becoming rigid and the families started becoming patriarchal. The major events of this time are:

1700 BC - Late Harappan and Early Vedic period coincide

1300 BC - The end of Cemetery H culture

1000 BC - Iron Age of India

Later Vedic Age (1000 BC to 500 BC)

The emergence of the later Vedic period was marked with agriculture becoming the dominant economic activity and a decline in the significance of cattle rearing.

The political organization changed completely, with the reduction in the involvement of people in the administration. The major events are:

600 BC - The formation of Sixteen Maha Janapadas (Great Kingdoms)

599 BC - The birth of Mahavira, founder of Jainism

563 BC - The birth of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), founder of Buddhism

538 BC - Cyrus the Great conquered parts of Pakistan

500 BC - Earliest written records in Brahmi

500 BC - Panini standardized grammar and morphology of Sanskrit, converting it

into Classical Sanskrit. With this, the Vedic Civilization came to an end.

Ancient India (500 BCE - 550 AD)

Rise of Jainism and Buddhism

The emergence of Buddhism in India

Buddhism

Jainism or Jain Dharma is the religious philosophy that originated in the Ancient India. The religion is based on the teachings of the Tirthankaras.

The 24th Tirthankara, Lord Mahavira, is credited with propagating the religion in the various parts of the world. Buddhism is based on the teachings of Lord Buddha, who was born as Prince Siddhartha Gautama.

After attaining Enlightenment, Lord Buddha set on a task of teaching others how to achieve nirvana. His teachings were later propagated throughout the world by Emperor Asoka.

The other major events of the Ancient Indian period are:

333 BC - Darius III was defeated by Alexander the Great. The Macedonian Empire was established

326 BC - Ambhi, King of Taxila surrendered to Alexander, Battle of the Hydaspes River

321 BC - Chandra Gupta Maurya established the Maurya Empire

273 BC - Emperor Ashoka took over the Maurya Empire

266 BC - Ashoka conquered most of South Asia, Afghanistan and Iran

265 BC - The battle of Kalinga, after which Emperor Ashoka embraced Buddhism

232 BC: Ashoka died and was succeeded by Dasaratha

230 BC - Satavahana Empire was established

200 to 100 BC - Tholkappiyam standardized grammar and morphology of Tamil

184 BC - Collapse of Maurya Empire with the assassination of Emperor Brihadrata, Establishment of the Sunga dynasty

180 BC - Establishment of the Indo-Greek kingdom

80 BC - Establishment of the Indo-Scythian kingdom

10 BC - Establishment of the Indo-Parthian kingdom

68 AD - Establishment of the Kushan Empire by Kujula Kadphises

78 AD - Gautamiputra Satkarni took over Satavahana Empire and defeated Scythian king Vikramaditya

240 AD - Establishment of the Gupta Empire by Sri-Gupta

320 AD - Chandragupta I took over the Gupta Empire

335 AD - Samudragupta took over the Gupta Empire and started expanding it

350 AD - Establishment of the Pallava Empire

380 AD - Chandragupta II took over the Gupta Empire

399 to 414 AD - Chinese scholar Fa-Hien traveled to India

Medieval Period (550 AD to 1526 AD)

The medieval period can be divided into the following two phases:

Early Medieval Period (Upto 1300 AD)

606 AD - Harshavardhana became the King

630 AD - Hiuen Tsiang traveled to India

761 AD - First Muslim invasion by Mohammed Bin Qasim

800 AD - The birth of Shankaracharya

814 AD - Nripatunga Amoghavarsha I became Rashtrakuta king

1000 AD - Invasion by Mahmud of Ghazni

1017AD - Alberuni traveled to India

1100s AD - Rule of the Chandelas, Cholas, Kadambas, and Rashrakutas

1120 AD - Kalyani Chalukya Empire attained peak, Vikramaditya VI introduced Vikrama Chalukya Era

1191 AD - First battle of Tarain between Mohammed Ghori & Prithivi Raj Chauhan III

1192 AD - Second battle of Tarain between Ghauri and Prithivi Raj Chauhan III

1194 AD - Battle of Chandawar between Ghauri and Jayachandra

1288 AD - Marco Polo came to India

Late Medieval Period (1300 AD to 1500 AD)

1300 AD - Establishment of the Khilji Dynasty

1336 to 1565 AD - Vijayanagar Empire

1498 AD - First voyage of Vasco-da-Gama to Goa

Post-Medieval Era (1526 AD to 1818 AD)

The major events in the post medieval era are:

1526 AD - Babur, the Mughal ruler of Kabul, invaded Delhi and Agra and killed Sultan Ibrahim Lodi

1527 AD - Battle of Khanwa, in which Babur annexed Mewar

1530 AD - Babur died and was succeeded Humayun

1556 AD - Humayun died and was succeeded by his son Akbar

1600 AD - East India company was formed in England

1605 AD - Akbar died and was succeeded by Jehangir

1628 AD - Jehangir died and was succeeded by Shah Jahan

1630 AD - Shivaji was born

1658 AD - Shah Jahan built Taj Mahal, Jamia Masjid and Red Fort.

1659 AD - Shivaji defeated Adilshahi troops at the Battle of Pratapgarh

1674 AD - Maratha Empire was established

1680 AD - Shivaji died

1707 AD - Aurangzeb died and was succeeded by Bahadur Shah I

1707 AD - Maratha Empire broke into two divisions

1734 AD - Pamheiba invaded Tripura

1737 AD - Bajirao I conquered Delhi

1740 AD - Bajirao I died and was succeeded by Balaji Bajirao

1757 AD - Battle of Plassey was fought

1761 AD - Third battle of Panipat ended the expansion of Maratha Empire

1766 AD - First Anglo-Mysore War

1777 AD - First Anglo-Maratha War

1779 AD - Battle of Wadgaon

1780 AD - Second Anglo-Mysore War

1789 AD - Third Anglo-Mysore War

1798 AD - Fourth Anglo-Mysore War

1799 AD - Tipu Sultan died, Wodeyar dynasty was restored

1803 AD - Second Anglo-Maratha War

1817 AD - Third Anglo-Maratha War begins

1818 AD - End of the Maratha Empire and British control over most of India

Colonial Era (1818 AD to 1947 AD)

The Colonial Era started with the British taking control over almost all the parts of India and ended with the freedom of India in 1947.

The major events that took place during the Colonial Era are:

1829 AD - Prohibition of Sati

1857 AD - First Indian war of Independence, known as Indian Mutiny

1885 AD - Indian National Congress was formed

1930 AD - Dandi Salt March, Simon Commission, First Round Table Conference

1915 AD - Home Rule League was founded by Annie Besant

1919 AD - Massacre at Jallianwalabagh

1931 AD - Bhagat Singh was hanged by the British, Second Round Table Conference, Gandhi-Irvin Pact

1919 AD - Khilafat Movement, Jalianwala Bagh Massacre, Rowlat Act

1937 AD - Congress won power in many states, World War II broke out

1921 AD - Civil Disobedience Movement

1928 AD - Murder of Lala Lajpat Rai

1942 AD - Quit India Movement, Rise of Subhash Chandra Bose

1922 AD - Quit India Movement suspended after the Chauri-Chura violence

1946 AD - Muslim League adamant about the formation of Pakistan

1947 AD - India gained independence and witnessed partition

Independent and Modern India (1947 onwards)

In 1947, India became independent and from that year onwards, started India's struggle to become one of the leading nations of the world.

Today, the country is regarded as one of the fastest-growing major economies of the world.

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Let us simplify the 'Timeline of Indian History'. This is a journey of the history of one of the greatest civilizations that the Indian Subcontinent has been. The Indian history timeline is the easiest way to understand the history of an ancient civilization with huge diversity.

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Known Dynasties:

Qing (1644-1912)

Yuan (1279–1368)

Ming (1368 to 1644)

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Yuan dynasty, Wade-Giles romanization Yüan, also called Mongol dynasty, dynasty established by Mongol nomads that ruled portions and eventually all of China from the early 13th century to 1368. Mongol suzerainty eventually also stretched throughout most of Asia and eastern Europe, though the Yuan emperors were rarely able to exercise much control over their more distant possessions.

History

The emergence of the Mongol dynasty dates to 1206, when Genghis Khan was able to unify under his leadership all Mongols in the vast steppe lands north of China. Genghis began encroaching on the Jin dynasty in northern China in 1211 and finally took the Jin capital of Yanjing (or Daxing; present-day Beijing) in 1215. For the next six decades the Mongols continued to extend their control over the north and then turned their attention to southern China, which they completed conquering with the defeat of the Nan (Southern) Song dynasty in 1279. The final consolidation came under Genghis's grandson Kublai Khan (reigned 1260-94).

The Mongol dynasty, which had been renamed the Yuan in 1271, proceeded to set up a Chinese-style administration that featured a centralized bureaucracy, political subdivisions, and a rationalized taxation system. Yuan was the first dynasty to make Beijing (called Dadu by the Yuan) its capital, moving it there from Karakorum (now in Mongolia) in 1267. The Yuan rebuilt the Grand Canal and put the roads and postal stations in good order, and their rule coincided with new cultural achievements including the development of the novel as a literary form. The vast size of the empire resulted in more-extensive foreign trade and foreign intercourse than at any other time before the modern period.

Unlike other rulers of China, the Mongols were never totally Sinicized, which proved to be an important factor in their downfall. They continued to maintain their separateness from the native population and utilized foreigners, such as the European traveler Marco Polo, to staff the government bureaucracy. Revolts in the mid-14th century led to the final overthrow of the Yuan in 1368, making it the shortest-lived major dynasty of China. The administrative centrality of the Yuan was continued by the succeeding Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911/12) dynasties, giving those later Chinese governments a more authoritarian structure than that of previous Chinese dynasties.

Cultural achievements

In the previous ages of the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, art had been encouraged by the state. During the Yuan, however, artists-especially those native Chinese who steadfastly refused to serve their conquerors-had to seek inspiration within themselves and their traditions. Those painters sought in their art a return to what they viewed as more ideal times, especially the Tang and Bei (Northern) Song periods. Artists such as Zhao Mengfu and the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty ( Huang Gongwang, Ni Zan, Wang Meng, and Wu Zhen) thus firmly fixed the ideal of "literati painting" ( wenrenhua), which valued erudition and personal expression above elegant surface or mere representation. There was also an emphasis on stark and simple forms (e.g., bamboo or rocks) and on calligraphy, often with long complementary inscriptions on the paintings themselves. Against that radical new direction of the native Chinese in pictorial art, there was a conservative revival of Buddhist art (painting and sculpture), which was sponsored by the Mongols as part of their effort to establish authority over the Chinese.

In addition to a renewed emphasis on traditional craft arts (silver, lacquer, and other materials), there were important developments in ceramics. Various earlier traditions were continued, but there was also interest in producing new shapes, decoration, and glazes. Of special merit was the first appearance of blue-and-white ware-consisting of white porcelain with blue underglaze-which was to become so popular in later periods and among Western collectors.

Under Yuan rule the regional music drama that had gone two separate ways during the Song dynasty was intermixed as yuanqu, or "Yuan drama." Popular song styles became freer than before, and several forms of dancing and acrobatics were added to popular entertainment. Poetry emphasized sanqu ("nondramatic songs"), and vernacular fiction grew in popularity. Dramatists-including at least a dozen prominent Sinicized Mongols-wrote romantic plays of four or five acts in vernacular, with several songs in each act. The new literary genre attracted many men of letters, as well as large audiences.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Amy McKenna.

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Yuan dynasty | History, Achievements, Art, & Facts

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Yuan dynasty, established by Mongol nomads that ruled portions and eventually all of China from the early 13th century to 1368. Mongol suzerainty eventually also stretched throughout most of Asia and eastern Europe, though the Yuan emperors were rarely able to exercise much control over their more distant possessions.

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Went from the 12th-9th centuries BC

The very first Olympics took place in Olympia, Greece in 776 BC

Known Gods (AKA Olympians):

Zeus

Poseidon

Athena

Amphrodite

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THE GAMES
The ancient Olympic Games were primarily a part of a religious festival in honor of Zeus, the father of the Greek gods and goddesses. The festival and the games were held in
The ancient Olympic Games began in the year 776 BC, when Koroibos, a cook from the nearby city of Elis, won the stadion race, a foot race 600 feet long. The stadion track at Olympia is shown here. According to some literary traditions, this was the only athletic event of the games for the first 13 Olympic festivals or until 724 BC. From 776 BC, the Games were held in Olympia every four years for almost 12 centuries.

Contrary evidence, both literary and archaeological, suggests that the games may have existed at Olympia much earlier than this date, perhaps as early as the 10th or 9th century BC.

Olympia (see 'Did you know' in the glossary), a rural sanctuary site (model shown here, courtesy of the British Museum) in the western Peloponnesos.

The Greeks that came to the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia shared the same religious beliefs and spoke the same language. The athletes were all male citizens of the city-states from every corner of the Greek world, coming from as far away as Iberia (Spain) in the west and the Black Sea (Turkey) in the east.

The sanctuary was named in antiquity after Mt. Olympos (see 'Did you know' in the glossary), the highest mountain in mainland Greece. In Greek mythology, Mt. Olympos was the home of the greatest of the Greek gods and goddesses.

There are two stories relating to the question of nudity at the ancient Olympic Games. One story states that it was a runner from Megara, Orsippos or Orrhippos who, in 720 B.C. was the first to run naked in the stadion race when he lost his shorts in the race. Another tradition is that it was the Spartans who introduced nudity to the Olympic Games in the 8th century B.C. as it was a Spartan tradition. It is not clear if the very first recorded victor at Olympia, Koroibos, who won the stadion race in 776 B.C. wore shorts or not. It seems fairly clear that by the late 8th century nudity was common for the male contestants.

FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN

Although the ancient Games were staged in Olympia, Greece, from 776 BC through 393 AD, it took 1503 years for the Olympics to return. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. The man responsible for its rebirth was a Frenchman named Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who presented the idea in 1894. His original thought was to unveil the modern Games in 1900 in his native Paris, but delegates from 34 countries were so enthralled with the concept that they convinced him to move the Games up to 1896 and have Athens serve as the first host.

THE OLYMPIC FLAME

The idea of the Olympic torch or Olympic Flame was first inaugurated in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. There was no torch relay in the ancient Olympic Games. There were known, however, torch relays in other ancient Greek athletic festivals including those held at Athens. The modern Olympic torch relay was first instituted at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

The Olympic Oath was introduced in 1920. The marathon was NOT an event of the ancient Olympic games. The marathon is a modern event that was first introduced in the Modern Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens, a race from Marathon northeast of Athens to the Olympic Stadium, a distance of 40 kilometers.

The race commemorates the run of Pheidippides, an ancient "day-runner" who carried the news of the Persian landing at Marathon of 490 B.C. to Sparta (a distance of 149 miles) in order to enlist help for the battle. According to the fifth century B.C.ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Pheidippides delivered the news to the Spartans the next day.

The distance of the modern marathon was standardized as 26 miles 385 yards or 42.195 km. in 1908 when the Olympic Games were held in London. The distance was the exact measurement between Windsor Castle, the start of the race, and the finish line inside White City Stadium.

Did you know...

Additional athletic events were gradually added until, by the 5th century BC, the religious festival consisted of a five-day program. For a complete list of events, click here.

PLUS...
For a complete list of modern Olympic Game location sites, click here.

Shown here is the stadium entrance at Olympia.

Any Winter Games?
The first modern Winter Olympic games were held in 1924 in Chamonix, France. There was no winter Olympic festival in ancient times. Separate Winter Games were first authorized in 1911 to be held in 1916, but due to World War I they didn't occur until 1924, in Chamonix.

Starting with Lillehammer in 1994, it was decided that every other year will be an Olympic year (with Summer and Winter Games alternating), rather than holding Summer and Winter Games every 4th year. This was done to accommodate TV networks and audiences.

The Modern Olympic flag of five linked rings, each with a primary color used in the flags of the nations competing in the games, was introduced in 1908. There is no ancient basis for this modern symbol.

Detail from an Attic Red Figure Kylix, ca. 490-480 BC, depicting two men wrestling. Above them hang a discus in its bag and a pair of jumping weights called 'halteres.' Long jumpers used the weights to increase their competition distances by vigorously swinging them forward at the moment of takeoff. The coach or trainer stands to the left of the wrestlers, leaning on his staff and holding a long forked branch. Museum Object Number: MS 2444 .

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The Games | The Real Story of the Ancient Olympic Games - Penn Museum

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The ancient Olympic Games were primarily a part of a religious festival in honor of Zeus, the father of the Greek gods and goddesses. The festival and the games were held in The ancient Olympic Games began in the year 776 BC, when Koroibos, a cook from the nearby city of Elis, won the stadion race, a foot race 600 feet long.

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Julius Caesar: Leader of the Roman Empire, dictator for life until his assassination in 44 BC

Fell when a group of a Germanic tribe evaded Italy under control of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD

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Tens of thousands of Romans take their seats in an enormous stadium made of stone and concrete. It's the year 80, and these people are entering the newly built Colosseum for the first time. Men wearing togas and women in long dresses called stolas will spend the next hundred days watching gladiator games and wild animal fights to celebrate the opening of this amphitheater.

These ancient people were living in the center of a vast empire that spanned across Europe, northern Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Lasting over a thousand years, the ancient Roman civilization contributed to modern languages, government, architecture, and more.

History of ancient Rome

Around the ninth or tenth century B.C., Rome was just a small town on the Tiber River in what's now central Italy. (One myth says that the town was founded by two brothers-Romulus and Remus-who were raised by a wolf.) For about 500 years, the area was ruled by a series of kings as it grew in strength and power.

But around the year 509 B.C., the last king was overthrown, and Rome became a republic. That meant that some citizens could vote for their leaders and other important matters. Only male Roman citizens could cast votes; women and enslaved people-often brought back as prisoners from military battles-could not.

Elected officials included two consuls who acted sort of like today's U.S. presidents and kept each other from taking too much power. Both consuls worked with senators, who advised the consuls and helped create laws. Senators were appointed by other officials and could hold their positions for life.

The Roman army fought many wars during this period, first conquering all of what's now Italy. In 146 B.C., they destroyed the city of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia, in northern Africa), which was Rome's greatest rival for trade in the western Mediterranean Sea. Next they conquered Greece.

For 500 years, the republic system mostly worked. But then a series of civil wars divided the people. In 59 B.C., Gaius Julius Caesar, a politician and military general, used the chaos to take power. Serving as consul, Caesar made new laws that benefitted his troops and other regular citizens. Then he conquered what's now France and invaded Britain.

Even though his troops and many Roman citizens supported him, the Senate worried he was too powerful and wanted him gone. Knowing this, Caesar marched his loyal army into Rome. It was an illegal act that started a civil war, which Caesar would eventually win.

At first, he was named dictator for 10 years. (Before that, a dictator served during times of emergencies for only six months.) He canceled people's debts and granted Roman citizenship to people outside of Italy so they could vote. Caesar also traveled to Egypt, making an alliance with the pharaoh Cleopatra.

In 44 B.C., Caesar named himself dictator for life. Fearing he was becoming a king, a group of senators killed him on the floor of the Senate. Caesar was gone, but his supporters chased down the assassins. His heir and nephew, Octavian, and general Mark Anthony battled for power.

Octavian eventually won and renamed himself Augustus Caesar. (The family name, Caesar, would become a title that future emperors would use to connect themselves back to Gaius Julius Caesar.) He convinced the Senate to give him absolute power and served successfully for 45 years. After his death, he was declared a god.

For the rest of its existence, Rome was ruled by emperors who were not elected-they reigned for life. The Senate was still part of the government, but it had very little power. Some emperors, like Claudius, were good at their jobs; others, like Nero and Caligula, were so cruel that even their guards turned against them.

By A.D. 117, the Roman Empire included what's now France, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, parts of northern Africa, England, Romania, and more. At one point, one out of every four people in the world lived under Rome's control.

But emperors and the Senate found this vast empire difficult to rule from the city of Rome. In the year 285, it was split into a Western Roman Empire and an Eastern Roman Empire. Known as the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire was ruled from the city of Constantinople, now the modern-day city of Istanbul in Turkey.

The Byzantine Empire would last for almost another thousand years, but the Western Empire-Rome-began to fall apart. Civil wars, plagues, money troubles, and invasions from other groups made the empire unstable. In the year 476, a Germanic king overthrew Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor.

Life in ancient Rome

Most people in the city of Rome lived in crowded apartment buildings called insulae that were five to seven stories high. Wealthier Romans lived in houses called domus that had a dining room and an atrium-an open-air courtyard that often had a pool at the center. Some Romans even had vacation homes in Pompeii and Herculaneum, two Roman cities that were destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.

Rich or poor, Romans gathered to relax, socialize, and clean themselves at Roman baths. Like modern spas, these structures had exercise rooms, swimming pools, saunas, hot and cold plunge pools, and massage spaces. The people also gathered to watch plays, chariot races, and gladiator battles.

Roman citizens enjoyed relaxing, but enslaved people in ancient Rome had a much more difficult life. Many worked in fields, mines, and on ships. Others, like educated Greeks who tutored wealthy children, were forced to work in rich people's homes. However, some enslaved people were able to buy or earn their freedom and eventually become Roman citizens.

Roman women sometimes worked as midwives-helping to deliver babies-or became priestesses. But in Roman society, women's main role was to look after the home and family. Although Romans could easily get divorced, children legally belonged to the father (or a male relative if he was no longer living).

Romans believed in many gods, including the sky god Jupiter; Mars, a god who protected Romans in war; and Vesta, the goddess of the home. People would worship these gods and goddesses both at public temples and in their homes.

Why ancient Rome still matters

Today, the city of Rome is the capital of Italy, with around three million people. Visitors can still see many ancient Roman ruins, from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, where much of ancient Roman politics took place.

But beyond the crumbling buildings, Rome's impact is seen all over the world today, from huge sports stadiums inspired by the Colosseum to the way that we vote for politicians. The republic's system of checks and balances on power even inspired the founders of the United States government.

If you drive in Europe or the Middle East today, you might be on a route created by the ancient Romans. Those engineers built a system of 50,000 miles of roads that connected the empire, allowing troops to easily conquer new land and traders to travel and bring back wealth. (It's where we get the saying, "All roads lead to Rome.")

You can also thank Roman engineers for perfecting a system for getting running water. They built aqueducts, which were long channels that delivered fresh water from up to 57 miles away for people's baths, fountains, and even toilets. (Some ancient aqueducts still provide water to modern-day Rome!)

Julius Caesar even gave the world its 365-day calendar with an extra day every fourth year, or leap year. The month of July is named after him, and August is named after his successor, Augustus.

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Find out why this ancient civilization is still important more than 2,000 years after its fall.

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Known Pharaohs:

King Tut (18th Dynasty)

Cleopatra was Ancient Egypt's last pharaoh.

Lasted for 3,000 years (Ancient Egypt, an introduction (article) | Khan Academy)

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It's the year 2490 B.C. Wooden boats cruise along the Nile River in Egypt as thousands of workers stack giant stone blocks into a pyramid. This 200-foot-tall structure honors a pharaoh named Menkaure. This pharaoh's father, Khafre, ordered construction of a 450-foot-high pyramid nearby, and his grandfather Khufu built the Great Pyramid at Giza-the largest of the three-at about 480 feet. Covered in polished white limestone, the pyramids seem to glow in the sunlight.

The Egyptians working on the pyramids are helping create a culture that will last more than 3,000 years-it will be one of the longest-lasting civilizations in the world. During that time, ancient Egyptians created works of art and engineering that still amaze us today.

History of ancient Egypt

People settled in Egypt as early as 6000 B.C. Over time, small villages joined together to become states until two kingdoms emerged: Lower Egypt, which covers the Nile River Delta up to the Mediterranean Sea in the north, and Upper Egypt, which covers the Nile Valley in the south. (The Nile River flows from south to north, so for the ancient Egyptians, the southern part of the country was "up.")

Around 3100 B.C., a king (later called a pharaoh) united these two lands to be one country, and so historians begin the long history of ancient Egypt here, dividing it into different periods. (They don't always know the exact date of historical events. So that's why you'll see a "ca" next to some of the years. It stands for "circa" meaning "around.")

Early Dynastic Period, about 525 years (ca 3100 B.C. to ca 2575 B.C.): These early pharaohs worked to keep the two lands under their control. To do this, they claimed they were being watched over by the falcon god Horus, and so the people of Egypt should respect them. They also used record keeping in the form of hieroglyphic writing to record things like royal decrees and the taxes that the people paid in the form of grain. (A dynasty is a series of rulers from the same family.)

Old Kingdom, about 425 years (ca 2575 B.C. to ca 2150 B.C.): By this time, the pharaohs had enough power and wealth to build pyramids in their honor; that's why the Old Kingdom is sometimes called the "Age of the Pyramids." The pharaohs at this time were mostly associated with the sun god Ra, a tradition that would remain for much of Egypt's history.

First Intermediate Period, about 200 years (ca 2130 B.C. to ca 1938 B.C.): These pharaohs lost power after drought hit Egypt. Instead, local leaders took control of their own communities, and they stopped passing along grain to the central government. Eventually, these local rulers formed independent states.

Middle Kingdom, about 300 years (ca 1938 B.C. to ca 1630 B.C.): Around 1938 B.C., Mentuhotep II reunited the country and began an era known for producing some of Egypt's greatest pieces of art. For the first time, Egyptians wrote stories for entertainment, and pharaohs started construction of Karnak Temple in the modern-day city of Luxor.

Second Intermediate Period, about 90 years (ca 1630 B.C. to ca 1540 B.C.): Weak pharaohs again lost control. Invaders from western Asia called Hyksos ruled in the north; people from Kush, a kingdom south of Egypt, took control in Upper Egypt.

New Kingdom, about 465 years (ca 1540 B.C. to 1075 B.C.): Egyptians took back control and crowned some of Egypt's most well-known rulers: The female pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled for 21 years; Akhenaten tried to start a new religion, and his son, the boy king Tutankhamun, reigned for 10 years. Ramses II built more monuments to himself than any other pharaoh. This was ancient Egypt's most prosperous and powerful period.

Third Intermediate Period, about 420 years (ca 1075 B.C. to ca 656 B.C.): This was a time of drought, famine, and foreign invasions. But some pharaohs thrived. Although King Taharqa was a foreign ruler from Kush, a kingdom south of Egypt, he repaired crumbling temples and even began building pyramids again for the first time in about 800 years.

Late Period, about 300 years (ca 656 B.C. to 332 B.C.): This period marks the last time that ancient Egypt was ruled by native Egyptians. Leading an army from Persia (what is now Iran), King Darius I took control.

Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt, about 300 years (332 B.C. to 30 B.C.): In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered the ruling Persians, then gave control to the Greek general Ptolemy I Soter. From then on, Egypt was ruled by Greek pharaohs. The last one, Cleopatra VII, lost a war to the Roman ruler Octavian. Egypt would be under Roman rule for the next 600 years.

Life in ancient Egypt

Most people in ancient Egypt were farmers. They lived with their families in houses made of mud bricks that were near the Nile River.

The Nile flooded each year, leaving behind fertile soil for planting crops like wheat, barley, lettuce, flax, and papyrus. As the Egyptians learned how to move river water to their fields, they were able to grow more food, including grapes, apricots, olives, and beans.

During flood season, farmers couldn't tend their crops. So instead, some worked building pyramids, tombs, and monuments. Other people worked as scribes (people who recorded events), priests, and doctors.

Women in ancient Egypt had more freedom than those in other ancient cultures. Like men, they could be scribes, priests, and doctors, and they usually had the same rights as men. Women could own their own homes and businesses.

Ancient Egyptians also like to have fun! They swam and canoed in the Nile, played board games, and they enjoyed making music and dancing.

The afterlife

In fact, Egyptians enjoyed life so much that they believed that the afterlife would be almost exactly the same-except without things like sadness, illness, or pesky mosquitoes. Even pets like cats, dogs, or monkeys would join them there.

Being mummified-the process of preserving a body-was an important part of how Egyptians believed their soul would enter the afterlife. So were tombs. These burial chambers were filled with things a person would need there: food, games, and even underwear!

According to legend, ancient Egyptian gods also helped people in the afterlife. Some, like the jackal-headed god Anubis, helped guide people to the underworld, where they would be judged by its ruler, the god Osiris.

Egyptians believed other gods helped them in real life, too. For instance, Osiris's wife, the goddess Isis, helped cure human sickness, and the goddess Tefnut caused the rain to fall.

Pyramid power

Click through this gallery to see how the pyramid developed over time.

Why ancient Egypt still matters

Today, millions of tourists visit the country of Egypt each year to see the pyramids, tombs, and temples. But these monuments aren't all this ancient culture left behind.

Ancient Egyptian astronomers created a calendar much like ours-based on the sun's rotation-and are thought to be the first civilization to measure a year using 365 days. They were also math geniuses: Historians think that division and multiplication were first developed by these people. (Plus, how else would they have figured out how to build pyramids without a lot of math?)

This was also one of the first civilizations to have a written language using a system called hieroglyphic writing, in which symbols-not letters-represent words or sounds. (These people even created writing sheets out of a plant called papyrus.) Hieroglyphs are carved into most temples and tombs to record names and dates, describe events like battles, and give instructions for passing on to the afterlife.

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Uncover the secrets of one of the world's oldest civilizations.

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Secondary Sources are sources that are created by a later generation who didn't experience a phenomenon firsthand. Examples include textbooks, real-life films, and dissertations.

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Scipione Amati's History of the Kingdom of Voxu (1615), an example of a secondary source.

In scholarship, a secondary source is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. A secondary source contrasts with a primary source, which is an original source of the information being discussed; a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or a document created by such a person.

A secondary source is one that gives information about a primary source. In this source, the original information is selected, modified and arranged in a suitable format. Secondary sources involve generalization, analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information.

The most accurate classification for any given source is not always obvious. Primary and secondary are relative terms, and some sources may be classified as primary or secondary, depending on how they are used. A third level, the tertiary source, such as an encyclopedia or dictionary, resembles a secondary source in that it contains analysis, but attempts to provide a broad introductory overview of a topic.

Information can be taken from a wide variety of objects, but this classification system is only useful for a class of sources that are called symbolic sources. Symbolic sources are sources that are intended to communicate information to someone. Common symbolic sources include written documents such as letters and notes, but not, for example, bits of broken pottery and scraps of food excavated from a midden, regardless of how much information can be extracted from an ancient trash heap, or how little can be extracted from a written document.

Many sources can be considered either primary or secondary, depending on the context in which they are used. Moreover, the distinction between primary and secondary sources is subjective and contextual, so that precise definitions are difficult to make. For example, if a historical text discusses old documents to derive a new historical conclusion, it is considered to be a primary source for the new conclusion, but a secondary source of information found in the old documents. Other examples in which a source can be both primary and secondary include an obituary or a survey of several volumes of a journal counting the frequency of articles on a certain topic.

Whether a source is regarded as primary or secondary in a given context may change, depending upon the present state of knowledge within the field. For example, if a document refers to the contents of a previous but undiscovered letter, that document may be considered "primary", since it is the closest known thing to an original source, but if the letter is later found, it may then be considered "secondary".

Attempts to map or model scientific and scholarly communication need the concepts of primary, secondary and further "levels". One such model is the UNISIST model of information dissemination. Within such a model, these concepts are defined in relation to each other, and the acceptance of this way of defining the concepts are connected to the acceptance of the model.

Some other modern languages use more than one word for the English word "source". German usually uses ("secondary literature") for secondary sources for historical facts, leaving ("secondary source") to historiography. A is a source which can tell about a lost ("primary source"), such as a letter quoting from minutes which are no longer known to exist, and so cannot be consulted by the historian.

Science, technology, and medicine

In general, secondary sources in a scientific context may be referred to as "secondary literature", and can be self-described as review articles or meta-analysis.

Primary source materials are typically defined as "original research papers written by the scientists who actually conducted the study." An example of primary source material is the Purpose, Methods, Results, Conclusions sections of a research paper (in IMRAD style) in a scientific journal by the authors who conducted the study. In some fields, a secondary source may include a summary of the literature in the introduction of a scientific paper, a description of what is known about a disease or treatment in a chapter in a reference book, or a synthesis written to review available literature. A survey of previous work in the field in a primary peer-reviewed source is secondary source information. This allows secondary sourcing of recent findings in areas where full review articles have not yet been published.

A book review that contains the judgment of the reviewer about the book is a primary source for the reviewer's opinion, and a secondary source for the contents of the book. A summary of the book within a review is a secondary source.

Library and information science

In library and information sciences, secondary sources are generally regarded as those sources that summarize or add commentary to primary sources in the context of the particular information or idea under study.

Mathematics

An important use of secondary sources in the field of mathematics has been to make difficult mathematical ideas and proofs from primary sources more accessible to the public; in other sciences tertiary sources are expected to fulfill the introductory role.

Humanities and history

Secondary sources in history and humanities are usually books or scholarly journals, from the perspective of a later interpreter, especially by a later scholar. In the humanities, a peer reviewed article is always a secondary source. The delineation of sources as primary and secondary first arose in the field of historiography, as historians attempted to identify and classify the sources of historical writing. In scholarly writing, an important objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources. In original scholarly writing, historians rely on primary sources, read in the context of the scholarly interpretations.

Following the Rankean model established by German scholarship in the 19th century, historians use archives of primary sources. Most undergraduate research projects rely on secondary source material, with perhaps snippets of primary sources.

In the legal field, source classification is important because the persuasiveness of a source usually depends upon its history. Primary sources may include cases, constitutions, statutes, administrative regulations, and other sources of binding legal authority, while secondary legal sources may include books, the headnotes of case reports, articles, and encyclopedias. Legal writers usually prefer to cite primary sources because only primary sources are authoritative and precedential, while secondary sources are only persuasive at best.

Family history

"A secondary source is a record or statement of an event or circumstance made by a non-eyewitness or by someone not closely connected with the event or circumstances, recorded or stated verbally either at or sometime after the event, or by an eye-witness at a time after the event when the fallibility of memory is an important factor." Consequently, according to this definition, a first-hand account written long after the event "when the fallibility of memory is an important factor" is a secondary source, even though it may be the first published description of that event.

Autobiographies

An autobiography can be a secondary source in history or the humanities when used for information about topics other than its subject. For example, many first-hand accounts of events in World War I written in the post-war years were influenced by the then prevailing perception of the war, which was significantly different from contemporary opinion.

1. ^ "Primary, secondary and tertiary sources". University Libraries, University of Maryland.

2. ^ "Secondary sources Archived 2014-11-06 at the Wayback Machine". James Cook University.

3. ^ Kragh, Helge (1989), An Introduction to the Historiography of Science, Cambridge University Press, p. 121, ISBN 0-521-38921-6, [T]he distinction is not a sharp one. Since a source is only a source in a specific historical context, the same source object can be both a primary or secondary source according to what it is used for.

4. ^ Delgadillo, Roberto; Lynch, Beverly (1999), "Future Historians: Their Quest for Information", College & Research Libraries, 60 (3): 245-259, at 253, doi:10.5860/crl.60.3.245, [T]he same document can be a primary or a secondary source depending on the particular analysis the historian is doing,

5. ^ Monagahn, E.J.; Hartman, D.K. (2001), "Historical research in literacy", Reading Online, 4 (11), archived from the original on 2012-02-13, [A] source may be primary or secondary, depending on what the researcher is looking for.

6. Richard Veit and Christopher Gould, ^ Writing, Reading, and Research (8th ed. 2009) p 335

7. ^ "Important Sources of History (Primary and Secondary Sources)". History Discussion - Discuss Anything About History. 2013-09-23.

8. ^ Henige, David (1986), "Primary Source by Primary Source? On the Role of Epidemics in New World Depopulation", Ethnohistory, Duke University Press, 33 (3): 292-312, at 292, doi:10.2307/481816, JSTOR 481816, PMID 11616953, [T]he term 'primary' inevitably carries a relative meaning insofar as it defines those pieces of information that stand in closest relationship to an event or process in the present state of our knowledge. Indeed, in most instances, the very nature of a primary source tells us that it is actually derivative....[H]istorians have no choice but to regard certain of the available sources as 'primary' since they are as near to truly original sources as they can now secure.

9. Open University, ^ 4.2 Secondary literature, Succeeding in postgraduate study, session 5, accessed 22 March 2023

10. ^ Garrard, Judith (2010). Health Sciences Literature Review Made Easy. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4496-1868-1.

11. ^ Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (2011). "Book reviews". Scholarly definition document. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Archived from the original on September 10, 2011.

12. ^ Edwards, H.M. (2001), Riemann's Zeta Function, Mineola, New York: Courier Dover Publications, p. xi, ISBN 0-486-41740-9, The purpose of a secondary source is to make the primary sources accessible to you. If you can read and understand the primary sources without reading this book, more power to you. If you read this book without reading the primary sources you are like a man who carries a sack lunch to a banquet

Jules R. Benjamin, A Student's Guide to History (2013) ISBN 9781457621444

Wood Gray, Historian's handbook, a key to the study and writing of history (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991, ©1964) ISBN 9780881336269

Derek Harland, A Basic Course in Genealogy: Volume two, Research Procedure and Evaluation of Evidence (Bookcraft Inc, 1958) WorldCat record

Richard A. Marius and Melvin E. Page, A Short Guide to Writing About History (8th Edition) (2012) ISBN 9780205118601

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In scholarship, a secondary source is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. A secondary source contrasts with a primary source, which is an original source of the information being discussed; a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or a document created by such a person.

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They are sources written by the original author. Examples include diaries, letters, and art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Primary sources are the raw materials of history. They are documents and objects that were created during the event being studied or created later by the participant of an event, reflecting their viewpoint. They enable researchers to get as close as possible to what happened during a historical event or period.

Primary source literacy is the ability to interrogate evidence, such as documents, images, or objects for credibility, trustworthiness, and accuracy using sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. Examining primary sources provides a powerful sense of history and demonstrates the complexity of the past. Even more importantly, analyzing primary sources develops better critical thinking and analysis skills.

To understand the significance of a primary source, you must evaluate key characteristics, including the role and perspective of the document creator, the intended purpose, the type of information or opinion conveyed, and the extent of the corroborating or conflicting evidence.

Developing primary source literacy engages four types of queries:

1. Description: What is this document? What kind of document is it? Who created it? When was it created? Was it personal or public? Are there any attributes (e.g., notarized, postal marks, tears, etc.) that are present?

2. Relationship: For what purpose was this document created? What is the context from which it emerged? What other documents are related? How is the context in which I am encountering it different from the context in which the creator intended? What is unknown about this document?

3. Meaning: What sense can I make of this document? Of what does it provide evidence? What interpretive frameworks help to understand this document? Is the meaning contested?

4. Use: How will I use this document in my work? Does it provide supporting evidence for my claims? Does it provide contrary evidence that I need to engage? What is the appropriate way to cite the document?

Primary sources raise questions that should be answered with sound research. While some answers are better than others, and some answers are wrong, good historical questions do not have a single right answer. The end product of primary source analysis should be a historical interpretation, supported with evidence from the documents, that answers the driving question.
Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

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Developing Primary Source Literacy - Margot Note Consulting LLC

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Primary sources are the raw materials of history. They are documents and objects that were created during the event being studied or created later by the participant of an event, reflecting their viewpoint.

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10.) Exploration and Colonization of North America

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10.) Exploration and Colonization of North America

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Great Britian took control of North America to expand their wealth.

Cristopher Columbus "discovered" North America in 1492.

Diseases decimated the Native Americans during Columbus's expedition.

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Environmental and health effects of European contact with the New World (article) | Khan Academy

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1. Louisiana Purchase & Lewis and Clark Expedition

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1. Louisiana Purchase & Lewis and Clark Expedition

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Thomas Jefferson back the United States in agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase.

Sale of 828,000 square miles for $27 million dollars from the French.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition began May 14, 1804 and ended September 23, 1806.

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What was the purpose of the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

Which president sent Lewis and Clark on their expedition?

Who was Seaman in the Lewis and Clark expedition?

What plants and animals did Lewis discover?

Who was the Native American woman who accompanied the expedition?

Lewis and Clark Expedition, (1804-06), U.S. military expedition, led by Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lieut. William Clark, to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest. The expedition was a major chapter in the history of American exploration.

Commissioning and preparation

On January 18, 1803, U.S. Pres. Thomas Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress asking for $2,500 to send an officer and a dozen soldiers to explore the Missouri River, make diplomatic contact with Indians, expand the American fur trade, and locate the Northwest Passage (the much-sought-after hypothetical northwestern water route to the Pacific Ocean). The proposed trip took on added significance on May 2, when the United States agreed to the Louisiana Purchase- Napoleon's sale of 828,000 square miles (2,100,000 square km) of French territory for $27 million. Jefferson, who had already sponsored several attempts to explore the West, asked his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition. Lewis was dispatched to Philadelphia for instruction in botany, celestial navigation, medicine, and zoology. He also purchased supplies and spent $20 on a Newfoundland dog, Seaman.

Lewis procured weapons at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), supervised the construction of a 55-foot (17-metre) keelboat, and secured smaller vessels, in addition to designing an iron-framed boat that could be assembled on the journey. As his co-commander he selected William Clark, who had been his military superior during the government's battles with the Northwest Indian Federation in the early 1790s. The U.S. secretary of war denied Lewis's request of a shared command, but Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark chose to address one another as "captain" to hide this fact from the other members of the expedition. For his part, Clark recruited men in Kentucky, oversaw their training that winter at Camp River Dubois in Illinois, and served as the expedition's principal waterman and cartographer.

Expedition from May 14, 1804, to October 16, 1805

Over the duration of the trip, from May 14, 1804, to September 23, 1806, from St. Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean and back, the Corps of Discovery, as the expedition company was called, traveled nearly 8,000 miles (13,000 km). The entourage, numbering about four dozen men, covered 10 to 20 miles (16 to 32 km) a day-poling, pushing, and pulling their 10-ton keelboat and two pirogues (dugout boats) up the Missouri River. Lewis's iron-framed boat was later assembled and covered with skins near Great Falls (in present-day Montana) but had to be abandoned because the seams leaked and there was no pitch to seal them. The captains and at least five others kept journals. President Jefferson had instructed Lewis to make observations of latitude and longitude and to take detailed notes about the soil, climate, animals, plants, and native peoples. Lewis identified 178 plants new to science, including bitterroot, prairie sagebrush, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine, as well as 122 animals, such as grizzly bear, prairie dog, and pronghorn antelope. The scientific names Philadelphus lewisii (mock orange), Lewisia rediva (bitterroot), and Clarkia pucella (pink fairy, or ragged robin) are but three examples of the men's discoveries. The expedition encountered immense animal herds and ate well, consuming one buffalo, two elk, or four deer per day, supplemented by roots, berries, and fish. They named geographic locations after expedition members, peers, loved ones, and even their dog (Seaman's Creek). They experienced dysentery, venereal disease, boils, tick bites, and injuries from prickly pear, yet only one man perished over the course of the journey.

Another primary objective involved diplomacy with Native Americans. The expedition held councils with Indians, in which the corps had military parades, handed out peace medals, flags, and gifts, delivered speeches, promised trade, and requested intertribal peace. There also was something of a magic show (magnets, compasses, and Lewis's air gun) and an invitation for Indian representatives to travel to Washington, D.C. Most tribes welcomed trading opportunities and provided the expedition with food, knowledge, guides, shelter, sex, and entertainment. The Lakota (encountered in South Dakota), however, already had British commercial ties and did not view American competition favourably, especially because it would make their enemies stronger. Their attempt to prevent the expedition from continuing upstream nearly turned violent, but Chief Black Buffalo's diplomacy defused the situation.

The expedition arrived at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, and constructed Fort Mandan in which to spend the winter. The captains prepared maps, artifacts, mineral samples, plant specimens, and papers to send back in the spring. On April 7, 1805, a small crew departed on a St. Louis-bound keelboat laden with boxes of materials for Jefferson that included live magpies and a prairie dog. Meanwhile, the permanent party proceeded up the Missouri in six canoes and two pirogues. It now consisted of 33 people, including soldiers, civilians, Clark's slave York, and two newly hired interpreters-a French Canadian, Toussaint Charbonneau, and his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, who had given birth to a boy, Jean Baptiste, that February. The departure scene was described by Lewis in his journal:

This little fleet altho' not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs...we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves.

On June 2, 1805, the expedition party arrived at a fork in the river. Not knowing which waterway was the principal stream, they sent out reconnaissance parties up both forks. Although the evidence was not conclusive, the captains believed the south fork to be the major course while everyone else favoured the north. Lewis named the north fork Maria's River (now Marias River) and instructed the party to continue up the south fork. This choice proved correct when the expedition arrived at the Great Falls almost two weeks later. An 18-mile (29-km) portage around the falls was made even more difficult by broken terrain, prickly pear cactus, hailstorms, and numerous grizzly bears. On July 4, 1805, the party finished the portage and, to celebrate Independence Day, consumed the last of their 120 gallons of alcohol and danced into the night.

Arriving at the Three Forks of the Missouri River (the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers), Sacagawea recognized Beaverhead Rock and informed the others they would soon encounter some Shoshones. Lewis climbed Lemhi Pass, crossing the Continental Divide, only to have his hope for a single mountain portage dashed by the view of endless mountains stretching before him: "I discovered immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow." Fortunately, in mid-August he met a Shoshone band led by Sacagawea's brother Cameahwait, who provided the expedition with horses. The Shoshone guide Old Toby joined the expedition and led them across the Bitterroot Range. On the crossing, Clark lamented, "I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life, indeed I was at one time fearfull my feet would freeze in the thin mockersons [moccasins] which I wore." Cold and hungry, the expedition finally spilled out of the mountains onto the Weippe Prairie, homeland of the Nez Percé. Upon the recommendation of a respected elderly woman, Watkuweis, the Nez Percé befriended the expedition. After leaving their horses with Chief Twisted Hair, the explorers hollowed out five cottonwood canoes and floated down the Clearwater and Snake rivers, reaching the Columbia River on October 16.

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Lewis and Clark Expedition | Summary, History, Members, Facts, & Map

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Lewis and Clark Expedition, U.S. military expedition (1804-06), led by Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lieut. William Clark, to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest. The expedition was a major chapter in the history of American exploration.

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2. U.S. Acquisitions of Florida, Texas, Oregon, and California

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2. U.S. Acquisitions of Florida, Texas, Oregon, and California

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Florida was purchased from Spain in 1819 for $5 million.

Texas in 1845 after the annexation of independent republic.

Oregon Territory in 1846, The Oregon Treaty with Great Britian.

California in 1848 from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

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The role of U.S. Territorial Acquisitions in the history of the United States of America.

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Most slaves very forces to work in agriculture in the South.

Slavery dates back to pre-constitution.

Three-fifths Compromise & Fugitive Slave Clause

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Constitution of the United States

Although the United States Constitution has never contained the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document.

At the time of the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, and its ratification in 1789, slavery was banned by the states in New England and Pennsylvania and by the Congress of the Confederation in the Northwest Territory, by the Northwest Ordinance. Though slaves were present in other states, most were forced to work in agriculture in the South.

According to H. W. Brands, because of the declining productivity of crops like tobacco due to soil exhaustion, many of the drafters of the Constitution assumed that slavery would die out naturally in the South as it had done in industrialized North. This changed with the invention of the modern cotton gin in 1793, which provided a more sustainable and economically viable crop for Southern plantations.

Throughout U.S. history there have been disputes about whether the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery. James Oakes writes that the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause and Three-Fifths Clause "might well be considered the bricks and mortar of the proslavery Constitution". "But", Oakes adds, "there was also an antislavery Constitution.... Congress was granted the power to make 'all needful rules and regulations' for the territories, and for decades after ratification hardly anyone doubted that this authorized the federal government to ban slavery from the territories.... Then there was the familiar assertion that the principle of fundamental human equality was embodied in the Constitution.... Doesn't the Preamble state that the purpose of the federal government was to 'secure the blessings of liberty' ... ? Similarly, the Fifth Amendment declares that 'no person' could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

Oakes continues: "Throughout the decades-long debate over slavery and the Constitution some of the most contentious issues arose over constitutional principles that cannot be found in the actual wording of the Constitution. Nowhere does the Constitution state that Congress cannot 'interfere' with slavery or abolition in a state, yet it was widely agreed that it could not. Nor does the Constitution expressly recognize a right of 'property in man'.... Given that the Constitution was the handiwork of men who disagreed about slavery, it is hardly surprising that it could be-and was-read as both proslavery and antislavery." Oakes' view is that, "depending on which clauses you cite and how you spin them, the Constitution can be read as either proslavery or antislavery".

In The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?, Frederick Douglass cites the Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 left behind by James Madison in order to describe four provisions of the Constitution that are said to be pro-slavery. In examining the history of how the clauses were debated and structured, he argues either that they are not pro-slavery or that they do not concern slavery.

He argues that the Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, section 2) "deprives [slave] States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation"; that the Migration or Importation Clause (Article I, section 9) allowed Congress to end the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808; that the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, section 2) does not apply to slaves but rather to "Person[s] held to Service or Labour", which do not include slaves, because a slave "is a simple article of property. He does not owe and cannot owe service. He cannot even make a contract"; and that the clause giving Congress the power to "suppress Insurrections" (Article I, section 8) gives Congress the power to end slavery, "[i]f it should turn out that slavery is a source of insurrection, [and] that there is no security from insurrection while slavery lasts...."

Balkin, Jack M. and Levinson, Sanford (2023). "Frederick Douglass as Constitutionalist". Maryland Law Review, forthcoming.

Belz, Herman (1998). Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era. New York: Fordham University Press.

Cover, Robert M. (1975). Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Douglass, Frederick. (1860) FREDERICK DOUGLASS, "THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES: IS IT PRO-SLAVERY OR ANTI-SLAVERY?", full text. Abridged

Farber, Daniel (2003). Lincoln's Constitution. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Finkelman, Paul (2016). "Frederick Douglass's Constitution: From Garrisonian Abolitionist to Lincoln Republican". Missouri Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 1-73.

Finkelman, Paul (2018). Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. Review

Maltz, Earl M. (2009). Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

McGinty, Brian (2008). Lincoln and the Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. Review, JSTOR

Moreno, Paul D.; O'Neill, Johnathan, eds. (2013). Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War. New York: Fordham University Press.

Neely, Jr., Mark E. (2011). Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Radan, Peter (2023). Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America. Lawrence Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Rebeiro, Bradley (2023). "Frederick Douglass and the Original Originalists". Brigham Young University Law Review, vol. 48

Waldstreicher, David (2009). Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. New York: Hill & Wang.

Wiecek, William W. (1977). The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Wood, Gordon S. (Jan. 12, 2021). "Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document?", The New York Times (review of James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition)

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Slavery and the United States Constitution - Wikipedia

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Although the United States Constitution has never contained the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document.

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4. Industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)

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4. Industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)

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Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.

Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical mower-reaper.

Steamboat and Railroad both allowed goods and crops to be transported easier.

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The Pre-Civil War Era (1815–1850): Overview | SparkNotes

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The Pre-Civil War Era (1815–1850) quiz that tests what you know about History SparkNotes, and the historical events that influenced The Pre-Civil War Era (1815–1850)

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From 1861-1865 between the Union and the Confederate States of America.

The economy in the Northern states was rapidly modernizing and becoming more diverse. While the South still relied on the free labor from slavery.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election.

Jefferson Davis was the president and commander in chief of the Confederate forces.

Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison we both abolitionists.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and helped many others escape.

John Brown was an abolitionist who led the raiding of Harper's Ferry.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in areas not under Union control, also allowed black men to serve in the Union army.

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American Civil War - The war in the west

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American Civil War - American Civil War - The war in the west: The surrender of Vicksburg was an important victory for the Union. It was one of several significant turning points in the war but was not decisive on its own. Confederate troops continued to put up a considerable fight, defeating Union…

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The Gettysburg Address is a speech that was given by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in dedication to the soldiers who died in battle. This is one of the best-known speeches in American History.

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The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. It is one of the best-known speeches in American history.

Not even the day's primary speech, Lincoln's carefully crafted address came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just 271 words, beginning with the now iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago,"‍ referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence 87 years earlier, Lincoln described the US as a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and represented the Civil War as a test that would determine whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, could endure. He extolled the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, and exhorted his listeners to resolve

that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Despite the prominent place of the speech in the history and popular culture of the United States, its exact wording is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand differ in a number of details, and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech. Neither is it clear where stood the platform from which Lincoln delivered the address. Modern scholarship locates the speakers' platform 40 yards (or more) away from the traditional site in Soldiers' National Cemetery at the Soldiers' National Monument, such that it stood entirely within the private, adjacent Evergreen Cemetery.

Background

Following the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863, the removal of the fallen Union soldiers from the Gettysburg Battlefield graves and their reburial in graves at the National Cemetery at Gettysburg began on October 17, though on the day of the ceremony, reinterment was less than half complete.

In inviting President Lincoln to the ceremonies, David Wills, of the committee for the November 19 Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks."

On the train trip from Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln was accompanied by three members of his Cabinet, William Seward, John Usher and Montgomery Blair, several foreign officials, his secretary John Nicolay, and his assistant secretary, John Hay. During the trip Lincoln remarked to Hay that he felt weak; on the morning of November 19, Lincoln mentioned to Nicolay that he was dizzy. Hay noted that during the speech Lincoln's face had "a ghastly color" and that he was "sad, mournful, almost haggard." After the speech, when Lincoln boarded the 6:30 pm train for Washington, D.C., he was feverish and weak, with a severe headache. A protracted illness followed, which included a vesicular rash; it was diagnosed as a mild case of smallpox. It thus seems highly likely that Lincoln was in the prodromal period of smallpox when he delivered the Gettysburg address.

Program and Everett's "Gettysburg Oration"

The program organized for that day by Wills and his committee included:

Music, by Birgfeld's Band ("Homage d'uns Heros" by Adolph Birgfeld)

Prayer, by Reverend T. H. Stockton, D.D.

Music, by the Marine Band ("Old Hundred"), directed by Francis Scala

Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett ("The Battles of Gettysburg")

Music, Hymn ("Consecration Chant") by B. B. French, Esq., music by Wilson G Horner, sung by Baltimore Glee Club

Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States

Dirge ("Oh! It is Great for Our Country to Die", words by James G. Percival, music by Alfred Delaney), sung by Choir selected for the occasion

Benediction, by Reverend H. L. Baugher, D.D.

While it is Lincoln's short speech that has gone down in history as one of the finest examples of English public oratory, it was Everett's two-hour oration that was slated to be the "Gettysburg address" that day. His now seldom-read 13,607-word oration began:

Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed;-grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.

And ended two hours later with:

But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.

Lengthy dedication addresses like Everett's were common at cemeteries in this era. The tradition began in 1831 when Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those addresses often linked cemeteries to the mission of Union.

Lincoln's address followed the oration by Edward Everett, who subsequently included a copy of the Gettysburg Address in his 1864 book about the event ( Address of the Hon. Edward Everett At the Consecration of the National Cemetery At Gettysburg, 19th November 1863, with the Dedicatory Speech of President Lincoln, and the Other Exercises of the Occasion; Accompanied by An Account of the Origin of the Undertaking and of the Arrangement of the Cemetery Grounds, and by a Map of the Battle-field and a Plan of the Cemetery).

Text of the Gettysburg Address

Shortly after Everett's well-received remarks, Lincoln spoke for only a few minutes. With a "few appropriate remarks", he was able to summarize his view of the war in just ten sentences.

Despite the historical significance of Lincoln's speech, modern scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure. Of these versions, the Bliss version, written well after the speech as a favor for a friend, is viewed by many as the standard text. Its text differs, however, from the written versions prepared by Lincoln before and after his speech. It is the only version to which Lincoln affixed his signature, and the last he is known to have written.

Lincoln's sources

In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills notes the parallels between Lincoln's speech and Pericles's Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War as described by Thucydides. (James McPherson notes this connection in his review of Wills's book. Gore Vidal also draws attention to this link in a BBC documentary about oration.) Pericles' speech, like Lincoln's:

Begins with an acknowledgment of revered predecessors: "I shall begin with our ancestors: it is both just and proper that they should have the honor of the first mention on an occasion like the present"

Praises the uniqueness of the State's commitment to democracy: "If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences"

Honors the sacrifice of the slain, "Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonor, but met danger face to face"

Exhorts the living to continue the struggle: "You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue."

In contrast, writer Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, notes that while Everett's Oration was explicitly neoclassical, referring directly to Marathon and Pericles, "Lincoln's rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in any of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis."

Several theories have been advanced by Lincoln scholars to explain the provenance of Lincoln's famous phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Despite many claims, there is no evidence that a similar phrase appears in the Prologue to John Wycliffe's 1384 English translation of the Bible.

In a discussion "A more probable origin of a famous Lincoln phrase", in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Albert Shaw credits a correspondent with pointing out the writings of William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, who wrote in the 1888 work Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of A Great Life that he had brought to Lincoln some of the sermons of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, of Massachusetts, and that Lincoln was moved by Parker's use of this idea:

I brought with me additional sermons and lectures of Theodore Parker, who was warm in his commendation of Lincoln. One of these was a lecture on 'The Effect of Slavery on the American People' ... which I gave to Lincoln, who read and returned it. He liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil, and which he in substance afterwards used in his Gettysburg Address: 'Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.'

Craig R. Smith, in "Criticism of Political Rhetoric and Disciplinary Integrity", suggested Lincoln's view of the government as expressed in the Gettysburg Address was influenced by the noted speech of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, the "Second Reply to Hayne", in which Webster famously thundered "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Specifically, in this speech on January 26, 1830, before the United States Senate, Webster described the federal government as: "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people", foreshadowing Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Webster also noted, "This government, Sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It is not the creature of State legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on State sovereignties."

A source predating these others with which Lincoln was certainly familiar was Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), a case upholding federal authority to create a national bank and to be free from the State's powers to tax. In asserting the superiority of federal power over the states, Chief Justice Marshall stated: "The government of the Union, then (whatever may be the influence of this fact on the case), is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people. In form, and in substance, it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit." Lincoln, a lawyer and President engaged in the greatest struggle of federalism, was (more eloquently) echoing the preeminent case that had solidified federal power over the States.

Wills observed Lincoln's usage of the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation "brought forth", "conceived", and that shall not "perish". Others, including Allen C. Guelzo, the director of Civil War Era studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, suggested that Lincoln's formulation "four score and seven" was an allusion to the King James Version of the Bible's Psalms 90:10, in which man's lifespan is given as "threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years".

Five manuscripts

Each of the five known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address is named for the person who received it from Lincoln. Lincoln gave copies to his private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. Both of these drafts were written around the time of his November 19 address, while the other three copies of the address, the Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss copies, were written by Lincoln for charitable purposes well after November 19. In part because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated the Bliss copy, it has become the standard text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Nicolay and Hay were appointed custodians of Lincoln's papers by Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln in 1874. After appearing in facsimile in an article written by John Nicolay in 1894, the Nicolay copy was presumably among the papers passed to Hay by Nicolay's daughter Helen upon Nicolay's death in 1901. Robert Lincoln began a search for the original copy in 1908, which resulted in the discovery of a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address among the bound papers of John Hay-a copy now known as the "Hay copy" or "Hay draft".

The Hay draft differed from the version of the Gettysburg Address published by John Nicolay in 1894 in a number of significant ways: it was written on a different type of paper, had a different number of words per line and number of lines, and contained editorial revisions in Lincoln's hand.

Both the Hay and Nicolay copies of the Address are within the Library of Congress, encased in specially designed, temperature-controlled, sealed containers with argon gas in order to protect the documents from oxidation and continued deterioration.

Nicolay copy

The Nicolay copy is often called the "first draft" because it is believed to be the earliest copy that exists. Scholars disagree over whether the Nicolay copy was actually the reading copy Lincoln held at Gettysburg on November 19. In an 1894 article that included a facsimile of this copy, Nicolay, who had become the custodian of Lincoln's papers, wrote that Lincoln had brought to Gettysburg the first part of the speech written in ink on Executive Mansion stationery, and that he had written the second page in pencil on lined paper before the dedication on November 19. Matching folds are still evident on the two pages, suggesting it could be the copy that eyewitnesses say Lincoln took from his coat pocket and read at the ceremony. Others believe that the delivery text has been lost, because some of the words and phrases of the Nicolay copy do not match contemporary transcriptions of Lincoln's original speech. The words "under God", for example, are missing in this copy from the phrase "that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom ..." In order for the Nicolay draft to have been the reading copy, either the contemporary transcriptions were inaccurate, or Lincoln would have had to depart from his written text in several instances. This copy of the Gettysburg Address apparently remained in John Nicolay's possession until his death in 1901, when it passed to his friend and colleague John Hay. It used to be on display as part of the American Treasures exhibition of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The existence of the Hay copy was first announced to the public in 1906, after the search for the "original manuscript" of the Address among the papers of John Hay brought it to light. Significantly, it differs somewhat from the manuscript of the Address described by John Nicolay in his article, and contains numerous omissions and inserts in Lincoln's own hand, including omissions critical to the basic meaning of the sentence, not simply words that would be added by Lincoln to strengthen or clarify their meaning. In this copy, as in the Nicolay copy, the words "under God" are not present.

This version has been described as "the most inexplicable" of the drafts and is sometimes referred to as the "second draft". The "Hay copy" was made either on the morning of the delivery of the Address, or shortly after Lincoln's return to Washington. Those who believe that it was completed on the morning of his address point to the fact that it contains certain phrases that are not in the first draft but are in the reports of the address as delivered and in subsequent copies made by Lincoln. It is probable, they conclude, that, as stated in the explanatory note accompanying the original copies of the first and second drafts in the Library of Congress, Lincoln held this second draft when he delivered the address. Lincoln eventually gave this copy to Hay, whose descendants donated both it and the Nicolay copy to the Library of Congress in 1916.

Everett copy

The Everett copy, also known as the "Everett-Keyes copy", was sent by President Lincoln to Edward Everett in early 1864, at Everett's request. Everett was collecting the speeches at the Gettysburg dedication into one bound volume to sell for the benefit of stricken soldiers at New York's Sanitary Commission Fair. The draft Lincoln sent became the third autograph copy, and is now in the possession of the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield, Illinois, where it is displayed in the Treasures Gallery of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Bancroft copy

The Bancroft copy of the Gettysburg Address was written out by President Lincoln in February 1864 at the request of George Bancroft, the famed historian and former Secretary of the Navy, whose comprehensive ten-volume History of the United States later led him to be known as the "father of American History". Bancroft planned to include this copy in Autograph Leaves of Our Country's Authors, which he planned to sell at a Soldiers' and Sailors' Sanitary Fair in Baltimore. As this fourth copy was written on both sides of the paper, it proved unusable for this purpose, and Bancroft was allowed to keep it. This manuscript is the only one accompanied both by a letter from Lincoln transmitting the manuscript and by the original envelope addressed and franked by Lincoln. This copy remained in the Bancroft family for many years, was sold to various dealers and purchased by Nicholas and Marguerite Lilly Noyes, who donated the manuscript to Cornell University in 1949. It is now held by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell. It is the only one of the five copies to be privately owned.

Discovering that his fourth written copy could not be used, Lincoln then wrote a fifth draft, which was accepted for the purpose requested. The Bliss copy, named for Colonel Alexander Bliss, Bancroft's stepson and publisher of Autograph Leaves, is the only draft to which Lincoln affixed his signature. Lincoln is not known to have made any further copies of the Gettysburg Address. Because of the apparent care in its preparation, and in part, because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated this copy, it has become the standard version of the address and the source for most facsimile reproductions of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It is the version that is inscribed on the South wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

This draft is now displayed in the Lincoln Room of the White House, a gift of Oscar B. Cintas, former Cuban Ambassador to the United States. Cintas, a wealthy collector of art and manuscripts, purchased the Bliss copy at a public auction in 1949 for $54,000 ($580,000 as of 2020), at that time the highest price ever paid for a document at public auction. Cintas' properties were claimed by the Castro government after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, but Cintas, who died in 1957, willed the Gettysburg Address to the American people, provided it would be kept at the White House, where it was transferred in 1959.

Garry Wills concluded the Bliss copy "is stylistically preferable to others in one significant way: Lincoln removed 'here' from 'that cause for which they (here) gave ... ' The seventh 'here' is in all other versions of the speech." Wills noted the fact that Lincoln "was still making such improvements", suggesting Lincoln was more concerned with a perfected text than with an 'original' one.

From November 21, 2008, to January 1, 2009, the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History hosted a limited public viewing of the Bliss copy, with the support of then- First Lady Laura Bush. The Museum also launched an online exhibition and interactive gallery to enable visitors to look more closely at the document.

Another contemporary source of the text is the Associated Press dispatch, transcribed from the shorthand notes taken by reporter Joseph L. Gilbert. It also differs from the drafted text in a number of minor ways.

Contemporary sources and reaction

Eyewitness reports vary as to their view of Lincoln's performance. In 1931, the printed recollections of 87-year-old Mrs. Sarah A. Cooke Myers, who was 19 when she attended the ceremony, suggest a dignified silence followed Lincoln's speech: "I was close to the President and heard all of the Address, but it seemed short. Then there was an impressive silence like our Menallen Friends Meeting. There was no applause when he stopped speaking." According to historian Shelby Foote, after Lincoln's presentation, the applause was delayed, scattered, and "barely polite". In contrast, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin maintained, "He pronounced that speech in a voice that all the multitude heard. The crowd was hushed into silence because the President stood before them ... It was so Impressive! It was the common remark of everybody. Such a speech, as they said it was!"

In an oft-repeated legend, Lincoln is said to have turned to his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and remarked that his speech, like a bad plow, "won't scour". According to Garry Wills, this statement has no basis in fact and largely originates from the unreliable recollections of Lamon. In Garry Wills's view, "[Lincoln] had done what he wanted to do [at Gettysburg]".

In a letter to Lincoln written the following day, Everett praised the President for his eloquent and concise speech, saying, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Lincoln replied that he was glad to know the speech was not a "total failure".

Other public reaction to the speech was divided along partisan lines. The Democratic-leaning Chicago Times observed, "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." In contrast, the Republican-leaning The New York Times was complimentary and printed the speech. In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican also printed the entire speech, calling it "a perfect gem" that was "deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma". The Republican predicted that Lincoln's brief remarks would "repay further study as the model speech". On the sesquicentennial of the address, The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, formerly the Patriot & Union, retracted its original reaction ("silly remarks" deserving "the veil of oblivion") stating: "Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives. ... the Patriot & Union failed to recognize [the speech's] momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error."

Foreign newspapers also criticized Lincoln's remarks. of London commented: "The ceremony [at Gettysburg] was rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln."

Congressman Joseph A. Goulden, then an eighteen-year-old school teacher, was present and heard the speech. He served in the United States Marine Corps during the war, and later had a successful career in insurance in Pennsylvania and New York City before entering Congress as a Democrat. In his later life, Goulden was often asked about the speech, since the passage of time made him one of a dwindling number of individuals who had been present for it. He commented on the event and Lincoln's speech in favorable terms, naming Lincoln's address as one of the inspirations for him to enter military service. Goulden's recollections included remarks to the House of Representatives in 1914.

Audio recollections

William R. Rathvon is the only known eyewitness of both Lincoln's arrival at Gettysburg and the address itself to have left an audio recording of his recollections. One year before his death in 1939, Rathvon's reminiscences were recorded on February 12, 1938, at the Boston studios of radio station WRUL, including his reading the address, itself, and a 78 RPM record was pressed. The title of the 78 record was "I Heard Lincoln That Day - William R. Rathvon, TR Productions". A copy wound up at National Public Radio (NPR) during a "Quest for Sound" project in 1999.

Like most people who came to Gettysburg, the Rathvon family was aware that Lincoln was going to make some remarks. The family went to the town square where the procession was to form to go out to the cemetery that had not been completed yet. At the head of the procession rode Lincoln on a gray horse preceded by a military band that was the first the young boy had ever seen. Rathvon describes Lincoln as so tall and with such long legs that they went almost to the ground; he also mentions the long eloquent speech given by Edward Everett of Massachusetts whom Rathvon accurately described as the "most finished orator of the day". Rathvon then goes on to describe how Lincoln stepped forward and "with a manner serious almost to sadness, gave his brief address". During the delivery, along with some other boys, young Rathvon wiggled his way forward through the crowd until he stood within 15 feet of Mr. Lincoln and looked up into what he described as Lincoln's "serious face". Rathvon recalls candidly that, although he listened "intently to every word the president uttered and heard it clearly", he explains, "boylike, I could not recall any of it afterwards". But he explains that if anyone said anything disparaging about "honest Abe", there would have been a "junior battle of Gettysburg". In the recording Rathvon speaks of Lincoln's speech allegorically "echoing through the hills".

Photographs

The only known and confirmed photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken by photographer David Bachrach, was identified in the Mathew Brady collection of photographic plates in the National Archives and Records Administration in 1952. While Lincoln's speech was short and may have precluded multiple pictures of him while speaking, he and the other dignitaries sat for hours during the rest of the program. Given the length of Everett's speech and the length of time it took for 19th-century photographers to get "set up" before taking a picture, it is quite plausible that the photographers were ill-prepared for the brevity of Lincoln's remarks.

Usage of "under God"

The words "under God" do not appear in the Nicolay and Hay drafts but are included in the three later copies (Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss). Accordingly, some skeptics maintain that Lincoln did not utter the words "under God" at Gettysburg. However, at least three reporters telegraphed the text of Lincoln's speech on the day the Address was given with the words "under God" included. Historian William E. Barton argues that:

Every stenographic report, good, bad and indifferent, says 'that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom.' There was no common source from which all the reporters could have obtained those words but from Lincoln's own lips at the time of delivery. It will not do to say that [Secretary of War] Stanton suggested those words after Lincoln's return to Washington, for the words were telegraphed by at least three reporters on the afternoon of the delivery.

The reporters present included Joseph Gilbert, from the Associated Press; Charles Hale, from the Boston Advertiser; John R. Young (who later became the Librarian of Congress), from the Philadelphia Press; and reporters from the Cincinnati Commercial, New York Tribune, and The New York Times. Charles Hale "had notebook and pencil in hand, [and] took down the slow-spoken words of the President". "He took down what he declared was the exact language of Lincoln's address, and his declaration was as good as the oath of a court stenographer. His associates confirmed his testimony, which was received, as it deserved to be, at its face value." One explanation is that Lincoln deviated from his prepared text and inserted the phrase when he spoke. Ronald C. White, visiting professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles and professor of American religious history emeritus at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote in this context of Lincoln's insertion and usage of "under God":

It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for a speaker who did not trust extemporaneous speech. Lincoln had added impromptu words in several earlier speeches, but always offered a subsequent apology for the change. In this instance, he did not. And Lincoln included "under God" in all three copies of the address he prepared at later dates. "Under God" pointed backward and forward: back to "this nation", which drew its breath from both political and religious sources, but also forward to a "new birth". Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die. The old man had to die. Death became a transition to a new Union and a new humanity.

The phrase "under God" was used frequently in works published before 1860, usually with the meaning "with God's help".

Platform location

Designations

Official name

Gettysburg Address

Location

PA 134 (Taneytown Rd.) at entrance to National Cemetery
Baltimore St. (old US 140) & PA 134 at entrance to National Cemetery

Outside the Cemetery and within sight of the crosswalk, a historical marker reads:

Nearby, Nov. 19, 1863, in dedicating the National Cemetery, Abraham Lincoln gave the address which he had written in Washington and revised after his arrival at Gettysburg the evening of November 18.

Directly inside the Taneytown Road entrance are located the Rostrum and the Lincoln Address Memorial. Neither of these is located within 300 yards of any of the five (or more) claimed locations for the dedicatory platform.

Colonel W. Yates Selleck was a marshal in the parade on Consecration Day and was seated on the platform when Lincoln made the address. Selleck marked a map with the position of the platform and described it as "350 feet almost due north of Soldiers' National Monument, 40 feet from a point in the outer circle of lots where [the] Michigan and New York [burial sections] are separated by a path". A location which approximates this description is 39°49.243′N, 77°13.869′W.

As pointed out in 1973 by retired park historian Frederick Tilberg, the Selleck Site is 25 feet lower than the crest of Cemetery Hill, and only the crest presents a panoramic view of the battlefield. A spectacular view from the location of the speech was noted by many eyewitnesses, is consistent with the Traditional Site at the Soldiers' National Monument (and other sites on the crest) but is inconsistent with the Selleck Site.

The Kentucky Memorial, erected in 1975, is directly adjacent to the Soldiers' National Monument, and states, "Kentucky honors her son, Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his immortal address at the site now marked by the soldiers' monument." With its position at the center of the concentric rings of soldiers' graves and the continuing endorsement of Lincoln's native state the Soldiers' National Monument persists as a credible location for the speech.

Writing a physical description of the layout for the Gettysburg National Cemetery under construction in November 1863, the correspondent from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial described the dividing lines between the state grave plots as "the radii of a common center, where a flag pole is now raised, but where it is proposed to erect a national monument". With the inclusion of this quotation Tilberg inadvertently verifies a central principle of future photographic analyses-a flagpole, rather than the speakers' platform, occupied the central point of the soldiers' graves. In fact, the precision of the photo-analyses relies upon the coincidence of position between this temporary flag pole and the future monument.

Confusing to today's tourist, the Kentucky Memorial is contradicted by a newer marker which was erected nearby by the Gettysburg National Military Park and locates the speakers' platform inside Evergreen Cemetery. Similarly, outdated National Park Service documents which pinpoint the location at the Soldiers' National Monument have not been systematically revised since the placement of the newer marker. Miscellaneous web pages perpetuate the Traditional Site.

Photo analysis

2-D and optical stereoscopy

Based upon photographic analysis, the Gettysburg National Military Park (G.N.M.P.) placed a marker (near ) which states, "The speakers' platform was located in Evergreen Cemetery to your left." The observer of this marker stands facing the fence which separates the two cemeteries (one public and one private).

In 1982, Senior Park Historian Kathleen Georg Harrison first analyzed photographs and proposed a location in Evergreen Cemetery but has not published her analysis. Speaking for Harrison without revealing details, two sources characterize her proposed location as "on or near [the] Brown family vault" in Evergreen Cemetery.

William A. Frassanito, a former military intelligence analyst, documented a comprehensive photographic analysis in 1995, and it associates the location of the platform with the position of specific modern headstones in Evergreen Cemetery. According to Frassanito, the extant graves of Israel Yount (died 1892)(), John Koch (died 1913)(), and George E. Kitzmiller (died 1874)() are among those which occupy the location of the 1863 speaker's stand.

Resolution

The GNMP marker, Wills's interpretation of Harrison's analysis, and the Frassanito analysis concur that the platform was located in private Evergreen Cemetery, rather than public Soldiers' National Cemetery. The National Park Service's National Cemetery Walking Tour brochure is one NPS document which agrees:

The Soldiers' National Monument, long misidentified as the spot from which Lincoln spoke, honors the fallen soldiers. [The location of the speech] was actually on the crown of this hill, a short distance on the other side of the iron fence and inside the Evergreen Cemetery, where President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of some 15,000 people.

While the GNMP marker is unspecific, providing only "to your left", the locations determined by the Harrison/Wills analysis and the Frassanito analysis differ by 40 yards. Frassanito has documented 1) his own conclusion, 2) his own methods and 3) a refutation of the Harrison site, but neither the GNMP nor Harrison has provided any documentation. Each of the three points to a location in Evergreen Cemetery, as do modern NPS publications.

Although Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg National Cemetery, the monument at the Cemetery's center actually has nothing to do with Lincoln or his famous speech. Intended to symbolize Columbia paying tribute to her fallen sons, its appreciation has been commandeered by the thirst for a tidy home for the speech. Freeing the Cemetery and Monument to serve their original purpose, honoring of Union departed, is as unlikely as a resolution to the location controversy and the erection of a public monument to the speech in the exclusively private Evergreen Cemetery.

The importance of the Gettysburg Address in the history of the United States is underscored by its enduring presence in American culture. In addition to its prominent place carved into a stone cella on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Gettysburg Address is frequently referred to in works of popular culture, with the implicit expectation that contemporary audiences will be familiar with Lincoln's words.

In the many generations that have passed since the Address, it has remained among the most famous speeches in American history, and is often taught in classes about history or civics. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is itself referenced in another of those famed orations, Martin Luther King Jr.'s " I Have a Dream" speech. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, King began with a reference, by the style of his opening phrase, to President Lincoln and his enduring words: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."

Phrases from the Address are often used or referenced in other works. The current Constitution of France states that the principle of the French Republic is " gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple" ("government of the people, by the people, and for the people"), a literal translation of Lincoln's words. Sun Yat-Sen's " Three Principles of the People" as well as the preamble for the 1947 Constitution of Japan were also inspired from that phrase. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has as its ship's motto the phrase "shall not perish".

U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts wrote of the address and its enduring presence in American culture after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865: "That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg ... and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said 'the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.' He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it."

U.S. President John F. Kennedy stated in July 1963 about the battle and Lincoln's speech: "Five score years ago the ground on which we here stand shuddered under the clash of arms and was consecrated for all time by the blood of American manhood. Abraham Lincoln, in dedicating this great battlefield, has expressed, in words too eloquent for paraphrase or summary, why this sacrifice was necessary." Kennedy was himself assassinated three days after the Gettysburg Address centennial.

In 2015, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation compiled Gettysburg Replies: The World Responds to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The work challenges leaders to craft 272 word responses to celebrate Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, or a related topic. One of the replies was by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he made the point that one of Lincoln's greatest legacies was establishing, in the same year of the Gettysburg Address, the National Academy of Sciences, which had the longterm effect of "setting our Nation on a course of scientifically enlightened governance, without which we all may perish from this Earth".

Envelope and other myths

A common American myth about the Gettysburg Address is that Lincoln quickly wrote the speech on the back of an envelope. This widely held misunderstanding may have originated with a popular book, The Perfect Tribute, by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews (1906), which was assigned reading for generations of schoolchildren, sold 600,000 copies when published as a standalone volume, and was twice adapted for film.

Other lesser-known claims include Harriet Beecher Stowe's assertion that Lincoln had composed the address "in only a few moments," and that of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who claimed to have personally supplied Lincoln with a pen.

The Gettysburg Address: Nicolay copy, page 1 (jpg), page 2 (jpg). The Library of Congress.

The Gettysburg Address: Hay copy, page 1 (jpg), page 2 (jpg). The Library of Congress.

Everett copy (jpg). virtualgettsyburg.com. Retrieved from internet archive 2007-06-14 version on 2007-12-10.

Bancroft copy cover letter (pic), Bancroft copy, page 1 (pic), page 2 (pic). Cornell University Library. Retrieved on 2007-12-11.

Bliss copy, page 1 (jpg), page 2 (jpg), page 3 (jpg). Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Retrieved on 2007-12-11.

References

1. ^ Conant, Sean (2015). The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln's Greatest Speech. New York: Oxford University Press. p. ix. ISBN 978-0-19-022745-6.

2. ^ Holsinger, M. Paul (1999). War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-313-29908-7.

3. White Jr., Ronald C. The Words That Moved a Nation in: "Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom", Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State - Bureau of International Information Programs, p. 58.

4. ^ Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, pp. 24-25, p. 35, pp. 34-35, p. 36.

5. ^ Goldman, A. S.; Schmalstieg Jr., F. C. (2007). "Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg illness". Journal of Medical Biography. 15 (2): 104-110. doi:10.1258/j.jmb.2007.06-14. PMID 17551612.

6. Boritt, Gabor. ^ The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. Simon & Schuster, 2008.

7. Alfred L. Brophy, ^ "'These Great and Beautiful Republics of the Dead': Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery"

8. Gopnik notes, "Gabor Boritt, in his book The Gettysburg Gospel, has a thirty-page appendix that compares what Lincoln (probably) read at the memorial with what people heard and reported. Most of the differences are small, and due to understandable confusions ... A few disputes seem more significant."

9. Also note ^ Johnson's reference that "In 1895 Congress had voted to place at Gettysburg a bronze tablet engraved with the address but had mandated a text that does not correspond to any in Lincoln's hand or to contemporary newspaper accounts. The statute is reprinted in Henry Sweetser Burrage, Gettysburg and Lincoln: The Battle, the Cemetery, and the National Park (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906), 211."

10. Boritt, Gabor. The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows., Appendix B p. 290: "This is the only copy that ... Lincoln dignified with a title: 'Address delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg.', a rare full signature, and the date: 'November 19, 1863.' ..This final draft, generally considered the standard text, remained in the Bliss family until 1949."

11. ^ Haney, John L. (November 7, 1944). "Of the People, by the People, for the People". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 88 (5): 359-367.

12. ^ Smith, Craig (Fall 2000). "Criticism of Political Rhetoric and Disciplinary Integrity". American Communication Journal. 4 (1). Archived from the original on May 5, 2009.

13. Webster himself may have been relying on earlier use of similar language. For example, John Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton had employed similar phraseology in 1819: "I am a man chosen for the people, by the people; and, if elected, I will do no other business than that of the people." See Broughton, John and Burdett, Francis. An Authentic Narrative of the Events of the Westminster Election, which Commenced on Saturday, February 13th, and Closed on Wednesday, March 3d, 1819 p. 105 (Published by R. Stodart, 1819).

14. ^ Johnson, Martin P. (Summer 2003). "Who Stole the Gettysburg Address". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 24 (2): 1-19.

15. White Jr., Ronald C. (2005). ^ The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. New York: Random House. ISBN 1-4000-6119-9 Appendix 9, p. 390: "The Bliss copy ... Lincoln made in March 1864 ... The Everett and Bancroft copies, both of which Lincoln made in February 1864."

16. Nicolay, J. "Lincoln's Gettysburg Address", Century Magazine 47 (February 1894): 596-608, cited by Johnson, Martin P. "Who Stole the Gettysburg Address", Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 24(2) (Summer 2003): 1-19.

17. Sandburg, Carl (1939). "Lincoln Speaks at Gettysburg". In: ^ Abraham Lincoln: The War Years New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. II, 452-457; cited by Prochnow, Victor Herbert. ed. (1944). Great Stories from Great Lives Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, ISBN 0-8369-2018-X, p. 13: "The Cincinnati Commercial reporter wrote 'The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper ... [and] reads the brief and pithy remarks."

18. David Mearns (1964). "Unknown at this Address", in ^ Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address: Commemorative Papers, ed. Allan Nevins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 133; Mearns and Dunlap, caption describing the facsimile of the Hay text in Long Remembered; both cited in Johnson, "Who Stole the Gettysburg Address".

19. ^ "The Gettysburg Address Hay draft". Library of Congress. September 15, 2010. Archived from the original on March 9, 2012.

20. Bryan, William Jennings, ed. (1906). ^ The World's Famous Orations Vol. IX. America: II. (1818-1865).

21. Simon, et al., eds. (1999). The Lincoln Forum: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, and the Civil War. Mason City: Savas Publishing Company. ISBN 1-882810-37-6, p. 41.

22. ^ Sandburg, Carl (1954). Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years, Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 445.

23. ^ Patriot-News Editorial Board (November 14, 2013). "Retraction for our 1863 editorial calling Gettysburg Address 'silly remarks': Editorial". Patriot-News.

24. Prochnow, p. 15.

25. ^ Lincoln National Life Insurance Company (November 25, 1969). "Dispute Over Exact Location Where Lincoln's Speech Was Made of Great Interest To Many Gettysburg Visitors". Gettysburg Times. pp. 7-9.

26. ^ "Soldiers' National Monument". (structure ID MN288, LCS ID 009949) List of Classified Structures: GETT p. 21. National Park Service. 2004 [1865-69]. Archived from the original on September 17, 2012.

27. ^ "Outline of U.S. History". United States Department of State. p. 73. Archived from the original on October 20, 2012.

28. ^ Dry, M. (1996). "Review of National Standards for Civics and Government". PS: Political Science and Politics. 29 (1): 49-53. doi:10.2307/420193. JSTOR 420193.

29. ^ Garrow, David J. (August 2003). "King: the March, the Man, the Dream" (PDF). American History. pp. 26-35. [F]our days before the March [King] told Al Duckett, a black journalist ... that his August 28 oration needed to be "sort of a Gettysburg Address".

30. ^ Sharman, Lyon (1968). Sun Yat-sen: His life and its meaning, a critical biography. Stanford University Press. p. 271.

31. ^ Bhagwan, Vishnoo; Bhushan, Vidya (2004). World Constitutions - A Comparative Study. New Delhi: Sterling. p. 445.

32. ^ "USS Abraham Lincoln". United States Navy. Carrier Strike Group NINE. Archived from the original on March 13, 2012. Aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) adopted Lincoln's phrase "Shall not perish" as her motto.

33. ^ Kent Gramm (Summer 2004). "A More Perfect Tribute". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 25 (2): 50-58.

Bibliography

Barton, William E. (1950). Lincoln at Gettysburg: What He Intended to Say; What He Said; What he was Reported to have Said; What he Wished he had Said. New York: Peter Smith.

Boritt, Gabor (2006). The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows Simon & Schuster. 432 pp. ISBN 0-7432-8820-3.

Herndon, William H., and Welk, Jesse W. (1892). Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of A Great Life (Vol II). New York: D. Appleton and Company.

Johnson, Martin P. (2013). Writing the Gettysburg Address[ISBN missing ]

Selzer, Linda. "Historicizing Lincoln: Garry Wills and the Canonization of the 'Gettysburg Address". Rhetoric Review Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 120-137.

Wills, Garry (1992). Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon and Schuster. 319 pp. ISBN 0-671-76956-1.

Primary sources

External links

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The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.

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13th Amendment: abolished slavery in the entirety of the United States.

14th Amendment: ensured that the Bill of Rights applies to all citizens of the United States of America.

15th Amendment: ratification of this amendment allowed all races to vote.

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Reconstruction Amendments: 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments - 2023 - MasterClass

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The Reconstruction era of United States history was a time of idealism and conflict. After Congress added the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution, they laid the groundwork for greater racial justice.

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After the Civil War the south was still segrated and many issues remained among races.

Plessy vs. Ferguson was the decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, separate but equal.

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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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Reconstruction Era and Progressive Era

1865 to 1904

This was a time of rapid economic growth.

"John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company and monopolized the oil industry."

J. P. Morgan was an investment banker and American financer who dominated Wall Street.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American Industrialist and philanthropist.

Robber Barron is a term applied to certain wealthy and powerful.

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The Gilded Age in United States history is the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. The term for this period came into use in the 1920s and 1930s and was derived from writer Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding.

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1880-1929

Industrialization is the manufacturing of products in factories using machines, and a labor force with unique divided tasks.

Urbanization is the growth of cities in both population and size.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

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Industrialization and urbanization began long before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it accelerated greatly during this period because of technological innovations, social changes, and a political system increasingly apt to favor economic growth beyond any other concern. Before , industrialization depended upon a prescribed division of labor-breaking most jobs up into smaller tasks, and assigning the same people to repeat one task indefinitely. After , industrialization depended much more on mechanization-the replacement of people with machines-to increase production and maximize profits. The development of the modern electrical grid, starting in the early 1880s, facilitated such technological advances. Henry Ford's assembly line and the rise of mass production after the turn of the 20th century only strengthened this effect. As a result, the total manufacturing output of the United States was twenty-eight times greater in than it was . Adjust that number for the growth in population over the same period, and it still multiplied seven times over.

Cities in America date back to the beginning of the colonial period, but the tendency for new industrial factories to be located in or near urban areas meant that cities grew much faster during the late 19th century than ever before. This trend was most apparent in large cities like New York, which expanded from approximately half a million to around 3.5 million people between and , and Philadelphia, which increased in size from slightly more than 100,000 inhabitants to more than 1.2 million people over the same period. During the last half of the late 19th century, Chicago proved to be the fastest growing city in the world. Overall, 15.3 percent of Americans lived in cities in . By , that percentage had increased to 39.7, and kept growing. The Census revealed that more Americans lived in cities than the countryside for the first time.

Not every city in the country developed as fast as the largest cities did. Important regional differences existed in urbanization because of differences in the nature of industrial growth. The largest cities in the Northeast were manufacturing powerhouses that contained everything, from large factories building railroad locomotives to small shops producing textiles in people's apartments. The Northeast also gave rise to smaller cities that concentrated on particular industries, like Rochester, New York, which specialized in men's clothing, boots, and shoes. Following on a tradition of manufacturing from earlier in the century, New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts increased in size because of their cotton textile factories. Other cities, like Elizabeth, New Jersey, grew as byproducts of the expansion of their larger neighbors.

Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest, made its name processing natural resources from the Western frontier before those resources traveled eastward as finished products. Grain and lumber-two industries that had been crucial for Chicago's early growth-relied on Chicago for marketing and storage. With perfection of the refrigerated railroad car, meat processing became such an enormous industry that the vast majority of the meat that Americans ate was processed in the stockyards on that city's south side. (That activity would disperse again, after the turn of the 20th century, to other cities like Fort Worth and Kansas City.) Smaller cities in America's industrial heartland would grow around other manufacturing pursuits like steel in Youngstown, and machine tools and cash registers in Dayton, Ohio.

What separates this period from earlier periods in urban and industrial history is that this was the first time in American history that cities had moved to the center of American life. Cities were where most of the new factories got built. Waves of immigrants settled in cities because that's where the job openings in industrial factories were. Cities were also places where the effects of industrialization, especially the increased inequality of wealth, were most visible. That means that the problems of cities became the problems of America.

The Electrical Grid and Improvements in Transportation

One of the reasons that later industrialization progressed at such a greater pace than before was the improvement in power sources. The early industrial revolution depended upon steam engines and waterpower. The earliest engines were large and prohibitively expensive for all but the largest firms. Water wheels were a possibility for smaller concerns, but they could not perform nearly as much work as later power sources could. Between and , total available horsepower in the United States increased from 2.3 million to 43 million units. In factories, the greatest part of that growth came from a huge increase in the use of electricity.

Symbolizing the importance of capital to Edison's efforts, the first person to have his home successfully wired for electricity was the banker J. P. Morgan, in . Despite setbacks, his experience with electric light encouraged him to invest further in Edison's efforts. Edison built the first central generating station in New York City later that same year. The first area of Manhattan that Edison wired was a neighborhood filled with the homes and workplaces of those who operated the financial institutions he hoped to convince to invest in his enterprises, as well as two major newspapers that would publicize his achievements. By , there were 2,250 electrical generating stations in the United States. By , that number grew to just short of 4,000. Electricity spread from large cities to small cities and eventually out into rural areas by the 1920s.

This kind of growth required substantial improvement beyond Edison's initial vision of an electrical system. The effects of a reliable electric grid on the cities where it first appeared were numerous, ranging from less coal smoke in the air to new sounds produced by various electrical creations-everything from streetcars to arc lights. Early arc lights were so bright people thought they could stop crime and vice by exposing the people who perpetrated these crimes. In smaller cities, obtaining electric light was a sign of modernization, which implied future growth. Modern light in urban workplaces made office work easier by lessening strain on the eyes. As electric light companies moved in, the much-hated urban gas companies lost a considerable amount of economic power. Since people preferred electric light to gas, it became increasingly popular, as the grid expanded and the costs dropped. Electric light even changed the way people lived inside their houses. For example, children could now be trusted to put themselves to bed since there was no longer a fire risk from the open flames that were once needed to get to bed in the dark.

Nevertheless, the growing electrical grid created new urban dangers. High voltage electrical wires strung above ground joined other wires from telephones, telegraphs-even stock tickers-posed a new urban "wire menace." Many came down in bad weather. They were a hazard for electric company employees and pedestrians alike. "The overhead system is a standing menace to health and life," reported one medical journal in . In , a fire caused by overheated electrical wires ignited a building full of dry goods and burned down much of downtown Boston.

The most noteworthy effect of high-quality, affordable lighting was the widespread practice of running factories twenty-four hours a day-which made them much more productive without any improvements in the technology of production. Replacing putrid gas lamps also made the smell of factories better for the workmen who worked there. As the electrical grid became more reliable, electric motors gradually began to replace steam engines as the source of power in manufacturing. Using small electric motors as a source of power freed factories from having to be located near water sources to feed boilers and made it possible for them to be smaller too.

Between and , factories tended to adopt electric lighting but kept using earlier sources of power for their operation. Electric power for factory operations came quickly between and . Both these developments (along with the large supply of immigrant workers) contributed to the industrialization of cities. The electrification of industrial facilities of all kinds proceeded quickly during the first two decades of the 20th century. Businesses got wired for electricity much faster than cities because they could make the most use of what started out as a relatively expensive service.

Because factories were concentrated in or near cities, it was a lot cheaper to wire them than it was to wire farms or even smaller cities away from electrical generating stations. Many of the new factories built during this later period appeared outside city limits, another new development. Electrification allowed managers to automate jobs once done by hand labor, thereby eliminating inefficiency, gaining greater control over the production process, and boosting overall productivity. New devices like time clocks and even new modes of production like the assembly line also depended upon electric power.

The advent of cheap and readily available electricity had a particularly important effect upon the physical layout of American cities during this period. Frank Sprague, an electrical engineer who had once worked for Thomas Edison, designed the first electric streetcar system for Richmond, Virginia, in . Such systems supplanted horse-drawn carriages, making it possible for people to travel further and faster than they would have otherwise. This gave rise to a burst of suburbanization, a spate of new towns on the outskirts of American cities where wealthy and middle-class people could move to escape from the difficulties of modern urban life but still be close enough to enjoy many of its advantages.

The new suburbanites often traveled to and from work via new electric streetcars. The electrical equipment manufacturer Westinghouse was one of the major manufacturers of vehicles powered by an overhead wire. Electric streetcars had the advantage over horses of not leaving manure or of dying in the streets. Streetcars were more popular during weekends than during the week as working class people took advantage of low fares to explore new neighborhoods or to visit amusement parks, like Coney Island, generally built at the end of these lines.

In the same way that employers and city planners depended upon streetcars to move people, manufacturers became more dependent upon railroads, after , to move their finished products. Railroad track mileage grew greatly after the Civil War, connecting cities and leading to the growth of new factories in places that were convenient to the necessary resources to make marketable goods. Eventually, mass distribution was a prerequisite to benefit from all that increased productivity. For all these reasons, separating the causes and effects of industrialization and urbanization is practically impossible.

Throughout the 19th century, factories usually had to be built near shipping ports or railroad stops because these were the easiest way to get factory products out to markets around the world. As more railroad tracks were built late in the 19th century, it became easier to locate factories outside of downtowns. Streetcars helped fill up the empty space downtown where factories would have gone. They made it easier to live further away from work and still commute to the heart of downtown, thereby making it possible for other kinds of businesses to locate there. One example would be the large urban department store, a phenomenon that predates , but grew into its own after that date. Such stores like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia or Marshall Field's in Chicago bought the products of industrialization in bulk and sold them at a discounted price to workers who might have had trouble getting access to them any other way.

Structural Steel and Skyscrapers

While retail emporiums could be blocks long and only a few stories tall, other business rented space in thinner buildings built much higher. By the late 1880s, structures that had once been built with iron began to be built with a structural steel-a new, stronger kind of steel. The practice had begun in Chicago, championed by the architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the first skyscrapers there. A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote, "must be every inch a tall and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." That kind of design required a skeleton of structural steel upon which other substances like brick or granite could hang. Even then, such skyscrapers had to be tapered; otherwise, the weight from the top floors could make the whole structure collapse.

Creating structural steel for skyscrapers required entirely different production methods than had been required to make Bessemer steel (which had been used primarily for railroad rails). Quantity and speed were the main requirements of producing Bessemer steel. Structural steel required a more carefully made product. The demands of structural steel encouraged steelmakers like Andrew Carnegie to redesign entire factories, most notably replacing older Bessemer converters with the open-hearth process. This new kind of steelmaking not only produced higher quality steel, it also required fewer skilled workers. This encouraged Carnegie's company to lock out its union workforce at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in , so that it could save money by employing cheap replacement workers.

The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age coordination of labor and materials distribution. Steel skeletons meant that the unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished. This saved both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near the tops of new buildings. Around the turn of the 20th century, a major skyscraper could be built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses.

Unburdened by the need to pay federal income tax, industrial titans from across the United States displayed their massive wealth by building lavish mansions along New York's Fifth Avenue during the 1890s. By the 1920s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them. Blocks of what was known as "Vanderbilt Alley," named after the children of the steamship and railroad pioneer who had built mansions in the same area, were replaced by skyscrapers and high-end retail emporiums.

The same basic principles of skyscraper production-build it quick and large, and pack it with people-motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles. "Today, three-fourths of [New York City's] people live in the tenements," wrote the reformer Jacob Riis in his classic, How the Other Half Lives, "and the 19th-century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them." The best-known tenement house design of this period was the dumbbell tenement of about five or six stories tall. They came about as the result of a design contest, but were generally so crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light and air into central courtyards (which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from above), stacked up back-to-back, one against the other they did neither. Widely copied, New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in -but the old structures remained.

Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. Wealthy people could buy space and separation from one's neighbors, while those middle class people who could not afford to live in suburbs lost the space they had before urbanization accelerated. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.

The Assembly Line

Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. This particular conceptual breakthrough owed much to the "disassembly lines" that had been pioneered in the meatpacking industry during the previous century. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before. The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile.

Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time (which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line) so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently. Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality. The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories.

Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor-not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines. This was not fun work to do. "The chain system you have is a slave driver!" wrote an anonymous housewife based on her husband's experience working on the assembly line. "My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home and thrown himself down and won't eat his supper-so done out! Can't it be remedied?" Ford instituted an unprecedented wage of $5/day to keep workers on his assembly line, but this reward did not make the work any easier.

Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line (actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car), labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible. Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to farming.

The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents. One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve the quality and quantity of roads. Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a case-by-case basis, laying pavement on well-traveled roads and widening them when appropriate. New traffic rules, such as the first one-way streets, appeared in an effort to alleviate these kinds of problems. Traffic control towers and traffic lights-the mechanical solution to a problem inspired by industrialization-also appeared for the first time during this era.

Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they worked (and few people lived in skyscrapers), many builders built out into undeveloped areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic expansions (like Detroit), those areas became parts of a larger city. If they hadn't, much of this growth occurred in new suburbs (like Philadelphia). Chicago was so confident of further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields. To meet rising demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building-using standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques. By the 1920s, buying pre-cut mail order houses became big business.

The Origins of Mass Production

After , mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological improvements. This can be traced back to Thomas Edison's labs in New Jersey, where he practiced systematic invention to exploit the great commercial opportunities that modern life created. The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of science and the useful arts during this era. By the 1920s, engineers had been formally integrated into the management hierarchies of countless American industries.

Reorganization of production merged with technological improvement had made mass production possible long before Ford developed the assembly line. James Bonsack's cigarette rolling machine, for example, patented in , could produce 70,000 cigarettes in a single ten-hour day. By the end of that decade, it could produce 120,000 cigarettes in a day. When James "Buck" Duke bought exclusive rights to this machine in , it became the basis of his American Tobacco Company, which quickly controlled most of the industry.

Even craft-dominated industries like furniture making came to depend upon mass production to make their products more available to the masses. People who moved from farms to cities desperately needed furniture for their new urban residences, but in industrial towns like Grand Rapids, Michigan, they could not afford pieces made by craftsman. New mass-produced models made with minimal carving and overlays, based on stylish patterns, found a market all over the country. It helped that companies like Bassett, founded in Virginia in , discouraged their workers from forming unions, just like Ford did. An unorganized workforce made it easier for industrialists to impose changes in the production process without resistance from employees.

The changeover from the Model T to the Model A, in , demonstrated the limits of industrialized mass production. The Model A was incredibly expensive, and Ford had to shut his main plant for months to retool the production line for his new models. While the new car sold well initially, sales dropped precipitously as the Depression deepened. "Mass production is not simply large-scale production," wrote the department store magnate Edward Filene, in . "It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying." Mass buying became difficult when people had little money with which to buy the products of industrialization. Urban building slowed precipitously during the Depression too. Since cities were the focal points of industrialization, urban citizens suffered disproportionately when production waned. Of course, when the United States sank into the economic downturn of the Great Depression, both urban and industrial growth decreased sharply.

Discussion of the Literature

It is difficult to cite previous scholarship on either industrialization or urbanization from precisely the period because both these trends pre- and post-date this period. Equally importantly, both are so broad, in the sense that they encompass all kinds of industries and locations that they include a huge range of books and other sources. While none of the following suggestions are exact fits for these subjects during this time, they are all worth reading because they cast at least some light on industrialization and urbanization during this particular time period.

David Hounshell's From the American System to Mass Production is simply the best comprehensive history of industrialization available. It covers a few very important industries in detail (like automobile manufacturing), but it is at its best when dealing with the similarities in production technologies from industry to industry. My own Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life is a simplified introduction to these principles and a summary of their effects on many aspects of American history during this period, including urbanization.

A number of excellent studies of important industries during this period show how industrialization progressed in some detail. Thomas Misa's Nation of Steel is the definitive work on the technology of that essential industry. Ron Chernow's Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. will teach you everything you want to know about the oil industry during this period. Richard R. John's Network Nation describes the intricacies of the telegraph and telephone industries. My own Refrigeration Nation is a close study of the American ice and refrigeration industries.

Sam Bass Warner Jr.'s The Urban Wilderness, an important history of urbanization throughout the United States, includes discussion of many problems unique to this time period. The best works of urban history published since then tend to deal with particular cities or with the relationship between cities and surrounding suburban communities. Warner's Streetcar Suburbs, for example, covers the growth of Boston throughout the 19th century. Donald L. Miller's Supreme City masterfully handles New York during the 1920s (and before, in order to set context). Miller's City of the Century offers a similarly thorough treatment of Chicago during the 1890s. Perhaps the most-beloved work of urban history that covers cities around the country is Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier, which takes in both the growth of suburbia and the cities they surround throughout American history, but paying special attention to the years covered in this article. Building Suburbia by Dolores is a detailed work that covers a similar subject over the same time period. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is the classic explanation of the relationship between the fastest-growing city of the late 19th century and all the natural resources that surrounded it.

The turn towards social history among historians since the 1960s has made studies of broad economic forces increasingly uncommon. Early labor history, for example, was often written by economists. Therefore, it showed a tendency towards looking at the effects of technological change upon workers. Early sociologists who practiced during this period used to do field work in the cities where their universities were located. While a return to this kind of study seems unlikely, more attempts to study the broader economic forces that made social change happen would likely be appreciated by scholars working in multiple disciplines.

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Industrialization and Urbanization in the United States, 1880-1929

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Between 1880 and 1929, industrialization and urbanization expanded in the United States faster than ever before. Industrialization, meaning manufacturing in factory settings using machines plus a labor force with unique, divided tasks to increase production, stimulated urbanization, meaning the growth of cities in both population and physical size.