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Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe, American author, and abolitionist. Author of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, a depiction of enslaved African Americans.

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Benjamin Franklin, pseudonym Richard Saunders, 1706- 1790.
Printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Helped in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and signed the Declaration of Independence. Representative to France during the American Revolution. Delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Inventor and contributor to science and electricity.

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Benjamin Franklin, (born January 17 [January 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston, Massachusetts [U.S.]-died April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, represented the United States in France during the American Revolution, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of electricity, and is remembered for the wit, wisdom, and elegance of his writing.

Early life

Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17 children of a man who made soap and candles, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. In an age that privileged the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he tartly noted in his Autobiography, "the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations back." He learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended at age 10. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the printer's trade, of which he was proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.

His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but, discouraged with the quality of his own, he gave it up. Prose was another matter. Young Franklin discovered a volume of The Spectator-featuring Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele's famous periodical essays, which had appeared in England in 1711-12-and saw in it a means for improving his writing. He read these Spectator papers over and over, copied and recopied them, and then tried to recall them from memory. He even turned them into poetry and then back into prose. Franklin realized, as all the Founders did, that writing competently was such a rare talent in the 18th century that anyone who could do it well immediately attracted attention. "Prose writing" became, as he recalled in his Autobiography, "of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement."

In 1721 James Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant, to which readers were invited to contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and perhaps set in type these contributions and decided that he could do as well himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed "Silence Dogood" in which he lampooned everything from funeral eulogies to the students of Harvard College. For one so young to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a remarkable feat, and Franklin took "exquisite Pleasure" in the fact that his brother and others became convinced that only a learned and ingenious wit could have written these essays.

Late in 1722 James Franklin got into trouble with the provincial authorities and was forbidden to print or publish the Courant. To keep the paper going, he discharged his younger brother from his original apprenticeship and made him the paper's nominal publisher. New indentures were drawn up but not made public. Some months later, after a bitter quarrel, Benjamin secretly left home, sure that James would not "go to law" and reveal the subterfuge he had devised.

Youthful adventures

Failing to find work in New York City, Franklin at age 17 went on to Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, a much more open and religiously tolerant place than Puritan Boston. One of the most memorable scenes of the Autobiography is the description of his arrival on a Sunday morning, tired and hungry. Finding a bakery, he asked for three pennies' worth of bread and got "three great Puffy Rolls." Carrying one under each arm and munching on the third, he walked up Market Street past the door of the Read family, where stood Deborah, his future wife. She saw him and "thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous Appearance."

A few weeks later he was rooming at the Reads' and employed as a printer. By the spring of 1724 he was enjoying the companionship of other young men with a taste for reading, and he was also being urged to set up in business for himself by the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith. At Keith's suggestion, Franklin returned to Boston to try to raise the necessary capital. His father thought him too young for such a venture, so Keith offered to foot the bill himself and arranged Franklin's passage to England so that he could choose his type and make connections with London stationers and booksellers. Franklin exchanged "some promises" about marriage with Deborah Read and, with a young friend, James Ralph, as his companion, sailed for London in November 1724, just over a year after arriving in Philadelphia. Not until his ship was well out at sea did he realize that Governor Keith had not delivered the letters of credit and introduction he had promised.

In London Franklin quickly found employment in his trade and was able to lend money to Ralph, who was trying to establish himself as a writer. The two young men enjoyed the theatre and the other pleasures of the city, including women. While in London, Franklin wrote A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), a Deistical pamphlet inspired by his having set type for William Wollaston's moral tract, The Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin argued in his essay that since human beings have no real freedom of choice, they are not morally responsible for their actions. This was perhaps a nice justification for his self-indulgent behaviour in London and his ignoring of Deborah, to whom he had written only once. He later repudiated the pamphlet, burning all but one of the copies still in his possession.

By 1726 Franklin was tiring of London. He considered becoming an itinerant teacher of swimming, but, when Thomas Denham, a Quaker merchant, offered him a clerkship in his store in Philadelphia with a prospect of fat commissions in the West Indian trade, he decided to return home.

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Benjamin Franklin | Biography, Inventions, Books, American Revolution, & Facts

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Benjamin Franklin, American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the American Founding Fathers, he helped draft the Declaration of Independence. He also made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of technology.

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World War II began in 1939.
The United States began supplying military supplies and other assistance to the Allies in September 1940. However, the United States did not enter World War II until December 1941.

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The road to war

After World War I most Americans concluded that participating in international affairs had been a mistake. They sought peace through isolation and throughout the 1920s advocated a policy of disarmament and nonintervention. As a result, relations with Latin-American nations improved substantially under Hoover, an anti-imperialist. This enabled Roosevelt to establish what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy, which repudiated altogether the right of intervention in Latin America. By exercising restraint in the region as a whole and by withdrawing American occupation forces from the Caribbean, Roosevelt increased the prestige of the United States in Latin America to its highest level in memory.

As the European situation became more tense, the United States continued to hold to its isolationist policy. Congress, with the approval of Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, enacted a series of neutrality laws that legislated against the factors that supposedly had taken the United States into World War I. As Italy prepared to invade Ethiopia, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, embargoing shipment of arms to either aggressor or victim. Stronger legislation followed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, in effect penalizing the Spanish government, whose fascist enemies were receiving strong support from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

In the Pacific Roosevelt continued Hoover's policy of nonrecognition of Japan's conquests in Asia. When Japan invaded China in 1937, however, he seemed to begin moving away from isolationism. He did not invoke the Neutrality Act, which had just been revised, and in October he warned that war was like a disease and suggested that it might be desirable for peace-loving nations to " quarantine" aggressor nations. He then quickly denied that his statement had any policy implications, and by December, when Japanese aircraft sank a U.S. gunboat in the Yangtze River, thoughts of reprisal were stifled by public apathy and by Japan's offer of apologies and indemnities. With strong public opposition to foreign intervention, Roosevelt concentrated on regional defense, continuing to build up the navy and signing mutual security agreements with other governments in North and South America.

When Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, Roosevelt called Congress into special session to revise the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents (in reality only Great Britain and France, both on the Allied side) to purchase munitions on a cash-and-carry basis. With the fall of France to Germany in June 1940, Roosevelt, with heavy public support, threw the resources of the United States behind the British. He ordered the War and Navy departments to resupply British divisions that had been rescued at Dunkirk minus their weaponry, and in September he agreed to exchange 50 obsolescent destroyers for 99-year leases on eight British naval and air bases in the Western Hemisphere.

The question of how much and what type of additional aid should be given to the Allies became a major issue of the election of 1940, in which Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term. Public opinion polls, a new influence upon decision makers, showed that most Americans favoured Britain but still wished to stay out of war. Roosevelt's opponent, Wendell Willkie, capitalized on this and rose steadily in the polls by attacking the president as a warmonger. An alarmed Roosevelt fought back, going so far as to make what he knew was an empty promise. "Your boys," he said just before the election, "are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." In truth, both candidates realized that U.S. intervention in the war might become essential, contrary to their public statements. Roosevelt won a decisive victory.

Upon being returned to office, Roosevelt moved quickly to aid the Allies. His Lend-Lease Act, passed in March 1941 after vehement debate, committed the United States to supply the Allies on credit. When Germany, on March 25, extended its war zone to include Iceland and the Denmark Strait, Roosevelt retaliated in April by extending the American Neutrality Patrol to Iceland. In July the United States occupied Iceland, and U.S. naval vessels began escorting convoys of American and Icelandic ships. That summer Lend-Lease was extended to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by Germany. In August Roosevelt met with the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, off the coast of Newfoundland to issue a set of war aims known as the Atlantic Charter. It called for national self-determination, larger economic opportunities, freedom from fear and want, freedom of the seas, and disarmament.

Although in retrospect U.S. entry into World War II seems inevitable, in 1941 it was still the subject of great debate. Isolationism was a great political force, and many influential individuals were determined that U.S. aid policy stop short of war. In fact, as late as August 12, 1941, the House of Representatives extended the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 by a vote of only 203 to 202. Despite isolationist resistance, Roosevelt pushed cautiously forward. In late August the navy added British and Allied ships to its Icelandic convoys. Its orders were to shoot German and Italian warships on sight, thus making the United States an undeclared participant in the Battle of the Atlantic. During October one U.S. destroyer was damaged by a German U-boat and another was sunk. The United States now embarked on an undeclared naval war against Germany, but Roosevelt refrained from asking for a formal declaration of war. According to public opinion polls, a majority of Americans still hoped to remain neutral.

The war question was soon resolved by events in the Pacific. As much as a distant neutral could, the United States had been supporting China in its war against Japan, yet it continued to sell Japan products and commodities essential to the Japanese war effort. Then, in July 1940, the United States applied an embargo on the sale of aviation gas, lubricants, and prime scrap metal to Japan. When Japanese armies invaded French Indochina in September with the apparent purpose of establishing bases for an attack on the East Indies, the United States struck back by embargoing all types of scrap iron and steel and by extending a loan to China. Japan promptly retaliated by signing a limited treaty of alliance, the Tripartite Pact, with Germany and Italy. Roosevelt extended a much larger loan to China and in December embargoed iron ore, pig iron, and a variety of other products.

Japan and the United States then entered into complex negotiations in the spring of 1941. Neither country would compromise on the China question, however, Japan refusing to withdraw and the United States insisting upon it. Believing that Japan intended to attack the East Indies, the United States stopped exporting oil to Japan at the end of the summer. In effect an ultimatum, since Japan had limited oil stocks and no alternative source of supply, the oil embargo confirmed Japan's decision to eliminate the U.S. Pacific Fleet and to conquer Southeast Asia, thereby becoming self-sufficient in crude oil and other vital resources. By the end of November Roosevelt and his military advisers knew (through intercepted Japanese messages) that a military attack was likely; they expected it to be against the East Indies or the Philippines. To their astonishment, on December 7 Japan directed its first blow against naval and air installations in Hawaii. In a bold surprise attack, Japanese aircraft destroyed or damaged 18 ships of war at Pearl Harbor, including the entire battleship force, and 347 planes. Total U.S. casualties amounted to 2,403 dead and 1,178 wounded.

On December 8, 1941, Congress with only one dissenting vote declared war against Japan. Three days later Germany and Italy declared war against the United States; and Congress, voting unanimously, reciprocated. As a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the previously divided nation entered into the global struggle with virtual unanimity.

The United States at war

Although isolationism died at Pearl Harbor, its legacy of unpreparedness lived on. Anticipating war, Roosevelt and his advisers had been able to develop and execute some plans for military expansion, but public opinion prohibited large-scale appropriations for armament and defense. Thus, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States had some 2,200,000 men under arms, but most were ill-trained and poorly equipped. Barely a handful of army divisions even approached a state of readiness. The Army Air Corps possessed only 1,100 combat planes, many of which were outdated. The navy was better prepared, but it was too small to fight a two-ocean war and had barely been able to provide enough ships for convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Eventually more than 15,000,000 men and women would serve in the armed forces, but not until 1943 would the United States be strong enough to undertake large-scale offensive operations. (For U.S. military involvement in World War II, see the article World War II.)

War production

Roosevelt had begun establishing mobilization agencies in 1939, but none had sufficient power or authority to bring order out of the chaos generated as industry converted to war production. He therefore created the War Production Board in January 1942 to coordinate mobilization, and in 1943 an Office of War Mobilization was established to supervise the host of defense agencies that had sprung up in Washington, D.C. Gradually, a priorities system was devised to supply defense plants with raw materials; a synthetic rubber industry was developed from scratch; rationing conserved scarce resources; and the Office of Price Administration kept inflation under control.

After initial snarls and never-ending disputes, by the beginning of 1944 production was reaching astronomical totals-double those of all the enemy countries combined. Hailed at the time as a production miracle, this increase was about equal to what the country would have produced in peacetime, assuming full employment. War production might have risen even higher if regulation of civilian consumption and industry had been stricter.

Scientists, under the direction of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, played a more important role in production than in any previous war, making gains in rocketry, radar and sonar, and other areas. Among the new inventions was the proximity fuze, which contained a tiny radio that detonated an artillery shell in the vicinity of its target, making a direct hit unnecessary. Of greatest importance was the atomic bomb, developed by scientists in secrecy and first tested on July 6, 1945.

Financing the war

The total cost of the war to the federal government between 1941 and 1945 was about $321,000,000,000 (10 times as much as World War I). Taxes paid 41 percent of the cost, less than Roosevelt requested but more than the World War I figure of 33 percent. The remainder was financed by borrowing from financial institutions, an expensive method but one that Congress preferred over the alternatives of raising taxes even higher or making war bond purchases compulsory. In consequence the national debt increased fivefold, amounting to $259,000,000,000 in 1945. The Revenue Act of 1942 revolutionized the tax structure by increasing the number who paid income taxes from 13,000,000 to 50,000,000. At the same time, through taxes on excess profits and other sources of income, the rich were made to bear a larger part of the burden, making this the only period in modern history when wealth was significantly redistributed.

Social consequences of the war

Despite the vast number of men and women in uniform, civilian employment rose from 46,000,000 in 1940 to more than 53,000,000 in 1945. The pool of unemployed men dried up in 1943, and further employment increases consisted of women, minorities, and over- or underage males. These were not enough to meet all needs, and by the end of the year a manpower shortage had developed.

One result of this shortage was that blacks made significant social and economic progress. Although the armed forces continued to practice segregation, as did Red Cross blood banks, Roosevelt, under pressure from blacks, who were outraged by the refusal of defense industries to integrate their labour forces, signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It prohibited racial discrimination in job training programs and by defense contractors and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to insure compliance. By the end of 1944 nearly 2,000,000 blacks were at work in defense industries. As black contributions to the military and industry increased, so did their demands for equality. This sometimes led to racial hostilities, as on June 20, 1943, when mobs of whites invaded the black section of Detroit. Nevertheless, the gains offset the losses. Lynching virtually died out, several states outlawed discriminatory voting practices, and others adopted fair employment laws.

Full employment also resulted in raised income levels, which, through a mixture of price and wage controls, were kept ahead of inflation. Despite both this increase in income and a no-strike pledge given by trade union leaders after Pearl Harbor, there were numerous labour actions. Workers resented wage ceilings because much of their increased income went to pay taxes and was earned by working overtime rather than through higher hourly rates. In consequence, there were almost 15,000 labour stoppages during the war at a cost of some 36,000,000 man-days. Strikes were greatly resented, particularly by the armed forces, but their effects were more symbolic than harmful. The time lost amounted to only one-ninth of 1 percent of all hours worked.

Because Pearl Harbor had united the nation, few people were prosecuted for disloyalty or sedition, unlike during World War I. The one glaring exception to this policy was the scandalous treatment of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent. In 1942, on the basis of groundless racial fears and suspicions, virtually the entire Japanese-American population of the West Coast, amounting to 110,000 persons, was rounded up and imprisoned in "relocation" centres, which the inmates regarded as concentration camps. The Japanese-Americans lost their liberty, and in most cases their property as well, despite the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had already arrested those individuals it considered security risks, had verified their loyalty.

Records of the War Relocation Authority, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The 1944 election

Roosevelt soundly defeated Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York in the 1944 election, but his margin of victory was smaller than it had been previously. His running mate, chosen by leaders who disliked former vice president Henry A. Wallace for his extreme liberalism, was Sen. Harry S. Truman of Missouri, a party Democrat who had distinguished himself by investigating fraud and waste among war contractors.

UPI/Bettmann Archive

The new U.S. role in world affairs

The U.S. entry into World War II had brought an end to isolation, and President Roosevelt was determined to prevent a retreat into isolationism once the war was over. After a series of conferences in December 1941, Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill announced the formation of the United Nations, a wartime alliance of 26 nations. In 1943 Roosevelt began planning the organization of a postwar United Nations, meeting with congressional leaders to assure bipartisan support. The public supported Roosevelt's efforts, and that fall Congress passed resolutions committing the United States to membership in an international body "with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace." Finally, in the spring of 1945, delegates from 50 nations signed the charter for a permanent United Nations. In addition to political harmony, Roosevelt promoted economic cooperation, and, with his full support, in 1944 the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created to bar a return of the cutthroat economic nationalism that had prevailed before the war.

Throughout the war Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin to plan military strategy and postwar policy. His last great conference with them took place at Yalta in Crimea in February 1945. There policies were agreed upon to enforce the unconditional surrender of Germany, to divide it into zones for occupation and policing by the respective Allied forces, and to provide democratic regimes in eastern European nations. A series of secret agreements were also made at Yalta; chief among these was the Soviet pledge to enter the war against Japan after the German surrender, in return for concessions in East Asia.

Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12 and was succeeded by Truman. In the following months the German armed forces collapsed, and on May 7 all German forces surrendered. In the Pacific the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in early 1945 brought Japan under a state of siege. In the summer, before an invasion could take place, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On September 2 the surrender of Japan was signed in Tokyo harbour on the battleship Missouri.
Frank Freidel William L. O'Neill

The United States since 1945

The peak Cold War years, 1945-60

The Truman Doctrine and containment

Truman, who had been chosen as vice president for domestic political reasons, was poorly prepared to assume the presidency. He had no experience of foreign affairs, knew little about Roosevelt's intentions, and was intimidated by the giant shoes he now had to fill. His first decisions were dictated by events or plans already laid. In July, two months after the German forces surrendered, he met at Potsdam, Germany, with Stalin and Churchill (who was succeeded at the conference by Clement Attlee) to discuss future operations against Japan and a peace settlement for Europe. Little was accomplished, and there would not be another meeting between Soviet and American heads of state for 10 years.

Hopes that good relations between the superpowers would ensure world peace soon faded as a result of the Stalinization of eastern Europe and Soviet support of communist insurgencies in various parts of the globe. Events came to a head in 1947 when Britain, weakened by a failing economy, decided to pull out of the eastern Mediterranean. This would leave both Greece, where a communist-inspired civil war was raging, and Turkey to the mercies of the Soviet Union. Truman now came into his own as a national leader, asking Congress to appropriate aid to Greece and Turkey and asserting, in effect, that henceforth the United States must help free peoples in general to resist communist aggression. This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine, has been criticized for committing the United States to the support of unworthy regimes and for taking on greater burdens than it was safe to assume. At first, however, the Truman Doctrine was narrowly applied. Congress appropriated $400 million for Greece and Turkey, saving both from falling into unfriendly hands, and thereafter the United States relied mainly on economic assistance to support its foreign policy.

The keystone of this policy, and its greatest success, was the European Recovery Program, usually called the Marshall Plan. Europe's economy had failed to recover after the war, its paralysis being worsened by the exceptionally severe winter of 1946-47. Thus, in June 1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed the greatest foreign-aid program in world history in order to bring Europe back to economic health. In 1948 Congress created the Economic Cooperation Administration and over the next five years poured some $13 billion worth of aid into western Europe. (Assistance was offered to Eastern-bloc countries also, but they were forced by Stalin to decline.) The plan restored economic vitality and confidence to the region, while undermining the local communist parties. In 1949 Truman proposed extending similar aid to underdeveloped nations throughout the world, but the resulting Point Four Program was less successful than the Marshall Plan. Experience showed that it was easier to rebuild a modern industrial economy than to develop one from scratch.

U.S. policy for limiting Soviet expansion had developed with remarkable speed. Soon after the collapse of hopes for world peace in 1945 and 1946, the Truman administration had accepted the danger posed by Soviet aggression and resolved to shore up noncommunist defenses at their most critical points. This policy, known as containment, a term suggested by its principal framer, George Kennan, resulted in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as in the decision to make the western zones of Germany (later West Germany) a pillar of strength. When the Soviet Union countered this development in June 1948 by blocking all surface routes into the western-occupied zones of Berlin, Britain and the United States supplied the sectors by air for almost a year until the Soviet Union called off the blockade. A logical culmination of U.S. policy was the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among 12 (later 16) nations to resist Soviet aggression.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Containment worked less well in Asia. In December 1945 Truman sent General Marshall to China with instructions to work out an agreement between the communist rebels and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. This was an impossible task, and in the subsequent fighting Mao Zedong's communist forces prevailed. The Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949, and the United States then decided to concentrate its East Asian policy upon strengthening occupied Japan, with much better results.

Postwar domestic reorganization

After the end of World War II the vast U.S. military establishment was dismantled, its strength falling from 12 million men and women to about 1.5 million in 1947. The navy and army air forces remained the world's strongest, however, and the U.S. monopoly of atomic weapons seemed to ensure security. In 1946 the United States formed an Atomic Energy Commission for purposes of research and development. The armed forces were reorganized under a secretary of defense by the National Security Act of 1947, which also created the U.S. Air Force as an independent service. In 1949 the services were brought together in a single Department of Defense, though each retained considerable autonomy. In that same year the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic device, opening an era of intense nuclear, and soon thermonuclear, competition.

Peace brought with it new fears. Demobilizing the armed forces might result in massive unemployment and another depression. Or, conversely, the huge savings accumulated during the war could promote runaway inflation. The first anxiety proved groundless, even though government did little to ease the transition to a peacetime economy. War contracts were canceled, war agencies diminished or dissolved, and government-owned war plants sold to private parties. But, after laying off defense workers, manufacturers rapidly tooled up and began producing consumer goods in volume. The housing industry grew too, despite shortages of every kind, thanks to mass construction techniques pioneered by the firm of Levitt and Sons, Inc., and other developers. All this activity created millions of new jobs. The Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, also helped ease military personnel back into civilian life. It provided veterans with loans, educational subsidies, and other benefits.

Inflation was more troublesome. Congress lacked enthusiasm for wartime price controls and in June 1946 passed a bill preserving only limited controls. Truman vetoed the bill as inadequate, controls expired, and prices immediately soared. Congress then passed an even weaker price-control bill, which Truman signed. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, most price and wage controls had been lifted. In December the Office of Price Administration began to close down. As a result, the consumer price index did not stabilize until 1948, when prices were more than a third above the 1945 level, while wage and salary income had risen by only about 15 percent.

Truman's difficulties with Congress had begun in September 1945 when he submitted a 21-point domestic program, including proposals for an expansion of social security and public housing and for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act banning discrimination. These and subsequent liberal initiatives, later known as the Fair Deal, were rejected by Congress, which passed only the Employment Act of 1946. This clearly stated the government's responsibility for maintaining full employment and established a Council of Economic Advisers to advise the president.

Truman's relations with Congress worsened after the 1946 elections. Voters, who were angered by the price-control debacle, a wave of strikes, and Truman's seeming inability to lead or govern, gave control of both houses of Congress to Republicans for the first time since 1928. The president and the extremely conservative 80th Congress battled from beginning to end, not over foreign policy, where bipartisanship prevailed, but over domestic matters. Congress passed two tax reductions over Truman's vetoes and in 1947, again over Truman's veto, passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted unions while extending the rights of management. Congress also rejected various liberal measures submitted by Truman, who did not expect the proposals to pass but wanted Congress on record as having opposed important social legislation.

By 1948, Truman had won support for his foreign policy, but he was expected to lose the presidential election that year because of his poor domestic record. Polls showed him lagging behind Dewey, again the Republican nominee, and to make matters worse the Democratic Party splintered. Former vice president Henry A. Wallace headed the Progressive Party ticket, which pledged to improve Soviet-American relations whatever the cost. Southerners, known as Dixiecrats, who were alienated by the Democratic Party's strong civil rights plank, formed the States' Rights Democratic Party and nominated Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. These defections appeared to ensure Truman's defeat. Instead Truman won handily, receiving almost as many votes as his opponents combined. His support came largely from labour, which was upset by the Republican passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, from blacks, who strongly supported the Democrats' civil rights provisions, and from farmers, who preferred the higher agricultural subsidies promised by the Democrats, especially at a time when commodity prices were falling.

The Democrats regained control of Congress in 1948, but Truman's relations with that body continued to be troubled. In January 1949 he asked for a broad range of Fair Deal measures, with uneven results. Congress did approve a higher minimum wage, the extension of social security to 10 million additional persons, more public works, larger sums for the TVA and for rural electrification, and the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized construction of 810,000 units for low-income families. Truman failed, however, to persuade Congress to repeal Taft-Hartley, to reform the agricultural subsidy system, to secure federal aid to education, to adopt his civil rights program, or, most importantly, to accept his proposal for national health insurance. He succeeded nevertheless in protecting the New Deal principle of federal responsibility for social welfare, and he helped form the Democratic agenda for the 1960s.

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United States - World War II: After World War I most Americans concluded that participating in international affairs had been a mistake. They sought peace through isolation and throughout the 1920s advocated a policy of disarmament and nonintervention. As a result, relations with Latin-American nations improved substantially under Hoover, an anti-imperialist.

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With the Manifest Destination, the United States expanded its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. With that came the acquisition of Florida (1819), Texas (1845), Oregon (1846), and California (1846).

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What was Manifest Destiny?

Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War (1861-65), the idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California. The purchase of Alaska after the Civil War briefly revived the concept of Manifest Destiny, but it most evidently became a renewed force in U.S. foreign policy in the 1890s, when the country went to war with Spain, annexed Hawaii, and laid plans for an isthmian canal across Central America.

Origin of the term

John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of a magazine that served as an organ for the Democratic Party and of a partisan newspaper, first wrote of "manifest destiny" in 1845, but at the time he did not think the words profound. Rather than being "coined," the phrase was buried halfway through the third paragraph of a long essay in the July-August issue of The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review on the necessity of annexing Texas and the inevitability of American expansion. O'Sullivan was protesting European meddling in American affairs, especially by France and England, which he said were acting

for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

O'Sullivan's observation was a complaint rather than a call for aggression, and he referred to demography rather than pugnacity as the solution to the perceived problem of European interference. Yet when he expanded his idea on December 27, 1845, in a newspaper column in the New York Morning News, the wider audience seized upon his reference to divine superintendence. Discussing the dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Country, O'Sullivan again cited the claim to

the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

Some found the opinion intriguing, but others were simply irritated. The Whig Party sought to discredit Manifest Destiny as belligerent as well as pompous, beginning with Massachusetts Rep. Robert Winthrop's using the term to mock Pres. James K. Polk 's policy toward Oregon.

Yet unabashed Democrats took up Manifest Destiny as a slogan. The phrase frequently appeared in debates relating to Oregon, sometimes as soaring rhetoric and other times as sarcastic derision. As an example of the latter, on February 6, 1846, the New-Hampshire Statesman and State Journal, a Whig newspaper, described "some windy orator in the House [of Representatives]" as "pouring for his 'manifest destiny' harangue."

Over the years, O'Sullivan's role in creating the phrase was forgotten, and he died in obscurity some 50 years after having first used the term "manifest destiny." In an essay in The American Historical Review in 1927, historian Julius W. Pratt identified O'Sullivan as the phrase's originator, a conclusion that became universally accepted.

A history of expansion

Despite disagreements about Manifest Destiny's validity at the time, O'Sullivan had stumbled on a broadly held national sentiment. Although it became a rallying cry as well as a rationale for the foreign policy that reached its culmination in 1845-46, the attitude behind Manifest Destiny had long been a part of the American experience. The impatient English who colonized North America in the 1600s and 1700s immediately gazed westward and instantly considered ways to venture into the wilderness and tame it. The cause of that ceaseless wanderlust varied from region to region, but the behaviour became a tradition within one generation. The western horizon would always beckon, and Americans would always follow. After the American Revolution (1775-83), the steady advance of the cotton kingdom in the South matched the lure of the Ohio Country in the North. In 1803, Pres. Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country with the stroke of a pen. Expansionists eager to acquire Spanish Florida were part of the drive for the War of 1812, and many historians argue that American desires to annex Canada were also an important part of the equation. Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida in 1818 and the subsequent Transcontinental Treaty (Adams-Onís Treaty) settled a southern border question that had been vexing the region for a generation and established an American claim to the Pacific Northwest as Spain renounced its claim to the Oregon Country. The most consequential territorial expansion in the country's history occurred during the 1820s. Spreading American settlements often caused additional unrest on the country's western borders. As the United States pacified and stabilized volatile regions, the resulting appropriation of territory usually worsened relations with neighbours, setting off a cycle of instability that encouraged additional annexations.

Caught in the upheaval coincidental to that expansion, Southeast Indians succumbed to the pressure of spreading settlement by ceding their lands to the United States and then relocating west of the Mississippi River under Pres. Andrew Jackson's removal policy of the 1830s. The considerable hardships suffered by the Indians in that episode were exemplified by the devastation of the Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears, which excited humanitarian protests from both the political class and the citizenry.

Finally, in the 1840s, diplomacy resolved the dispute over the Oregon Country with Britain, and victory in the Mexican-American War (1846-48) closed out a period of dramatically swift growth for the United States. Less than a century after breaking from the British Empire, the United States had gone far in creating its own empire by extending sovereignty across the continent to the Pacific, to the 49th parallel on the Canadian border, and to the Rio Grande in the south. Having transformed a group of sparsely settled colonies into a continental power of enormous potential, many Americans thought the achievement so stunning as to be obvious. It was for them proof that God had chosen the United States to grow and flourish.

Yet in a story as old as ancient Rome's transformation from republic to empire, not all Americans, like the doubters of Rome, found it encouraging. Those dissenters saw rapid expansion as contrary to the principles of a true republic and predicted that the cost of empire would be high and its consequences perilous.

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Manifest Destiny | Summary, Examples, Westward Expansion, & Significance

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Manifest Destiny, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War, Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

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In 1803 the United States purchased from France 530,000,000 acres of territory in North America for $15 million at approximently 3 cents an acre.  This has been considered the greatest real estate deal in the United States.

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For a mere $15 million, Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the United States, buying 800,000 square miles from the French that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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Westward Expansion: Lewis and Clark Expedition

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Westward Expansion: Lewis and Clark Expedition

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Lewis and Clark Expedition 1804-06
Explorers of the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark also were involved in diplomacy with Native Indians.

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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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People choose to immigrate for many reasons, from employment, to escape a conflict, environmental factors, education, or to be with family. The process of immigrating to the United States can be complicated.

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The history of the United States has always been shaped by peoples and communities who came to its shores or moved within its borders. Some sought a better life, some fled oppression, and some were moved against their will. This presentation uses Library of Congress primary sources to explore moments and experiences from several of these communities.

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Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The history of the United States has always been shaped by peoples and communities who came to its shores or moved within its borders. Some sought a better life, some fled oppression, and some were moved against their will. This presentation uses Library of Congress primary sources to explore moments and experiences from several of these communities.

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Industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)

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Industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)

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Industrial Revolution was a period of science and technology. Many cities and countries were transformed due to this period. Goods that were once made by hand began to be made in mass quantities.  New machinery, techniques, and developments were made in textiles and other areas.

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When Was the Industrial Revolution?

Though a few innovations were developed as early as the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution began in earnest by the 1830s and 1840s in Britain, and soon spread to the rest of the world, including the United States.

Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.

Spinning Jenny

Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true "cottage industry," with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.

Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the spinning jenny (a wooden frame with multiple spindles), the flying shuttle, the water frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.

More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain's new textile factories could meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad, where the British Empire's many overseas colonies provided a captive market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron industry also adopted new innovations.

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced higher-quality material, enabling Britain's iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the later growth of the railroad industry.

Impact of Steam Power

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the "atmospheric steam engine," Newcomen's invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts.

In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with one of Newcomen's models, adding a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals.

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

Transportation During the Industrial Revolution

Britain's road network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in use across Britain by 1815.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain's rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Banking and Communication in the Industrial Revolution

In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith, who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.

Banks and industrial financiers soon rose to new prominence during this period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States.

Cooke and Wheatstone's system would be used for railroad signaling, as the speed of the new steam-powered trains created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Labor Movement

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation, miserable housing conditions and a lack of safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious (and sometimes dangerous), and many workers-including children-were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.

Such dramatic changes and abuses fueled opposition to industrialization worldwide, including the " Luddites," known for their violent resistance to changes in Britain's textile industry.

Did you know? The word "luddite" refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ludd, though he may have been an apocryphal figure.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions, as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright's designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution."

The United States followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by innovations "borrowed" from Britain as well as by homegrown inventors like Eli Whitney. Whitney's 1793 invention of the cotton gin (short for "engine") revolutionized the nation's cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton-producing South).

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.

By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America's northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world's leading industrial nation.

Effects of the Industrial Revolution

Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex.

On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and environmental pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and ingenious inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.

Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.

Photo Galleries

Sources

Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Claire Hopley, "A History of the British Cotton Industry." British Heritage Travel, July 29, 2006
William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010
Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2007
Matthew White, "Georgian Britain: The Industrial Revolution." British Library, October 14, 2009

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Industrial Revolution: Definition, Inventions & Dates - HISTORY

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The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, a time of great growth in technologies and inventions, transformed rural societies into industrialized, urban ones.

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Charles Babbage, an English mathematician and inventor considered to and credited for creating the first automated digital computer in 1837. It was said to be approximently 50 foot long, 5 tons, and 750,000 seperate parts. https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer/The-first-computer

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By the second decade of the 19th century, a number of ideas necessary for the invention of the computer were in the air. First, the potential benefits to science and industry of being able to automate routine calculations were appreciated, as they had not been a century earlier. Specific methods to make automated calculation more practical, such as doing multiplication by adding logarithms or by repeating addition, had been invented, and experience with both analog and digital devices had shown some of the benefits of each approach. The Jacquard loom (as described in the previous section, Computer precursors) had shown the benefits of directing a multipurpose device through coded instructions, and it had demonstrated how punched cards could be used to modify those instructions quickly and flexibly. It was a mathematical genius in England who began to put all these pieces together.

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician and inventor: he invented the cowcatcher, reformed the British postal system, and was a pioneer in the fields of operations research and actuarial science. It was Babbage who first suggested that the weather of years past could be read from tree rings. He also had a lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls.

As a founding member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage had seen a clear need to design and build a mechanical device that could automate long, tedious astronomical calculations. He began by writing a letter in 1822 to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, about the possibility of automating the construction of mathematical tables-specifically, logarithm tables for use in navigation. He then wrote a paper, "On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables," which he read to the society later that year. (It won the Royal Society's first Gold Medal in 1823.) Tables then in use often contained errors, which could be a life-and-death matter for sailors at sea, and Babbage argued that, by automating the production of the tables, he could assure their accuracy. Having gained support in the society for his Difference Engine, as he called it, Babbage next turned to the British government to fund development, obtaining one of the world's first government grants for research and technological development.

Babbage approached the project very seriously: he hired a master machinist, set up a fireproof workshop, and built a dustproof environment for testing the device. Up until then calculations were rarely carried out to more than 6 digits; Babbage planned to produce 20- or 30-digit results routinely. The Difference Engine was a digital device: it operated on discrete digits rather than smooth quantities, and the digits were decimal (0-9), represented by positions on toothed wheels, rather than the binary digits that Leibniz favored (but did not use). When one of the toothed wheels turned from 9 to 0, it caused the next wheel to advance one position, carrying the digit just as Leibniz's Step Reckoner calculator had operated.

The Difference Engine was more than a simple calculator, however. It mechanized not just a single calculation but a whole series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem. It went far beyond calculators in other ways as well. Like modern computers, the Difference Engine had storage-that is, a place where data could be held temporarily for later processing-and it was designed to stamp its output into soft metal, which could later be used to produce a printing plate.

Nevertheless, the Difference Engine performed only one operation. The operator would set up all of its data registers with the original data, and then the single operation would be repeatedly applied to all of the registers, ultimately producing a solution. Still, in complexity and audacity of design, it dwarfed any calculating device then in existence.

The full engine, designed to be room-size, was never built, at least not by Babbage. Although he sporadically received several government grants-governments changed, funding often ran out, and he had to personally bear some of the financial costs-he was working at or near the tolerances of the construction methods of the day, and he ran into numerous construction difficulties. All design and construction ceased in 1833, when Joseph Clement, the machinist responsible for actually building the machine, refused to continue unless he was prepaid. (The completed portion of the Difference Engine is on permanent exhibition at the Science Museum in London.)

While working on the Difference Engine, Babbage began to imagine ways to improve it. Chiefly he thought about generalizing its operation so that it could perform other kinds of calculations. By the time the funding had run out in 1833, he had conceived of something far more revolutionary: a general-purpose computing machine called the Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine was to be a general-purpose, fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer. It would be able to perform any calculation set before it. Before Babbage there is no evidence that anyone had ever conceived of such a device, let alone attempted to build one. The machine was designed to consist of four components: the mill, the store, the reader, and the printer. These components are the essential components of every computer today. The mill was the calculating unit, analogous to the central processing unit (CPU) in a modern computer; the store was where data were held prior to processing, exactly analogous to memory and storage in today's computers; and the reader and printer were the input and output devices.

As with the Difference Engine, the project was far more complex than anything theretofore built. The store was to be large enough to hold 1,000 50-digit numbers; this was larger than the storage capacity of any computer built before 1960. The machine was to be steam-driven and run by one attendant. The printing capability was also ambitious, as it had been for the Difference Engine: Babbage wanted to automate the process as much as possible, right up to producing printed tables of numbers.

The reader was another new feature of the Analytical Engine. Data (numbers) were to be entered on punched cards, using the card-reading technology of the Jacquard loom. Instructions were also to be entered on cards, another idea taken directly from Jacquard. The use of instruction cards would make it a programmable device and far more flexible than any machine then in existence. Another element of programmability was to be its ability to execute instructions in other than sequential order. It was to have a kind of decision-making ability in its conditional control transfer, also known as conditional branching, whereby it would be able to jump to a different instruction depending on the value of some data. This extremely powerful feature was missing in many of the early computers of the 20th century.

By most definitions, the Analytical Engine was a real computer as understood today-or would have been, had not Babbage run into implementation problems again. Actually building his ambitious design was judged infeasible given the current technology, and Babbage's failure to generate the promised mathematical tables with his Difference Engine had dampened enthusiasm for further government funding. Indeed, it was apparent to the British government that Babbage was more interested in innovation than in constructing tables.

All the same, Babbage's Analytical Engine was something new under the sun. Its most revolutionary feature was the ability to change its operation by changing the instructions on punched cards. Until this breakthrough, all the mechanical aids to calculation were merely calculators or, like the Difference Engine, glorified calculators. The Analytical Engine, although not actually completed, was the first machine that deserved to be called a computer.

Ada Lovelace, the first programmer

The distinction between calculator and computer, although clear to Babbage, was not apparent to most people in the early 19th century, even to the intellectually adventuresome visitors at Babbage's soirees-with the exception of a young girl of unusual parentage and education.

Augusta Ada King, the countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and the mathematically inclined Anne Millbanke. One of her tutors was Augustus De Morgan, a famous mathematician and logician. Because Byron was involved in a notorious scandal at the time of her birth, Lovelace's mother encouraged her mathematical and scientific interests, hoping to suppress any inclination to wildness she may have inherited from her father.

Toward that end, Lovelace attended Babbage's soirees and became fascinated with his Difference Engine. She also corresponded with him, asking pointed questions. It was his plan for the Analytical Engine that truly fired her imagination, however. In 1843, at age 27, she had come to understand it well enough to publish the definitive paper explaining the device and drawing the crucial distinction between this new thing and existing calculators. The Analytical Engine, she argued, went beyond the bounds of arithmetic. Because it operated on general symbols rather than on numbers, it established "a link...between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science." It was a physical device that was capable of operating in the realm of abstract thought.

Lovelace rightly reported that this was not only something no one had built, it was something that no one before had even conceived. She went on to become the world's only expert on the process of sequencing instructions on the punched cards that the Analytical Engine used; that is, she became the world's first computer programmer.

One feature of the Analytical Engine was its ability to place numbers and instructions temporarily in its store and return them to its mill for processing at an appropriate time. This was accomplished by the proper sequencing of instructions and data in its reader, and the ability to reorder instructions and data gave the machine a flexibility and power that was hard to grasp. The first electronic digital computers of a century later lacked this ability. It was remarkable that a young scholar realized its importance in 1840, and it would be 100 years before anyone would understand it so well again. In the intervening century, attention would be diverted to the calculator and other business machines.

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Computer - Technology, Invention, History

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Computer - Technology, Invention, History: By the second decade of the 19th century, a number of ideas necessary for the invention of the computer were in the air. First, the potential benefits to science and industry of being able to automate routine calculations were appreciated, as they had not been a century earlier.

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Women's rights movement or women's liberation movement sought egual rights, opportunities, and greater personal freedom for women. "Second wave" of femonism.

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Prologue to a social movement

In the aftermath of World War II, the lives of women in developed countries changed dramatically. Household technology eased the burdens of homemaking, life expectancies increased dramatically, and the growth of the service sector opened up thousands of jobs not dependent on physical strength. Despite these socioeconomic transformations, cultural attitudes (especially concerning women's work) and legal precedents still reinforced sexual inequalities. An articulate account of the oppressive effects of prevailing notions of femininity appeared in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It became a worldwide best seller and raised feminist consciousness by stressing that liberation for women was liberation for men too.

The first public indication that change was imminent came with women's reaction to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Friedan spoke of the problem that "lay buried, unspoken" in the mind of the suburban housewife: utter boredom and lack of fulfillment. Women who had been told that they had it all-nice houses, lovely children, responsible husbands-were deadened by domesticity, she said, and they were too socially conditioned to recognize their own desperation. The Feminine Mystique was an immediate best seller. Friedan had struck a chord.

Reformers and revolutionaries

Initially, women energized by Friedan's book joined with government leaders and union representatives who had been lobbying the federal government for equal pay and for protection against employment discrimination. By June 1966 they had concluded that polite requests were insufficient. They would need their own national pressure group-a women's equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With this, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was born.

The organization was not an instant success. By the end of its second year, NOW had just 1,035 members and was racked by ideological divisions. When the group tried to write a Bill of Rights for Women, it found consensus on six measures essential to ensuring women's equality: enforcement of laws banning employment discrimination; maternity leave rights; child-care centres that could enable mothers to work; tax deductions for child-care expenses; equal and unsegregated education; and equal job-training opportunities for poor women.

Two other measures stirred enormous controversy: one demanded immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution (to ensure equality of rights, regardless of sex), and the other demanded greater access to contraception and abortion. When NOW threw its support behind passage of the ERA, the United Auto Workers union-which had been providing NOW with office space-withdrew its support, because the ERA would effectively prohibit protective labour legislation for women. When some NOW members called for repeal of all abortion laws, other members left the fledgling organization, convinced that this latest action would undermine their struggles against economic and legal discrimination.

NOW's membership was also siphoned off from the left. Impatient with a top-heavy traditional organization, activists in New York City, where half of NOW's membership was located, walked out. Over the next two years, as NOW struggled to establish itself as a national organization, more radical women's groups were formed by female antiwar, civil rights, and leftist activists who had grown disgusted by the New Left's refusal to address women's concerns. Ironically, sexist attitudes had pervaded 1960s radical politics, with some women being exploited or treated unequally within those movements. In 1964, for example, when a woman's resolution was brought up at a Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) conference, Stokely Carmichael flippantly cut off all debate: "The only position for women in SNCC is prone."

While NOW focused on issues of women's rights, the more radical groups pursued the broader themes of women's liberation. Although they lacked the kind of coherent national structure NOW had formed, liberation groups sprang up in Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, Detroit, and elsewhere. Suddenly, the women's liberation movement was everywhere-and nowhere. It had no officers, no mailing address, no printed agenda. What it did have was attitude. In September 1968 activists converged on Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest the image of womanhood conveyed by the Miss America Pageant. In February 1969 one of the most radical liberation groups, the Redstockings, published its principles as "The Bitch Manifesto." Based in New York City, the Redstockings penned the movement's first analysis of the politics of housework, held the first public speak-out on abortion, and helped to develop the concept of "consciousness-raising" groups-rap sessions to unravel how sexism might have coloured their lives. The Redstockings also held speak-outs on rape to focus national attention on the problem of violence against women, including domestic violence.

Responding to these diverse interests, NOW called the Congress to Unite Women, which drew more than 500 feminists to New York City in November 1969. The meeting was meant to establish common ground between the radical and moderate wings of the women's rights movement, but it was an impossible task. Well-dressed professionals convinced that women needed to reason with men could not unite with wild-haired radicals whose New Left experience had soured them on polite discourse with "the enemy." NOW's leadership seemed more comfortable lobbying politicians in Washington or corresponding with NASA about the exclusion of women from the astronaut program, while the young upstarts preferred disrupting legislative committee hearings. NOW leaders were looking for reform. The more radical women were plotting a revolution.

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Women's rights movement | Definition, Leaders, Overview, History, & Facts

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Women's rights movement, diverse social movement, largely based in the United States, that in the 1960s and '70s sought equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women. It coincided with and is recognized as part of the 'second wave' of feminism.

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The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850. This act required slaves to be returned to their owners even if they were in free states. It made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves.

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Andrew Carnegie became one of the wealthiest men in America during the guilded age. Although he grew up rather poor, Carnegie expanded the steel industry in the late 1800s which is where he made his money. He was a philanthropist. He donated money to libraries, world peace, education, and scientific research. Although he said he was pro-union his actions did not always match this rhetoric.

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Biography: Andrew Carnegie | American Experience | PBS

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Andrew Carnegie helped build the formidable American steel industry, a process that turned a poor young man into the richest man in the world.

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The Civil Rights Movement was a nonviolent, political, and social movement that took place from 1954-1968. Its focus was to gain equal rights for Black Americans under US law. Ending segregation and discrimination, as well as enforcing anti-lynching laws were at the forefront of this movement. During this time two Civil Rights Acts were passed and several monumental Supreme Court Cases were determined in favor of equal rights for Black Americans.

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The Civil Rights Era Timeline - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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Civil Rights Era Timeline from 1950-1963.

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John Brown was a famous abolitionist who helped on the Underground Railroad and helped establish the League of Gileadites, a group that protected escaped slaves from slave catchers. He rose to fame in Kansas where he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought in an attack against the antislavery town of Lawrence, KS.

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John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured.

John Brown was born into a deeply religious family in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800. Led by a father who was vehemently opposed to slavery, the family moved to northern Ohio when John was five, to a district that would become known for its antislavery views.

During his first fifty years, Brown moved about the country, settling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, and taking along his ever-growing family. (He would father twenty children.) Working at various times as a farmer, wool merchant, tanner, and land speculator, he never was finacially successful -- he even filed for bankruptcy when in his forties. His lack of funds, however, did not keep him from supporting causes he believed in. He helped finance the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Henry Highland's "Call to Rebellion" speech. He gave land to fugitive slaves. He and his wife agreed to raise a black youth as one of their own. He also participated in the Underground Railroad and, in 1851, helped establish the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave catchers.

In 1847 Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of the meeting Douglass stated that, "though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." It was at this meeting that Brown first outlined his plan to Douglass to lead a war to free slaves.

Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York, in 1849. The community had been established thanks to the philanthropy of Gerrit Smith, who donated tracts of at least 50 acres to black families willing to clear and farm the land. Brown, knowing that many of the families were finding life in this isolated area difficult, offered to establish his own farm there as well, in order to lead the blacks by his example and to act as a "kind father to them."

Despite his contributions to the antislavery cause, Brown did not emerge as a figure of major significance until 1855 after he followed five of his sons to the Kansas territory. There, he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought a proslavery attack against the antislavery town of Lawrence. The following year, in retribution for another attack, Brown went to a proslavery town and brutally killed five of its settlers. Brown and his sons would continue to fight in the territory and in Missouri for the rest of the year.

Brown returned to the east and began to think more seriously about his plan for a war in Virginia against slavery. He sought money to fund an "army" he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he set his plan to action when he and 21 other men -- 5 blacks and 16 whites -- raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

Brown was wounded and quickly captured, and moved to Charlestown, Virginia, where he was tried and convicted of treason, Before hearing his sentence, Brown was allowed make an address to the court.

. . . I believe to have interfered as I have done, . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done."

Although initially shocked by Brown's exploits, many Northerners began to speak favorably of the militant abolitionist. "He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. . . .," said Henry David Thoreau in an address to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts. "No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature. . . ."

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859.

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John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

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Harriet was a slave until she escaped in 1849. She returned to the south despite the dangers to free many more enslaved people. She was a union nurse and spy during the civil war. She helped collect money to help those that were enslaved and to build schools for black children. She was also active in Women's Suffrage.

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The breathtaking courage of Harriet Tubman - Janell Hobson

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The Bill of Rights includes the first 10 amendments made to the US Constitution. These 10 amendments are still widely discussed and debated. Some of these amendments include the right to free speech, freedom of religion, the right to a speedy trial and impartial jury, and state's rights.

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A 3-minute guide to the Bill of Rights - Belinda Stutzman

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The Declaration of Independence is a document that was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. It explains why the colonies are declaring independence from Great Britain and why they are at war. It was signed by 56 founding fathers from all 13 colonies.

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George Washington was a founding father and the first president of the United States of America (1789-1797). He was instrumental in establishing the United States government and set many presidential precedents that still impact US government to this day.

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The Winter Patriots: A Revolutionary War Tale

Explore one of the darkest moments of the American Revolution and how the Continental Army, under the command of General George Washington, was able to save the cause of independence through one brilliant military campaign.

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Explore one of the darkest moments of the American Revolution and how the Continental Army, under the command of General George Washington, was able to save the cause of independence through one brilliant military campaign.

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King George III was king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760-1820. He was king when an empire was won through the 7 Years' War and king when America won its independence from Great Britain.

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George III | Biography, Madness, & Facts

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George III, the controversial British monarch known for his long reign and struggles with mental illness, played a pivotal role in shaping Britain’s political landscape during a time of significant global change.

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On May, 28th 1830 president Andrew Jackson signed this act was signed into law to give the president power to seize land from Native American tribes in existing states in exchange for land west of the Mississippi river. While some tribes went willingly some did not and were forced to relocate in events like the Trail of Tears.

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After the Civil War, the U.S. emerged as an industrial giant. Industries expanded and new ones arose. This growth transformed American society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Slavery was Addressed in the Constitution 

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How Slavery was Addressed in the Constitution 

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The 13th Amendment says that neither slavery or involuntary servitude will exist in the United States. There is an exception for punishment for crime after someone has been duly convicted.

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Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.
In 1863 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation since it only applied to areas of the Confederacy currently in a state of rebellion (and not even to the loyal "border states" that remained in the Union). Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee the abolishment of slavery.

The 13th Amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War before the Southern states had been restored to the Union, and should have easily passed in Congress. However, though the Senate passed it in April 1864, the House initially did not. At that point, Lincoln took an active role to ensure passage through Congress. He insisted that passage of the 13th Amendment be added to the Republican Party platform for the upcoming 1864 Presidential election. His efforts met with success when the House passed the bill in January 1865 with a vote of 119-56.

On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The necessary number of states (three-fourths) ratified it by December 6, 1865. The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

With the adoption of the 13th Amendment, the United States found a final constitutional solution to the issue of slavery. The 13th Amendment, along with the 14th and 15th, is one of the trio of Civil War amendments that greatly expanded the civil rights of Americans.

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13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865)

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: The House Joint Resolution Proposing the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, January 31, 1865; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-1999; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.

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Federalists: wanted a strong central government. Made up of merchants, bankers, manufacturers, wealthy farmers, and plantation owners.

The Democratic Republican Party: Was led by Thomas Jefferson. Created in direct oppositions to the Federalists party. It was supported by commoners and the middle and lower classes.

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A brief overview of America’s first two political parties: the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans and their similarities and differences.

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Thomas Jefferson was a spokesman for democracy and one of the founding fathers. He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He was also the third president of the United States.

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Thomas Jefferson, a spokesman for democracy, was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801-1809).

In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.

Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786.

Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington's Cabinet. He resigned in 1793.

Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.

As a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Republican electors, attempting to name both a President and a Vice President from their own party, cast a tie vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled the tie. Hamilton, disliking both Jefferson and Burr, nevertheless urged Jefferson's election.

When Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. He slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West, yet reduced the national debt by a third. He also sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary pirates, who were harassing American commerce in the Mediterranean. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803.

During Jefferson's second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson's attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular.

Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind "on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe."

He died on July 4, 1826.

Learn more about Thomas Jefferson's spouse, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson.

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Thomas Jefferson, a spokesman for democracy, was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801-1809).

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John Adams was a political philosopher that first served as vice president under George Washington then became the second president of the United States.

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John Adams, a remarkable political philosopher, served as the second President of the United States (1797-1801), after serving as the first Vice President under President George Washington.

Learned and thoughtful, John Adams was more remarkable as a political philosopher than as a politician. "People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity," he said, doubtless thinking of his own as well as the American experience.

Adams was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1735. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he early became identified with the patriot cause; a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, he led in the movement for independence.

During the Revolutionary War he served in France and Holland in diplomatic roles, and helped negotiate the treaty of peace. From 1785 to 1788 he was minister to the Court of St. James's, returning to be elected Vice President under George Washington.

Adams' two terms as Vice President were frustrating experiences for a man of his vigor, intellect, and vanity. He complained to his wife Abigail, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

When Adams became President, the war between the French and British was causing great difficulties for the United States on the high seas and intense partisanship among contending factions within the Nation.

His administration focused on France, where the Directory, the ruling group, had refused to receive the American envoy and had suspended commercial relations.

Adams sent three commissioners to France, but in the spring of 1798 word arrived that the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand and the Directory had refused to negotiate with them unless they would first pay a substantial bribe. Adams reported the insult to Congress, and the Senate printed the correspondence, in which the Frenchmen were referred to only as "X, Y, and Z."

The Nation broke out into what Jefferson called "the X. Y. Z. fever," increased in intensity by Adams's exhortations. The populace cheered itself hoarse wherever the President appeared. Never had the Federalists been so popular.

Congress appropriated money to complete three new frigates and to build additional ships, and authorized the raising of a provisional army. It also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, intended to frighten foreign agents out of the country and to stifle the attacks of Republican editors.

President Adams did not call for a declaration of war, but hostilities began at sea. At first, American shipping was almost defenseless against French privateers, but by 1800 armed merchantmen and U.S. warships were clearing the sea-lanes.

Despite several brilliant naval victories, war fever subsided. Word came to Adams that France also had no stomach for war and would receive an envoy with respect. Long negotiations ended the quasi war.

Sending a peace mission to France brought the full fury of the Hamiltonians against Adams. In the campaign of 1800 the Republicans were united and effective, the Federalists badly divided. Nevertheless, Adams polled only a few less electoral votes than Jefferson, who became President.

On November 1, 1800, just before the election, Adams arrived in the new Capital City to take up his residence in the White House. On his second evening in its damp, unfinished rooms, he wrote his wife, "Before I end my letter, I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."

Adams retired to his farm in Quincy. Here he penned his elaborate letters to Thomas Jefferson. Here on July 4, 1826, he whispered his last words: "Thomas Jefferson survives." But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier.

Learn more about John Adams's spouse, Abigail Smith Adams.

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John Adams, a remarkable political philosopher, served as the second President of the United States (1797-1801), after serving as the first Vice President under President George Washington.

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Characterizations of the Thirteen Colonies

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Characterizations of the Thirteen Colonies

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New England colonies: poor, rocky soil. Short and narrow rivers. Lumber and fish resources.

Middle colonies: Colonies were made up largely of British Puritans.

Southern Colonies: The Southern Colonies focused their efforts on cash crops like cotton and tobacco. Used slavery to make their plantations profitable.

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The North American colonies that were settled by the English are often divided into three different groups: the New England colonies, the Middle colonies, and the Southern colonies. The New England colonies consisted of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. These colonies shared many common characteristics that helped define the region. The following is a look at these key characteristics.

Physical Characteristics of New England

All of the New England colonies had been covered by ice during the last Ice Age, which created poor, rocky soil. The final melt-back of the glaciers left some of the rocky areas peppered with large boulders.

Rivers are fairly short and their floodplains are narrow, unlike in other areas of America, and do not allow for the creation of huge agricultural plots along their banks.

The major resources available and used by the colonists were lumber and fish.

The People of New England

The New England region was an area of mostly homogeneous culture, mostly settled by large groups of people from England who were fleeing religious persecution or seeking new opportunities.

The New England colonists settled in towns, typically surrounded by 40 square miles of land that were farmed by the individuals who lived in the towns.

Indigenous groups such as the Pequot in Connecticut were involved in extensive trading with the Dutch, but the situation became tense when the English started arriving in the 1630s. Britain launched the Pequot War in 1636-1637, after which many Pequot people were executed and many survivors were sent the the Caribbean and enslaved.In 1666 and 1683, Connecticut colony built two reservations for the remaining Pequot people.

Major Occupations in New England

Agriculture: Land surrounding the farmswas not terribly fertile. As a group, the farmers brought a high degree of mechanical ingenuity and self-sufficiency.

Fishing: Boston began exporting fish in 1633. In 1639, Massachusetts Bay was exempted from paying taxes on fishing boats; and as a result, by 1700, the fishing industry was huge. The colonists obtained crustaceans and pelagic fish from saltwater bays and freshwater rivers, and Pilgrim fathers also hunted right whales off Cape Cod.

Commerce: Individuals from the New England area were heavily involved in commerce. Extensive trade with England allowed ship holders to flourish, and the New Englanders also maintained lucrative trade connections with the West Indies and French colonies to the north.

New England Religion

Calvinism and the Social Contract Theory: Many individuals who lived in the New England area were Calvinists or heavily influenced by John Calvin's works and thought. While many look at John Locke as the primary founder of the idea of the social contract (which defined proper government as an agreement or contract between the individuals to join together into a society), the Calvinist doctrine was one of the first to espouse the idea in England. The fact that many New England settlers followed the religious doctrines of John Calvin meant that this theory was part of their religious heritage. Further, this belief in the importance of social contracts transferred to economic contracts as well.

A Belief in Predestination: One of the tenets of Calvinism is the idea of predestination. This was the belief that God had already predetermined everything, including who was going to heaven and who to hell. The idea that God had chosen the British colonies for a special destiny to take the North American continent and develop and maintain an ideal of liberty and democracy later fed into 19th century manifest destiny.

Congregationalism: This style of religion means that the church itself was governed by its own members, and the congregation chose its own minister, rather than being assigned one by a hierarchy.

Intolerance: While the Puritans might have escaped England due to religious persecution, they did not come to America to establish religious freedom for all. They wanted to be free to worship the way they wished. In Massachusetts Bay colony, people who did not subscribe to the colony religion were not allowed to vote, and nonconformists such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams were excommunicated from the church and banished from the colony.

The Spread of the New England Population

The small towns only lasted a few years, as the populations outgrew the 40-acre supporting fields. That resulted in the rapid increase of many new small towns: instead of having a few large metropolises, New England was dotted with many smaller towns that were established by breakaway groups. This low-intensity settlement pattern lasted until the 1790s when a transition to commercial agriculture and small-scale industry began.

In essence, during its first few decades, New England was an area that had been founded by a fairly homogeneous population, most of whom shared common religious beliefs. Because the region lacked huge tracts of fertile land, the area turned to commerce and fishing as their main occupations, though individuals within towns still worked small plots of land in the surrounding area. Enslavement did not become an economic necessity in New England, as it grew to be in the Southern colonies. This turn to commerce would have a major impact many years later after the founding of the United States when questions of states rights and enslavement were being discussed.

Sources and Further Reading

Carroll, Charles F. "The Timber Economy of Puritan New England." Providence: Brown University Press, 1973.

Foster, David R. "Land-Use History (1730-1990) and Vegetation Dynamics in Central New England, USA." Journal of Ecology 80.4 (1992): 753-71.

Foster, David R., Glenn Motzkin, and Benjamin Slater. "Land-Use History as Long-Term Broad-Scale Disturbance: Regional Forest Dynamics in Central New England." Ecosystems 1.1 (1998): 96-119.

Scott, Donald M. "The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny." Divining America: Religion in American History. National Humanities Center.

Silliman, Stephen W. "Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England." American Antiquity 74.2 (2009): 211-30.

Stout, Harry S. "The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

"Yankee Whaling." New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2016.

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Key Characteristics of the New England Colonies

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The North American colonies that were settled by the English are often divided into three different groups: the New England colonies, the Middle colonies, and the Southern colonies. The New England colonies consisted of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. These colonies shared many common characteristics that helped define the region.

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This was a decade long time for freedom by Dred Scott. It ultimately ended in the supreme court and the decision gave momentum to the anti-slavery movement.

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Who Was Dred Scott?

Dred Scott was born into slavery around 1799 in Southampton County, Virginia. In 1818, he moved with his owner Peter Blow to Alabama, then in 1830 he moved to St. Louis, Missouri-both slave states-where Peter ran a boarding house.

After Blow died in 1832, army surgeon Dr. John Emerson purchased Scott and eventually took him to Illinois, a free state, and then to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory where the Missouri Compromise had outlawed slavery. There, Scott married Harriet Robinson, also enslaved, in a rare civil ceremony; her owner transferred ownership of Harriet to Emerson.

In late 1837, Emerson returned to St. Louis but left Dred and Harriet Scott behind and hired them out. Emerson then moved to Louisiana, a slave state, where he met and married Eliza (Irene) Sandford in February 1838; Dred Scott soon joined them.

Did you know? Dred Scott, along with several members of his family, was formally emancipated by his owner just three months after the Supreme Court denied them their freedom in the Dred Scott decision.

In October 1838, Emerson, his wife Irene and their enslaved workers returned to Wisconsin. After the army honorably discharged Emerson in 1842, he and Irene returned to St. Louis with Scott and his family (which now included two daughters), but they struggled to find success and soon moved to Iowa. It's unclear if Scott and his family accompanied them or stayed in St. Louis to be hired out.

John Emerson died suddenly in 1843 in Iowa, and his enslaved workers became Irene's property. She returned to St. Louis to live with her father and hired out Scott and his family. Scott tried multiple times to purchase his freedom from Irene, but she refused.

For unknown reasons, Dred and Harriet Scott never tried to run away or sue for freedom while living in or traveling through free states and territories.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

In April 1846, Dred and Harriet filed separate lawsuits for freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court against Irene Emerson based on two Missouri statutes. One statute allowed any person of any color to sue for wrongful enslavement. The other stated that any person taken to a free territory automatically became free and could not be re-enslaved upon returning to a slave state.

Neither Dred nor Harriet Scott could read or write and they needed both logistical and financial support to plead their case. They received it from their church, abolitionists and an unlikely source, the Blow family who had once owned them.

Since Dred and Harriet Scott had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory - both free domains - they hoped they had a persuasive case. When they went to trial on June 30, 1847, however, the court ruled against them on a technicality and the judge granted a retrial.

The Scotts went to trial again in January 1850 and won their freedom. Irene appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court which combined Dred and Harriet's cases and reversed the lower court's decision in 1852, making Dred Scott and his family enslaved again.

In November 1853, Scott filed a federal lawsuit with the United States Circuit Court for the District of Missouri. By this time, Irene had transferred Scott and his family to her brother, John Sandford (although it was determined later that she retained ownership). On May 15, 1854, the federal court heard Dred Scott v. Sandford and ruled against Scott, holding him and his family in slavery.

In December 1854, Scott appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court. The trial began on February 11, 1856. By this time, the case had gained notoriety and Scott received support from many abolitionists, including powerful politicians and high-profile attorneys. But on March 6, 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott decision, Scott lost his fight for freedom again.

Chief Justice Roger Taney

Roger Taney was born into the southern aristocracy and became the fifth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Taney became best known for writing the final majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said that all people of African descent, free or enslaved, were not United States citizens and therefore had no right to sue in federal court. In addition, he wrote that the Fifth Amendment protected slave owner rights because enslaved workers were their legal property.

The decision also argued that the Missouri Compromise legislation - passed to balance the power between slave and non-slave states - was unconstitutional. In effect, this meant that Congress had no power to prevent the spread of slavery.

Despite Taney's long tenure as a Supreme Court justice, people vilified him for his role in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. In an ironic historical footnote, Taney would later swear in Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," as president of the United States in 1861.

Dred Scott Wins His Freedom

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision, Irene had married her second husband, Calvin Chaffee, a U.S. congressman and abolitionist. Upset upon learning his wife still owned the most infamous slave of the time, he sold Scott and his family to Taylor Blow, the son of Peter Blow, Scott's original owner.

Taylor freed Scott and his family on May 26, 1857. Scott found work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel, but didn't live long as a free man. At about 59 years of age, Scott died from tuberculosis on September 17, 1858.

Dred Scott Decision: Impact on Civil War

The Dred Scott Decision outraged abolitionists, who saw the Supreme Court's ruling as a way to stop debate about slavery in the territories. The divide between North and South over slavery grew and culminated in the secession of southern states from the Union and the creation of the Confederate States of America. The Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 freed enslaved people living in the Confederacy, but it would be another three years until Congress passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States.

Sources

Missouri State Archives: Missouri's Dred Scott Case, 1846-1857. Missouri Digital Heritage.
Primary Documents in American History: Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Library of Congress.
Roger B. Taney. United States Senate.
The Dred Scott Case. National Park Service.

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Dred Scott Case - Decision, Definition & Impact

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In the Dred Scott case, or Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court ruled that no enslaved person could claim U.S. citizenship or petition a court for their freedom.

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Economic and Cultural Differences Between the North and the South

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Economic and Cultural Differences Between the North and the South

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Natural resources like iron and copper were more abundant in the north. Industry and manufacturing flourished here. Slavery pretty much died out in the north.

The south is noted for its large farmland and the use of slavery to yield high agricultural profits. This was so profitable that few southerners saw the need for industrial development. Most of their profit came from crops like tobacco and cotton.

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The South: An Agricultural Aggregate

Ultimately, what led to the American Civil War were the differences in the North and South's views toward the institution of slavery. There were other aspects within the institution of slavery that led to division in the United States. Economic practices, religious practices, education, cultural differences, and political differences all furthered the division between the North and South about the institution of slavery. These decade-long divisions all culminated in the bloody conflict of the Civil War, which permanently ended the division and abolished slavery permanently.

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The Civil War that raged across the nation from 1861 to 1865 was the violent conclusion to decades of diversification. Gradually, throughout the beginning of the nineteenth century, the North and South followed different paths, developing into two distinct and very different regions.

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Creating timelines can help students become more actively engaged in learning sequences of events. It is important to co-create timelines with students.

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Alleman, J., & Brophy, J. (2003). History is alive: Teaching young children about changes over time. Social Studies, 94(3), 107-111.

Barton, K. C. (1997). History-it can be elementary: An overview of elementary students' understanding of history. Social Education, 61, 13-16.

Ba1ton, K. C. (2002). "Oh, that's a tricky piece!" Children, medicated action, and the tools of historical time. Elementary School Journal, 103,161-185.

Barton, K. C. (2008). Research on students' ideas about history. In L. S. Levstik & C. A. Tyson (Eds.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 239-258). New York: Routledge.

Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L. S. (1996). "Back when God was around and everything": Elementary children's understanding of historical time. American Educational Research Journal, 33, 419-454.

Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L. S. (1998). "It wasn't a good part of history": Ambiguity and identity in middle grade students' judgments of historical significance. Teachers College Record, 99, 478-513.

Downey, M. T., & Levstik, L. S. (2008). Teaching and learning history. In L. S. Levstik & C. A. Tyson (Eds.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 400-410). New York: Routledge.

Haas, M. (2000). A street through time used with powerful instructional strategies. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 13(2), 20-23.

Harnett, P. (1993). Identifying progression in children's understanding: The use of visual materials to assess primary school children's learning in history. Cambridge Journal of Education, 23, 137-154.

Hoodless, P. A. (2002). An investigation into children's developing awareness of time and chronology in story. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34, 173-200.

Lee, P. (2004). "Walking backwards into tomorrow": Historical consciousness and understanding of history. International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 4(1), 226-234.

Levstik, L. (1991). Teaching history: A definitional and developmental dilemma. In V. A. Atwood (Ed.), Elementary school social studies: Research as a guide to practice (pp. 68-84). Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies.

Lynn, S. (1993). Children reading pictures: History visuals at key stages 1 and 2. Education, 3-13, 21(3), 23-29.

Masterman, E., & Rogers, Y. (2002). A framework for designing interactive multimedia to scaffold young children's understanding of historical chronology. Instructional Science, 30, 221-241.

Yeager, E. A., & Terzian, S. (2007). "That's when we became a nation": Urban Latino adolescents and the designation of historical significance. Urban Education 42, 52-81.

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Timelines are graphic representations of the chronology of events in time. While they are often used as a way to display information in visual form in textbooks as an alternative to written narrative, students can also become more actively engaged in learning the sequence of events in history by constructing timelines themselves.

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The federal government forced nearly 125,000 Native Americans to specifically designated Indian Territory. The journey was difficult and deadly leading to it being called The Trail of Tears.

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The 'Indian Problem'

White Americans, particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented the Native Americans they encountered: To them, American Indians seemed to be an unfamiliar, alien people who occupied land that white settlers wanted (and believed they deserved).

Some officials in the early years of the American republic, such as President George Washington, believed that the best way to solve this "Indian problem" was to simply "civilize" the Native Americans. The goal of this civilization campaign was to make Native Americans as much like white Americans as possible by encouraging them convert to Christianity, learn to speak and read English and adopt European-style economic practices such as the individual ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances in the South, enslaved persons).

In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the "Five Civilized Tribes."

Did you know? Indian removal took place in the Northern states as well. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, the bloody Black Hawk War in 1832 opened to white settlement millions of acres of land that had belonged to the Sauk, Fox and other native nations.

But the Native Americans' land, located in parts of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, was valuable, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton, and often resorted to violent means to take land from their Indigenous neighbors. They stole livestock; burned and looted houses and towns; committed mass murder; and squatted on land that did not belong to them.

Worcester v. Georgia

State governments joined in this effort to drive Native Americans out of the South. Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory.

In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the U.S. Supreme Court objected to these practices and affirmed that native nations were sovereign nations "in which the laws of Georgia [and other states] can have no force."

Even so, the maltreatment continued. As President Andrew Jackson noted in 1832, if no one intended to enforce the Supreme Court's rulings (which he certainly did not), then the decisions would "[fall]...still born." Southern states were determined to take ownership of Indian lands and would go to great lengths to secure this territory.

Indian Removal Act

Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called "Indian removal." As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida-campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers.

As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the "Indian colonization zone" that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. This "Indian territory" was located in present-day Oklahoma.

The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their ancestral lands. However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations.

Trail of Tears

In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot (some "bound in chains and marched double file," one historian writes), and without any food, supplies or other help from the government.

Thousands of people died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a "trail of tears and death."

The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.

Treaty of New Echota

The Cherokee people were divided: What was the best way to handle the government's determination to get its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions.

In 1835, a few self-appointed representatives of the Cherokee nation negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi - roughly 7 million acres - for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property.

To the federal government, the treaty (signed in New Echota, Georgia) was a done deal, but a majority of the Cherokee felt betrayed. Importantly, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else. Most Cherokee people considered the Treaty of New Echota fraudulent, and the Cherokee National Council voted in 1836 to reject it.

John Ross

"The instrument in question is not the act of our nation," wrote the nation's principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the Treaty of New Echota. "We are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people." Nearly 16,000 Cherokees signed Ross's petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.

By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings.

Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way. Historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.

Legacy of the Trail of Tears

By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, "Indian Country" shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was considered lost.

A 2020 decision by the Supreme Court, however, highlighted ongoing interest in Native American territorial rights. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that a huge area of Oklahoma is still considered an American Indian reservation.

This decision left the state of Oklahoma unable to prosecute Native Americans accused of crimes on those tribal lands - only federal and tribal law enforcement can prosecute such crimes. (A later 2022 Supreme Court decision rolled back some provisions of the 2020 court finding.)

The Trail of Tears - actually a network of different routes - is over 5,000 miles long and covers nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Today, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail is run by the National Park Service and portions of it are accessible on foot, by horse, by bicycle or by car.

Sources

Trail of Tears. NPS.gov.
Trail of Tears. Museum of the Cherokee Indian.
The Treaty of New Echota and the Trail of Tears. North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View. Smithsonian Magazine.
Justices rule swath of Oklahoma remains tribal reservation. Associated Press.
Justices limit 2020 ruling on tribal lands in Oklahoma. Associated Press.

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Trail of Tears: Definition, Date & Cherokee Nation - HISTORY

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The Trail of Tears was the deadly route Native Americans were forced to follow when they were pushed off their ancestral lands and into Oklahoma by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

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Julia Ward Howe requested Mother's Day to be voted in as a new holiday and this was her way of protesting sending all mother's sons to war. This is basically a bunch of people who hated the casualties of war and wanted to protest for peace and neutrality. They wanted to make fliers, and sign petitions against going into a new war.

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According to my understanding Postwar isolationism means that after World War 1 some people were really sickened by the toll that the war had exacted of them and they wanted from 1930-1941 to only deal with domestic affairs and leave the U. S. out of foreign affairs.

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Urbanization is the concept of people from the 1870's to the 1920's moving from rural America to live in the cities, about 11 million people were involved. The poorer people lived in very unsanitary places called tenements, and the rich lived in urban mansions. By the end of the 1920's more people lived in cities than in rural areas.

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The industrial boom of the late nineteenth century led Americans and immigrants from the world over to leave farming life and head to the city.

Americans increasingly moved into cities over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a movement motivated in large measure by industrialization.

Eleven million people migrated from rural to urban areas between 1870 and 1920, and a majority of the twenty-five million immigrants who came to the United States in these same years moved into the nation's cities.

By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in US history.

From farm to city

Today most Americans live in cities or suburbs, but from colonial times into the early twentieth century a majority of Americans lived in the countryside and worked on farms. Only two percent of Americans live on farms or ranches today, but in 1790 ninety percent of the population did. What caused this shift?

The movement of populations from rural to urban areas is called urbanization. Urbanization in the United States increased gradually in the early 1800s and then accelerated in the years after the Civil War. By 1890, twenty-eight percent of Americans lived in urban areas, and by 1920 more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas.

The Second Industrial Revolution and urbanization

The principal force driving America's move into cities was the Second Industrial Revolution.

In the United States the industrial revolution came in two waves. The first saw the rise of factories and mechanized production in the late 1700s and early 1800s and included steam-powered spinning and weaving machines, the cotton gin, steamboats, locomotives, and the telegraph. The Second Industrial Revolution took off following the Civil War with the introduction of interchangeable parts, assembly-line production, and new technologies, including the telephone, automobile, electrification of homes and businesses, and more.

The businesses and factories behind the industrial revolution were located in the nation's towns and cities. Eleven million Americans migrated from the countryside to cities in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920. During these same years an additional 25 million immigrants, most from Europe, moved to the United States-one of the largest mass migrations in human history-and while some settled on farms, most moved into the nation's growing towns and cities.

Cities in the Gilded Age were studies in contrasts. The wealthy lived in urban mansions while the poor crowded into tenement houses, apartment buildings with tiny rooms, no ventilation, and poor sanitation. Not until journalist and reformer Jacob Riis published his eye-opening photoessay How the Other Half Lives in 1890 did cities begin passing ordinances to make tenement housing safer.

The Second Industrial Revolution also changed the physical composition of cities. The invention in the 1850s of the Otis elevator and Bessemer steelmaking process (an inexpensive process for the mass production of steel) created the material means for the rise of tall city buildings, some so tall they were said to scrape the sky- skyscrapers. The advent of trolleys and subways also allowed city dwellers to move about with ease on public transportation, encouraging developers to build new suburbs, allowing people to live outside the city center and commute to work.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cities were energetic centers of culture and community, rich with ethnic enclaves such as "Little Italy," places in which people of different backgrounds and worldviews lived and worked in close proximity. With museums and public libraries, colleges and universities, churches and synagogues, clubs and organizations, saloons and dance halls, shops and street life, cities were vibrant and diverse places. But America's cities could also be geographically concentrated areas of poverty, disease, and violence.

New York City in the Gilded Age

The diversity of the nation's cities was nowhere more on display than in the nation's largest city, New York. At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was the national capital of finance, industry, shipping and trade, publishing, the arts, and immigration, a magnet that drew to it much of the best and most avant-garde in art and literature. With a population of more than three million in 1900 and 4.7 million by 1910, New York was more than twice as populous than Chicago, the nation's second-ranked city, three times as large as third-ranked Philadelphia, and six to nine times as large as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland, all urban centers of immigrants.

By 1910, New York's millionaires had built palatial mansions along much of Fifth Avenue, while, at the same time, many New Yorkers lived in poverty. The Lower East Side was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, housing tens of thousands in ill-lighted, overcrowded tenements, many without running water, flush toilets, or electricity. An 1893 observer in this section of the city wrote of the "fermenting garbage in the gutter and the smell of stale beer" and the sight of exhausted sweatshop workers toiling away, sewing clothes for the garment industry.

What do you think?

What drew Americans and immigrants to move into the nation's cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Do you think the city offered them a better life?

What were some of the contrasts in life between the rich and the poor in cities such as New York at the turn of the twentieth century?

Historians reach for words like "revolution" and "world-historical" in describing big historical changes. Would you consider the movement from farms to cities, from colonial times to today, to be revolutionary? Why or why not?

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America moves to the city (article) | Khan Academy

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

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This gave women the right to vote and we couldn't be discriminated on our sex. It took 41 years of writing letters, marching, and lobbying for this right that finally was passed in 1920! https://www.archives.gov/women/suffrage

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Women's right to vote Pic from book cover

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Plessy boarded a train in 1892 and even though he was only one eighth black he refused to move out of the white area but under the law in Louisiana was considered black and because of his disobedience he was arrested and jailed. The Supreme Court decided that he was at fault and they upheld the "separate but equal law" that was known at that time.

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The new deal was a domestic program for economic relief created in 1933. FDR proposed these reforms which affected industry, agriculture, finance, water power, labor, and housing, making the federal government more involved in those areas.

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Table of Contents

What was the purpose of the New Deal?

What were the New Deal programs and what did they do?

What were the most important results of the New Deal?

What New Deal programs remain in effect?

New Deal, domestic program of the administration of U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) between 1933 and 1939, which took action to bring about immediate economic relief as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labour, and housing, vastly increasing the scope of the federal government's activities. The term was taken from Roosevelt's speech accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency on July 2, 1932. Reacting to the ineffectiveness of the administration of Pres. Herbert Hoover in meeting the ravages of the Great Depression, American voters the following November overwhelmingly voted in favour of the Democratic promise of a "new deal" for the "forgotten man." Opposed to the traditional American political philosophy of laissez-faire, the New Deal generally embraced the concept of a government-regulated economy aimed at achieving a balance between conflicting economic interests.

The Hundred Days

Much of the New Deal legislation was enacted within the first three months of Roosevelt's presidency (March 9-June 16, 1933), which became known as the Hundred Days. The new administration's first objective was to alleviate the suffering of the nation's huge number of unemployed workers. Such agencies as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were established to dispense emergency and short-term governmental aid and to provide temporary jobs, employment on construction projects, and youth work in the national forests. The WPA gave some 8.5 million people jobs. Its construction projects produced more than 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 public buildings, 75,000 bridges, and 8,000 parks. Also under its aegis were the Federal Art Project, Federal Writers' Project, and Federal Theatre Project. The CCC provided national conservation work primarily for young unmarried men. Projects included planting trees, building flood barriers, fighting forest fires, and maintaining forest roads and trails.

Before 1935 the New Deal focused on revitalizing the country's stricken business and agricultural communities. To revive industrial activity, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was granted authority to help shape industrial codes governing trade practices, wages, hours, child labour, and collective bargaining. The New Deal also tried to regulate the nation's financial hierarchy in order to avoid a repetition of the stock market crash of 1929 and the massive bank failures that followed. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) granted government insurance for bank deposits in member banks of the Federal Reserve System, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established in 1934 to restore investor confidence in the stock market by ending the misleading sales practices and stock manipulations that had led to the stock market crash. The farm program, known as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was signed in May 1933. It was centred in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which attempted to raise prices by controlling the production of staple crops through cash subsidies to farmers. In addition, the arm of the federal government reached into the area of electric power, establishing in 1933 the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which was to cover a seven-state area and supply cheap electricity, prevent floods, improve navigation, and produce nitrates.

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New Deal | Definition, History, Programs, Summary, & Facts

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New Deal, domestic program of the administration of U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) between 1933 and 1939, which took action to bring about immediate economic relief as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labour, and housing, vastly increasing the scope of the federal government's activities.

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Mr. Roosevelt was the president of the U.S. during the great depression and World War II; he had polio and was in a wheel chair, but that did not stop this man from helping Americans to regain faith in themselves as many struggled with unemployment.  He enacted the "good neighbor" policy!

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Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his Inaugural Address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Born in 1882 at Hyde Park, New York-now a national historic site-he attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School. On St. Patrick's Day, 1905, he married Eleanor Roosevelt.

Following the example of his fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered public service through politics, but as a Democrat. He won election to the New York Senate in 1910. President Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920.

In the summer of 1921, when he was 39, disaster hit-he was stricken with poliomyelitis. Demonstrating indomitable courage, he fought to regain the use of his legs, particularly through swimming. At the 1924 Democratic Convention he dramatically appeared on crutches to nominate Alfred E. Smith as "the Happy Warrior." In 1928 Roosevelt became Governor of New York.

He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. By March there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and almost every bank was closed. In his first "hundred days," he proposed, and Congress enacted, a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt's New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he was armed with a popular mandate, he sought legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt lost the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law took place. Thereafter the Government could legally regulate the economy.

Roosevelt had pledged the United States to the "good neighbor" policy, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral American manifesto into arrangements for mutual action against aggressors. He also sought through neutrality legislation to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, yet at the same time to strengthen nations threatened or attacked. When France fell and England came under siege in 1940, he began to send Great Britain all possible aid short of actual military involvement.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation's manpower and resources for global war.

Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.

As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt's health deteriorated, and on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

For more information about President Roosevelt, please visit Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

Learn more about Franklin D. Roosevelt's spouse, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

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Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression as our 32nd President (1933-1945), Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves.

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The ancient Roman civilization created a vast empire that excelled in their social institutions, politics, and military. They were also highly skilled in organization, administration, and engineering.

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Mosaic of Roman farmer with cattle and plow

Traditionally, Roman society was extremely rigid. By the first century, however, the need for capable men to run Rome's vast empire was slowly eroding the old social barriers.

The social structure of ancient Rome was based on heredity, property, wealth, citizenship and freedom. It was also based around men: women were defined by the social status of their fathers or husbands. Women were expected to look after the houses and very few had any real independence.

Dressed to impress

The boundaries between the different classes were strict and legally enforced: members of different classes even dressed differently. Only the emperor was allowed to wear a purple toga, while senators could wear a white toga with the latus clavus, a broad purple stripe along the edge. Equestrian togas had a narrow purple stripe (clavus augustus).

Although the classes were strictly defined, there was a lot of interaction. Slaves and some freemen worked the in homes of the upper classes, like the senators and patricians. Soldiers also mixed with their officers.

Patronage

Roman society also involved a system of patronage. Members of the upper classes – the patroni – offered protection to freedmen or plebeians, who became their "cliens." Patronage might consist of money, food, or legal help. Traditionally, any freed slaves became the cliens of their former owner.

In return, patroni received respect and political favors. During the empire, cliens were required to offer daily greetings to their patroni, and the number of these greeters helped determine social status. On the frontiers of the empire, Roman generals served as patroni for the people they conquered, while Roman provinces or cities often sought out an influential senator to act as patroni and oversee their interests in Rome.

The chosen few

Despite the inflexibility of Roman society, advancement was always possible for the select few. Wealth and property were well-known routes to social advancement, as was patronage by the emperor – at one point, Caligula even made a horse a senator.

Over time, society did become more fluid. Augustus expanded the equestrian order and hired them into senior administrative positions. By the end of the first century, equestrians were recruited into the Senate.

Membership of the equestrian class was not restricted to Italian-born citizens, so letting equestrians into the Senate was a big step. Over time, the Senate would be open to Roman citizens from outside Italy. By the end of the first century, even the emperor himself would be born abroad.

Where to next:
Writers - Petronius
Writers - Juvenal

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The Roman Empire: in the First Century. The Roman Empire. Social Order | PBS

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Mosaic of Roman farmer with cattle and plow Traditionally, Roman society was extremely rigid. By the first century, however, the need for capable men to run Rome's vast empire was slowly eroding the old social barriers. The social structure of ancient Rome was based on heredity, property, wealth, citizenship and freedom.

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Egyptians contributed large construction projects to their society in the form of pyramids and palaces.  They also produced small machines like the ramp and the lever.  They had a complex system of government and religion, including beautiful hieroglyphics!

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Major Characteristics and Contributions of Ancient China

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Major Characteristics and Contributions of Ancient China

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The ancient civilization of China was a very independent nation that contributed papermaking, printing, gun powder, and the compass to history. We also get our yellow pencils from China! Yellow meant royalty and respect and the graphite came from China. Cool fact!

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Why are pencils yellow and not another color (like red)?

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Answer (1 of 2): American pencil makers wanted a special way to tell people that their pencils contained Chinese graphite. In China, the color yellow is associated with royalty and respect. American pencil manufacturers began painting their pencils bright yellow to communicate this "regal" feelin...

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Ancient Greece made huge contributions to history in the form of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, sculpture, and architecture. They also influenced modern theater as we know it.