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Bessemer process, the first method discovered for mass-producing steel. Though named after Sir Henry Bessemer of England, the process evolved from the contributions of many investigators before it could be used on a broad commercial basis. It was apparently conceived independently and almost concurrently by Bessemer and by William Kelly of the United States. As early as 1847, Kelly, a businessman-scientist of Pittsburgh, began experiments aimed at developing a revolutionary means of removing impurities from pig iron by an air blast. Kelly theorized that not only would the air, injected into the molten iron, supply oxygen to react with the impurities, converting them into oxides separable as slag, but that the heat evolved in these reactions would increase the temperature of the mass, keeping it from solidifying during the operation. After several failures, he succeeded in proving his theory and rapidly producing steel ingots.

In 1856 Bessemer, working independently in Sheffield, developed and patented the same process. Whereas Kelly had been unable to perfect the process owing to a lack of financial resources, Bessemer was able to develop it into a commercial success. Another Englishman, Robert Forester Mushet, found that adding an alloy of carbon, manganese, and iron after the air-blowing was complete restored the carbon content of the steel while neutralizing the effect of remaining impurities, notably sulfur. A Swedish ironmaster, Goran Goransson, redesigned the Bessemer furnace, or converter, making it reliable in performance. The end result was a means of mass-producing steel. The resultant volume of low-cost steel in Britain and the United States soon revolutionized building construction and provided steel to replace iron in railroad rails and many other uses.

The Bessemer converter is a cylindrical steel pot approximately 6 metres (20 feet) high, originally lined with a siliceous refractory. Air is blown in through openings (tuyeres) near the bottom, creating oxides of silicon and manganese, which become part of the slag, and of carbon, which are carried out in the stream of air. Within a few minutes an ingot of steel can be produced, ready for the forge or rolling mill.

The original Bessemer converter was not effective in removing the phosphorus present in sizable amounts in most British and European iron ore. The invention in England, by Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, of what is now called the Thomas-Gilchrist converter, which was lined with a basic material such as burned limestone rather than an (acid) siliceous material, overcame this problem. Another drawback to Bessemer steel, its retention of a small percentage of nitrogen from the air blow, was not corrected until the 1950s. The open-hearth process, which was developed in the 1860s, did not suffer from this difficulty, and it eventually outstripped the Bessemer process to become the dominant steelmaking process until the mid-20th century. The open-hearth process was in turn replaced by the basic oxygen process, which is actually an extension and refinement of the Bessemer process.

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Bessemer process | Dates, Definition, & Facts

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Bessemer process, the first method discovered for mass-producing steel. Though named after Sir Henry Bessemer of England, the process evolved from the contributions of many investigators before it could be used on a broad commercial basis. It was apparently conceived independently and almost concurrently by Bessemer and by William Kelly of the United States.

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Age of Jackson: Crash Course US History #14

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The Arctic

The Arctic culture area, a cold, flat, treeless region (actually a frozen desert) near the Arctic Circle in present-day Alaska, Canada and Greenland, was home to the Inuit and the Aleut. Both groups spoke, and continue to speak, dialects descended from what scholars call the Eskimo-Aleut language family.

Because it is such an inhospitable landscape, the Arctic's population was comparatively small and scattered. Some of its peoples, especially the Inuit in the northern part of the region, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra. In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were a bit more settled, living in small fishing villages along the shore.

Did you know? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the United States today. That's about 1.5 percent of the population.

The Inuit and Aleut had a great deal in common. Many lived in dome-shaped houses made of sod or timber (or, in the North, ice blocks). They used seal and otter skins to make warm, weatherproof clothing, aerodynamic dogsleds and long, open fishing boats (kayaks in Inuit; baidarkas in Aleut).

By the time the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, decades of oppression and exposure to European diseases had taken their toll: The native population had dropped to just 2,500; the descendants of these survivors still make their homes in the area today.

The Subarctic

The Subarctic culture area, mostly composed of swampy, piney forests (taiga) and waterlogged tundra, stretched across much of inland Alaska and Canada. Scholars have divided the region's people into two language groups: the Athabaskan speakers at its western end, among them the Tsattine (Beaver), Gwich'in (or Kuchin) and the Deg Xinag (formerly-and pejoratively-known as the Ingalik), and the Algonquian speakers at its eastern end, including the Cree, the Ojibwa and the Naskapi.

In the Subarctic, travel was difficult-toboggans, snowshoes and lightweight canoes were the primary means of transportation-and population was sparse. In general, the peoples of the Subarctic did not form large permanent settlements; instead, small family groups stuck together as they traipsed after herds of caribou. They lived in small, easy-to-move tents and lean-tos, and when it grew too cold to hunt they hunkered into underground dugouts.

The growth of the fur trade in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the Subarctic way of life-now, instead of hunting and gathering for subsistence, the Indians focused on supplying pelts to the European traders-and eventually led to the displacement and extermination of many of the region's native communities.

The Northeast

The Northeast culture area, one of the first to have sustained contact with Europeans, stretched from present-day Canada's Atlantic coast to North Carolina and inland to the Mississippi River valley. Its inhabitants were members of two main groups: Iroquoian speakers (these included the Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora), most of whom lived along inland rivers and lakes in fortified, politically stable villages, and the more numerous Algonquian speakers (these included the Pequot, Fox, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Delaware and Menominee) who lived in small farming and fishing villages along the ocean. There, they grew crops like corn, beans and vegetables.

Life in the Northeast culture area was already fraught with conflict-the Iroquoian groups tended to be rather aggressive and warlike, and bands and villages outside of their allied confederacies were never safe from their raids-and it grew more complicated when European colonizers arrived. Colonial wars repeatedly forced the region's Indigenous people to take sides, pitting the Iroquois groups against their Algonquian neighbors. Meanwhile, as white settlement pressed westward, it eventually displaced both sets of Indigenous people from their lands.

The Southeast

The Southeast culture area, north of the Gulf of Mexico and south of the Northeast, was a humid, fertile agricultural region. Many of its natives were expert farmers-they grew staple crops like maize, beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower-who organized their lives around small ceremonial and market villages known as hamlets. Perhaps the most familiar of the Southeastern Indigenous peoples are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, sometimes called the Five Civilized Tribes, some of whom spoke a variant of the Muskogean language.

By the time the U.S. had won its independence from Britain, the Southeast culture area had already lost many of its native people to disease and displacement. In 1830, the federal Indian Removal Act compelled the relocation of what remained of the Five Civilized Tribes so that white settlers could have their land. Between 1830 and 1838, federal officials forced nearly 100,000 Indigenous people out of the southern states and into "Indian Territory" (later Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee called this frequently deadly trek the Trail of Tears.

The Plains

The Plains culture area comprises the vast prairie region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from present-day Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Before the arrival of European traders and explorers, its inhabitants-speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages-were relatively settled hunters and farmers. After European contact, and especially after Spanish colonists brought horses to the region in the 18th century, the peoples of the Great Plains became much more nomadic.

Groups like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho used horses to pursue great herds of buffalo across the prairie. The most common dwelling for these hunters was the cone-shaped teepee, a bison-skin tent that could be folded up and carried anywhere. Plains Indians are also known for their elaborately feathered war bonnets.

As white traders and settlers moved west across the Plains region, they brought many damaging things with them: commercial goods, like knives and kettles, which Indigenous people came to depend on; guns; and disease. By the end of the 19th century, white sport hunters had nearly exterminated the area's buffalo herds. With settlers encroaching on their lands and no way to make money, the Plains natives were forced onto government reservations.

The Southwest

The peoples of the Southwest culture area, a huge desert region in present-day Arizona and New Mexico (along with parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Mexico) developed two distinct ways of life.

Sedentary farmers such as the Hopi, the Zuni, the Yaqui and the Yuma grew crops like corn, beans and squash. Many lived in permanent settlements, known as pueblos, built of stone and adobe. These pueblos featured great multistory dwellings that resembled apartment houses. At their centers, many of these villages also had large ceremonial pit houses, or kivas.

Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Navajo and the Apache, were more nomadic. They survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Because these groups were always on the move, their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos. For instance, the Navajo fashioned their iconic eastward-facing round houses, known as hogans, out of materials like mud and bark.

By the time the southwestern territories became a part of the United States after the Mexican War, many of the region's native people had already been killed. (Spanish colonists and missionaries had enslaved many of the Pueblo Indians, for example, working them to death on vast Spanish ranches known as encomiendas.) During the second half of the 19th century, the federal government resettled most of the region's remaining natives onto reservations.

The Great Basin

The Great Basin culture area, an expansive bowl formed by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a barren wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes. Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects (the Bannock, Paiute and Ute, for example), foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small mammals. Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush. Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership (what little there was) was informal.

After European contact, some Great Basin groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we associate with the Great Plains natives. After white prospectors discovered gold and silver in the region in the mid-19th century, most of the Great Basin's people lost their land and, frequently, their lives.

California

Before European contact, the temperate California area had more people than any other North American landscape at the time, with approximately 300,000 people in the mid-16th century. It's estimated that 100 different tribes and groups spoke more than 200 dialects. These languages were derived from the Penutian (the Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts), the Hokan (the Chumash, Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), the Uto-Aztecan (the Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) and the Athapaskan (the Hupa, among others). Many of the "Mission Indians" who were driven out of the Southwest by Spanish colonization also spoke Uto-Aztecan dialects.

Despite this great diversity, many native Californians lived very similar lives. They did not practice much agriculture. Instead, they organized themselves into small, family-based bands of hunter-gatherers known as tribelets. Inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of trade and common rights, were generally peaceful.

Spanish explorers infiltrated the California region in the middle of the 16th century. In 1769, the cleric Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego, inaugurating a particularly brutal period in which forced labor, disease and assimilation nearly exterminated the culture area's native population.

The Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast culture area, along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to the top of Northern California, has a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources. In particular, the ocean and the region's rivers provided almost everything its people needed-salmon, especially, but also whales, sea otters, seals and fish and shellfish of all kinds. As a result, unlike many other hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds from place to place, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest were secure enough to build permanent villages that housed hundreds of people apiece.

Those villages operated according to a rigidly stratified social structure, more sophisticated than any outside of Mexico and Central America. A person's status was determined by his closeness to the village's chief and reinforced by the number of possessions-blankets, shells and skins, canoes and even slaves-he had at his disposal. (Goods like these played an important role in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions.)

Prominent groups in the region included the Athapaskan Haida and Tlingit; the Penutian Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos; the Wakashan Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka); and the Salishan Coast Salish.

The Plateau

The Plateau culture area sat in the Columbia and Fraser River basins at the intersection of the Subarctic, the Plains, the Great Basin, California and the Northwest Coast (present-day Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon and Washington). Most of its people lived in small, peaceful villages along streams and riverbanks and survived by fishing for salmon and trout, hunting and gathering wild berries, roots and nuts.

In the southern Plateau region, the great majority spoke languages derived from the Penutian (the Klamath, Klikitat, Modoc, Nez Perce, Walla Walla and Yakima or Yakama). North of the Columbia River, most (the Skitswish (Coeur d'Alene), Salish (Flathead), Spokane and Columbia) spoke Salishan dialects.

In the 18th century, other native groups brought horses to the Plateau. The region's inhabitants quickly integrated the animals into their economy, expanding the radius of their hunts and acting as traders and emissaries between the Northwest and the Plains.

In 1805, the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the area, followed by increasing numbers of white settlers. By the end of the 19th century, most of the remaining members of Plateau tribes had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.

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Native American Cultures - Facts, Regions & Tribes

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Native Americans, also known as American Indians and Indigenous Americans, are the indigenous peoples of the United States. By the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than 50 million Native Americans were already living in the Americas - 10 million in the area that would become the United States.

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The Renaissance: Was it a Thing? - Crash Course World History #22

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Christopher Columbus - Facts, Voyage & Discovery

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The explorer Christopher Columbus made four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. His most famous was his first voyage, commanding the ships the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria to the Americas.

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Read an excerpt from Who Was First? by Russell Freedman:
Before Columbus
For a long time, most people believed that Christopher Columbus was the first explorer to "discover" America-the first to make a successful round-trip voyage across the Atlantic. But in recent years, as new evidence came to light, our understanding of history has changed. We know now that Columbus was among the last explorers to reach the Americas, not the first.

Five hundred years before Columbus, a daring band of Vikings led by Leif Eriksson set foot in North America and established a settlement. And long before that, some scholars say, the Americas seem to have been visited by seafaring travelers from China, and possibly by visitors from Africa and even Ice Age Europe.

A popular legend suggests an additional event: According to an ancient manuscript, a band of Irish monks led by Saint Brendan sailed an ox-hide boat westward in the sixth century in search of new lands. After seven years they returned home and reported that they had discovered a land covered with luxuriant vegetation, believed by some people today to have been Newfoundland.

All along, of course, the two continents we now call North and South America had already been "discovered." Before European explorers arrived, the Americas were home to tens of millions of native peoples. While those Native American groups differed greatly from one another, they all performed rituals and ceremonies, songs and dances, that brought back to mind and heart memories of the ancestors who had come before them and given them their place on Earth.

Who were the ancestors of those Native Americans? Where did they come from, when did they arrive in the Americas, and how did they make their epic journeys?

As we dig deeper and deeper into the past, we find that the Americas have always been lands of immigrants, lands that have been "discovered" time and again by different peoples coming from different parts of the world over the course of countless generations-going far back to the prehistoric past, when a band of Stone Age hunters first set foot in what truly was an unexplored New World.
1. Admiral of the Ocean Sea
Christopher Columbus was having trouble with his crew. His fleet of three small sailing ships had left the Canary Islands nearly three weeks earlier, heading west across the uncharted Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was known. He had expected to reach China or Japan by now, but there was still no sign of land.

None of the sailors had ever been so long away from the sight of land, and as the days passed, they grew increasingly restless and fearful. The Ocean Sea was known also as the Sea of Darkness. Hideous monsters were said to lurk beneath the waves-venomous sea serpents and giant crabs that could rise up from the deep and crush a ship along with its crew. And if the Earth was flat, as many of the men believed, then they might fall off the edge of the world and plunge into that fiery abyss where the sun sets in the west. What's more, Columbus was a foreigner-a red-headed Italian commanding a crew of tough seafaring Spaniards-and that meant he couldn't be trusted.

Finally, the men demanded that Columbus turn back and head for home. When he refused, some of the sailors whispered together of mutiny. They wanted to kill the admiral by throwing him overboard. But, for the moment, the crisis passed. Columbus managed to calm his men and persuade them to be patient a while longer.

"I am having serious trouble with the crew . . . complaining that they will never be able to return home," he wrote in his journal. "They have said that it is insanity and suicidal on their part to risk their lives following the madness of a foreigner. . . . I am told by a few trusted men (and these are few in number!) that if I persist in going onward, the best course of action will be to throw me into the sea some night."

All along, Columbus had been keeping two sets of logs. One, which he kept secretly and showed to no one, was accurate, recording the distance really sailed each day. The other log, which he showed to his crew, hoping to reassure them that they were nowhere near the edge of the world, deliberately underestimated the miles they had covered since leaving Spain.

They sailed on for another two weeks and still saw nothing. There were more rumblings of protest and complaint from the crew. The men seemed willing to endure no more. On October 10, Columbus announced that he would give a fine silk coat to the man who first sighted land. The sailors greeted that offer with glum silence. What good was a silk coat in the middle of the Sea of Darkness?

Later that day, Columbus spotted a flock of birds flying toward the southwest-a sign that land was close. He ordered his ships to follow the birds.

The next night, the moon rose in the east shortly before midnight. About two hours later, at two A.M. on October 12, a sailor on one of Columbus's ships, the Pinta, saw a white stretch of beach, shouted, "Land! Land!" and fired a cannon. At dawn, the three ships dropped anchor in the calm, blue waters just offshore. They had arrived at an island in what we now call the Bahamas.

Excited crew members crowded the decks. People were standing on the beach, waiting to greet them. The natives had no weapons other than wooden fishing spears, and they were practically naked. Who were these people? And what place was this?

Columbus supposed that his fleet had landed on one of the many islands that Marco Polo had reported lay just off the coast of Asia. They must have reached the Indies, he thought-islands reputedly near India and known today as the East Indies. So he decided that those people on the beach must be "Indians," the name by which they have been known ever since. China and Japan, he believed, lay a bit farther to the north.

Though Christopher Columbus was an Italian born in Genoa, he had lived for years in Portugal, where he worked as a bookseller, a mapmaker, and a sailor. He had sailed on Portuguese voyages as far as Iceland in the North Atlantic, and down the coast of Africa in the South Atlantic. During his days at sea, he read books on history, geography, and travel.

Like most educated people at the time, Columbus believed that the Earth was round-not flat, as some ignorant folks still insisted. The Ocean Sea was seen as a great expanse of water surrounding the land mass of Eurasia and Africa, which stretched from Europe in the west to China and Japan in the far distant east. If a ship left the coast of Europe, sailed west toward the setting sun, and circled the globe, it would reach the shores of Asia-or so Columbus thought.

In the past, European explorers and traders had taken the overland route to the Far East, with its precious silks and spices. They traveled for months by horse and camel along the Silk Road, an ancient caravan trail that crossed deserts and climbed dizzying mountain peaks. Marco Polo had followed the Silk Road on his famous journey to China two centuries earlier. But recently, this land route to Asia, controlled in part by the Turks, had been closed to Europeans. And in any case, Columbus was convinced that he could find an easier and faster route to Asia by sailing west.

There were plenty of stories circulating in those years about the possibility of sailing directly from Europe to Asia, an idea first considered by the ancient Greeks. Columbus owned a book called Imago Mundi, or Image of the World, by a French scholar, Pierre d'Ailly, who argued that the Ocean Sea wasn't as wide as it seemed and that a ship driven by favorable winds could cross it in a few days. Next to that passage in the margin of the book, Columbus had written: "There is no reason to think that the ocean covers half the earth."

In 1484, he proposed his bold scheme of sailing west to China to King John II of Portugal, a monarch who had paid much attention to the discovery of new lands. Portugal was Europe's leading maritime power. Portuguese explorers in search of slaves, ivory, and gold had already discovered rich kingdoms and colossal rivers in western Africa and would soon reach the Cape of Good Hope at Africa's southern tip. From there, they would be able to sail across the Indian Ocean to the famed Spice Islands of southeast Asia.

King John listened to what Columbus had to say, then submitted the Italian sailor's plan to a committee of mapmakers, astronomers, and geographers. The distinguished experts declared that Asia must be much farther away than Columbus thought. They said that no expedition could be fitted out with enough food and water to sail across such an enormous expanse of sea.

Rejected by the Portuguese king, Columbus decided to approach King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, a country he had never before visited. Well-connected friends gave him letters of introduction to the inner circle of the Spanish royal court. Ferdinand and Isabella seemed curious about the route to Asia that Columbus proposed. Like King John, they too appointed a committee of inquiry to consider the matter, but those experts came to the same negative conclusion: Columbus's claim about the distance to China and the ease of sailing there could not possibly be true.

Columbus persisted. He talked at length to members of the Spanish court and convinced some of them, but Ferdinand and Isabella twice rejected his appeal for ships. Finally, angry and impatient after six discouraging years in Spain, he threatened to seek support from the king of France. Columbus actually set out for France, riding a mule down a dusty Spanish road.

With that, royal advisors persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella to change their minds. If another king sponsored Columbus, and his expedition turned out to be a success, then the Spanish monarchs would be embarrassed. They would be criticized in Spain. Let Columbus risk his life, the advisors said. Let him seek out "the grandeurs and secrets of the universe." If he succeeded, Spain would win much glory and would overcome the Portuguese lead in the race to exploit the riches of Asia.

And so Ferdinand and Isabella decided to take a chance. They dispatched a messenger to intercept Columbus on the road and bring him back to court. They were ready to grant him a hereditary title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and the right to a tenth of any riches-pearls, gold, silver, silks, spices-that he brought back from his voyage. And they agreed to supply two ships for his expedition. Columbus himself raised the money to hire a third ship.

A half hour before sunrise on August 3, 1492, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa María sailed from the port of Palos, Spain, carrying some ninety crew members in all. They were small, lightweight ships called caravels, swift and maneuverable, each with three masts, their white sails with big red crosses billowing before the wind. They had on board food that would last-salted cod, bacon, and biscuits, along with flour, wine, olive oil, and plenty of water, enough for a year. In his small cabin, Columbus kept several hourglasses to mark the passage of time, a compass, and an astrolabe, an instrument for calculating latitude by observing the movement of the sun.

The little fleet stopped for repairs at La Gomera in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession off the coast of Morocco. On September 6, after praying at the parish church of San Sebastian (which still looks out over the ocean today), Columbus and his three ships set sail again, heading due west, moving now through the unknown waters of the Ocean Sea. Five weeks later, on October 12, his worried crew finally sighted land.

Columbus called the place where they landed San Salvador-the first of many Caribbean islands that he would name. The natives who greeted him called their island Guanahani. They themselves were a people known as the Tainos, the largest group of natives inhabiting the islands of what we today call the West Indies.

Columbus tells us a few things about these now-extinct people. He was impressed by their good looks and apparent robust health. "They are very well-built people, with handsome bodies and very fine faces," he wrote in his log. "Their eyes are large and very pretty. . . . These are tall people and their legs, with no exceptions, are quite straight, and none of them has a paunch." Many of the Tainos had painted their faces or their whole bodies black or white or red. And as Columbus and his men noticed right away, some of them wore gold earrings and nose rings. They offered gifts to the European visitors-parrots, wooden javelins, and balls of cotton thread.

From San Salvador, Columbus sailed on to several more islands, still believing that he was close to Japan "because all my globes and world maps seem to indicate that the island of Japan is in this vicinity." He stopped at Cuba and at Hispaniola (the island that today contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic). And he wrote enthusiastically in his journal of the lush tropical beauty of the islands, the sweet singing of birds "that might make a man wish never to leave here," and the hospitality of the people: "They gave my men bread and fish and whatever they had." And later, "They brought us all they had in this world, knowing what I wanted, and they did it so generously and willingly that it was wonderful."

The Tainos lived in large, airy wooden houses with palm roofs. They slept in cotton hammocks, sat on wooden chairs carved in elaborate animal shapes, and kept small barkless dogs and tame birds as pets. They were skilled farmers, fishermen, and boat builders who traveled from island to island in long, brightly painted canoes carved from tree trunks, each of which carried as many as 150 people.

They told Columbus that they called themselves Tainos, a word meaning "good," to distinguish themselves from the "bad" Caribs, their fierce, warlike neighbors who raided Taino villages, carried off their girls as brides, and, the Tainos insisted, ate human flesh. To fend off Carib attacks, the Tainos painted themselves red and fought back with clubs, bows and arrows, and spears propelled by throwing sticks.

The Tainos themselves were not warlike, Columbus reported to his monarchs: "They are an affectionate people, free from avarice and agreeable to everything. I certify to Your Highnesses that in all the world I do not believe there is a better people or a better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the softest and gentlest voices in the world and are always smiling."

A village chief gave Columbus a mask with golden eyes and large ears of gold. And the Spaniards were already aware that many of the Tainos wore gold jewelry. They kept asking where the gold came from. After much searching, they found a river on the island of Hispaniola where "the sand was full of gold, and in such quantity, that it is wonderful. . . . I named this El Rio del Oro" (The River of Gold).

Columbus built a small fort nearby and left thirty-nine men behind to collect gold samples and await the next Spanish expedition. Still believing that he had discovered unknown islands near the shores of Asia, he sailed back to Spain with some gold from Hispaniola and with ten Indians he had kidnapped so he could train them as interpreters and exhibit them at the royal court. One of the Indians died at sea.

He returned to a triumphant welcome. It was said that when Ferdinand and Isabella received him at their court in Barcelona, "there were tears in the royal eyes." They greeted Columbus as a hero, inviting him to ride with them in royal processions. A second voyage was planned. This time, the monarchs gave Columbus seventeen ships, about fifteen hundred men, and a few women to colonize the islands. He was instructed to continue his explorations, establish gold mines, install settlers, develop trade with the Indians, and convert them to Christianity.

Columbus returned to Hispaniola in the fall of 1493. He hoped to find huge amounts of gold on the island. But the mines yielded much less gold than expected, and the European crops planted by the settlers wilted in the tropical climate. Some settlers began to lord it over the Indians, stealing their possessions, abducting their wives, and seizing captives to be shipped to Spain and sold as slaves. Thousands of Tainos fled to the mountains to escape capture. Others, vowing to avenge themselves, attacked any Spaniards they found in small groups and set fire to their huts.

While Columbus was a courageous and enterprising mariner, he proved to be a poor governor, unable to control the greed of his followers. In 1496, he was called back to Spain to answer complaints about his management of the colony. When he appeared at court before Ferdinand and Isabella, he found the king and queen were still willing to support his explorations. Columbus gave them a "good sample of gold . . . and many masks, with eyes and ears of gold, and many parrots." He also presented to the monarchs "Diego," the brother of a Taino chief, who was wearing a heavy gold collar. These hints that more gold might be forthcoming encouraged Ferdinand and Isabella to send Columbus back to the Indies, this time with eight ships.

When he returned to Hispaniola on his third voyage in 1498, he found the island in turmoil, torn by rivalries and disagreements among the settlers. Many colonists, unable to make a living from the gold mines or by farming, were clamoring to return to Spain. Others, rivals of Columbus who wanted to gain control of the colony, rebelled against his rule. When word of the conflict reached Spain, the king and queen sent an emissary, Francisco de Bobadilla, to investigate the uprising and take charge of the government.

Columbus, it seems, made the mistake of arguing with the royal emissary and challenging his credentials. He was promptly arrested and with his two brothers was shipped back to Spain to face charges of wrongdoing. "Bobadilla sent me here in chains," he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella when he landed in Spain. "I swear that I do not know, nor can I think why." Though Columbus was quickly pardoned by the Spanish monarchs, who felt he had been treated too harshly, he was stripped of his right to govern the islands he had discovered, and he lost his title as Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Even so, he was allowed to make one more voyage, sailing across the Caribbean and exploring the coast of Central America. This final expedition was cursed by bad luck. Two of Columbus's ships became so infested with termites, they sank. When he headed back to Spain, he had to beach his remaining ships at St. Ann's Bay in Jamaica, where he was marooned for a year before being rescued in the fall of 1504. He returned to Spain an ill and disappointed man.

Spanish colonists, meanwhile, had been settling in Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and other islands in the West Indies. The local Indians were put to work as forced laborers in the goldfields or on Spanish ranches. Indians who resisted were killed, sometimes with terrible brutality, or were shipped to Spain to be sold as slaves. Spanish missionaries denounced this mistreatment, but with little effect. "I have seen the greatest cruelty and inhumanity practiced on these gentle and peace-loving [native peoples]," Father Bartolomé de Las Casas would say a half century later, "without any reason except for insatiable greed, thirst, and hunger for gold."

As the number of Spanish colonists increased, the native population of the West Indies quickly declined. Tens of thousands of native people were worked to death or died of smallpox, measles, and other European diseases to which they had no immunity. As the Tainos died off, the colonists brought in black slaves from Africa to labor on ranches and in the spreading sugar-cane fields.

Within fifty years, the Tainos had ceased to exist as a distinct race of people. A few Taino words survive today in Spanish and even in English, including hammock, canoe, hurricane, savannah, barbecue, and cannibal.

Columbus died in a Spanish monastery on May 20, 1506, at the age of fifty-seven, still believing that he had found a new route to Asia, and that China and Japan lay just beyond the islands he had explored. By then, other explorers were following the sea route pioneered by the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and Europeans were already speaking of Columbus's discoveries as a "New World."

The first map of the world to show these newly discovered lands across the Ocean Sea appeared in 1507, a year after Christopher Columbus's death. The mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, named the New World "America," after the Italian Amerigo Vespucci, who had explored the coastline of South America and was the first to realize that it was a separate continent, not part of Asia.

Columbus wasn't the first explorer to "discover" America. His voyages were significant because they were the first to become widely known in Europe. They opened a pathway from the Old World to the New, paving the way for the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, changing life forever on both sides of the Atlantic.
Excerpted from Who Was First? Copyright © 2007 by Russell Freedman.

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Most of us were taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Yet it is far from clear cut. There are alternative theories about who got here first - some well-documented, others much more flimsy in their scholarship. A new book probes their merits.

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Spanish colonization (video) | Khan Academy

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

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Printable Version During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of North America as a base for piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of the century, the English began to think more seriously about North America as a place to colonize: as a market for English goods and a source of raw materials and commodities such as furs. English promoters claimed that New World colonization offered England many advantages. Not only would it serve as a bulwark against Catholic Spain, it would supply England with raw materials and provide a market for finished products. America would also provide a place to send the English poor and ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English poor increased rapidly in number. As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands (which were increasingly used to raise sheep), many common people were forced to become wage laborers or else to support themselves hand-to-mouth or simply as beggars.

After unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and at Roanoke, the famous "Lost Colony," off the coast of present-day North Carolina, England established its first permanent North American settlement, Jamestown, in 1607. Located in swampy marshlands along Virginia's James River, Jamestown's residents suffered horrendous mortality rates during its first years. Immigrants had just a fifty-fifty chance of surviving five years.

The Jamestown expedition was financed by the Virginia Company of London, which believed that precious metals were to be found in the area. From the outset, however, Jamestown suffered from disease and conflict with Indians. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian Indians lived in the region, divided into about 40 tribes. About 30 tribes belonged to a confederacy led by Powhatan.

Food was an initial source of conflict. More interested in finding gold and silver than in farming, Jamestown's residents (many of whom were either aristocrats or their servants) were unable or unwilling to work. When the English began to seize Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off supplies, forcing the colonists to subsist on frogs, snakes, and even decaying corpses.

Captain John Smith (1580?-1631) was twenty-six years old when the first expedition landed. A farmer's son, Smith had already led an adventurous life before arriving in Virginia. He had fought with the Dutch army against the Spanish and in eastern Europe against the Ottoman Turks, when he was taken captive and enslaved. He later escaped to Russia before returning to England.

Smith, serving as president of the Jamestown colony from 1608 to 1609, required the colonists to work and traded with the Indians for food. In 1609, after being wounded in a gunpowder accident, Smith returned to England. After his departure, conflict between the English and the Powhatan confederacy intensified, especially after the colonists began to clear land in order to plant tobacco.

In a volume recounting the history of the English colony in Virginia, Smith describes a famous incident in which Powhatan's 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas (1595?-1617), saved him from execution. Although some have questioned whether this incident took place (since Smith failed to mention it in his Historie's first edition), it may well have been a "staged event," an elaborate adoption ceremony by which Powhatan symbolically made Smith his vassal or servant. Through similar ceremonies, the Powhatan people incorporated outsiders into their society. Pocahontas reappears in the colonial records in 1613, when she was lured aboard an English ship and held captive. Negotiations for her release failed, and in 1614, she married John Rolfe, the colonist who introduced tobacco to Virginia. Whether this marriage represented an attempt to forge an alliance between the English and the Powhatan remains uncertain.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of North America as a base for piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of the century, the English began to think more seriously about North America as a place to colonize: as a market for English goods and a source of raw materials and commodities such as furs.

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Colonists Affected by the Great Awakening or Enlightenmient 

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Colonists Affected by the Great Awakening or Enlightenmient 

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the significance of the Great Awakening

Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the Enlightenment in British North America

Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-American colonists' connection to Great Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. Both movements began in Europe, but they advocated very different ideas: the Great Awakening promoted a fervent, emotional religiosity, while the Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all things. On both sides of the Atlantic, British subjects grappled with these new ideas.

During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced an outburst of Protestant revivalism known as the First Great Awakening. (A Second Great Awakening would take place in the 1800s.) During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the Church of England), and Presbyterians. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity. Whereas Martin Luther and John Calvin had preached a doctrine of predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book learning. Individuals could bring about their own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome message for those who had felt excluded by traditional Protestantism: women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum.

The Great Awakening caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message (the "New Lights") and those who rejected it (the "Old Lights"). The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos. Indeed, the revivals did sometimes lead to excess. In one notorious incident in 1743, an influential New Light minister named James Davenport urged his listeners to burn books. The next day, he told them to burn their clothes as a sign of their casting off the sinful trappings of the world. He then took off his own pants and threw them into the fire, but a woman saved them and tossed them back to Davenport, telling him he had gone too far.

Another outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey, led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen's example inspired other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in the Middle Colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), in part by founding a seminary to train other evangelical clergyman. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that would later become Brown University and Dartmouth College.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still another explosion of evangelical fervor. Edwards's best-known sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," used powerful word imagery to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding damnation by personal conversion. One passage reads: "The wrath of God burns against them [sinners], their damnation don't slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them." Edwards's revival spread along the Connecticut River Valley, and news of the event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon.

The foremost evangelical of the Great Awakening was an Anglican minister named George Whitefield. Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was itinerant, traveling the countryside instead of having his own church and congregation. Between 1739 and 1740, he electrified colonial listeners with his brilliant oratory.

Two Opposing Views of George Whitefield

Not everyone embraced George Whitefield and other New Lights. Many established Old Lights decried the way the new evangelical religions appealed to people's passions, rather than to traditional religious values. The two illustrations below present two very different visions of George Whitefield.

Compare the two images above. On the left is an illustration for Whitefield's memoirs, while on the right is a cartoon satirizing the circus-like atmosphere that his preaching seemed to attract (Dr. Squintum was a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed). How do these two artists portray the same man? What emotions are the illustration for his memoirs intended to evoke? What details can you find in the cartoon that indicate the artist's distaste for the preacher?

The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists (who emphasized adult baptism of converted Christians rather than infant baptism). These new churches gained converts and competed with older Protestant groups like Anglicans (members of the Church of England), Congregationalists (the heirs of Puritanism in America), and Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant groups, such as the New England Congregationalists, declined because of the Great Awakening. Nonetheless, the Great Awakening touched the lives of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and provided a shared experience in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a major turning point in Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of darkness.

Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including rationalism, empiricism, progressivism, and cosmopolitanism. Rationalism is the idea that humans are capable of using their faculty of reason to gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing idea that people needed to rely on scripture or church authorities for knowledge. Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world. Progressivism is the belief that through their powers of reason and observation, humans could make unlimited, linear progress over time; this belief was especially important as a response to the carnage and upheaval of the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century. Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers' view of themselves as citizens of the world and actively engaged in it, as opposed to being provincial and close-minded. In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

The Freemasons were a fraternal society that advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in the early eighteenth century, and Masonic lodges (local units) soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies. One prominent Freemason, Benjamin Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in British America. Born in Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved to read, although he found little beyond religious publications in his father's house. In 1718 he was apprenticed to his brother to work in a print shop, where he learned how to be a good writer by copying the style he found in the Spectator, which his brother printed. At the age of seventeen, the independent-minded Franklin ran away, eventually ending up in Quaker Philadelphia. There he began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette in the late 1720s, and in 1732 he started his annual publication Poor Richard: An Almanack, in which he gave readers much practical advice, such as "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

Franklin subscribed to deism, an Enlightenment-era belief in a God who created, but has no continuing involvement in, the world and the events within it. Deists also advanced the belief that personal morality-an individual's moral compass, leading to good works and actions-is more important than strict church doctrines. Franklin's deism guided his many philanthropic projects. In 1731, he established a reading library that became the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to encourage the spirit of inquiry. In 1749, he provided the foundation for the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751, he helped found Pennsylvania Hospital.

His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well-respected. When he retired in 1748, he devoted himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most famous work, on electricity, exemplified Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning strikes tended to hit metal objects and reasoned that he could therefore direct lightning through the placement of metal objects during an electrical storm. He used this knowledge to advocate the use of lightning rods: metal poles connected to wires directing lightning's electrical charge into the ground and saving wooden homes in cities like Philadelphia from catastrophic fires. He published his findings in 1751, in Experiments and Observations on Electricity.

Franklin also wrote of his "rags to riches" tale, his Memoir, in the 1770s and 1780s. This story laid the foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.

Visit the Worldly Ways section of PBS's Benjamin Franklin site to see an interactive map showing Franklin's overseas travels and his influence around the world. His diplomatic, political, scientific, and business achievements had great effects in many countries.

The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep. In the 1730s, it even prompted the founding of a new colony. Having witnessed the terrible conditions of debtors' prison, as well as the results of releasing penniless debtors onto the streets of London, James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament and advocate of social reform, petitioned King George II for a charter to start a new colony. George II, understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony standing as a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and twenty like-minded proprietors in 1732. Oglethorpe led the settlement of the colony, which was called Georgia in honor of the king. In 1733, he and 113 immigrants arrived on the ship Anne. Over the next decade, Parliament funded the migration of twenty-five hundred settlers, making Georgia the only government-funded colonial project.

Oglethorpe's vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age of Reason, seeing it as a place for England's "worthy poor" to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant fifty acres of land, tools, and a year's worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a utopia: "an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal."

Oglethorpe's vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded these prohibitions. Despite its proprietors' early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by slaves.

The eighteenth century saw a host of social, religious, and intellectual changes across the British Empire. While the Great Awakening emphasized vigorously emotional religiosity, the Enlightenment promoted the power of reason and scientific observation. Both movements had lasting impacts on the colonies. The beliefs of the New Lights of the First Great Awakening competed with the religions of the first colonists, and the religious fervor in Great Britain and her North American colonies bound the eighteenth-century British Atlantic together in a shared, common experience. The British colonist Benjamin Franklin gained fame on both sides of the Atlantic as a printer, publisher, and scientist. He embodied Enlightenment ideals in the British Atlantic with his scientific experiments and philanthropic endeavors. Enlightenment principles even guided the founding of the colony of Georgia, although those principles could not stand up to the realities of colonial life, and slavery soon took hold in the colony.

Review Question

Who were the Freemasons, and why were they significant?

Answer to Review Question

The Freemasons were a fraternal society that originated in London coffeehouses in the early eighteenth century. They advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Masonic lodges soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies, creating a shared experience on both sides of the Atlantic and spreading Enlightenment intellectual currents throughout the British Empire. Benjamin Franklin was a prominent Freemason.

Glossary

deism an Enlightenment-era belief in the existence of a supreme being-specifically, a creator who does not intervene in the universe-representing a rejection of the belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind

Enlightenment an eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural movement that emphasized reason and science over superstition, religion, and tradition

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By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the significance of the Great Awakening Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the Enlightenment in British North America Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-American colonists' connection to Great Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment.

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British Acts and Colonial Reactions - ppt video online download

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The Navigation Acts (1650) Colonists were required to transport goods only on British ships Certain goods (sugar, tobacco, indigo, furs) could only go to England. Imported goods must be purchased from England or pay taxes in British port if purchased from a foreign nation.

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Colonists Response to Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre

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Colonists Response to Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre

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Paul Reveres Ride/ Lexington and Concord

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Paul Reveres Ride/ Lexington and Concord

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Paul Revere's Ride: The Patriots Prepare for Battle

On April 16th, 1775, Paul Revere began to gather tips that a raid was planned for the city of Concord in the coming days. In fact, it is speculated that these tips came from General Gage's wife, an American who may have been sympathetic to the plight of her countrymen. With this intelligence, Revere began making plans to alert the surrounding countryside by horseback that the redcoats would indeed be arriving to ransack their military supplies.

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The Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere | Paul Revere's Ride

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On April 16th, 1775, Paul Revere began to gather tips that a raid was planned for the city of Concord in the coming days. In fact, it is speculated that these tips came from General Gage's wife, an American who may have been sympathetic to the plight of her countrymen.

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The Battle of Saratoga, comprising two significant battles during September and October of 1777, was a crucial victory for the Patriots during the American Revolution and is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The Battle was the impetus for France to enter the war against Britain, re-invigorating Washington's Continental Army and providing much needed supplies and support.

Recognized as one of the fifteen most decisive battles in world history, the Saratoga National Historic Park commemorates the site where a new Nation emerged.

A Brief Overview of the Crucial Battles of Saratoga
N. Currier, and John Trumbull. Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga N.Y. Oct. 17th. New York: Published by N. Currier. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2002695771/>.
The turning point in the Revolutionary War began as a plan by the British to strategically control Upstate New York and isolate New England from the Southern colonies in an effort to decisively put an end to the Revolution. It ended as an opportunity the Patriots were waiting for.

British troops led by General John Burgoyne planned to drive south from Montreal to Albany, NY along the historic water route of Lake Champlain, Lake George and the Hudson River. Once in Albany, they would join forces with two other British commands, one coming north from New York City and the other coming east along the Mohawk River valley.

Moving South

Burgoyne's advance south faltered in the forests near the Lake George area. Colonist troops were felling trees and blocking Burgoyne's path, slowing the British considerably. By the time Burgoyne reached Fort Edward, they were running low on supplies. A detachment was sent to procure cattle and supplies from nearby Vermont, and were subsequently overrun by Colonist forces, further dwindling Burgoyne's numbers.

Separately, the British that were traveling North from New York City under the command of General Howe, decided to veer from the plan and 'take' Philadelphia, which they did, however, Washington's Continental Army retreated to York and prevented Howe from leaving and joining forces with Burgoyne. In addition, Washington realized that a major battle was shaping up, and sent troops north. He also put the word out that any Militia that could join the troops should. The end result was a large contingent of regular troops and militia gathered in the Saratoga area.
Photo Credit: SaratogaPhotographer.com
Battle #1

Burgoyne again began his advance south, but was stopped about 10 miles below Saratoga. The first battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Freeman's Farm, took place on September 19, 1777. A militia of sharpshooters from Virginia harassed the British, while other colonist forces aggressively charged into battle with them. Burgoyne lost two men for every one on the American side.

Battle #2

The second battle, the Battle of Bemis Heights, occurred on October 7, when Burgoyne determined to break free from the encircling colonial forces and drive them from the field. The British troops and their German allies were devastated, and nearly lost their entrenched positions. Fighting on horseback, Benedict Arnold, received a wound in his leg during this battle; his contribution to the battle is commemorated by a statue of his boot, with no other reference to the hero turned traitor.

Victory!

This defeat at Bemis Heights forced Burgoyne to withdraw north to camps in and around the present Village of Schuylerville. Burgoyne surrendered on October 17, 1777, in what would later be named Victory NY, where the Saratoga Monument memorializes that important day.

Disgraced, Burgoyne returned to England, and was never given another command. These crucial colonist victories at the Battle of Saratoga persuaded the French to support the Americans with military aid, and is considered the major turning point in the American Revolution.

See Where It Happened!
Photo Credit: SaratogaPhotographer.com
Here in Saratoga you can walk the battlefield that marked the turning point of the American Revolution, observe period artillery and discover more about the crucial Battle of Saratoga. Visit our page on Saratoga National Historic Park: Site of the Battle of Saratoga to learn more.
Sources of Information: MyRevolutionaryWar.com, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Saratoga National Historic Park MORE: Full excerpt on the Battle of Saratoga from Creasy's 15 most Decisive Battles

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The Battle of Saratoga - A Major Turning Point of the Revolutionary War

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The Battle of Saratoga proved to be a crucial victory for the Patriots and is considered a turning point of the Revolutionary War.

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The Last Year of the War

Late in the American Revolution, George Washington had good reason to be hopeful. Despite Britain's Southern Strategy, American troops were making headway against the British army and their loyalist forces. Foreign navies were fighting the British at sea, and French officers, like the Marquis de Lafayette, were also helping on land. While the morale of the Continental armies and navies were on the rise, British troops became disheartened, and the English population was starting to grumble about another expensive, seemingly endless war.

In an attempt to disrupt the American troops in the south, General Charles Cornwallis had moved his army into Yorktown, Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. From there, he planned to attack the American supply and communication lines. And in the event that things went poorly, he figured he had a quick escape by sea.

Lafayette had been covertly following Cornwallis' actions and quietly gathering reinforcements throughout the summer, preparing for a coordinated attack. The Americans needed to stop Cornwallis before he received a supply shipment and reinforcements from England, but this would also have to be a surprise attack, so they could surround him before he escaped.

Converging on Yorktown

In mid-August 1781, the Continental Army received a message from across the sea. The French fleet was leaving the West Indies and heading to Yorktown. They would arrive within a month. The French army moved down from Rhode Island to join the American forces right under the nose of the redcoats. Moving thousands of men and animals secretly for several hundred miles would be a challenge today, but without the modern conveniences of roads or bridges, it seems impossible.

To try and slip away without being noticed, Washington established a decoy force, suggesting to the British that he was planning to attack their base in New York City. About two weeks later, the British commander-in-chief learned from a scout that the Americans were past Philadelphia. He desperately tried to get word to General Cornwallis. But by September 5, Cornwallis didn't need anyone to tell him he was in trouble. The French navy had arrived.

The Siege of Yorktown

A British fleet from New York was dispatched and the two rivals clashed at sea in the Battle of the Chesapeake. On September 16, the British attack fleet retreated to New York with their tails between their legs, leaving General Cornwallis pinned against the bay with France at his back and the combined army approaching from the front. At least 7,000 land forces arrived on September 28, joined by more than 3,000 French marines. The British army was surrounded.

The Battle of Yorktown was really a three-week siege. French and American cannons began to fire on British defensive positions without stopping in order to prevent the British from making any repairs. The allies captured the redoubts and turned the guns back on the British. As the allies drew closer to the town, Cornwallis began sinking his own ships in the harbor to keep them from being captured. After a failed attempt to escape, General Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781.

Back in England, King George insisted he could send more troops and win the war, but he didn't have any support in Parliament or among the English people. The surrender at Yorktown marked the end of the American Revolution. However, it would be two more years before the various navies resolved their fights overseas, British troops evacuated the United States and a peace treaty was signed.

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the battle of yorktown and the treaty of paris - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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The Battle of Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Late in the American Revolution, George Washington had good reason to be hopeful. Despite Britain's Southern Strategy, American troops were making headway against the British army and their loyalist forces. Foreign navies were fighting the British at sea, and French officers, like the Marquis de Lafayette, were also helping on land.

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http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm
https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/native-american-cultures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vufba_ZcoR0
Ch.2
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15040888
https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/christopher-columbus
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/precontact-and-early-colonial-era/spanish-colonization/v/spanish-colonization
https://slideplayer.com/slide/7996655/25/images/47/The+Race+for+empires.jpg
Ch.3
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3574
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1os2xmaster/chapter/great-awakening-and-enlightenment/
https://slideplayer.com/slide/3834552/
https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc5MDg1NjM0OTU0OTc1/boston-massacre-2.jpg
Ch.4
https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/paul-reveres-ride
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQmQUEYgTGHpSNFCD1qgrwRgAeq-5lrvsGZ8S8JOwnUCxNQYppYyQ:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg
https://www.saratoga.com/aboutsaratoga/battle-of-saratoga/
https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-battle-of-yorktown-and-the-treaty-of-paris.html
Ch.5/ Ch.6
http://www.ushistory.org/documents/confederation.htm
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/A_Great_Compromise.htm
http://www.ushistory.org/gov/3.asp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuFR5XBYLfU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO7FQsCcbD8
http://www.thepowermall.com/assets/images/Bill%20of%20Rights_FInal_4.jpg
Ch.7-9
https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Rise-of-Political-Parties-FKJTFUSTC
https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/louisiana-lewis-clark/the-louisiana-purchase/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5E2y1-m898
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Woh4gwIFpic
https://www.sutori.com/story/nationalism-and-sectionalism--S6cvMqKbbDnb3hJ7d6mumxS5
Ch.10/Ch.11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beN4qE-e5O8
https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act
http://mahernfaschool.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/2/5/14254196/794819.png?798
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/texas-declares-independence
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/civil-war-era/sectional-tension-1850s/v/manifest-destiny
Ch.12/13
Industrial Revolution article-https://www.britannica.com/event/Industrial-Revolution
Interchangable parts article-https://www.britannica.com/technology/interchangeable-parts
The rize of organized labor  article-https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/history/us-history-ii/industrial-america/the-rise-of-organized-labor
Transportation  Revolution video- https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-transportation-revolution-turnpikes-to-steamboats-to-railroads.html
Picture of cotton gin- http://science4fun.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/cotton-gin-eli-whitney.jpg
Life of a Slave video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYqllZ3kdrc
Ch. 14/15
Immigration to the United States in the 1800s -  http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/immgnts/
Second Great Awakening-  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2LTugtRQEQ
Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War- https://www.history.com/.image/c_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Ch_400%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_620/MTU3ODc5MDg1ODkzMTAwODcz/the-petition-for-abolishing-the-slave-trade-come-listen-to-my-plaintive-dittyye-tender-hearts-and-children-dearand-should-it-move-your-souls-to-pityoh-try-to-end-the-griefs-you-hear-from.jpg
Women's Rights Movement in the 1800's-https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/
Compromise of 1850-https://www.history.com/topics/abolitionist-movement/compromise-of-1850
Kansas/Nebraska Act- http://www.ushistory.org/us/images/00035329.jpg
Lincoln/Douglas Debates- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LljCzkPasuk
Ch.16
Ft.Sumter-https://res.cloudinary.com/simpleview/image/upload/c_fill,w_1000,q_auto:eco,f_auto,g_auto/crm/charleston/16VG_316_db3e9262-5056-a36a-06fcbd508c039f2d.jpg
Emancipation Proclamation- https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation
Battle of Vicksburg- https://cropper.watch.aetnd.com/images.history.com/images/media/video/history_civil_war_the_union_siege_at_vicksburg_sf_1137360/History_Civil_War_The_Union_Siege_at_Vicksburg_SF_still_624x352.jpg
Ch.18
Transcontinental railroad-https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTYzOTYzOTU2MzgwMTE2ODE3/railroad-chinese-immigrants-gettyimages-515567402.jpg
Massacre at Wounded Knee-https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-army-massacres-indians-at-wounded-knee
Dawes General Allotment Act -https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dawes-General-Allotment-Act

The Homestead & Morrill Act-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjLoWwOtT4w
Ch.19
Bessemer Process-https://www.britannica.com/technology/Bessemer-process
Growth of Invention - late 1800s-
https://americanhistory.si.edu/american-stories/1870-1900-industrial-development
Rise of Big Businesses-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZiESiaa-U
Antitrust Movement-
https://sites.google.com/site/mshochhonorsusiiwebsite/_/rsrc/1468867493562/home/the-rise-of-industrial-america/the-antitrust-movement/image003.jpg?height=320&width=271
The Labor Movement-
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/the-early-labor-movement/
Ch.20
The rise of immigration in the late 1800s- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6GfVdrfM3-g/maxresdefault.jpg
The growth of cities- http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/city/
Tenemant Life- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLYx2Bux_0
The growth of mass comunication- https://www.onecallnow.com/blog/02/evolution-of-communication-1800s-and-1900s/
Ch. 21/22
Rise of Political Machines (Late 1800s)-https://study.com/academy/lesson/political-machine-definition-lesson.html
Progressive Reform (Late 1800s)- https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/rise-to-world-power/age-of-empire/a/the-progressive-era
Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)- https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/labor
Women’s Suffrage & the Temperance Movement (Late 1800s/Early 1900s)-

https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/women-and-the-temperance-movement

Election of 1912- https://www.britannica.com/video/81667/election-1912
Isolationism vs. Imperialism-
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2008vus9aimperialism-130602120748-phpapp01/95/2008vus9a-imperialism-5-638.jpg?cb=1370174903
Ch. 23
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand-https://www.history.com/news/the-assassination-of-archduke-franz-ferdinand-100-years-ago
New Technology of World War 1-https://www.ncpedia.org/wwi-technology-and-weapons-war
President Wilsons Fourteen Points- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbdhxLVlrhI
Treaty of Versailles-https://historycooperative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/newspaper.jpg

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

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July 16, 1787

July 16, 1987, began with a light breeze, a cloudless sky, and a spirit of celebration. On that day, 200 senators and representatives boarded a special train for a journey to Philadelphia to celebrate a singular congressional anniversary.

Exactly 200 years earlier, the framers of the U.S. Constitution, meeting at Independence Hall, had reached a supremely important agreement. Their so-called Great Compromise (or Connecticut Compromise in honor of its architects, Connecticut delegates Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth) provided a dual system of congressional representation. In the House of Representatives each state would be assigned a number of seats in proportion to its population. In the Senate, all states would have the same number of seats. Today, we take this arrangement for granted; in the wilting-hot summer of 1787, it was a new idea.

In the weeks before July 16, 1787, the framers had made several important decisions about the Senate's structure. They turned aside a proposal to have the House of Representatives elect senators from lists submitted by the individual state legislatures and agreed that those legislatures should elect their own senators.

By July 16, the convention had already set the minimum age for senators at 30 and the term length at six years, as opposed to 25 for House members, with two-year terms. James Madison explained that these distinctions, based on "the nature of the senatorial trust, which requires greater extent of information and stability of character," would allow the Senate "to proceed with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom than the popular[ly elected] branch."

The issue of representation, however, threatened to destroy the seven-week-old convention. Delegates from the large states believed that because their states contributed proportionally more to the nation's financial and defensive resources, they should enjoy proportionally greater representation in the Senate as well as in the House. Small-state delegates demanded, with comparable intensity, that all states be equally represented in both houses. When Sherman proposed the compromise, Benjamin Franklin agreed that each state should have an equal vote in the Senate in all matters-except those involving money.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, delegates worked out a compromise plan that sidetracked Franklin's proposal. On July 16, the convention adopted the Great Compromise by a heart-stopping margin of one vote. As the 1987 celebrants duly noted, without that vote, there would likely have been no Constitution.

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July 16, 1787 July 16, 1987, began with a light breeze, a cloudless sky, and a spirit of celebration. On that day, 200 senators and representatives boarded a special train for a journey to Philadelphia to celebrate a singular congressional anniversary. Exactly 200 years earlier, the framers of the U.S.

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How is power divided in the United States government? - Belinda Stutzman

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The Constitution, the Articles, and Federalism: Crash Course US History #8

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Essay The Rise of Political Parties - 533 Words | Bartleby

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Free Essay: In 1790, the United States had just recently broke free from the British crown and united under the cause of liberty. But in spite of this,...

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

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To print the story please do so via the link in the story toolbar.

Read through the timeline and answer the questions in your notebook.

Henry Clay, a representative from Kentucky, was a strong nationalist. He presented a plan to President Madison to strengthen the country and unify its different regions. The plan was to help the country prosper and grow by itself, without foreign products.

The plan, known as the American System, included 3 main actions:

1. Establish a protective tariff - a tax on imported goods. It made European goods more expensive than American goods. It encouraged Americans to buy cheaper American-made products.

2. Establish a national bank - This would promote a single currency, making trade easier. In 1816, Congress set up the Second Bank of the United States.

3. Improve the country's transportation systems - Poor roads made transportation slow and costly.

Water transportation improved as well. The period of 1825-1850 is often called the Age of Canals. Completed in 1825 was the massive Erie Canal. This canal created a water route between New York City and Buffalo, New York. The canal opened the upper Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region to settlement and trade. It also helped nationalism by bringing these two sections of the country together.

Trade stimulated by the canal helped New York City become the nation's largest city.

The nationalist spirit also made U.S. leaders want to expand the country's borders. To get this done, they would have to reach agreements with Britain and Spain.

One agreement with Britain, set the 49th parallel as the U.S.-Canadian border as far west as the Rocky Mountains.

U.S. relations with Spain were tense. The two nations disagreed on the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase and who owned West Florida. In 1817, President Monroe ordered General Andrew Jackson to stop Seminole raids on white settlements in Georgia, but do not confront the Spanish. Jackson followed the Seminoles into Spanish territory and claimed Florida for the U.S.

Monroe then ordered Jackson to withdraw but gave Spain a choice. They could police Florida or turn it over to the U.S. Spain decided to hand Florida over to the U.S. and also gave up claims to the Oregon Country.

Sectionalism became a major issue when Missouri applied for statehood in 1817. People living in Missouri wanted to allow slavery in their state. At the time, the U.S. had 11 slave states and 11 free states. Adding Missouri would upset the balance of power in Congress.

For months the country argued over admitting Missouri as a slave state or free state. At the same time, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, also wanted statehood.

Henry Clay suggested that Missouri be admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Congress passed Clay's plan, known as the Missouri Compromise. It kept the balance of power in Senate between slave and free states. It also called for slavery to be banned from the Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36/30, Missouri's southern border.

The nation felt threatened not only by sectionalism, but be events elsewhere in the Americas. Latin America had won their independence from Spain and Portugal. Some European monarchies planned to help Spain and Portugal regain their colonies. U.S. leaders feared that if this happened, their own government would be in danger.

In December 1823, President Monroe issued a statement that became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe said that the Americas were closed to further colonization. He also warned that European efforts to reestablish colonies would be considered "dangerous to our peace and safety." Finally, he promised that the U.S. would stay out of European affairs.

The Monroe Doctrine showed that the U.S. saw itself as a world power and a protector of Latin America.

Henry Clay, a representative from Kentucky, was a strong nationalist. He presented a plan to President Madison to strengthen the country and unify its different regions. The plan was to help the country prosper and grow by itself, without foreign products.

The plan, known as the American System, included 3 main actions:

1. Establish a protective tariff - a tax on imported goods. It made European goods more expensive than American goods. It encouraged Americans to buy cheaper American-made products.

2. Establish a national bank - This would promote a single currency, making trade easier. In 1816, Congress set up the Second Bank of the United States.

3. Improve the country's transportation systems - Poor roads made transportation slow and costly.

Water transportation improved as well. The period of 1825-1850 is often called the Age of Canals. Completed in 1825 was the massive Erie Canal. This canal created a water route between New York City and Buffalo, New York. The canal opened the upper Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region to settlement and trade. It also helped nationalism by bringing these two sections of the country together.

Trade stimulated by the canal helped New York City become the nation's largest city.

The nationalist spirit also made U.S. leaders want to expand the country's borders. To get this done, they would have to reach agreements with Britain and Spain.

One agreement with Britain, set the 49th parallel as the U.S.-Canadian border as far west as the Rocky Mountains.

U.S. relations with Spain were tense. The two nations disagreed on the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase and who owned West Florida. In 1817, President Monroe ordered General Andrew Jackson to stop Seminole raids on white settlements in Georgia, but do not confront the Spanish. Jackson followed the Seminoles into Spanish territory and claimed Florida for the U.S.

Monroe then ordered Jackson to withdraw but gave Spain a choice. They could police Florida or turn it over to the U.S. Spain decided to hand Florida over to the U.S. and also gave up claims to the Oregon Country.

Sectionalism became a major issue when Missouri applied for statehood in 1817. People living in Missouri wanted to allow slavery in their state. At the time, the U.S. had 11 slave states and 11 free states. Adding Missouri would upset the balance of power in Congress.

For months the country argued over admitting Missouri as a slave state or free state. At the same time, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, also wanted statehood.

Henry Clay suggested that Missouri be admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Congress passed Clay's plan, known as the Missouri Compromise. It kept the balance of power in Senate between slave and free states. It also called for slavery to be banned from the Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36/30, Missouri's southern border.

The nation felt threatened not only by sectionalism, but be events elsewhere in the Americas. Latin America had won their independence from Spain and Portugal. Some European monarchies planned to help Spain and Portugal regain their colonies. U.S. leaders feared that if this happened, their own government would be in danger.

In December 1823, President Monroe issued a statement that became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe said that the Americas were closed to further colonization. He also warned that European efforts to reestablish colonies would be considered "dangerous to our peace and safety." Finally, he promised that the U.S. would stay out of European affairs.

The Monroe Doctrine showed that the U.S. saw itself as a world power and a protector of Latin America.

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Read through the timeline and answer the questions in your notebook. Question #4: what was the main message of the Monroe Doctrine and who was it directed towards? Question #3: Why was it so important to Southerners to admit Missouri as a slave state? Sectionalism became a major issue when Missouri applied for statehood in 1817.

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Research Guides: Indian Removal Act: Primary Documents in American History: Introduction

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This guide contains digital materials at the Library of Congress related to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its after-effects, as well as links to external websites and a selected print bibliography.

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During the Texas Revolution, a convention of American Texans meets at Washington-on-the-Brazos and declares the independence of Texas from Mexico. The delegates chose David Burnet as provisional president and confirmed Sam Houston as the commander in chief of all Texan forces. The Texans also adopted a constitution that protected the free practice of slavery, which had been prohibited by Mexican law. Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's siege of the Alamo continued, and the fort's 185 or so American defenders waited for the final Mexican assault.

In 1820, Moses Austin, a U.S. citizen, asked the Spanish government in Mexico for permission to settle in sparsely populated Texas. Land was granted, but Austin died soon thereafter, so his son, Stephen F. Austin, took over the project. In 1821, Mexico gained independence from Spain, and Austin negotiated a contract with the new Mexican government that allowed him to lead some 300 families to the Brazos River.

Under the terms of the agreement, the settlers were to be Catholics, but Austin mainly brought Protestants from the southern United States. Other U.S. settlers arrived in succeeding years, and the Americans soon outnumbered the resident Mexicans. In 1826, a conflict between Mexican and American settlers led to the Fredonian Rebellion, and in 1830 the Mexican government took measures to stop the influx of Americans. In 1833, Austin, who sought statehood for Texas in the Mexican federation, was imprisoned after calling on settlers to declare it without the consent of the Mexican congress. He was released in 1835.

In 1834, Santa Anna, a soldier and politician, became dictator of Mexico and sought to crush rebellions in Texas and other areas. In October 1835, Anglo residents of Gonzales, 50 miles east of San Antonio, responded to Santa Anna's demand that they return a cannon loaned for defense against Indian attack by discharging it against the Mexican troops sent to reclaim it. The Mexicans were routed in what is regarded as the first battle of the Texas Revolution. The American settlers set up a provisional state government, and a Texan army under Sam Houston won a series of minor battles in the fall of 1835.

In December, Texas volunteers commanded by Ben Milam drove Mexican troops out of San Antonio and settled in around the Alamo, a mission compound adapted to military purposes around 1800. In January 1836, Santa Anna concentrated a force of several thousand men south of the Rio Grande, and Sam Houston ordered the Alamo abandoned. Colonel James Bowie, who arrived at the Alamo on January 19, realized that the fort's captured cannons could not be removed before Santa Anna's arrival, so he remained entrenched with his men. By delaying Santa Anna's forces, he also reasoned, Houston would have more time to raise an army large enough to repulse the Mexicans. On February 2, Bowie and his 30 or so men were joined by a small cavalry company under Colonel William Travis, bringing the total number of Alamo defenders to about 140. One week later, the frontiersman Davy Crockett arrived in command of 14 Tennessee Mounted Volunteers.

On February 23, Santa Anna and some 3,000 Mexican troops besieged the Alamo, and the former mission was bombarded with cannon and rifle fire for 12 days. On February 24, in the chaos of the siege, Colonel Travis smuggled out a letter that read: "To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World.... I shall never surrender or retreat.... Victory or Death!" On March 1, the last Texan reinforcements from nearby Gonzales broke through the enemy's lines and into the Alamo, bringing the total defenders to approximately 185. On March 2, Texas' revolutionary government formally declared its independence from Mexico.

In the early morning of March 6, Santa Anna ordered his troops to storm the Alamo. Travis' artillery decimated the first and then the second Mexican charge, but in just over an hour the Texans were overwhelmed, and the Alamo was taken. Santa Anna had ordered that no prisoners be taken, and all the Texan and American defenders were killed in brutal hand-to-hand fighting. The only survivors of the Alamo were a handful of civilians, mostly women and children. Several hundred of Santa Anna's men died during the siege and storming of the Alamo.

Six weeks later, a large Texan army under Sam Houston surprised Santa Anna's army at San Jacinto. Shouting "Remember the Alamo!" the Texans defeated the Mexicans and captured Santa Anna. The Mexican dictator was forced to recognize Texas' independence and withdrew his forces south of the Rio Grande.

Texas sought annexation by the United States, but both Mexico and antislavery forces in the United States opposed its admission into the Union. For nearly a decade, Texas existed as an independent republic, and Houston was Texas' first elected president. In 1845, Texas joined the Union as the 28th state, leading to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War.

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Texas declares independence | March 2, 1836 | HISTORY

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During the Texas Revolution, a convention of American Texans meets at Washington-on-the-Brazos and declares the independence of Texas from Mexico. The delegates chose David Burnet as provisional president and confirmed Sam Houston as the commander in chief of all Texan forces. The Texans also adopted a constitution that protected the free practice of slavery, which [...]

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This is an article that talks about the definition, facts, what is was.

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Industrial Revolution | Definition, History, Dates, Summary, & Facts

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Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. The process began in Britain in the 18th century and from there spread to other parts of the world, driving changes in energy use, socioecon…

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This is an article about interchangable parts and it tells you when is was and what it was/did.

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Interchangeable parts | industrial engineering

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Interchangeable parts, identical components that can be substituted one for another, particularly important in the history of manufacturing. Mass production, which transformed the organization of work, came about by the development of the machine-tool industry by a series of 19th-century

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This article is about organized labor, it tells you all about the labor unions and a lot of things about labor all around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This video talks about the need for transportation and all the different types of it.

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This is a picture of the cotton gin. This cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney. The cotton gin would do what slaves do, but way faster. So plantation owners did not need so many slaves anymore

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This is a video about life as a slave/ plantation life. It tells you about how slaves suffered and other conditions they had to deal with.

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800s

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800s

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This article talks about how during the 1870s and 1880s, the vast majority of these people were from Germany, Ireland, and England--the principal sources of immigration before the Civil War.

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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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This is a video about the Second Great Awakening. The video talks about key points of the awakening. Such as expansion west, methosists, and slavery.

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Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War

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Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War

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This is a picture showing the petition for abolishing slave trade.

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This article talks about the Movement in the 1800s and how during the 1880s, the two wings of the women’s rights movement struggled to maintain momentum. The AWSA was better funded and the larger of the two groups, but it had only a regional reach.

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The Women’s Rights Movement, 1848–1917 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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The fight for women’s suffrage in the United States began with the women’s rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century. This reform effort encompassed a broad spectrum of goals before its leaders decided to focus first on securing the vote for women. Women’s suffrage leaders, however, disagreed ov…

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This article talks about how war was resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state.

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The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves whether to be a slave state or a free state, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runways under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Compromise of 1850 was the mastermind of Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephan Douglas. Lingering resentment over its provisions contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War was a result of U.S. President James K. Polk's belief that it was America's " manifest destiny " to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Following the U.S. Victory, Mexico lost about one-third of its territory including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. A national dispute arose as to whether or not slavery would be permitted in the new Western territories.

Who Was Responsible for The Compromise of 1850?

Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a leading statesman and member of the Whig Party known as "The Great Compromiser" for his work on the Missouri Compromise, was the primary creator of the Missouri Compromise. Fearful of the growing divide between North and South over the issue of slavery, he hoped to avoid civil war by enacting a compromise.

Famed orator and Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, while opposed to the extension of slavery, also saw the compromise of 1850 as a way of averting national discord, and disappointed his abolitionist supporters by siding with Clay.

When Clay, facing health problems, grew too ill to argue his case before the senate, his cause was taken up by Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, an ardent proponent of states' rights when it came to deciding the issue of slavery.

John C. Calhoun, a former vice president-turned senator from South Carolina, sought the expansion of slavery into new territories, but in an 1850 speech to the Senate, wrote: "I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion."

When the full compromise failed to pass, Douglas split the omnibus bill into individual bills, which permitted congressmen to either vote or abstain on each topic. The untimely death of President Zachary Taylor and ascendancy of pro-compromise Vice President Millard Fillmore to the White House helped contribute to the passage of each bill. Calhoun died in 1850 and Clay and Webster two years later, making their roles in the Compromise of 1850 one of their last acts as statesmen.

Main Points of The Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five separate bills that made the following main points:

Permitted slavery in Washington, D.C., but outlawed the slave trade

Added California to the Union as a "free state"

Established Utah and New Mexico as territories that could decide via popular sovereignty if they would permit slavery

Defined new boundaries for the state of Texas following the Mexican-American War, removing its claims to parts of New Mexico but awarding the state $10 million in compensation

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required citizens to assist in apprehending runaway slaves and denied enslaved people a right to trial by jury.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

The first Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1793 and authorized local governments to seize and return people who had escaped slavery to their owners while imposing penalties on anyone who had attempted to help them gain their freedom. The Act encountered fierce resistance from abolitionists, many of whom who felt it was tantamount to kidnapping.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled all citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves and denied enslaved people the right to a jury trial. It also placed control of individual cases in the hands of federal commissioners, who were paid more for returning a suspected slave than for freeing them, leading many to argue the law was biased in favor of Southern slaveholders.

Outrage over the new law only increased traffic along the Underground Railroad during the 1850s. Northern states avoided enforcing the law and by 1860, the number of runaways successfully returned to slaveholders hovered around just 330.

Both Acts were repealed by Congress on June 28, 1864, following the outbreak of the Civil War, the event proponents of the Compromise of 1850 had hoped to avoid.

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The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runway slaves.

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This picture shows the states sepereated.

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This video talks about the debate and both sides of it.

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Sound Smart: The Lincoln-Douglass Debates | History

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Here is a picture showing Ft. Sumter

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Article

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

The original of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, is in the National Archives in Washington, DC. With the text covering five pages the document was originally tied with narrow red and blue ribbons, which were attached to the signature page by a wafered impression of the seal of the United States. Most of the ribbon remains; parts of the seal are still decipherable, but other parts have worn off.

The document was bound with other proclamations in a large volume preserved for many years by the Department of State. When it was prepared for binding, it was reinforced with strips along the center folds and then mounted on a still larger sheet of heavy paper. Written in red ink on the upper right-hand corner of this large sheet is the number of the Proclamation, 95, given to it by the Department of State long after it was signed. With other records, the volume containing the Emancipation Proclamation was transferred in 1936 from the Department of State to the National Archives of the United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation

Select Resources

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Enlarge The Emancipation Proclamation (page 1) Record Group 11 General Records of the United States View in National Archives Catalog Español President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war.

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The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

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SECTION. 1. 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.

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July 28 marked the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 14th Amendment not only granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, but it granted all people equal protection of the laws. The historical context surrounding its creation and ratification bears striking parallels to the political and constitutional crises we face today. Andrew Johnson, the president at the time, was supporting Southern states in their efforts to preserve systems of oppression and deny rights to freed slaves. Republicans in Congress, the party of Lincoln, decided that only a constitutional amendment could remedy these attempts to frustrate the emancipation proclamation. The sweeping language of the 14th Amendment, along with its enforcement clause, marked a fundamental change in the concept of democracy.

Unfortunately, despite early gains for freed slaves and immigrants under the 14th Amendment, the backlash against freed slaves continued. Just days before the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment, a construction project in Texas unearthed the bodies of 95 individuals who were likely freed slaves who had been imprisoned for violating Jim Crow era laws and then "leased" to work a sugar plantation in the era after the amendment had been ratified. During roughly the same time, entrenched political actors and corporate interests appropriated the Amendment for their own use, claiming that it protected not only natural persons, but artificial persons, such as corporations. By 1938, Justice Black observed that the 14th Amendment, which "sought to prevent discrimination by the states against classes or races," had become a tool for corporate challenges. Per Justice Black, less than one-half of one percent of cases, in which the 14th Amendment was applied, were for the purpose of protecting the constitutional rights of African-Americans. Rather, more than fifty percent of cases invoking the 14th Amendment asked that the benefits be applied to corporations.

Free Speech For People is fighting to protect the promises of the Fourteenth Amendment for the people. We've exposed the corporate campaign to misuse the Constitution to attack public interest laws which disproportionately impact underserved communities. Our report Contaminating the Courts., details how corporations claim constitutional rights to evade regulation and have caused a devastating environmental impact. A number of studies catalog the extreme effects of climate change and other environmental issues on underserved communities including impacts on access to food and water, safety, health, and more.

And we're continuing to fight against the unlawful pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in large part because it's critical to prevent the pardon power from being used to vindicate the violation of the 14th Amendment rights of the individuals that Arpaio illegally detained and targeted, due to racial profiling.

The 14th Amendment is a powerful tool for equality, but it's promises have yet to be fully realized. We all need to join the fight to make the promises of the 14th Amendment a reality.

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Protecting the Promise of the 14th Amendment - Free Speech for People

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July 28 marked the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 14th Amendment not only granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, but it granted all people ... More "

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- [Kim] Long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, Homer Plessy boarded a train car in New Orleans to protest Jim Crow segregation laws. Plessy was arrested and convicted in Louisiana, but his test case for segregated public transportation reached the Supreme Court in 1896. This is Kim from Khan Academy. And today, we're learning more about the landmark case, Plessy versus Ferguson, which asks whether separate but equal accommodations for Black and White Americans violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. To learn more about this case, I spoke with two experts. Jamal Greene is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Earl Maltz is a Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. So Professor Greene, could you kind of set the stage for us in this time period? After the Civil War, what was the legal and social status of former slaves? - [Jamal] Well, of course, the Civil War ended in 1865. And it was fought in large part over the institution of chattel slavery, so slavery of, generally speaking, Black or African American slaves. And right at the end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was passed. And the 13th Amendment basically said that there shouldn't be any slavery or involuntary servitude in the United States. So the institution of slavery itself had ended, but the passage of the 13th Amendment did not mean that former slaves had equal rights. A number of the former states of the Confederacy, the, generally speaking, Southern states, passed a number of racially discriminatory laws immediately after the end of slavery that prevented Black Americans from participating in civil society on equal terms with Whites. For example, laws restricting the ability of Blacks to enter into and enforce contracts, restricting the ability of Blacks to own property, to sit on juries, to vote, to testify in court, and so forth. So there were a number of openly discriminatory laws. There were also laws that required Blacks to be employed on pain of having their labor forced, so ways of essentially re-instituting the institution of slavery. - [Kim] And these were known as the Black Codes. - [Jamal] Those were known as the Black Codes, exactly. - [Earl] In the Reconstruction period between say the late 1860s and the mid 1870s, there was a concerted effort by the federal government to improve the social status and political rights of African Americans. In 1876, there was part of the settlement of the presidential election of 1876, the federal government drew back some. But most of the so-called Redeemer movement really took off in the 1890s. I think 1891 is when the last real effort is made by the federal government to have a serious Voting Rights Act. After that, the South is pretty much under control of the people who sympathized with ex-Confederates. - [Jamal] In both Northern and Southern states, there was widespread racial segregation. So there were laws that were basically codifying long-existing social practices of segregated housing, segregated schools, and segregated public conveyances like steamships and rail cars. But much of that changed in the years immediately following the Civil War. Congress passed a number of federal laws that banned racial discrimination, particularly in contracting and in housing. Quite significantly, in addition to the actual federal laws that Congress passed, the country passed and ratified the 14th Amendment. - [Kim] So I think one thing that is very hard for me to understand and that I've seen students struggle with is you have the passage of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment in 1868, 1870. And these are supposed to guarantee equal protection and citizenship and voting rights for African Americans, specifically men in the 15th Amendment. And then, you have Jim Crow. So how did we get from this moment after the Civil War where things really seem like they're looking up in terms of African American citizenship to the system of Jim Crow that's going to persist into the 1960s and 70s. - [Jamal] The Civil War did not end racism. It simply ended slavery. And so, we're still living in a racist society in which residential and school segregation remained both in Southern states and in Northern states notwithstanding the Civil Rights Amendments. And in Southern states, Reconstruction, the process of trying to bring former slaves fully into civil society, was enforced by the presence of federal troops in Southern states on the theory, the very well-founded theory, that states that had just gone to war in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery were not going to willingly adopt equal rights for the former slaves that they had just been holding in bondage. And so, there was a federal military occupation of a number of former Confederate states for a good decade plus after the Civil War really ending in 1877. - [Earl] And at that point, again through the Redeemer movement, people who were the White power structure, most of which had sympathized with the Secessionist Movement, the White power structure and its successors took power back in the beginning and mid 1870s in the Southern states. And as part of their campaign, they imposed the Jim Crow system. - [Jamal] Slavery was not just about labor. It was really a system of racial hierarchy. And many in the United States remained committed to that system even after bondage itself ended. And if you don't have the political will within the Northern states to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, you had really a retrenchment of deep racial inequality within the Southern states, but not just within the Southern states, but also within a number of Northern states as well. - [Kim] So let's kind of dial into the case Plessy versus Ferguson. Who was Homer Plessy? And why did he take issue with segregation? - [Earl] Well the law that was at issue required what was in theory separate but equal accommodation of African Americans and Whites on public transportation. Homer Plessy objected to it because A, the facilities weren't really equal. And he objected to it in part because he was classified as Black, but also in general because he thought that that was demeaning. Obviously, a majority of members of the Supreme Court believed that the Southern states should have at least some leeway and to establish their the system of racial segregation. - [Jamal] And so, Plessy was in league with the railroad and with the civil rights organization that recruited him to set up a case. So he agreed with the railroad to board the White area of the railway car on a car going from New Orleans to a town called Covington. And it was agreed that the railway would ask him to leave. He would refuse. And then, he would be arrested. And once he was arrested, that would enable him to challenge the law under which he was arrested under the Constitution. The railroads didn't like this law. They didn't like this law because they didn't want to be subject to fines or liability for not properly maintaining separate cars. It was really up to the conductors to make sure that separate cars were maintained. And the conductors themselves could be fined by the state for not doing so. And they could also be fined by passengers for mistakenly putting someone in the wrong car. So the railroads didn't really wanna be bothered with this kind of law. And so, this particular railroad, Eastern Railway, was willing to agree to set up a situation to challenge the law. - [Kim] So Homer Plessy, he gets on this train and he challenges the statute. I believe he sat in a Whites-only car and announced that he was African American. And then, he was arrested. So what happened next? - [Jamal] He's arrested. And then, he is eventually charged with a crime, with a violation of the statute. And there's a fine associated with violating the state law. And his lawyers bring a claim that the law violates the Federal Constitution. So initially, it goes through the state courts of Louisiana. And then eventually, they rule against Homer Plessy in favor of the law. And then, his lawyers appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. - [Kim] So how did the court rule? - [Jamal] In the years leading up to the case, the lawyers for Homer Plessy were quite concerned about the composition of the court because they weren't sure if they could count five votes in favor of Black civil rights. Because none of the justices on the court were considered to be particularly friends of Black Americans. - [Earl] In the civil rights cases in 1883, the court had already held that Congress lacked authority to prohibit segregation in public accommodations, which meant they viewed public accommodations as something fairly private rather than a civil right, a quasi-governmental right or a quasi-public right. And that's one of the big distinctions between the majority and the dissent in both the civil rights cases and in Plessy versus Ferguson. The court ruled that in fact that so long as the state of Louisiana maintained separate but equal facilities, they could do that, that that was not prohibited by the 14th Amendment. - [Jamal] The Supreme Court in 1896 rules seven to one that the Separate Car Act is constitutional. So a state is allowed to segregate its public conveyances, including rail cars, by race. The court denies that the Separate Car Act violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. What the court basically says is: look, the law says the railway cars have to be equal, even if they're separate. And all the 14th Amendment requires is that basic equality in civil rights. - [Earl] John Marshall Harlan, of course, dissented from that. I think that it's important to understand what was the actual nature of Harlan's dissent rather than the way that it is actually portrayed. Harlan is famous talking about the colorblind Constitution, but in fact, what he says is: "With respect to civil rights common to all citizens," I don't have the exact language before me, "that the Constitution which required to be colorblind." So one of the big distinctions between the majority and the dissent is that Harlan does in fact believe that the right to use public transportation counted as a civil right, and therefore, was protected against segregation by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. I wanna make that point because it's pretty clear that Harlan believed, for example, that maintenance of segregated schools would be constitutional. And it's also true that Harlan voted for to say that miscegenation laws were constitutional. - [Jamal] The dissenting judge, Justice Harlan himself a former supporter of slavery, who changed his views and eventually became known as a champion of Black civil rights. So Justice Harlan, the lone dissenter, one of the only Southern judges on the court. But the others were basically Northern, both Republican and Democrat. They didn't have strong views about race. They didn't have unusually strong views about race for their time. And they maintained this distinction between social and civil rights. It's important to understand in trying to understand the context of Plessy versus Ferguson that the Supreme Court used to distinguish between what it called civil rights and what it called social rights. Civil rights were basically rights to participate in civil society, and included rights like the right to enter into contracts, the right to buy property, the right to testify in court. The court understood social rights as something very different from that, which is really the right to do all of those things in the company of people of a different race. - [Kim] That's fascinating. So what was the effect of this ruling in Plessy versus Ferguson? - [Earl] There are two ways that you could look at it. That until 1954, the effect of the ruling was to say that the state governments were allowed to segregate their citizenry on the basis of race. That's one way you could look at it. Now one of the interesting questions is how much difference it would have made given the sort of culture of the Southern states even if the court had held that it was unconstitutional for the state to formally require segregation among the races. That is, that there were a lot of informal pressures which would have pushed toward segregation even if the court had said that the statute was unconstitutional. But we'll never know that. So in other words, the question in Plessy is not whether the federal government was going to mandate segregation, but rather whether the federal government was simply going to leave the states and their citizenry to their own devices in determining whether to segregate their public transportation and some other thing. - [Kim] So this concept of separate but equal is I think the most important thing that comes out of Plessy versus Ferguson, and then later will be at issue in the 20th century. So was separate ever equal in theory or in practice? - [Jamal] It was very clear at the time. And Justice Harlan says so in his dissenting opinion in Plessy that the practice of separating railway cars or any number of other public accommodations by race was not designed for the comfort of Black Americans. It was designed in order to maintain their social inferiority through legal institutions. So once you no longer have the institution of slavery, there was a felt need among many in the South to maintain the system of social relations that slavery represented. And that's what Jim Crow was all about. And everyone knew that's what Jim Crow was all about. So Jim Crow was really kind of in its infancy when Plessy versus Ferguson was decided. Laws that prevented Blacks from voting through a number of literacy requirements and property requirements and good character requirements and so forth, those kinds of laws were very much in their infancy at the time Plessy versus Ferguson was decided. And so, the whole system of segregation is really revving up in the 1890s. And the court just gives it carte blanche to continue after that. And it's important to remember that as of the 1890s, the Supreme Court had not admitted to ever having reversed one of its own decisions. Whereas your Plessy case was quite clear about this. The assumption was that once the court ruled, it was going to be an awfully long time before you could get the court to reverse itself. And that's in fact what happened. So the court does not reverse Plessy versus Ferguson until Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. And so, you had an almost 60-year period in which practices of institutionalized segregation had the blessing of the Supreme Court. - [Kim] So we've learned that in Plessy versus Ferguson, the Supreme Court took a narrow view of the Equal Protection Clause, ruling that separate but equal accommodations for White and Black Americans did not violate the 14th Amendment. Earl Maltz suggests that it's difficult to tell if a different outcome in Plessy versus Ferguson would have made much difference in the actions of Southern states if there was no political will to enforce integration anyway. Jamal Greene, by contrast, reminds us that segregation was just getting started at the time of the Plessy case. And this ruling by the court legitimized Jim Crow laws that would continue to spread for nearly 60 years. To learn more about Plessy versus Ferguson, check out the National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution in Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government and history.

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Plessy v. Ferguson (video) | Khan Academy

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Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1896 Supreme Court case concerning whether "separate but equal" railway cars for black and white Americans violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this video, Kim discusses the case with scholars Jamal Greene and Earl Maltz. To read more about constitutional law, visit the National Constitution Center.

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This is a photo of the transcontinental railroad in 1862.

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This is a article that talks about wounded knee and how in 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days to protest conditions on the reservation.

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

Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge.

On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it's unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it's estimated almost 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it's unlikely that Big Foot's band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the last major confrontation in America's deadly war against the Plains Indians.

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

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U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded Knee

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

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Under its terms, the president determined the suitability of the recipients and issued the grants, usually by a formula of 160 acres to each head of household and 80 acres to each unmarried adult, with the stipulation that no grantee could alienate his land for 25 years.

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Dawes General Allotment Act | History, Significance, & Facts

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Dawes General Allotment Act, U.S. law providing for the distribution of Indian reservation land among individual Native Americans, with the aim of creating farmers in the white man's image. It was sponsored several times by Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts and finally was enacted in February 1887.

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This video talks about both acts and how they used land grants.

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USA 2.1: Introduction to the Morrill Land Grant Act

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

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

Century Vase, 1876

Made by Union Porcelain Works, Greenpoint, New York

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

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

Railroad Spike, 1869

Commemorative of the final spike that completed the transcontinental railroad

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

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

Stock Ticker, about 1900

Made by the Western Union Telegraph Company

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

Gift of Western Union Corporation

Incandescent Lamp, about 1891

Made by Edison General Electric Company

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

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

Tinfoil Phonograph, 1878

Invented by Thomas Alva Edison

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

Gift of American Telephone and Telegraph Company

Alexander Graham Bell's Big Box Telephone, 1876

One of the first commercially available telephones

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

Gift of American Telephone and Telegraph Company

Cross, 1875–99

Made by a Hispanic Catholic in New Mexico

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

Silver Presentation Cup, about 1900

Presented to Susan B. Anthony on her eightieth birthday

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

Gift of National American Woman Suffrage Association

Print, 1870s

Black politicians during Reconstruction

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

From the Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana

Statue, late 1800s

Made by the Union Porcelain Works, Greenpoint, New York

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

Gift of Mrs. Franklin Chace

Singer Sewing Machine Patent Model, 1889

Factory machine for making buttonholes

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

Sholes & Glidden Typewriter, 1873

Made by E. Remington & Sons

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

Gift of Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict

John Brown Lennon's Delegate Badge, 1893

From the Journeymen Tailors’ Union convention

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

Gift of D. E. Lennon

Jeans, 1873-96

Made by Levi Strauss & Co., San Franscisco

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

Gift of Walter Haas Jr.

Winchester Rifle, 1881

Captured from Sioux when Chief Low Dog surrendered in Montana Territory

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

Man's Gown, about 1896

Ordered from China by Lee B. Lok in 1896

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

Gift of James Edgar Mead and Virginia Lee Mead

The objects below are no longer on view

Harvester and Self-Raking Reaper Patent Model, 1877

Patented by William Whiteley

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

Creeping Baby Doll, 1870s

Patented by Robert J. Clay

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

Child's Dress, 1876

Made from fabric purchased at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition

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

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

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The Gilded Age, Robber Barons, & The Rise of Big Business: BRI's AP U.S. History Exam Study Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Early Labor Movement | History Detectives | PBS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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City Life in the Late 19th Century - American Memory Timeline- Classroom Presentation | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

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

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Evolution of Communication: 1800s and 1900s | OCN

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

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The period of US history from the 1890s to the 1920s is usually referred to as the Progressive Era, an era of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society.

Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization.

During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.

The problems of industrialization

The ideology and politics of progressivism

The worldview of Progressive reformers was based on certain key assumptions. The first was that human nature could be improved through the enlightened application of regulations, incentives, and punishments. The second key assumption was that the power of the federal government could be harnessed to improve the individual and transform society. These two assumptions were not shared by political conservatives, who tended to believe that human nature was unchanging, and that the federal government should remain limited in size and scope.

Some of the most famous Progressive reformers were Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to help immigrants adapt to life in the United States; Ida Tarbell, a "muckraker" who exposed the corrupt business practices of Standard Oil and became an early pioneer of investigative journalism; and Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, who both expanded the power of the federal government to impose regulations on private industry and implement protections for workers, consumers, and the natural environment.

Progressive reformers successfully influenced the passage of much substantive legislation, including several amendments to the US Constitution. The Sixteenth Amendment established a federal income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment allowed for the direct election of Senators, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited sales of alcohol, and the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

The dark side of progressivism

Though Progressive reformers achieved many noteworthy goals during this period, they also promoted discriminatory policies and espoused intolerant ideas. The Wilson administration, for instance, despite its embrace of modernity and progress, pursued a racial agenda that culminated in the segregation of the federal government. The years of Wilson's presidency (1913-1921) witnessed a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and a viciously racist backlash against the economic and political gains of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period.

In line with their view of human nature as capable of being engineered and manipulated, many Progressive reformers advocated selective breeding, or eugenics. Eugenics was considered "the science of better breeding" and aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population through policies that would encourage the more "desirable" elements of society to have more children while preventing "undesirables" from reproducing. Eugenics was based on a racial and class hierarchy that placed white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top. Lower classes, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, the mentally ill, and the developmentally disabled all occupied lower rungs on this hierarchy. In 1907, the United States became the first country to pass a compulsory sterilization law.

The genocidal policies of Nazi Germany ultimately discredited the "science" of eugenics, but not before over 60,000 American men and women were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having children.

What do you think?

How would you describe the Progressive worldview? Do you agree with the ideological assumptions of progressivism?

What were the most impressive achievements of Progressive reformers?

Overall, were the effects of progressivism more harmful or beneficial to American society?

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The Progressive Era (Progressive movement) (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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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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Origins of The Labor Movement

The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers.
WATCH: The Labor Movement
From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of "prices" for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism. First, with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies began uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions began bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation "international"). Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. In the 19th century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.

Did you know? In 2009, 12 percent of American workers belonged to unions.

Early Labor Unions

The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor's vision. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up "two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with the workingmen's parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s.

On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers' immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct.
PHOTOS: These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in America
American Federation of Labor

During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes. When it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning-hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. The founders of theAFL translated this notion into the principle of "pure and simple" unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be "furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation."

That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The AFL asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality or gender. But the national unions that had created the AFL in fact comprised only the skilled trades. Almost at once, therefore, the trade union movement encountered a dilemma: How to square ideological aspirations against contrary institutional realities?

Discrimination in The Labor Movement

As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat-packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to conform to racial, ethnic and gender divisions, the trade union movement took on a racist and sexist coloration as well. For a short period, the AFL resisted that tendency. But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists' union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals. In the case of women and eastern European immigrants, a similar devolution occurred-welcomed as equals in theory, excluded or segregated in practice. (Only the fate of Asian workers was unproblematic; their rights had never been asserted by the AFLin the first place.)

Samuel Gompers

Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of "trade autonomy," by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change might the labor movement expand beyond the narrow limits-roughly 10 percent of the labor force-at which it stabilized before World War I.

In the political realm, the founding doctrine of pure-and-simple unionism meant an arm's-length relationship to the state and the least possible entanglement in partisan politics. A total separation had, of course, never been seriously contemplated; some objectives, such as immigration restriction, could be achieved only through state action, and the predecessor to the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881), had in fact been created to serve as labor's lobbying arm in Washington. Partly because of the lure of progressive labor legislation, even more in response to increasingly damaging court attacks on the trade unions, political activity quickened after 1900. With the enunciation of Labor's Bill of Grievances (1906), the AFL laid down a challenge to the major parties. Henceforth it would campaign for its friends and seek the defeat of its enemies.

This nonpartisan entry into electoral politics, paradoxically, undercut the left-wing advocates of an independent working-class politics. That question had been repeatedly debated within theAFL, first in 1890 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in 1893-1894 over an alliance with the Populist Party and after 1901 over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. Now, as labor's leverage with the major parties began to pay off, Gompers had an effective answer to his critics on the left: the labor movement could not afford to waste its political capital on socialist parties or independent politics. When that nonpartisan strategy failed, as it did in the reaction following World War I, an independent political strategy took hold, first through the robust campaigning of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, and in 1924 through labor's endorsement of Robert La Follette on the Progressive ticket. By then, however, the Republican administration was moderating its hard line, evident especially in Herbert Hoover's efforts to resolve the simmering crises in mining and on the railroads. In response, the trade unions abandoned the Progressive party, retreated to nonpartisanship, and, as their power waned, lapsed into inactivity.

The Labor Movement and The Great Depression
WATCH: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the ALF's organizing efforts, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in 1935 and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel and other basic industries. In 1938 the CIO was formally established as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions and collective bargaining had taken hold throughout the industrial economy.

In politics, its enhanced power led the union movement not to a new departure but to a variant on the policy of nonpartisanship. As far back as the Progressive Era, organized labor had been drifting toward the Democratic party, partly because of the latter's greater programmatic appeal, perhaps even more because of its ethno-cultural basis of support within an increasingly "new" immigrant working class. With the coming of Roosevelt's New Deal, this incipient alliance solidified, and from 1936 onward the Democratic Party could count on-and came to rely on-the campaigning resources of the labor movement.

Collective Bargaining

That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers's authorship-too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties-became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did theCIO oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year.

The formation of the AFL-CIOin 1955 visibly testified to the powerful continuities persisting through the age of industrial unionism. Above all, the central purpose remained what it had always been-to advance the economic and job interests of the union membership. Collective bargaining performed impressively after World War II, more than tripling weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970, gaining for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace. But if the benefits were greater and if they went to more people, the basic job-conscious thrust remained intact. Organized labor was still a sectional movement, covering at most only a third of America's wage earners and inaccessible to those cut off in the low-wage secondary labor market.

Women and Minorities in the Labor Movement

Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor's historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not to the point of challenging the status quo within the labor movement itself. Thus the leadership structure remained largely closed to minorities-as did the skilled jobs that were historically the preserve of white male workers-notoriously so in the construction trades but in the industrial unions as well. Yet the AFL-CIOplayed a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 1964-1965. That this legislation might be directed against discriminatory trade union practices was anticipated (and quietly welcomed) by the more progressive labor leaders. But more significant was the meaning they found in championing this kind of reform: the chance to act on the broad ideals of the labor movement. And, so motivated, they deployed labor's power with great effect in the achievement of John F. Kennedy's and Lyndon B. Johnson 's domestic programs during the 1960s.

Decline in Unions

This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor's grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructuring and by an unprecedented onslaught of foreign goods. As oligopolistic and regulated market structures broke down, nonunion competition spurted, concession bargaining became widespread and plant closings decimated union memberships. The once-celebrated National Labor Relations Act increasingly hamstrung the labor movement; an all-out reform campaign to get the law amended failed in 1978. And with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era.

Between 1975 and 1985, union membership fell by 5 million. In manufacturing, the unionized portion of the labor force dropped below 25 percent, while mining and construction, once labor's flagship industries, were decimated. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early 1950s.

The labor movement has never been swift to change. But if the new high-tech and service sectors seemed beyond its reach in 1989, so did the mass production industries in 1929. There is a silver lining: Compared to the old AFL, organized labor is today much more diverse and broadly based: In 2018, of the 14.7 million wage and salary workers who were part of a union (compared to 17.7 million in 1983), 25 percent are women and 28 percent are Black.

Sources

TED: The Economics Daily. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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U.S. presidential election of 1912 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

NARRATOR: In 1912 all three presidential candidates were Progressives. Theodore Roosevelt had been president in 1902. He had forced the coal mine owners to settle with the union. He had stopped Hill and Harriman when they tried to monopolize the western railroads. He accepted trusts as inevitable, but insisted the federal government regulate them. He denounced Woodrow Wilson's call for the limitations of federal power as the surest way to allow the employer to work his employees to death.

ROOSEVELT: The liberty of which Mr. Wilson speaks today means merely the liberty of the factory owner to close his operatives into some crazy death trap on a stuffed floor where, if fire starts, the slaughter is immense.

NARRATOR: Roosevelt was running as a Progressive against the incumbent William Howard Taft.

But Taft, too, ran as a Progressive. He claimed accurately that he had carried out more legal actions against the trusts than Roosevelt ever had.

TAFT: We must make up the abuses in the good old Anglo-Saxon ways, adjust our statutory remedies to the fitness of the thing, place our confidence in the public servants who show themselves alive to public need, and courageous and energetic enough to prosecute the offenders to convictions.

NARRATOR: Which brings us back to the beginning--Woodrow Wilson's campaign film starring everybody's favorite villain, the fat capitalist. By 1912 the Muckrakers had done their work well. Our villain carried on his back the accumulated sins of a thousand trusts. He carried with him the stench of the tenements, the nameless miners who had been killed in his mine shafts, the hordes of farmers who had been dispossessed by his sheriffs, the anguished children who had collapsed at his looms, the army of politicians who were on his payroll. He was behind it all. If he could be regulated by law, the world would be a better and a happier place.

And so Teddy Roosevelt said, let the federal government control him. And William Howard Taft replied, yes, but I can control him better than Teddy Roosevelt ever did. And Woodrow Wilson added, he's too fat, too big; let us break him up into a thousand smaller businessmen; send me your dollars, and I will bring forth the Progressive world. For Wilson, too, preached the Progressive litany.

WILSON: We hold that the night labor of women and children is abnormal and should be prohibited; we hold that the employment of women over 48 hours per week is abnormal and should be prohibited; we hold that the 7 day working week is abnormal; we hold that one day of rest in 7 should be provided by law.

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NARRATOR: In 1912 all three presidential candidates were Progressives. Theodore Roosevelt had been president in 1902. He had forced the coal mine owners to settle with the union. He had stopped Hill and Harriman when they tried to monopolize the western railroads. He accepted trusts as inevitable, but insisted the federal government regulate them.

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 100 Years Ago

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

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by A. Torrey McLean
Reprinted with permission from Tar Heel Junior Historian, Spring 1993.
Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of History

See also: WWI: Life on the Western Front

One of the saddest facts about World War I is that millions died needlessly because military and civilian leaders were slow to adapt their old-fashioned strategies and tactics to the new weapons of 1914. New technology made war more horrible and more complex than ever before. The United States and other countries felt the effects of the war for years afterwards.

The popular image of World War I is soldiers in muddy trenches and dugouts, living miserably until the next attack. This is basically correct. Technological developments in engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, and optics had produced weapons deadlier than anything known before. The power of defensive weapons made winning the war on the western front all but impossible for either side.

When attacks were ordered, Allied soldiers went "over the top," climbing out of their trenches and crossing no-man's-land to reach enemy trenches. They had to cut through belts of barbed wire before they could use rifles, bayonets, pistols, and hand grenades to capture enemy positions. A victory usually meant they had seized only a few hundred yards of shell-torn earth at a terrible cost in lives. Wounded men often lay helpless in the open until they died. Those lucky enough to be rescued still faced horrible sanitary conditions before they could be taken to proper medical facilities. Between attacks,the snipers, artillery, and poison gas caused misery and death.

Airplanes, products of the new technology, were primarily made of canvas, wood, and wire. At first they were used only to observe enemy troops. As their effectiveness became apparent, both sides shot planes down with artillery from the ground and with rifles, pistols, and machine guns from other planes. In 1916, the Germans armed planes with machine guns that could fire forward without shooting off the fighters' propellers. The Allies soon armed their airplanes the same way, and war in the air became a deadly business. These light, highly maneuverable fighter planes attacked each other in wild air battles called dogfights. Pilots who were shot down often remained trapped in their falling, burning planes, for they had no parachutes. Airmen at the front did not often live long. Germany also used its fleet of huge dirigibles, or zeppelins, and large bomber planes to drop bombs on British and French cities. Britain retaliated by bombing German cities.

Back on the ground, the tank proved to be the answer to stalemate in the trenches. This British invention used American-designed caterpillar tracks to move the armored vehicle equipped with machine guns and sometimes light cannon. Tanks worked effectively on firm, dry ground, in spite of their slow speed, mechanical problems, and vulnerability to artillery. Able to crush barbed wire and cross trenches, tanks moved forward through machine gun fire and often terrified German soldiers with their unstoppable approach.

Chemical warfare first appeared when the Germans used poison gas during a surprise attack in Flanders, Belgium, in 1915. At first, gas was just released from large cylinders and carried by the wind into nearby enemy lines. Later, phosgene and other gases were loaded into artillery shells and shot into enemy trenches. The Germans used this weapon the most, realizing that enemy soldiers wearing gas masks did not fight as well. All sides used gas frequently by 1918. Its use was a frightening development that caused its victims a great deal of suffering, if not death.

Both sides used a variety of big guns on the western front, ranging from huge naval guns mounted on railroad cars to short-range trench mortars. The result was a war in which soldiers near the front were seldom safe from artillery bombardment. The Germans used super-long-range artillery to shell Paris from almost eighty miles away. Artillery shell blasts created vast, cratered, moonlike landscapes where beautiful fields and woods had once stood.

Perhaps the most significant technological advance during World War I was the improvement of the machine gun, a weapon originally developed by an American, Hiram Maxim. The Germans recognized its military potential and had large numbers ready to use in 1914. They also developed air-cooled machine guns for airplanes and improved those used on the ground, making them lighter and easier to move. The weapon's full potential was demonstrated on the Somme battlefield in July 1916 when German machine guns killed or wounded almost 60,000 British soldiers in only one day.

At sea, submarines attacked ships far from port. In order to locate and sink German U-boats, British scientists developed underwater listening devices and underwater explosives called depth charges. Warships became faster and more powerful than ever before and used newly invented radios to communicate effectively. The British naval blockade of Germany, which was made possible by developments in naval technology, brought a total war to civilians. The blockade caused a famine that finally brought about the collapse of Germany and its allies in late 1918. Starvation and malnutrition continued to take the lives of German adults and children for years after the war.

The firing stopped on November 11, 1918, but modern war technology had changed the course of civilization. Millions had been killed, gassed, maimed, or starved. Famine and disease continued to rage through central Europe, taking countless lives. Because of rapid technological advances in every area, the nature of warfare had changed forever, affecting soldiers, airmen, sailors, and civilians alike.
A. Torrey McLean, a former United States Army officer who served in Vietnam, studied World War I for more than thirty years, personally interviewing a number of World War I veterans.

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by A. Torrey McLean Reprinted with permission from Tar Heel Junior Historian, Spring 1993. Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of History See also: WWI: Life on the Western Front One of the saddest facts about World War I is that millions died needlessly because military and civilian leaders were slow to adapt their old-fashioned strategies and tactics to the new weapons of 1914.

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Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points | History