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How and when humans first came to the Americas has long been a topic of intense debate. Theories to explain the colonization of the New World-the last great habitable landmass to be occupied by humans-focus on the Bering land bridge, or Beringia, which emerged between Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age. Rising from seas drained by the water-locking effect of spreading ice caps, Beringia is said to have given passage to the forebears of Native Americans anywhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago.

The earliest date, based on a footprint left in volcanic ash in Mexico, might be wildly off track, according to recent studies that put the migration at the opposite end of the timescale. While older archaeological evidence exists, 13,000 years is the date put on the oldest known human remains. This fits with the findings of DNA studies that indicate that the genetic ancestors of the Native Americans consisted of a few dozen individuals from eastern Siberia who ventured across Beringia less than 20,000 years ago.

The gap between their departure and arrival (the length of this time gap varies depending on the study) is explained by the presence of two massive ice sheets, the Laurentide and Cordilleran, that blocked entry to North America. The hunter-gatherers waited out the ice age in Beringia. (A significant landmass, if a temporary one, Beringia supported large herds of mammoth, reindeer, and other substantial prey.) When conditions eventually warmed, and the glaciers began to melt, the migrants were up and running again.

Or were they? Another debate centers on the migrants' mode of transport. Some researchers believe Beringia was flooded by rising sea levels before its inhabitants had the chance to cross into Alaska. Challenging the idea that the land bridge was the only route in, they say groups must have ferried themselves in boats at least part of the way. This seafaring theory is supported by evidence of human occupation in Chile by 14,500 years ago. Such rapid progress from the Arctic, all the way down through South America, is difficult to explain if the colonizers had to wait for corridors to open up in the ice sheets that overlaid the land route through Canada. Southward excursions down the Pacific Coast by boat would have been a much quicker way of covering the distance.

Backing for this argument has been found in the form of ancient DNA extracted from a 10,300-year-old tooth from Alaska's Prince of Wales Island. Researchers found that only one percent of modern indigenous people they sampled matched the tooth's genetic markers, but those who did lived primarily along the Pacific Coast, between Chile and California.

Such findings haven't helped the pioneer reputation of the Clovis people, long feted as the earliest occupiers of America. A culture characterized by fluted stone spear points, often found with the bones of bison and other large animals, the Clovis people are described from sites dating back 13,000 years in New Mexico and Colorado. But that's too recent, and too far inland to retain their claim as founders of the New World.

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How and when humans first came to the Americas has long been a topic of intense debate. Theories to explain the colonization of the New World-the last great habitable landmass to be occupied by humans-focus on the Bering land bridge, ...

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The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth.

Elaine Thompson / AP

Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages. The Skraeling were probably a people we now call Thule, who were the ancestors of the Inuit in Greenland and Canada and the Iñupiat in Alaska. The Taíno were a people spread across multiple chiefdoms around the Caribbean and Florida. Based on cultural and language similarities, we think that they had probably separated from earlier populations from South American lands, now Guyana and Trinidad. The Spanish brought no women with them in 1492, and raped the Taíno women, resulting in the first generation of "mestizo"-mixed ancestry people.

Immediately upon arrival, European alleles began to flow, admixed into the indigenous population, and that process has continued ever since: European DNA is found today throughout the Americas, no matter how remote or isolated a tribe might appear to be. But before Columbus, these continents were already populated. The indigenous people hadn't always been there, nor had they originated there, as some of their traditions state, but they had occupied these American lands for at least 20,000 years.

This article is adapted from Rutherford's new book.

It's only because of the presence of Europeans from the 15th century onward that we even have terms such as Indians or Native Americans. How these people came to be is a subject that is complex and fraught, but it begins in the north. Alaska is separated from Russian land by the Bering Strait. There are islands that punctuate those icy waters, and on a clear day U.S. citizens of Little Diomede can see Russians on Big Diomede, just a little over two miles and one International Date Line away. Between December and June, the water between them freezes solid.

From 30,000 years ago until around 11,000 BCE, the earth was subjected to a cold snap that sucked up the sea into glaciers and ice sheets extending from the poles. This period is known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when the reach of the most recent Ice Age was at its fullest. By drilling mud cores out of the seabed, we can reconstruct a history of the land and the seas, notably by measuring concentrations of oxygen, and looking for pollen, which would have been deposited on dry ground from the flora growing there. We think therefore that sea level was somewhere between 60 and 120 meters lower than today. So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians-a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.

The prevailing theory about how the people of the Americas came to those lands is via that bridge. We refer to it as a land bridge, though given its duration and size, it was simply continuous land, thousands of miles from north to south; it's only a bridge if we view it in comparison to today's straits. The area is called Beringia, and the first people across it the Beringians. These were harsh lands, sparse with shrubs and herbs; to the south, there were boreal woodlands, and where the land met the sea, kelp forests and seals.

Though these were still tough terrains, according to archaeological finds Western Beringians were living near the Yana River in Siberia by 30,000 BCE. There's been plenty of debate over the years as to when exactly people reached the eastern side, and therefore at what point after the seas rose they became isolated as the founding peoples of the Americas. The questions that remain-and there are many-concern whether they came all at once or in dribs and drabs. Sites in the Yukon that straddle the U.S.-Alaskan border with Canada give us clues, such as the Bluefish Caves, 33 miles southwest of the village of Old Crow.

The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. These founding peoples spread over 12,000 years to every corner of the continents and formed the pool from which all Americans would be drawn until 1492. I will focus on North America here, and what we know so far, what we can know through genetics, and why we don't know more.

Until Columbus, the Americas were populated by pockets of tribal groups distributed up and down both north and south continents. There are dozens of individual cultures that have been identified by age, location, and specific technologies-and via newer ways of knowing the past, including genetics and linguistics. Scholars have hypothesized various patterns of migration from Beringia into the Americas. Over time, it has been suggested that there were multiple waves, or that a certain people with particular technologies spread from north all the way south.

Both ideas have now fallen from grace. The multiple-waves theory has failed as a model because the linguistic similarities used to show patterns of migration are just not that convincing. And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind. In New Mexico there is a small town called Clovis, population 37,000. In the 1930s, projectile points resembling spearheads and other hunting paraphernalia were found in an archaeological site nearby, dating from around 13,000 years ago. These were knapped on both sides-bifaced with fluted tips. It had been thought that it was the inventors of these tools who had been the first people to spread up and down the continents. But there's evidence of humans living in southern Chile 12,500 years ago without Clovis technology. These people are too far away to show a direct link between them and the Clovis in such a way that indicates the Clovis being the aboriginals of South America.

Today, the emerging theory is that the people up in the Bluefish Caves some 24,000 years ago were the founders, and that they represent a culture that was isolated for thousands of years up in the cold north, incubating a population that would eventually seed everywhere else. This idea has become known as Beringian Standstill. Those founders had split from known populations in Siberian Asia some 40,000 years ago, come across Beringia, and stayed put until around 16,000 years ago.

Analysis of the genomes of indigenous people show 15 founding mitochondrial types not found in Asia. This suggests a time when genetic diversification occurred, an incubation lasting maybe 10,000 years. New gene variants spread across the American lands, but not back into Asia, as the waters had cut them off. Nowadays, we see lower levels of genetic diversity in modern Native Americans-derived from just those original 15-than in the rest of the world. Again, this supports the idea of a single, small population seeding the continents, and-unlike in Europe or Asia-these people being cut off, with little admixture from new populations for thousands of years, at least until Columbus.

In Montana, 20 miles or so off Highway 90, lies the minuscule conurbation of Wilsall, population 178 as of 2010. Though stacks of material culture in the Clovis tradition have been recovered throughout North America, only one person from this time and culture has risen from his grave. He's acquired the name Anzick-1, and was laid to rest in a rock shelter in what would become-around 12,600 years later-Wilsall. He was a toddler, probably less than two years old, judging from the unfused sutures in his skull. He was laid to rest surrounded by at least 100 stone tools, and 15 ivory ones. Some of these were covered in red ochre, and together they suggest Anzick was a very special child who had been ceremonially buried in splendor. Now he's special because we have his complete genome.

And there's the woeful saga of Kennewick Man. While attending a hydroplane race in 1996, two locals of Kennewick, Washington, discovered a broad-faced skull inching its way out of the bank of the Columbia River. Over the weeks and years, more than 350 fragments of bone and teeth were eked out of this 8,500-year-old grave, all belonging to a middle-aged man, maybe in his forties, deliberately buried, with some signs of injuries that had healed over his life-a cracked rib, an incision from a spear, a minor depression fracture on his forehead. There were academic squabbles about his facial morphology, with some saying it was most similar to Japanese skulls, some arguing for a link with Polynesians, and some asserting he must have been European.

With all the toing and froing about his morphology, DNA should be a rich source of conclusive data for this man. But the political controversies about his body have severely hampered his value to science for 20 years. For Native Americans, he became known as the Ancient One, and five clans, notably the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, wanted to have him ceremonially reburied under guidelines determined by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which affords custodial rights to Native American artifacts and bodies found on their lands. Scientists sued the government to prevent his reburial, some claiming that his bones suggested he was European, and therefore not connected with Native Americans.

To add an absurd cherry on top of this already distasteful cake, a Californian pagan group called the Asatru Folk Assembly put in a bid for the body, claiming Kennewick Man might have a Norse tribal identity, and if science could establish that the body was European, then he should be given a ceremony in honor of Odin, ruler of the mythical Asgard, though what that ritual entails is not clear.

His reburial was successfully blocked in 2002, when a judge ruled that his facial bones suggested he was European, and therefore NAGPRA guidelines could not be invoked. The issue was batted back and forth for years, in a manner in which no one came out looking good. Nineteen years after this important body was found, the genome analysis was finally published.

Had he been European (or Japanese or Polynesian), it would've been the most revolutionary find in the history of U.S. anthropology, and all textbooks on human migration would have been rewritten. But of course he wasn't. A fragment of material was used to sequence his DNA, and it showed that lo and behold, Kennewick Man-the Ancient One-was closely related to the Anzick baby. And as for the living, he was more closely related to Native Americans than to anyone else on Earth, and within that group, most closely related to the Colville tribes.

Anzick is firm and final proof that North and South America were populated by the same people. Anzick's mitochondrial genome is most similar to people of central and south America today. The genes of the Ancient One most closely resemble those of tribes in the Seattle area today. These similarities do not indicate that either were members of those tribes or people, nor that their genes have not spread throughout the Americas, as we would expect over timescales of thousands of years. What they show is that the population dynamics-how ancient indigenous people relate to contemporary Native Americans-is complex and varies from region to region. No people are completely static, and genes less so.

In December 2016, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allowed Kennewick Man to be reburied as a Native American. Anzick was found on private land, so not subject to NAGPRA rules, but was reburied anyway in 2014 in a ceremony involving a few different tribes. We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

Anzick and Kennewick Man represent narrow samples-a tantalizing glimpse of the big picture. And politics and history are hampering progress. The legacy of 500 years of occupation have fostered profound difficulty in understanding how the Americas were first peopled. Two of the doyennes of this field-Connie Mulligan and Emőke Szathmáry-suggest that there is a long cultural tradition that percolates through our attempts to deconstruct the past.

Europeans are taught a history of migration from birth, of Greeks and Romans spreading over Europe, conquering lands, and interloping afar. Judeo-Christian lore puts people in and out of Africa and Asia, and the silk routes connect Europeans with the East and back again. Many European countries have been seafaring nations, exploring and sometimes belligerently building empires, for commerce or to impose a perceived superiority over other people. Even though we have national identities, and pride and traditions that come with that sense of belonging, European culture is imbued with migration.

For Native Americans, this is not their culture. Not all believe they have always been in their lands, nor that they are a static people. But for the most part, the narrative of migration does not threaten European identity in the same way that it might for the people we called the Indians. The scientifically valid notion of the migration of people from Asia into the Americas may challenge Native creation stories. It may also have the effect of conflating early modern migrants from the 15th century onward with those from 24,000 years earlier, with the effect of undermining indigenous claims to land and sovereignty.

* * *

Deep among the lakes of the Grand Canyon are the Havasupai. Their name means "people of the blue-green waters," and they've been there for at least 800 years. They're a small tribe, around 650 members today, and they use ladders, horses, and sometimes helicopters to travel in and out of-or rather, up and down-the canyon. The tribe is rife with type 2 diabetes, and in 1990, the Havasupai people agreed to provide Arizona State University scientists with DNA from 151 individuals with the understanding that they would seek genetic answers to the puzzle of why diabetes was so common. Written consent was obtained, and blood samples were taken.

An obvious genetic link to diabetes was not found, but the researchers continued to use their DNA to test for schizophrenia and patterns of inbreeding. The data was also passed on to other scientists who were interested in migration and the history of Native Americans. The Havasupai only found this out years later, and eventually sued the university. In 2010, they were awarded $700,000 in compensation.

Therese Markow was one of the scientists involved, and insists that consent was on the papers they signed, and that the forms were necessarily simple, as many Havasupai do not have English as a first language, and many did not graduate from high school. But many in the tribe thought that they were only being asked about their endemic diabetes. A blood sample contains an individual's entire genome, and with it, reams of data about that individual, their family, and evolution.

This isn't the first time this has happened. In the 1980s, before the days of easy and cheap genomics, blood samples were taken with consent to analyze the unusually high levels of rheumatic disease in the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the Pacific Northwest of Canada. The project, led by the late Ryk Ward, then at the University of British Columbia, found no genetic link in their samples, and the project petered out. By the '90s, though, Ward had moved to the University of Utah, and then Oxford in the UK, and the blood samples had been used in anthropological and HIV/AIDS studies around the world, which turned into grants, academic papers, and a PBS-BBC jointly produced documentary.

The use of the samples for historical migration indicated that the origins of the Havasupai were from ancient ancestors in Siberia, which is in accordance with our understanding of human history by all scientific and archaeological methods. But it is in opposition to the Havasupai religious belief that they were created in situ in the Grand Canyon. Though nonscientific, it is perfectly within their rights to preclude investigations that contradict their stories, and those rights appear to have been violated. Havasupai vice chairman Edmond Tilousi told The New York Times in 2010 that "coming from the canyon ... is the basis of our sovereign rights."

Sovereignty and membership of a tribe is a complex and hard-won thing. It includes a concept called "blood quantum," which is effectively the proportion of one's ancestors who are already members of a tribe. It's an invention of European Americans in the 19th century, and though most tribes had their own criteria for tribal membership, most eventually adopted Blood Quantum as part of the qualification for tribal status.

DNA is not part of that mix. With our current knowledge of the genomics of Native Americans, there is no possibility of DNA being anywhere near a useful tool in ascribing tribal status to people. Furthermore, given our understanding of ancestry and family trees, I have profound doubts that DNA could ever be used to determine tribal membership. While mtDNA (which is passed down from mothers to children) and the Y chromosome (passed from fathers to sons) have both proved profoundly useful in determining the deep ancestral trajectory of the first peoples of the Americas into the present, these two chromosomes represent a tiny proportion of the total amount of DNA that an individual bears. The rest, the autosomes, comes from all of one's ancestors.

Some genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public.

Over centuries, people are too mobile to have remained genetically isolated for any significant length of time. Tribes are known to have mixed before and after colonialism, which should be enough to indicate that some notion of tribal purity is at best imagined. Of the genetic markers that have been shown to exist in individual tribes so far, none is exclusive. Some tribes have begun to use DNA as a test to verify immediate family, such as in paternity cases, and this can be useful as part of qualification for tribal status. But on its own, a DNA test cannot place someone in a specific tribe.

That hasn't stopped the emergence of some companies in the United States that sell kits that claim to use DNA to ascribe tribal membership. Accu-Metrics is one such company. On their web page, they state that there are "562 recognized tribes in the United States, plus at least 50 others in Canada, divided into First Nation, Inuit, and Metis." For $125 they claim that they " can determine if you belong to one of these groups."

The idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have non-native parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.

The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity-and suspicion-toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can't), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the 19th century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.

When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, "We were hesitant. Science hasn't been good to us."

Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave. But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one's scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.

This is beginning to change. A new model of engagement with the first people of the Americas is emerging, albeit at a glacial pace. The American Society of Human Genetics meeting is the annual who's who in genetics, and has been for many years, where all of the newest and biggest ideas in the study of human biology are discussed. In October 2016 they met in Vancouver, and it was hosted by the Squamish Nation, a First Nations people based in British Colombia. They greeted the delegates with song, and passed the talking stick to the president for the proceedings to begin.

The relationship between science and indigenous people has been one characterized by a range of behaviors from outright exploitation to casual insensitivity to tokenism and lip service. Perhaps this time is coming to an end and we might foster a relationship based on trust, genuine engagement, and mutual respect, so that we might work together and build the capacity for tribes to lead their own research into the histories of these nations.

* * *

Though the terms Native American and Indian are relative, the United States is a nation of immigrants and descendants of slaves who have overwhelmed the indigenous population. Less than 2 percent of the current population defines itself as Native American, which means that 98 percent of Americans are unable to trace their roots, genetic or otherwise, beyond 500 years on American soil. That is, however, plenty of time for populations to come and breed and mix and lay down patterns of ancestry that can be enlightened with living DNA as our historical text.

A comprehensive genetic picture of the people of postcolonial North America was revealed at the beginning of 2017, drawn from data submitted by paying customers to the genealogy company AncestryDNA. The genomes of more than 770,000 people born in the United States were filtered for markers of ancestry, and revealed a picture of mishmash, as you might expect from a country of immigrants.

Nevertheless, genetic clusters of specific European countries are seen. Paying customers supply spit harboring their genomes, alongside whatever genealogical data they have. By aligning these as carefully as possible, a map of post-Columbus America can be summoned with clusters of common ancestry, such as Finnish and Swedish in the Midwest, and Acadians-French-speaking Canadians from the Atlantic seaboard-clustering way down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans, where the word Acadian has mutated into Cajun. Here, genetics recapitulates history, as we know the Acadians were forcibly expelled by the British in the 18th century, and many eventually settled in Louisiana, then under Spanish control.

In trying to do something similar with African Americans, we immediately stumble. Most black people in the United States cannot trace their genealogy with much precision because of the legacy of slavery. Their ancestors were seized from West Africa, leaving little or no record of where they were born. In 2014, the genetic genealogy company 23andMe published their version of the population structure of the United States. In their portrait we see a similar pattern of European admixture, and some insights into the history of the postcolonial United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation-a federal mandate to change the legal status of slaves to free-was issued by President Lincoln in 1863, though the effects were not necessarily immediate. In the genomic data, there's admixture between European DNA and African that begins in earnest around six generations ago, roughly in the mid-19th century. Within these samples we see more male European DNA and female African, measured by Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, suggesting male Europeans had sex with female slaves. Genetics makes no comment on the nature of these relations.
This post is adapted from Rutherford's upcoming book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Adam Rutherford is a writer based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.

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A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas

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The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth. Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages.

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1492: The Voyages of Christopher Columbus

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1492: The Voyages of Christopher Columbus

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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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Spanish colonization | Period 1: 1491-1607 | AP US History | Khan Academy

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They built astronomical observatories and innovative farming systems - and we don't even know their names. Meet the first great civilizations of Native American history.

Nearly four thousand years ago - as the city of Babylon was first growing into a metropolis and Egypt's Middle Kingdom was in full swing - a group of hunters along North America's Mississippi River assembled in their thousands, to build something very strange.

In a place that would someday be known as northern Louisiana, they staked out an area of some five hundred acres, and began to heap the earth into enormous mounds.

By the time their great project was completed, these people had arranged more than one million cubic feet of soil into a sprawling system of concentric semicircles, ten feet high and nearly a square mile in diameter. At the far western end of these earthworks, they raised a towering mountain of earth.

Standing on that mountain's peak, gazing eastward across the construction, one would see the sun rise precisely above its center on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

But this vast, intricate structure did not serve as the center of a city, like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia.

It wasn't a king's tomb, like the pyramids of Egypt. The people who built these earthworks did not surround them with fields of crops, or pens of livestock, or imposing royal palaces, as did the builders of so many other holy monuments.

Instead, they stockpiled vast hoards of copper, slate, quartz and other exotic materials - often imported from hundreds of miles away. They used these materials to manufacture finely tooled knives, beads, stone effigies and animal figurines, which they sold to a network of trading partners throughout North America's Gulf Coast region.

Their business flourished for more than a thousand years - until at last, around 700 BCE, they abandoned their great distribution center, never to return.

We don't know what the builders of these earthworks called themselves - or even what language they spoke. We have no idea which (if any) living American Indian groups they might be related to, because we've found none of their depictions of themselves, or any remnants of their DNA. Today, they're known as the Poverty Point culture, after the modern English name for the place where they once made their home.

The Poverty Point people were not the first great civilization to rise in North America.

As early as 3500 BCE - centuries before Stonehenge or Egypt's Great Pyramid were built - people in what's now Watson Brake, Louisiana raised a set of circular mounds 900 feet across, towering 25 feet high.

These earthworks seem to have served as a base for hunter-gatherers - meaning that even without agriculture, these builders (whoever they were) knew how to organize human expertise on a large scale, over an extended period.

To create, in other words, a civilized society.

But long before anyone raised earthworks in North America, technological and societal innovation had already been flourishing for a very long time.

In the first article of my "Great African Empires" series, we met the San people, whose technology may date back as far as 44,000 BCE, and whose languages may be directly related to the primordial mother tongue spoken by the first Homo sapiens.

We also met the Australian Yidindji people, whose oral traditions clearly describe a sea level rise that happened at the end of the last Ice Age, no less than 13,000 years ago.

Sometime during that last Ice Age, people first started walking from Russia to Alaska.

Starting around 30,000 years ago, the eastern tip of Siberia was connected to western Alaska by a land bridge known as Beringia. This bridge was no narrow strip of ice, but a sprawling tundra, teeming with mammoths and woolly rhinos.

Around 13,000 BCE, a few thousand people crossed Beringia into Alaska - most likely pursuing herds of the great beasts they hunted.

These Ice-Age hunters could not have known, of course, that they were entering a brand-new continent.

The landscape in Alaska would have looked much the same as that of Russia and Beringia: a half-frozen steppe-tundra, bounded by towering glaciers, filled with forests of pine and birch, and with the same thundering menagerie of furred, tusked, horned beasts depicted in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet.

In fact, the culture of these North American newcomers would remain strikingly similar to that of their relatives in Siberia.

Long centuries after the ice melted, the seas rose, and the land bridge of Beringia was no more, peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait would continue to dress in furs and feathers, to speak very similar languages, to live in pointed houses wrapped in animal skins, to throat-sing to the sound of pounding drums, and to send shamans to journey between the worlds of life, dreams and death.

But as the ice melted and the newcomers multiplied, their descendants began to push southward, lured by warmer weather, greener meadows, and greater herds of mammoth, mastodon - and of course, by the bison, which thronged in their millions across the North American plains.

By 12,000 BCE, these hunters had settled throughout what's now the west coast of Canada.

Their most distinctive mark was the pair of fluted incisions they made on the sides of their stone arrowheads. We still don't know why these peoples fluted their arrowheads - this technique is unique to North America; stone-age hunters around the world got along perfectly fine without it - or whether they were even a single culture, or a diverse array of peoples who happened to share certain ideas.

We call these mysterious people the Clovis culture - though we have no idea how they categorized themselves.

But the Clovis people were not alone on their new continent.

As early as 17,000 BCE - a full 4,000 years before the Clovis people arrived in Canada - people at Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft Rockshelter were stockpiling corn, squash and fruit, hunting deer and small game, and creating arrowheads without the distinctive Clovis fluting.

In fact, a wide variety of hunting-gathering peoples already thrived throughout the North American continent, thousands of years before the Clovis people showed up.

Who were these primordial American peoples? Where did they come from?

We simply don't know. Some experts think they came across Beringia much earlier, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the Clovis people. Others have connected them with even more ancient sites - such as Monte Verde in Chile, where people constructed hide buildings and clay-lined pits as early as 20,000 BCE.

In any case, one fact is very clear:

By 13,000 BCE, Native American history had already witnessed a diverse cast of well-developed cultures.

By 9000 BCE, people in the Great Basin - the sprawling watershed region at the center of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California - had become experts at hunting ducks and rabbits, harvesting roots and pine nuts, and carving scenes of animals into the rocks.

A few thousand years later, in 6000 BCE, people in the Lower Pecos region of Texas were practicing organized agriculture and creating complex cave paintings. By 5500 BCE, people in what's now Florida had settled down to a fishing life not unlike that of the earliest Sumerians.

Although ancient North America didn't experience a bronze or iron age, it gave birth to a staggering array of complex societies.

When Babylon rose to power far to the east, North America was home to a dizzying range of civilizations, about which we know astonishingly little. Some of these peoples hunted bison on the Great Plains, while others fished in the southern marshes, or grew crops on hilltop farms - living in dread, no doubt, of raids from the wild nomads of the steppes.

But since none of these peoples felt inclined to leave inscriptions or compile written texts, our understanding of Native American history is somewhat limited: we do not know these people's names, or the names of their cities, or of the gods in their pantheons.

We know exactly what they liked to eat, because they left plenty of it lying around - but we can make only vague guesses about what they believed and how they worshiped, based on scant clues from their effigies, paintings, carvings and sculptures.

We know they must have spoken thousands of dialects of hundreds of languages, in dozens of different language families. Among some of those language families, only one lonely language remains alive - as in the case of Zuni; while other families, like the Uto-Aztecan languages, still have several living members, along with many extinct ones.

There are, without a doubt, entire families of extinct North American languages about which we know nothing.

And while it's easy to pin the blame for these losses on European colonialists - who certainly did inflict apocalyptic destruction on thousands of North American peoples, societies and languages - the fact remains that ancient North America was already a stage for war, oppression, slavery and ethnic hatred, thousands of years before Columbus arrived.

Throughout those centuries, the North American continent played host to legendary cities, epic migrations, mighty kings, transformative religions, and a myriad of intertwined, ever-evolving ways of life - some of which you'll experience later in this series, while others still remain buried beneath the dust of prehistory.

Europeans did not invade an untouched paradise. They invaded a continent already dense with thousands of years of civilization.

Over the course of this series, we're going to see how the great civilizations of ancient North America developed a breathtaking variety of societal structures and ways of life. We'll visit the mighty cities those civilizations raised in ancient Arizona and Colorado, and in medieval Missouri and Arkansas.

We'll meet powerful merchant princes who built a trade empire across the Northeast, and steppe warriors who defeated and enslaved their would-be European conquerors.

You're about to see North America as you've never seen it before.

Because the truth is -

This so-called "New World" is one of the oldest worlds on earth.

Great Empires of North America, Part 2: Exodus to Arizona

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Great Empires of North America, Part 1: The Old World - The Strange Continent

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They built astronomical observatories and innovative farming systems - and we don't even know their names. Meet the first great civilizations of Native American history. Nearly four thousand years ago - as the city of Babylon was first growing into a metropolis and Egypt's Middle Kingdom was in full swing - a group of hunters...

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Colonists affected by the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

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Colonists affected by the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Paul Revere's Ride Lexington and Concord

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Paul Revere's Ride Lexington and Concord

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The History Place - American Revolution: Declaration of Independence

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Above: The top portion of the original draft document written by Thomas Jefferson, with additions-deletions by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Below: Presentation of the finished Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia, July 4, 1776. The Declaration was then signed and copies of the text were transported to key cities such as New York and Boston to be read aloud.

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The Battle of Saratoga: The American Revolutionary War, the soldiers and the famous battles of the conflict

The Battles of Saratoga
Battle of Saratoga Definition: The Battles of Saratoga were a series of military conflicts fought during September and October 1777 between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in North America during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). The battlefield in which the British and American Forces fought during the Battles of Saratoga were located near Albany in Saratoga County, New York. The Battles of Saratoga ended in victory for the American colonists. The earlier Siege of Fort Stanwix and the Battle of Oriskany together with the Battle of Bennington were also part of the Saratoga campaign. The names of the conflicts detailed in this article on the Battles of Saratoga include the Battle of Freeman's Farm that took place on September 19, 1777 and the Battle of Bemis Heights that took place on October 7, 1777.

The Battles of Saratoga - The Plan of General John Burgoyne
Following the Battle of Princeton on January 03, 1777 the British army under General Howe and Lord Cornwallis abandoned nearly all their posts in New Jersey and positioned themselves in New York state. General Burgoyne was given command of the British forces charged with gaining control of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River valley. General John Burgoyne planned to cross Lake Champlain from Quebec and capture Ticonderoga before advancing on Albany, New York where he would rendezvous with the British forces under General Howe coming north from New York City and a smaller force advancing from the Mohawk River valley under Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger thus dividing the colonies of New England from the southern colonies. The plan faltered when:

St. Leger was forced to withdraw to Canada following the Siege of Fort Stanwix and the Battle of Oriskany

The British defeat at the Battle of Bennington and their failure to gain new supplies and horses

The Continental Army, led by George Washington, prevented General Howe from joining forces with General Burgoyne

General George Washington realized that a major battle was imminent and called for any Militia to join the Continental Army in New York that resulted in a large contingent of regular troops and militia gathered in the Saratoga area

The Battles of Saratoga - Overview and Summary of the Battle of Freeman's Farm
The first crucial battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Freeman's Farm, took place on September 19, 1777. General John Burgoyne had begun his advance south, but was stopped about 10 miles below Saratoga fighting occurred in a clearing known as Freeman's Farm. A militia of sharpshooters from Virginia, under Daniel Morgan, harassed the British. Burgoyne lost two men for every one on the American side but were saved by the arrival of German Hessian forces under Riedesel. The German Hessians were therefore instrumental in the British victory at the Battle of Freeman's Farm.
The Battle of Freeman's Farm
The Battles of Saratoga - Overview and Summary of the Battle of Bemis Heights
The second crucial battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Bemis Heights, occurred on October 7, 1777. Following the initial battle at Freeman's Farm, the American forces of led by Horatio Gates were positioned in their fortification on Bemis Heights which was located nine miles south of Saratoga. Bemis Heights stood above the road that General John Burgoyne and his British army needed to follow to reach Albany. The British forces tried to push through the American line on Bemis Heights. Uncharacteristically, the Americans took the fight to the enemy and successfully assaulted the British line, forcing them into a retreat toward Saratoga. The defeat at Bemis Heights forced General John Burgoyne to surrender ten days later on October 17, 1777. Burgoyne surrendered 6222 men. Burgoyne returned to England in disgrace, and was never given another command.
Battle of Bemis Heights

The Importance and Significance of the Battle of Saratoga
Significance of the Battle of Saratoga: The significance of the conflict was that it proved to be the turning point of Revolutionary war and convinced the French of American strength which persuaded the French to support the Americans with military aid. The combined French and American forces achieved their first victory at the Battle of Monmouth.

Facts about the Battle of Saratoga
Facts about who fought in the Battle of Saratoga and who were the leaders of the conflict. Facts about where the Battle of Saratoga was fought, the location of the battlefield. Facts and stats about the number of troops involved in the conflict and the numbers of those who were killed, wounded, missing in action or captured. Interesting history and facts about the Battle of Saratoga:

Fast Facts about the Battle of Saratoga

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Battle of Saratoga American Colonies British Forces

Names of Leaders & Commanders:

Benedict Arnold
Daniel Morgan
Horatio Gates
Benjamin Lincoln
Enoch Poor
Ebenezer Learned

General John Burgoyne
Simon Fraser
F.A. Riedesel
Johann Specht
Wilhelm R. von Gall

Saratoga Strength of Forces:

9000 - Battle of Freeman's Farm
12000 - Battle of Bemis Heights

7200 - Battle of Freeman's Farm
6600 - Battle of Bemis Heights

Number of men killed in the Battle of Saratoga:

90

440

Number of men wounded:

240

695

Number of men captured:

0

6222

American Revolutionary war - The Battle of Saratoga
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), which included the Battle of Saratoga, was the culmination of the political American Revolution, in which many of the American colonists rejected the legitimacy of the British Parliament to govern the 13 colonies without representation.
Battles in the Revolutionary War - Battle of Bunker Hill, Battle of Quebec, Battle of Cowpens & Moonlight Battle
The Battle of Saratoga

The year and date of the Battle of Saratoga

Facts, stats and history of the Battle of Saratoga

Fast Facts and info about the Battle of Saratoga and the Revolutionary War

A great history resource for kids

Social Studies Homework help for kids on the Battle of Saratoga

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Fast facts about the Battle of Saratoga for kids. Summary of the Battle of Saratoga for kids. Facts, history and stats about the Battle of Saratoga and the Revolutionary War.

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Battle of Yorktown and The Treaty of Paris

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Battle of Yorktown and The Treaty of Paris

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

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Separation of Powers explained (explainity® explainer video)

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begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Article the first. .... After the first enumeration required by the first Article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which, the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Article the second. .... No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened. see Amendment XXVII

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begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Wrote the Bill of Rights

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

Why was the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution?

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

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

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

Primary Source by James Madison, George Mason (1791)

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

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

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The Rise of Political Parties (Federalists and Republicans)

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The Rise of Political Parties (Federalists and Republicans)

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The Washington, Jefferson & Madison Institute

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"The reign of party spirit in the United States began with the adoption of [the Constitution] by the Convention. Between this date and that of its ratification by the States the Federal and Anti-Federal parties struggled for supremacy, the former being in favor of a strong central government, the latter favoring the practical independence of the States. The ratification of the Constitution by the States ended this contest. The prominent Anti-Federalists announced their intention of supporting the Constitution, and for several years there was practically but one party in the country. George Washington was the first President elected, the electoral vote in his favor being unanimous. John Adams was chosen for Vice-President. Until about 1824-28, electors were generally chosen by the State legislatures, not by the direct vote of the people, as since that period. The two persons receiving the highest electoral vote became respectively President and Vice-President.
Opposition to the Federal party began in 1790, when Hamilton broached a project for the assumption of State debts by the central government. It grew stronger in 1791, when he proposed to establish a national bank. Jefferson, who had been the first Secretary of State, was now found at the head of a party in open opposition to the administration. This party, though adopting the name of Republicans, advocated the principles of the older Anti-Federalists, claiming that there was a scheme to subvert the State governments and establish a strong central government, and denouncing the Hamilton party as monarchists. Democratic clubs soon after arose, instigated by, and imitating many of the follies of, the Jacobin revolutionists of France. They had the one good effect of introducing political discussion among the masses of the people, and in a few years the Democrats coalesced with the Republicans as a single national party. The Federalists, however, continued in the majority, and in 1792 Washington and Adams were again elected President and Vice-President.
During this second term the power of the Republican party rapidly increased. The acts of the administration were fiercely attacked, and when, at the approach of a new election, Washington announced his intention to retire, a hot political contest arose, which nearly resulted in a Republican victory. Of the electoral votes Adams received seventy-one, and Jefferson sixty-eight, the latter receiving all but two of the Southern votes. The new administration was therefore organized with Adams for President and Jefferson for Vice-President.
The financial condition of the country had now greatly improved. A sound credit was established, funds were provided for the payment of the national debt, and treaties were concluded with the Indians and with several of the European powers, while a very rapid increase in population and in agricultural and commercial wealth had taken place. During the summer of 1800 the seat of government was removed from Philadelphia to Washington, as at that time the centre of the country. The Republican party continued to develop in strength, mainly on account of the passage of laws which tended to strengthen the central government, and which were unfavorably received by the people. The "Alien Law," which empowered the President to order from the country any foreigner whose presence he deemed dangerous to the public safety, and the "Sedition Law," which visited with fine and imprisonment "any false, scandalous, or malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President," were deemed tyrannical measures; while the effort to pass an act establishing a standing army added to the unpopularity of the Federalists. In the election of 1800, therefore, the Republicans were victorious. Jefferson became President, and Aaron Burr, who had prominent control of the Democratic party, was made Vice-President. Jefferson and Burr, indeed, received an equal number of votes, and Congress had to decide between them. With this election the power of the Federal party ceased, and for many years thereafter the "State Rights" Democratic-Republican party continued in the supremacy. The effort to strengthen the central government unduly at the expense of the power of the States had failed, and the Federalists, as a distinct party, gradually vanished from existence."

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"The reign of party spirit in the United States began with the adoption of [the Constitution] by the Convention. Between this date and that of its ratification by the States the Federal and Anti-Federal parties struggled for supremacy, the former being in favor of a strong central government, the latter favoring the practical independence of the States.

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Table of Contents

1. France in the New World

2. Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

3. Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

4. Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought into the United States about 828,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known at the time as the Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

France in the New World

Beginning in the 17th century, France explored the Mississippi River valley and established scattered settlements in the region.

By the middle of the 18th century, France controlled more of the present-day United States than any other European power: from New Orleans northeast to the Great Lakes and northwest to modern-day Montana.

In 1762, during the French and Indian War, France ceded French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain and in 1763 transferred nearly all of its remaining North American holdings to Great Britain. Spain, no longer a dominant European power, did little to develop Louisiana during the next three decades.

Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

In 1796, Spain allied itself with France, leading Britain to use its powerful navy to cut off Spain from America. And in 1801, Spain signed a secret treaty with France to return the Louisiana Territory to France.

Reports of the retrocession caused considerable unease in the United States. Since the late 1780s, Americans had been moving westward into the Ohio River and Tennessee River valleys, and these settlers were highly dependent on free access to the Mississippi River and the strategic port of New Orleans.

U.S. officials feared that France, resurgent under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, would soon seek to dominate the Mississippi River and access to the Gulf of Mexico. In a letter to U.S. minister to France Robert Livingston, President Thomas Jefferson stated, "The day that France takes possession of New Orleans...we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."

Livingston was ordered to negotiate with French Finance Minister Barbé-Marbois for the purchase of New Orleans.

Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

France was slow in taking control of Louisiana, but in 1802 Spanish authorities, apparently acting under French orders, revoked a U.S.-Spanish treaty that granted Americans the right to store goods in New Orleans.

In response, Jefferson sent future U.S. president James Monroe to Paris to aid Livingston in the New Orleans purchase talks. In mid-April 1803, shortly before Monroe's arrival, the French asked a surprised Livingston if the United States was interested in purchasing all of Louisiana Territory.

It's believed that the failure of France to put down a slave revolution in Haiti, the impending war with Great Britain and probable British naval blockade of France - combined with French economic difficulties - may have prompted Napoleon to offer Louisiana for sale to the United States.

Negotiations moved swiftly, and at the end of April the U.S. envoys agreed to pay $11,250,000 and assume claims of American citizens against France in the amount of $3,750,000. In exchange, the United States acquired the vast domain of Louisiana Territory, some 828,000 square miles of land.

The treaty was dated April 30 and signed on May 2. In October, the U.S. Senate ratified the purchase, and in December 1803 France transferred authority over the region to the United States.

Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory for the bargain price of less than three cents an acre was among Jefferson's most notable achievements as president. American expansion westward into the new lands began immediately, and in 1804 a territorial government was established.

Jefferson soon commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase.

On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase agreement was made, the first state to be carved from the territory - Louisiana - was admitted into the Union as the 18th U.S. state.
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Louisiana Purchase - Definition, Facts & Importance | HISTORY

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The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 introduced about 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France into the United States, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. Explore the facts about this important acquisition and its lasting legacy on Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

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Why was the Monroe Doctrine important?

What were the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine?

What motives were behind the Monroe Doctrine?

Who worked on the Monroe Doctrine?

How did the Monroe Doctrine change over time?

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

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

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

The origin and framing of the Monroe Doctrine

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

American History and Politics Quiz

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

Adams noted in his diary,

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

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Monroe Doctrine | History, Summary, & Significance

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

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An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after 1828. More loosely, it alludes to the entire range of democratic reforms that proceeded alongside the Jacksonians' triumph-from expanding the suffrage to restructuring federal institutions. From another angle, however, Jacksonianism appears as a political impulse tied to slavery, the subjugation of Native Americans, and the celebration of white supremacy-so much so that some scholars have dismissed the phrase "Jacksonian Democracy" as a contradiction in terms.

Such tendentious revisionism may provide a useful corrective to older enthusiastic assessments, but it fails to capture a larger historical tragedy: Jacksonian Democracy was an authentic democratic movement, dedicated to powerful, at times radical, egalitarian ideals-but mainly for white men.

Socially and intellectually, the Jacksonian movement represented not the insurgency of a specific class or region but a diverse, sometimes testy national coalition. Its origins stretch back to the democratic stirrings of the American Revolution, the Antifederalists of the 1780s and 1790s, and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans. More directly, it arose out of the profound social and economic changes of the early nineteenth century.

Recent historians have analyzed these changes in terms of a market revolution. In the Northeast and Old Northwest, rapid transportation improvements and immigration hastened the collapse of an older yeoman and artisan economy and its replacement by cash-crop agriculture and capitalist manufacturing. In the South, the cotton boom revived a flagging plantation slave economy, which spread to occupy the best lands of the region. In the West, the seizure of lands from Native Americans and mixed-blood Hispanics opened up fresh areas for white settlement and cultivation-and for speculation.

Not everyone benefited equally from the market revolution, least of all those nonwhites for whom it was an unmitigated disaster. Jacksonianism, however, would grow directly from the tensions it generated within white society. Mortgaged farmers and an emerging proletariat in the Northeast, nonslaveholders in the South, tenants and would-be yeomen in the West-all had reasons to think that the spread of commerce and capitalism would bring not boundless opportunities but new forms of dependence. And in all sections of the country, some of the rising entrepreneurs of the market revolution suspected that older elites would block their way and shape economic development to suit themselves.

By the 1820s, these tensions fed into a many-sided crisis of political faith. To the frustration of both self-made men and plebeians, certain eighteenth-century elitist republican assumptions remained strong, especially in the seaboard states, mandating that government be left to a natural aristocracy of virtuous, propertied gentlemen. Simultaneously, some of the looming shapes of nineteenth-century capitalism-chartered corporations, commercial banks, and other private institutions-presaged the consolidation of a new kind of moneyed aristocracy. And increasingly after the War of 1812, government policy seemed to combine the worst of both old and new, favoring the kinds of centralized, broad constructionist, top-down forms of economic development that many thought would aid men of established means while deepening inequalities among whites. Numerous events during and after the misnamed Era of Good Feelings-among them the neo-Federalist rulings of John Marshall's Supreme Court, the devastating effects of the panic of 1819, the launching of John Quincy Adams's and Henry Clay's American System-confirmed a growing impression that power was steadily flowing into the hands of a small, self-confident minority.

Proposed cures for this sickness included more democracy and a redirection of economic policy. In the older states, reformers fought to lower or abolish property requirements for voting and officeholding, and to equalize representation. A new generation of politicians broke with the old republican animus against mass political parties. Urban workers formed labor movements and demanded political reforms. Southerners sought low tariffs, greater respect for states' rights, and a return to strict constructionism. Westerners clamored for more and cheaper land and for relief from creditors, speculators, and bankers (above all, the hated Second Bank of the United States).

It has confounded some scholars that so much of this ferment eventually coalesced behind Andrew Jackson-a one-time land speculator, opponent of debtor relief, and fervent wartime nationalist. By the 1820s, however, Jackson's personal business experiences had long since altered his opinions about speculation and paper money, leaving him eternally suspicious of the credit system in general and banks in particular. His career as an Indian fighter and conqueror of the British made him a popular hero, especially among land-hungry settlers. His enthusiasm for nationalist programs had diminished after 1815, as foreign threats receded and economic difficulties multiplied. Above all, Jackson, with his own hardscrabble origins, epitomized contempt for the old republican elitism, with its hierarchical deference and its wariness of popular democracy.

After losing the "corrupt bargain" presidential election of 1824, Jackson expanded upon his political base in the lower and mid-South, pulling together many strands of disaffection from around the country. But in successfully challenging President John Quincy Adams in 1828, Jackson's supporters played mainly on his image as a manly warrior, framing the contest as one between Adams who could write and Jackson who could fight. Only after taking power did the Jacksonian Democracy refine its politics and ideology. Out of that self-definition came a fundamental shift in the terms of national political debate.

The Jacksonians' basic policy thrust, both in Washington and in the states, was to rid government of class biases and dismantle the top-down, credit-driven engines of the market revolution. The war on the Second Bank of the United States and subsequent hard-money initiatives set the tone-an unyielding effort to remove the hands of a few wealthy, unelected private bankers from the levers of the nation's economy. Under the Jacksonians, government-sponsored internal improvements generally fell into disfavor, on the grounds that they were unnecessary expansions of centralized power, beneficial mainly to men with connections. The Jacksonians defended rotation in office as a solvent to entrenched elitism. To aid hard-pressed farmers and planters, they pursued an unrelenting (some say unconstitutional) program of Indian removal, while backing cheap land prices and settlers' preemption rights.

Around these policies, Jacksonian leaders built a democratic ideology aimed primarily at voters who felt injured by or cut off from the market revolution. Updating the more democratic pieces of the republican legacy, they posited that no republic could long survive without a citizenry of economically independent men. Unfortunately, they claimed, that state of republican independence was exceedingly fragile. According to the Jacksonians, all of human history had involved a struggle between the few and the many, instigated by a greedy minority of wealth and privilege that hoped to exploit the vast majority. And this struggle, they declared, lay behind the major problems of the day, as the "associated wealth" of America sought to augment its domination.

The people's best weapons were equal rights and limited government-ensuring that the already wealthy and favored classes would not enrich themselves further by commandeering, enlarging, and then plundering public institutions. More broadly, the Jacksonians proclaimed a political culture predicated on white male equality, contrasting themselves with other self-styled reform movements. Nativism, for example, struck them as a hateful manifestation of elitist puritanism. Sabbatarians, temperance advocates, and other would-be moral uplifters, they insisted, should not impose righteousness on others. Beyond position-taking, the Jacksonians propounded a social vision in which any white man would have the chance to secure his economic independence, would be free to live as he saw fit, under a system of laws and representative government utterly cleansed of privilege.

As Jacksonian leaders developed these arguments, they roused a noisy opposition-some of it coming from elements of the coalition that originally elected Jackson president. Reactionary southern planters, centered in South Carolina, worried that the Jacksonians' egalitarianism might endanger their own prerogatives-and perhaps the institution of slavery-if southern nonslaveholders carried them too far. They also feared that Jackson, their supposed champion, lacked sufficient vigilance in protecting their interests-fears that provoked the nullification crisis in 1832-1833 and Jackson's crushing of extremist threats to federal authority. A broader southern opposition emerged in the late 1830s, mainly among wealthy planters alienated by the disastrous panic of 1837 and suspicious of Jackson's successor, the Yankee Martin Van Buren. In the rest of the country, meanwhile, the Jacksonian leadership's continuing hard-money, antibank campaigns offended more conservative men-the so-called Bank Democrats-who, whatever their displeasure with the Second Bank of the United States, did not want to see the entire paper money credit system dramatically curtailed.

The oppositionist core, however, came from a cross-class coalition, strongest in rapidly commercializing areas, that viewed the market revolution as the embodiment of civilized progress. Far from pitting the few against the many, oppositionists argued, carefully guided economic growth would provide more for everyone. Government encouragement-in the form of tariffs, internal improvements, a strong national bank, and aid to a wide range of benevolent institutions-was essential to that growth. Powerfully influenced by the evangelical Second Great Awakening, core oppositionists saw in moral reform not a threat to individual independence but an idealistic cooperative effort to relieve human degradation and further expand the store of national wealth. Eager to build up the country as it already existed, they were cool to territorial expansion. Angered by Jackson's large claims for presidential power and rotation in office, they charged that the Jacksonians had brought corruption and executive tyranny, not democracy. Above all, they believed that personal rectitude and industriousness, not alleged political inequalities, dictated men's failures or successes. The Jacksonians, with their spurious class rhetoric, menaced that natural harmony of interests between rich and poor which, if only left alone, would eventually bring widespread prosperity.

By 1840, both the Jacksonian Democracy and its opposite (now organized as the Whig party) had built formidable national followings and had turned politics into a debate over the market revolution itself. Yet less than a decade later, sectional contests linked to slavery promised to drown out that debate and fracture both major parties. In large measure, that turnabout derived from the racial exclusiveness of the Jacksonians' democratic vision.

The Jacksonian mainstream, so insistent on the equality of white men, took racism for granted. To be sure, there were key radical exceptions-people like Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen-who were drawn to the Democracy's cause. North and South, the democratic reforms achieved by plebeian whites-especially those respecting voting and representation-came at the direct expense of free blacks. Although informed by constitutional principles and genuine paternalist concern, the Jacksonian rationale for territorial expansion assumed that Indians (and, in some areas, Hispanics) were lesser peoples. As for slavery, the Jacksonians were determined, on both practical and ideological grounds, to keep the issue out of national affairs. Few mainstream Jacksonians had moral qualms about black enslavement or any desire to meddle with it where it existed. More important, they believed that the mounting antislavery agitation would distract attention from the artificial inequalities among white men and upset the party's delicate intersectional alliances. Deep down, many suspected that the slavery issue was but a smokescreen thrown up by disgruntled elitists looking to regain the initiative from the real people's cause.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, the mainstream Jacksonian leadership, correctly confident that their views matched those of the white majority, fought to keep the United States a democracy free from the slavery question-condemning abolitionists as fomenters of rebellion, curtailing abolitionist mail campaigns, enforcing the congressional gag rule that squelched debate on abolitionist petitions, while fending off the more extremist proslavery southerners. In all of this fighting, however, the Jacksonians also began to run afoul of their professions about white egalitarianism. Opposing antislavery was one thing; silencing the heretics with gag rules amounted to tampering with white people's equal rights. More important, Jacksonian proexpansionism-what one friendly periodical, the Democratic Review boosted as "manifest destiny"-only intensified sectional rifts. Slaveholders, quite naturally, thought they were entitled to see as much new territory as legally possible opened up to slavery. But that prospect appalled northern whites who had hoped to settle in lily white areas, untroubled by that peculiar institution whose presence (they believed) would degrade the status of white free labor.

It would take until the 1850s before these contradictions fully unraveled the Jacksonian coalition. But as early as the mid-1840s, during the debates over Texas annexation, the Mexican War, and the Wilmot Proviso, sectional cleavages had grown ominous. The presidential candidacy of Martin Van Buren on the Free-Soil ticket in 1848-a protest against growing southern power within the Democracy-amply symbolized northern Democratic alienation. Southern slaveholder Democrats, for their part, began to wonder if anything short of positive federal protection for slavery would spell doom for their class-and the white man's republic. In the middle remained a battered Jacksonian mainstream, ever hopeful that by raising the old issues, avoiding slavery, and resorting to the language of popular sovereignty, the party and the nation might be held together. Led by men like Stephen A. Douglas, these mainstream compromisers held sway into the mid-1850s, but at the cost of constant appeasement of southern concerns, further exacerbating sectional turmoil. Jacksonian Democracy was buried at Fort Sumter, but it had died many years earlier.

There was a grim, ironic justice to the Jacksonians' fate. Having tapped into the disaffection of the 1820s and 1830s and molded it into an effective national party, they advanced the democratization of American politics. By denouncing the moneyed aristocracy and proclaiming the common man, they also helped politicize American life, broadening electoral participation to include an overwhelming majority of the electorate. Yet this very politicization would ultimately prove the Jacksonian Democracy's undoing. Once the slavery issue entered the concerns of even a small portion of the electorate, it proved impossible to remove without trampling on some of the very egalitarian principles the Jacksonians were pledged to uphold.

None of this, however, should be a source of self-satisfaction to modern Americans. Although the Jacksonian Democracy died in the 1850s, it left a powerful legacy, entwining egalitarian aspirations and class justice with the presumptions of white supremacy. Over the decades after the Civil War, that legacy remained a bulwark of a new Democratic party, allying debt-ridden farmers and immigrant workers with the Solid South. The Second Reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s forced Democrats to reckon with the party's past-only to see party schismatics and Republicans pick up the theme. And at the close of the twentieth century, the tragic mix of egalitarianism and racial prejudice so central to the Jacksonian Democracy still infected American politics, poisoning some of its best impulses with some of its worst.

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Jacksonian Democracy - Definition, Summary & Significance

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Jacksonian Democracy refers to the ascendancy of President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829 -1837)and the Democratic party after the election of 1828. More loosely, it alludes to the entire range of democratic reforms that proceeded during Jacksons' tenure-from expanding suffrage to restructuring federal institutions, but also slavery, the subjugation of Native Americans, and the celebration of white supremacy.

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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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Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Editor

National Geographic Society

Producer

other

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Dec 29, 1845 CE: Texas Becomes a State | National Geographic Society

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Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Editor National Geographic Society Producer other

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What Was the Mexican-American War? | History

# data[].attributes.body
The First Migration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7XWiGflkQ8
The European Renaissance: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/land-bridge/
The Earliest North American Societies: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7a/84/35/7a8435566fde65a2e219b58433d699ad.jpg
Native American Culture Areas: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/
http://thestrangecontinent.com/2018/02/27/great-empires-north-america-part-1-welcome-old-world/

Chapter 2
1492: The Voyages of Christopher Columbus: https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline__699w__no_aspect/public/vikings_16x9.jpg?itok=TdQvXtpx
Spanish Empire in North America: https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/christopher-columbus
Race for Empires in North America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWj0GCvn_Oo
The Vikings: http://thestrangecontinent.com/2018/02/27/great-empires-north-america-part-1-welcome-old-world/
Chapter 3
English Settlement in North America: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1os2xmaster/chapter/great-awakening-and-enlightenment/
Colonists affected by the Great Awakening and the Enllightenment: http://www.stamp-act-history.com/british-taxation-colonial-america/list-of-british-acts/
Acts Passed by the Colonists: http://www.stamp-act-history.com/british-taxation-colonial-america/list-of-british-acts/
Colonists Response: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/colonial-america/early-chesapeake-and-southern-colonies/v/early-english-settlements-jamestown

Chapter 4
Paul Revere´s Ride Lexington and Concord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWaYbei5WMc
Declaration of Independence:
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/revolution/decindep.htm
Battle of Saratoga:
https://www.landofthebrave.info/battle-of-saratoga.htm
Treaty of Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris
http://www.ushistory.org/march/images/surrender.jpg

Chapter 5/6
Articles of Confederation:
http://www.ushistory.org/documents/confederation.htm
The Great Compromise:
http://www.mrsperkinsclassroom.com/uploads/1/0/5/1/10514687/8148921.png?860
Federalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie6mvIDU2y4
Separation of Powers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1cN5KuB5s0
The Constitution:
http://constitutionus.com/
Bill of Rights:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/bill-of-rights/

Chapter 7/9
Rise of Political Parties (Federalists and Republicans)
http://wjmi.blogspot.com/2011/10/rise-of-political-parties.html
The Louisiana Purchase
https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/louisiana-purchase
The Corps of Discovery
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/Lewis_and_clark-expedition.jpg/300px-Lewis_and_clark-expedition.jpg
The War of 1812
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5E2y1-m898
The Monroe Doctrine
https://www.britannica.com/event/Monroe-Doctrine
Nationalism vs. Sectionalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FeKQXigaFk

Chapter 10/11
Jacksonian Democracy:
https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/jacksonian-democracy
Native American Removal:
https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act
Trails West:
https://www.tngenweb.org/tnletters/west-usa.jpg
Texas Becomes a Nation:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/dec29/texas-becomes-state/
Manifest Destiny:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/civil-war-era/sectional-tension-1850s/v/manifest-destiny
Mexican-American War:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9vbZwFZL4

Chapter 12/13
Industrial Revolution
https://inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/img/iea/M3OeL9rgwN/sizes/industrial-spy-main_resize_md.jpg
Interchangable Parts:
https://www.allaboutlean.com/230-years-interchangeability/
Rise of Organized Labor:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/37.a
The Transportation Revolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5FDMIDcyn0
Wli Whitneyś Cotton Gin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur-IssVtWnI
Life of a Slave:
https://www.historyonthenet.com/living-conditions-of-slaves

Chapter 14/15
Immigrants in the United States in the 1800's: https://sites.google.com/site/thenorthsite/early-immigration-in-the-u-s-1
Second Great Awakening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mO3LXjLoP0
Abolitionist Movement Prior to the Civil War:
https://www.civilwaracademy.com/abolitionist
Womens Rights Movement in the 1800's:
https://thedevelopmentofwomensrights.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/5/8/11585765/5194282_orig.png
Compromise of 1850:
https://sites.google.com/a/student.ucps.k12.nc.us/the-antebellum-period/_/rsrc/1463679147583/compromises/compromise-of-1850/E5FFF08C-7341-45BC-89DF-CAA47C7C9AB6.jpg
Kansas/Nebraska Act:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYP854GAPAU
Lincoln Douglas Debates:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/lincoln-douglas-debates
Election of 1860:
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/election-of-1860

Chapter 16
The Fall of Ft. Sumter: https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-battle-of-fort-sumter-the-start-of-the-civil-war.html
The Emancipation Proclamation:
https://www.archives.gov/files/images/00315-2008-001-ac.png
Clara Barton and The American Red Cross: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/clara-barton
The Battle of Gettysburg:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/battle-of-gettysburg-facts-summary-significance.html
The Battle of Vicksburg:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Battle_of_Vicksburg
Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/appomattox-court-house

Chapter 17:
The 13th Amendment: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/thirteenth-amendment
The 14th Amendment: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fourteenth-amendment
The 15th Amendment: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fifteenth-amendment
The Election of 1876: https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348361049l/151255.jpg
Plessy v. Ferguson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsDTqtyiNZk

Chapter 18
the transcontinental railroad: https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/transcontinental-railroad
massacre at wounded knee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc7fZonjD1M
Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887:http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Dawes-Act.jpg
The homestead and Morrill Act: https://into-the-westah1.weebly.com/homestead-act-and-morrill-land.html

Chapter 19
Bessemer Process: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Bessemer_converter.jpg
Growth of Invention - late 1800s:http://www.softschools.com/timelines/inventions_of_the_1800s_timeline/262/
The Rise of Big Business:http://www.american-historama.org/1866-1881-reconstruction-era/rise-of-big-business.htm
The Antitrust movement: https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/1912/trusts/TheAntitrustMovement
The Labor Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewu-v36szlE

Chapter 20
Rise of Immigration- Late 1800s:https://study.com/academy/lesson/immigration-patterns-in-the-late-1800s.html
The Growth of Cities: https://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/images/1citygrowth.jpg
Tenement Life- Causes and Effects: https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-and-architecture/architecture/tenements
The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s: https://www.onecallnow.com/blog/02/evolution-of-communication-1800s-and-1900s/

Chapter 21/22
Rise of Political Machines: https://prezi.com/l8s6frc5buig/political-machines-gov-corruption-during-the-late-1800s/
Progressive Reform: https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/progressive-era.cfm
Rise of Labor Organizations: http://www.teamsters362.com/the-industrial-revolution-the-rise-of-labour-unions/
Womens Suffrage and Temperance Movement: https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/womens-suffrage-and-temperance-movement/
Election of 1912: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdl8RzFcArU
Isolationism vs. Imperialiam: https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2008vus9aimperialism-130602120748-phpapp01/95/2008vus9a-imperialism-5-638.jpg?cb=1370174903

Chapter 23
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/archduke-ferdinand-assassinated
New Technonogy in WW1: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/world-war-i-fighting/v/technology-in-world-war-i
President Wilson's 14 Points: https://www.ducksters.com/history/world_war_i/fourteen_points.php
Treaty of Versailles: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiOrKnA3rXnAhWylnIEHZRJCWkQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTreaty_of_Versailles&psig=AOvVaw1sj-Gy8kDHd0849kj7zr5S&ust=1580831508207249

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Today 230 years ago on July 8, 1785, Honoré Blanc demonstrated the first large scale interchangeability of complex mechanical parts in the courtyard of the Château de Vincennes by disassembling musket locks, mixing the parts, and assembling them again. While it took another 150 years for the idea to take hold firmly in industry, it all started here with 50 muskets. Time for a look back in history.

The Benefit of Interchangeable Parts

The interchangeability of parts is nowadays taken for granted. If, for example, you buy a M10 bolt in America, fly to China, and buy a M10 nut, they will fit.
This is amazing!
Imagine for a second if they would not fit. Imagine not having worldwide standards for screws. Or even a standard within your own company. While for Screws different standards exist, most of the world nowadays uses the metric screw standard.

In your assembly line, you expect that each part delivered to the line fits into any of the products. For most of history, however, this was not true. Even around 1900, the most important tool in assembly of metal parts was a file. Almost every part that was delivered to the assembly line needed to be filed down in some place to make it fit.

Now consider modern automotive manufacturing. Imagine the unlikely case that a piston would not fit in the cylinder. 😯 Imagine that person having a file available on the assembly line. 😯 Now imagine someone filing the piston down to make them fit. 😯 😯 😯

I am pretty sure most of the employees of that company - including the CEO - would know that piston maker's name ... or more likely remember his name, since he would probably never again set foot in that company. Yet that was the standard up to 100 years ago.

Interchangeability Before Le Blanc

The idea and the benefit of interchangeability was realized long before Honoré Blanc. However, often these were either very loose tolerances, very simple parts, or expensive samples. For example, already in the Arsenal of Venice, wooden parts for ships as, for example, benches, were pre-cut, so they could be assembled with only minor adjustments.

Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem reportedly achieved interchangeability in his workshop for clocks in 1720, but it definitely did not spread beyond his workshops.

For metal parts with tighter tolerances, interchangeability was created only for very simple parts. A pioneer here was Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval (1715-1789). French artillery and artillery carriages were already standardized to five classes of cannons: 4, 8, 12, 16, and 24 pounders. More for aesthetics than technical reason, Gribeauval continued this standardization. By 1780 this quest for aesthetic uniformity had a surprise side effect - wooden parts for the carriages no longer had to be fitted, but were interchangeable.

Gribeauval also pushed for standards in the manufacture of the cannons themselves. Go gauges to ensure that a cannon ball fits in the barrel have been used since medieval times.

Griebeauval also added another no-go gauge to check if the ball was too small. If a cannon ball passed through the go gauge, it was at least not too big. However, if it also passed through the no-go gauge, it was too small. Only balls that passed through the go but not the no-go gauge were within acceptable tolerance limits. They also added additional requirements to prevent egg-shaped balls from passing through a series of gauges.

Using a similar system for the cannons, Gribeauval was able to have both standard caliber balls and cannons, resulting in probably the most advanced artillery of its time. Nevertheless, round holes and round balls are very simple geometries, and hence easy to check.

Musket locks, however, have a much more tricky geometry. Especially a small piece inside the lock called the tumbler (necessary to fire the gun) had a complex shape and tight tolerances. The first one to demonstrate interchangeability for musket locks was Guillaume Deschamps in 1723. However, his locks were ridiculously expensive, and for one of his interchangeable locks you could buy seven normal ones. Hence he only produced a few hundred guns in total.

Honoré Blanc

Honoré Blanc (1736-1801) was a French gunsmith, and from 1763, he was in charge of quality control for the French Army. The French Army tried to lower costs and to increase quality by putting pressure on French gunsmiths. The gunsmiths, in turn, preferred not to work for such a troublesome customer and rather supplied weapons to the American Revolution soldiers for a higher profit and less fuzz.

An attempt by the army to force gunsmiths to sell their product to them was unsuccessful, and the army was in serious danger of running out of weapons. Out of this problem, the idea was born to take control of the value chain by introducing interchangeable parts.
Yup, it had nothing to do with ease of assembly, or the possibility of in-field repairs while under combat, but only with replacing annoying headstrong craftsmen with more docile unskilled labor.
Honoré Blanc developed a multitude of tools and gauges to ensure accuracy, hardened the parts slowly in horse manure to avoid warping, and eventually succeeded. Today 230 years ago on July 8, 1785 in Château de Vincennes, he disassembled 50 locks, picked pieces for 25 locks at random, and - to the amazement of the assembled officials and representatives - assembled them again.

Duly impressed, the French government had him set up a workshop. Since Le Blanc was now rather unpopular with his fellow gunsmiths, this workshop was located (for protection) in the dungeons of the Château de Vincennes where he also held his demonstration. This dungeon was previously a prison with such famous prisoners as Diderot, de Mirabeau, Jean Henri Latude, and the infamous Marquis de Sade.

Nevertheless, even the strong walls of Château de Vincennes did not protect his workshop from the French Revolution, and his workshop was destroyed. Even worse, his supporter Gribeauval died in 1789. Determined to continue, Le Blanc set up his own workshop and produced large quantities of interchangeable gun locks at only 10% additional cost before he died in 1801.

However, after his death a political posse formed between proponents and opponents with documents and demonstrations against counter-documents and counter-demonstrations about the interchangeability of parts. Eventually the opponents won, the production of interchangeable parts stopped, and France lost the knowledge of interchangeable parts - and even forgot that they ever knew they had it.

Springfield and Harpers Ferry Armory

By coincidence, however, a new US ambassador to France Thomas Jefferson (better known nowadays as the third president of the USA) was able to witness the demonstration by Le Blanc in 1785. Jefferson brought the idea and samples back to the USA, and promoted interchangeability there.

Eventually, the young nation established two armories, one in Springfield, Massachusetts, and one in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. One of their goals, besides having a reliable supply of weapons, was to establish interchangeability of parts.

The two armories differed enormously. While Springfield pushed for organization and structure, Harpers Ferry was a hotbed of corruption and waste. Yet, it was in Harpers Ferry that the US produced their first interchangeable locks. Gunmaker, inventor, and proponent of interchangeability John Hancock Hall (1781-1841) was sent to Harpers Ferry to set up a workshop, independent from the rest of the armory. Hence, Hall not only had to solve the myriad of technical details of interchangeability, but also fight against the Harpers Ferry superintendent, who tried to hinder and hamper this outsider whenever he could. Hall had constant problems getting men, material, machines, or even a workshop large enough to set them all up.

Hall realized that interchangeability was all about precision. While conventional gun lock parts had a precision of ±0.2 mm, he needed ±0.02 mm for interchangeability. He achieved this interchangeability with the help of gauges, using a total of 63 gauges to verify the tolerances of the components of a lock. He also invented new measurement techniques, and created new and sturdier machines to reduce vibration. He also improved the new technology of milling. By 1824 the parts for his locks were completely interchangeable.

The next step was interchangeability across different workshops. This he achieved together with fellow gunsmith Simeon North (whose 250th anniversary of his birth, July 13, 1765, is coming up in five days). It took some time, but by 1834 North's and Hall's lock parts were completely interchangeable. Eventually, Springfield Armory also achieved interchangeability, but only in 1849.

By the way, you may have heard about interchangeability being invented by Eli Whitney (1765-1825). However, he was much better with words than with metal. Constantly promising to deliver 10,000 guns, he eventually " demonstrated " interchangeability to President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

However, in this presentation of " interchangeability, " he was very careful not to disassemble the complex locks. Instead, he only took the locks out of the wooden gun stock and placed them in another wooden gun stock. With no moving parts, this had a much looser tolerance. Additionally, Whitney used only ten carefully selected gun stocks that had been specially adjusted to fit all ten locks. Detailed analysis of existing Whitney muskets definitely prove that there was no interchangeability of the locks themselves.Hence, the entire demonstration was staged and Whitney "duped government authorities" (Smith, M.R 1980) about his lack of interchangeability.

He also was 10 years late in delivering his 10,000 guns. And, while I am at it, he did not invent the milling machine either. He did invent a small improvement to the cotton gin, although even this is contested (see below for a selection of my sources).

Spreading the Idea

In any case, the idea of interchangeability was now firmly set in American gun manufacturing. Additionally, hundreds of machinists and technicians working for the armories eventually moved to other industries and brought their knowledge with them. Many of the new complex products benefited from the experience of the armories, including typewriters, sewing machines, bicycles, and eventually the automobile.

However, even then it took time. For example, famous sewing machine maker Singer did not achieve interchangeability until around 1900. Similarly, as late as 1900 most automobile parts were still not interchangeable.

A famous demonstration was with three Cadillac Model K's in 1907. These new vehicles were tested on a racetrack and then completely disassembled. The many high-precision parts were then mixed, and three vehicles were assembled again. They not only successfully completed another 500-mile test, but one of the vehicles even won a subsequent 2000-mile reliability test. What nowadays would be standard in interchangeability was in 1907 an outstanding achievement.

Hence, the idea of interchangeability that we take for granted nowadays was a long and winding road. Many inventors and supporters were needed to establish the idea and to bring it into the market. Most of them were idealists, and Le Blanc, Hall, and North all died poor or without significant wealth. Nevertheless, without their contributions, our modern world would look quite different. Hence, remember them when you go out and organize your industry!

PS: If you would like to read more about the history of manufacturing, then check out my book:

Roser, Christoph, 2016. "Faster, Better, Cheaper" in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond, 439 pages, 1st ed. Productivity Press.

Selected Sources

Some still see Eli Whitney as an US icon, but research shows that his status is sometimes quite overrated. Since this may be a controversial statement for some, here are some selected sources on Whitney:

Battison, E.A., 1973. A New Look at the "Whitney" Milling Machine. Technology and Culture 14, 592-598. doi:10.2307/3102445

Woodbury, R.S., 1960. The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts. Technology and Culture 1, 235-253. doi:10.2307/3101392

Smith, M.R., 1980. Harpers Ferry armory and the new technology: the challenge of change. Cornell University Press.

Baida, P., 1987. Eli Whitney's Other Talent. American Heritage 38.

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230 Years of Interchangeable Parts - A Brief History | AllAboutLean.com

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Brief history of interchangeable parts, starting with the Arsenal of Venice, but focusing on its main achievements with Honoré Blanc in France, and John Hall and Simeon North in America. Shows the ups and downs of these inventors and their achievements.

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The living conditions of slaves in the antebellum American South were some of the worst for slaves across history. As legal property of their masters they had no rights themselves and fared far worse than Roman slaves or medieval serfs. Perhaps only slaves in sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean fared worse. Africans sold as slaves in the Americas had to rely on their owners providing them with housing or building materials, pots and pans for cooking and eating, food and clothing. Many slaves did the best they could with what they were given. Most did not dare complain for fear of receiving a whipping or worse punishment.

Living Conditions of Slaves: Housing

Slaves were allocated an area of the plantation for their living quarters. On some plantations the owners would provide the slaves with housing, on others the slaves had to build their own homes. Slaves that had to build their own houses tended to make them like the houses they had had in Africa and they all had thatched roofs. Living conditions were cramped with sometimes as many as ten people sharing a hut.

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They had little in the way of furniture and their beds usually made of straw or old rags.

Slaves who worked in the plantation house generally had slightly better housing nearer to the house and were given better food and clothing than those slaves that worked in the fields.

Living Conditions of Slaves: Food

Sometimes they were given pots and pans for cooking, but more often they had to make their own. The long hours they had to work in the fields meant that they had little free time for making things to improve their living conditions. Some slaves used a hollowed out pumpkin shell called a calabash, to cook their food in.?

Most plantation owners did not spend more money on food for their slaves than they had to and so the slaves lived on a diet of fatty meat and cornbread.

Living Conditions of Slaves: Clothing

Slaves would be given one pair of shoes and three items of underwear a year. Although these and other clothing would be provided by their owner, they were often ill-fitting and made of coarse material

Living Conditions of Slaves: Non-Forced Labor

Most slaves had to work from sunrise to sunset. Some owners made their slaves work every day, others allowed slaves one day a month off and some allowed their slaves to have Sundays as a rest-day.

Slaves would spend their non-forced working time mending their huts, making pots and pans and relaxing. Some plantation owners allowed their slaves a small plot of land to grow things to supplement their diet.

Slaves were not allowed to read or write, but some were allowed to go to church.
This article is part of our extensive resources on black history. For a comprehensive article on black history in the United States, click here.
Cite This Article

"The Living Conditions of Slaves in the American South" History on the Net
© 2000-2021, Salem Media.
April 28, 2021 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/living-conditions-of-slaves>
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The Living Conditions of Slaves in the American South - History

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Loading... The living conditions of slaves in the antebellum American South were some of the worst for slaves across history. As legal property of their masters they had no rights themselves and fared far worse than Roman slaves or medieval serfs. Perhaps only slaves in sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean fared worse.

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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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People of European or Asian decent immigrat

ed to the United States in the mid-1800's. Gjert Hovland, from Norway, was one of these people. He emigrated from Norway and came here, to the U.S. with his family in search of a better life. As he said himself in a letter he wrote to a friend in Norway, there was room and jobs for immigrants in America. Therefore people that could not support their family would come here for economic reasons.

Coming to the United States was a difficult task. Usually only men would come. People would come in steerage because of lack of money. The conditions they faced there were devastating. People were crammed up together in dirty, small decks. Coming to America was a dangerous journey where many got sick, and some even died. But still, people from Britain, Ireland, Gernamy, Sweden, Denmark, and China, came to America.

Push-Pull factors

Push-Pull factors are said to be the cause of Immigrants in the U.S.. Push factors are circumstances that generally push people out of their native country. "Push factors" in Europe are:

"Pull factors" are reasons or actions that that attracted emigrants to the United States. Some pull factors are stated below.

Scandinavians, or people from Sweeden, came to the United States for economic opportunity. Land here was sold for $1.25 an acre which enticed people to come to the U.S.. Sweedish laws prevented scandavians from emigrating and preachers adviced church members to stay in Sweeden. Soon, they realized that people were going to leave anyways. Scandaviand who came to the U.S. tried to find places that felt comfortable to them, so most settled in WIsconsin and Minnisota and became farmers.

Germans who immigrated to the United Sates would settle in Wisconsin or Texas. They chose Wisconsin because the climate would allow them to grow oats. They were looking to settle in places where they were the most comfortable in, and Wisconsin had a German Catholic bishop. They also settled in Texas because it had German culture within it. Many Germans became successful as they opened various types of bussineses. They also had a lot of influence in America. The Christmas tree, hamburgers and hotdogs, gyms, and kindergartens came from Germany.

Most immigrants from Ireland were Catholic and were denyed some rights, so they decided to come to the United States. In 1845, Ireland's main food crop, the potato stoped growing causing a famine. This food shortage to emigrate from Ireland.orced about two milion to emigrate from Ireland. When they came to America, Irish men and w omen had no savings with little education. Men worked building railroads in very dangerous conditions where many died. Women became servants. They often had fight for their jobs because they were competing with free slaves. The Irish lived in cities where ships had docked filling up one quarter of the population in New York, Baltimore, Philidelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.

Overcrowding in the U.S.

Population in many cities kept growing abruptly because of new immigrants. In the early 1800's, New York's population went from 60,489 to 202,589. St.Louis' population doubled every nine years and Cincinnati doubled every seven years. Abrupt population growth brought issues for the residents. Houses were compacted together and toilets overflowed, spreading diseases. Crime was also a huge problem. To help new immigrants, societies were set up to aid them and politicians set up organizations to help.

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Early Immigration in the U.S - The North:1800s to 1850s

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People of European or Asian decent immigrat ed to the United States in the mid-1800's. Gjert Hovland, from Norway, was one of these people. He emigrated from Norway and came here, to the U.S. with his family in search of a better life.

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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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Abolitionist Definition

Leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War the definition of abolitionist was a person who opposed slavery. Their goal was to abolish slavery immediately. John Brown and Frederick Douglass are the most well known abolitionists.

Abolitionist Movement

The abolitionist movement began years before the Civil War broke out. Prior to the war in the 1850's Kansas was in it's own little war between abolitionists and slave holders. This was known as Bleeding Kansas.

Abraham Lincoln was opposed to slavery however he was not an abolitionist. The abolitionist definition was a fanatical belief that slavery should immediately cease and all slaves should be freed without delay. Lincoln wanted to end slavery gradually over a period of time.

The southern states felt extremely threatened by the abolitionist movement and by Abraham Lincoln. They knew that if he was elected in 1860 the institution of slavery would be under direct attack.

The entire economy of the south depended on agriculture and slavery, with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 the south had no choice but to immediately secede and withdraw from the Union.

Abolitionist John Brown

John Brown is one of the most famous abolitionist. He was heavily involved with the fighting against the pro slavery groups in Kansas during the 1850's. On May 24th 1856 he and his abolitionist group were responsible for murdering five pro slavery men known as the Pottawatomie massacre.

If you'd like to read more about John Brown check out John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights

He is most famous for his raid against Harpers Ferry Virginia on October 16th 1859. The idea was that he and twenty-one of his followers would raid the town, capture the arsenal and recruit nearby slaves to rise up against their masters and join him in a revolution to end slavery. He would form a slave army that would be armed with weapons from the Harpers Ferry arsenal.

In reality the plan never had any hope of success. The group captured the town easily since there was little resistance however his slave army never materialized. There was no mass uprising to support his cause. As John Brown and his men waited in Harpers Ferry hoping slaves would come to their aid, they were instead greeted with local militia forces who had been alerted to the attack and quickly converged on the town.

After a small skirmish with the militia they were eventually trapped inside the firehouse where they were forced to eventually surrender. John Brown was later tried and executed for treason on December 2nd 1859.

While the raid failed it did bolster the anti-slavery movement in the north. Some northerners praised the raid and renewed their call for the end of slavery.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass is another well-known abolitionist from the Civil War.

He was born into slavery around 1818 but was able to escape when he was around twenty years old.

After his escape he began to get more involved in the abolitionists efforts to end slavery. He met another staunch abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who offered to accept him into the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society, Douglass soon began giving many speeches to northern crowds.

Frederick Douglass wrote three books about his life as a slave Frederick Douglass : Autobiographies : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Library of America) which offer a fascinating glimpse into Frederick Douglass through his own eyes.

During the Civil War he offered his counsel to President Lincoln and convinced him to begin to focus more on abolishing slavery everywhere and to make it clear the the north was fighting this war to end slavery.

Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1st 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. This made slavery illegal in all of the rebellious states, it did not change anything for the border states, however most of them decided to end slavery on their own before the Civil War ended in April 1865.

On December 16th 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified making slavery in the United States illegal. African Americans would go on to win the right to vote and receive full citizenship. With these things accomplished the abolitionist movement succeeded in fulfilling it's goals.

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Abolitionist Definition Leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War the definition of abolitionist was a person who opposed slavery. Their goal was to abolish slavery immediately. John Brown and Frederick Douglass are the most well known abolitionists. Abolitionist Movement The abolitionist movement began years before the Civil War broke out.

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Sound Smart: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 | History

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In the summer and the fall of 1858 two of the most influential statesmen of the late antebellum era, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln faced off in a series of debates focused on slavery as they vied for a United States Senate seat representing Illinois. In the long term, the Lincoln-Douglas debates propelled Lincoln's political career into the national spotlight, while simultaneously stifling Douglas' career, and foreshadowing the 1860 Election.

By 1858, Stephen A. Douglas was the most prominent politician in the West, if not the entire country. However, Douglas was in the midst of a massive feud with the Buchanan administration and the Democratic Party bosses over the Lecompton Constitution, which seriously affected his chances of being re-elected. The Lecompton Constitution was a state constitution for Kansas that illegitimately used popular sovereignty to push through a pro-slavery constitution that did not represent the will of Kansans. Douglas also faced an enormous backlash in the North for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so by coming out against the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, Douglas highlighted that popular sovereignty could be used to restrict slavery in the territories, which pleased his those constituents who supported anti-slavery measures.In contrast, Lincoln was a relatively unknown, "prairie lawyer" with only one term in Congress under his belt, which he served over a decade prior to his senatorial candidacy. Lincoln was also a member of a relatively new anti-slavery party-the Republican party. Despite Douglas' fame, and Lincoln's lack of it, for Douglas to achieve victory in this contest required some campaigning, which led to the debates.

From August 21 to October 15, 1858, Lincoln and Douglas traveled to seven cities across Illinois to engage in public debates. Unlike our modern political debates where candidates go back and forth roughly every few minutes, the format for the debates between Honest Abe and the Little Giant featured one candidate talking for an hour followed by the other candidate speaking for an hour and a half before the first candidate was given thirty minutes for a rebuttal. Lincoln and Douglas alternated which candidate went first and which candidate responded, although, as the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four out of the seven debates. Citizens across the Midwest traveled in droves to see Lincoln and Douglas speak, and those who missed the debates would read their transcripts in Democratic and Republican newspapers the following day. Additionally, after the election, Lincoln edited the transcriptions and published them in a book, which became popular among Republicans. It is important to note that at that time the general public did not elect senators through a popular vote as they do now. Rather, Illinoisans elected members to the state legislature and whichever party received the majority of seats would then elect their candidate to the U.S. Senate seat. Consequently, Lincoln and Douglas were not simply campaigning for themselves but also for their respective political parties.

The main focus of these debates was slavery and its influence on American politics and society-specifically the slave power, popular sovereignty, race equality, emancipation, etc. Although personally against slavery, Lincoln reiterated in these debates that he wanted to "avoid doing anything that would bring about a war between the free and slave states" and as such supported a free-soil platform rather than an emancipation platform. Lincoln believed that slaves were humans, and as humans deserve the fundamental right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which Lincoln interpreted as only the right to not be enslaved, not the right to citizenship. Lincoln believed that one race must be superior to the others and he was "in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." First and foremost, Douglas believed in the inferiority of African Americans and often articulated this conviction quite bluntly. However, Douglas believed just because this group was inferior did not automatically mean that they should be enslaved. To Douglas, it was up to the citizens in respective states/territories to decide if they wanted slavery-reconfirming his support of popular sovereignty. Whether blacks were free or enslaved did not matter to Douglas, what mattered was they were never to be citizens and always subordinate to whites. One of the biggest differences between Douglas' and Lincoln's views on slavery is that, unlike Lincoln, Douglas did not consider slavery a moral issue, an agonizing dilemma, nor was it an issue that would tear the Union apart.

In the end, Douglas triumphed over Lincoln with Democrats gaining forty-six seats to the Republican's forty-one. However, while Douglas might have won the battle, Lincoln won the true war: the 1860 Presidential Election. The popularity of these debates and of Lincoln's book propelled Honest Abe into the Republican spotlight, who appreciated this articulate anti-slavery leader. Lincoln's stellar performance in these debates enabled his nomination for President in 1860.

For his part, Douglas, already on thin ice with the southern wing of the Democratic party, ruined any chance of reconciliation by supporting the Freeport Doctrine, which provided a free-soil foil to the southern pro-slavery version of popular sovereignty. During a debate in Freeport, Illinois Douglas fell right into Lincoln's trap when answering a question about how territories could restrict slavery in the wake of the Dred Scott decision. The Freeport Doctrine is derived from Douglas's response in which he argued that slavery could only exist in places with support from local police regulations. By unequivocally supporting this doctrine, Douglas hurt his chances to achieve victory in 1860.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates remain steeped in folklore and historians and the public alike consider them to be a representation of true grassroots democracy. The thirty years prior to these debates were marred with conflict over slavery, and never in that time did two politicians go head to head to discuss this contentious issue in such a public and articulate way. These debates reinvigorated Lincoln's political career and propelled him to the spotlight among Republicans. Simultaneously, Douglas used these debates to reaffirm his support for popular sovereignty which further alienated the senator from the Democratic Party. All in all, these debates set the stage for a much more important showdown, both for these politicians and for the country, the Election of 1860.

Suggested Reading:
Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America The Lincoln-Douglas Debates​

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In the summer and the fall of 1858 two of the most influential statesmen of the late antebellum era, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln faced off in a series of debates focused on slavery as they vied for a United States Senate seat representing Illinois.

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Lincoln's Political History

Abraham Lincoln's political ambitions began in 1832 when he was just 23 years old and ran for the Illinois House of Representatives. While he lost that election, two years later, he was elected to the state legislature as a member of the Whig party, where he publicly announced his disdain for slavery.

In 1847, Lincoln was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives where, on January 10, 1849, he introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The bill didn't pass, but it opened the door for later anti-slavery legislation.

In 1858, Lincoln ran for the Senate, this time as a Republican against Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. He lost the election but gained prominence for himself and the newly established Republican Party.

1860 Republican National Convention

The Republican Party held its second national convention on May 16, 1860, in Chicago, Illinois. It adopted a moderate stance on slavery and was against its expansion, although some delegates wanted the institution abolished altogether.

The two frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination were Lincoln and New York Senator William Seward. After three votes, Lincoln was nominated with Hannibal Hamlin as his running mate.

Democrats Split Over Slavery

The Democratic Party was in shambles in 1860. They should have been the party of unity, but instead were divided on the issue of slavery. Southern Democrats thought slavery should be expanded but Northern Democrats opposed the idea.

States' rights were also hotly debated. Southern Democrats felt states had the right to govern themselves while Northern Democrats supported the Union and a national government.

With such confusion among the ranks, it was unclear how the Democratic Party would ever nominate a candidate for the 1860 election. But on April 23, 1860, they met in Charleston, South Carolina to decide their platform and identify a nominee.

Stephen Douglas was the frontrunner, but Southern Democrats refused to support him because he wouldn't adopt a pro-slavery platform. Many walked out in protest, leaving the remaining delates without the majority needed to nominate Douglas; the convention ended without a nominee.

The Democrats met again two months later in Baltimore. Once again, many Southern delegates left in disgust, but enough remained to nominate Douglas as their presidential nominee and his running mate, former Georgia governor Herschel Johnson.

Southern Democrats nominated John Breckinridge, a supporter of slavery and states' rights, to represent them in the election. Oregon senator Joseph Lane was his running mate.

Constitutional Union Party

The Constitutional Union Party was mainly made up of disgruntled Democrats, Unionists and former Whigs. On May 9, 1860, they held their first convention and nominated Tennessee slaveholder John Bell as their presidential nominee and former Harvard University President Edward Everett as his running mate.

The Constitutional Union party claimed to be the party of law. They took no official position on slavery or states' rights, but promised to defend the Constitution and the Union.

Still, Bell wanted to offer a compromise on the topic of slavery by extending the Missouri Compromise line across the United States and make slavery legal in new states to the south of the line and illegal in new states north of the line. They hoped to sway voters who were upset with the divisiveness of the Democratic Party.

1860 Presidential Campaign

None of the 1860 presidential candidates did anywhere near the level of campaigning seen in modern-day elections. In fact, except for Douglas, they mostly kept to themselves and let well-known party members and citizens campaign for them at rallies and parades. Much of the campaigning, however, was devoted to getting voters to the ballot box on Election Day.

Lincoln's political experience and speeches spoke for themselves, but one of his main campaign goals was to keep the Republican party unified. He didn't want his party to reveal any of the discord of the Democrats and hoped to divide the Democratic votes.

Douglas campaigned in the North and South to hopefully make up for the divided voter base in the South, and gave a series of campaign speeches in favor of the Union.

1860 Election Results: The South Reacts

On November 6, 1860, voters went to the ballot box to cast their vote for President of the United States. Lincoln won the election in an electoral college landslide with 180 electoral votes, although he secured less than 40 percent of the popular vote.

The North had many more people than the South and therefore control of the Electoral College. Lincoln dominated the Northern states but didn't carry a single Southern state.

Douglas received some Northern support-12 electoral votes-but not nearly enough to offer a serious challenge to Lincoln. The Southern vote was split between Breckenridge who won 72 electoral votes and Bell who won 39 electoral votes. The split prevented either candidate from gaining enough votes to win the election.

The election of 1860 firmly established the Democratic and Republican parties as the majority parties in the United States. It also confirmed deep-seated views on slavery and states' rights between the North and South.

Before Lincoln's inauguration, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. Weeks after his swearing-in, the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War.

Sources

1860 Presidential General Election Results. David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.
Abraham Lincoln. Whitehouse.gov.
Constitutional Union Party. "No North, No South, No East, No West, Nothing but the Union." National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior.
Constitutional Union Party. Texas State Historical Association.
Pre-Presidential Career 1830-1860. National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior.
Southern Democratic Party. Ohio History Central.
United States Presidential Election of 1860. Encyclopedia Virginia.

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Election of 1860 - Summary, Lincoln & Significance | HISTORY

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The election of 1860 was a pivotal presidential election that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House amid debates on issues of slavery and states' rights.

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Crisis At Fort Sumter

When South Carolina seceded from the United States in late December 1860, 87 soldiers in the U.S. Army stationed in Charleston were now trapped, in a sense, in a hostile country. Their commander, Major Robert Anderson, was himself a southern slave-owner but was still loyal to the Union. In the middle of the night, Anderson secretly moved his men from their indefensible position to the unfinished Fort Sumter, an island in the harbor. The South Carolina militia quickly seized their old garrison and claimed the arsenal located there as their own. On December 28, South Carolina demanded that all U.S. troops be evacuated from their territory, but President James Buchanan, in his last days in office, declared that he needed more time. Meanwhile, the South Carolina militia began to close in, capturing several federal positions and thousands of weapons. By early January, Major Anderson and his men were trapped inside Fort Sumter surrounded by 6,000 hostile militiamen.

On January 5, 1861, President Buchanan dispatched the merchant ship Star of the West to reinforce Fort Sumter with food and 250 troops. Though the ship was unarmed, the move was viewed as a federal violation of state sovereignty. After all, South Carolina had asked them to leave, not to resupply. Upon hearing the news of the resupply ship, Southern senators advised their states to secede and join forces with South Carolina. A few days later, when Star of the West neared Charleston Harbor, the South Carolina militia fired on the ship from shore, forcing it to return north without unloading. The U.S. troops inside had no choice but to tighten their belts and wait. Meanwhile, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas also approved secession.

In early February, representatives from most seceding states met to form the Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy for the duration of the war). They chose Jefferson Davis as their president and selected a military commander. Soon, the militias of several Southern states (even some that had not yet seceded) began taking over federal military installations and weapons located within their borders. Many (but not all) southern soldiers deserted the U.S. Army and joined ranks with their state militias.

The Fall of Fort Sumter

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office as president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he extended an olive branch to the seceding states, insisting that he did not want to abolish slavery anywhere it already existed. And, while he did not want war, he could not accept secession.

Lincoln had also inherited the problem of Fort Sumter. He didn't want to provoke the South by attacking, yet he didn't want to appear weak by capitulating. When Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent delegates to Washington to negotiate the transfer of the fort, Lincoln sent them away, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Confederate government. But, Major Anderson's troops were about to either starve or surrender. So, on April 6, 1861, Lincoln announced that he was going to send food to Fort Sumter - no men, no weapons. This put the ball in Davis's court.

The Confederacy considered their strategic advantages: the men inside were weak from hunger, and they had very limited ammunition. If South Carolina attacked before supplies arrived, they would surely win. But, if they waited, they might discover that Lincoln's resupply shipment included more than food. As soon as Lincoln dispatched the relief shipment, Davis ordered Major Anderson to surrender the fort; Anderson refused.

Two days later, jubilant civilians watched from their rooftops as Confederate forces opened fire, raining thousands of artillery shells on the fort. On the afternoon of the second day of bombardment, a former Senator secretly rowed out to Fort Sumter and asked Anderson what terms he would accept in exchange for evacuating the island. The fortress was in ruins and on fire, they were almost out of food and ammunition, but no one had been killed. Anderson decided it was time to leave; he asked only that the U.S. flag be offered a 100-gun salute out of respect. The two gentlemen agreed, and the Senator's tiny white handkerchief was raised over the fort. On April 14, 1861, Major Robert Anderson surrendered the garrison, but the 100-gun salute was cut short when a misfire killed two U.S. soldiers. Anderson took the fortress's tattered flag with him; the Confederate flag was raised. Fort Sumter had fallen to the Confederacy. The American Civil War had begun.

Effects of Fort Sumter

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the battle of fort sumter & the start of the civil war - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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The Battle of Fort Sumter & the Start of the Civil War - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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When South Carolina seceded from the United States in late December 1860, 87 soldiers in the U.S. Army stationed in Charleston were now trapped, in a sense, in a hostile country. Their commander, Major Robert Anderson, was himself a southern slave-owner but was still loyal to the Union.

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Early Life of Clara Barton

She was born Clarissa Harlowe Barton on December 25, 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, into an abolitionist family. It's reported her love of nursing started when her oldest brother experienced a serious head injury and she nursed him diligently for two years.

After receiving a formal education, Barton became a teacher at the age of 17. Twelve years later, she founded and was headmaster of a free school in New Jersey where 600 students were eventually enrolled. She left the school after the school board voted to replace her as headmaster with a man.

Barton then moved to Washington, D.C., and became a clerk for the U.S. Patent Office, earning pay equal to her male counterparts. "I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay," Barton said later.
READ MORE: Clara Barton: 7 Facts about the Civil War Nurse and Medical Pioneer
Civil War Service Begins

Barton was working for the Patent Office when the Civil War broke out on April 12, 1861. A week later, soldiers of the 6th Massachusetts Infantry were attacked by southern sympathizers, and the wounded flooded the streets of Washington, D.C.

A makeshift hospital was created in the uncompleted Capitol Building. Though often described as shy, Barton felt an urgency to care for the injured and brought them food, clothing and other necessities.

As the need for care and medical provisions grew, Barton gathered provisions from her home and spearheaded a campaign to solicit additional relief items from friends and the public.

More importantly, she spent hours with the homesick, suffering soldiers, nursing them back to health, writing letters and offering kind words, prayers and comfort. With no formal training, her nursing expertise came from common sense, courage and compassion.
WATCH: Women's History Videos on HISTORY Vault
'Angel of the Battlefield'

After witnessing the sad state of battle-weary soldiers in Washington, D.C., Barton realized the greatest need for care and supplies was in the makeshift field hospitals near the front lines. In 1862, she received permission to take bandages and other supplies to a battlefield hospital after the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Northern Virginia. From then on, she traveled with the Union Army.

On September 17, 1862, Barton arrived at the now-infamous Antietam cornfield during the Battle of Antietam. After dropping off her wagon load of medical supplies to grateful surgeons struggling to make bandages out of corn husks, she worked long into the night assisting the surgeons, cooking food for the soldiers and tending the wounded, despite nearby cannon fire and bullets flying overhead.

One unlucky soldier was shot and killed as Barton tended him. Said Barton later, "A ball has passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve. I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?"

Barton made a profound impression on Union army surgeons at Antietam. One surgeon, Dr. James Dunn, said of Barton, "In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield."

Barton continued to assist the Union Army at Petersburg, Virginia, and Fredericksburg and Fort Wagoner, South Carolina, among other places. But even her best efforts couldn't conquer the disease and infection so rampant in warfare.

In Charleston, South Carolina, she became seriously ill and was transported to Hilton Head Island, then to Washington, D.C., to recuperate. She solicited more supplies and, once recovered, went back to the battlefield.

Organizing an Unprecedented Letter Campaign

Whenever possible, Barton recorded the personal information of the soldiers she cared for. As the war progressed, she was often called upon to correspond with family members of missing, wounded or dead soldiers. After returning to Washington, D.C., in January 1865 after the death of her brother, she continued her letter-writing campaign from her home.

Barton's efforts didn't go unnoticed, and President Abraham Lincoln selected her as General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners. Her job was to find missing soldiers and, if possible, inform their families of their fate.

It was a daunting yet important job which she couldn't do alone. She formed the Bureau of Records of Missing Men of the Armies of the United States and - along with twelve clerks - researched the status of tens of thousands of soldiers and answered over 63,000 letters.

By the time Barton left her post and presented her final report to Congress in 1869, she and her assistants had identified 22,000 missing soldiers, but she believed at least 40,000 were still unaccounted for.

Founding the American Red Cross

In 1869, Barton traveled to Europe for rest and learned about the International Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland, which had established an international agreement known as the Geneva Treaty (now part of the Geneva Convention), which laid out rules for the care of the sick and wounded in wartime.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Barton - never one to sit on the sidelines - wore a red cross made of red ribbon and helped deliver supplies to needy war-zone citizens.

After Barton returned to the United States, she solicited political support for America to enter the Geneva Treaty. President Chester A. Arthur finally signed the treaty in 1882 and the American Association of the Red Cross (later called the American Red Cross) was born, with Barton at its helm.

Leading the American Red Cross

As head of the American Red Cross, Barton focused mainly on disaster relief, including helping victims of the deadly Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, and devastating hurricanes and tidal waves in South Carolina and Galveston, Texas. She also sent relief supplies overseas to victims of war and famine.

Barton played an integral role in the passing of the "American Amendment" to the Geneva Treaty in 1884 which expanded the role of the International Red Cross to include assisting victims of natural disasters.

But everything wasn't rosy in Barton's Red Cross. She was reportedly an independent workaholic who fiercely protected her vision of what the Red Cross should be. She also suffered from depression, although nothing rallied her more than an urgent call for help. Her authoritarian leadership approach and supposed mismanagement of funds eventually forced her to resign her post in 1904.

In 1905, Barton established the National First Aid Association of America which made first aid kits and worked closely with local fire and police departments to create ambulance brigades.

Clara Barton's Legacy

Barton served on sixteen battlefields during the Civil War. Whether working tirelessly behind the scenes to procure supplies, prepare meals and arrange makeshift hospitals or tending the wounded during some of the goriest battles in American history, she earned the respect of countless soldiers, officers, surgeons and politicians. She almost singlehandedly changed the widely-held viewpoint that women were too weak to help on battlefields.

The American Red Cross wouldn't exist as it is today without Barton's influence. She believed in equal rights and helped everyone regardless of race, gender or economic station. She brought attention to the great need of disaster victims and streamlined many first aid, emergency preparedness and emergency response procedures still used by the American Red Cross.

Clara Barton died on April 12, 1912, at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland at age 91. A monument in her honor stands at Antietam National Battlefield.

Sources

American Red Cross Founder Clara Barton. American Red Cross.

Biography: Clara Barton. Civil War Trust.

Clara Barton. Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum.

Clara Barton and the American Red Cross. Clara Barton Birthplace Museum.

Clara Barton at Antietam. National Park Service.

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She was born Clarissa Harlowe Barton on December 25, 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, into an abolitionist family. It's reported her love of nursing started when her oldest brother experienced a serious head injury and she nursed him diligently for two years. After receiving a formal education, Barton became a teacher at the age of 17.

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The Battle of Gettysburg

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

Confederate Invasion

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

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

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

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

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

Showdown at Gettysburg

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

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

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

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

Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

Day 3

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

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

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

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

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The Battle of Vicksburg, or Siege of Vicksburg, was the final significant battle in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of skilled maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate army of Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton into defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Grant besieged the city from May 18 to July 4, 1863, until it surrendered, yielding command of the Mississippi River to the Union and thus securing one of its major objectives for achieving victory in the war; splitting the southern states at the Mississippi River. The simultaneous victory the day before, at Gettysburg, gave cause for great excitement in the Northern states. However, almost two more years of bloodshed stood between this victory and the end of the war on April 9, 1865.

Background

Grant had captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, in mid-May 1863, forcing Pemberton to retreat westward. Attempts to stop the Union advance at Champion Hill and Big Black River Bridge were unsuccessful. Pemberton knew that the corps under William T. Sherman was preparing to flank him from the north; he had no choice but to withdraw or be outflanked. Pemberton burned the bridges over the Big Black River and took everything edible in his path, animal and plant, as he retreated to the well-fortified city of Vicksburg.

The Confederates evacuated Haine's Bluff, attacked by Sherman, and Union steamboats no longer had to run the guns of Vicksburg, now able to dock by the dozens up the Yazoo River. Grant could now receive supplies more directly than the previous route around Vicksburg, over the crossing at Grand Gulf, and back up north.

Over half of Pemberton's army of 17,500 had been lost in the two preceding battles, and everyone in Vicksburg expected General Joseph E. Johnston, in overall command of Confederate forces in Mississippi, to relieve the city-which he never did. Large masses of Union troops were on the march to invest the city, repairing the burnt bridges over the Big Black River; Grant's forces were across on May 18. Johnston sent a note to Pemberton, asking him to sacrifice the city and save his troops, something Pemberton would not do (Pemberton, a northerner by birth, was probably influenced by his fear of public condemnation as a traitor if he abandoned Vicksburg). Pemberton assured him that Vicksburg was vital to the Confederacy, though it was really more of a symbol at this point, which would bolster moral if it could be held. Vicksburg was under siege.

In the twenty days since the river crossing at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, Grant had marched his troops 180 miles, inflicting 7,200 casualties at a cost of 4,300 of his own, winning five of five battles-Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge-and not losing a single gun or stand of colors.

As the Union forces approached Vicksburg, Pemberton could put only 18,500 troops in his lines. Grant had over twice that, with more coming.

Grant wanted a quick end and prepared for an immediate assault, performing only a cursory reconnaissance. His troops prepared a position in front of the town, and on May 19, Sherman's corps conducted a frontal assault against the Confederate works, marching from the north along Graveyard Road into murderous fire from Stockade Redan. Many of the Federals found something under which to hide, sneaking back to Union lines after dark. Grant inflicted under 200 casualties at a cost of 942. The Confederates, assumed to be demoralized, had regained their fighting edge.

True to his aggressive nature, Grant planned his next assault, but this time with greater care; they would first reconnoiter thoroughly and soften up the rebels with artillery fire. The attack was set for May 22. Grant did not want a long siege, and this attack was to be by the entire army.

Despite their bloody repulse, Union troops were in high spirits, now well-fed with provisions they had foraged. On seeing Grant pass by, a soldier commented, "Hardtack." Soon, all Union troops in the vicinity were yelling, "Hardtack! Hardtack!" The Union served hardtack, beans, and coffee that night. Everyone expected that Vicksburg would fall the next day.

Union forces bombarded the city all night, including naval gunfire from the river, and while causing little property damage, they damaged Confederate morale. On the morning of May 22, the defenders were bombarded again for four hours before the Union attacked once more along a three-mile front. Sherman attacked once again down the Graveyard Road, James B. McPherson in the center along the Jackson Road, and John A. McClernand on the south along the Baldwin Ferry Road and astride the Southern Railroad of Mississippi. They broke through a few times, but were beaten back by the Confederates, who could move reinforcements easily on their shorter interior lines. McClernand's corps achieved a small breakthrough at the Railroad Redoubt and requested reinforcements. Encouraged by McClernand's messages that exaggerated his success and suggested he could break through if properly supported, Grant ordered a diversionary attack, first by Sherman's corps, then McPherson's, both bloodily repulsed. McClernand attacked again, reinforced by one of McPherson's divisions, but with no success. The day saw over 4,000 Union casualties. Enraged, Grant blamed McClernand for the misleading dispatches.

Grant's optimism grew as he realized he had the city invested. With their backs against the Mississippi and Union gunboats firing from the river, Confederate soldiers and citizens alike were trapped. Grant's troops dug in and started a siege. Pemberton was determined to hold his few miles of the Mississippi as long as possible, hoping for relief from Johnston, or elsewhere.

A new problem confronted the Confederates. The dead and wounded of Grant's army lay in the heat of Mississippi summer, the odor of the deceased men and horses fouling the air, the wounded crying for medical help and water. Grant first refused a request of truce, thinking it a show of weakness. Finally he relented, and the Confederates held their fire while the Union recovered the wounded and dead, soldiers from both sides mingling and trading as if no hostilities existed for the moment. Meanwhile, recent copies of the St. Louis Democrat coming into the trenches would laud McClerland for his supposed feats and articulate an order from him to his soldiers commending their actions. Grant and his officers were infuriated at McClerland's false statements and his attempts to bolster his political fortunes. (He would be replaced with Maj. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord, who would run the XIII Corps with far greater efficiency than his predecessor after assuming command June 20).

In an effort to cut Grant's supply line, the Confederates attacked Milliken's Bend up the Mississippi on June 7. This was mainly defended by untrained colored troops participating in the first major battle of the war in which African American soldiers were extensively involved. These troops fought bravely with inferior weaponry and finally fought off the rebels with help from gunboats, although at horrible cost; the defenders lost 652 to the Confederate 185. The loss at Milliken's Bend left the rebels with no hope for relief but from the cautious Johnston.

All through June, the Union dug lines parallel to and approaching the rebel lines. Soldiers could not poke their heads up above their works for fear of snipers. It was a sport for Union troops to poke a hat above the works on a rod, betting on how many rebel bullets would pierce it in a given time.

Pemberton was boxed in with lots of inedible munitions and little food. The poor diet was showing on the Confederate soldiers. By the end of June, half were out sick or hospitalized. Scurvy, malaria, dysentery, diarrhea, and other diseases cut their ranks. At least one city resident had to stay up at night to keep starving soldiers out of his vegetable garden. The constant shelling did not bother him as much as the loss of his food. As the siege wore on, fewer and fewer horses, mules, and dogs were seen wandering about Vicksburg. Shoe leather became a last resort of sustenance for many adults.

As the bombing continued, suitable housing in Vicksburg was reduced to a minimum. A ridge, located between the main town and the rebel defense line, provided a diverse citizenry with lodging for the duration. Whether houses were structurally sound or not, it was deemed safer to occupy these dugouts. People did their best to make them comfortable, with rugs, furniture, and pictures. They tried to time their movements and foraging with the rhythm of the cannonade, sometimes unsuccessfully. Because of these dugouts or caves, the Union soldiers gave the town the nickname of "Prairie Dog Village." Since the fighting line was fairly close, soldiers made their way rearward to visit family and friends, a boost to morale.

Mine explosions

One of the major roads into Vicksburg was the Jackson Road. To guard this entrance the 3rd Louisiana Infantry built a large earthen redan, which became known as the 3rd Louisiana Redan. Union troops tunneled under the redan and packed the mine with 2,200 pounds of black powder. The explosion blew apart the Confederate lines on June 25, while an infantry attack made by troops from Maj. Gen. John A. Logan's XVII Corps division followed the blast. Logan's troops, led by Col. Jaspar Maltby's 45th Illinois Regiment, charged into the crater with ease. They were, however, stopped by rearward Confederate infantry and became pinned down in the crater. Short fuse shells were simply rolled into the crater with deadly results. Union engineers worked to set up casement in the crater in order to extricate the infantry and soon the soldiers fell back to a new defensive line. From the crater left by the explosion on June 25, Union miners worked to dig a new mine to the south. On July 1, this mine was detonated but no infantry attack followed. Pioneers worked throughout July 2 and July 3, to widen the initial crater large enough for an infantry column of four to pass through for future anticipated assaults. However, events the following day negated any further assaults.

Surrender and aftermath

Joseph E. Johnston, the only possibility for a Confederate rescue, felt his force at Jackson was too small to attack Grant's huge army. While Johnston's force was growing (at cost to the rest of the hard-pressed Confederacy), Grant's was growing faster, supplied via the now-open Yazoo River. Johnston, lacking in supplies, stated, "I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless." The Confederate government felt otherwise, asking the cautious Johnston to attack; requests he resisted. Robert E. Lee had remarked that the Mississippi climate in June would be sufficient to defeat the Union attack and he resisted calls to ride to the city's rescue from the Eastern Theater; his Army of Northern Virginia instead invaded the North in the Gettysburg Campaign with the partial objective of relieving pressure on Vicksburg. Finally on July 1, Johnston's relief column began cautiously advancing due west toward Union lines. On July 3, he was ready for his attack, but on July 4, Independence Day, the Union guns were oddly quiet.

On July 3, Pemberton had sent a note to Grant, who, as at Fort Donelson, first demanded unconditional surrender. But Grant reconsidered, not wanting to feed 30,000 hungry Confederates in Union prison camps, and offered to parole all prisoners. Considering their destitute state, dejected and starving, he never expected them to fight again; he hoped they would carry home the stigma of defeat to the rest of the Confederacy. In any event, it would have occupied his army and taken months to ship that many troops north. Pemberton would turn over to Grant an army of nearly 30,000 men, 172 cannons, and 60,000 arms, including many Enfield rifles that Grant used to outfit his volunteers, who had been carrying outdated smoothbore muskets.

Surrender was formalized by an old oak tree, "made historical by the event." In his Personal Memoirs, Grant described the fate of this luckless tree: "It was but a short time before the last vestige of its body, root and limb had disappeared, the fragments taken as trophies. Since then the same tree has furnished as many cords of wood, in the shape of trophies, as the 'True Cross.'"

Union Soldiers rejoiced as they celebrated the Fourth of July with great pomp following their major victory at Vicksburg. Some even went so far as to share their rations with local citizens who had been lingering on the brink of starvation for some time by this point.

Although there was more action to come in the Vicksburg Campaign, the fortress city had fallen and, with the capture of Port Hudson on July 8, the Mississippi River was firmly in Union hands and the Confederacy split in two.

The battle would prove decisive in the career of Grant, as well. He would be glorified for his aptitude in battle and unhesitant approach towards the Confederate Army. This would pave the way for him to achieve the status of Lieut. Gen. and later become the commander of the entire Federal Army.

The Fourth of July holiday was not celebrated by most of the citizens of Vicksburg until World War II, because of the surrender of the city on July 4.

The works around Vicksburg are now maintained by the National Park Service as Vicksburg National Military Park.

1. ↑ Frances H. Kennedy, ed., The Civil War Battlefield Guide, 2nd ed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), 172.

2. ↑ Kennedy, 173.

3. ↑ Stanley S. McGowen, "Vicksburg Campaign," in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

4. ↑ David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the United States (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2001), 469.

5. ↑ McGowen, 2025.

6. ↑ McGowen, 2026.

7. ↑ Center for Global Environmental Education, Hamline University, Rivers of Life. Retrieved September 6, 2007.

8. ↑ McGowen, 2027.

References

Ballard, Michael B. Vicksburg, The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ISBN 0807828939

Bearss, Edwin C. The Vicksburg Campaign. Morningside Press, 1991. ISBN 0890293082

Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat. New York: Doubleday, 1965. ISBN 0671469908

Eicher, David J. The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. ISBN 0684849445

Foote, Shelby. The Civil War, A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian. New York: Random House, 1958. ISBN 0394495179

Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885-86. ISBN 0914427679

Hamline University. Rivers of Life for Students Center for Global Environmental Education Rivers of Life. Retrieved August 19, 2019.

Kennedy, Frances H., ed. The Civil War Battlefield Guide, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. ISBN 0395740126

McGowen, Stanley S. "Vicksburg Campaign." In Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN 039304758X

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States). New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ISBN 0195038630

External links

All links retrieved December 13, 2016.

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The Battle of Vicksburg, or Siege of Vicksburg, was the final significant battle in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of skilled maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate army of Lt.

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Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

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Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

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Trapped by the Federals near Appomattox Court House, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Union general Ulysses S. Grant, precipitating the capitulation of other Confederate forces and leading to the end of the bloodiest conflict in American history.

How it ended

Union victory. Lee's formal surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, brought the war in Virginia to an end. While this event is considered the most significant surrender of the Civil War, several other Confederate commanders had to capitulate and negotiate paroles and amnesty for Southern combatants before President Andrew Johnson could officially proclaim an end to the Civil War. That formal declaration occurred sixteen months after Appomattox, on August 20, 1866.

In context

General Lee's final campaign began on March 25, 1865, with a Confederate attack on Fort Stedman, near Petersburg. General Grant's forces counterattacked a week later on April 1 at Five Forks, forcing Lee to abandon Richmond and Petersburg the following day. The Confederate Army's retreat moved southwest along the Richmond & Danville Railroad. Heavily outnumbered by the enemy and low on supplies, Lee was in dire trouble. Nevertheless, he led a series of grueling night marches, hoping to reach supply trains in Farmville, Virginia, and eventually join Maj. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina. Union troops captured the valuable supplies at Farmville on April 7.

On April 8, the Confederates discovered that their army was blocked by Federal cavalry. Confederate commanders tried to break through the cavalry screen, hoping that the horsemen were unsupported by other troops. But Grant had anticipated Lee's attempt to escape and ordered two corps (Twenty-fourth and Fifth), under the commands of Maj. Gen. John Gibbon and Bvt. Maj. Gen. Charles Griffin, to march all night to reinforce the Union cavalry and trap Lee. On April 9, those corps drove back the Confederates.

Rather than destroy his army and sacrifice the lives of his soldiers to no purpose, Lee decided to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. Three days later, a formal ceremony marked the disbanding of Lee's army and the parole of his men, ending the war in Virginia. The Grant-Lee agreement served not only as a signal that the South had lost the war but also as a model for the rest of the surrenders that followed.

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The Battle of Appomattox Court House page includes history articles, photo galleries, maps, and other recommended links for this 1865 Civil War battle in Virginia.

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Founding Fathers and Slavery

Despite the long history of slavery in the British colonies in North America, and the continued existence of slavery in America until 1865, the amendment was the first explicit mention of the institution of slavery in the U.S. Constitution.

While America's founding fathers enshrined the importance of liberty and equality in the nation's founding documents-including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution-they conspicuously failed to mention slavery, which was legal in all 13 colonies in 1776.

Many of the founders themselves owned enslaved workers, and though they acknowledged that slavery was morally wrong, they effectively pushed the question of how to eradicate it to future generations of Americans.

Thomas Jefferson, who left a particularly complex legacy regarding slavery, signed a law banning the importation of enslaved people from Africa in 1807. Still, the institution became ever more entrenched in American society and economy-particularly in the South.

By 1861, when the Civil War broke out, more than 4 million people (nearly all of them of African descent) were enslaved in 15 southern and border states.

Emancipation Proclamation

Though Abraham Lincoln abhorred slavery as a moral evil, he also wavered over the course of his career (and as president) on how to deal with the peculiar institution.

But by 1862, he had become convinced that emancipating enslaved people in the South would help the Union crush the Confederate rebellion and win the Civil War. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in 1863, announced that all enslaved people held in the states "then in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

But the Emancipation Proclamation in itself did not end slavery in the United States, as it only applied to the 11 Confederate states then at war against the Union, and only to the portion of those states not already under Union control. To make emancipation permanent would take a constitutional amendment abolishing the institution of slavery itself.

Battle Over the 13th Amendment

In April 1864, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed amendment banning slavery with the necessary two-thirds majority. But the amendment faltered in the House of Representatives, as more and more Democrats refused to support it (especially during an election year).

As November approached, Lincoln's reelection looked far from assured, but Union military victories greatly helped his cause, and he ended up defeating his Democratic opponent, General George McClellan, by a resounding margin.

When Congress reconvened in December 1864, the emboldened Republicans put a vote on the proposed amendment at the top of their agenda. More than any previous point in his presidency, Lincoln threw himself in the legislative process, inviting individual representatives to his office to discuss the amendment and putting pressure on border-state Unionists (who had previously opposed it) to change their position.

Lincoln also authorized his allies to entice House members with plum positions and other inducements, reportedly telling them: "I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes."

Hampton Roads Conference

Last-minute drama ensued when rumors started flying that Confederate peace commissioners were en route to Washington (or already there), putting the future of the amendment in serious doubt.

But Lincoln assured Congressman James Ashley, who had introduced the bill into the House, that no peace commissioners were in the city, and the vote went ahead.

As it turned out, there were in fact Confederate representatives on their way to Union headquarters in Virginia. On February 3, at the Hampton Roads Conference, Lincoln met with them aboard a steamboat called the River Queen, but the meeting ended quickly after he refused to grant any concessions.

13th Amendment Passes

On January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed the proposed amendment with a vote of 119-56, just over the required two-thirds majority. The following day, Lincoln approved a joint resolution of Congress submitting it to the state legislatures for ratification.

But he would not see final ratification: Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and the necessary number of states did not ratify the 13th Amendment until December 6.

While Section 1 of the 13th Amendment outlawed chattel slavery and involuntary servitude ( except as punishment for a crime), Section 2 gave the U.S. Congress the power "to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Black Codes

The year after the amendment's passage, Congress used this power to pass the nation's first civil rights bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The law invalidated the so-called black codes, those laws put into place in the former Confederate states that governed the behavior of Black people, effectively keeping them dependent on their former owners.

Congress also required the former Confederate states to ratify the 13th Amendment in order to regain representation in the federal government.

Together with the 14th and 15th Amendments, also ratified during the Reconstruction era, the 13th Amendment sought to establish equality for black Americans. Despite these efforts, the struggle to achieve full equality and guarantee the civil rights of all Americans has continued well into the 21st century. (It wasn't until February 2013 that Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment, one of the later states to do so.)

Sources

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865), OurDocuments.gov.
The Thirteenth Amendment, Constitution Center.
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery ( New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

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13th Amendment - Simplified, Definition & Passed | HISTORY

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The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, passed in Congress during the Civil War before being ratified in late 1865.

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14th Amendment: Simplified Summary, Text & Impact

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The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former slaves—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.”

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

What Is the 15th Amendment?

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

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

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

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

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

Poll Taxes and Literacy Tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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Plessy v. Ferguson Summary | quimbee.com

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Transcontinental Railroad ‑ Construction, Competition & Impact

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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American Indian Activist Russell Means Powerful Speech

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

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Inventions of the 1800's Timeline
Timeline Description: The latter half of the nineteenth century became known as the second Industrial Revolution. Many inventions came into play which would change the way people lived.

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inventions of the 1800's timeline of vents

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inventions of the 1800's timeline for kids

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Inventions of the 1800's Timeline Timeline Description: The latter half of the nineteenth century became known as the second Industrial Revolution. Many inventions came into play which would change the way people lived.

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Rise of Big Business: US History for kids ***

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Find a summary, definition and facts about the Rise of Big Business for kids. The Rise of Big Business and Corporations in the 1800's. The Rise of Big Business in America for kids, children, homework and schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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The Labor Movement in the United States | History

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Immigration

Here are some crazy statistics. By the early 1900s, it's estimated that New York City had more Italians in it than any other city but Rome. It also had more Polish people than any other city but Warsaw. Talk about a melting pot! To take a closer look at this, let's explore immigration to the U.S. during the late 1800s.

For starters, an immigrant is one who settles in a foreign country. Most of us have ancestors who, at some point or another, immigrated to the U.S. Whether speaking of the North, South, East, or West, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants.

Prior to the late 1880s, many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. were of Western or Northern European descent. Speaking more specifically, they tended to be English, German, or Norwegian. With their fair skin and their Protestant beliefs, they assimilated very nicely into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that pervaded the country. To state it simply and sadly, they didn't threaten the status quo. However, this all changed as the end of the century brought what history calls the new immigrants.

New Immigrants

Keeping things simple, the new immigrants of the late 1800s came from Southern and Eastern Europe. They landed on the American shore from places like Italy, Poland, Greece, and Russia. Unfortunately, these new immigrants didn't always receive the warmest of welcomes. In fact, they often faced discrimination.

For starters, the new immigrants were perceived as different. Rather than being light-eyed and fair-skinned, many were of darker complexion. Sounding sadly familiar, this bothered some already settled Americans. Also, many of the immigrants were Roman Catholic, not Protestant. After all, many came from Italy! Adding to this, many of those coming from Russia were Jews fleeing religious persecution. Rather than open arms, these groups met discrimination in the U.S. Despite this not-so-warm welcome, the year 1886 alone saw over 300,000 immigrants land on American soil.

Birds of Passage

Some of the immigrants who came in the late 1800s were known as birds of passage. They were usually men who came alone and did not settle in one place. Rather than permanently settling in the U.S., their goal was to return home.

To explain their stories, during the 1800s, commercial farming gobbled up much of the land in Southern and Eastern Europe. Driven by profit, large, wealthy landowners tossed thousands upon thousands of poor farmers from their land.

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immigration patterns in the late 1800s - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Immigration Patterns in the Late 1800s - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Here are some crazy statistics. By the early 1900s, it's estimated that New York City had more Italians in it than any other city but Rome. It also had more Polish people than any other city but Warsaw. Talk about a melting pot! To take a closer look at this, let's explore immigration to the U.S.

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TENEMENTS. The New York City Tenement House Act of 1867 defined a tenement as any rented or leased dwelling that housed more than three independent families. Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and they represented the primary form of urban working-class housing until the New Deal.

A typical tenement building was from five to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor. To maximize the number of renters, builders wasted little space. Early tenements might occupy as much as 90 percent of their lots, leaving little room behind the building for privies and water pumps and little ventilation, light, or privacy inside the tenement. With a large extended family and regular boarders to help pay the rent, which could otherwise eat up over half of a family's income, a tenement apartment might house as many as from ten to twelve people at a time. These tenement residents often also worked in the building in such occupations as cigar rolling and garment making.

From the beginning, reformers attacked tenement conditions. In New York City, early attempts at reform included fire-prevention measures, the creation of a Department of Survey and Inspection of Buildings in 1862, and the founding of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. Meanwhile, city tenements were getting increasingly

crowded: by 1864, approximately 480,400 of New York City's more than 700,000 residents lived in some 15,300 tenement buildings.

New York State passed a Tenement House Law on 14 May 1867, the nation's first comprehensive housing reform law. It established the first standards for minimum room size, ventilation, and sanitation. It required fire escapes and at least one toilet or privy (usually outside) for every twenty inhabitants. However, enforcement was lax.

An 1879 amendment to the 1867 legislation required more open space on a building lot and stipulated that all tenement rooms open onto a street, rear yard, or air shaft. The measure was designed to increase ventilation and fight diseases, such as tuberculosis, that ravaged tenement neighborhoods. To meet the standards of the 1879 law, builders designed the "dumbbell tenement" with narrow airshafts on each side to create a dumbbell-like shape from above. Despite slightly better fireproofing and ventilation, reformers attacked these buildings as only a limited improvement on existing conditions.

In 1890, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives rallied middle-class reformers to the cause of improving tenement life. His photos and essays drew attention to the health and housing problems of tenement neighborhoods.

The most significant New York State law to improve deteriorating tenement conditions was the Tenement Act of 1901, promoted by a design competition and exhibition held by the Charity Organization Society in 1900. By that time, the city's Lower East Side was home to the most densely populated buildings on earth. The neighborhood's Tenth Ward had a population of 69,944, approximately 665 people per acre.

The 1901 legislation, opposed by the real estate industry on the grounds that it would discourage new construction, improved tenement buildings. The law mandated better lighting and fireproofing. Most important, it required that privies be replaced with indoor toilet facilities connected to the city sewers, with one toilet for every two apartments.

Beginning in the New Deal era, reformers' strategies changed. Drawing on a tradition of "model tenements" and new government interest in housing construction, reformers designed public housing projects. Their plans emphasized open space, much as an earlier generation had passed laws to provide more light and fresh air for urban working-class families. The imposed standards, however, often created new problems. Building closures and slum clearance displaced many working-class families, while new high-rise public housing often fell victim to segregation and neglect. Although reformers continued to attack working-class living conditions, social pressures sustained many of the problems of poverty and overcrowding.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bauman, John F., Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian. From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Day, Jared N. Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Ford, James. Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City: History, Conditions, Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. New York: Blackwell, 1988.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Home page at http://www.tenement.org.

Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribners, 1890.

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TENEMENTSTENEMENTS. The New York [1] City Tenement House Act of 1867 defined a tenement as any rented or leased dwelling that housed more than three independent families.

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Evolution of Communication: 1800s and 1900s | OCN

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

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Political Machines & Gov. Corruption During the Late 1800s

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What is a political machine? Political Corruption William Magear Tweed, Sr., better known as Boss Tweed, was a Democratic politician noted for being the political "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of New York

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The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project is a university-chartered research center associated with the Department of History of The George Washington University

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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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Rise of Labor Organizations (Early 1900s)

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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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by Keri Engel

It might seem like women's rights and alcohol prohibition would be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But did you know that throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, women's suffrage and the temperance movement were both considered radical causes? Many suffragists, in addition to their work for women's rights, were also a part of the temperance movement, which advocated for reduced or no alcohol consumption.

Both movements culminated in the same year: 1920, when the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol came into effect and the 19th Amendment enfranchising women was ratified.

How was the women's suffrage movement connected to the temperance movement?

Let's take a look at how it started...

Why Did the Temperance Movement Want Prohibition?

As the United States developed, its people started turning from light alcoholic beverages, such as beer and hard cider, to stronger beverages like rum and whiskey as they became cheaper.

The production of rum especially was part of the whole slave trade. Slaves from Africa were brought to the West Indies to grow sugar, which was used to make rum. That's why it started to become available so cheaply.

What many citizens saw as an epidemic of alcoholism followed.

Remember that at this time, women had no rights. A woman was legally not a person, and was considered to be the property of her father or husband.

So what happened if a woman got married to a man who turned out to be an alcoholic? If he spent all their money on booze, or even became violent?

Legally, there was no escape.

What could women do?

All they could do was ask men to stop drinking so much.

"THE BOTTLE: He is discharged from his employment for drunkenness: They pawn their clothes to supply the bottle."

That's how the rise of cheap alcohol and growing alcoholism led to the growth of the women's temperance movement in the early 19th century.

Advocates for temperance linked the consumption of alcohol with greater issues like violent crime, poverty, unemployment, and domestic violence.

Though at first campaigning for moderation, the movement became more radical after the Civil War and began calling for complete prohibition of all alcohol. National organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union grew quickly, and by the late 19th century became very powerful in lobbying for prohibition legislation.

"Fearful quarrels and brutal violence are the natural consequences of the frequent use of the bottle."

Women's Suffrage and Prohibition

Around the turn of the 20th century, Western society still overwhelmingly believed in biological determinism: that men and women had different inherent natures determined by their respective biology.

Women were thought to be morally superior to men by nature, and many advocates for women's suffrage argued that women should have the vote because of this.

Advocates for temperance wanted women to have the vote because it was believed they would vote for prohibition due to their moral superiority. Many breweries, on the other hand, lobbied against the suffrage movement out of fear of losing their businesses to prohibition.

A Respectable Suffrage Movement

Groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1873, linked together the causes of Christianity, temperance, and social reform.

As a religious organization, the WCTU was seen as a more ladylike and respectable way for women to become involved in the struggle for suffrage. Since each local chapter of the WCTU was autonomous, local leaders had the freedom to act on issues such as women's suffrage under the banner of a respectable religious organization.

Francis Willard (1839-1898) was a suffragist and a temperance movement leader

Suffrage and Temperance Movement Leaders

Many of the most famous early feminists and women's suffrage advocates were also supporters of prohibition. The WCTU's second president, Francis Willard, broadened the organization's activism with her slogan "Do everything." A feminist and suffragist, Francis Willard fought not only for temperance and women's suffrage, but for other radical causes such as workers' unions, federal aid for education, and an eight-hour workday.

Perhaps the most famous pair of United States suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were temperance activists before they became involved in the women's suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony, before becoming a famous speaker on women's rights, gave her first speech at a Daughters of Temperance dinner. Together Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton co-founded the Woman's State Temperance Society in 1852, the first women's state temperance society in America.

Though the temperance movement mostly died out after the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933, adherents to the movement continue to exist to this day.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union still fights for social reform, though they are now considered extremely conservative in their current stance against abortion rights and same-sex marriage. The feminist movement, on the other hand, is now mainly considered a liberal cause. This strange alliance, though it lasted almost a century, died out soon after the death of prohibition as each movement went its separate way.

Radfem Graphic Tee - "Prude Is a Slur Against Any Woman With Boundaries"

This radfem t-shir...

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Women's Suffrage and the Temperance Movement: Strange Allies

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by Keri Engel It might seem like women's rights and alcohol prohibition would be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But did you know that throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, women's suffrage and the temperance movement were both considered radical causes?

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The American Presidential Election of 1912

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August. On June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand's death, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, officially marking the end of World War I.

The archduke traveled to Sarajevo in June 1914 to inspect the imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. The annexation had angered Serbian nationalists, who believed the territories should be part of Serbia. A group of young nationalists hatched a plot to kill the archduke during his visit to Sarajevo, and after some missteps, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip was able to shoot the royal couple at point-blank range, while they traveled in their official procession, killing both almost instantly.

The assassination set off a rapid chain of events, as Austria-Hungary immediately blamed the Serbian government for the attack. As large and powerful Russia supported Serbia, Austria asked for assurances that Germany would step in on its side against Russia and its allies, including France and possibly Great Britain. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the fragile peace between Europe's great powers collapsed, beginning the devastating conflict now known as the First World War.

After more than four years of bloodshed, the Great War ended on November 11, 1918, after Germany, the last of the Central Powers, surrendered to the Allies. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, Allied leaders would state their desire to build a post-war world that was safe from future wars of such enormous scale. The Versailles Treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, tragically failed to achieve this objective. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's grand dreams of an international peace-keeping organization faltered when put into practice as the League of Nations. Even worse, the harsh terms imposed on Germany, the war's biggest loser, led to widespread resentment of the treaty and its authors in that country-a resentment that would culminate in the outbreak of the Second World War two decades later.

Fact Check

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

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Austria's Archduke Ferdinand assassinated | June 28, 1914 | HISTORY

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Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August.

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World War I shaped our world in many, many, many ways. And it's important to realize it wasn't that long ago. It was not even 100 years ago. But it was really the end of the more traditional empires. It was the end of kingdoms. It really reshaped much of the globe much more around states defined by nations rather than states defined by monarchies or states defined by empires. And it was also the first war where technology, or I would say modern technology-- technology has always played a major role in wars. In fact, wars have been a catalyst for technology often. But it was the first time that much of what we consider to be modern technology played a huge role in the actual carrying out of the war. And to a large degree, this is what made the war so much bloodier, and one could argue, even more protracted. So here I have a bunch of pictures of the various technologies used in World War I. Here in this picture you have a machine gun, which obviously allows you to indiscriminately mow down folks. These guys, it looks like they might be in some type of a trench. And so you could imagine that combination if viewed from above. So let's say that this is a trench. This is a trench right over here. We're looking from above. So there's some people sitting in the trench. A couple of these folks have machine guns. The rest of the guys just have rifles over here. If you wanted to storm this trench, you'd be in a bad situation. The guy with the machine gun essentially could just mow people down. They also tended to use barbed wire. Barbed wire wasn't invented in World War I. It was invented many decades before in the 1800s. But that would make it very hard for someone to cross this period. They would get stuck in it. At which point these guys in the trench could shoot him down. And it would be very hard to shoot the guys in the trench. So it also, other than making it very deadly, it gave all the advantages to the defense. So any time someone wanted to gain ground, especially in one of the fronts where trench warfare was being used, it was a hugely, hugely, hugely bloody affair. The other technology that came into mainstream use in World War I was the use of gas, and in particular poison gas. And as you see these gentleman right over here, they're wearing gas masks because they're afraid that their opponent is going to use poison gas. And the benefit of gas in particular is let's say you have an artillery shell that you throw over and it doesn't hit anybody. But then it starts releasing a canister of-- let me do that in a different color-- it starts releasing a canister of gas. So the gas I've drawn in this purplish color. And so it doesn't have to be a direct hit. It can just linger there and infect that trench. And it'll affect everyone there. And gas warfare was-- actually, the Germans weren't first to use just gas warfare. But they were the first to use very lethal, what we would call poison, gas. And in particular in 1915, they used chlorine gas. So let me write that down. Chlorine gas, which immediately attacks the respiratory system of the person who inhales it. And they essentially choke to death within seconds or minutes. They also used phosgene gas because this did not stimulate that choking. And in some ways it could infiltrate the respiratory system even more. It had a delayed effect. So it would linger around. And you have the use of mustard gas. Mustard gas was very hard to protect against. It wouldn't immediately have you choke to death like chlorine gas. It would be severe blistering. It would essentially take you out of the battle. It was very hard to protect against. And it would also linger around in the trench. So it made the trench a very toxic environment to work in. So these are very, very, very ugly weapons. I mean, war itself is ugly. Weapons themselves are ugly. I mean, the machine gun is not a pleasant weapon. It can mow people down. But even folks who view something like a machine gun as an acceptable thing tend to view these things as particularly ugly things to use. Other weapons that showed up in World War I, we talked about this in other videos, but the tank started to become a factor. This right over here is an American tank. Obviously, with these treads it can go in tough terrain. It's heavily, heavily armored. When you talk about this trench type of thing, well, if you've got a big hulking beast, maybe that could roll through the barbed wire and take some beating and maybe eventually-- so you could imagine a tank over here, it could eventually-- and actually the tanks at this time did not have these big turrets. So they might have looked something more like that. But this might be able to actually be part of an offensive against a trench like this. We've talked extensively about submarine warfare in World War I. The Germans especially used it, essentially to have a chance against the dominant British Navy. Unrestricted U-boat warfare was one of the primary reasons given by the Americans as to why they entered the war on the side of the entente. These are World War I era US submarines, just to give an idea of how they actually looked. And in some ways the best foreshadowing of what would play a major, major, major role in future wars it was the bringing of heavier than air craft into the war. So in particular, we're talking about airplanes. So before this, you had stuff like balloons and zeppelins used for reconnaissance, used to see where we should aim the artillery, things like that. But now you had the Wright brothers only, frankly, several years before inventing the engine powered heavier than air craft. And at first the airplane, in the beginning stages the war, was used for reconnaissance. But as the technology improved, as the engines improved, it started to be used for bombing. It started to actually used for air to air combat. And out of all of the folks involved in air to air combat, this gentleman right over here is probably the most famous. Although you might not recognize his name. He's been turned into a bit of a caricature in the modern world. But this is Manfred von Richthofen. And he was a pilot for the Germans. And he's more famously known as the Red Baron. And he was called the Red Baron because he was actually a Baron. It is a title of nobility in imperial Germany. And he painted his plane red. So this is a picture of his plane right over here. So if I were to color it in-- I guess this isn't quite red. I should actually probably try to get a more reddish color. So maybe this is more of a red. So this is obviously a black and white photograph, but maybe if I color it in for you, you'll get more of the feeling of what his plane might have looked like. And it was a triplane. It had these three wings right over here, or three levels of wings. So whatever, his plane was red. That's why he was called the Red Baron. And he was famous for being the most lethal pilot in all of the war. He has 80 confirmed kills. He was able to down 80 enemy aircraft. So 80 confirmed wins, I guess you can say in combat, which is more than any other folks in World War I. So very, very famous pilot. He himself-- when you're talking about any of the combatants in World War I did not have a long life expectancy. The pilots especially this was a dangerous game. And he also, despite being the top pilot, the top ace, amongst all the pilots in World War I, he also ended up getting shot in the air in 1918. He literally got shot through the lungs and the heart. He somehow managed to land his plane. And when the people ran up to him, the accounts say, that his famous last words as he died, right when they ran up to him, was "kaput". So interesting. And on top of that, he's now been turned into a bit of a caricature. I mean, us in the West, in the US, we recognize the brand Red Baron pizza. It is named for the Red Baron, for Manfred von Richthofen. Kind of a strange name, I think, for a pizza company. I mean, he's not even Italian. But that's, I guess, what we know him for. But you see, this guy right over here looks a lot more like Tom Selleck than look like the real Manfred von Richthofen.

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Technology in World War I (video) | Khan Academy

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World War I shaped our world in many, many, many ways. And it's important to realize it wasn't that long ago. It was not even 100 years ago. But it was really the end of the more traditional empires.

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Kids learn about U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points during World War. These were his war aims and goals to establish world peace in the future.