American Studies

Lecture 1. New England Settlements, Puritanism

Puritanism
- Rise of Puritanism
- Significance for New England Colonies
- Significance for Today
-
Basic Protestant Beliefs
- The authority (primacy) of the Bible
- The centrality of Jesus
- The importance of faith for both personal and social life
- Witnessing responsibility of the church

Reasons
Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church (Papal schism 1378 - 1417)
• Indulgences (The Dominican friar Johannes Tetzel)
• Excessive displays of wealth and power by the church
Renaissance - The Rise of Humanism - Petrarch, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther
• The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power of Indulgences (All Saint’s Church at
Wittenberg, October 31, 1517)
• His religion, based on mystical conversion, tended to distrust reason; opposition to indulgences,
for him only a right personal relationship with God would bring salvation. Repentance is not an act
but a life-long habit of mind.

Main Objections to Roman Catholicism

• Corruption, monopoly, immorality of the Church; earthly possessions of the Church; infallibility
of the Pope, Virgin Mary, 7 sacraments; monasticism (sanctity of common life); purgatory (not
founded in the Bible); use of Latin in the liturgy
• Protestantism on the positive side meant reformation, establishing a better church according to the
normative authority of the Bible

Some Major Protestant Groups

• Lutherans or Evangelicals – fidelity to the Gospel
• Calvinists or Reformed – Central attention to Scripture, Sovereign grace of God
• Anglicans or Episcopalians (Agrees with R.C. on all points except papal infallibility)

1520 Luther’s pamphlet On Good Works - defined the noblest of all good works the belief in Christ
and he further affirmed the essential goodness of the ordinary trades and occupations of everyday
life (not just alms giving, fasting, prayers, asceticism or monastic life); Luther aimed at reforming
Roman Catholic church, rather than breaking away from it.

John Calvin 1509 - main beliefs: original sin, absolute sovereignty of God, predestination, salvation
by God’s grace alone, “Man is saved to virtue rather than by virtue.“

5 Principal Beliefs of Calvinism: TULIP

•Total depravity of humankind
•Unconditional Election
•Limited Atonement
•Irresistible Grace
•Perseverance of the Saints

The Southern and the Northern Colonies... and the others (1660; 1750)
The Thirteen Colonies
Jamestown (1607)

The New England Settlements – Plymouth Plantation

• Plymouth Plantation - Pilgrims; (35-67 strangers), Mayflower - a ship; 1620; separatists;
• Voyage: September – November 11, 66 days;
• December 21 stepped ashore at Plymouth rock;
• 25th Dec. built their first house
The New England Settlements - The People

Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1630)

• But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present
condition. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation, they
had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies,
no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.

It is recorded in scripture as a mercy to the apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the
barbarians showed no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they
met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows then otherwise.
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be
sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much
more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate
wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

Mayflower Compact (Nov. 11, 1620)

• In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread
Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King,
Defender of the Faith.
• Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of
our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by
these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and
Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and
furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and
equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought
most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due
submission and obedience.
• Cape Cod, the 11th of November, 1620, A.D.

Plymouth and Mayflower ‘Remade’

In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying 102
passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely
practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in
the "New World." After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped
anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson
River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are
now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.
In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from a
member of the Abenaki tribe who greeted them in English.
Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet
tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to
London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims,
weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish
in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the
Wampanoag, a local tribe, which endured for more than 50 years and remains one of the sole
examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.

The First Thanksgiving

• Jean Louis Gerome Ferris 1863-1930
• Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a
special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day
killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.
• At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, and many of the Indians coming
amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for
three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to
the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be
not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from
want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."
• Edward Winslow's account appears in: Heath, Dwight, A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth:
Mourt's Relation (1963); EyeWitness to America (1997); Morrison, Samuel Eliot, Builders of the
Bay Colony (1930).

In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William
Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native
American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit; the festival lasted for three days.

1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of
the United States; he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to
the country’s war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His
successors John Adams and James Madison also designated days of thanks during their
presidencies.
In 1817, NY became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday;
each celebrated it on a different day, however, and the American South remained largely unfamiliar
with the tradition.

In 1827, Sarah Joseph’s Hale — author, of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, launched
a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday; her the nickname the “Mother of
Thanksgiving.”

Abraham Lincoln 1863, at the height of the Civil War, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to
ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or
sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.” He scheduled
Thanksgiving for the final Thursday in November, and it was celebrated on that day every year until
1939, when F. D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in an attempt to spur retail sales during
the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s plan, known derisively as Franksgiving, was met with passionate
opposition, and in 1941 the president reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth
Thursday in November.

1621, at the first Thanksgiving:

• Seafood: Cod, Eel, Clams, Lobster
• Wild Fowl: Wild Turkey, Goose, Duck, Crane, Swan,
Partridge, Eagles
• Meat: Venison, Seal
• Grain: Wheat Flour, Indian Corn
• Vegetables: Pumpkin, Peas, Beans, Onions, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots
• Fruit: Plums, Grapes
• Nuts: Walnuts, Chestnuts, Acorns
• Herbs and Seasonings: Olive Oil, Liverwort, Leeks, Dried Currants, Parsnips

Massachusetts Bay Colony

• 1629 a group of Puritan merchants won the charter;
• The Massachusetts Bay company soon transformed itself into the Mass. Colonial
Government;
• 1630; 11 ships, about 1000 persons, families; livestock; non-conformists

A Model of Christian Charity

• John Winthrop’s sermon “Modell of Christian Charity”: a vision of a Biblical state, example for
the whole mankind;
• “a city upon a hill”

A Model of Christian Charity

The definition which the Scripture gives us of love is this: Love is the bond of perfection. First it is
a bond or ligament. Secondly, it makes the work perfect.
There is no body but consists of parts and that which knits these parts together,
gives the body its perfection, because it makes each part so contiguous to others
as thereby they do mutually participate with each other, both in strength and infirmity, in pleasure
and pain. To instance in the most perfect of all bodies: Christ and his Church make one body.

Major Aspects of Puritans

• bound by “covenant”
• communal
• patriarchal
• not egalitarian
• favored education
• pragmatic
• joyless or just earnest?
• intolerant
• negative attitude to art
• religious fervor slowly disappearing in subsequent generations
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis
• capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology.
• The Calling – For Luther, as for most mediaeval theologians, it had normally meant the state of
life in which the individual had been set to Heaven, and against which it was impious to rebel. To
the Calvinist, Weber argues, the calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a
strenuous and exacting enterprise to be chosen by himself, and to the pursuers of religious
responsibility...labor is not merely an economic means: it is a spiritual end.
• The virtues of the elect: diligence, thrift, sobriety, prudence – are the most reliable passport to
commercial prosperity.

Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address

• We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom-freedom of speech, freedom
of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs [protection].
[...]
• The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city
upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he
imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man.
He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was
looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't
know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud
city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all
kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and
creativity. [...]
• After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow
has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have
freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward
home.

Chapter 2.
Transplantations and borderlands - the Early Chesapeake, founding of Jamestown, Jamestown’s
early ordeal, John Smith, reorganisation and expansion, the growth of New England, the restoration
colonies, borderlands and middle grounds, the development of empire

The colonists suffered from the climate, the lack of food, and the spread of disease. Also they
struggled with the growing hostility of the neighbouring Indians.
The Europeans tried to isolate themselves from the Indians and created enclosed societies.
“Middle ground” - American society was from the beginning a fusion of many cultures (Native
American tribes, colonists, traders and explorers from Spain, France and the Netherlands,
immigrants from Africa and other parts of Europe.
1606 - James I, the London Company, a colonising expedition headed for Virginia, 144 men, 3
ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant
1607 - set sail for America into Chesapeake Bay, only 104 men, up a river they named the James,
established colony on a peninsula, called it Jamestown
The initial colonists were vulnerable to local diseases

The English colonization of North America was part of a larger effort by several European nations
to expand the reach of their increasingly commercial societies. Indeed, for many years, the British
Empire in America was among the smallest and weakest of the imperial ventures there, over-
shadowed by the French to the north and the Spanish to the south. In the British colonies along the
Atlantic seaboard, new agricultural and commercial societies gradually emerged-those in the South
centered on the cultivation of tobacco and cotton and were reliant on slave labor; those in the
northern colonies centered on more traditional food crops and were based mostly on free labor.
Substantial trading centers emerged in such cities as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston, and a grow- ing proportion of the population became prosperous and settled in these
increasingly complex communities. By the early eighteenth century, English settlement had spread
from northern New England (in what is now Maine) south into Georgia. But this growing British
Empire coexisted with, and often found itself in conflict with, the presence of other Europeans-most
notably the Span- ish and the French-in other areas of North America. In these borderlands,
societies did not assume the settled, prosperous form they were taking in the Tidewater and New
England. They were raw, sparsely populated settlements in which Europeans, including over time
increasing numbers of English, had to learn to accommodate not only one another but also the still-
substantial Indian tribes with whom they shared these interior lands. By the middle of the eighteenth
century, there was a significant European presence across a broad swath of North America-from
Florida to Maine, and from Texas to Mexico to California-only a relatively small part of it
controlled by the British. But changes were under way within the British Empire that would soon
lead to its dominance through a much larger area of North America.

Chapter 3. Society and culture in provincial America

Between the 1650s and the 1750s, the English colonies in America grew steadily in population, in
the size of their economies, and in the sophistication and diversity-of their cultures. Although most
white Americans in the 1750s still believed that they were fully a part of the British Empire, they
were in fact living in a world that had become very different from that of England. Many distinct
societies developed in the colonies, but the greatest distinction was between the colonies of the
North and those of the South. In the North, society was dominated by relatively small family farms
and by towns and cities of growing size. A thriving commercial class was developing, and with it an
increasingly elaborate urban culture. In the South, there were many family farms as well. But there
were also large plantations cultivating tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton for export. By the late
seventeenth century, these plantations were relying heavily on African workers who had been
brought to the colonies forcibly as slaves. There were few significant towns and cities in the South,
and little commerce other than the marketing of crops. South The colonies did, however, have much
in common. Most white Americans accepted common assumptions about racial inequality. That
enabled them to tolerate the enslavement of African men and women and to justify a campaign of
displacement and often violence against Native Americans. Most white Americans (and, in different
ways, most nonwhite Americans as well) were deeply religious. The Great Awakening, therefore,
had a powerful impact throughout the colonies. And most white colonists shared a belief in certain
basic principles of law and politics, which they considered embedded in the English constitution.
Their interpretation of that constitution, however, was becoming increasingly different from that of
the Parliament in England and was laying the groundwork for future conflict.

Chapter 4. The empire in transition

The end of the French and Indian War altered the imperial relationship forever, in ways that
ultimately drove Americans to rebel against English rule and begin a war for independence. To the
British, the lesson of the French and Indian War was that the colonies in America needed firmer
control from London. The empire was now much bigger, and it needed better administration. The
war had produced great debts, and the Americans-among the principal beneficiaries of the war-
should help pay them. the British tried one strategy after another to tighten control over and extract
money from the colonies. To the colonists, this effort to tighten imperial rule appeared both a
betrayal of the sacrifices they had made in the war and a challenge to their long-developing
assumptions about the rights of English people to rule themselves. Gradually, white Americans
came to see in the British policies evidence of a conspiracy to establish tyranny in the New World.
And so throughout the 1760s and 1770s, the colonists developed an ideology of resistance and
defiance. By the time the first shots were fired in the American Revolution in 1775, Britain and
America had come to view each other as two very different societies. Their differences, which came
to seem irreconcilable, propelled them into a war that would change the course of both countries'
history.

Lecture 2. Introduction to American Studies

Historical dates
August 6, 1945 - the 1st use of nuclear weapon
• Hiroshima
• Hiroshima peace memorial
• Designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel

• Norse (Vikings) - the first Europeans - L’Anse aux Meadows c. 1000 A.D.
Other claimants?
• Egyptians
• Phoenicians
• Welsh
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Polynesians

Christopher Columbus
• Cristoforo Colombo
• Cristóbal Colón
• Christopher Columbus
• c. 1451-1506
• Generally believed to have been born in Genoa (now Italy)
• Some evidence for other possibilities (e.g. Barcelona)
• Some claim he was raised in Santa Margherita
• Born in Santa Margarita (Italy)
• Discovered the Americas
• October 12, 1492
• A group of 3 ships - The Niña, Pinta, Santa María
• Lands on an island in the Caribbean and named the island “San Salvador” and claims the
island in the name of the king and Queen of Spain by the right of discovery

The Colombian exchange

Term developed in 1972 by the environmental historian Alfred Crosby
Old World -> New World
• Technology (iron and other smelted metals, gunpowder and firearms, plow)
• People (16th to 19th century - Europeans and Africans)
• Diseases
New World -> Old World
• Gold, silver, animal furs
• Maize, potatoes, tobacco

The beginnings of globalisation

What are Columbus’s words?

“It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion
that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion”
12 October 1492, Journal of the First Voyage
“So that they are good to be ordered about, to work and sow, and do all that may be necessary, and
to build towns, and they should be taught to go about clothed and to adopt our customs.”
16 December 1492, Journal of the First Voyage
“From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold, as
well as a quantity of Brazil [timber]. If the information I have is correct, it appears that we could
sell four thousand slaves, who might be worth twenty millions and more”
September 1498, Journal of the Third Voyage

Columbus’s 4 voyages and their impact

• Spanish colonise the Caribbean islands
• They give the indigenous people into labour (gold, silver, agriculture)
• Resistance is severely punished
• Estimates for the Taino popular for Hispaniola in 1492 range from 100,000 to several million

They [the Spanish] would erect long gibbets ... and bind thirteen of the Indians at one time, in
honour and reverence, they said, of Our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, and put firewood
around it and burn the Indians alive.

The image of “discovery”

• Indigenous people are frightened, small, uncivilised and more appealed to the exotic nature
• Colonists are huge, aggressive, in military armour, with modern technology
• “Columbus, as he first arrives in India, is received by the inhabitants and honored with the
bestowing of many gifts”
• “He called her but once and thenceforth she was always awake”

The dates of American history

• August 20, 1619 - first African workers in Virginia, beginning of American slavery
• a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of
Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America
was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would
be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.

John Hector St. John De Crevecoeur (1735-1815)

Born in Caen, Normandy, he immigrated to America in 1755
In 1782, he published Letters from An American Farmer

Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one
day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims.
1835: Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America: First published in French as De la démocratie en Amérique in two volumes
(Volume 1–1835, Volume 2–1840)
“Everything is extraordinary in America, the social condition of the inhabitants as well as the laws;
but the soil upon which these institutions are founded is more extraordinary than all the rest. When
the earth was given to men by the Creator, the earth was inexhaustible; but men were weak and
ignorant, and when they had learned to take advantage of the treasures which it contained, they
already covered its surface and were soon obliged to earn by the sword an asylum for repose and
freedom. Just then North America was discovered, as if it had been kept in reserve by the Deity and
had just risen from beneath the waters of the Deluge.”

“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no
democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their
exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds
from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to
neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have
only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the
American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything
about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids
him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven.”

What are some possible causes?

• “City Upon a Hill”
• American Exceptionalism
• Manifest Destiny
• The Frontier Hypothesis
• The Melting Pot
• Race-based Slavery

1. The oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the USA - Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, it has
been always occupied
2. The oldest continuously-occupied European-established settlement in the USA - Florida,
St.Augustine (1565)
3. The oldest state capital - Santa Fe, New Mexico (1607), established by the Spanish

Regional histories and their non-British elements are important

• Spanish and Mexicans impacts in the West and Southwest
• French impacts in Louisiana, in the Mississippi River Valley and Great Lakes region
• Dutch impacts in what is now New York
• German impacts in eastern Pennsylvania and the Ohio River valley
• Russian impacts in Alaska
• Italian and Irish impacts in major American port cities like New York City, Boston, New
Orleans and San Francisco

John Winthrop founded the colony of Massachusetts Bay and was the colony's first governor, a
position he held almost continuously until 1649.
As a leader of the colony Winthrop tried to create a society based in a moral code that was rooted in
the Bible. His notion that New England was to be seen as a “city upon a hill” became a larger ideal
in American history, as Americans came to see themselves as models for the rest of the world, not
so much in religious beliefs as in their Democratic ideals.
He and his colleagues were intolerant of dissenters and insisted upon a strict adherence to Puritan
religious beliefs. His rigid standards of conduct placed him a odds with British authorities from
time to time, perhaps foreshadowing Massachusetts as a hotbed of rebellion during the pre-
revolutionary era.

Chapter 5. The American Revolution

Between a small, inconclusive battle on a village green in New England in 1775 and a momentous
surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the American people fought a great and terrible war against the
mightiest military nation in the world. Few would have predicted in 1775 that the makeshift armies
of the colonies could withstand the armies and navies of the British Empire. But a combination of
luck, brilliance, determination, costly errors by the British, and timely aid from abroad allowed the
Patriots, as they began to call themselves, to make full use of the advantages of fighting on their
home soil and to frustrate British designs. The war was not just a historic military event. It was also
a great political one, for it propelled the colonies to unite, to organise, and to declare their
independence. Having done so, they fought with even greater determination, defending now not just
a set of principles, but an actual, fledgling nation. By the end of the war, they had created new
governments at both the state and national level and had begun experimenting with new political
forms. The war was also important for its effects on American society-for the way it shook the
existing social order; for the way it caused women to question their place in society; and for the way
it spread notions of liberty and freedom throughout a society that in the past had mostly been rigidly
hierarchical. Even African American slaves absorbed some of the ideas of the Revolution, although
it would be many years before they would be in any position to make much use of them.
Victory in the American Revolution solved many of the problems of the new nation, but it also
produced others. What should the United States do about its relations with the Indians and with its
neighbours to the north and south? What should it do about the distribution of western lands? What
should it do about slavery? How should it balance its commitment to liberty with its need for order?
These questions bedevilled the new national government in its first years of existence

Chapter 6. The constitution and the new republic

The writing of the Constitution of 1787 was the single most important political event in the history
of the United States. In creating a federal system of dispersed authority-authority divided among
national and state governments, and among an executive, a legislature, and a judiciary—the young
nation sought to balance its need for an effective central government against its fear of concentrated
and despotic power. The ability of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to compromise
revealed the deep yearning among them for a stable political system. The same willingness to
compromise allowed the greatest challenge to the ideals of the new democracy-slavery-to survive
intact. The writing and ratifying of the Constitution settled some questions about the shape of the
new nation. The first twelve years under the government created by the Constitution solved others.
And yet by the year 1800, a basic disagreement about the future of the nation remained unresolved
and was creating bitter divisions and conflicts within the political world. The election of Thomas
Jefferson to the presidency that year opened a new chapter in the nation's public history. It also
brought to a close, at least temporarily, savage political conflicts that had seemed to threaten the
nation's future.
Lecture 3. Identity the Declaration of Independence
National identity
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 1983

Language
There is no official language in the US.
States with English-only laws - California (English is an official language)
• Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish/Mennonites)
• Cajun French (Louisiana)
• Spanish - Rio Grande Valley 1598, San Miguel Chapel, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1610
• Chinese - California 1849, Chinatown, San Francisco

Regional diversity that reflects local history and immigration

Various food traditions in:
• South - cornbread, barbecue
• Midwest - German, Polish, Greek
• Northeast - Jewish and Italian
• West - Mexican and Asian

Thanksgiving
• Tradition goes back to the 17th century “Pilgrims”
• 4th Thursday November
• Dated fixed by Abraham Lincoln during Civil War
Traditions are community based.

American national identity is based on two things:

• Flag - notes of “patriotism” (you declare your national identity)
The pledge of allegiance - originally written by Francis Bellamy in 1892
• “Charters of Freedom”
• Words “under God” added in 1954
• I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which
it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
⁃ Declaration of Independence
⁃ Constitution
⁃ Bill of Rights
NO PRESIDENTIAL PORTRAIT(S) IN US CLASSROOMS

Declaration of Independence
• Copy of the original kept at the National Archives
• Together with the Constitution and Bill of Rights they form the “Charters of Freedom”
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.
Thomas Jefferson, a spokesman for democracy, was an American Founding Father, the principal
author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States
(1801–1809).

Thomas Jefferson, quintessential Enlightenment figure

• Author of Declaration of Independence
• Founder of University of Virginia (1825)
• Author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom
• Designed and ran Monticello
• Notes on the State of Virginia 1781
• A comprehensive natural history
• Slave owner, father of slaves
• TOMBSTONE
• ISAAC JEFFERSON (1775-1850) IN 1845
• sold Sandy to Colo [Colonel] Chas [Charles] Lewis for £100 paiable [sic] in June. From
which deduct £9.4.8. my present debt with him; leaves £90.15.4. to be sec’d [secured]

Sally Hemmings
As early as 1802 rumors existed that Jefferson had fathered children by one or more of his slaves
In 1802, the journalist James Thomson Callender wrote in the newspaper The Richmond Recorder,
“The PRESIDENT AGAIN. It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor,
keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is
SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable
resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age...We hear that
our young MULLATO PRESIDENT begins to give himself a great number of airs of importance in
Charlottesville, and the neighbourhood...By this wench, Sally, our president has had several
children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the
story, and not a few who know it...The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at
Monticello.”

‘A PHILOSOPHIC COCK’
Attributed to James Akin, Newburyport, Massachusetts, ca. 1804.
“Tis not a set of features or complexion or tincture of a Skin that I admire”
Joseph Addison (1672- 1719), Cato, Act 1
Jefferson discussing the Missouri question and slavery to John Holmes April 22, 1820:
“But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice
is in one scale, and self- preservation in the other.”

Lecture 4. Social change in antebellum America

“USA” - one nation
American society in 1800
Tomas Jefferson - a president
Seven out of ten non-enslaved Americans worked the land
Jeffersonian ideal of the “yeoman farmer”
Notes on the State of Virginia:
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people,
whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”.
Most Americans were subsistence farmers (for supporting oneself)
Only 1 in 9 American adults earned a wage
Individual homesteads - self-reliant (family farms)
No direct government control
No currency - no economic system
“Real America”
Sarah

Basic principles and questions

Changing economic systems impacted social changes
What were the basic social and economic units in the pre-Industrial era? - Family
How does industrialisation affect these units? - slavery approach
These changes were more profound in the North than South, which would lead to diverging
societies in North and South

Stability in the South

Three class system developed in the colonial era
Plantation / large property owners
Subsistence farmers - white (non-slaveholding small landowners)
Slaves
Very little immigration into or emigration out of south - internal movement of peoples
From Chesapeake/Atlantic seaboard to the Cotton Belt
From frontier areas to areas considered unsuitable for slave based agriculture systems
This system would basically unchanged until the 1960s, with the one major difference

Other factors influencing economic and social change

• Lack of a developments transportation network (slow journeys and high cost)
• In 1817, how long did it take to ship goods overland from New York City to Cincinnati, Ohio?
(Today this journey takes about 11 hrs by car)
• In 1816, it cost $9 to ship ton of goods from Europe to the USA.

How would these facts impact society?

• Social impacts on the family (division of labour and role of women, social structure of the
family)
• Economic impacts (barter economy ->

High cost of manufactured goods -> reduced cost

Coffee mill in 1813 cost $5 -> today about $1000

Changes to the system

• Increasing manufacturing reduces cost of goods and increases number of wage earners,
increasing urbanisation
• Increasing demand for manufactured goods from labourers and farmers
• Wage earners need to be fed providing new market to farmers
• Improving transportation network reduced costs and travel time

Why?
• Road network - national road, turnpikes,
• Canals
• River transportation (Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont 1807)
• Railroads (much more intense in the North, route for transportation railroad caught up in the
politics of slavery)

The Canal Era (1825-1860)

Changing face of America
By 1860 only 4 out of 10 Americans were farmers

Other changes
• Newspapers (New York Tribune 1841); change in the number of newspapers in the United
States
• Magazines (National magazines - Harper’s Weekly 1857

Impact on the family

• Family no longer economic unit
• Differentiation of spheres (men - economic, women - social/domestic, Domestic servants in
the North - number grew twice as fast as number of families)
• Cult of Domesticity
• Middle class ideal versus working class reality
A woman role - to raise children; The American women’s home, domestic science

Harriet Beecher Stowe rose to fame in 1851 with the publication of her best-selling book, Uncle
Tom's Cabin, which highlighted the evils of slavery, angered the slaveholding South, and inspired
pro-slavery copy-cat works in defense of the institution of slavery.
Reality for working-class women
Lowell mill girls at work

Chapter 7. The Jeffersonian era

Thomas Jefferson called his election to the presidency the "Revolution of 1800," and his supporters
believed that his victory would bring a dramatic change in the character of the nation-a retreat from
Hamilton's dreams of a powerful, developing nation and a return to an ideal of a simple agrarian
republic. But American society was changing rapidly, making it virtually impossible for the
Jeffersonian dream to prevail. The nation's population was expanding and diversifying. Its cities
were growing, and its commercial life was becoming ever more important. In 1803, Jefferson
himself made one of the most important contributions to the growth of the United States: the
Louisiana Purchase, which dramatically expanded the physical boundaries of the nation—and
which began extending white settlement deeper into the continent. In the process, it greatly widened
the battles between Euro- peans and Native Americans. The growing national pride and commercial
ambitions of the United States gradually created another serious conflict with Great Britain: the War
of 1812, a war that was settled finally in 1814 on terms at least mildly favorable to the United
States. By then, the bitter party rivalries that had characterized the first years of the republic had to
some degree subsided, and the nation was poised to enter what became known, quite inaccurately,
as the "era of good feelings."

Chapter 8. Varieties of American nationalism

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, a vigorous nationalism increasingly came to characterize the
political and popular culture of the United States. In all regions of the country, white men and
women celebrated the achievements of the early leaders of the republic, the genius of the
Constitution, and the success of the nation in withstanding serious challenges both from without and
within. Party divisions faded. But the broad nationalism of the so-called era of good feelings
disguised some deep divisions. Indeed, the character of American nationalism differed substantially
from one region, and one group, to another. Battles continued between those who favored a strong
central government committed to advancing the economic development of the nation and those who
wanted a decentralization of power to open opportunity to more people. Battles continued as well
over the role of slavery in American life-and in particular over the place of slavery in the new
western territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 postponed the day of reckoning on that
issue-but only for a time

Lecture 5. The Age of Reforms

Various Attempts at Reform in the 1840s

• Utopian Projects
• New Religions
• Educational Reforms
• Temperance Movement
• Feminist Movement
• Abolitionism

Territorial expansion - opportunity land

Industrial revolution - telegraph (communication), rails (transportation), textiles
Midwest - agriculture production
Slavery

Utopian Projects: Brook Farm

• Founded by George Ripley 1841/7, Roxbury, Mass.
• Stress on integration of mental and physical labour, social harmony, communal life, positive
value of leisure

Utopian Projects: Oneida Community

• John Humphrey Noyes, 1848
• Religious idea “the Kingdom of God had come”
• The economic base - agricultural and industrial
• Principles: complex marriage, male continence, ascending fellowship, mutual criticism
• Big Hall - the whole community meeting
• Dining room
• Common clothing

New Religions - Mormonism

• Founded by Joseph Smith, 1830
• The Book of Mormon
• Salt Lake City - the centre of their religion (Utah)

The Shakers
• Founded in England as an offshoot of Quakers, 1772
• Committed to celibacy
• Believed in gender equality

Protestant Revivalism: Methodists or Baptists

• Up to 20% of the population (women, African Americans)

Temperance Movement
XVIII Amendment - 1918
XXI Amendment - 1933

Feminist Movement
• 1848 Seneca Falls, NY - the 1st public gathering debating the issue of women’s rights
• Elizabeth Candy Stanton
• Susan B. Anthony
• The Declaration of Sentiments - is now known as the Seneca Falls Convention.
• The principal author of the Declaration was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who modeled it upon the
United States Declaration of Independence. She was a key organizer of the convention along
with Lucretia Coffin Mott, and Martha Coffin Wright.
• the document was the "grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious
rights of women."

Abolitionism
• The American Colonisation Society (1817)
• national organization dedicated to promoting the manumission of the enslaved and the
settlement of free blacks in West Africa, specifically in the colony of Liberia
• John Randolph
• Henry Clay

Prominent Abolitionists
• William Lloyd Garrison, Boston, The Liberator, 1831, separation of the North, moral appeals
• Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life, 1845
• Sojourner Truth John Brown
• Uncle Tom’s Cabinet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852

The Pro-Slavery Side

• Thomas Roderick Dew
• George Fitzhugh

The Underground Railroad

• Black people

Educational Reform
• Horace Mann reorganised Mass, school system
• In 1861 94% in the North

Transcendentalism
• Nature, Divinity School Address, The American Scholar, Self-Reliance
• Positive view of mankind
Chapter 9. Jacksonian America
The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 reflected the emergence of a new political world.
Throughout the American nation, the laws governing political participation were loosening, and the
number of people permitted to vote (which eventually included most white males, but almost no one
else) was increasing. Along with this expansion of the electorate was emerging a new spirit of party
politics. Jackson set out as president to entrench his party, the Democrats, in power. A fierce
defender of the West and a sharp critic of what he considered the stranglehold of the aristocratic
East on the nation's economic life, he sought to limit the role of the federal government in economic
affairs and worked to destroy the Bank of the United States, which he considered a corrupt vehicle
of aristocratic influence. And he confronted the greatest challenge yet to American unity-the
nullification crisis of 1832-1833-with a strong assertion of the power and importance of the Union.
These positions won him broad popularity and ensured his reelection in 1832 and the election of his
designated successor, Martin Van Buren, in 1836. But a new coalition of anti-Jacksonians, who
called themselves the Whigs, launched a powerful new party that used much of the same anti-elitist
rhetoric to win support for their own, much more nationalist program. Their emergence culminated
in the campaign of 1840 with the election of the first Whig president

Chapter 10. America’s economic revolution

Between the 1820s and the 1850s, the American economy experienced the beginnings of an
industrial revolution-a change that transformed almost every area of life in fundamental ways. The
American industrial revolution was a result of many things: population growth, advances in
transportation and communication, new technologies that spurred the development of factories and
mass production, the recruiting of a large industrial labor force, and the creation of corporate bodies
capable of managing large enterprises. The new economy expanded the ranks of the wealthy, helped
create a large new middle class, and introduced high levels of inequality. Culture in the
industrializing areas of the North changed, too, as did the structure and behavior of the family, the
role of women, and the way people used their leisure time and encountered popular culture. The
changes helped widen the gap in experience and understanding between the generation of the
Revolution and the generation of the mid-nineteenth century. They also helped widen the gap
between North and South.

Lecture 6. Sectionalism and Constitunional Crises, Slavery

• Manifest Destiny
• Mexican – American War
• Sectional Issues and Growing Radicalism Slavery
• Gettysburg Address

Manifest Destiny
• was the idea that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent of
North America.
• The ideology inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native
population
• US President James K. Polk (1845-1849) is the leader
• inflamed sectional tensions over slavery, which ultimately led to the Civil War.

Missouri Compromise 1820

• The question of balance of power in Congress between slave and free states
• The legislation was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free
state.
• this law prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory
• In 1854, the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act
• Three years later the Missouri Compromise was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme
Court in the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress did not have the authority to
prohibit slavery in the territories.

Mexican-American War
• (April 1846–February 1848)
• stemming from the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over
whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim).
• the United States’ acquisition of more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory
extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean.

Treaty of Guadelupe Hilalgo

Mexico ceded to the United States - New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and
western Colorado

The Compromise of 1850

• five laws
• the issue of slavery and territorial expansion
• In 1849 California requested permission to enter the Union as a free state, potentially
upsetting the balance between the free and slave states in the U.S. Senate

The Compromise of 1850

• The Fugitive Slave Act was amended.
• Slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished.
• California entered the Union as a free state.
• A Territorial government was created in Utah.
• A boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico was settled that also established a
territorial government in New Mexico.

Fugitive Slave Act

• fugitives could not testify on their own behalf, nor were they permitted a trial by jury
• The severity of the 1850 measure led to abuses and defeated its purpose...
• The number of abolitionists increased, the operations of the Underground Railroad became
more efficient, and new personal-liberty laws were enacted in many Northern states

Stowe ́s Uncle Tom ́s Cabin

• was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the
Bible.
• credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s.
• apocryphal story arose of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe at the start of the Civil War and
declaring, "So this is the little lady who started this great war."
Kansas Nebraska Act - 1854
• On May 30, 1854 Congress passed the Act proposed by Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen
Douglas and by President Franklin Pierce.
• The act organized governments on territory that belonged to the Louisiana Purchase, Kansas
and Nebraska, these new territories would be open to decide on the inclusion or exclusion of
slavery by popular sovereignty.
• The Act nullified the 1820 Missouri
• Compromise which served as a limitation on the spread of slavery.

"Bleeding Kansas"
Anti-slavery and pro-slavery supporters rushed to Kansas to impact the outcome of the elections.
Antislavery supporters held elections but were charged with fraud by pro-slavery settlers. When
elections were held by pro-slavery supporters, anti-slavery settlers refused to vote. This led to two
administrations being established in Kansas and the ensuing violence which is known as “Bleeding
Kansas”.

Dred Scott Decision 1857

• Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford
• a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was
prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom;
• African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States;
• the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and
north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional.
• The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil
war.

John Brown ́s Attack at Harper ́s Ferry (WV) 1859

• John Brown, (1800 – 1859), a militant American abolitionist whose raid on the federal arsenal
at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), in 1859 made him a martyr to the
antislavery cause and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the
American Civil War (1861–65).
• In 1855 he followed five of his sons to the Kansas Territory to assist antislavery forces
struggling for control there, a conflict that became known as Bleeding Kansas.

The Last Moments of John Brown

• In the summer of 1859, with an armed band of 16 white and 5 Black abolitionists, Brown set
up a headquarters in a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry,
the site of a federal armoury
• On the night of October 16, he quickly took the armoury and rounded up some 60 leading
men of the area as hostages.
• in the hope that escaped slaves would join his rebellion, forming an “army of emancipation”
with which to liberate their fellow slaves.

"The Peculiar Institution"

• 3⁄4 of Southern whites owned no slaves, yet even they defended the institution
• Differences in slave population (S.Carolina 57%, Delaware 1.5%)
• Small and large plantations
Chapter 11. Cotton, slavery and the old South
While the North was creating a complex and rapidly developing commercial- industrial economy,
the South was expanding its agrarian economy without making many fundamental changes in the
region's character. Great migrations took many southern whites, and even more African American
slaves, into new agricultural areas in the Deep South, where they created a booming "cotton
kingdom." The cotton economy created many great fortunes, and some modest ones. It also
entrenched the planter class as the dominant force within southern society-both as owners of vast
numbers of slaves and as patrons, creditors, landlords, and marketers for the large number of poor
whites who lived on the edge of the planter world. The differences between the North and the South
were a result of differences in natural resources, social structure, climate, and culture. Above all,
they were the result of the existence within the South of an unfree labor system that prevented the
kind of social fluidity that an industrializing society usually requires. Within that system, however,
slaves created a vital, independent culture and religion in the face of white subjugation.

Chapter 12. Antebellum culture and reform

The rapidly changing society of antebellum America encouraged interest in a wide range of
reforms. Writers, artists, intellectuals, and others drew heavily from new European notions of
personal liberation and fulfillment-a set of ideas often known as romanticism. But they also strove
to create a truly American culture. The literary and artistic life of the nation expressed the rising
interest in personal liberation in giving individuals the freedom to explore their own souls and to
find in nature a full expression of their divinity. It also called attention to some of the nation's
glaring social problems. Reformers, too, made use of the romantic belief in the divinity of the
individual. They flocked to religious revivals, worked on behalf of such "moral" reforms as
temperance, supported education, and articulated some of the first statements of modern feminism.
And in the North, they rallied against slavery. Out of this growing antislavery movement emerged a
new and powerful phenomenon: abolitionism, which insisted on immediate emancipation of slaves.
The abolitionist movement galvanized much of the North and contributed greatly to the growing
schism between North and South

Lecture 7. Reconstruction 1865 - 1877

Reconstruction Issues
• Punishment of the South, Retribution
• Readmission of the rebel states
• The status and conditions of the freed slaves

13th Amendment – Abolishing of Slavery, 1865

Recomended: Lincoln (2012)

• InJanuary 1865, United States
• President Abraham Lincoln expects the Civil War to end soon, with the defeat of the
Confederate States. He is concerned that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation may be
discarded by the courts after the war and that the proposed Thirteenth Amendment will be
defeated by the returning slave states. He feels it imperative to pass the amendment
beforehand, to remove any possibility that freed slaves might be re-enslaved.
Freedmen Bureau, 1865
• an agency of the War Department to assist people emancipated from slavery in obtaining
relief, land, jobs, fair treatment, and education

Lincoln’s Plan
• oath-taken by 10%, those loyal voters would set up a state government,
• suffrage to blacks - educated, property & served in union army

Black Codes (1865, 1866)

• enacted immediately after the American Civil War, though varying from state to state, were all
intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labour, and all continued to assume the inferiority
of the freed slaves.
• There were vagrancy laws that declared a black person to be vagrant if unemployed and
without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a
term of labour if unable to pay the fine.

Ku-Klux-Klan (1865)
• The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club
by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They apparently derived the name from the
Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English “circle”; “Klan” was added for the sake of
alliteration and Ku Klux Klan emerged.
• The organization quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance to
Radical Reconstruction. Klan members sought the restoration of white supremacy through
intimidation and violence aimed at the newly enfranchised Black freedmen.

Sharecropping
• a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of
the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and
ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities.

Carpetbagger
• a derogatory term for an individual from the North who relocated to the South during the
Reconstruction period (1865–77), following the American Civil War. The term was applied to
Northern politicians and financial adventurers whom Southerners accused of coming to the
South to use the newly enfranchised freedmen as a means of obtaining office or profit.

Scallawag
• a pejorative term for a white Southerner who supported the federal plan of Reconstruction or
who joined with black freedmen and the so-
• called carpetbaggers in support of Republican Party policies.
• The origin of the term is unclear, but it was known in the United States from at least the
1840s, at first denoting a worthless farm animal and then denoting a worthless person.

14th Amendment – Citizenship, Equal Rights, 1868

15th Amendment – Voting Rights, 1870
• Voting rights can’t be denied based on race, color or previous condition of servitude
The Grant Administration, 1869-1877
• Growing dissatisfaction with Reconstruction
• corruption
• expanding education
• Democrats in the South growing stronger

The Compromise of 1877

• resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election between Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden
and Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes.
• The disputed states: Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Oregon
• Democrats agreed that Rutherford B. Hayes would become president in exchange for the
withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the granting of home rule in the South as
well as for massive federal aid, e.g., for the Texas and Pacific railroad

Jim Crow South

• President Hayes’ withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina marked a
major turning point in American political history, effectively ending the Reconstruction Era
and issuing in the system of Jim Crow.

Modern Times in the USA “The Gilded Age”

USA:The Land of Techno-utopianism
Bill Gates (1955)
Mark Zuckerberg (1984)
Elon Musk (1971)
Jeff Bezos (1964)
Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877)
Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919)
J. D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
J. P. Morgan (1837 – 1913)
Promomtory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869
Advances in Transportation
Introduction of Time Zones
Urbanisation - Marshall Fields Building, Chicago 1898, Chicago 1903
Carl Sandurg: Chicago (an Extract)

Migrations in the Late 19th Century

̶ Farmers to the cities
̶ Southern blacks to Northern Cities
̶ Immigration from abroad
̶ Rapid development of the cities - a sense of disorder (also elsewhere)

Advances in Architecture:
Sullivan and Adler: Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1887-89
Sullivan and Adler: Guaranty Building, Buffalo, 1894-95
The Brooklyn Bridge (1883)
Louis Sullivan’ Department store: Carson, Pirie, Scott, Building, Chicago, 1899.
A New Consumer Culture: Sears and Roebuck
Vanderbilt (railroad magnate) and Rockefeller (Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil
industry and was the first great U.S)

• The Monopolies and their Power

• Social Cleavages: The Gilded Age
• A Summer “Cottage”
• Tenement Housing
• Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives
• Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) - Conspicuous consumption -
Conspicuous leisure
• Marble House
• Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives
• Floor Plan – Riverside Buildings
• Child Labor

Patterns of Thought & Ideology

̶ Social Darwinism, i.e. survival of the fittest
̶ Laissez-faire Capitalism
̶ Horatio Alger myth
̶ Philantropy

Horatio Alger, Jr., “from rags to riches”

Philanthropy
Philantropy: Vanderbilt University

Captains of Industry vs. Robber Barons?

• Vanderbilt:
• Helped develop Grand Central station
• Allowed business to easily ship goods E – W
• Philanthropist: Donations to Colleges/Universities
• Contributed to L.I. mansions built during the Gilded Age
• Secret Rebates given to "best" customers
• Refused customers from other railroads
• Drove competition out of business by slashing prices
• Consolidated smaller railroads to controll the industry

The Rise of Big Business: Types of Integration

• stock companies - limited liability
• integration of the corporation - horizontal, vertical
• (J.P. Morgan’s US Steel Corporation)
• problem of monopoly (e.g. Standard Oil Company)
• 1% of corporations controlled more than 33% of the manufacturing

Political Graft, Corruption

̶ “honest” graft vs. corruption
̶ machine politics,
̶ New York’s Tammany Hall
̶ (A day in the life of a local boss)
Chapter 13. The impending crisis
In the decades following the War of 1812, a vigorous nationalism pervaded much of American life,
helping to smooth over the growing differences among the very distinct societies emerging in the
United States. During the 1850s, however, the forces that had worked to hold the nation together in
the past fell victim to new and much more divisive pressures. Driving the sectional tensions of the
1850s was a battle over national policy toward the place of slavery within the western territories.
Should slavery be permitted in the new states? And who should decide? There were strenuous
efforts to craft compromises and solutions to this dilemma: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-
Nebraska Act of 1854, and others. But despite these efforts, positions on slavery continued to
harden in both the North and South. Bitter battles in the territory of Kansas over whether to permit
slavery there; growing agitation by abolitionists in the North and pro-slavery advocates in the
South; the Supreme Court's controversial Dred Scott decision in 1857; the popularity of Uncle
Tom's Cabin throughout the decade; and the emergence of a new political party-the Republican
Party-openly and centrally opposed to slavery: all worked to destroy the hopes for compromise and
push the South toward secession. In 1860, all pretense of common sentiment collapsed when no
political party presented a presidential candidate capable of attracting national support. The
Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a little- known politician recognized for his
eloquent condemnations of slavery in a Senate race two years earlier. The Democratic Party split
apart, with its northern and southern wings each nominating different candidates. Lincoln won the
election easily, but with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. And almost immediately after his
victory, the states of the South began preparing to secede from the Union

Chapter 14. The Civil War

The American Civil War began with high hopes and high ideals on both sides. In the North and the
South alike, thousands of men enthusiastically enlisted in local regiments and went off to war. Four
years later, over 600,000 of them were dead and many more maimed and traumatized for life. A
fight for "principles" and "ideals"-a fight few people had thought would last more than a few
months-had become one of the longest wars, and by far the bloodiest war, in American history,
before or since. During the first two years of fighting, the Confederate forces seemed to have all the
advantages. They were fighting on their own soil. Their troops seemed more committed to the cause
than those of the North. Their commanders were exceptionally talented, while Union forces were,
for a time, erratically led. Gradually, however, the Union's advantages began to assert themselves.
The North had a stabler political system led by one of the greatest leaders in the nation's history. It
had a much larger population, a far more developed industrial economy, superior financial
institutions, and a better railroad system. By the middle of 1863, the tide of the war had shifted;
over the next two years, Union forces gradually wore down the Confederate armies before finally
triumphing in 1865. The war strengthened the North's economy, giving a spur to industry and
railroad development. It greatly weakened the South's by destroying millions of dollars of property
and depleting the region's young male population. Southerners had gone to war in part because of
their fears of growing northern dominance. The war itself, ironically, confirmed and strengthened
that dominance. But most of all, the Civil War was a victory for millions of African American
slaves. The war produced Abraham Lincoln's epochal Emancipation Proclamation and, later, the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery altogether. It also encouraged
hundreds of thousands of slaves literally to free themselves, to desert their masters and seek refuge
behind Union lines at times to fight in the Union armies. The future of the freed slaves was not to be
an easy one, but three and a half million people who had once lived in bondage emerged from the
war as free men and women.
Lecture 8. Setting the West

Manifest Destiny (clear)

• Key political and historical term
• John L O’Sullivan 1845
• a belief in America as the vessel of the progress of civilization
• Newspapers become very important
• Expanding to the West
• the 19th-century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American
continents was both justified and inevitable

Our claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the
continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and
federative self government entrusted to us.

By the time of the Civil War, the U.S. had “achieved” this destiny.
• Louisiana purchase 1803 (from France)
• British cession 1818
• Spanish cession 1819
• Texas annexation 1845
• Oregon territory 1846
• Gadsden purchase 1853

The Frontier hypothesis - Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932)

• Speech 1893, The Significance of the Frontier in American History
• Frontier has defined American history

The frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”

❑ The struggle to transform the wilderness transformed Europeans into Americans:
“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization”
❑ The frontier promoted individualism, independence and democracy

Promotion of democracy
Free land = independence
Colonies in debt

What to do with Federal lands?

When new states were formed, most of the land remained under Federal control
❑ Beginning in the 1780s
❑ Even today this is the case (Nevada)
Pre-Civil War
❑ Limited westward expansion
❑ Debates over route of transcontinental railroad
During the Civil War
❑ Pacific Railway Act of 1862
❑ Homestead Act of 1862
❑ Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862
Land cessions for debt relief
In exchange for assuming state debts, the lands were ceded to the central government
3 laws dealing with lands west of Appalachian mountains:
• The Land Ordinance of 1874 - these land would eventually become states
• The Land Ordinance of 1785 - a system for surveying and selling the land
• The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 - Northwest territory

Township and Range system - 36 sections - by The Land Ordinance of 1785 and The Northwest
Ordinance of 1787 - in quarter sections

Westward Expansion
❑ Early Explorers
❑ Trappers
❑ Mountain Men
❑ Westward Migration
EarlySettlers
Conestoga Wagon Trains
MormonSettlement
OregonTerritory
❑ Gold Discoveries
❑ Mail routes/Pony Express
❑ Transcontinental Railroad

The Plains Indians

• The American government’s perspective was that all Native Americans must relocate in one of
two areas: Oklahoma and South Dakota
• Confined to reservations, the tribes would be transitioned into the white culture
• Some tribes refused to comply and were systematically extinguished

Pacific Railway Act of 1862

◼ Gave approval to a plan to build the first transcontinental line
❑ Previous attempts had failed due to debates about which route (southern, northern, central) to
take
◼ Purpose?
❑ “AN ACT to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the
Pacific ocean, and to secure to the government the use of the same for postal, military, and other
purposes,...”
❑ To connect two existing railroads: Union Pacific + Central Pacific
❑ Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Nebraska (1,087 miles/1749 km of track)
❑ Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, California (609 miles/980)
◼ May 10, 1869: The two rail lines meet at Promontory Point (mountains of Utah territory)

Advertising for homesteads

◼ This poster alerted many to inexpensive land for sale in Iowa and Nebraska
◼ CREDIT: "Millions of Acres. Iowa and Nebraska. Land for Sale on 10 years Credit by the
Burlington & Missouri River R. R. Co. at 6 per ct Interest and Low Prices . . . " Burlington &
Missouri River Railroad Co., 1872. An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and
Other Printed Ephemera, American Memory collections, Library of Congress.

The Homestead Act of 1862

◼ 160acres(65hectares)of public domain free to any settler who lived on the land and “improved”
it for at least five years
◼ Improvement meant tilling or fencing the land
❑ Settlers could purchase the
land for $1.25 per acre
($3.13 per hectare)
◼ About $2,680 in economic power today
❑ 605 million acres (244.8
million hectares/2,448,348
km2) of land available
◼ Equivalent to the size of Algeria
❑ Land given to male heads of households and single or widowed women

Problems
◼ Is this enough land for
◼ The Cost of “free a successful farm?
◼ Distant neighbors – meant little support or assistance
◼ Little financial support for investments
◼ Distant markets
❑ Reliance on railroads
◼ Dry farming
❑ Reliance on rainfall
land” for settlers:
❑ Only 10% of western settlers (400,000 families) received their land under the Homestead Act
❑ State governments and land companies usually held the most valuable land
❑ Speculation was more profitable than farming

Problems facing farmers

◼ The expansion of American agriculture was inextricably tide to world demand
◼ Many European nations had to import the bulk of their food, especially England
◼ America’s new role as the agricultural center of the western world depended on technological
innovation to make crop production more efficient
◼ This often backfired as a surplus of foodstuffs caused the market price to fall

As productivity increased, pressure on farmers to mechanize and have larger farms increased

Changes in the system of higher education

◼ Prior to the Civil War, higher education in the United States was dominated by private colleges
and universities such as:
❑ Harvard (Massachusetts), est. 1636 ❑ William and Mary (Virginia), est. 1693 ❑ Yale
(Connecticut), est. 1701
◼ These private institutions were usually affiliated with a religious denomination
◼ Curriculum at these institutions was based on classical European models and enrolment
restricted to white men
❑ Oberlin College (Ohio, est. 1833) was the first to admit African Americans (1835) and women
(1837)

Setting aside public lands to support a system of public higher education was first proposed in 1857
by the Vermont representative (and later Senator) Justin Smith Morrill
◼ The purpose of the land-grant colleges as defined
by Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 the was:
❑ “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach
such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the
legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical
education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
◼ Overall, the 1862 Morrill Act allocated
17,400,000 acres (70,000 km2) of land to the states for the purpose of establishing these schools

The goals of the Morrill Act

◼ From the legislation itself and various speeches by
Senator Morrill it seems clear that at least three
purposes were embodied in the legislation:
❑ A protest against the dominance of the classics in higher education;
❑ A desire to develop at the college level instruction relating to the practical realities of an
agricultural and industrial society;
❑ An attempt to offer to those belonging to the industrial classes preparation for the “professions of
life.”

Davenport Hall (1899),

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (est. 1867)

Chapter 15. Reconstruction and the New South

Reconstruction was a profoundly important moment in American history. Despite the bitter political
battles in Washington and throughout the South, culminating in the unsuccessful effort to remove
President Andrew Johnson from office, the most important result of the effort to reunite the nation
after its long and bloody war was a reshaping of the lives of ordinary people in all regions. In the
North, Reconstruction solidified the power of the Republican Party. The rapid expansion of the
northern economy continued and accelerated, drawing more and more of its residents into a
burgeoning commercial world. In the South, Reconstruction fundamentally rearranged the
relationship between the region's white and black citizens. Only for a while did Reconstruction
permit African Americans to participate actively and effectively in southern politics. After a few
years of widespread black voting and significant black officeholding, the forces of white supremacy
ushered most African Americans to the margins of the southern political world, where they would
mostly remain until the 1960s. In other ways, however, the lives of southern blacks changed
dramatically and permanently. Overwhelmingly, they left the plantations. Some sought work in
towns and cities. Some left the region altogether. But the great majority began farming on small
farms of their own-not as landowners, except in rare cases, but as tenants and sharecroppers on land
owned by whites. The result was a form of economic bondage, driven by debt, only scarcely less
oppressive than the legal bondage of slavery. Within this system, however, African Americans
managed to carve out a much larger sphere of social and cultural activity than they had ever been
able to create under slavery. Black churches proliferated in great numbers. African American
schools emerged in some communities, and black colleges began to operate in the region. Some
former slaves owned businesses and flourished. Strenuous efforts by "New South" advocates to
advance industry and commerce in the region produced significant results in a few areas. But the
south on the whole remained what it had always been: an overwhelmingly rural society with a
sharply defined class structure. It also maintained a deep commitment among its white citizens to
the subordination of African Americans a commitment solidified in the 1890s and the early
twentieth century when white southerners erected an elaborate legal system of segregation (the Jim
Crow laws). The promise of the great Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution-the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth-remained largely unfulfilled in the South as the century drew to its close.

Chapter 16. The conquest of the Far West

To many Americans in the late nineteenth century, the West seemed a place utterly unlike the rest of
the United States—an untamed "frontier" in which hardy pioneers were creating a new society, in
which sturdy individuals still had a chance to be heroes. The reality of the West in these years,
however, was very different from this enduring image. White Americans were moving into the vast
regions west of the Mississippi at a remarkable rate in the years after the Civil War, and many of
them were indeed settling in lands far from any civilization they had ever known. But the West was
not an empty place. It contained a large population of Indians, with whom the white settlers
sometimes lived uneasily and sometimes battled, but almost always in the end pushed aside and
(with help from the federal government) relocated onto lands whites did not want. There were
significant numbers of Mexicans in some areas, small populations of Asians in others, and African
Americans moving in from the South in search of land and freedom. The West was not a barren
frontier, but a place of many cultures. The West was also closely and increasingly tied to the
emerging capitalist-industrial economy of the East. The miners who flooded into California,
Colorado, Nevada, the Dakotas, and elsewhere were responding to the demand in the East for gold
and silver, but even more for utilitarian minerals that had industrial uses, such as iron ore, copper,
lead, zinc, and quartz. Cattle and sheep ranchers produced meat, wool, and leather for eastern
consumers and manufacturers. Farmers grew crops for sale in national and international
commodities markets. The West certainly looked different from the East, and its people lived their
lives in surroundings very different from those of eastern cities. But the growth of the West was
very much a part of the growth of the rest of the nation. And the culture of the West, despite the
romantic images of pioneering individuals embraced by easterners and westerners alike, was at its
heart as much a culture of economic growth and capitalist ambition as was the culture of the rest of
the nation.

Chapter 17. Industrial supremacy

In the four decades following the end of the Civil War, the United States propelled itself into the
forefront of the industrializing nations of the world. Large areas of the nation remained
overwhelmingly rural, to be sure, and the majority of the population was still engaged in activities
closely tied to farming. Even so, America's economy, and along with it the nation's society and
culture, were being profoundly transformed. New technologies, new forms of corporate
management, and new supplies of labor helped make possible the rapid growth of the nation's in-
dustries and the construction of its railroads. The factory system contributed to the growth of the
nation's cities, and at times created entirely new ones. Immigration provided a steady supply of new
workers for the growing industrial economy. The result was a steady and substantial increase in
national wealth, rising living standards for much of the population, and the creation of great new
fortunes. But industrialization did not spread its fruits evenly. Large areas of the country, most
notably the South, and large groups in the population, most notably minorities, women, and recent
immigrants, profited relatively little from economic growth. Industrial workers experienced arduous
conditions of labor and wages that rose much more slowly than the profits of the corporations for
which they worked. Small merchants and manufacturers found themselves overmatched by great
new combinations. Industrialists strove to create a rationale for their power and to persuade the
public that everyone had something to gain from it. But many Americans remained skeptical of
modern capitalism, and some-workers struggling to form unions, reformers denouncing trusts,
women fighting to win protections for female laborers, socialists envisioning a new world, and
many others-created broad and powerful critiques of the new economic order. Industrialization
brought both progress and pain to late-nineteenth-century America. Controversies over its effects
defined the era and would continue to define the first decades of the twentieth century

Chapter 18. The Age of the City

The extraordinary growth of American cities in the last decades of the nineteenth century led to both
great achievements and enormous problems. Cities became centers of learning, art, and commerce.
They produced great advances in technology, transportation, architecture, and communications.
They provided their residents-and their many visitors— with varied and dazzling experiences, so
much so that many people increasingly left the countryside to move to the city, and many more
dreamed of doing so. But cities were also places of congestion, filth, disease, and corruption. With
populations expanding too rapidly for services to keep up, most American cities in this era struggled
with makeshift government and makeshift techniques to solve the basic problems of providing
water, disposing of sewage, building roads, running public transportation, fighting fire, stopping
crime, and preventing or curing disease. City governments, many of them dominated by political
machines and ruled by party bosses, were often models of inefficiency and corruption-although in
their informal way they also provided substantial services to the working-class and immigrant
constituencies who needed them most. Yet they also managed, despite the administrative limitations
of most municipal goverments, to oversee great public projects: the building of parks, museums,
opera houses, and theaters, usually in partnership with private developers. The city brought together
races, ethnic groups, and classes of extraordinary variety—from the families of great wealth that the
new industrial age was creating to the vast working class, much of it consisting of immi- grants, that
crowded into densely-packed neighborhoods sharply divided by nationality. The city also spawned
new forms of popular culture. It created temples of consumerism: shops, boutiques, and above all
the great department stores. And it created forums for public recreation and entertainment: parks,
theaters, athletic fields, amusement parks, and later movie palaces. Urban life created great anxiety
among those who lived within the cities and among those who observed them from afar-so much so
that in some cities middle-class people literally armed themselves to prepare for the insurrections
they expected from the poor. But in fact, American cities adapted reasonably successfully over time
to the great demands their growth made of them and learned to govern themselves if not entirely
honestly and efficiently, at least adequately to allow them to survive and grow.
Lecture 9. Progressivism
• Social, political and cultural reform movement
• Social reforms - Jane Addams (Temperance issues)
• Muckraking journalists and authors - The Arena, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, The independent,
and McClures
• Political reform
• Urban renewal

Progressivism - political and social-reform movement that brought major changes to American
politics and government during the first two decades of the 20th century.
People’s Party
⁃ Populism predates Progressivism
⁃ Present in the West, in agriculture
Demands:
• Direct election of US senators (17 - 1913)
• Abolishing of National banks
• Government ownership of railroads, telephones, telegraph
• Graduated income tax (Federal Income Tax, 16 - 1913)
• Inflation of currency (remonetisation silver)
Revolt coming from below, e.g. farmers. Did not include people of color.

Social Gospel, Charles Sheldon

• Protestant origins
• Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1886)
• Charles Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897)
• A middle class movement

Jane Addams
• 1889, Hull House - founded and managed the settlement house
• a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that provides social services to poor immigrants
• In the slums of Chicago
• A settlement house was a means to mitigate the harsh conditions of poverty found in the cities
• No direct financial support

Temperance
• Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 1873, alcohol has a negative effect on the family
• 18th Amendment (1919) established Prohibition across the U.S.
• Repealed by the 21st Amendment
• Individual states were given the right to restrict the sale of alcohol
• Many states (mostly in the South) allow local authorities to regulate the sale (dry, damp, wet)

Consumer protections
• Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)
• Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906)

Upton Sinclair
• The Jungle (1905) had spurred reform of U.S. meat inspection laws and promoted passage of
the Pure Food and Drug Act
• The first of several “muckraking” novels.

Political Reform
• Women’s suffrage
• Rose out of the abolition movement
• Leaders: Sojourner Truth, Susan B.Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapmen Catt
• 1869 - Wioming territory - a provision for women’s suffrage
• People fight for change
• The Silent Sentinels
• 1920
• Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment, giving all women citizens the right to vote in
U.S. elections.

Other political reforms

• Increasing concern over political corruption (Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in NY)
• Thomas Nast’s political cartoons about Tammany Hall
• The Triangle shirtwaist factory fire leads to the deaths of 146 workers, mostly young
immigrant women, in an overcrowded and unsafe New York City clothing factory. The
tragedy brings attention to the sweatshop conditions that many labor in.
• Direct elections of senators (17th amendment) passed in 1913
• Non-partisan local elections
• Referendums, propositions, recall elections
• Professional city managers
• Professional civil service

The environment
• Establishment of National Parks
• Yellowstone (Wyoming) - 1872
• John Muir
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Gifford Pit

City Beautiful Movement

• Progressive movement response to urban plights besetting American cities
• Uncontrolled growth
• Crime, poverty, urban blight
Progressivists didn’t take care of economy.
The “Roaring Twenties”
A Culture in Conflict

The 1920s was a decade of transition characterised by rural backlash against the material,
superficial values of an increasingly urban culture

The impact of WWI

• Increased power of the Federal Government
• Partnership forged between business and government
• The “Great Migration” of southern Blacks
• Temporary gains for women economically and socially
• Short-lived economic recession in 1921

The “Red Scare”

• Palmer Raids
• Hoover begins career hunting down radicals
• Sacco and Vanzetti Case
• A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism,
anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer
to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name.

A “Culture on the Grow” and “on the Move”

• Decline in agricultural labor
• Consumer goods revolution
• Automobile as a symbol of the second industrial revolution
• Ford Motor Company
• The Model T

Culture “on the Move”

• “Multiplier effect” of the auto industry (suppliers, road building, service industry)
• Impact on rural women
• Impact of cars on residential housing patterns
• The need of advertising
Spreading of cities, advertising (gradual process)

Advertising
• Increasing importance of brands and brand identity
• Logos
• Imagery
• Slogans

Chapter 19. From Stalemate to crisis

For nearly three decades after the battles over Reconstruction, American politics remained locked in
a rigid stalemate. The electorate was relatively evenly divided between the two major parties, which
differed with one another on only a few issues. The national government, never fully dominated by
either party, remained small and inconsequential. Except for Indian tribes, people engaged in
international trade (who were thus subject to tariffs), and the many northern Civil War veterans who
received federal pensions, few Americans had any direct contact with the government in
Washington except to receive mail from the federal post office. A series of worthy and generally
dull presidents presided over this political system as unwitting symbols of its stability and passivity.
Beneath the placid surface of national politics, however, great social issues were creating deep
divisions in American life. Battles between employers and workers intensified. American farmers
became increasingly resentful of their declining fortunes. Men and women throughout the country
grew angry about corruption in government and excessive power in the hands of a few corporate
leaders. When a great depression, the worst in the nation's history to that point, began in 1893, these
social tensions exploded to the surface and reshaped national politics. The most visible sign of the
challenge to politics was the Populist movement, a great uprising of American farmers demanding
far-reaching changes in the political, economic, and financial systems. The Populists created their
own political party, showed impressive strength in several elections, and then-in 1806-joined with
the Democrats to nominate the great Nebraska orator William Jennings Bryan for president. But the
forces for insurgency were, in the end, no match for the forces of established institutions. After a
campaign notable for its hysterical attacks on Bryan and on the issue with which he was identified
("free silver," making silver a basis for issuing currency in addition to gold), Bryan lost the election
to William McKinley. Perhaps more important, the election became the occasion for a great
electoral realignment that left the Republicans the clear majority party for the next three decades.
The Republican victory did not, however, end the battle over power and corruption in American
life. It simply redirected it into other channels. The challenges to the old politics soon made
themselves felt as more conventional reform movements that became known, collectively, as
progressivism.

Chapter 21. The rise of progressivism

A powerful surge of reform efforts emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first
years of the twentieth-reforms intended to help the United States deal with the extraordinary
changes and vexing problems that the rise of the modern industrial economy had caused. American
reformers at the time thought of themselves as "progressives." But neither then nor since has there
ever been wide agreement on what the term "progressive" meant in those years. The reforms
themselves were of a bewildering variety-efforts to improve the moral fabric of families and
communities; efforts to make politics more efficient and less corrupt: efforts to tame or discipline
the great industrial combinations of the time; efforts to empower some groups and restrict or control
others. The ideas that lay behind these reforms were similarly various, and the constituencies
supporting them included at times representatives of almost every group in the population.
"Progressivism" was a remarkably heterogeneous movement, united-if it was united at all- by the
common belief among reformers that progress was indeed possible, even necessary; and that
laissez-faire orthodoxy was inadequate to the needs of the nation, that purposeful human
intervention in the life of society and its economy was necessary. The reform crusades gained
strength steadily from the 1880s onward, driven in large part by the energy and commitment of
millions of women organized in clubs and other organizations. By the early years of the twentieth
century, reform was beginning to transform the character of society and the nature of American
politics.

Chapter 22. The battle for national reform

Driven by the great surge of reform energies emerging throughout the United States, American
national politics in the early twentieth century itself became an important battleground for
progressives. The rise of national reform was a result of many things, but two in particular. First,
many of the reform efforts that had been gaining strength outside of politics, or within states and
localities, eventually discovered that success required the engagement of the federal government in
their efforts. Progressives themselves increasingly turned to Washington as a potential ally in their
efforts. Second, two national leaders helped transform both the image and the reality of the federal
government from the inconspicuous ally of business interests it had been in the late nineteenth
century into a visible and muscular vehicle of reform. Theodore Roosevelt's eight years as president
transformed popular expectations of the office and launched a significant reform agenda. Woodrow
Wilson, who defeated not only Roosevelt's ill-fated successor William Howard Taft in 1912, but
also Roosevelt himself, running as a third-party challenger, became the most successful legislative
president of the early twentieth century by winning passage of a broad and ambitious reform agenda
of his own. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson-despite considerable disagreements among them-also
contributed to a continuation, and indeed an expansion, of America's active role in international
affairs in the first years of the century, in part as an effort to abet the growth of American capitalism
and in part as an attempt to impose American standards of morality and democracy on other parts of
the world. Similar mixtures of ideals and self- interest would soon guide the United States into a
great world war.

Chapter 24. The New Era

The remarkable prosperity of the 1920s-a prosperity without parallel in the previous history of the
United States-shaped much of what exuberant contemporaries liked to call the "New Era." In the
years after World War I, America built a vibrant and extensive national culture. Its middle class
moved increasingly into the embrace of the growing consumer culture. Its politics reorganized itself
around the needs of a booming, interdependent industrial economy-rejecting many of the reform
crusades of the previous generation, but also creating new institutions to help promote economic
growth and stability. Beneath the glittering surface of the New Era, however, were roiling
controversies and timeless injustices clamoring for redress. Although the prosperity of the 1920s
was more widely spread than at any time in the nation's industrial history, more than half the
population failed to achieve any real benefits from the growth. A new, optimistic, secular culture
was attracting millions of urban, middle-class people. But many other Americans looked at it with
alarm and fought against it with great fervor. The unprepossessing conservative presidents of the era
suggested a time with few political challenges, but in fact few eras in modern American history
have seen so much political and cultural conflict. The 1920s ended in a catastrophic economic crash
that has colored the image of those years ever since. The crises of the 1930s should not obscure the
real achievements of the New Era economy. Neither, however, should the prosperity of the 1920s
obscure the inequity and instability in those years that helped produce the difficult years to come.

Chapter 25. The Great Depression

The Great Depression, which began so unexpectedly and spread so widely, changed many things in
American life. It created unemployment on a scale never before experienced in the nation's history.
It put enormous pressures on families, on communities, on state and local governments, and
ultimately on Washington-which during the innovative but ultimately failed presidency of Herbert
Hoover was unable to produce policies capable of dealing effectively with the crisis. In the nation's
politics and culture, there were strong currents of radicalism and protest; and many middle-class
Americans came to fear (and many less affluent people to hope) that a revolution might be
approaching. In reality, while the Great Depression shook much of American society and culture, it
actually toppled very little. The capitalism system survived, damaged for a time but never truly
threatened. The values of materialism and personal responsibility were shaken, but never
overturned.
The American people in the 1930s were more receptive than they had been in the 1920s to
evocations of community, generosity, and the dignity of common people. They were more open to
experiments in government and business and even private lives than they had been in earlier years.
But for most Americans, belief in the "American way of life"-a phrase that became widely resonant
in the 1930s for the first time-remained strong throughout the long years of economic despair.

Chapter 26. The New Deal

The New Deal was the most dramatic and important moment in the modern history of American
government. From the time of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933 to the beginning of World
War II eight years later, the federal government engaged in a broad and diverse series of
experiments designed to relieve the distress of unemployment and poverty; to reform the economy
to prevent future crises; and to bring the Great Depression itself to an end. It had only partial
success in all those efforts. Unemployment and poverty remained high throughout the New Deal,
although many federal programs provided assistance to millions of people who would otherwise
have had none. The structure of the American economy remained essentially the same as it had been
in earlier years, although there were by the end of the New Deal some important new regulatory
agencies in Washington-and an important new role for organized labor, enforced by a new federal
law. Nothing the New Deal did ended the Great Depression, but some of its policies kept it from
getting worse and some of them pointed the way toward more effective economic policies in the
future. Perhaps the most important legacy of the New Deal was to create a sense of possibilities
among many Americans, to persuade them that the fortunes of individuals need not be left entirely
to chance or to the workings of an unregulated market. Many Americans emerged from the 1930s
convinced that individuals deserved some protections from the unpredictability and instability of the
modern economy, and that the New Deal for all its limitations-had demonstrated the value of
enlisting government in the effort to provide those protections. The New Deal itself did not always
fulfill the expectations it raised, but those expectations survived for generations to become the basis
of new liberal crusades in the postwar era.