Studied by 56 peopleThe West
had a raw frontier and was the most American part of America
Who said, “Europe stretches to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond”
Emerson
half of Americans were under the age of 30 by
the late 1850’s
Most pioneer families were…
poorly-fed, ill-clad, housed in hastily erected shanties
Pioneer families were victims of…
disease, depression, and premature death
Who lived in a three-sided lean-to made of brush and sticks for a year?
Abraham Lincoln
Pioneer women cut off…
human contact
Popular entertainment for pioneer men…
No-holds-barred wrestling that permitted biting off noses and gouging out eyes
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s popular lecture essay
“Self-Reliance”
James Fenimore Cooper'‘s nickname
Naty Bumppo
Herman Melville’s nickname
Captain Ahab
Pioneers hurried to what lands and then moved on
tobacco lands
What was in the Kentuck bottomlands?
cane as high a fifteen feet called “Kentucky bluegrass”
Fur-trappers were setting their traps all over…
the Rocky Mountain Region
The fur-trapping system was based on…
“rendezvous” system
Traders camped and waited for…
trappers and Indians to swap for goods from the East like beaver pelts
Some historians have called this aggressive and often heedless exploitation of the West’s natural bounty…
“ecological imperialism.’’
George Catlin
a painter and student of Native American life who was among the first Americans to advocate the preservation of nature as a deliberate national policy.
In 1832, George Catlin observed…
Sioux Indians in South Dakota recklessly slaughtering buffalo in order to trade the animals’ tongues for the white man’s whiskey.
George Catlin proposed the idea of a…
national park
By midcentury the population was still…
doubling approximately every twenty-five years
By 1860 the original thirteen states
had more than doubled in number
The United States was the fourth most populous nation in the western world, exceeded only by three…
European countries—Russia, France, and Austria.
In 1790 there had been only two American cities that could boast populations of twenty thousand or more souls…
Philadelphia and New York.
New York was the…
metropolis
New Orleans was the…
“Queen of the South’’
Chicago was the…
“hog butcher for the world.”
Before 1840 immigrants had been flowing in at a rate of…
sixty thousand a year
The influx immigrants _____ in 1840
tripled
The influx of immigrants ______ in 1850
quadrupled
Europeans mostly immigrated to America because…
Europe was running out of room
How many Europeans immigrated somewhere else than America?
25 million Europeans
Migrants called America…
“land of freedom and opportunity”
1840, in Ireland, what swept the Irish away?
A potato rot
How many Irish died because of the potato rot?
2 million
Boston and particularly New York, which rapidly became…
the largest Irish city in the world
What did they call Bridget’s and what were they forced to do?
“Biddies” took jobs as kitchen maids
What did they call Patricks and what were they forced to do?
“Paddies’’ were pushed into pick-and-shovel drudgery on canals and railroads
NINA meant…
“No Irish Need Apply”
Irish resented…
African Americans
a shadowy Irish miners’ union that rocked the Pennsylvania coal districts in the 1860s and 1870s…
“Molly Maguires,’’
What did the Irish drive that had once crated their brawling forebearers to jail?
“Paddy wagons”
Two millions Irish arrived between…
1830 and 1860
Politicians often found it politically profitable to fire verbal volleys at London—a process vulgarly known as…
“twisting the British lion’s tail.’’
Why did Germans come to America?
The bulk of them were uprooted farm-ers, displaced by crop failures and other hardships. But a strong sprinkling were liberal political refugees
Carl Schurz
a relentless foe of slavery and public corruption, contributed richly to the elevation of American political life.
Unlike the Irish, many of the Germanic new-comers…
possessed a modest amount of material goods
Germans were pushed out into…
the Middle West aka Wisconsin
The Conestoga wagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the Christmas tree were all…
German contributions to American culture.
Germans were often dubbed as…
“damned Dutchmen”
Newcomes took jobs from…
American “natives”
Roman Catholics created public schools to…
protect their children from Protestant indoctrination
In 1840 Catholics had ranked fifth, behind the…
Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.
the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which developed into…
the formidable American, or “Know-Nothing,’’ party—a name derived from its secretiveness
Maria Monk’s ___________ sold over 300,000 copies.
“Awful Disclosures”
A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about 1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass production of textiles in a time frame called the…
Industrial Revolution
Samuel Slater has been acclaimed as the…
“Father of the Factory System”
Samuel Slater
After memorizing the plans for the machinery, he escaped in disguise to America, and in 1791 put into operation the machinery for spinning cotton thread.
Eli Whitney
he created the cotton gin in 1793
New England was favored as a…
industrial center
John Randolph
he exchanged the trident for the distaff
“Buy American’’ and “Wear American’’ became…
popular slogans
manufacturing boomlet broke abruptly with the…
peace of Ghent in 1815
Congress provided some relief when it passed the mildly protective…
Tariff of 1816
Eli Whitney also turned to…
the mass production of muskets for the U.S. Army.
Eli Whitney seized the idea of…
interchangeable parts
Elias Howe
he created the sewing machine
Isaac Singer
he perfected the sewing machine
Laws of “free incorporation,’’ first passed in New York in 1848 meant that…
businessmen could create corporations without applying for individual charters from the legislature.
Samuel F.B. Morse
a portrait painter who created the telegraph
Workers were forbidden by law to…
form labor unions to raise wages
Many children workers were…
mentally blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunted, and even brutally whipped in special “whipping rooms.’’
the employer could resort to such tactics as the importing of strikebreakers—often derisively called…
“scabs’’ or “rats,’’
The supreme court of Massachusetts ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt that…
labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided that their methods were “honorable and peaceful.’’
Factory jobs promised…
greater economic independence for women,
Catherine Beecher
she urged women to join the teaching career
Women’s changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought some important changes in the life of the nineteenth-century home called…
the traditional “women’s sphere.’’
newly assertive role for women has been called…
“domestic feminism,’’
Cincinnati was known as the…
“Porkopolis’’ of the West.
John Deere
in 1837 he finally produced a steel plow that broke the virgin soil.
Cyrus McCormick
he contributed the most wondrous contraption of all: a mechanical mower-reaper.
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