Transforming a nation
The United States transformed itself again in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A rural, agricultural nation became an
industrial power whose backbone was steel and coal, railroads, and steam power. A young country once bound by the Mississippi River expanded across the North American continent, and on to overseas territories. A nation divided by the issue of slavery and
tested by the trauma of civil war became a world power whose global influence was first felt in World War I.
A P I C T U R E P R O F I L E
Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837. Charismatic, forceful, and passionate, Jackson forged an effective political coalition within the Democratic Party with Westerners, farmers, and working people.
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Henry Clay of Kentucky, although never president,
was one of the most influential American
politicians of the first half of the 19th century. Clay
became indispensable for his role in preserving the Union with the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. Both pieces of legislation
resolved, for a time, disputes over slavery in
the territories.
The great champions of women’s rights in the 19th century: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) and Susan B. Anthony. Stanton helped organize the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. In later years, she joined Anthony in founding the National Woman Suffrage Association. “I forged the thunderbolts,” Stanton said of their partnership, “and she fired them.”
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William Lloyd Garrison, whose passionate denunciations of slavery and eloquent defense of the rights of enslaved African Americans appeared in his weekly paper, the Liberator, from its first issue in 1831 to 1865, when the last issue appeared at the close of the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass, the nation’s leading African-American abolitionist of the 19th century, escaped from slavery in 1838. His speech about his sufferings as a slave at the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society’s annual convention in Nantucket launched his career as an outspoken lecturer, writer, and publisher on the abolition of slavery and racial equality.
Harriet Tubman, a former slave who rescued hundreds from slavery through the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to Canada in the first half of the 19th century.
Confederate dead along a stone wall during the Chancellorsville campaign, May 1863. Victorious at Chancellorsville, Southern forces advanced north into Pennsylvania, but were defeated at the three-day battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War and the largest battle ever fought in North America. More Americans died in the Civil War (1861-65) than in any other conflict in U.S. history.
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Encampment of Union troops from New York in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the capital of Washington.
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Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who led Union forces to victory in the Civil War and became the 18th president of the United States. Despite heavy losses in several battles against his opponent, General Lee (below), Grant refused to retreat, leading President Lincoln to say to critics calling for his removal, “I can’t spare this general. He fights.”
Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Military historians to this day study his tactics and Grant’s in battles such as Vicksburg, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness.
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Engraving of the first African-American members elected to the U.S. Congress during the Reconstruction Era, following the Civil War. Seated at left is H.R. Revels, senator from Mississippi. The others were members of the House of Representatives, from the states of Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Although practically unknown during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is now seen as one of the most brilliant and original poets America has ever produced.
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Andrew Carnegie, business tycoon and philanthropist. Born in Scotland of a poor family, Carnegie immigrated to the United States and made his fortune by building the country’s largest iron and steel manufacturing corporation. Believing that the wealthy had an obligation to give back to society, he endowed public libraries across the United States.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain,
is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed American writer and humorist. In his Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and other works, Twain developed a style based on
vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech.
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Custer’s army on the march prior to Little Bighorn. The Plains Indians who
defeated his army were resisting white intrusions into their sacred lands and
U.S. government attempts to force them back onto South Dakota’s
Great Sioux Reservation.
Sitting Bull, Sioux chief who led the last great battle of the Plains Indians against the U.S. Army, when his warriors defeated forces under the command of General George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.
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Above, Oklahoma City in 1889, four weeks after the Oklahoma Territory was opened up for settlement. Settlers staked their claim, put up tents, and then swiftly began erecting board shacks and houses — a pattern repeated throughout the West.
Left, a vessel at the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal. The United States acquired the rights to build the canal in 1903 in a treaty with Panama, which had just rebelled and broken away from Colombia. Under the terms of the 1977 treaty, the canal reverted to Panamanian control on December 31, 1999.
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Left, opposite page, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York City, principal gateway to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From 1890 to 1921, almost 19 million people entered the United States as immigrants.
Below, children working at the Indiana Glass Works in 1908. Enacting child labor laws was one of the principal goals of the Progressive movement in this era.
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Mulberry Street in New York City, also known as “Little Italy,” in the early years of the 20th century.
Newly arrived immigrant families, largely from Eastern and southern Europe in this period,
often settled in densely populated urban enclaves. Typically, their children, or grandchildren, would disperse,
moving to other cities or other parts of the country.
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Thomas Edison examines film used in the motion picture projector that he invented with George Eastman. The most celebrated of Edison’s hundreds of inventions was the incandescent light bulb.
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Orville Wright, who built and flew the first heavier-than-air airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, with his brother Wilbur. Orville is shown here at the controls of a later model plane in 1909.
Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call from New York City to Chicago in 1892. Bell, an immigrant from Scotland who settled in Boston, invented the telephone 16 years earlier, in 1876.
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American infantry forces in 1918, firing a 37 mm. gun, advance against German positions in World War I.
The “Big Four” at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, following the end of World War I. They are, seated from left, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. Despite strenuous efforts, Wilson was unable to persuade the U.S. Senate to agree to American participation in the new League of Nations established in the aftermath of the war.
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For the educated and well-to-do, the 1920s was the era of the “Lost Generation,” symbolized by writers like Ernest Hemingway, who left the United States for voluntary exile in Paris. It was also the “flapper era” of frivolity and excess in which young people could reject the constraints and traditions of their elders. Top, flappers posing for the camera at a 1920s-era party. Above, Henry Ford and his son stand with one of his early automobiles, and the 10-millionth Ford Model-T. The Model-T was the first car whose price and availability made car ownership possible for large numbers of people.
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C H A P T E R
5 WESTWARD EXPANSION
AND REGIONAL
DIFFERENCES
Horse-drawn combine harvesting wheat in the Midwest, 19th century.