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| 1789; he was a British mechanic that came to America despite the British rules. England was afraid of American textile competition so they prohibited the shipping of textile machinery to the US and they also prohibited British mechanics who knew how to build the machines from moving there. When he came over, he had the blueprints for the most advanced British machinery for spinning cotton memorized in his head. He opened a factory, marking the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution. |
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| Eli Whitney: cotton gin and interchangeable parts |
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| 1794; he invented the cotton gin, which was a machine that separated the cotton seeds from the cotton fiber. He also introduced the concept of interchangeable parts when he began producing parts for guns that could be replaced (interchangeable). Because of this, more slaves were needed in cotton production. |
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| 1807; it was the first American steamboat, built by the engineer/inventor named Robert Fulton. This invention ensured the success of the new water-based transportation system. He took it up the Hudson River, demonstrating that now technology provided for things to be shipped upstream. |
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| 1810’s and 1820's; It was a massive and costly project, but it was very profitable. It sped transportation up, linking the northeast and midwest economies. The Erie canal’s great benefits caused a national canal boom. It connected Lake Erie to Albany and thus, the Hudson river. |
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| 1818; this cultural ideal developed from Franklin’s suggestions made in his Autobiography that a hard-working industrious man would become rich and successful. It encouraged men to work hard, save money, and practice honest business. It instilled a new goal of personal achievement and social mobility. It helped tie the upper and middle classes together. |
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| Waltham Plan (Lowell System) |
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| 1820’s; it was a strategy that American producers used to compete with the British ones. They hired farm girls and women as cheap labor to work in the textile industries. The girls lived in boardinghouses with strict rules. These types of factories sprung up in Lowell, Chicopee, and other places in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. These jobs made the women feel a sense of freedom. |
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| 1820’s; well-to-do Americans created organizations to help the less fortunate. They began social reform and regulation, instilling moral discipline, combating alcoholism, prostitution, and crime, and performing charity. The people involved were ministers and like-minded merchants and their wives. Women played a role in this, founding charity organizations. |
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| 1820-1860; His is the biggest name associated with the Second Great Awakening. He took the revival meetings to major cities. He tried to apply business principles to the organization of a revival team (organizing them). He believed in “Man’s free moral agency:” men and women are capable of making decisions for themselves on salvation; this was tied with a theological shift away from Calvanist beliefs (predestination) on religion. The phrases like, “Making a choice for Christ,” tie in to this belief. |
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| Working Men’s Party and the National Trades’ Union |
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| 1830’s; artisans protested for shorter days and fair wages (for the hours), which led to the establishment of the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia. They wanted to secure fair balance of power, so they founded this Working Men’s Party, which sought to get rid of banks, get a universal system of education, and gain equal taxes. The National Trades’ Union brought together local Unions from Boston to Philadelphia, binding different trades in the first regional Union. |
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| American Temperance Society |
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| 1830’s and 40’s; it emerged out of the temperance movement; they sought to improve the American work ethic by combating alcohol and laziness. they tried to limit the amount of alcohol consumption during the reform movements, in the beginning. The temperance movement sought to eliminate alcohol consumption altogether towards the end. To be temperate means to be modest in all aspects of life. |
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| Nativism- 1830’s and 40’s |
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| coming from some British-descended Americans, it was an anti-immigrant stance. They were Pro-natives, which meant they supported the original white, English settlers. The reason for their opposition to the new immigrants was the predominant Roman Catholicism of the Irish immigrants, which were flooding into the US. They also disliked the Germans. The anti-Catholics and unemployed Protestants blamed the immigrants for taking jobs and lowering wages. |
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| there was an overproduction of goods that exceeded the demand for a product, forcing employers to lay off workers. A period of overproduction in the 1850’s caused this panic that was a financial crisis. It showed the Americans that they did not have the best job security in the new industrialized world. Unemployment raised to 10% and there was a major recession. People had also invested in the railroad industry, which failed, spreading the panic. |
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| 1787; they were one of the Utopian communities; started by Ann Lee Stanley because of her claim to having a vision, this group saw her as the second coming of Christ. They did not allow marriage and they enforced celibacy. They wanted to turn away from the complexity of life in the US; they sought a God-centered world. |
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| mid 1800’s; It was tied with Romantic ideas that were prevalent in Europe. Human reason was being transcended by emotion. It put an emphasis on human emotion and feeling. Emerson brought this movement into being; he was critical of conformity, consistency, tradition, and reason. |
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| 1803-1882; Emerson was a writer and a popular speaker. The Emersonian approach (transcendentalism) was very individualistic. He criticizes society for supporting conformity and for suppressing self-reliance. He claims that society wants docile, obedient people. |
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| David Walker’s An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World |
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| 1829; in this pamphlet, Walker, a freed black man, warned the white Americans that the slaves would revolt. He attacked the defenses of slavery and justified slave rebellion. He sought to get rid of slavery. |
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| William Lloyd Garrison & The Liberator |
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| 1831; Among the Northern responses to slavery, there were two groups of abolitionists. One of the groups was the radicals who wanted to declare all the slaves free immediately with no compensation to their previous owners. This Man was one of these radicals and he wrote Prospectus For The Liberator, in which he called for a radical reaction on the subject of slavery, saying, “On the Subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.” He started the American Anti-slavery Society. quote: "I will be heard." He proposed that the North separate from the South. He also wanted equal rights for women. |
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| 1831; this slave had a hard life, being separated from his wife and being reduced to mindless work. He claimed he had a vision from God that led him to rebel with a handful of other slaves. His small force killed about 60 whites but they were soon overpowered. The result of this event was that slave-owners got stricter with their slaves, reducing education of slaves and their mobility. |
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| Theodore Weld and the Grimke sisters |
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| 1830’s; they joined the anti-slavery cause and started an anti-slavery society. They wrote American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses in 1839, seeking to expose the true horror stories of slavery. The book was vastly popular. |
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| American Anti-Slavery Society |
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| 1833; Weld and Garrison met with 60 local black and white abolitionists in Philadelphia. Women also created their own anti-slavery societies. Their main approach was educating the public and publicizing. The society strove to foster public condemnation of slavery by distributing lots of anti-slavery literature. They helped escaped slaves. They also tried to get support from the legislatures. They supported rallies with emotional speakers. |
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| 1836; after president Jackson was denied by Congress the ability to restrict abolitionist use of the mail system, the House of Representatives passed this, which informally made it so all the petitions against slavery were automatically tabled so that they would not be able to come up for debate in the House. |
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| 1839; she was very well educated and a teacher; she explored women’s possible freedoms, predicting more gender equality in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844). Inspired by Emerson’s beliefs, she started a discussion group of women. She was involved in transcendentalist writings and journals. She inspired women rights’ reformers and writers. She was an editor for the leading transcendentalist journal called The Dial. |
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| 1830’s and 40’s; she led many women in improving and reforming almshouses, asylums, hospitals and jails. She gained legislation that expanded state hospitals so that mentally ill and poor people could use them instead of being sent to the jails. She was a teacher, and author, a political activist, and a moral reformer. |
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| 1848; the convention was in New York, led by Stanton and Mott. Mostly women, but some men, came. They devised a statement of women’s equality that they called their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions; it greatly resembled the Declaration of Independence. They composed a list of grievances. They attacked the lack of suffrage for women. |
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| 1840’s; the idea started with the French reformer, Charles Fourier. Arthur Brisbane brought it to America where he introduced the idea of phalanxes—where there would be cooperative work in communities and where all the members would be its shareholders. He started these communities in New York and some other Midwestern states, but they were not able to support themselves. |
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| 1841; it was one of the communal experiments of the transcendentalists that believed that these controlled communities that escaped urban society could help people realize their moral potential. The members of the community tried to be independent of the market. It was very intellectually prosperous, but it failed economically. |
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| 1846; he led the persecuted Mormons (10,000 people) out of the US into territory that was claimed by Mexico (Utah). They spread out with agricultural communities based on communal labor and water rights in the Great Salt Lake Valley. They practiced polygamy. When the US bought the territory from MExico that the Mormons were living on, they stopped their polygamy and constricted the Mormons. |
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| 1848; led by John Humphrey Noyes, a community of perfectionists . moved to an isolated settlement where they practiced complex marriage—where everyone in the community was married to everyone else in the community. They raised children communally and had gender equality. |
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| 1855; Whitman wrote it; he was gay and an outcast that lived in New York. Leaves of Grass was a collection of his poetry. He wrote with a free verse style and he was egotistical (a little self-absorbed). He described the common experiences of human life in his writing. He was a follower of Emerson. his poems were an attempt to pass invisible boundaries, between solitude and community, prose and poetry, and the living and the dead. |
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| 1854; Thoreau wrote this non-fiction book describing his life in the woods; he lived in the woods in a small cabin, seeking to live a simpler life, but he lived close enough to be able to go into the town frequently. He was against the sense of being in a rat race in society that distracts us. This is why he went to the woods; “to live deliberately.” He is hoping to find his answer to what the meaning of life is by going to nature, not to church. ‘What is the purpose of life?’ he wanted to know. |
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