M01 Overview

Before starting this module, please be sure to review the Course Syllabus (click here) first!

In the first module, familiarize yourself with the fundamentals about this course. Next, it is crucial to understand "Why Study History?" Noted historian Peter Stearns argues that history helps us to understand people and societies, how change and the society we live in came to be.  Stearns concludes that history enables us to compare and contrast our lives with those of others, and knowing the past gives us a better understanding of the present. Also in this module, we examine the period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, including national politics, the status of the freed people, efforts to establish white-supremacist "Redeemer" governments in the former Confederate states, and reasons for the eventual abandonment of Reconstruction in the North. As the American experiment entered a new period in a new form and sought to heal the physical, political, and mental wounds caused by years of brutal conflict, new conflicts emerged. The nation met these challenges, but not without discord and turmoil.

Westward Expansion

Figure 1. Widely held rhetoric of the nineteenth century suggested to Americans that it was their divine right and responsibility to settle the West with Protestant democratic values. Newspaper editor Horace Greely, who coined the phrase “Go west, young man,” encouraged Americans to fulfill this dream. Artists of the day depicted this western expansion in idealized landscapes that bore little resemblance to the difficulties of life on the trail.

 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, farmers in the “Old West”—the land across the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania—began to hear about the opportunities to be found in the “New West.” They had long believed that the land west of the Mississippi was a great desert, unfit for human habitation. But now, the federal government was encouraging them to join the migratory stream westward to this unknown land. For a variety of reasons, Americans increasingly felt compelled to fulfill their “Manifest Destiny,” a phrase that came to mean that they were expected to spread across the land given to them by God and, most importantly, spread predominantly American values to the frontier.

With great trepidation, hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands, of settlers packed their lives into wagons and set out, following the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails, to seek a new life in the West. Some sought open lands and greater freedom to fulfill the democratic vision originally promoted by Thomas Jefferson and experienced by their ancestors. Others saw an economic opportunity. Still, others believed it was their job to spread the word of God to the “heathens” on the frontier. Whatever their motivation, the great migration was underway.

In this module, we will also be looking at the rise of modern agriculture in the United States. It focuses on the different aspects of agricultural development, including farming, ranching, and mining. The problems for Native American families caused by the advance of Anglo American settlers are also covered in terms of federal Indian policy and the native response. Yet, the western frontier, although vast, was anything but empty. Indigenous Americans had lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, perhaps as many as 250,000 Natives still inhabited the American West. But then unending waves of American settlers, the American military, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered all. The United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, controlled the enormity of land between the two oceans. The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is many-sided. A tragedy for some, a triumph for others, the many intertwined histories of the American West marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the United States.

 

Industrialization and Urbanization

 

When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he observed a city that seemed to him captivated by technology and blinded by greed. He described a rushed and crowded metropolis, a “huge wilderness” with “scores of miles of these terrible streets” and their “hundred thousand of these terrible people.” “The show impressed me with a great horror,” he wrote. “There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.” He took a cab “and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress.” Kipling visited a “gilded and mirrored” hotel “crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere.” He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. “I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again.” Kipling said American newspapers report “that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.”^[1] Links to an external site.

At the end of the 19th century, Chicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. The last decades of the century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business. Chicago, for instance, became America’s butcher. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four-fifths of the meat bought by American consumers. Kipling described in intimate detail the Union Stock Yards, the nation’s largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city’s vast agricultural hinterland to the nation’s dinner tables. “Once having seen them,” he concluded, “you will never forget the sight.” Like other notable Chicago industries, such as agricultural machinery and steel production, the meatpacking industry was closely tied to urbanization and immigration. In 1850, Chicago had a population of about 30,000. Twenty years later, it had 300,000. Nothing could stop the city’s growth. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3.5 square miles and left a third of its residents homeless in 1871, but the city quickly recovered and resumed its spectacular expansion. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was home to 1.7 million people.

Chicago’s explosive growth reflected national trends. In 1870, a quarter of the nation’s population lived in towns or cities with populations greater than 2,500. By 1920, a majority did. But if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. Mirroring national immigration patterns, Chicago’s newcomers had at first come mostly from Germany, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, but, by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant city. In 1900, nearly 80% of Chicago’s population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants.^[2] Links to an external site.

Kipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United States. The rise of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the emergence of mass culture, the creation of great concentrated wealth, the growth of city slums, the conquest of the West, the establishment of a middle class, the problem of poverty, the triumph of big business, battles between capital and labor, the consolidation of farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.

While many believed in the land of opportunity, the reality of urban life in the United States was more chaotic and difficult than people expected. In addition to the challenges of language, class, race, and ethnicity, these new arrivals dealt with low wages, overcrowded buildings, poor sanitation, and widespread disease. The land of opportunity, it seemed, did not always deliver on its promises.

 

---

The content in each module is sequenced in the suggested order you should complete it.  When you are ready to get started on this module, click the  button below.