Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология
Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии


What was the difference between Old South and Southwest as different economic regions and why did they unite against Northern states during the Civil War?



Dates

1787 — the Second Compromise of the Constitutionsettled the dispute between Northern states and Southern states over the definition of " population" for determining the number of members a state had in the House of Representatives. Northern states thought that slaves should not be counted, and Southern states thought they should. The Compromise that both sides agreed to was to count each slave as three-fifths of a person. Meaning that slavery was constitutionally accepted. With that in mind, the Constitution also said that in 20 yrs slave trade in the US was to be abolished. By 1807, however, there were enough slaves in the US for them not to be brought from overseas: they were sold inside the country.

— The Northwest Ordinance settles the issue of slavery for the territory acquired by the US from Great Britain after the Revolutionary War;

1807 — (external) Slave-trade was stopped in the US

1820 — The Missouri Compromise

1848 — Gold is found in California when a sawmill was being built near a stream: the gold rush. Many cities were born from settlements of gold diggers (like Denver, CO).

1850 — The Compromise of 1850 which basically annulled the Missouri Compromise

1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as reflection of Northern opposition to the new Fugitive Slave Law;

the Underground Railroad (Harriet Tubman);

1854 — Kansas - Nebraska Act, «Bleeding Kansas»; In 1854 a Senator named Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to end the Missouri Compromise. West of Missouri, on land that was supposed to be closed to slavery, was a western territory called Kansas. In 1854 Congress voted to let its people decide for themselves whether to permit slavery there by introducing the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

A race to win control of Kansas began. Pro-slavery immigrants poured from the South and anti-slavery immigrants from the North. Each group was determined to outnumber the other. Soon fighting and killing began. Pro-slavery raiders from Missouri burned a town called Lawrence and killed some of its people. In reply, a half-mad abolitionist named John Brown led a raid in which a number of supporters of slavery were killed. Because of all the fighting and killing on this territory Americans everywhere began referring to it as " bleeding Kansas."

— New Republican Party emerges.

1857 — Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court (slaves are slaves no matter where - in pro- or anti-slavery territory - they are; the Supreme Court is racist, which sets precedent; compromises don’t work);

1858 — Lincoln - Douglas debates

1859 — John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry; He hoped that through his own actions he would incite rebellion amongst the slave populations, create an army of freed slaves and topple the pro-slave institutions from within.

1860 — The Democratic Party is in crisis; The Democrats who favored compromise with the pro-slavery South held fast to the ailing presidency of James Buchanan. Those Democrats seeking a way to outlaw slavery altogether moved towards Stephen Douglas. The split in the ruling party meant there was just enough space for the upstart Republican Party to field candidates to Congress as well as to the presidency and to do so with success. The pinnacle for their new party was the election victory of 1860, which placed a little-known railroad lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln into the White House.

Abraham Lincoln is elected president from the Republican Party by electoral vote;

South Carolina secedes from the Union

1861 — Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas secede (January); Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia secede (May-April);

— The Civil War begins

1862 — the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act offered free farms (homesteads) in the West to families of settlers. Each homestead consisted of 160 acres of land and any head of a family who was at least twenty-one years of age and an American citizen could claim one (so could immigrants who intended to become citizens). All that homesteaders had to do was to move a piece of public land — that is, land owned by the government— live on it for five years and the land became theirs. If a family wanted to own its homestead more quickly than this it could buy the land after only six months for a very low price of $l.25 an acre. Transcontinental railroad companies like the Union Pacific also provided settlers with cheap land. These companies had been given land beside their tracks by the government;
— Union Pacific Railroad Company and the Central Pacific Railroad Company are granted money to build a railroad west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific and from the east from California to Utah.

1865 — End of Civil War; Lincoln’s assassination

1866 — Congress reconstruction (Civil Rights Act + 14th Amendment); KKK is born in Tennessee under N.B. Forrest.
1869 — Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines meet at Promontory Point in Utah. The first railroad was completed.
1872 — Yellowstone Park (Old Faithful geyser is located there) in the Rockies becomes a national park. This movement for ‘conservation’ of the US’ natural heritage was lead by John Muir.

1874 — Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire (fencing off farms in the Mid-West => conflicts between farmers and cowboys)

1876 — Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to show off American achievements

1877 — Northern military units leave the South, end of the Reconstruction
1878 — Edison Electric Company is formed. Edison begins work on the electric bulb.

1890 — Yosemite Park in California becomes a national park

1898 — Plessy v. Ferguson (‘separate but equal’ facilities for black and white people including schools, bathrooms, cemeteries, etc.)

— Spanish- American War: The war took place against the background of the Cuban War of Independence, so the main location was Cuba and Puerto Rico. Reasons: officially, America wanted to free Cuba from Spanish domination and to protect American citizens, but actually saw an opportunity to seize overseas possessions and to start building the American empire.
Main events:

- Military events in the Philippines (a naval battle, 1, May, 1898, nearly all Spanish ships sank)

- The land campaign in Cuba (Santiago, 1, July – 17, July, 1898).

Results: The Treaty of Paris, protectorate over Cuba, the outbreak of Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902).

1913 — Henry Ford and mass production
1916 — National Parks Service is established to look after national parks.

1917 — America entered World War One on April 6th, 1917 after long deliberation. The reason for entering the war was the armed blockade of the German Navy of water routes to England. First they sank the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. Because the Germans sank, without warning, what was officially a non-military ship, many accused the Germans of breaching the internationally recognized Cruiser Rules. The sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States as 128 American citizens were among the dead. The sinking helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany, and was a factor in the United States' declaration of war nearly two years later. On March 1, 1917, newspapers all over the United States printed a sensational story. The story claimed that Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Secretary, had tried to persuade Mexico and Japan to attack the United States. The Zimmermann telegram turned American opinion more strongly in favor of the Allies. This was especially true in the previously uninterested western parts of the country. These were the very areas that would have been threatened most if Zimmermann's plan had worked.
Battles: the fighting along the Marne River (May, 1918), an all-out attack in the Saint-Michel area of Eastern France (June, 1918), military actions in the Argonne Forest (October, 1918). After the war, despite Woodrow Wilson’s attempt at organizing the League of Nations, the US decided not to go against the Monroe Doctrine.

1924 — Indian Citizenship Act

1929 — In the 1920s, the controlling party were the republicans. Republicans believed that if the government looked after the interests of the businessmen, everybody would become richer. Businessmen whose firms were doing well, they claimed, would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing wealth would benefit everybody. To help businessmen Congress placed high import taxes on goods from abroad. The aim was to make imported goods more expensive so that American manufacturers would have less competition from foreign rivals. At the same time Congress reduced taxes on high incomes and company profits. This gave rich men more money to invest. Yet some people began to have doubts. The true value of shares in a business firm depends up on its profits. By the fall of 1929 the profits being made by many American firms had been decreasing for some time. If profits were falling, thought more cautious investors, then share prices, too, would soon fall. Slowly, such people began to sell their shares. Day by day their numbers grew. Soon so many people were selling shares that prices did start to fall. At first many investors held on to their shares, hoping that prices would rise again. But the fall became faster. A panic began. On Thursday, October 24, 1929 - Black Thursday - 13 mil shares were sold. On the following Tuesday, October 29 - Terrifying Tuesday - 16.5 mil were sold.

The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed. Though the relief and reform measures put into place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal) helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the economy would not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II kicked American industry into high gear.
Many of the new laws set up government organizations called «agencies’’ to help the nation to recover from the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCE) found work for many thousands of young men. The federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) gave individual states government money to help their unemployed and homeless. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) set out to raise crop prices by paying farmers to produce less. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a network of dams to make electricity and stop floods in a poor southeastern region of the United States. And the National Recovery Administration (NRA) worked to make sure that businesses paid fair wages and charged fair prices.

A later alphabet agency was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Roosevelt set up the WPA in 1935. Like the CCC, it aimed to set people to work on jobs that were useful to the community. By 1937 its worker s had built thousands of miles of new roads and thousands of schools and hospitals. The WPA even found work for unemployed writers and artists. The writers produced guidebooks to states and cities. The artists painted pictures on the walls of post offices and other public buildings. Alphabet agencies like the CCC and the WPA put millions of people to work. Between 1935 and 1941 the WPA alone provided eight million jobs. The money they were paid helped to bring trade back to life. Shops had customers again. Factories became busy once more. Farmers had someone to buy their produce.

19(39)41-1945 — WWII. Isolationist ideas were strong in Congress during the 1930s. It passed a number of laws called Neutrality Acts. These said that American citizens would not be allowed to sell military equipment, or lend money, to any nations at war. Even non-military supplies such as foodstuffs would be sold to warring countries only if they paid cash for them and collected them in their own ships. Roosevelt had already persuaded Congress to approve the first peacetime military conscription in American history and to suspend the Neutrality Acts. Now he sent Britain all the military equipment that the United States could spare: rifles, guns, ships. Early in 1941 the British ran out of money. In March Roosevelt persuaded Congress to accept his Lend Lease Plan. Lend Lease gave Roosevelt the right to supply military equipment and other goods to Britain and other Allied nations without payment. The US entered World War II on the 8th of December in 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. World War Conferences: Washington Conference, Tehran Conference, Yalta Conference, Potsdam Conference, Operation Overlord (D-day, 06.06.1944).

Results: industrial and economic growth, casualties about 418 000 people.

Aug. 6 & 9 1945 — Americans drop A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan
1947 — Truman’s ‘containment’ doctrine& Marshall plan (providing Europe w/ goods needed to restore; ended in 1954)

1949 — NATO
1950-53 — Korean War. On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75, 000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war. The Korean peninsula is still divided today.

1954 — Brown v. Topeka overturns Plessy v. Ferguson (public schools are to be open for children of all races) => beginning of campaign to end all forms of legally enforced segregation.
1962 — The Cuban missile crisis. Soviets remove missiles from Cuba, Americans lay off Turkey.

1968-1973 — Vietnam war (active American participation in the action).The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the end of French occupation and the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including 58, 000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War; more than half were Vietnamese civilians. By 1969, at the peak of U.S. involvement in the war, more than 500, 000 U.S. military personnel were involved in the Vietnam conflict. Growing opposition to the war in the United States led to bitter divisions among Americans, both before and after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. In 1975, communist forces seized control of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.
1969 — Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Edward Aldrin, Michael Collins. Americans plant their flag on the Moon.

1972-74 — Nixon’s Watergate scandal

2000 — Republican George W. Bush is elected President of the US

9/11 — Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center => American «War on Terror» policy and invasion of Iraq in 2003

Questions

Unit 9
1. How was slavery treated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

On the surface, the Constitution seemed to protect slavery in the states, prohibited Congress from banning the slave trade for twenty years, and required that fugitive slaves, even in the North, be returned to their masters. The Constitution, therefore, in the eyes of some scholars, seems to be a contradiction to the universal ideals of liberty and equality in the American Founding and the Declaration of Independence which proclaimed “all men are created equal” and endowed with “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Slaves were imported into and held as property all of the American colonies for more than a century. Slavery persisted despite the Revolutionary War and ratification of the Constitution, with most of the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution owning slaves, and the number of slaves steadily grew through natural increase and slave imports from abroad. Westward expansion caused sectionalism—disputes between the northern and southern sections of the new nation—to rise over slavery, and Congress continued to put off the controversy through a series of compromises (The Three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, the Missouri compromise and the Compromise of 1850) until it could no longer be ignored.

2. How did the North and the South respond to the Industrial Revolution? Which region got the advantages at the beginning of it and which region got the advantages at the end of it? What were those advantages?
1 812-1814 War w/ Britain. Brits burned ports and blocked american ships (the most notable was the battle of New Orleans). America imported all industrial goods from Europe, and they couldn't allow that. Jefferson, who was previously against industrialization (bc he was from the South) realized that building american industry would make the US more independent from Europe economically and also stabilize the situation at home (they wouldn't risk going hungry).

The first industry in the US was the textile industry (cotton). The South was leading at the beginning, bc they had the resources. The North built factories to process cotton into cloth, and roads and canals to transport it. Hired immigrants who unlike slaves had to be paid. So at first they spent more money than the South. The South had resources (cotton & tobacco), rivers (Mississippi being the greatest) and ports (New Orleans especially). They sold raw materials to the North to be processed and also exported cotton to Europe. However, the South soon started to lag behind (industry > agriculture; the North could manufacture more and thus export more; cloth costs more than cotton). 2 major paradoxes of the South: they stayed agrarian despite it no longer being affordable, the industrial revolution made slavery even more desirable (expanded plantations to get more profit => needed more slaves).

Vocabulary

Unit 9
rural region/ industrial region - сельский (аграрный) район/ промышленный район

rapid economic growth - быстрый экономический рост

sharpen regional differences - обострять региональные различия

develop textile industry - развивать текстильную промышленность

grow cotton - выращивать хлопок

make slavery desirable - делать рабство желательным

have natural advantages - иметь естественные преимущества

invest a lot of money in industry - вкладывать деньги в промышленность

defend/ oppose slavery - защищать рабство/ быть против рабства

defend/ attack Southern values - защищать/ нападать на ценности южан

have a regional outlook/ have a broad national outlook - иметь региональное (узкое) мировоззрение/ иметь широкое (общенациональное мировоззрение

abolish slavery gradually/ immediately - отменить рабство постепенно/ немедленно

settle the issue of slavery - решать проблему рабства

work out a complicated compromise - выработать сложный компромисс

the terms of a compromise - условия компромисса

contradict the previous compromise - противоречить предыдущему компромиссу

a controversial issue - спорный вопрос

a sin/ an evil/ a benefit/ a matter of honour - грех/ зло/ польза/ дело чести

entertaining books/ sophisticated arguments развлекательные книги / сложные (научные) аргументы

be responsible for Southern economic backwardness - отвечать за экономическую отсталость Юга

be incompatible with the natural human right to be free - быть несовместимым с естественным человеческим правом быть свободным

justify slavery - оправдывать рабство

be inferior to sb. - быть ниже кого-то по уровню развития

Pro-slavery movement/ anti-slavery movement - движение в защиту рабства/ против рабства

 

Unit 10

1. The 1850s:

settle the issue of slavery - решать проблему рабства

be a political failure - быть политическим провалом

the tension was growing - напряжение нарастало

sparkle a fire - зажечь огонь

catch runaway slaves - ловить беглых рабов

set an example - подавать пример

make the previous compromise void - делать предыдущий компромисс

недействительным

gain support in the North - получать поддержку на Севере

struggle for Presidency - бороться за пост президента

apply to court - обращаться в суд

win the elections - выигрывать выборы

attack an arsenal - нападать на арсенал

start a slave uprising - начинать восстание рабов

2. The Civil War

secede from the Union - выходить из союза

attack a fort - нападать на форт

emancipate slaves - освобождать рабов

terms of surrender - условия капитуляции

defeat the army - разгромить армию

assassinate the President - убить президента (совершить политическое убийство)

Unit 11

1. strengthen the Union - укреплять союз

mild terms of capitulation - мягкие условия капитуляции

execute for war crimes - казнить за военные преступления

release from prison - освобождать из тюрьмы

2. restore economy - восстанавливать экономику

rely on private investments - полагаться на частные инвестиции

conduct the economic policy - проводить экономическую политику

3. sign a fair contract - подписывать справедливый контракт

4. Radical/ Moderate Republicans - радикальные/ умеренные

республиканцы

pardon the citizens - помиловать граждан

treat as a conquered territory - относиться как к завоеванной

территории

adopt the amendment - принимать поправку

divide into military districts - разделить на военные округа

give the right to vote - давать право голоса

ally with Democrats - объединяться с демократами

a tie - ничья

withdraw military troops from the South - выводить войска с Юга

betray former slaves - предавать бывших рабов

5. threaten blacks - угрожать темнокожим

conduct the policy of segregation - проводить политику сегрегации

silent approval - молчаливое одобрение

Unit 12

create monopoly - создавать монополию

limit the power of trusts - ограничивать власть трестов

increase productivity in assembling cars - повышать производительность труда в процессе сборки автомобилей

decrease industrial production during economic depression - снижать темпы промышленного производства во время экономической депрессии

increase the government control over the US economy - усиливать контроль государства над экономикой

support social welfare programs - поддерживать социальные программы

form the majority in Congress - формировать большинство в Конгрессе

recognize as full US citizens - признавать гражданами США

sue the federal government for breaking old treaties - подавать в суд на федеральное правительство за нарушение старых договоров

pay compensation to Indian tribes - выплачивать компенсацию индейским племенам

make segregation illegal - делать сегрегацию незаконной

interfere in US affairs - вмешиваться в дела США

protect democratic values in the world - защищать демократические ценности во всем мире

conduct / terminate the war - вести войну/ останавливать войну


Terms
Unit 9

the Second Compromise of the Constitution (1787) - второй компромисс Конституции

the Missouri Compromise (1820) - Компромисс по Миссури

the Compromise of 1850 (1850) - Компромисс 1850 года

the Fugitive Slave Law - Закон о беглых рабах

abolitionists - аболиционисты

racism - расизм

Unit 10

the Compromise of 1850 (1850) - Компромисс 1850 года

the Fugitive Slave Law - Закон о беглых рабах

Kansas-Nebraska Act: bleeding Kansas - Закон о Канзасе и

Небраске: " истекающий кровью Канзас"

Republican / Democratic Party - Республиканская/

Демократическая Партия

Federate / Confederate States - Штаты, поддерживающие

Федерацию/ Штаты, поддерживающие Конфедерацию

Unit 11

Presidential Reconstruction/ Radical Reconstruction - Президентская /Радикальная

реконструкция

Radical Republicans/ Moderate Republicans - радикальные/ умеренные республиканцы

hands-off policy - политика невмешательства (hands-off - руки прочь)

Freedmen's Bureau - Бюро по делам освобожденных лиц

13th, 14th, 15th Amendments 13. 14. 15 -я поправки

segregation - сегрегация

racism - расизм

the Ku Klux Klan - Ку-клукс-клан

Unit 12

Anti-Trust Laws - Антитрастовые законы

Great Depression - Великая депрессия

New Deal - Новый Курс

Trail of Broken Treaties - Путь нарушенных соглашений

Civil Rights Movement - Движение за гражданские права

Proper names

Unit 9

New England (Boston)

Middle region (New York City, Philadelphia)

Old South (Charlestown)

Northwest (Chicago, Cincinnati), Southwest

Missouri, Maine, California, Texas, Utah, New Mexico

Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison

Harriet Beecher Stowe " Uncle Tom's Cabin»

Unit 10

Abraham Lincoln

Stephen Douglas

Dred Scott

John Brown / Harper's Ferry

General Lee

General Grant

Jefferson Davis

South Carolina

Fort Sumter

Gettysburg

Appomattox

Unit 11

Abraham Lincoln

Andrew Johnson

Rutherford Hayes

Samuel Tilden

 

Unit 12

Henry Ford

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Barack Obama

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dates

1787 — the Second Compromise of the Constitutionsettled the dispute between Northern states and Southern states over the definition of " population" for determining the number of members a state had in the House of Representatives. Northern states thought that slaves should not be counted, and Southern states thought they should. The Compromise that both sides agreed to was to count each slave as three-fifths of a person. Meaning that slavery was constitutionally accepted. With that in mind, the Constitution also said that in 20 yrs slave trade in the US was to be abolished. By 1807, however, there were enough slaves in the US for them not to be brought from overseas: they were sold inside the country.

— The Northwest Ordinance settles the issue of slavery for the territory acquired by the US from Great Britain after the Revolutionary War;

1807 — (external) Slave-trade was stopped in the US

1820 — The Missouri Compromise

1848 — Gold is found in California when a sawmill was being built near a stream: the gold rush. Many cities were born from settlements of gold diggers (like Denver, CO).

1850 — The Compromise of 1850 which basically annulled the Missouri Compromise

1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as reflection of Northern opposition to the new Fugitive Slave Law;

the Underground Railroad (Harriet Tubman);

1854 — Kansas - Nebraska Act, «Bleeding Kansas»; In 1854 a Senator named Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to end the Missouri Compromise. West of Missouri, on land that was supposed to be closed to slavery, was a western territory called Kansas. In 1854 Congress voted to let its people decide for themselves whether to permit slavery there by introducing the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

A race to win control of Kansas began. Pro-slavery immigrants poured from the South and anti-slavery immigrants from the North. Each group was determined to outnumber the other. Soon fighting and killing began. Pro-slavery raiders from Missouri burned a town called Lawrence and killed some of its people. In reply, a half-mad abolitionist named John Brown led a raid in which a number of supporters of slavery were killed. Because of all the fighting and killing on this territory Americans everywhere began referring to it as " bleeding Kansas."

— New Republican Party emerges.

1857 — Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court (slaves are slaves no matter where - in pro- or anti-slavery territory - they are; the Supreme Court is racist, which sets precedent; compromises don’t work);

1858 — Lincoln - Douglas debates

1859 — John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry; He hoped that through his own actions he would incite rebellion amongst the slave populations, create an army of freed slaves and topple the pro-slave institutions from within.

1860 — The Democratic Party is in crisis; The Democrats who favored compromise with the pro-slavery South held fast to the ailing presidency of James Buchanan. Those Democrats seeking a way to outlaw slavery altogether moved towards Stephen Douglas. The split in the ruling party meant there was just enough space for the upstart Republican Party to field candidates to Congress as well as to the presidency and to do so with success. The pinnacle for their new party was the election victory of 1860, which placed a little-known railroad lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln into the White House.

Abraham Lincoln is elected president from the Republican Party by electoral vote;

South Carolina secedes from the Union

1861 — Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas secede (January); Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia secede (May-April);

— The Civil War begins

1862 — the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act offered free farms (homesteads) in the West to families of settlers. Each homestead consisted of 160 acres of land and any head of a family who was at least twenty-one years of age and an American citizen could claim one (so could immigrants who intended to become citizens). All that homesteaders had to do was to move a piece of public land — that is, land owned by the government— live on it for five years and the land became theirs. If a family wanted to own its homestead more quickly than this it could buy the land after only six months for a very low price of $l.25 an acre. Transcontinental railroad companies like the Union Pacific also provided settlers with cheap land. These companies had been given land beside their tracks by the government;
— Union Pacific Railroad Company and the Central Pacific Railroad Company are granted money to build a railroad west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific and from the east from California to Utah.

1865 — End of Civil War; Lincoln’s assassination

1866 — Congress reconstruction (Civil Rights Act + 14th Amendment); KKK is born in Tennessee under N.B. Forrest.
1869 — Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines meet at Promontory Point in Utah. The first railroad was completed.
1872 — Yellowstone Park (Old Faithful geyser is located there) in the Rockies becomes a national park. This movement for ‘conservation’ of the US’ natural heritage was lead by John Muir.

1874 — Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire (fencing off farms in the Mid-West => conflicts between farmers and cowboys)

1876 — Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to show off American achievements

1877 — Northern military units leave the South, end of the Reconstruction
1878 — Edison Electric Company is formed. Edison begins work on the electric bulb.

1890 — Yosemite Park in California becomes a national park

1898 — Plessy v. Ferguson (‘separate but equal’ facilities for black and white people including schools, bathrooms, cemeteries, etc.)

— Spanish- American War: The war took place against the background of the Cuban War of Independence, so the main location was Cuba and Puerto Rico. Reasons: officially, America wanted to free Cuba from Spanish domination and to protect American citizens, but actually saw an opportunity to seize overseas possessions and to start building the American empire.
Main events:

- Military events in the Philippines (a naval battle, 1, May, 1898, nearly all Spanish ships sank)

- The land campaign in Cuba (Santiago, 1, July – 17, July, 1898).

Results: The Treaty of Paris, protectorate over Cuba, the outbreak of Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902).

1913 — Henry Ford and mass production
1916 — National Parks Service is established to look after national parks.

1917 — America entered World War One on April 6th, 1917 after long deliberation. The reason for entering the war was the armed blockade of the German Navy of water routes to England. First they sank the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. Because the Germans sank, without warning, what was officially a non-military ship, many accused the Germans of breaching the internationally recognized Cruiser Rules. The sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States as 128 American citizens were among the dead. The sinking helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany, and was a factor in the United States' declaration of war nearly two years later. On March 1, 1917, newspapers all over the United States printed a sensational story. The story claimed that Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Secretary, had tried to persuade Mexico and Japan to attack the United States. The Zimmermann telegram turned American opinion more strongly in favor of the Allies. This was especially true in the previously uninterested western parts of the country. These were the very areas that would have been threatened most if Zimmermann's plan had worked.
Battles: the fighting along the Marne River (May, 1918), an all-out attack in the Saint-Michel area of Eastern France (June, 1918), military actions in the Argonne Forest (October, 1918). After the war, despite Woodrow Wilson’s attempt at organizing the League of Nations, the US decided not to go against the Monroe Doctrine.

1924 — Indian Citizenship Act

1929 — In the 1920s, the controlling party were the republicans. Republicans believed that if the government looked after the interests of the businessmen, everybody would become richer. Businessmen whose firms were doing well, they claimed, would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing wealth would benefit everybody. To help businessmen Congress placed high import taxes on goods from abroad. The aim was to make imported goods more expensive so that American manufacturers would have less competition from foreign rivals. At the same time Congress reduced taxes on high incomes and company profits. This gave rich men more money to invest. Yet some people began to have doubts. The true value of shares in a business firm depends up on its profits. By the fall of 1929 the profits being made by many American firms had been decreasing for some time. If profits were falling, thought more cautious investors, then share prices, too, would soon fall. Slowly, such people began to sell their shares. Day by day their numbers grew. Soon so many people were selling shares that prices did start to fall. At first many investors held on to their shares, hoping that prices would rise again. But the fall became faster. A panic began. On Thursday, October 24, 1929 - Black Thursday - 13 mil shares were sold. On the following Tuesday, October 29 - Terrifying Tuesday - 16.5 mil were sold.

The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed. Though the relief and reform measures put into place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal) helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the economy would not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II kicked American industry into high gear.
Many of the new laws set up government organizations called «agencies’’ to help the nation to recover from the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCE) found work for many thousands of young men. The federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) gave individual states government money to help their unemployed and homeless. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) set out to raise crop prices by paying farmers to produce less. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a network of dams to make electricity and stop floods in a poor southeastern region of the United States. And the National Recovery Administration (NRA) worked to make sure that businesses paid fair wages and charged fair prices.

A later alphabet agency was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Roosevelt set up the WPA in 1935. Like the CCC, it aimed to set people to work on jobs that were useful to the community. By 1937 its worker s had built thousands of miles of new roads and thousands of schools and hospitals. The WPA even found work for unemployed writers and artists. The writers produced guidebooks to states and cities. The artists painted pictures on the walls of post offices and other public buildings. Alphabet agencies like the CCC and the WPA put millions of people to work. Between 1935 and 1941 the WPA alone provided eight million jobs. The money they were paid helped to bring trade back to life. Shops had customers again. Factories became busy once more. Farmers had someone to buy their produce.

19(39)41-1945 — WWII. Isolationist ideas were strong in Congress during the 1930s. It passed a number of laws called Neutrality Acts. These said that American citizens would not be allowed to sell military equipment, or lend money, to any nations at war. Even non-military supplies such as foodstuffs would be sold to warring countries only if they paid cash for them and collected them in their own ships. Roosevelt had already persuaded Congress to approve the first peacetime military conscription in American history and to suspend the Neutrality Acts. Now he sent Britain all the military equipment that the United States could spare: rifles, guns, ships. Early in 1941 the British ran out of money. In March Roosevelt persuaded Congress to accept his Lend Lease Plan. Lend Lease gave Roosevelt the right to supply military equipment and other goods to Britain and other Allied nations without payment. The US entered World War II on the 8th of December in 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. World War Conferences: Washington Conference, Tehran Conference, Yalta Conference, Potsdam Conference, Operation Overlord (D-day, 06.06.1944).

Results: industrial and economic growth, casualties about 418 000 people.

Aug. 6 & 9 1945 — Americans drop A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan
1947 — Truman’s ‘containment’ doctrine& Marshall plan (providing Europe w/ goods needed to restore; ended in 1954)

1949 — NATO
1950-53 — Korean War. On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75, 000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war. The Korean peninsula is still divided today.

1954 — Brown v. Topeka overturns Plessy v. Ferguson (public schools are to be open for children of all races) => beginning of campaign to end all forms of legally enforced segregation.
1962 — The Cuban missile crisis. Soviets remove missiles from Cuba, Americans lay off Turkey.

1968-1973 — Vietnam war (active American participation in the action).The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the end of French occupation and the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including 58, 000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War; more than half were Vietnamese civilians. By 1969, at the peak of U.S. involvement in the war, more than 500, 000 U.S. military personnel were involved in the Vietnam conflict. Growing opposition to the war in the United States led to bitter divisions among Americans, both before and after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. In 1975, communist forces seized control of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.
1969 — Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Edward Aldrin, Michael Collins. Americans plant their flag on the Moon.

1972-74 — Nixon’s Watergate scandal

2000 — Republican George W. Bush is elected President of the US

9/11 — Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center => American «War on Terror» policy and invasion of Iraq in 2003

Questions

Unit 9
1. How was slavery treated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

On the surface, the Constitution seemed to protect slavery in the states, prohibited Congress from banning the slave trade for twenty years, and required that fugitive slaves, even in the North, be returned to their masters. The Constitution, therefore, in the eyes of some scholars, seems to be a contradiction to the universal ideals of liberty and equality in the American Founding and the Declaration of Independence which proclaimed “all men are created equal” and endowed with “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Slaves were imported into and held as property all of the American colonies for more than a century. Slavery persisted despite the Revolutionary War and ratification of the Constitution, with most of the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution owning slaves, and the number of slaves steadily grew through natural increase and slave imports from abroad. Westward expansion caused sectionalism—disputes between the northern and southern sections of the new nation—to rise over slavery, and Congress continued to put off the controversy through a series of compromises (The Three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, the Missouri compromise and the Compromise of 1850) until it could no longer be ignored.

2. How did the North and the South respond to the Industrial Revolution? Which region got the advantages at the beginning of it and which region got the advantages at the end of it? What were those advantages?
1 812-1814 War w/ Britain. Brits burned ports and blocked american ships (the most notable was the battle of New Orleans). America imported all industrial goods from Europe, and they couldn't allow that. Jefferson, who was previously against industrialization (bc he was from the South) realized that building american industry would make the US more independent from Europe economically and also stabilize the situation at home (they wouldn't risk going hungry).

The first industry in the US was the textile industry (cotton). The South was leading at the beginning, bc they had the resources. The North built factories to process cotton into cloth, and roads and canals to transport it. Hired immigrants who unlike slaves had to be paid. So at first they spent more money than the South. The South had resources (cotton & tobacco), rivers (Mississippi being the greatest) and ports (New Orleans especially). They sold raw materials to the North to be processed and also exported cotton to Europe. However, the South soon started to lag behind (industry > agriculture; the North could manufacture more and thus export more; cloth costs more than cotton). 2 major paradoxes of the South: they stayed agrarian despite it no longer being affordable, the industrial revolution made slavery even more desirable (expanded plantations to get more profit => needed more slaves).

What was the difference between Old South and Southwest as different economic regions and why did they unite against Northern states during the Civil War?

The Old South was made up of large plantations that used to be allotments of land given to British nobles. Those nobles had the financial ability to upkeep the vast lands of their giant estates and acquire enough slaves to work there. The Southwest was populated by old south peeps, but who were significantly poorer and wanted to make it on their own. They had small farms and few slaves. The North and Southwest were similar in the way that both planters and small farmers relied on slave labor, or at least thought it to be the end-all-be-all of their enterprises’ success. Southerners couldn't imagine their life without slaves, and this is the point that united the Old and New South in the fight against the North.

4. What political compromises regulated the issue of slavery in the USA? What did the Compromise of 1850 say and why did it start a new dispute?
The 3/5 compromise
The delegates from Southern (slave) states wanted to counts slaves as part of their population. This would give the Southern states additional representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives. Delegates from the Northern (free) states strongly opposed this, arguing that if slaves had no rights to vote (or any other rights of citizenship) then the South should not be given additional representatives in the House. Also, the North feared that counting slaves as part of the South's population would allow the South to have enough representatives in the House to out-vote the North on issues regarding slavery. The South likewise feared that not counting slaves as part of their population would give them too few representatives in the House, thus allowing the North to out-vote the South on issues regarding slavery. The compromise they reached would arbitrarily count each slave as 3/5 of a person. Thus, neither North nor South fully got their way, as slaves were counted in part toward population when determining how many representatives the free whites should have in the House of Representatives. Hence the name " 3/5 compromise." Not wanting to put the word " slave" in the Constitution, the delegates agreed the Constitution would state that population would be determined by counting the number of " free Persons... plus three-fifths of all other Persons..." Of course, if one is an " other person" rather than a free person, obviously the " other person" must be " not free"; in other words, a slave.

The Missouri Compromise. Balance between slave and non slave states: 11-11. But then in 1819, Missouri wanted to enter as a slave state, thus breaking the balance. A compromise was reached in 1820, when Missouri was admitted as a slave state, but Maine was admitted as a slave-free state. This set up a precedent for states being admitted in slave/non-slave states (so waiting was involved). A line was established to the north of Missouri's southern border.
However, when TX was admitted as a slave state, northerners got the whole gold-bountiful CA without splitting it into non-slave North and slave South California.

The compromise of 1850. According to the 1787 North West Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise of 1819, they would have had to split California into 2, but compensation was due for admitting the enormous territory of TX into the union.
Terms of the compromise:
1. Cali was non-slave, TX-all-slave.
2. The rest of the territory, Utah and New Mexico, would have to vote whether to enter as slave or non-slave states (this procedure is called popular sovereignty).
3. Southern states wanted to balance the power w/ the Northern states out by making them search for runaway slaves and return them to their masters by introducing the (new) Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
=> This compromise contradicted the earlier one of 1819, basically ignoring it altogether. It wasn’t long until it would become officially void.


Поделиться:



Последнее изменение этой страницы: 2017-04-13; Просмотров: 871; Нарушение авторского права страницы


lektsia.com 2007 - 2024 год. Все материалы представленные на сайте исключительно с целью ознакомления читателями и не преследуют коммерческих целей или нарушение авторских прав! (0.242 с.)
Главная | Случайная страница | Обратная связь