Unit 2 - Antebellum Reform
Study Guide for Unit 2 test
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The new republic struggled to define and extend democratic ideals in the face of rapid economic, territorial, and demographic changes.
- Key Concept 4.1: The United States developed the world’s first modern mass democracy and celebrated a new national culture, while Americans sought to define the nation’s democratic ideals and to reform its institutions to match them.
- Key Concept 4.2: Developments in technology, agriculture, and commerce precipitated profound changes in U.S. settlement patterns, regional identities, gender and family relations, political power, and distribution of consumer goods.
- Key Concept 4.3: U.S. interest in increasing foreign trade, expanding its national borders, and isolating itself from European conflicts shaped the nation’s foreign policy and spurred government and private initiatives.
Women in the 19th Century
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The Market Revolution
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Key Concepts:
- Various groups of American Indians, women, and religious followers developed cultures reflecting their interests and experiences, as did regional groups and an emerging urban middle class.
- A global market and communications revolution, influencing and influenced by technological innovations, led to dramatic shifts in the nature of agriculture and manufacturing.
- Innovations including textile machinery, steam engines, interchangeable parts, canals, railroads, and the telegraph, as well as agricultural inventions, both extended markets and brought efficiency to production for those markets.
- Despite some governmental and private efforts to create a unified national economy, most notably the American System, the shift to market production linked the North and the Midwest more closely than either was linked to the South.
- With the opening of canals and new roads into the western territories, native-born white citizens relocated westward, relying on new community systems to replace their old family and local relationships.
- The South remained politically, culturally, and ideologically distinct from the other sections while continuing to rely on its exports to Europe for economic growth.
- The market revolution helped to widen a gap between rich and poor, shaped emerging middle and working classes, and caused an increasing separation between home and workplace, which led to dramatic transformations in gender and in family roles and expectations.
- Regional interests continued to trump national concerns as the basis for many political leaders’ positions on economic issues including slavery, the national bank, tariffs, and internal improvements.
The Importance of Frederick Douglass
19th Century Reforms
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Key Concepts:
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Anti-Slavery - Integration vs Colonization
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On Abolition
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Key Concepts:
- Many white Americans in the South asserted their regional identity through pride in the institution of slavery, insisting that the federal government should defend that institution.
- Despite the outlawing of the international slave trade, the rise in the number of free African Americans in both the North and the South, and widespread discussion of various emancipation plans, the United States and many state governments continued to restrict African Americans’ citizenship possibilities.
- Resistance to initiatives for democracy and inclusion included pro-slavery arguments, rising xenophobia, anti-black sentiments in political and popular culture, and restrictive anti-Indian policies.
- Enslaved and free African Americans, isolated at the bottom of the social hierarchy, created communities and strategies to protect their dignity and their family structures, even as some launched abolitionist and reform movements aimed at changing their status.
- Increasing numbers of Americans, especially women in factories and low-skilled male workers, no longer relied on semi-subsistence agriculture but made their livelihoods producing goods for distant markets, even as some urban entrepreneurs went into finance rather than manufacturing.
- Southern cotton furnished the raw materials for manufacturing in the Northeast, while the growth in cotton production and trade promoted the development of national economic ties, shaped the international economy, and fueled the internal slave trade.