Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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North Packet: Reading Set #1
Early United States History
Textile: The Waltham factory was so successful that Lowell and his
cloth, fabric partners built a new factory town, Lowell, near the Merrimack and
Concord rivers. The Lowell mills, textile mills in the village, employed farm girls who lived in
Deafening: company-owned boardinghouses. Lowell girls worked 12 hour days in deafening noise.
extremely
loud
Young women came to Lowell in spite of the noise. In the early years, wages were high
between two and four dollars a week. Older women supervised the girls, making them follow strict rules
and attend church. Girls read books, went to lectures, and even published a literary magazinethe Lowell Offering.
Usually they worked for only a few years, until they married. By the 1830s, however, falling profits meant that wages
dropped and working conditions worsened for the Lowell girls.
The Lowell mills and other early factories ran on water power. Factories built after the 1830s were run by
more powerful steam engines. Because steam engines used coal and wood, not fast-moving water, factories could be
built away from rivers and beyond New England.
Reading Source: Garcia, Jesus et al. Creating America. Evanston, IL: McDougal Little, 2007. Print.
Group
Name: ___________________________________________________
B
North Packet: Reading Set #2
Early United States History
Machines that produced exactly matching parts soon became standard in industries. Interchangeable parts
speeded up production, made repairs easy, and allowed the use of lower-paid, less-skilled workers. But the new
system also required a new style of management, with inspectors to make sure each piece was uniform. Workers
who were used to more independence disliked such close supervision.
The Clermont was dubbed Fultons Folly and described as looking precisely
Folly: Mistake like a backwards saw-mill mounted on a scow [boat] and set on fire.
But it made the 300-mile trip from New York to Albany and back in a
record 62 hours. Even Fulton had not expected to travel so quickly.
In 1811, the first steamship traveled down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. But
its engine was not powerful enough to return upriver, against the current. Henry Miller
Shreve, a trader on the Mississippi, designed a more powerful engine. He installed it on a
double-decker boat with a paddle wheel in the back. In 1816, he sailed this boat up the
Mississippi and launched a new era of trade and transportation on the river.
In 1837, Samuel F.B. Morse first demonstrated his Telegraph machine and Morse Code
National telegraph. This machine sent long and short pulses of electricity
unity: the along a wire. These pulses could be translated into letters of a message. With the telegraph, it
feeling of being took only seconds to communicate with someone in another city! In 1844, the first long-distance
connected with telegraph line carried news from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., about who had been
people across all
parts of the nominated for president. Telegraph lines spanned the country by 1861, bringing people closer as
country a nation. Both the telegraph and the steamboat brought more national unity.
Deeres steel plow
Plow: A piece Technology Improves Farming
of farm
equipment that Other new inventions increased farm production. In 1836, the
is used to dig blacksmith John Deere invented a lightweight plow with a steel cutting
into and turn edge. Older cast-iron plows were designed for the light, sandy soil of
over soil, New England. But rich, heavy Midwestern soil clung to the bottom of
especially to these plows and slowed farmers down. Deeres new plow made
prepare it for
planting preparing ground much less work. As a result, more farmers began to
move to the Midwest.
The mechanical reaper and the threshing machine were other inventions that improved agriculture.
Cyrus McCormicks reaper, patented in 1834, cut ripe grain. The threshing machine separated kernels of wheat from
husks.
New technologies linked regions and contributed to national unity. With new farm equipment, Midwestern
farmers grew food to feed Northeastern factory workers. In turn, Midwestern farmers became a market for
Northeastern manufactured goods. The growth of Northeastern textile mills increased demand for Southern cotton.
This led to expansion of slavery in the South.
Water transportation improved, too, with the building of canals. In fact, the period from
Nationalism: 1825 to 1850 is often called the Age of Canals. Completed in 1825, the massive Erie Canal created
A feeling of a water route between New York City and Buffalo, New York. The canal opened the upper Ohio
pride in ones
country Valley and the Great Lakes region to settlement and trade. It also fueled nationalism by unifying
these two sections of the country.
The Erie Canal allowed farm products from the Great Lakes region to flow east and people and
manufactured goods from the East to flow west. Trade stimulated by the canal helped New York City become the
nations largest city. Between 1820 and 1830, its population swelled from less than 125,000 to more than 200,000.
Around the 1830s, the nation began to use steam-powered trains for transportation. In 1830, only about 30
miles of track existed in the United States. But by 1850, the number had climbed to 9,000 miles. Improvements in
rail travel led to a decline in the use of canals.
Reading Source: Garcia, Jesus et al. Creating America. Evanston, IL: McDougal Little, 2007. Print.
Group
Name: ___________________________________________________
B
North Packet: Reading Set #3
Early United States History
Fighting for Workers Rights
As business owners tried to improve workers habits, workers called for improvements in
Boarding house: a working conditions. Factory work was noisy, boring, and unsafe. In the 1830s, American
house where people workers began to organize.
pay to live and have
daily meals
The young women mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, started a labor union. A labor
union is a group of workers who band together to seek better working conditions. In 1836, the
Scarce: hard to find mill owners raised the rent of the company-owned boarding houses where the women lived.
About 1,500 women went on strike, stopping work to demand better conditions. Eleven year-
old Harriet Hanson helped lead the strikers.
Istarted on ahead, sayingI dont care what you do, I am going to turn
out, whether anyone else does or not, and I marched out, and was followed by the
followed me, I was more proud than I
others. As I looked back at the long line that
have ever been since.
Other workers called for shorter hours and higher wages. In 1835 and 1836, 140 strikes took
place in the eastern United States. Then the Panic of 1837 brought hard times. Jobs were scarce,
and workers were afraid to cause trouble. The young labor movement fell apart. Even so,
workers achieved a few goals. For example, in 1840 President Martin Van Buren ordered a ten-
hour workday for government workers.
Improving Education
In the 1830s, Americans also began to demand better schools. In 1837, Massachusetts
Equalizer: Something that set up the first state board of education in the United States. Its head was Horace Mann.
makes people or things
equal Mann called public education the great equalizer. He also argued that education
Northwest Territory: land creates or develops new treasurestreasures never before possessed or dreamed of by
out west that the US owned any one. By 1850, many Northern states had opened public elementary schools.
but were not states yet Boston opened the first public high school in 1821. A few other Northern cities
followed suit. In addition, churches and other groups founded hundreds of private
colleges in the following decades. Many were located in states carved from the Northwest Territory. These included
Antioch and Oberlin Colleges in Ohio, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and Northwestern University in
Illinois.
Women could not attend most colleges. One exception was Oberlin. It was the first college to accept women
as well as men. In 1849, English immigrant Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a medical degree in
the United States. Despite such individual efforts, it was rare for a woman to attend college until the late 1800s.
African Americans also faced obstacles to getting an education. This was especially true in the
Barred: South. There, teaching an enslaved person to read had been illegal since the Nat Turner slave rebellion
Did not in 1831. Enslaved African Americans who tried to learn were brutally punished. Even in the North,
allow
most public schools barred African- American children.
Few colleges accepted African Americans. Those that did often took only one or two blacks
at a time. The first African American to receive a college degree was Alexander Twilight in 1823. John Russwurm
received one in 1826 and later began the first African American newspaper.
I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as
much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I
am as strong as any manIf you have womans rights give it
to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights,
and they wont be much trouble.
Slavery Expands
Oregon Fever
Hundreds of settlers also began migrating west on the Oregon Trail, which ran from
Missionaries: Independence, Missouri, to the Oregon Territory. The first whites to cross the continent to
people who Oregon were missionaries, such as Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in 1836. At that time, the
travel around United States and Britain were locked in an argument about which country owned Oregon.
trying to spread To the Whitmans great disappointment, they made few converts among the Native
their religion Americans. However, their glowing reports of Oregons rich land began to attract other
American settlers.
Converts: new Amazing stories spread about Oregon. The sun always shone there. Wheat grew as tall
members (of a as a man. One tale claimed that pigs were running about,round and fat, and already
religion) cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so you can cut off a slice whenever you are
hungry.
Fever: a state Such stories
of great tempted many
excitement or people to make the
interest 2,000-mile journey
to Oregon. In 1843,
Raging: very nearly 1,000 people
strong traveled from
Missouri to Oregon.
The next year, twice
as many came. The Oregon Fever has
broken out, observed a Boston
newspaper, and is now raging.
The Mormon Trail
While most pioneers went west in search of wealth, one group migrated for religious reasons. The
Mormons, who settled Utah, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Joseph Smith had
founded this church in upstate New York in 1830. The Mormons
lived in close communities, worked hard, shared their goods, and
prospered.
The Mormons, though, also made enemies. Some people
reacted angrily to the Mormons teachings. They saw the Mormon
practice of polygamy-allowing a man to have more than one wife at
a timeas immoral. Others objected to their holding property in
common.
In 1844, an anti-Mormon mob in Common: belonging to the
Illinois killed Smith. Brigham Young, the community as a whole
rather than individuals
next Mormon leader, moved his people out of the United States. His destination was
Utah, the part of Mexico. In this desolate region, he hoped his people would be left to Mob: violent crowd
follow their faith in peace.
In 1847, about 1,600 Mormons followed part of the Oregon Trail to Utah.
There they built a new settlement by the Great Salt Lake. Because Utah has little rainfall, the Mormons had to work
together to build dams and canals. These structures captured water in the hills and carried it to the farms in the
valleys below. Through teamwork, they made their desert homeland bloom.