Where did you go on your Summer Vacation? If you could have gone anywhere, where would you have traveled? How would you get there? Plane, train, automobile?
I bet that most of you did not take the train. There was a time however when the train was not only the preferred form of transportation in America; IT WAS THE ONLY FORM OF TRANSPORTATION.
As you watch this clip focus on the social and the economic factors that influenced rail travel in the United States.
What challenges did building the Transcontinental Railroad pose?
3) Which groups depicted in this image were most likely positively affected by westward expansion?
4) Which were most likely negatively affected?
In Chapter 12 we will discover how westward expansion in the late 1800s affected several groups of people. Many of these groups saw new opportunities for jobs, prosperity, freedom, and land ownership open up before them, while others were denied these same opportunities.
“Home on the Range” appears to have been written in 1885 by a group of prospectors in a cabin near Leadville, Colorado. It was popular throughout the Southwest in the 1880s and 1890s and is now recognized as the state song of Kansas.
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
How often at night when the heavens are bright I see the light of those flickering stars Have I laid there amazed and asked as I gazed If their glory exceeds that of love
The red man was pressed from this part of the west
It's not likely he'll ever return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
His flickering campfires still burn
Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
1. Do you think the settlement of this region had a more positive effect or a more negative effect on the person or people who wrote this song? How can you tell?
2. Do you think the settlement of this region had the same effect on all the different groups of people who lived there? Why or why not?
During the 1870s, more than a dozen African American men, many of whom had been born into slavery, were elected to the U.S. Congress. It was a triumph of our founding ideals of equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness!
It was a period that ended all too quickly.
When neither candidate in the 1876 presidential election secured enough votes in the Electoral College to be declared winner, a deal was struck. Southern Democrats agreed to back Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes; in exchange, the federal troops who had protected black voters were withdrawn from the South. Just a few years later, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. Black voting rights were gradually stripped away, and black representation in Congress faded.
Reconstruction was over, and the Jim Crow era of segregation began.
1) What were the ultimate results of Reconstruction? Do you think it was successful?
2) In what ways were freed people better off?
3) In what ways weren't they?
4) How did the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment advance rights for African Americans?
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It tells a story of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a white Southern point of view.
The film received ten Academy Awards (eight competitive, two honorary), a record that stood for 20 years.
What does the title of the film mean?
What challenges did the South face following the Civil War?
How could a nation torn apart by civil war put itself back together? That was the question facing all Americans in 1865. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of healing the wounds on both sides of the conflict:
With malice [hatred] toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 1865
Have you ever broken something and tried to put back together again? Was it the same as before?
After the North defeated the South in the Civil War, politicians faced the task of putting the divided country back together. There was great debate about how severely the former Confederate states should be punished for leaving the Union. With the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, it was up to President Andrew Johnson to try to reunite former enemies.
Welcome to the home page of Mr. Kelly's American History class, Talawanda High School, Oxford, Ohio, USA. Here you will find assignments, links to lessons, your grades, and online discussions. Please remember that this site is an online extension of our classroom and to treat each other with respect. Thanks and BE BRAVE!
