Transcript The North Transformed

Objectives
• Explain why American cities grew in the 1800s.
• List the new inventions and advances in
agriculture and manufacturing.
• Describe the improvements in transportation
during the early 1800s.
• Discuss the wave of immigration to the United
States in the 1840s and 1850s.
• Describe the problems African Americans faced
in the North.
Terms and People
• urbanization – the growth of cities due to the
movement of people from rural areas to cities
• telegraph – a device that used electrical signals
to send messages
• Samuel F. B. Morse – the inventor of the
telegraph
Terms and People (continued)
• famine – widespread starvation
• nativists – people who wanted to preserve the
country for white, American-born Protestants
• discrimination – the denial of equal rights or
equal treatment to certain groups of people
How did urbanization, technology,
and social change affect the North?
During the Industrial Revolution, the
differences between the North and South
widened.
Northern cities, industries, and
transportation technologies grew rapidly,
with both benefits and drawbacks for
citizens.
Early American cities were small by today’s
standards, but in the 1800s, U.S. cities grew
larger.
The Industrial Revolution spurred
urbanization, as agricultural workers moved
to the cities for jobs.
Farm laborers who had been replaced by
machines went to work in city factories and
shops.
As cities grew, a variety of problems emerged.
filthy streets
structures made
mostly of wood
a lack of clean
drinking water
poorly trained fire
fighters
the absence of
good sewage
systems
rival fire companies
fought each other
instead of fires
disease
fires
The Industrial Revolution also provided
many benefits.
New inventions and technological advances
affected many industries and caused many
changes in people’s ways of life, in the
following areas.
• Agriculture
• Clothing and manufactured goods
• Communication
• Transportation
Agriculture
Inventions made it easier for farmers to cultivate
more land and harvest their crops with fewer
workers.
Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper cut stalks of
wheat.
Threshers separated grains of wheat from their
stalks.
The reaper and the thresher were put together into
one machine called a combine.
Clothing and Manufactured Goods
Sewing machines made it much more efficient to
produce clothing in quantity.
By 1860, factories in New England and the middle
Atlantic states were producing most of the nation’s
manufactured goods.
Communications
Samuel F. B. Morse began working on the
telegraph in 1835.
Morse code used shorter (“dots”) and longer
(“dashes”) bursts of electricity to represent the
letters of the alphabet.
Soon, thousands of telegraph wires were strung
across the nation.
The telegraph
worked by
sending
electrical signals
over a wire.
Messages could
be sent quickly
over long
distances.
Transportation
Improvements in transportation spurred the growth
of American industry.
Factories could make use of raw materials that were
farther away.
Factory owners could ship their goods to distant
markets.
In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat.
Side-paddle steamboats traveled well on rivers,
but not on oceans.
In 1850, American-built clipper ships—the fastest
ships in the world at the time—were introduced.
But by the 1850s, Britain was producing oceangoing steamships that were faster than and could
carry more cargo than clipper ships.
Railroads tied together raw materials,
manufacturers, and markets better than any
other form of transportation.
Steamboats
had to
follow the
paths of
rivers, which
sometimes
froze in
winter.
Railroads
could be
built
almost
anywhere.
Cars were drawn along the track by horses on
America’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio,
which was begun in 1828.
In 1830, Peter Cooper built the first Americanmade steam locomotive.
By 1840, about 3,000 miles of railway track had
been built in the United States.
Not only was America’s way of life changing,
immigrants were changing who Americans were.
The American population
grew rapidly in the 1840s
because millions of
immigrants, mostly from
Western Europe, entered
the United States.
United
States
Population
Some immigrants came for land, others for
opportunity, and still others because they could
not survive in their home countries.
As cities along the eastern coast became
crowded, newly arrived immigrants headed
west.
In 1845, a fungus destroyed the potato crop in
Ireland, which led to a famine.
During the Great
Hunger, more
than a million
people starved to
death, and a
million more left
Ireland.
Most of the Irish immigrants who came to the
United States during this period found work:
• laying railroad track in the East and
Midwest.
• as household workers.
• in construction.
Germans also came to America during this period,
many to escape political persecution.
Unlike the Irish, German
immigrants came from
many different levels of
society.
Many Germans settled
in the Ohio Valley and
the Great Lakes region.
Some Americans, called nativists, worried
about the growing foreign population.
Nativists especially opposed Irish immigration
because most Irish were Roman Catholic.
One New York nativist group became the powerful
Know-Nothing political party, but the party
eventually dissolved over the issue of slavery.
Even more so than immigrants, African
Americans in the North faced discrimination.
Slavery had largely ended in the North by the
early 1800s, but free African Americans did not
receive the same treatment as whites.
Discrimination in the North
Suffrage
• African Americans were often denied the
right to vote.
Job Market
• African Americans were not allowed to
work in factories or in skilled trades.
• Many employers preferred to hire whites.
Segregation
• Schools, public facilities, and churches
were segregated, so African Americans
formed their own churches.
The Media
• White newspapers often portrayed African
Americans as inferior, so African
Americans started their own newspapers.