US history survey

April 3, 2012Social change & social reform

1830s – 1850s

****suggestions for studying****

• review – Power Point slide shows– your own notes– readings

• create a study group – talking with other students is a very useful way to prepare for exams.

• think about what the big picture is.• what are most important details?• look at maps!

announcements

• midterm exam, Tuesday, April 17 – covers everything this semester – reading, lectures, discussions, slides.

• Class picnic in park (after midterms)?

• If you want to talk with me, please make an appointment (in person or by email), so I will be in my office.

social changes

• immigration• reform movements– abolitionism– women’s rights– temperance (in use of alcohol)

• labor movements – improve wages, hours, conditions of workers

immigration – Irish and Germans

• 2 largest groups today of self-identified descendants of European immigrants.

Irish potato famine – 1 million died, 1845 - 1852

departing for America

• Memorial to Irish famine, 1845 – 1852, Dublin.

• 2 million Irish immigrated to US, 1820 – 1860, most during/ after potato famine.

• also labor recruitment.• only major immigrant

group that was more than 50% women.

life in US

• mostly remained in cities; couldn’t afford to become farmers in west.

• Boston & New York major Irish communities.• competed with free people of color for jobs,

especially as laborers & domestic workers. • hostility, anti-Irish, & anti-Catholic attitudes &

actions in US.• stereotyped as violent, alcoholic, dominated by

Catholic priests & political bosses.

German immigrants

• typically small farmers & artisans dislodged by industrialization & commercialization of agriculture. Not as poor as Irish.

• also people who immigrated because of 1848 revolutions in Europe.

• included intellectuals.• included some German Jews.• greatest numbers in 1850s.

German immigrants mid-19th c went to midwest & Texas farms & newer cities.

1837 Boston newspaper

“Our foreign population are too much in the habit of retaining their own nations usages, of associating too exclusively with each other, & living in groups together. It would be the best part of wisdom, to abandon at once all usages and associations which mark them as foreigners, and to become in feeling & custom, as well as in privileges & rights, citizens of the US.”

moral & social reform

• abolition of slavery.– American Colonization Society, 1817 – return to Africa.– did not mean social equality to most white abolitionists.– at least 50 Black abolitionist societies in N by 1830.

• women’s rights.• evangelical religion – underlay reforms ideologically &

in tactics. – anti-Catholicism.

• Americans founded more voluntary organizations than anywhere else in world (de Tocqueville).

Grimke sisters: Angelina & Sarah• left South Carolina because of slavery.• became Quakers & abolitionists in Penn.• Angelina married Theodore Dwight Weld,

abolitionist.

Grimke home, Charleston, SC

Charleston, South Carolina home of Grimke relatives

Pastoral Letter of the General Assoc. of Massachusetts to the Congregational Churches under Their Care (1837)

• Strongly criticized women for daring to speak in public – although these were ministers who were also abolitionists!

Philadelphia abolitionists, 1840s

William Lloyd Garrison

• Liberator, 1831 – 1865, Boston journalist.• immediate emancipation, non-violent

resistance, social equality. • American Anti-Slavery Society, which included

women, 1833.

anti-abolitionist mobs

Sojourner Truth

S. Truth statue • Florence Massachusetts• erected 2002• S.T. lived in Florence in

1850s

ST’s home in Florence (today)

Seneca Falls, New York

1st women’s rights convention

leaders at Seneca Falls conventionFrederick Douglass

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Lucretia Mott

connections between movements for social change

• Stanton & Mott met at London World Anti-Slavery convention, 1840, & agreed on the need for a women’s rights convention.

• organizers at Seneca Falls included members of Underground Railroad.

• Frederick Douglass led the convention to approve controversial resolution for women’s suffrage.

• compare avenues of change open to enslaved persons.

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

• “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

• Note language! Where have you heard this before?

Note that women & men attended, debated, and supported the Declaration of Sentiments.

“injuries & usurpations”

• “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”

• “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.”

• “He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”

• “He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.”

double standards

• “He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies, which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of

little account in man.”

rights of citizens

“Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation--in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”

Trayvon Martin

• unarmed, 17-y-o student. • murdered in Feb. by self-

appointed neighborhood watch guy, 28-y-o Anglo/ Latino, George Zimmerman, who claims self-defense. Not charged by police.

• Florida has “Stand Your Ground” gun law.

• History: Black men murdered with impunity.

• “racial profiling.”• Obama: “if I had a son, he’d

look like Trayvon Martin.”• protests for justice all over

US.

announcements

• midterm exam, Tuesday, April 17 – covers everything this semester – reading, lectures, discussions, slides.

• Class picnic in park (after midterms)?

• If you want to talk with me, please make an appointment (in person or by email), so I will be in my office.