The Flowering of New England

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The Flowering of New England

• Coach Nabors Briarcrest Christian High School

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Important Events, Dates, and Circumstances 1829
-1861

• 1829 -1837 Andrew Jackson President
• 1861 Civil War begins
• Unrestrained growth and movement west
• Immigrants and treasure seekers head west (34,000
  died on Oregon trail during this period)

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1829 -1861 cont.

• 1846-1848 Mexican War (gives US Southwest
  territory)

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Nations population doubled again by 1870.
• http//www.wisegeek.com/what-was-the-population-of
  -the-us-throughout-its-history.htm

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Individualism was questioned due to the fact that
  in a mass society many were barred by poverty or
  lack of education from any possibility of
  self-development.
• Thus, two proponents of the country
• Dissatisfaction with the present
• Optimism about the future

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Optimism
• Science soil surveys and machine tools
• Technology reaper, canals, railroads,
  telegraph, steam, electricity
• Problems
• Mass production increased need for cheap labor
  thus, decrepit mill towns arose
• 50 per week for Mass. women shoe mill workers
• Child laborers would work from before sunup till
  past sundown seeing daylight perhaps one day per
  week
• http//www.measuringworth.com/calculators/compare/
  

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Reform groups arose to create Utopian societies
• Education was the real way to reform
• By 1860 each state had tax supported public
  schools
• Until then most thought one did not need to read
  or write
• Education increases need/want of newspapers,
  magazines, and lectures

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Womens rights
• Considered minors
• No right to sign contracts or make wills
• No right to vote
• Wife beating was legal in almost every state
• Divorce was very unusual
• The spread of education helped womens rights
• The need for women teachers made it illogical to
  maintain that women were intellectually inferior

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Womens rights cont.
• Elizabeth Stanton one of the first feminist
• She separated the RIGHT TO VOTE from the larger
  question of equality
• Of course, it took seventy years for women to
  gain suffrage (The 19th Amendment was passed by
  congress on August 26,1920)

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Slavery
• The most disruptive and heated issue of the time
• Most people were not full abolitionists but did,
  in principle, oppose slavery
• Writers spoke out against slavery
• Some took on active roles
• John Brown Harpers Ferry (armed insurrection
  against US forces)
• David Walker free black walked through the
  South scattering petitions for insurrection and
  violence
• Everything came to a head when Lincoln was
  elected President in 1860

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Lest we forget

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But, we have. Today more than 27 million PEOPLE
enslaved.

• This
• picture
• was
• taken
• in
• 1999.

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Literature
• Known as The American Renaissance because of
  high quality of works
• The Renaissance was launched unofficially in
  1836 with Emersons Nature.

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Transcendentalism
• A combination of religion, philosophy, and
  literary theory
• The view that the basic truths of the universe
  lie beyond the knowledge we obtain from our
  senses
• Intuition!!!!!
• Affirmed individuals ability to experience God
  first hand
• Spiritual unity of all forms of being, with God,
  humanity, and nature sharing a universal soul

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1829 -1861 cont.

• Transcendentalism cont.
• Transcendentalist took many of their ideas from
  the Romantic traditions and many text discuss
  the Transcendentalist in terms of an off-shoot or
  section of the Romantic movement
• Thoreau was the epitome of the Transcendentalists
• Perfectly combined naturalist and nature as a
  symbol with transcendentalist ideas of the
  individual
• Walden, the crowning achievement, blends the
  natural, the human, and the spiritual.
• Emerson stated Man is a stream whose source is
  hidden in order to express the transcendental
  notion that the human personality is a mystery.

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1829 -1861 cont.

• The Anti-Transcendentalists
• Brahmins (after the highest caste in Hindu)
• James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
  Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Socially important and exhibited good taste and
  distinguished achievement
• Hawthorne and Melville
• Found in nature the contradictions not accounted
  for in transcendentalism
• They saw life in its tragic dimension the
  unbridgeable gap between human desires and human
  possibilities

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More Important Dates

• 1807 British Slave trade is abolished
• 1808 United States bans slave trade
• 1820 Missouri Compromise
• 1821 Mexico declares independence from Spain
• 1829-1837 Andrew Jackson administration
• 1830 Indian Removal Act authorizes relocation
  of southeaster Native American tribes (Cherokee,
  Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)to
  territories west of the Mississippi
• 1835 Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller form
  the Transcendental Club
• 1837 John Deere produces first steel-bladed
  plow, which makes large-scale farming possible in
  heavy soil in Midwest and West (leads eventually
  to dust bowl)
• 1839 Poe publishes The Fall of the House of
  Usher
• 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse sends first telegraph
  from Baltimore to D.C.
• 1845 Thoreau begins living on shore of Walden
  Pond
• 1847 Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience

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More Important Dates

• 1848 United States defeats Mexico in Mexican
  War
• 1848 California Gold Rush begins
• ----- First Womens Rights Convention
• 1848 Mass revolution sweep Europe Marx and
  Engels publish Communist Manifesto
• 1850 Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter
• ----- Congress passes Fugitive Slave Act,
  forcing officials in Northern states to return
  escaped slaves to owners Compromise of 1850 is
  passed, which supposedly settles controversy over
  slavery between slave and free states
• 1851 Melvilles Moby Dick
• ---- Former slave Sojourner Truth speaks as a
  womens rights convention
• 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin
• 1854 Thoreaus Walden
• 1855 Whitman publishes poetry collection Leaves
  of Grass
• 1856 New York Times publishes letters by
  Margaret Fuller about her travels in Europe,
  making her Americas first woman foreign
  correspondent

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More Important Dates

• 1857-- Dred Scott decsion
• Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his
  freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade
  of appeals and court reversals, his case was
  finally brought before the United States Supreme
  Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case
  in its history, the court decided that all people
  of African ancestry -- slaves as well as those
  who were free -- could never become citizens of
  the United States and therefore could not sue in
  federal court. The court also ruled that the
  federal government did not have the power to
  prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott,
  needless to say, remained a slave
  (http//www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2932.html).

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More Important Dates

• 1859 First oil well
• ----- John Brown raids Harpers Ferry
• 1860 South Carolina secedes from the Union
• 1861 Civil War begins
• 1862 Emily Dickinson writes 366 poems within
  the year

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And now for the end.

• This is the end,
• My only friend, the end.
• This is the end.
• Beautiful friend, the end.