The Day After (1983)



Our friends, the Taliban:



Be All That You Can Be! (1986)



Yakoff Smirnoff comedy skit:



We return to Berlin:



The big collapse:

Study terms for the final exam (Textbook)

These are the terms from the textbook. You will have seen other terms in the lectures that also appear in your textbook, but are not listed here. If they were in the lecture, I will still test on them. Of course, your notes and the blog can help you out to formulate a list of lecture terms. Most of what you find here are terms that I did NOT mention in class.

Chapter 23
Containment
Long Telegram (George Kennan)
Truman Doctrine
Marshall Plan
Inchon
McCarthyism
HUAC
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Taft-Hartley Bill

Chapter 24
MAD
Thurgood Marshall
Brown v. Board of Education
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Massive Resistance
SNCC
Direct Action

Chapter 25
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Barry Goldwater
Great Society
NOW
AIM
Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
silent majority

Chapter 26
detente
Vietnamization
My Lai
Watergate
SDI
Iran-Contra

Ah, the Carter Years: America Comes to Grip With Some Hard Realities

1968 Pontiac GTO ad



1973 OPEC Oil Embargo



A piece when they did away with the 1973 55 MPH Speed Limit in the 1990s



The AMC Gremlin



another Gremlin ad!



Evacuation of the Embassy in Saigon, 30 April 1975



The Embassy in Tehran



Carter's "crisis of confidence" or "malaise" speech.



The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow - Who is missing here (hint: THE USA!)



This after the 1980 Lake Placid Games featuring the "Miracle" hockey upset!



The 1980 Election

And, of course, who could forget Operation Eagle Claw?

The 1970s and Backlash Politics

We've spent a lot of time looking at how media images were important in shaping public opinion and the overall course of events in both the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s. By the 1970s, these media images had taken on a new dimension. Combined with the actions of the Warren and Burger Court, these images created an environment ripe for backlash politics.

But first, here is the companion site for the Wallace documentary, which you should have viewed by now. It is back up on Blackboard for two more weeks.

Dirty Harry: Do you feel lucky?



Jerry Falwell: Old Time Christian Gospel Hour



The Congress and the Supreme Court were busy trying to address civil liberties, rights, and poverty during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a lot of their actions, however well intentioned, created a great deal of backlash - the sort of backlash you saw in the Wallace video. Here are just a few topics that we will look at

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)
The Fair Housing Act (1968)
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)
Title IX (1972)
Roe v. Wade (1973) Do I even need a link?
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1974)
Section 8 Vouchers (1974)

Guns and Butter

Some videos to go along with today's material:

David Bowie: Panic in Detroit



The 1967 Detroit Riot



Marines at Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive



The Assassination of Martin Luther King




LBJ Announces that he will not run for reelection:

Civil Rights and the Cold War under JFK

The Nixon - Kennedy Debate of 1960:



Here is a LINK to the electoral contest in 1960

Forgive the Mad Men moment, and the overglorification of JFK's speech, but think of this video as a powerful document of the Cold War and why Berlin was so very important symbolically.



The bombing of the 16h Street Baptist Church, Birmingham:

The Birth of the Mall Rat

Here is an interesting video about Midtown Plaza Mall in Rochester, New York - a shopping center opened in 1963 to combat (oh, excuse me, coexist with) suburban growth.



some terms to consider today: baby boom, GI Bill (in education and credit), suburban shopping, Eisenhower Interstates, white flight.

1948: Civil Rights and the Cold War

Ol' Strom on the stump:

Some terms for today's lecture:

Scottsboro Boys, Election of 1948 (S. Thurmond, H. Wallace, T. Dewey, H.S. Truman, Berlin Airlift, NAACP, CPUSA, Dixiecrats

The War in the Pacific

The Pacific Theater:

A poster promoting the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from the 1930s

The B-29 "Superfortress" with its long range and pressurized cabin:



The Kamikaze: How did this alter notions of naval power?




A few terms from today's lecture: for clarity's sake:
Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (1930s), Island Hopping, The importance of aircraft carriers, Midway, Leyte Gulf, B-29, Kamikaze, Iwo Jima.

Textbook terms for Test 2

Chapter 19
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Wilson and Mexico
the Lusitania
submarine warfare and its influence on American intervention into WWI
Zimmerman telegram
Fourteen Points
Committee on Public Information (CPI)
Jeannette Rankin
Espionage Act of 1917
W.E.B. DuBois and Souls of Black Folk
"Closing Ranks"
The Great Migration
Marcus Garvey
A. Mitchell Palmer and the Red Scare
Treaty of Versailles and why it didn't work


Chapter 20
Sacco and Vanzetti
the Hays code
the ACLU and what inspired its creation
fundamentalist revolt
Scopes trial
the Second KKK
Harlem Renaissance
Hoover's "associational action."

Chapter 21
The First New Deal and what it aimed to accomplish
John Maynard Keynes
The AAA
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
The Second New Deal and what it aimed to accomplish
Social Security
Wagner Act
FDR and the Supreme Court in his second term

Chapter 22
the Four Freedoms
Isolationism
Office of War Information (OWI)
the GI Bill of Rights
the Bracero program
nisei
Double-V
"What the Negro Wants"
Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)
Yalta

Seldom Disappointed and Best Years of our Lives

 Today we will be discussing the film and the book.

Some background information on the film, and a pretty decent analysis of key moments can be found here. It's no replacement for actually watching the movie, however.

Some insight into Fred's nightmares might well be gleaned from the following clip:

Our calendar for the rest of the semester

All,

In order to not meet the Monday before Thanksgiving, when many of you will be on the road, I had to make more schedule shifts. The Google Calendar has also been acting up. So you will find a revised schedule on the "syllabus" link at the right, but for those of you who want even easier access, here is the rest of the schedule. NOTE that I have moved test 2 to Nov. 9 because I want more time to discuss the film and the book.

Week 9:

10/26: Lecture: “Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, Charles Lindbergh, and What It Meant to be an American.” Read: GML, Chap. 22 to p. 755. Seldom Disappointed, Chap. 1-9.

10/28: Lecture: “Guns, Bombs, and Explosions: A Shameless and Indulgent Foray into WW2 in Europe. Read: GML, Chap. 22 p.755-end.

Week 10: World War II and Demobilization

11/2: Discussion of Best Years and Hillerman: VIEW Best Years of Our Lives by today.

11/4: Lecture: “Guns, Bombs, and Explosions: A Shameless and Indulgent Foray into WW2 in the Pacific. Read: Seldom Disappointed, Chap. 10-14. 

Week 11: The Cold War

11/9: Test 2

11/11:  Lecture: “Truman, 1948, and Cold War America.” Read: Seldom Disappointed, Chap. 15-17, GML, Chap. 23: Deadline to watch Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.

Week 12: The Emergence of Suburbia & the Dawning of the 1960s.

11/16: Lecture: “The Birth of the Mall Rat.” Read: GML, Chap. 24, Seldom Disappointed, Chap. 18-23.

11/18: Lecture: “JFK, Ardent Cold Warrior, Reluctant Civil Rights Champion.”

Week 13: Tofurkey or Turkey?

11/23: No Class: 

11/25: Thanksgiving, no class

Week 14: The Rise and Fall of the 1960s

11/30: Lecture: “Civil Rights and Vietnam, Guns and Butter.” Read: GML, Chap. 25

12/2:  Lecture: “Nixon, Wallace, and the Emergence of Backlash Politics.” Read: GML, Chap. 26 (VIEW Settin' the Woods on Fire by this date.)

Week 15: “Is the Best of the Free Life Behind Us; Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?”

12/7: Lecture: “Dark Days: Watergate, Carter, and Burning Helicopters in the Desert.”

12/9: Lecture: “Turning up the Heat in the Cold War under Reagan.”

The Road to War and the War in Europe

Today we will look at developments both in Europe in America that converge in war. Then we will look at the war itself in Europe, including strategy, turning points, and "big picture" questions.

Click on the map to see a larger version.

A few key words in today's lecture (for review purposes and so that you have the right spelling when you take your notes.) Sudatenland, Vichy France, Barbarossa, rationing, flying fortress, Dresden, Germany First, ENIGMA, V1 and V2 rockets, Yalta and Potsdam.

A "Willie and Joe" Cartoon by Bill Mauldin

Technology helping unite a nation on the eve of war

Today we will look at the ways in which technological and administrative advances in communications and media distribution helped unite America in the 1930s.

A few lectures ago, we saw the economic impact of new manufactured goods on the American consumer market, and the radio figured prominently in that discussion. We also saw how radio also helped popularize the musical genre of jazz. Yet radio was doing more than just transform American music - it was changing the way Americans shared experiences.

Radio syndication or a "radio network" was first pioneered by AT&T, who had a newr monopoly on the nation's telephone system. Believing that it was not going to be important in its business future, AT&T sold its interest in the network for $1 Million dollars and in 1926, NBC was formed. Syndication was not anything new, newspapers having syndicated columns for decades, but radio syndication meant that Americans of a broad spectrum could enjoy the same entertainment and music from coast to coast like the "Amos n' Andy" show and the Grand Ole Opry which first broadcast live in 1925. Starting in the late 1920s, it also meant that they could also experience live events together, uniting the nation in a common experience in a way that had not before been possible. Radio also enabled people from all over the country to feel like they were part of something greater.

Boxing was a much bigger sport in the 1930s than it is today, and the two heavyweight championship fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were not only landmark national events, but they had profound political overtones both in terms of race in America and the growing antagonism between Nazi Germany and the rest of the Western world.

The syndication of broadcast news also became a powerful weapon in uniting the nation. Newspaper syndication had been joined by radio news syndication as well as newsreels shown before movies. This type of news, shown before popular movies and referenced in Hillerman's Seldom Disappointed, helped shape opinion about the coming war.



Media syndication also intensified the role that celebrity played in America, and in this regard we will look at the rise and fall of one of the country's biggest superstars in the 1920s and 1930s, aviator Charles Lindbergh. 

A video of Lindbergh's famous 1927 Transatlantic Flight.


A much sought-after home movie of the Lindbergh Baby shortly before his kidnapping:

Lindbergh making an anti-war speech:

The Dangerous Neighborhood of the 1930s

There is no mistaking that the collective programs of FDR's New Deal reshaped the way Americans related to their government. The underlying principles of the New Deal remain central today to the debate over government's role in the everyday lives of Americans.

Some programs of the New Deal had lasting positive effects, while others had unintended consequences, both good and bad, while still more unambiguously hurt people. Whatever their impact, they were definitely "New" if not always a "Deal." We will be looking at several case studies regarding the impact of New Deal Legislation:

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (or AAA) was both successful and unsuccessful in achieving its aims. In the process it benefited some while hurt others.  Its administration was also some measure of the strength of the Solid Democratic South's power in New Deal legislation.

The Works Progress Administration employed thousands of unemployed writers, scholars, and artists to produce works in the general interest. This included everything from microfilming the Compiled Service Records of Union and Confederate Soldiers to the memorable WPA Murals and WPA Slave Narratives.

Perhaps one of the greatest successes of the New Deal was its impact on stabilizing America's banking and investment sector. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) established standards that lent a great deal of conservatism to the financial sector's behavior.

Today, we still debate the utility of some New Deal programs such as public housing. New Orleans's Iberville Housing Development was a New Deal Era concept, built on what was once Storyville in the 1940s. Under the segregated terms of the time, the Iberville was white, while the nearby Lafitte projects were black. Recent redevelopments like Rivergardens on the site of the old St. Thomas Projects points one possible direction for the future of the Iberville housing project.

But what of alternatives to the New Deal?

Your textbook talks of FDR's rivals, and there were many on both the right and the left.  Probably the most credible threat in the United States came from Huey Pierce Long and his Share Our Wealth programs. With millions of members willing to contribute to Long's corrupt programs, it makes one wonder at the potential of alternatives to the New Deal.

From an international perspective, we see Europe respond to economic crisis quite differently. Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, we will see the emergence of Fascism. Under Adolph Hitler's National Socialism, Germany makes a remarkable recovery and attracts the admiration of many Americans.  Meanwhile, the Soviets will suffer under the successive 5-year plans of Stalin.

Calendar Updated

All,

Please check out the updated calendar at the bottom of this blog. All adjustments have been made to make it up-to-date. See you in class this afternoon!

JN

Jazz and Gangster Movies: America's best unsolicited cultural gifts to the world!

Before Jazz became mainstream among sophisticates in the late 1920s, the cultural vanguard went to operas like Verdi's Il Trovatore, from which we find "D'amor sull'ali rosee" sung magnificently by the one and only Marie Callas in 1959. Sometimes Youtube is a blessing!

Here is a mulitmedia link from the Times-Picayune on Buddy Bolden.

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was one of the more successful groups to head out of New Orleans to Chicago, distributing the sound up the Mississippi River. In New Orleans, this sound also took on new dimensions with Italian-American groups such as Nick LaRocca's Original Dixieland Jazz Band (embedded below.)



In northern cities and on the radio, white audiences fell in love with the form. Soon, major white performers (and bands) began to mimic this style and create their own sounds. Perhaps most emblematic was the tragic musical genius of Bix Beiderbecke.

By the late 1920s, Jazz had become a widely accepted form of pop music - and its play ranged the gambit from the transcendental to the profoundly banal - not unlike most forms of modern music. Paul Whiteman dubbed himself the "King of Jazz" by hiring all of the best (white) talent available and assembling it into his orchestra. This over-the-top production of orchestral jazz reached its zenith with the making of The King of Jazz, a feature-length film featuring Whiteman's orchestra and a host of extras including the Rhythm Boys whose lead man was a youthful Bing Crosby. It also was the premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which Whiteman commissioned for the film.





Gangster movies really began to take off as the Depression deepened. Along with the longstanding love of westerns, Americans loved the escapism of the gangster movies. Most were made to reinforce the old saw that crime doesn't pay, but sometimes that message would get lost on audiences. James Cagney's performance in Public Enemy (1931) is an iconic execution of this genre. Here is the famous "grapefruit scene:"



Lastly, while there probably weren't all that many "flappers," they were conspicuous for what they represented to main-stream Americans.

Class Today

Class today has been canceled. We will cover the second half of the 1920s on Wednesday. Adjustments to the course's Google calendar to follow.

The 1920s in all of their contradictory glory

A 1926 Cadillac Coupe (from the 2008 Fernie to Victoria Tour - a rally in British Columbia, Canada - www.vccc.com)

The next two lectures will look at 1920s America and the varying interpretations about what they meant for the nation at the time and what they continue to mean today.

Your textbook's author makes a general portrayal of the 1920s as a time when fiscal and social conservatism and corporate greed ran amok - and ultimately ran the country into the Great Depression. Along the way he laments the weakening of labor unions (his pet cause) and the "unequal distribution" of wealth. Yet between today's lecture and the next, we will look at a time in America marked by enormous cultural ferment and the emergence of a modern credit and consumer economy - however weak that economy's foundations were.

A 1920s Radio Ad from an interesting but mostly defunct website on 1920s radio from the University of Virginia. 

In particular, we will consider to what degree governmental conservatism and a lack of corporate regulation fed economic disaster, and to what degree uncontrollable market forces and underlying global economic weaknesses were responsible. 

Your author also enumerates in particular a fairly concise and accurate list of reasons for the coming of the Great Depression on pages 690-691. Do these square in emphasis and scale with what he sets forth in the rest of the chapter?

Class Tomorrow

All,

I received an email from a student regarding study guides and such and I felt it germane to post my reply to this blog for all to read:

"As the terms go on the blog, if you can describe, contextualize, identify the relevance of what is listed, that is what I want you to study from the book. For instance, you don't see Emma Goldman listed there but you do see Margaret Sanger. A-ha! you should say - I will not ask you about Emma Goldman, and you would be right. The purpose of the list is so that you can narrow down what you have learned from the book. Your lectures will require you to have notes. There isn't going to be any further sort of comprehensive study guide for the exam, but of course, tomorrow would be a good day to bring in your questions."

Tomorrow's class will depend entirely upon you to ask and answer questions about the material.  Come prepared. Do not come in and say "give me a basic recap of your lecture on the Progressives." You should have notes from the lectures, you should have read your chapters. Be ready. Invariably, people waste these review sessions because they fail to study until the night before or perhaps the morning of an exam. I will not spend the class period reviewing material without some sort of accurate questions. Moreover, I'll be expecting you to help out your classmates. Think of class tomorrow as a moderated review session.

Chapter Review Terms

Chapter 15 review terms:

Freedmen's Bureau

Sharecropping

Crop Lien

Presidential Reconstruction

Black Codes

Radical Republicans

Radical or Congressional Reconstruction

Civil Rights Bill of 1866

Fourteenth Amendment

Reconstruction Acts

Fifteenth Amendment

The relationship between women's rights movement and black civil rights

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

Liberal Republicans

The Redeemers

The Bargain or Compromise of 1877

Chapter 16: in previous blog post

Chapter 17:

Be able to define Populism

The Farmers' Alliance

The People's Party

The Populist Coalition

The relative success of the Populist Party in 1892

Eugene Debs

The Pullman Strike

Free Silver

Subtreasury Plan

Free Silver

William Jennings Bryan

Henry Grady

Kansas Exodus

understanding clause

grandfather clause

disfranchisement

Plessy v. Ferguson

Lynching (and when it was most prevalent.)

New Nativism

Chinese Exclusion Activities

Booker T. Washington

Tuskegee

Women's Christian Temperance Union

Alfred T. Mahan

William Randolph Hearst

The Maine

San Juan Hill and the celebrity of Teddy Roosevelt

Philippine theater of the Spanish-American War (general context and length)

Anti-Imperialist League

Chapter 18:

Triangle Shirtwaist Company

Muckrakers (who and what)

Changes in immigration in the Progressive Era

Fordism

Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

Eugene Debs and Socialism

American Federation of Labor

Margaret Sanger

Robert M. LaFollette

Jane Addams and Hull House

Women's Suffrage

Prohibition

Maternalist reform

Food and Drug Act

Yellowstone and what it meant.

Sherman Antitrust Act

The New Freedom

Why Were the Progressives Like Velveeta Cheese?

A 1974 Kraft Cheese Commercial (though not what inspired the title of this lecture!)

This, however, was the commercial that inspired the title:



There's no single cheese like Velveeta? What Kraft is trying to say is even they aren't sure what it contains, because it contains so many contradictory things that we don't really want to discuss!

The Progressives are a little like Velveeta Cheese because we tend to lump a lot of different campaigns for social change together under the banner of "Progressivism" yet many of these campaigns had vastly different aims and inspirations.

As you have read in your textbook, the Progressives included well meaning upper middle-class white women like Jane Addams who starts Hull House in an effort to make life better for immigrant women who have not yet discovered the joys of living like middle class white women.  Another "Progressive" impulse led another group of middle-class white women into Appalachia where they taught southern mountain folk the value of baking powder and flour biscuits in an attempt to lead them away from the backward practice of baking cornbread!

The Progressive impulse is an important one, and we will discuss it in great detail. As a political movement the Progressives were not only incredibly successful, passing FOUR amendments to the Constitution of the United States, their ideas remain current - perhaps more current than we would like to admit.

Here are some links to help us discuss Progressivism:

A discussion of the Corbett-Sullivan fight (that took place right here in New Orleans!) Why were the Marquis of Queensbury rules for boxing a Progressive idea, even though they were incorporated in 1892, before the main of the "Progressive Era?" Can we justifiably define the Progressive Era in chronological terms? If not, how should we define it?

As this advertisement humorously indicates, people began worrying more about health and fitness in the Progressive Era. Imagine if all products were as effective as "Rondo" promises!

Lastly, when we consider "ballot reform," prohibition, and eugenics, we should be careful of Progressives  bearing gifts. Consider Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in Buck vs. Bell . Ruled in 1924, like the Corbett-Sullivan fight, it takes place outside of what we consider the "Progressive Era." Why is this important when considering the legacy of the Progressives? What might we consider Progressive impulses in our society today?

Ragtime

Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel by the same name,  Ragtime won an Academy Award for best picture in 1981. Outside of the academic reasons that we are watching the film, this movie is quite enjoyable on many counts. It has a fantastic score composed by Randy Newman. It contains some of Hollywood's more recognizable actors like James Cagney toward the end of his career and a young Samuel L. Jackson and Jeff Daniels before their acting careers had really taken off. Plus it delivers a compelling story.

We are watching it in our class for its fictionalized account of turn-of-the-century America. It will be important for you to grasp the film's multiple story lines and accept them as while not always fully related to one another, they compose a montage of the whole - a time period when a variety of forces shaped the nation. It is set roughly in 1905-1908 just as the tide went out on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era hit its full swing. We see elements of both, from the elaborate excesses of Stanford White to the Progressive-Era inspired insanity plea of Harry K. Thaw. We see the racial tensions of early twentieth-century America in the dilemma of Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the forces of modernity on traditional patterns of patriarchy in the collapse of the Delmas family. In short, you should be able to relate a variety of themes in this film to topics that we have studied in class.

The film will be available online, streamed on Blackboard. Be sure to select the "Streaming Video" option at the bottom of the main list of selection items.

Populism, Race, and Imperialism

Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden

The USS Iowa (1898)

Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders

 

Daniel Desdunes 

 

The Combine Against the Democracy

The West of Romance and Reality

 

 George Armstrong Custer and his wife Elizabeth Clift Bacon not long after their 1864 marriage.

George Armstrong Custer and a hunting expedition in 1874. He was as big of a celebrity as was known in America at the time. (National Archives)

The 7th Cavalry on the Dakota Plains in 1874, two years before Custer's company of troopers met its fate at Little Big Horn. (National Archives

Frederic Remington, The Herd Boy (1905) Museum of Fine Art, Houston. 

Few shows were as popular in late nineteenth-century America than Buffalo Bill's Wild West. (In fact, it once played in what is now Lee Circle!) At the same time, the western "dime novel" became very popular, only to be later replaced by the detective story. Both Buffalo Bill and the "western" genre of literature and film have done much to shape both the self-image and projected image of Americans.

A map depicting the scheme by which private railroad companies acquired land in checkerboard fashion. Shaded squares reflect railroad land. Those shaded red have been sold. Unshaded land was sold by the federal government. (Library of Congress)

 

Apache prisoners ready to board an eastbound train toward captivity. Does this picture suggest any irony? (Library of Congress)

Although it would not embed, this image of Virginia City, Nevada, adjacent to the Comstock Lode, is worth a look.

Sample questions from Chapter 16

You read chapter sixteen for last week which chronicled Gilded Age America. You could probably surmise from the emphasis given by your book's author that stems from a labor union background. Both his father and uncle were blacklisted as Communists (probably wrongly) earlier in the 20th century because of their labor activism on behalf of "the workers." Edward Bellamy might not have been quite so influential or labor so deeply rooted as this chapter depicts, but Foner presents a compelling argument for its vibrancy and relevance in late nineteenth-century America. 

Here are a few sample questions that you should be able to answer from the chapter:

How did railroads, both as corporations and as transportation networks, revolutionize the American economy?

What were "pools" and "trusts?" What does Foner mean by "economic concentration" with regard to big business and the leadership of private industry?

How were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller the same, how were they different?

Who was Jacob Riis?

Who was Frederick Jackson Turner and what was the Frontier Thesis all about?

What were the main techniques for the final defeat of the Plains Indians of the West?

What was the Dawes Act? Wounded Knee?

Who was Boss Tweed and why was he significant?

What did the Crédit Mobilier scandal symbolize and what sorts of people were involved in it?

Why was the Civil Service Act relevant, and what did the Interstate Commerce Commission hope to accomplish?

What were the ramifications of the Gold Standard and why did some people want Greenbacks?

What was the Grange?

Who was William Graham Sumner and what were the principles of Social Darwinism?

What, generally speaking, was the government (local, state, and federal) toward organized labor?

Who were Edward Bellamy and Henry George?

Who were the Knights of Labor, and why was the Haymarket "Affair" so damaging to organized labor?

NOTE: WE will be coming back to some of these themes in the next two lectures!

The Miracles of Science

This advertisement is amusing, but it is also indicative of the belief that Americans had in science in the second half of the nineteenth century... even if it what was at stake in some instances was snake oil!

The American Civil War introduced many new technological innovations, but above all, the need to produce large amounts of material for the war encouraged the development of more sophisticated production techniques. Yet in many ways, the technology evident during the war was largely transitional. Not until the postbellum period, when engineering and hard science became professionalized and studied in a systematic way at the university level, did the great explosion in technological advancement take place.

Perhaps no innovation was more telling than the development of high quality and inexpensive steel. Before the late nineteenth century, steel was a craft. It was produced in small quantities and was expensive - reserved for only the most important applications. Iron production was equally primitive. This furnace would not have been uncommon in the production of Civil War Era pig iron. Yet twenty years down the road, thanks to the proliferation of the Bessemer Process, steel made giant leaps forward to the point that a steel mill looked like Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thompson works or the Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. Its widespread use revolutionized American life.

Perhaps nowhere was the impact of steel greater than on transportation.

The following images and links will help us think about the impact of steel on naval technology. This cistern at the Hermann Grima house in New Orleans is actually a pretty good example of how antebellum boilers were constructed.

Weak boilers could lead to horrible events like the Sultana disaster.

When Admiral Farragut took New Orleans with his Gulf Blockading Squadron, his flagship, the Hartford, was considered state-of-the-art, including auxiliary steam propulsion. But it was made out of wood.

Over the course of the war - four short years - the Hartford was obsolete. So, too, was the famed Confederate raider, the Alabama. The war introduced ironclads, yet like many transitional technologies, this was basically a wood ship with iron quite literally bolted to the frame. They were far more effective than their predecessors, but were fairly crude in reality.

 

A Monitor class river cruiser from the Civil War. 

The real revolution came about when ships began to be made out of steel - that is the hull itself as well as propulsion systems. This led to ships that were much larger, faster, and reliable. The consequences for an industrial power capable of producing them were awesome. Steel led to powerful navies, which in turn led to imperial might. Steel ships drastically increased the ability to ship products reliably over great distances. It made markets much more vast.

The USS Atlanta - a mere 35 years after the Hartford.

Steel had an equally great impact upon rail transportation. Size, speed, regularity, cost effectiveness were all fundamentally altered by its introduction. The very shift from iron to steel rails was significant. We will discuss this more next week in our lecture on the West.

Steel was part of a revolution in science. Modern steel represented a sophisticated understanding of metallurgy. It also had enormous repercussions on weaponry.

Chemistry also revolutionized everything from warfare to agriculture. The develoment of smokeless powder at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, still stands as the most significant recent development in small arms technology. It was what made the machine gun and all other modern arms possible. Likewise, chemical fertilizer altered American agriculture in unpredictable and sometimes harmful ways. Science had the power to create and destroy, a fact that Americans were not yet fully aware of.

Communications also underwent a technological revolution. The telegraph had been around since the 1840s, but not until 1866 did we have a reliable Transatlantic cable. The laying of the cable was a tremendous feat of engineering, and says much about Gilded Age ambition. Like steel ships, it made the world smaller.

A cable ship plying the waters. 

Steel's introduction will transform the way everybody lives. Before steel, most people didn't need a clock, for instance. Few people will be able to avoid it afterward.

The Many Reconstructions of Reconstruction

The ruins of Richmond at the end of the Civil War. (National Archives)

Confederate prisoners held toward the end of the war (National Archives)

 

A somewhat posed photograph of soldiers from the United States Colored Troops (National Archives)

 Members of the first Radical state legislature in South Carolina. (National Archives)

Louisiana Governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1868-1872)

Your textbook's chapter on Reconstruction does a good job of outlining the important details and themes in the overall narrative of this period in American History. After reading this chapter,  you should have a good handle on all of the major phases (Presidential Reconstruction, Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, and the "Redemption" or overthrow of Reconstruction, Compromise of 1877, etc.) and the key figures associated with the era. Reconstruction is also important because it laid the foundation for the debate about civil rights in America, its most important legacies were probably the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

Reconstruction was more than this standard narrative of political struggle, and your book also does a fairly good job of outlining the broader social challenges of the era, although it pays particular attention to the plight of the South's four million recently-freed slaves. In our lecture, we will consider what Reconstruction meant to some of these competing interest groups and the roles that they played in shaping political and social outcomes:

Freedmen
Former Confederate soldiers (the average soldier)
Union veterans (their counterpart)
Republicans (Northern and Southern)
Democrats (Northern and Southern)
Old Secessionists
Former Slaveholders and planters large and small
Poor whites
Former free people of color

Lastly, we will consider the memory of Reconstruction and the ways in which we write its history have been a metaphor for shifting values and interpretations in the intervening 135 years.

Welcome to class!

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