Journeys to America Course Summary
Prof. Bruce A. Harvey
|
Web Readings |
Professor's Study Questions, Etc. |
Accumulated "Big Picture" Summary (some texts vary semester to semester; also, there is considerable repetition, because various motifs get recycled in different lecture contexts as the semester proceeds) |
|
|
|
--Readings in the first 1/4th of the course are/are not about the U.S.
--Except for Columbus, we've skipped over narratives about Cortez and other Conquistadors (it would be equally useful to read about the latter as much as to read Shakespeare's The Tempest perhaps). "Early American Studies" over the last decade or so has become "Early Americas Studies” and “Transatlantic Studies." Scholars tend to focus these days less on the origins of U.S. national identity (at least exclusively) than on friction/exchange among cultures and geographical regions. The course begins with The Tempest because it is paradigmatic of power/tension within a contested geographical space. Many of our readings, one way or another, are about moving from one space to a culturally different space, about mobility and psychological/internal and political/external conflicts that ensue… and thus the title of the course: journeys literally to America and journeys to the meaning of America.
--Before 1776, folks writing in English in North America or about America think of themselves or America as part of the British Empire (which included colonies in the Caribbean).
--Thus Shakespeare's The Tempest (about power relations/ takes place in the Caribbean, or at least it has elements of a New World setting) may be considered a work of "Early American Literature"
--Thus Equiano's Life of... (takes place in Caribbean, England, and U.S.) is "EAL"
--Yet, even before 1776, cultural themes appear important to later U.S. identity per se.
--1620: Protestant Pilgrims land in New England. They think of themselves as British, but also see themselves as escaping the corruptions of the Old World (Bradford’s story of poor Thomas Granger learning his sodomy habit in "old England") = isolationism.
--They also want to
set an example of a pure community (Winthrop's “City on a Hill”). --Escape/isolationism + pure = a sense of U.S. being the Redeemer Nation = American Exceptionalism (we are uniquely free and so on) = a right to dictate our way elsewhere via imperialism (U.S. has been imperialistic, but the ideology is that the U.S. is not imperialistic).
--Later immigrants in the 17th/18th centuries see the "new" country as a land of opportunity (cheap land/ less hierarchical class system), because of:
--a) pastoral vision
(escape from grimy London and go farm in Kentucky): the "heartland"
of America is farming, supposedly. --b) self-reliance (we're all just farmers; not dependent on elaborate commodity exchange): you'll see this in the short Crevecoeur selection (President Bush, during his presidency, would pretend to be a down-home Texan, etc. etc.). President Jefferson, especially, feared that the nation would shift from being one of agricultural/independence to one of mercantile, dependent exchange.
--the Puritan mentality in the course of the 17th-18th centuries shifts to an Enlightenment World View (the Founding Fathers are all products of Enlightenment thinking). The transition is caused by:
1) Population/mobility:
--ever increasing population of non-Calvinist/Puritan immigrants --younger generation very mobile --seeking western farmland (west=western Pennsylvania, etc.)/ capitalistic-oriented --cities become larger: trade=more economic opportunity but also vice (lots of "young man" manuals written to morally instruct artisans/apprentices detached from nuclear family; Franklin’s autobiography is in some ways such a guidebook)
2) 1662--Half-Way Covenant:
--second generation of Puritans less devout--should they be part of church community? --children of church members (who had testified to their faith) could join without a full statement of their conversion: good conduct emphasized instead
3) Scientific-philosophical shift:
--1687: Issac Newton's Principia Mathematica: motion/gravity understood, gives a sense of control --Deism philosophy: universe like a vast clock, a mechanism that can be rationally understood --God no longer intervenes with miracles/providence --best way of understanding God is by understanding his creation
4) Psychological-philosophical shift:
--John Locke’s 1690 Treatise on Human Understanding --mind is a blank slate: a tabula rasa, awaiting sensory input --senses receive input
from the world, which combines to form ideas
5) Technological-sociological
--before 18th-century: Great Chain of Being/hierarchal feudal model --populace does not revolt against King --but the new realm of the public sphere, created via an explosion of journalistic print, provides a buffer zone, a space to debate political issues --everybody is hanging out in coffee houses (all the rage in the eighteenth-century) reading newspapers. In Shakespeare's day, there was the "court" and the "masses," but no realm of what today we call "public opinion."
Consequences of transition from Puritan to proto-contemporary U.S. identity:
--no innate depravity/original sin: no essential or stable identity; self is determined by external circumstances
--paranoia: you are vulnerable to circumstance; you can be controlled or influenced by your environment (think about Brown’s Wieland)
--but also creates opportunity: you can influence others by manipulating the environment/ self is malleable
--leads to fascination with impressions one creates/ with public effect or public persona
--you’ll notice that both Franklin and Equiano refer to “impressions” frequently. Both also refer to “character,” which seems to have more to do with reputation than inward essence. Equiano sometimes uses the language of conversion/predestination/sovereign God; but he is equally at home in the pragmatic world of Franklin!
--Franklin--his pragmatism, fascination with gadgetry, entrepreneurial savvyness, recognition of mobility/fluidity within a secular culture (note all the aspiring young artisans in his narrative)--is a truly modern figure: homo economicus! On the one hand, a self always improving and always "on the make" is positive; on the other hand, Franklin's emphasis on not wasting time and on efficiency, for us (Franklin himself seems anxiety free) heralds an aspect of modern selfhood not entirely desireable!
--he is also a a media
man: once Franklin perceives his life as one that might be imitated,
everything comes directed towards external display and not towards introspection
--Brown suggests a much more paranoid world than Franklin. Franklin believes he can be an agent in his own destiny, and exert his will to affect outcomes. In Brown’s depicted world, wills are inexplicable, darkly Freudian, or subject to influences outside of the self: why does Carwin, ultimately, want to test Clara? Where does the voice come from that instructs Wieland to slay his family?
--Here is an example of a very typical moment in the novel, at the bottom of page 8, pertaining to Wieland’s father’s religious enthusiasm: “One Sunday afternoon, being induced to retire for a few minutes to his garret, his eye was attracted by a page of this book, which, by some accident, had been opened and placed full in his view…. His eyes were not confined to his work, but occasionally wandering, lighted at length upon the page….” He does not will his eyes to fall on the page; such is sheer accident, yet the influence is profound.
--Outside that hill—the wilderness—remained threatening: Bradford and Rowlandson see it as land of vicious Indians.
--By the American Revolution, all Eastern Indian territory appropriated: a sense of security ensues.
--The vast majority of population still lives on farms, although Boston/Philadelphia are thriving urban centers.
--American exceptionalism/special destiny becomes secularized: American environment itself becomes responsible for a nation uniquely free of corruptions/constraints/hierarchy of Old World. The “City on the Hill” ideology of being an exemplary community fuses with the boundless possibility of expanding westward, unburdened by history (Indian history and peoples, of course, were a tactical/military impediment; but Indian-ness also served a key purpose as “white” men drew upon the raw virtue and vigor of the “red” Indian…. Thus the novel The Last of the Mohicans in which the white hero romps in the woods with his native-non-white pal… and thus why we have a pop-culture tradition of white/non-white guys fleeing marriage/civilization for the innocent freedom of the woods: Huck Finn/Jim, Lone Ranger/Tonto, Rockford files, Mel Gibson/Danny Glover, Crockett/Tubbs (woods replaced by “urban jungle.).
--Note the tremendous/rapid settlement that occurrs between the Puritan times (1640s-70s) up to the time in which Equiano and Crevecouer are writing (the American Revolution). Yet also reflect upon how much vast "open" space remains to the west. It is hard for us to imagine what a sense of nation, national identity, and national "mission" would have been like if we do not envision these tracts of land westward of the white settlements. Think about Prospero (who wants resources) and resistant Caliban (who sees his island as a garden). Americans alternate between Prospero-like domination of the land (i.e. technology, the future-as-real-estate development, etc.) and a longing for the pure space of non-development, the pastoral refuge (a romantic concept, to be sure, since the territories were occupied by native Americans), the Garden lost. We urbanites have a tough time finding open, "wilderness" space: you then need to be, as Henry David Thoreau put it, "a Lewis and Clark of your own mind."
--The curious feature about the antithesis I've set
up--settlement/technology/ industry/ future vs. wilderness/pastoral refuge/sublimity/regression--is
that it gets racialized: the "other" on the other side, in the
woods, is typically non-white, or vaguely sexualized (in Willa Cather's My
Antonia, the pastoral farmland/woods is described as being
"soft" etc). --Not in the Puritan period, but by the end of the
18th-century, the "captivity narrative" had become
secularized/eroticized. See the famous painting "The Death of Jane
McCrea" (from 1808). The "captivity narrative"--insofar
as it manifests a sexual/gender dynamic--is part of what might be called the
"feminization" of "America." Initially,
"America" is the native woman (the engraving of Vespucci
discovering America); bit by bit "America"
geographically/symbolically becomes a pastoral garden/Edenic (you'll see this
briefly in Crevecouer and Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"), a figure
vulnerable to too much technology/industrialization or to outside hostile
forces. When we read Brown's Wieland you will see that the main plot
involves (sort of) the seduction of a woman by an outsider European. The 20th
century rendition is, of course, the Statue of Liberty/America, a genderized
geo-political body threatened by evil terrorists (this is not to downplay the
threat of terrorism, but to illustrate that there are long continuities in
how "Americans" think about "America"). Part of our
moral-political-symbolic language perhaps subliminally invokes rape
anxieties. President Bush=Prospero/father; Miranda=America;
Caliban=terrorists.
--Rip wants to avoid anything that has an agenda—whether his wife's agenda (voiced loudly) to work, stories that might be about "something," or history itself (the revolutionary moment). Irving seems to be playing infantile retreat/womb-like security of the mountain hills off of "maturing" into history/change. But both are found wanting. Rip is, indeed, immature, etc.; and history turns out to be bickering. It is almost as if Irving cannot conceive of history as something that people make; you're either in stasis (the town before the revolution), evade history (Rip in the hills), or history just "happens" (you "wake up" and George Washington has replaced King George). Consider the postscript as well: static Garden of Eden (sort of) that seems sublime, but then change happens (gourds broken) and catastrophe follows. Rip deserts/evades his family, just as the new "America" seeks to reject the Old World. These moments of separation, of evading genealogical responsibility (dismembered mountain: strange faded patriarchal ghost men), lead to crises of identity: the town is disunified after Revolution, and Rip can’t recognize himself (his alienation when he sees his son passage). Those who are not "making" history often retreat into regressive memories of the glories of the past—the ghost men are the perfect symbol of the ghostly power/faded grandeur of the past. (To switch gears slightly: in Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk's nostalgia for green power is not unlike Rip in the hills, and Rip's wife would then be kindred to the grey box world).
--The Last of the Mohicans plays the world of the immature/regressive male psyche (that wants to be in the secret, mysterious womb-like woods) against the more mechanized, marriage-oriented world of Heyward and Colonel Duncan. In American culture there is a long tradition of transcoding desires for freedom and power into racial terms. Non-whites are typically represented as more "id" like, more Caliban like. (I'm speaking of stereotypes, not realities.) Hippies are versions of Indians, repulsed by the world of plastic and the grey cubes of the bourgeoisie.
--Pastoralism, in short, either as a sublime sentiment or a regressive impulse, is an enduring theme in "American" culture:
--Europeans thought of America as new, "virginal", not-yet-corrupted-by-history space.
--Vespucci (remember the engraving) awakens "America" into history (Indian rights to the land are ignored, just as Prospero ignores Caliban's claims).
--The sense of potentiality (the longing to start over, to recreate Eden in secular terms, etc) is deeply, as it were, libidinal:
--Here, in “America, a utopian fantasy of perfect (democratical) society might be realized.
--Here, free from the shackles of history or class, your individual desires can be realized.
--Perhaps you will be able to create a holy community (Bradford, Winthrop).
--Perhaps you will be free from paternal authority (Ashbridge).
--Perhaps you find in the woods the thrill of pure masculinism (Cooper), absent of fussy, nagging women (Rip Van Winkle).
--Perhaps you will find in the woods the racial other (Indians).
--Your identity, regardless, will be fluid, unconstrained because you are linked to a vast geographic space, not to a tidy plot of ground in, say, England (Crevecouer).
--Such potentiality ultimately undercuts the Puritan belief in innate depravity.
--Such potentiality requires a post-Lockean understanding of the personality as being in flux.
--And yet such potentiality (the freedom from Old World class hierarchy) can also lead to a sense of anomie and disconnectedness: think of the isolated characters in Brown's Wieland; think of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" as perhaps about the dislocations/disconnectedness/isolation that follows from democracy. Here is a famous passage from Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1832) to ponder: "Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. It is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed. Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."
--Such potentiality can also lead to bad, overly rational social engineering and to the bad fascination with technological solutions.
--Happy optimistic Ben Franklin, from a certain perspective, seems a bit too ruthlessly mechanical in his effort to achieve perfection (even if he does relate his efforts tongue-in-cheek!).
--Franklin does not speak of trees (nor did Prospero); he speaks of rational solutions.
--He does not want the
green world, he wants a tidy cube world (Black Elk Speaks will later comment
on a “grey world”).
Expansion westward: a brief history
--Lewis and Clark published in 1814: History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean.
--This expedition stimulated fur trade (for beaver pelt) up the Missouri.
--It was conducted by reckless breed of uncouth mountain men.
--They pioneered routes for other explorers and emigrants to Western territories.
--This lead to an imperialistic war against Mexico in 1845: Southwest territories acquired.
--By 1845-46 exploration/settlement/military presence on Pacific coast--Oregon and California.
--Throughout this period a feeling that the US had a “Manifest Destiny”, a natural right, to conquer/inhabit/claim entire North Continent of America, from East to West—to create an “empire of freedom,” as one common slogan of the day put it.
--The ideology of Manifest Destiny, however, still somewhat abstract, until 1848 when the Gold Rush began.
--Before the Gold Rush the Western territories were perceived as remote from the normal patterns of American society.
--With Gold Rush, hugh influx of Easterners to California almost overnight, West becomes major locale for adventure and settlement.
--Indians pushed onto reservations; era of U.S. cavalry and Indian wars.
--Railroads push west; open up territory for farms, grazing lands. Era of robber barons, etc.
--Two abrupt leaps forward:
--The space race, in the metaphorics of culture, perfectly satisfies the sublime impulse and the engineering impulse.
--I have been speaking of cultural symbols when I say sublime vs. engineering. Such oppositions are constructs only. U.S. culture is, in fact, much more messy.
The Western and the sublime: "Shane"
--In case you didn't get the BIG transition from Puritan times to eighteenth-century (and, in effect, our times); think in terms of:
A) GEOGRAPHY--Puritan escape from Old World Corruption (Bradford) + exemplary purity (Withrop) + push westward thru the frontier (into “virgin” green pastures/woods) = Manifest Destiny/righteous imperialism/uncontaminated by the sins of history. The world can be made new by America.
B) PSYCHOLOGY–essential self gets replaced by fluid self:
--transition from belief in innate depravity and inherited sin
--to a post-Lockean world where the self is malleable and may be understood as a mechanism that can be engineered
--note in Franklin the mechanical reproduction of virtue: habitual practice interiorizes virtues; habit becomes "2nd nature"
--the desire to engineer the self leads to pop psychology but also to all that bad rationalist, capitalist drive towards efficiency that plagues us
C) NATION—anxiety over autonomy/of national agency, of nation “voice” (see the Fliegelman editor introduction to Wieland):
--hierarchial world of Great Chain of Being: you just care about the sovereign's voice
--don’t want to hear Caliban’s voice
--in a democracy "Caliban" becomes enfranchised, but such liberty can lead to license
--Ashbridge stands up against her husband and revolts (yikes, women get to speak!)
--in a democracy, voice becomes the voice of the people “We the people...”: a fiction of convenience
--in a democracy there is always a tension between individual voice and collective voice (states vs. federal government), and a tension between self-assertion/radical energy and collective restraint (note the odd passivity in the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events”).
--This passivity occurs in the elaborate passive constructions in Wieland, and reflects the philosophical/psychological anxiety (coming out of John Locke) about volition and agency or cause/effect. Americans like to think they are a “can do” culture with lots of gumption; Americans are also prone to anxieties about big government, conspiracies, and so on. The tension between self-agency and conspiracy (some unknown force being the unknown cause of known effects) is, for instance, why TV shows such as “Lost” are so popular: macho guys/brave heroines fighting hard against…..?
ALL-PURPOSE U.S. DATE SHEET OF KEY EVENTS AND INTELLECTUAL/CULTURAL HISTORY BEFORE 20TH CENTURY (MOST RELEVANT DATES FOR OUR READINGS ARE IN BOLD):
1492 Columbus "discovers" Americas. 1502 First Africans taken to work in Americas. 1517 Martin Luther's 95 Theses--Protestant reformation begins. 1521 Conquest of Mexico by Cortez. 1543 Copernicus refutes 'Geocentric' view of universe (earth no longer center of Creation). 1603 Queen Elizabeth dies; James I rules until 1625; Charles I until 1649. 1607 Founding of Jamestown in Virginia. 1611 Shakespeare's The Tempest. 1620 William Bradford and "Pilgrim Fathers" land at Plymouth. 1637 Descartes' Meditations published (in which appears the most famous line in philosophy, "I think, therefore I am"). 1640 John Winthrop delivers sermon aboard the Arabella. 1642 English Civil War begins (country divided between pro-Catholic loyalists to Charles I and Protestant landed nobleman and propertied classes, who feel the king has disregarded their traditional rights and privileges; more democratical, radical groups‑‑the Levellers‑‑are also against the king). 1642 Galileo (born in 1564) dies. 1643 Louis XIV ("the Great" or the "Sun King") of France begins 72 year reign. 1649 Charles I, son of James I, son of Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary"), sister to Queen Elizabeth, is beheaded; Cromwell, a radical Puritan, leads the parliamentary Commonwealth to 1660. 1651 Hobbes' Leviathan (a famous political treatise defending absolute monarchy) published. 1660 Restoration of monarchy in England; Charles II rules. 1662 Puritan "Half-Way Covenant". 1665 Black Death hits London. 1682 William Penn founds Quaker colony in Pennsylvania. 1682 Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative published (she dies probably in 1678). 1685 Charles II, on the throne since 1660, dies; James II (a Catholic) becomes king. 1687 Newton's Principia Mathematica. The Einstein of his age, Newton's theories of matter/motion seem to explain the workings of the universe‑‑an optimistic sense of being able to control nature ensues. God no longer perceived as routinely intervening in the cosmos; instead, the Deity has created a perfectly rational, harmonious universe (like a super-complex watch), and he is best known by understanding his creation, the natural world. 1688 English "Glorious Revolution." William III (Protestant) usurps the throne, by invitation of Parliament (from now on, government in Britain is parliamentary, with kings & queens increasingly becoming only symbolic figureheads). 1690 Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding published. Main theory is that our minds are "blank slates" when we are born. There are no inborn ideas (traditional Christian notion of innate depravity, the inheritance of Adam and Eve's sin, loses validity for intellectuals of the period); we gain knowledge only through experience and our environment. Consequently, education becomes very important‑‑perhaps humankind can be perfected in the progress of time. Combined with optimism from Newton's scientific ideas, the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" emerges in full swing. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and company all read and took Locke to heart. 1690 Two Treatises on Civil Government published, to legitimate the overthrow of James II. 1692 Puritan Witchcraft trials in Salem, Mass. (rationality eventually wins out over mass hysteria; U.S. becomes more and more secular). 1702 William III dies. Queen Anne reigns to 1714. 1706 Benjamin Franklin born (dies in 1790). 1713 Elizabeth Ashbridge born (dies in 1755). 1721 J.S. Bach completes the Brandenburg Concertos. 1735 Swedish naturalist Linnaeus publishes The System of Nature‑‑descriptive system designed to classify all the plants on the earth, known and unknown, according to the characteristics of their reproductive parts. 1743 Thomas Jefferson born (dies in 1826). 1762 J.J. Rousseau publishes Emile, in which he sketches a method of education that would preserve the natural goodness of children by allowing relatively free expression of their inclinations. 1764 Mozart (aged eight) writes his first symphony. 1769 Watt patents the steam-engine; Industrial Age takes off. 1773 Captain Cook ("discoverer" of Hawaii) brings Omai, a native of the Polynesian island of Huahine, back to England, where he is entertained by the aristocracy and causes a sensation. Signals fascination with "noble savage"‑‑a main theme of "Romanticism." By the end of the 18th-century, a very complicated and competitive international network of commerce and colonialism has emerged. 1773 Phillis Wheatley publishes "On Being Brought from Africa to America". 1775 American Revolution begins. 1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations: establishes "laissez faire" principle: capitalism is like a self-regulating clock, so no need to regulate working conditions. 1782 Crevecoeur publishes "What is an American" in Letters from an American Farmer (1782). 1787 U.S. Constitution signed. 1789 Parisians storm the Bastille: English government clamps down on dissent. Fear of "mob rule" makes it difficult for workers to articulate grievances. Wordsworth, Blake, and other Romantic poets greatly enthusiastic about the democratical energy unleashed by the revolution. 1793 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France executed. 1789 Olaudah Equiano's The Life.... is published. 1791 Toussaint L'Ouverture leads slave rebellion against French in Haiti. 1794 Thomas Paine publishes scandalous Age of Reason (debunks Old Testament as superstitious myth). 1800 Thomas Jefferson becomes third President of U.S. 1803 Louisiana Purchase ("Manifest Destiny" ideology, right of nation to appropriate western lands, kicks in). 1804 Immanuel Kant, German "Idealist" philosopher, dies. Basic philosophical premise is that we cannot absolutely know "reality" because it is always shaped, a priori, by the mind's faculties. Will influence Romantic celebration of the shaping power of imagination. 1804 Beethoven composes his Third Symphony, "Eroica". 1807 Robert Fulton's steamboat. 1814 First steam locomotive. 1821 Napoleon (defeated in 1815) dies: the British Romantic Period more or less ends. "Captains of Industry" become the heroes of the Victorian Age. 1826 James F. Cooper publishes Last of the Mohicans (Indians either "savage" or "noble"). 1828 Andrew Jackson becomes U.S. President. "Orphan, frontiersman, horseracing man, Indian fighter, war hero, and land speculator, Andrew Jackson embodied the new American spirit and became the idol of the ambitious, jingoistic younger men who now called themselves Democrats. At its best, Jacksonian democracy meant an opening of the political process to more people (although blacks, women, and Indians still remained political nonentities). The flip side was that it represented a new level of militant, land-frenzied, slavery-condoning, Indian-killing greed" (qtd. from Kenneth Davis). 1830 Opening of Liverpool-Manchester railroad: allows for rapid transport of coal, etc. between industrial areas of England. 1832 First Reform Bill in England: extends vote to middle-class owners of property (but working classes must wait until 1867, when the Second Reform Bill passes). 1833 All slaves emancipated in the British Empire. 1837 Queen Victoria begins reign--Victorian stuffiness/prudery, etc. 1838 First transatlantic steamship crossing. 1839 Opium War begins (ends 1842): England forces free trade upon China. 1843 Karl Marx meets Engels; during the 1840's widespread unemployment, depression, and famine leads to rioting throughout Europe; massive immigration from Ireland to U.S. 1844 Frederick Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of FD. 1848 Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. 1851 The Great Exhibition in London‑‑a celebration of the wonders of technological progress (world perceived‑‑by the middle-class, that is‑‑as dynamically changing, for the better). 1852 Otis invents the first elevator with a safety break. 1853 Charles Dickens publishes Hard Times‑‑a novel about exploited English factory workers. 1856 Bessemer announces new process for making high-quality, low-cost steel. When combined with the Otis elevator, this makes possible the modern skyscraper. 1859 Darwin publishes Origin of Species. 1861 U.S. Civil War begins. 1865 Lister introduces antiseptic practices in hospitals. 1876 Bell patents the telephone. 1879 Edison invents the incandescent bulb. 1880's Britain and European nations colonize Africa. 1901 Queen Victoria dies. 1917 Lenin leads the Bolshevik Revolution (which will lead to Communist Russia, Cold War, etc.).
|
