Chapter 9 Flashcards
Conestoga wagons
These large horse drawn wagons were used to carry people or heavy freight long distances, including from the east to the western frontier settlements.
Erie Canal
Most important and profitable of the barge canals of the 1820’s and 1830’s; stretched from buffalo to Albany, NY, connecting the Great Lakes to the east coast and making New York City the nations largest port.
Samuel F. B. Morse
In 1832, he invented the telegraph and revolutionized the speed of communication.
Eli Whitney
He invented the cotton gin which could separate cotton from its seeds. One machine operator could separate fifty times more cotton than worker could by hand, which led to an increase in cotton production and prices. These increases gave planters a new profitable use for slavery and a lucrative slave trade emerged from the coastal south to the southwest.
Cyrus Hall McCormick
In 1831 he invented a mechanical reaper to harvest wheat, which transformed the scale of agriculture. By hand a farmer could only harvest a half an acre a day, while the McCormick reaper allowed two people to harvest twelve acres of wheat a day.
Lowell girls
Young female factory workers at the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, which in the early 1820s provided its employees with prepared meals, dormitories, moral discipline, and educational opportunities.
Cult of domesticity
The belief that women should stay at home to manage the household, educate their children with strong moral values, and please their husbands.
Minstrelsy
A form of entertainment that was popular from the 1830’s to the 1870’s. The performances featured white performers who were made up as African Americans or blackface. They performed banjo and fiddle music, shuffle dances, and lowbrow humor that reinforced racial stereotypes.
Irish potato famine
In 1845, an epidemic of potato rot brought a famine to rural Ireland that killed over 1 million peasants and instigated a huge increase in the number of Irish immigrating to America. By 1850 the Irish made up 43% of the foreign born population in the United States. And in the 1850 they made up over half of the population of New York City and Boston.
Coffin ships
Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine had to endure a six week journey across the Atlantic to reach America. During these voyages, thousands of passengers died of disease and starvation, which led to the ships being called coffin ships
Levi Strauss
A Jewish tailor who followed miners to California during the gold rush and began making durable work pants that were later dubbed blue jeans or Levi’s.
Nativism
Anti immigration and anti Catholic feeling in the 1830’s through the 1850’s; the largest group was New York’s Order of the Star Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American or Know-Nothing party in 1854.
Know-Nothing party
Nativist, anti Catholic third party organized in 1854 in reaction to large scale German and Irish immigration; the party’s only presidential candidate was Millard Fillmore in 1856.
