Manifest destiny was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North blogger.com are three basic themes to manifest destiny: The special virtues of the American people and their institutions; The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of the agrarian East Aug 20, · Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War (–65), the idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and blogger.com purchase of Alaska after the Civil War Dec 30, · You must enable JavaScript in order to use this site
Wonder of science essay class 10th pdf
Edward S. Curtis, Navajo Riders in Canyon de Chellyc Library of Congress. Please click here to improve this chapter. Westward expansion essay Americans long dominated the vastness of the American West.
Linked culturally and geographically by trade, travel, and warfare, westward expansion essay, various Indigenous groups controlled most of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the nineteenth century.
Spanish, French, British, and later American traders had integrated themselves into many regional economies, and American emigrants pushed ever westward, but no imperial power had yet achieved anything approximating political or military control over the great bulk of the continent.
But then the Civil War came and went and decoupled the West from the question of slavery just as the United States industrialized and laid down rails and pushed its ever-expanding population ever farther west. Indigenous Americans have lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, westward expansion essay, perhaps as many asNative people still inhabited the American West. Often in violation of its own treaties, the United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, controlled the enormity of land between the two oceans.
The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is not a simple story. What some touted westward expansion essay a triumph—the westward expansion of American authority—was for others a tragedy.
The West contained many westward expansion essay and many places, and their intertwined histories marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the United States. In the decades after the Civil War, American settlers poured across the Mississippi River in record numbers. No longer simply crossing over the continent for new imagined Edens in California or Oregon, they settled now in the vast heart of the continent. Many of the first American migrants had come to the West in search of quick profits during the midcentury gold and silver rushes.
As westward expansion essay the California rush of —, droves of prospectors poured in after precious-metal strikes in Colorado inNevada inIdaho inMontana inwestward expansion essay, and the Black Hills in While women often performed housework that allowed mining families to subsist in often difficult conditions, a significant portion of the mining workforce were single men without families dependent on service industries in nearby towns and cities, westward expansion essay.
There, working-class women worked in shops, saloons, boardinghouses, and brothels. Many of these ancillary operations profited from the mining boom: as failed prospectors found, the rush itself often generated more wealth than the mines, westward expansion essay.
Others came to the Plains to extract the hides of the great bison herds. Millions of animals had roamed the Plains, but their tough leather supplied industrial belting in eastern factories and raw material for the booming clothing industry.
Specialized teams took down and skinned the herds. The infamous American bison slaughter peaked in the early s. The number of American bison plummeted from over ten million at midcentury to only a few hundred by the early s. The expansion of the railroads allowed ranching to replace the bison with cattle on the American grasslands. This s photograph illustrates the massive number of bison killed for these and other reasons including sport in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Photograph of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer, s. The nearly seventy thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints more commonly called Mormons who migrated west between and were similar to other Americans traveling west on the overland trails. They faced many of the same problems, but unlike most other American migrants, westward expansion essay, Mormons were fleeing from religious persecution.
Mormons believed that Americans were exceptional—chosen by God to spread truth across the world and to build utopia, a New Jerusalem in North America. However, westward expansion essay, many Americans were suspicious of the Latter-Day Saint movement and its unusual rituals, especially the practice of polygamy, and most Mormons found it difficult to practice their faith in the eastern United States.
Thus began a series of migrations in the midnineteenth century, first to Illinois, then Missouri and Nebraska, and finally into Utah Territory.
Once in the west, Mormon settlements served as important supply points for other emigrants heading on to California and Oregon. Brigham Young, the leader of the Church after the death of Joseph Smith, was appointed governor of the Utah Territory by the federal government in He encouraged Mormon residents of the territory to engage in agricultural pursuits and be cautious of the outsiders who arrived as the mining and railroad industries developed in the region.
It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West. Family farms were the backbone of the agricultural economy that expanded in the West after the Civil War, westward expansion essay.
Innortherners in Congress passed the Homestead Act, which allowed male citizens or those who declared their intent to become citizens to claim federally owned lands in the West, westward expansion essay. Hundreds westward expansion essay thousands of Americans used the Homestead Act to acquire land.
The treeless plains that had been considered unfit for settlement became the new agricultural mecca for land-hungry Americans. The Homestead Act excluded married women from filing claims because they were considered the legal dependents of westward expansion essay husbands.
Some unmarried women filed claims on their own, westward expansion essay single farmers male or female were hard-pressed to run westward expansion essay farm and they were a small minority. Most farm households adopted traditional divisions of labor: men worked in the fields and women managed the home and kept the family fed. Both were essential. Migrants sometimes found in homesteads a self-sufficiency denied at home.
Second or third sons who did not inherit land in Scandinavia, westward expansion essay, for instance, founded farm communities in Minnesota, Dakota, and other Midwestern territories in the s.
The Plains were transformed. Infor example, Kansas had about 10, farms; in it hadwestward expansion essay, Texas saw enormous population growth. The federal government countedpeople in Texas in1, inand 3, inmaking it the westward expansion essay most populous state in the nation.
military forces and various Native American groups. More sustained and equally impactful conflicts were economic and cultural. New patterns of American settlement, railroad construction, and material extraction clashed with the vast and cyclical movement across the Great Plains to hunt buffalo, raid enemies, and trade goods.
Political, economic, and even humanitarian concerns intensified American efforts to isolate Indians on reservations. Although Indian removal had long been a part of federal Indian policy, following the Civil War the U.
government redoubled its efforts. If treaties and other forms of persistent coercion would not work, federal officials pushed for more drastic measures: after the Civil War, coordinated military action by celebrity Civil War generals such as William Sherman and William Sheridan exploited and exacerbated local conflicts sparked by illegal business ventures and settler incursions. Against the threat of confinement and the extinction of traditional ways of life, Native Americans battled the American army and the encroaching lines of American settlement.
In one of the earliest western engagements, inwhile the Civil War still consumed the United States, tensions erupted between Westward expansion essay Nation and white settlers in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. The U. census recorded a white population of about 6, westward expansion essay, in Minnesota; eight years later, westward expansion essay, when it became a state, it was more thanWestward expansion essay became unsustainable and those Dakota who had taken up farming found only poverty.
The federal Indian agent refused to disburse promised food. Many starved. Andrew Myrick, a trader at the agency, refused to sell food on credit. In the face of an inevitable American retaliation, and over the protests of many members, the tribe chose war. On the following day, Dakota warriors attacked settlements near the Agency. They killed thirty-one men, women, and children including Myrick, whose mouth was found filled with grass.
They then ambushed a U. military detachment at Redwood Ferry, killing twenty-three. The governor of Minnesota called up militia and several thousand Americans waged war against the Sioux insurgents. Fighting westward expansion essay out at New Ulm, Fort Ridgely, and Birch Coulee, but the Americans westward expansion essay the Indian resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, ending the so-called Dakota War.
Buffalo Soldiers, the nickname given westward expansion essay African-American cavalrymen by the native Americans they fought, were the first peacetime all-black regiments in the regular United States army, westward expansion essay. These soldiers regularly confronted racial prejudice from other Army members and civilians but were an essential part of American victories during the Indian Wars of the late westward expansion essay and early twentieth centuries.
Farther south, settlers inflamed tensions in Colorado. Inthe first Treaty of Fort Laramie had secured right-of-way access for Americans passing through on their way to California and Oregon. But a gold rush in drew approximatelywhite gold seekers, and they demanded new treaties be made with local Indian groups to secure land rights in the newly created Colorado Territory.
Cheyenne bands splintered over the possibility of signing a new treaty that would confine them to a westward expansion essay. Settlers, already wary of raids by powerful groups of Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Comanches, meanwhile read in their local newspapers sensationalist accounts of the uprising in Minnesota. Militia leader John M.
Chivington warned settlers in the summer westward expansion essay that the Cheyenne were dangerous, urged war, and promised a swift military victory. Settlers sparked conflict and sporadic fighting broke out. The aged Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, believing that a peace treaty would be best for his people, traveled to Denver to arrange for peace talks. He and his followers traveled toward Fort Lyon in accordance with government instructions, but on November 29,Chivington ordered his seven hundred militiamen to move on the Cheyenne camp near Fort Lyon at Sand Creek.
It was a slaughter. After the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant the following spring, Congress allied with prominent philanthropists to create the Board of Indian Commissioners, a permanent advisory body to oversee Indian affairs and prevent the further outbreak of violence. The board effectively Christianized American Indian policy. Much of the reservation system was handed over to Protestant churches, which were tasked with finding agents and missionaries to manage reservation life.
Congress hoped that religiously minded men might fare better at creating just assimilation policies and persuading Indians to accept them.
Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, entered the Carlisle Indian School, a Native American boarding school founded by the United States government inon October 21, and departed on August 28, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.
Many female Christian missionaries played a central role in cultural reeducation programs that attempted to not only instill Protestant religion but also impose traditional American gender roles and family structures.
Fieldwork, the westward expansion essay domain of white males, westward expansion essay, was primarily performed by Native women, who also usually controlled the products of their labor, if not the land that was worked, giving them status westward expansion essay society as laborers and food providers, westward expansion essay.
Christian missionaries performed much as secular federal agents had, westward expansion essay. Few American agents could meet Native Americans on their own terms. Most viewed reservation Indians as lazy and thought of Native cultures as inferior to their own.
The views of J.
Westward expansion: social and cultural development - AP US History - Khan Academy
, time: 8:25Manifest destiny - Wikipedia
What some touted as a triumph—the westward expansion of American authority—was for others a tragedy. The West contained many peoples and many places, and their intertwined histories marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the United States. II. Post-Civil War Westward Migration Aug 20, · Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War (–65), the idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and blogger.com purchase of Alaska after the Civil War Classkick is a free app that shows teachers in real-time exactly what students are doing and who needs help so they can provide instant feedback
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