Monday, January 1, 2024

The Seventy-Six Things That Changed America the Most From 1776 to 1900

To be patriotic, I decided to go back the country's founding, and bring the total of landmark developments up to 176 (1,776 was just too many). Without further ado:

The Seventy-Six Things That Changed America the Most From 1776 to 1900


Declaration of Independence

The origins of the United States come from the Declaration of Independence – a document most all Americans could quote, at least in part. It was adopted on July 2, 1776, and two days later the language was agreed upon. America was officially leaving Great Britain. Published a few months earlier, Paine’s Common Sense helped colonists embrace the bold idea.

 

Winning the Revolutionary War

Declaring independence, however, didn’t achieve it. With fighting having begun in 1775, the Revolutionary War, led by George Washington, was not over quickly. Many episodes became part of America’s founding mythos, like the Christmas retreat across the Delaware. For a little over five years the new nation fought on, until the victory at Yorktown in 1781 meant freedom.

 

The Constitutional Convention

America’s early history is a sort of odd prelude, governed under the Articles of Confederation, which were wholly inadequate to running a federal government. For six years the problems continued, until in 1787 a convention drafted the new Constitution, and argued for more central authority and powers. It has remained the foundation of America’s political and legal system ever since.

 

The Bill of Rights

It took a few years of wrangling to get the new states to approve the Bill of Rights – after the Constitution had been adopted. Easily the most well-known part of the document, the first ten amendments have become the guiding principles for America’s citizens, including freedoms of speech and religion, and the right to bear arms or a speedy trial.

 

Survey of American Roads

In 1789 an early civil engineer with tons of foresight – Christopher Colles – created the Survey of the Roads of the United States. It was the first mapping of its kind, to help connect travelers and encourage trade. Colles had other great ideas too: his ideas for New York’s waterways and canal system would eventually be realized half a century later.

 

The Cabinet

When Washington was sworn in as the first President, he had to figure out what that meant. Immediately he decided to create a cabinet of advisors – which was radical, because the Constitution had no such offices in its description. Jefferson was Secretary of State, Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury, and Henry Knox Secretary of War. There are now fourteen such positions, in the 21st century.

 

National Bank

Hamilton is well-known for his work to create a National Bank – again, not found in the Constitution. Two main issues remained from after the Revolution and Confederation era: dealing with states’ debts and currencies, and getting the new federal government a line of international credit. It was an idea that the U.S. fought with a readopted numerous times in the 1800s.

 

Whiskey Rebellion

The Federal government, it almost goes without saying, will not tolerate armed rebellion. But this was put to the test almost immediately, and was initially no sure thing. When troops, led by Washington himself, had to stop an uprising of farmers outraged by the imposition of a tax on whiskey, it proved the newly empowered government had more clout than the former Confederation.

 

Stepping Down After Two Terms

Washington could have been a king in all but name. By stepping down after his second term, while still in good health, he set an extraordinary precedent that was honored until the Second World War (and then codified in a Constitutional amendment). Retiring to Mount Vernon, he reverted to being just another citizen – which also modeled what should happen to retired Presidents.

 

XYZ Affair

This was more than a diplomatic spat – it set a crucial precedent for America’s handling of foreign affairs. At the root of it was a question: who gets to conduct foreign affairs? The government? Individual people? And what was the literal price of negotiating? The latter was the affront of the time – French diplomats insisting on being paid bribes. Not giving in changed foreign policy forever.

 

Washington, D.C. Established

America already had some major cities, from Boston to Charleston. But the Constitution called for a capital – and so D.C. began to be planned, from the boulevards, to the White House, to the Capitol building. It would be the first statement of the new nation – moving its original capital from New York to the Potomac.

 

Second Great Awakening

Starting in the 1790s, a Protestant religious fervor swept through America, and inspired many new sects and movements – some of them quite radical. The Shakers, for example, believed in celibacy and the end of the world. The Baptists grew significantly in this era as well. By the 1840s the movement had died out, but not without lasting cultural consequences.

 

USPS

The federalization of the Postal Service began in 1775 under Ben Franklin, but really got off the ground in 1792. It was instrumental in the early years of delivering newspapers to the people as well, besides just mail – which the young government thought was vital, to help keep the populace well-informed. To this day, the USPS is essential for American shipping.

 

The Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney’s 1793 patent for a machine that helped process cotton radically transformed the South. Tobacco had been America’s main cash crop since the days of Jamestown – but that would shift to cotton as a result of Whitney’s machine. Since cotton still had to be picked by hand, though, many see the cotton gin as exacerbating the argument for the usefulness of slavery.

 

Mills

The precursor to modern factories, mills began operating in New England in the 1790s, first in Rhode Island – producing textiles. Staffed with child laborers and young, unmarried, women, mill work was tedious and often dangerous – powered initially by waterwheels and eventually by steam power. It marks the north beginning to industrialize, distinct from the agrarian south.

 

The Alien and Sedition Acts

One of the first blows to the Bill of Rights was when Adams tried to ban speech that was critical of the U.S. government and tried to deport anyone who didn’t agree with American policy during a time of national crisis. It stained his reputation forever, but the acts didn’t stand. That said, in the centuries to come, similar curbs on free speech have resurfaced again and again.

 

Peaceful Transfer of Power

The election of 1800 saw the Federalists, led by John Adams, defeated by Jeffersonian Republicans. Adams, like Washington, became a private citizen, and a new administration with very different goals and ideas came to power. Compared to the English history they’d inherited (think of the War of the Roses) such a transfer of power was revolutionary.

 

West Point

The United States Military Academy was launched in 1802, and became the cadet training corps for the U.S. Army. In the Revolutionary War, Washington had to get whatever soldiers he could to fight. By the early 1800s, the country started to formalize its armed forces, and began developing its navy at the same time, which would slowly become a powerhouse.

 

Marbury v. Madison

The 1803 decision codified the role of the Judicial branch, and the Supreme Court especially. Courts now could strike down any law that was in violation of the U.S. Constitution – the main source of judicial review and power to this day. In the short term, the dispute was over judicial appointments from the outgoing administration: something familiar to 21st century Americans.

 

Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny

When Jefferson purchased all the land from New Orleans to Montana from the French it kickstarted a westward movement that would spread white supremacy and an agrarian vision across the Great Plains. By the 1840s the concept had developed into a fever-pitch, under the banner of ‘Manifest Destiny’ – that God himself wanted this for his favorite nation.

 

Webster’s Dictionary

American English got its first dictionary in 1806, and has pulled away from England’s speech patterns and spellings ever since. Some American words are weirdly anachronistic – holding onto terms the British have since given up, and others were brand new (and often heavily indebted to indigenous naming). Soon we’d be “two countries separated by the same language.”

 

Steamboats

Robert Fulton launched his first – and the world’s first – steamship in 1807. No longer hampered by the variable winds, steamships could travel anywhere, anytime. As they got larger they managed to take on increasingly rough seas, became loaded with guns, and began developing into the backbone of America’s naval and trade vessels.

 

End of Transatlantic Slavery

In 1808 the United States, at least legally and formally, stopped importing new enslaved peoples from Africa. This did nothing for the people in the U.S. who were enslaved, or their progeny, but it was an important first step for the nation ridding itself of the evil. The perpetual enslavement of those already here would last another half century.

 

The War of 1812

The British came back, via Canada, and burned the White House. The war inspired Francis Scott Key to pen America’s national anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner, which helped launch the national obsession with its flag. Meanwhile, the Battle of New Orleans made Andrew Jackson an American hero and household name.

 

Tecumseh’s War

As America began, under Jefferson, looking to the west, the Ohio Valley became the focal point of the wars with native peoples. Since the Revolution, the Appalachian Mountains had provided a sort of buffer between the indigenous confederations and tribes and the new nation. Tecumseh raised an enormous army from across the continent to keep that boundary. Having lost, the Americans pushed their way in.

 

Failed Compromises

Each new state that entered the Union led to discussions about whether it was to be a slave state or a free state – trying to preserve a balance between the two in Washington, so the South wouldn’t bolt. Many compromises were made, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which all had the same effect: kicking the can of the issue down the road.

 

Monroe Doctrine

In 1823 James Monroe first stated his cornerstone of foreign policy, which would define the nation’s view until the present day: Europe was to stay out of the western hemisphere. By now, of course, America had grown substantially, and the Spanish were already on the run in South America, thanks to Bolivar. Territory and military engagements in the Americas were to be under U.S. purview, moving forward.

 

“Jim Crow” and Stephen Foster

By the late 1820s, or early 1830s, the noxious racial stereotype of Jim Crow had been formed. Minstrel shows soon followed, and blackface entertainment based on painful racial stereotypes. At the same time, Stephen Foster – no stranger to minstrelsy himself – began writing a host of popular songs about the South, many of which have been passed down, in sanitized forms, to today.

 

Transcendentalism

People and nature are good – and that goodness reflects the divine. Such were the teachings of America’s first major philosophical movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-reliance was also preached, and the concept of ‘civil disobedience’ was given its first-ever articulation from Henry David Thoreau, which would inspire everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Democracy in America

The first great historical survey of America was written by an outsider – which helps lend it credibility. Clearly, the United States, now nearly a half century old, was becoming a power to reckon with on the world stage – De Tocqueville’s work presented the nation to the world. It was this work which framed America as a ‘great experiment’.

 

Jacksonian Democracy

The Constitution said that voters were only land-owning white men. Surprisingly it wasn’t for a number of decades that non-landowning men were able to be voters. The Jacksonian era ushered in a new period of populism and the Democratic Party, which remains, in the 2020s, one of the longest-standing of political parties in the world.

 

The Trail of Tears

In the American South, there were the five ‘civilized’ tribes, which had dutifully complied with all requests made of them: to speak English, dress as Americans, and cultivate the land. Andrew Jackson, however, hated all Indians, and so set forth the tragic Trail of Tears, a forced march to the west which killed many, and a powerful symbol of the displacement of North America’s indigenous peoples.

 

Colt’s Interchangeable Parts

One of the first pioneers of interchangeable parts was Samuel Colt. His firearms revolutionized the early industrial era: taking a complex piece of equipment and making it easy to manufacture. When part of your gun broke, you could now replace a single piece, instead of the entire, expensive, revolver. Colt weapons helped define the U.S.

 

Telegraph

In the mid-1830s Morse invented the functional telegraph and Morse Code, which revolutionized communication. Far faster than the post office or a galloping horse, you could now send a message to someone as quick as electricity. The first functional telegraph lines were set up in the D.C. area by the 1840s, and stayed in place well after the telephone.

 

Streetcars

In the 1830s the streetcar was developed in America, in places like Harlem and New Orleans. Slowly horses began to be phased out of the cities of North America as trams and trolleys became electrified. Urban spaces began to fundamentally alter how people lived in ways separate from the towns and villages in more rural areas.

 

Seneca Falls

Long considered the birth of American feminism and the suffrage movement, the great names of the age were involved in the planning and execution including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A few years later Sojourner Truth delivered her famed ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ – another milestone in the early days of feminism.

 

Homesteading and the Oregon Trail

In 1836 the first wagon train to Oregon set out from Missouri. Half a million would take the route. Starting in the 1840s, homesteading helped defining the American west. Places like Nebraska had 40% of their land claimed by homesteaders, as wave after wave of settlers set up in the Great Plains. 1.6 million people took free land past the Mississippi River.

 

The Smithsonian

The Castle building was founded in the 1840s, and began mostly as an academic institution. In time, the Smithsonian has come to play the role of our National Museum – the warehouse of our collective history as a country. From the actual Star-Spangled Banner to modern touchstones like Julia Child’s kitchen and Obama’s Hope poster, it’s become the repository of our cultural memory.

 

Frederick Law Olmsted

Olmsted was the landscaper of America’s urban green spaces. From New York’s Central Park to the emerald necklaces of cities like Chicago and Boston, he set up parks all over. He also planned a variety of college campuses from UC Berkeley and Stanford to the University of Maine. Most famously, perhaps, was the work he did on the National Mall.

 

Annexing Texas and the Mexican-American War

The history of Texas joining the Union is complicated. Oversimplifying, a bunch of Americans went over the border of Mexico and tried to set up shop (which failed spectacularly – remember the Alamo?). But the U.S. decided to take the land anyway. American troops marched to Mexico City, and land from San Francisco to San Antonio became part of the United States.

 

The Gold Rush

When gold was discovered in the Sierra's foothills, it sparked a global race to California to strike it rich. People came from all over, and the first major hub of America’s West Coast was established. Similar rushes followed, such as the silver rush in Nevada a decade later, or the gold rush in Alaska in the 1890s.  America was fast becoming a land of prosperity.

 

The Underground Railroad and Growing Abolitionism

Abolitionism had been part of the U.S. since the founding and before. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act made abetting runaway enslaved people a crime. The underground railroad had already transported 100,000 people to freedom by 1850, and Harriet Tubman became an American heroine. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a smash hit, and inflamed abolitionist sentiments even more.

 

Paleontology

In the 1850s the first complete dinosaur skeletons were discovered in the United States. For the next half century, culminating in 1902’s discovery of T. Rex, America led the burgeoning field of paleontology. Darwin was just around the corner, and dinosaur fossils would play a pivotal role in redefining history and science.

 

Mormons Head to Utah

The U.S. Army in 1858 marched on Salt Lake City – a watershed moment. The Mormons, founded in upstate New York, had been driven out of everywhere, most recently Missouri, before heading to Utah. Sending troops against American citizens – even those of a new faith – hadn’t really happened before. The Church of Latter-Day Saints didn’t go away, of course – in eventually thrived.

 

Slave Rebellions and Violence

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a catastrophe, leading to Bleeding Kansas, where people killed each other to determine if the new states would be slave or free. Slave rebellions, such as Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831, provided a template for John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry, which shocked the country. The disastrous Dred Scott decision made things worse. Violence was breaking out across the nation.

 

The Civil War

Finally, it all came to a head. One of the world’s first modern wars, the conflict famously pitted brother against brother, and millions died. Abraham Lincoln shepherded the nation through its greatest trial. The Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation: the nation changed forever. The Confederacy fell, but a myth of antebellum plantation life proliferated in the decades that followed.

 

Reconstruction Amendments

By Juneteenth, slavery was basically ended in the U.S. The best part of Reconstruction was the three Constitutional Amendments it spawned: abolishing slavery in the 13th, citizenship in the 14th, and voting rights in the 15th. They would become a new bedrock of civil and political rights in America – even if they took the better part of a century to actually come to fruition.

 

Failed Reconstruction Policies

Lincoln’s assassination nearly stopped Reconstruction in its tracks, though. It limped on, with a few early victories – the first black Congressmen and Senators, for example. But soon the Klan had been organized, and Andrew Johnson simply wasn’t up to the task of guiding the grieving nation. Sharecropping replaced slavery, and black citizens’ lives were still essentially not free.

 

ASPCA and Cruelty to Animals

In 1866 the first laws against cruelty to animals were passed, and Henry Bergh launched the American Society for the Prevention to the Cruelty of Animals days later. A shift in consciousness was underway, changing attitudes regarding everything from work horses to dog fighting – and people began to consider animals’ welfare. Nowadays nearly 4 million pets are adopted through the ASPCA each year.

 

American Literature

From Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s to Mark Twain in the 1880s, in the mid-century American literature came into its own. Leaves of Grass and Moby Dick in the 1850s helped lead the way in poetry and prose, with many brilliant artists following, including Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The nation was finding its voice.

 

Steel Production

Bessemer steel had been discovered in the 1850s, either in the UK or the U.S. Because of this, modern steel production really took off in the second half of the 19th century. Production settled especially in the Great Lakes region, from Pittsburgh to Detroit. By the 1890s new processes replaced Bessemer, but steel remained part of America’s manufacturing culture.

 

Trans-Continental Railroad

With the famed golden spike in Promontory, Utah, the first transcontinental railroad was completed, linking the east coast to the west. Slowly things like stagecoaches and the wagon trains of the earlier generation began to be replaced. Railroad workers, especially the Chinese, became part of the fabric of the country.

 

“The Wild West” and Barbed Wire

Barbed wire transformed the west in the 1870s, as the Great Plains changed from bison to cattle. Ranchers divvied up the land with their new fences, and cowboys became mythical figures, driving herds to the midwestern slaughterhouses. Saloons, outlaws, and all the rest followed. Gunslingers and the OK Corral – it all became part of America’s story.

 

Baseball

After the Civil War, baseball, the slowly-developing pastime, became a professional sport. In the last decades of the century, it went on to become America’s favorite sport, and leagues were up and running by the 1870s. Precursors of the World Series followed in the next decade, and cities began to have their own teams and rivalries.

 

Third Great Awakening

Another religious movement came in the second half of the century. Some of the new denominations included the Pentecostal sect, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science. The Salvation Army followed, and Christianity got linked to health and wellness. YMCAs, developed in the UK, came to the US, and it was at a Y where basketball was invented in the 1890s.

 

Civil Service Reform

When James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a deranged office-seeker, one good thing came out of it as a consequence – the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Finally, employment in the U.S. government would be accounted on merit, and not as favors, patronage, or nepotism. Of course at the local level favors still ruled, like in Boss Tweed’s corrupt Tammany Hall – but it was an important start.

 

Chinese Exclusion Act

One of America’s more infamous racist policies was when the Chinese were barred entry to the country in 1882. Never before had a group of people been denied entry to the country, and it created a bleak precedent. The Chinese, who had, in the west especially, taken on many roles in society that were otherwise unwanted, would not be readmitted legally for decades.

 

Gilded Age Wealth

By the 1880s unchecked accumulation of wealth in America had created a fabulously opulent elite comprised of railroad magnates, shipping magnates, and other corporate titans and robber barons. Names like Astor, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt became part of America’s story. Their fortunes built both extraordinary mansions and civic structures across the continent.

 

Haymarket Affair

The very first rumblings of unionism responded to gilded age wealth and poor working conditions. But in 1886 a bomb went off at a gathering in Chicago which set organized labor back for decades. The rally had begun in demand of an eight-hour working day. Still, by 1894, the U.S. government made Labor Day a federal holiday – showing the tide was turning in support of working peoples.

 

Helen Keller

Starting in 1887, Anne Sullivan began helping Helen Keller, who was mute, deaf, and blind, learn how to speak. It was a watershed in the history of disability, and Keller went on to become an inspiration, and leant her fame to many movements, from feminism to Socialism. Easily the most famous icon of disability, Keller became a crucial advocate in changing people’s opinions about the roles of the disabled.

 

Johnstown Flood

In 1889, Johnstown, PA, flooded: One of the worst disasters in American history, it killed 2,200 people. The cause was human, though – not just a random accident. A wealthy group of businessmen had created dangerous conditions in a reservoir above the valley, endangering its inhabitants below. The court battle that followed helped define legal responsibility to this day.

 

The Reservation System

By the mid-1880s, the reservation system for native peoples was completed. Geronimo and his followers, members of the Chiricahua Apache, gave themselves up – the last “wild Indians” of America. Tragedies followed, like the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota in 1890. Concurrent with the end of the frontier, the internment of native peoples closed an iconic American chapter.

 

Pain Relief

Between the synthetization of aspirin and the development of medical ether for anesthesia, pain relief changed drastically in the last decades of the 1800s. Morphine had begun being medically used in the first half of the century – but it was, of course, highly addictive. Aspirin was nonaddictive, and anesthesia was a far cry better than ‘bite down on this stick’.

 

Changes in Journalism

Nellie Bly famously went undercover and had herself admitted to an insane asylum in 1887. It launched the modern field of investigative journalism. A decade later, and yellow journalism was in full swing – sensationalized and ginned-up stories that were written to sell copy – whether true or not. Famously this pitted Pulitzer against Hearst: whoever won, the reading public lost.

 

Thomas Edison

Edison – and his associates – created the gramophone and motion pictures. Recorded sound revolutionized music and entertainment, and then movies revolutionized drama and entertainment all over again. If he’d only made these two breakthroughs, he’d be a legend. But he did so much more, including developing the first commercially viable electric lightbulbs.

 

Electrifying Cities

From whale oil to gaslight, city streets had been poorly illuminated for decades. Electrifying the cities meant you could stay out late at night, and could be (more or less) safe. It also meant trading gas and candles for electric lighting in the home, and eventually outlets for the home. Electric gadgetry followed, from sewing machines to dishwashers, which were all now viable appliances.

 

Statue of Liberty

One of the nation’s most potent symbols, Lady Liberty has been lighting the way to America since 1886. From France, the colossal statue has become visual shorthand for the U.S. It also inspired one of America’s most well-known poems, by Emma Lazarus, which begins “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

 

Ellis Island and Tenement New York

European immigration to America became a flood in the years after Reconstruction. This was critical since it was no longer as exclusively English-speaking: Italians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans (notably Jews) came in droves. Most, after disembarking at Ellis Island, stayed in New York City, living in crowded high-rise tenements in ethnic or religious enclaves.

 

Hull House

Besides NYC, Chicago was another major destination for immigrants in the 1880s, and so in 1889 Jane Addams launched Hull House. It was a simple premise to our minds: build a home for immigrants newly arrived to get on their feet, find a job, learn the language, etc. Yet this was a totally new concept, and earned Addams one of America’s first Nobel Peace prizes.

 

Kodak Cameras

In the early 1890s, the Kodak corporation made a huge leap in the viability of cameras with their easy-to-develop film rolls. Photography had been popular since the 1840s, with daguerreotypes, but this breakthrough took photography out of the early days into the modern – say goodbye single-plate photos. The technology was widespread throughout the next century.

 

JP Morgan

Already a powerhouse by the 1870s, by the 1890s Morgan was seemingly unstoppable. He almost single-handedly bailed out the U.S. government in the Panic of 1895 – an absurd amount of wealth. He ran his namesake company, but was also involved in U.S. Steel, General Electric, Western Union, and more. In the 1907 Panic he again had to save the financial sector, effectively on his own.

 

Plessy v. Ferguson

Arguably the most disastrous Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. Plessy codified the segregation that had been increasing with Jim Crow and Black Codes in the South. It allowed segregation to spread, unabated, across the nation – which it did. In turn, black southerners in the decades to come would begin leaving to find safety and opportunity in the Great Migration.

 

Populists

William Jennings Bryan ran for President three times between 1896 and 1908 and never won. His political career was, in some ways, the high watermark of the late 1800s populism. Agrarian and rural in origin, this was a seriously left-wing movement, that was trying to improve the lives of America’s forgotten people. In some ways, its failure led that demographic to swing conservative.

 

Overseas Imperialism

Alaska was America’s first noncontiguous holding of note, since the 1860s. But it wasn’t really ‘overseas’ in the same way that, say, Hawai’i was. In 1898 the U.S. annexed the kingdom – newly created by fruit boss Sanford Dole for the sole purpose of acquiescing to American imperialism. The rightful monarch had already been overthrown a few years earlier. Manifest Destiny, it seemed, didn’t end at the Pacific.

 

Spanish-American War and Philippine-American War

Finally kicking the Spanish out of the hemisphere, taking Cuba, their last stronghold, and the Philippines, which… definitely wasn’t in the realm covered under the Monroe Doctrine. The war with the Philippines that followed was brutal, and led to American occupation for a half century. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and eventually the Virgin Islands became U.S. territories.

 

Radio

In 1899 Marconi, the Italian inventor of modern radio technology and broadcasting, came to the United States and demonstrated what he’d been showing off in Great Britain for a few years. Americans took to radio in droves, and soon no house would be without one. Some programs that started on radio continued into the television era, such as the soap opera Guiding Light. It revolutionized communication.




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