Unit Four
Chapters 11, 12, and 13
How did innovations change life in antebellum America?
How did the “American system” of manufacturing improve production in America?
What impact did American railroads have prior to the Civil War?
What impact did technological changes have on the American worker before the Civil War?
Describe urban housing during the early nineteenth century?
Describe the changes in home furnishings during the antebellum period?
What do these changes indicate about the U.S. during this time?
What medical developments improved health care in the decades before the Civil War?
How were newspapers transformed before the Civil War?
Characterize popular entertainment before the Civil War
Transcendentalism was . . . .
Know these authors
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margret Fuller
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
James Fenimore Cooper
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What were the goals of the Hudson River school of painters?
What were lyceum lectures?
How did the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman differ from those of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville?
Why did cotton become “king” in the South?
How was the North different from the South before the Civil War? Socially, Politically, Economically
Why did Southern industrial efforts lag behind the North’s?
Describe the social structure of the antebellum South.
James Henry Hammond.
Hinton R. Helper.
George Fitzhugh.
Gabriel Prosser.
Where did the non-slaveholding Southerners find legitimacy for supporting the slave system?
What role did slavery, the code of honor and martial tradition play in the Old South?
How did the life of plantation slaves differ from other slaves?
What cultural traits were carried over from West African society to America?
Why were some slaves allowed to work in towns or cities?
What forms did slave resistance often take?
What role did slave uprisings play in the antebellum South?
How did most African-Americans’ react to slavery?
What was pidgin?
Describe the role of the slave family during antebellum America.
What trends in immigration took place prior to the Civil War?
Compare and contrast the experience of German Americans with that of Irish Americans.
Why did many Americans migrate to Mexico in the 1820s and 1830s?
What cultural conflicts took place between Americans who migrated to Mexico and the government of Mexico?
Compare and contrast the overland routes to California and Oregon
Describe the Whig Party political platform in 1840.
Why was John Tyler a disaster for the Whig Party?
Why did some anti-slavery Northerners believe there was a Southern conspiracy to extend slavery into the Southwest?
Why did the “dark horse” James K. Polk won the Presidency in 1844?
Why, by the mid-1840’s, did many Americans support territorial expansion?
What were President James K. Polk’s goals in Oregon?
What were the background causes of the Mexican War?
Why did some Americans oppose the war with Mexico?
In the Mexican War, the US was victorious in virtually all its encounters with Mexican forces for all of the following reasons except…
What were the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
Describe American opinion on the extension of slavery into the new territories?
What was John C. Calhoun’s argument that the federal government had no power to prohibit slavery in the Mexican Cession?
Why did the Whig Party in 1848 nominate Zachary Taylor for president?
“squatter sovereignty” and “popular sovereignty
What happened to the San Francisco economy during the early years of the gold rush?
What transformation occurred in the workforce of the New England textile mills prior to the Civil War?
In what cause were women reformers most active in the first half of the 19th century?