Introduction to the United States
History and Politics
Including what the book gets WRONG
What is an American
• Immigrant Nation
• Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
• Regional Cultures
• Elections
• Effects of Colonial Period
Jamestown (1607)
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• Founded by a joint-stock company chartered by James I (this was not a capitalist enterprise; it was a royal monopoly.) In Virginia. (It was actually the second attempt; Roanoke, under Sir Walter Raleigh was the first.)
• Originally, the task was to find gold but after the Starving Time and the reforms of John Smith and John Rolfe it became about tobacco farming.
• Jamestown and Virginia, like all colonies, suffered from a labor shortage. In 1619, this led to the importation of slaves.
• House of Burgesses
Stories of Jamestown
• The stories of Jamestown give interesting insight into some aspects of American attitudes.
• ‘He who does not work……”
• Pocahontas.
Plymouth Plantation
• The Pilgrims were NOT the same as the Puritans who settled Boston and Salem. Although the Pilgrims were always a minority, even in Plymouth, they captured the imagination of later generations.
• Story of the Starving Time and the First Thanksgiving.
• Massasoit and peaceful relations with Native Americans.
Puritan Massachusetts
• 长泾镇Came over to escape religious persecution during Civil War in England. They wanted to create a “City on the Hill.” or a religiously based ideal society.
• Differences over religion led to Rhode Island and Connecticut. Suppression of dissentients. Calvinist.
• Economically based on the small tradesman and free holding farmer.
Maryland, or the Plantation of Lord Baltimore
• The plan was pretty much as the book lays out except that religious toleration became the norm early and the feudal plan was doomed. Feudalism requires a large population and scarce land. Instead, they followed, in the northern part of the colony a path similar to New England (economically) and in the southern part a path similar to Virginia.丽江到
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• First colony to practice both a liberal religious policy (Freedom of Religion in the modern sense) and a liberal immigration policy by encouraging people from all over Europe to come.
• Founded on Quaker ideals of equality and justice.
General Notes on the Early Colonies
• Generally, the colonies were left alone by England because of the problems there.
• Each developed some form of representative legislature.
• Each of the four variations can be seen as contributing to different aspects of the American character, even when they are contradictory.
• Literacy was widespread.
Late Colonial Period (or the Coming of Revolution)
• French and Indian War: Canada becomes British.
• Religion was on the wane since the early 1700s.
• Leaders of the colonies were educated, by the time of the revolution, based on Enlightenment ideas.
• Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
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• The Declaration of Independence
The Constitutional Period and the Early Republic
• Shays Rebellion
• Creation of Constitution
• Size of the country
• Economy before the Civil War (Start of industrialization
• Westward expansion; Louisiana Purchase
• Creation of the American Mythology: Parson Weems and Washington Irving台山
美食 • Slavery
The Romantic Period
• For the most part it followed the ideas of British Romanticism with some noticeable differences
• Principle form was the short story with the occasional novel.
• Rather than seeking wisdom in the “spirit of the folk”, American Romantics looked to stories of the past, exotic locations, and Nature for inspiration. There was also a nationalist element in it.
• Rather than seeking an intellectual or emotional understanding of Nature, they sought a more spiritual understanding of Nature.
• Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman (?).
Transcendentalism
• As a moral philosophy, it lacked a systemic coherence. It favored emotional responses over Enlightenment-style rationalism.
• There are a few points that all Transcendentalist shared: the concept of the Oversoul, an all-pervading force for good that all things shared in including people, Nature as a source of both moral understanding and divinity, original thinking and activity could lead to a cultural rejuvenation, and lastly a rejection of materialism.
• Brook Farm
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller
The Civil War
• Leaders of the Union (aka the North or the United States) President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant who becomes the Union Army’s top general.
• Leaders of the Confederacy (aka the South) President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee-head of the Confederate Army. (Ironically, Lee had been opposed to both secession and slavery before the war.)
