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Reform: Horace Mann
Horace Mann was a U.S. educator, and the first great American advocate/reformer of public education, who believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained, professional teachers. A Whig devoted to promoting speedy modernization, he also served in the Massachusetts State legislature. -
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Expansion: Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny is a term for the attitude prevalent during the 19th century period of American expansion that the United States not only could, but was destined to, stretch from coast to coast. This attitude helped fuel western settlement, Native American removal and war with Mexico. -
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Reform: Dorthea Dix
Dorothea Dix was a social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread international reforms. After seeing horrific conditions in a Massachusetts prison, she spent the next 40 years lobbying U.S. and Canadian legislators to establish state hospitals for the mentally ill. Her efforts directly affected the building of 32 institutions in the United States. -
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Reform: William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garri was an abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He was the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which was published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement. -
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Conflict: Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!
In 1818, the US and UK made a joint claim over the Oregon Territory. After 15 years, they found that it wasn't working well so they set out to divide Oregon. The 1844 presidential candidate James K. Polk used the slogan, "54 40 or Fight!" (after the line of latitude serving as the north boundary of Oregon at 54°40'). Polk's plan was to claim the territory for the US; after his election and inauguration the boundary between the US and Canada was set at 49° with the Treaty of Oregon in 1846. -
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Reform: Fredrick Douglas
Frederick Douglas was a prominent American abolitionist, author and orator. Born a slave, Douglass escaped at age 20 and went on to become a world-renowned anti-slavery activist. His three autobiographies are considered important works of the slave narrative tradition as well as classics of American autobiography. Douglass’ work as a reformer ranged from his abolitionist activities in the early 1840s to his attacks on Jim Crow and lynching in the 1890s. -
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The American Dream: Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in American history, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time. -
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The American Dream: Hudson River School
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration, and settlement. The paintings also depict the American landscape as a setting where human beings and nature coexist peacefully. -
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Reform: Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist, humanitarian, and an armed scout and spy for the US Army during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved people using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. In the post-war era, she was an active participant in the struggle for women's suffrage. -
The American Dream: Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. It arose as a reaction to or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. -
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Conflict: The Battle of the Alamo
The Battle of the Alamo took place in what is now San Antonio, Texas. At the time, Texas belonged to Mexico, but many people in Texas wanted it to leave Mexico and become a new country. Over 100 of these people were in the Alamo, which was a mission, when a Mexican army of several thousand, led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, showed up and surrounded the Alamo. For 13 days, the Mexican army surrounded the Alamo, then it attacked on March 6, 1836. All 187 of the Texans were killed. -
Expansion: The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail was laid by fur trappers and traders from about 1811 to 1840, and was only passable on foot or by horseback. By 1836, when the first migrant wagon train was organized in Independence, Missouri, a wagon trail had been cleared to Fort Hall, Idaho. Wagon trails were cleared increasingly farther west, and eventually reached all the way to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, at which point what came to be called the Oregon Trail was complete. -
Conflict The Webster-Ashburton Treaty
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolved several border issues between the US and the British North American colonies. It resolved a dispute over the location of the Maine–New Brunswick border. It established the border between Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods, reaffirmed the location of the border in the westward frontier up to the Rocky Mountains, defined 7 crimes subject to extradition, called for an end to slave trade on the high seas, and agreed to shared use of the Great Lakes. -
Conflict: The Annexation of Texas
The Texas Annexation was the incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the USA, which was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. Texas declared independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836. The vast majority of the Texan population favored the annexation of the Republic.The leadership of both the Democrats and the Whigs opposed the introduction of Texas, and wished to avoid a war with Mexico. -
Conflict: Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso proposed an American law to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War. David Wilmot first introduced this in the US House of Representatives in 1846. It passed the House but failed in the Senate. It was reintroduced in 1847 and again passed the House and failed in the Senate. In 1848, an attempt to make it part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also failed. Disputes over slavery in the Southwest continued until the Compromise of 1850. -
Expansion: Mexican Cession
The Mexican Cession of 1848 is the region of the modern day southwestern United States that Mexico ceded to the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, but had not been part of the areas east of the Rio Grande which had been claimed by the Republic of Texas, though the Texas annexation resolution two years earlier had not specified Texas's southern and western boundary. The Mexican Cession was the third largest acquisition of territory in US history. -
Expansion: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This treaty ended the Mexican-American War in favor of the United States. The war had begun almost two years earlier, in May 1846, over a territorial dispute involving Texas. The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the including the land that makes up all or parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Mexico also gave up all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as America’s southern boundary. -
Reform: The Declaration of Sentiments
The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by the then thirty-two-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton, outlined a series of grievances resulting from the disenfranchisement of women and proposed eleven resolutions arguing that women had the right to equality in all aspects of their lives, including the right to vote. Despite the declaration's symbolic significance, however, it would be seventy-two years later that women finally won the right to vote. -
Expansion: Gadsden Purchase
The Gadsden Purchase, or Treaty, was an agreement between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1854, in which the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico. Gadsden’s Purchase provided the land necessary for a southern transcontinental railroad and attempted to resolve conflicts that lingered after the Mexican-American War. -
The American Dream: John Gast's "American Progress"
This painting, painted by John Gast in 1872, is set on an American landscape, with the right half of the painting representing eastern America, and the left half of the painting representing western America. The dominating figure in the middle of the painting is a woman who resembles an angel, and presents the idea of technological advancement being brought further West as American folk continue to settle the frontier, a thought which was very widespread at the time.