Dianne Alcala APUSH

Graham Ch 14 Questions

1. The invasion by the so-called immigrants led the nativists to become hostile. This is because the nativisits
prejudiced the newcomers in jobs, politics, and religion. They feared that these foreign hordes would outbreed,
outvote, and overwhelm the old “native” stock. Not only did the newcomers take jobs from “native”
Americans, but the bulk of the displaced Irish were Roman Catholics, as were a substantial minority of the
Germans. This then resulted to the nativists to have an anti-foreignism nature because of the rapid change this
new group had brought upon them.

2. Unlike the Irish, many of the Germanic newcomers possessed a modest amount of material goods. Most of
them pushed out to the lush lands of the Middle West, notable Wisconsin, where they settled and established
model farms. The Irish came to America with nothing but hope from the famine in Ireland that they deemed to
escape; they were poorly prepared for urban life. Irish were forced to live in squalor; they were rudely
crammed into the already-vile slums. The Germans formed an influential body of voters whom American
politicians shamelessly wooed. But the Germans were less potent politically because their strength was more
widely scattered.

3. The westward movement was grim for most pioneer families. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed in hastily erected
shanties, they were perpetual victims of disease, depression, and premature death. Above all, unbearable
loneliness haunted them, especially the women, who were often cut off from human contact, even their
neighbors, for days or even weeks, while confined to the cramped orbit of a dark cabin in a secluded clearing.
Breakdowns and even madness were all too frequently the “opportunities” that the frontier offered to pioneer
women. The westward movement molded the environment. Tobacco overuse had exhausted the land forcing
settlers to move on, but “Kentucky bluegrass” thrived. Ecological imperialism was alive as well, trapped
beavers, sea otters, and Bison to manufacture for East. This manufacturing and trading contributed to the boost
of their economy. Spirit of nationalism led to appreciation of American wilderness.

4. Industrial Revolution spread to the United States as it was destined to become an industrial giant because
land was cheap, labor scared, money for investment was plentiful, raw materials were plentiful, Britain lacked
consumer for factory-scale manufacturing, British long establishment factory was a competition, and kept
textile to own monopoly (forbade travel of crafts men and exports of machine.)

5. The War of 1812 prompted a boom of American factories and the use of American products as opposed to
British imports. Embargo of War of 1812 encouraged home manufacture. The surplus in American
manufacturing dropped following the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, forcing close of American factory. This
resulted into the slight increase of competition with the foreign trade relationships.

6. Americans in this period also revered nature and admired its beauty. Indeed the spirit of nationalism fed a
growing belief in the uniqueness of the American wilderness. Many observers found the wild, unspoiled
character of the land, especially in the West, to be among the young nation’s defining attributes. Romanticism
tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of
God," and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks
to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual. In literature it was America's first great creative
period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil. Surviving form the Federalist Age were its
three major literary figures: Bryant, Irving, and Cooper. The poetry was predominantly romantic in spirit and
form. Moral qualities were significantly present in the verse of Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier,
Holmes, Lowell, and Thoreau. Whitman, beginning with the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, was the ultimate
expression of a poetry organic in form and romantic in spirit, united to a concept of democracy that was
pervasively egalitarian.
7. The United States is believed to have truly undergone an economic revolution by 1860 because of its vast
population growth due to job vacancies and job applications, viral machine inventions, and factory growth.
America remained an agricultural nation because of the inventions that boomed agriculture. The invention of
the steel plow and the mechanical mower-reaper led to a large-scale production and growth of cash crops.

8. Industrialization all but shifted the family unit. More families lived in cities as wage earners. Fewer were
farmers or self-employed craft-workers. Children became a financial asset. Family members would work
separately in order to earn enough for a daily budget - resulting into having less time for each other.

9. Immigrants such as the German and Irish were eager to escape the current adversities of their homeland and
start anew in the United States. Some immigrants just did not support their nation’s ideas and some
immigrants just thought that the birth of the American Industrialization would benefit their families. The Irish
potato famine in the mid-1840s led to the death of 2 million resulting of thousands to flee to the United States
in hope for a better life.

10. “The Know-Nothings” was a party formed by the nativists who feared that Catholicism challended
Protestantism (Popish idols.) a.k.a. “Order of Star-Spangled Banner” They fought for restrictions on
immigration, naturalization, and deportation of alien paupers. They created mass violence, i.e. Philadelphia in
1844; burnt churches, schools, and people killed.