Trends and Themes
The Colonial Period
Spain dominated the early years of European exploration of the New World, with France a distant
second. England did not get seriously involved in the New World until nearly a century after Columbus
landed.
After England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the balance of power in the New World (and in
Europe) shifted. After initial hardship in the colonies, English settlements showed the New World could
bring profit and offered religious freedom. A quick buildup of colonial settlements began along the East
Coast of North America and continued through the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries.
Under its mercantilist economic policy, England created laws ensuring that its colonies existed primarily
to help enrich the mother country. England did not enforce these laws too strictly, employing a policy of
salutary neglect, for fear of alienating its colonists and thereby helping France’s interests in the New
World.
After the 1763 French and Indian War, England no longer worried about France as a threat, but faced
huge war debts. England believed the colonies should bear the brunt of the debt, since the war was for
their benefit. England ended salutary neglect, to the colonist’s dismay and anger.
Revolution and Constitution
Increased British taxation of the colonies after the French and Indian war led to tension. Colonists felt
they were being taxed without representation in government. The British felt the colonists were getting
the benefits of English citizenship without paying the taxes required.
The colonies resisted British taxation and other legislation. The British responded by implementing
stricter taxes and reprisals, which the colonists opposed more fiercely and violently. During this period,
colonial resistance efforts became increasingly unified.
Colonists felt the British were denying them their natural rights, as described by John Locke and other
Enlightenment thinkers. As revolution became more likely, many colonists hoped to implement a
government independent of the British crown and based on Enlightenment ideals.
After the Revolution, the states reacted against their experience with the strong central government of
Parliament by creating a loose federation under the Articles of Confederation. When this loose
federation proved too weak, the colonists wrote the Constitution, which outlined a strong central
government that, through the system of checks and balances, was still limited in scope. The Constitution
represented a desire for a strong but limited government that was dedicated to preserving individual and
state freedoms.
Two debates during the writing and ratification of the Constitution highlighted issues that would
generate conflicts in the newly formed United States: 1) the separate interests of northern and southern
states, and the role of slavery in sectional debates; 2) the proper balance between states’ rights and
federal power.
A New Nation
The U.S. government began to build and define itself under George Washington.
The differences in opinion shown in the debates over ratification of the Constitution soon spawned the
development of two separate political parties. New England Federalists supported a loose interpretation
of the Constitution and a strong central government. Southern Republicans supported a strict
interpretation of the Constitution and a more limited central government. Enmity between the two
parties deepened, until the events of the War of 1812 finally eliminated the Federalists as a significant
political party.
The U.S. made a concerted effort to stay out of European entanglements and maintain neutrality in its
effort to build its national infrastructure. Often, though, the U.S. was caught in a tug-of-war between
Britain and France. Eventually, British aggression and America’s desire to increase its territory and
prove itself as an international force led to the War of 1812.
After the war, the U.S. enjoyed a period of optimism and general cooperation under a single political
party: the Republicans. In this period, the U.S. asserted its dominance in the Western Hemisphere
through the Monroe Doctrine.
Westward expansion began in earnest after the Louisiana Purchase. The sectional tensions created by
expansion, made apparent in the Missouri Compromise, illustrated the increasing role slavery and
regionalism would play in the politics of the nineteenth century.
Through various rulings, the Supreme Court established itself as a body able to declare the acts of
Congress unconstitutional, and supportive of Federalist policies.
The Age of Jackson
Cracks based on regional differences began to appear in the Republican Party, resulting in a split into
two parties: Democratic and Republican.
Coupled with lowered voting restrictions, the two-party system ushered in a newly democratic age,
marked by more election choice and increased voter turnout. Andrew Jackson, the first man from the
West to win the presidency, won in large part on his appeal to the “common man.” Politics began to be
increasingly swayed by the public, rather than by the elites.
The Nullification Crisis revealed deep regional differences in economic needs and attitudes about states’
rights versus federal power. The Nullification Crisis introduced the possibility of state secession from
the Union.
Jackson turned the presidency into a vastly more powerful office, using the presidential veto to assert his
political and legislative will and more deeply embedding the government in party politics.
Cultural Trends: 1781-Mid-1800s
Religion
Since the Revolution, America had become increasingly secular. Educated Americans, in particular, came to
embrace the doctrines of the Enlightenment, which favored logic and reason over piety. Partly as a reaction
against this growing rationalism, the Second Great Awakening emerged in the 1800s and caused a resurgence of
religious faith.
Social Reform
The 1820s and 1830s saw a great rise in popular politics, as free white males achieved universal suffrage.
Women, blacks, and Native Americans, however, remained excluded from the political process and were often
neglected by politicians. In protest, these marginalized groups and their sympathizers organized reform
movements to heighten public awareness and to influence social and political policy. Many reformers believed
that they were doing God’s work, and the Second Great Awakening did much to encourage them in their
missions.
These reform movements, like many issues of the day, quickly became sectional in nature. New England and
Midwestern areas settled by New Englanders were most likely to be reformist. Southerners, by contrast, actively
opposed the abolition of slavery, pursued temperance and school reform only halfheartedly, and largely ignored
women’s rights.
The North and South Diverge
In the 80 years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the North and South developed along
distinct and opposing lines—economically, politically, and culturally. While the North became an industrial and
manufacturing powerhouse deeply affected by social reform movements like abolitionism and women’s rights,
the South became a cotton kingdom, founded on slavery, whose inhabitants generally abstained from or
opposed such reformist tendencies.
The Blossoming of American Literature
During the early 1800s, American literature began to separate itself from its British roots. Washington Irving
and James Fennimore Cooper helped carve out the early territory of American literature, using distinctly
American literary themes. Washington Irving achieved international acclaim, writing often satirical accounts of
life in colonial New York. Two of his most famous stories are “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow.” James Fennimore Cooper, the author of The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is
credited with creating the first western hero. In “The American Scholar” (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson lauded
such American literary advances and urged American authors to continue setting their own course.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allen Poe emerged in the late 1840s and early 1850s
as prominent writers of fiction. They portrayed individuals as conflicted and obsessive, proud and guilt-ridden.
In The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, Hawthorne explores the moral dilemmas of an adulterous Puritan
minister. Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) portrays a sea captain’s tortured obsession. Poe’s macabre short stories,
including “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Raven” (1844), examine depravity and moral corruption.
Prominent essayists and poets also emerged during the 1840s and 1850s. Two of the most renowned essayists
were the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (discussed in the
Transcendentalism section), who favored emotion and intuition over pure logic. The poet Walt Whitman, a
follower of Emerson, celebrated America for producing a new type of democratic man uncorrupted by
European vice in his compilation of poems, Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.
Westward Expansion and Sectional Strife
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States and its citizens were moved by a belief in
manifest destiny, which held that it was the right and fate of the United States to cover the continent.
Technology, specifically in the form of the railroad, dramatically accelerated expansion.
Expansion intensified the sectional tension between the North and South by bringing to the forefront the
issue of the extension of slavery into the West. Brief compromises relieved the tension from time to
time, but no compromise was able to resolve the fundamental differences between the North and South.
Civil War and Reconstruction
After Lincoln’s election, sectional differences over slavery and the question of states’ rights versus
federal power erupted in the Civil War.
After the war, Lincoln favored a mild Reconstruction of the South, though Congress was dominated by
Radical Republicans who favored a harsher reconstruction plan in order to punish the South for
secession and for slavery. After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress overwhelmed Andrew Johnson, who
had taken over as president, and instituted punitive Reconstruction policies.
Blacks in the South, freed during the Civil War, gained considerable rights during radical
Reconstruction. Through both legal and illegal means, Southerners fought against the granting of these
rights. After the failure of radical Reconstruction, Southerners used the Supreme Court’s Plessy v.
Ferguson decision to institutionalize segregation and the discrimination of blacks.
Industrial Revolution
Big Business, first in the form of massive corporations and then in even larger trusts, built up
monopolies over markets and made astronomical profits. Big Business drove industrialization and
helped foster the belief in America as the land of opportunity, where anyone who worked hard could get
rich. It also, however, generated a vast imbalance between the rich and the poor.
The government at first followed a hands-off policy with Big Business. As business abuses increased,
state governments and then the Federal government passed a spate of regulatory legislation. True
regulation of business would not begin until the early twentieth century, however.
Industrialism attracted rural Americans and many European immigrants to cities in the United States. As
a result, the U.S. shifted from an agrarian to an urban country. Immigration became a key ingredient in
the success of industrialism, since immigrants were willing to work as cheap labor.
Politics were dominated by local political parties, called Machines, rather than individuals. Politics and
politicians were often corrupt, complicit with Big Business interests. Beginning with the Pendleton Act
in the 1880s, the government began to try to clean itself up.
Technology, in the form of railroads and other innovations that increased efficiency and communication,
helped drive industrialism. Increased industrialism, in turn, created the wealth and impetus that drove
the need for better technology. Technology became essential to American economic success.
The Age of Imperialism
American industrialization created a need for foreign markets in which to sell manufactured goods and
from which to buy raw materials.
Early efforts to find foreign markets involved economic expansionism, which focused on opening
markets through investment rather than military involvement. Under President McKinley, near the end
of the nineteenth century, the United States wanted to increase its exposure to foreign markets and
shifted to a more military and imperialist policy.
Victory in the Spanish-American War gave the U.S. an empire, and also marked the ascendance of the
U.S. as a world power.
The Progressive Era
Backlash against the excesses and corruption of the big business Industrial Revolution led to a fervor for
reform. Reform stretched across economic, environmental, social, and racial lines.
In foreign affairs through the first half of the Progressive Era,the U.S. continued to assert its power
internationally through military and economic means, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.
Woodrow Wilson shifted this aggressive interventionist policy to a more idealistic one, but the outbreak
of World War I interrupted his plans.
World War I
Although the U.S. wanted to stay neutral in the war, it could not. U.S. involvement in the war helped
turn the tide in favor of the Allies. If the Spanish-American War had left any doubt, World War I firmly
established the U.S. as a dominant world power.
Woodrow Wilson saw the war as an opportunity to end all future wars. He wanted to make peace
through a liberal and merciful peace settlement. The ravaged European victors and many members of
Congress, though, rejected his aims. His proposed League of Nations was not even supported by his own
country.
The war effort brought blacks and women into the workforce in record numbers. It also prompted the
migration of nearly 500,000 blacks from the South to the North. Women’s work in the war effort had a
direct result in their achieving the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment.
Progressivism continued throughount the war, and secured its last great success with the passage of the
prohibition of alcohol in the Eighteenth Amendment.
The Roaring Twenties
America turned away from the ideals of progressivism. Even the prohibition amendment was not always
strictly enforced. Republicans regained the presidency and ushered in a new era of pro-business policies.
Government policies, progress in technology, and a new consumer society produced a booming
economy. Radio helped transform the U.S. into a single national market, and a mass popular culture
developed based largely on the consumption of luxury items. To take full advantage of the profits to be
made, businesses merged and grew ever larger.
Tired from the war and disillusioned by Wilson’s failure with the League of Nations, America entered a
period of isolationism. The U.S. aimed to stay out of European affairs and severely limited immigration.
New immigrants were often subject to suspicion and hatred.
The younger generation rebelled against traditional morals. College students took to drinking and
throwing wild parties. Women became more forward in dress and behavior. Premarital sex became less
taboo. The two symbols of this new, looser social behavior were jazz and the “flapper.”
The Great Depression and the New Deal
The frenzied speculation and mergers of the booming economy in the 1920s led to the horrendous
depression of the 1930s.
Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government committed itself to unprecedented levels of
regulation and control over the national economy. These policies of the New Deal made FDR and the
Democrats extremely popular and also changed American government forever. After the New Deal,
American citizens came to see one role of the government as offering a safety net, not just an
opportunity to succeed.
FDR’s policies changed the demographics of the political parties. His support for blacks, the poor, and
labor unions won him and the Democrats support from those groups—a support base that remains in
place today. Up until that time, blacks tended to voted for Republicans (Republicans had been the
antislavery party during the Civil War and Reconstruction). FDR’s policies also lost Democrats their
traditional support from the white South, which shifted to the Republicans.
The depression, a worldwide phenomenon, created the circumstances that allowed for Fascists to rise to
power in Germany and Italy.
World War II
The strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the depression of the 1930s
created the terms under which fascism and extreme nationalism arose in Germany and Italy. The
expansionist designs of these fascist regimes started World War II.
During the years before the war began and in its first two years, the U.S. maintained its isolationist
policies. As the war continued, though, American sympathies increasingly moved toward the Allies.
American isolationism shifted first to indirect involvement and then to full involvement after Japan
bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The war effort brought the American economy out of the Great Depression. Socially, blacks and women
played large roles in the war effort.
As the war neared its end, relations between the United States and the USSR became increasingly
hostile. The discussions between the Allies about how to divide and rebuild Europe after Germany fell
were also an occasion for the U.S. and the USSR to jockey for power. The endgame of World War II
was in many ways the beginning of the Cold War.
When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it changed the
nature of war. A country now had the capacity to destroy vast regions with a single bomb. The dropping
of the bomb presaged the arms race between the U.S. and the USSR that was such a dominating aspect
of the Cold War.
The 1950s: Cold War, Civil Rights, and Social Trends
The U.S. and the USSR emerged from World War II as the two sole superpowers in the world. The two
quickly became enemies and rivals, battling in politics, technology, and military power. The arms race,
in which each nation developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could destroy the other numerous
times over, was a defining fact and metaphor of the conflict. Neither side wanted to face destruction,
however, which is what made the Cold War cold: though crisis after crisis loomed, the two sides
avoided direct conflict. Policies of containing communism influenced virtually all U.S. foreign policy
decisions.
Fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government led to intense domestic anticommunist fervor.
Communists and suspected communists were closely watched, vilified, blacklisted, and in one case tried
and executed. Domestic anticommunism reached its peak in the mid-1950s with the rise of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, and waned after he lost influence and power. But fear of communism remained a part
of American culture for decades to follow.
Bolstered by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v.Board of Education, the civil rights
movement began to come into its own. Following an ethic of nonviolence, blacks in the South began to
win their first battles for equality.
1950s postwar prosperity helped propel the creation of suburbs and the popularization of the automobile,
which in turn caused the decline of cities as wealthy whites left urban areas for suburban ones.
Prosperity also led to a baby boom and the promotion of conservative values. In the late 1950s, artists
began to rebel against this conservativism.
The 1960s
Democrats, who held the presidency in the 1960s, tried to bring about the liberal social reforms that
were the hallmarks of their party’s philosophy.
Led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement achieved its greatest successes,
culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement
gained massive public support and helped convince the nation of the power of social action.
The Cold War continued throughout the decade, and nearly erupted in nuclear war during the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962. Cold War anxieties and concerns over Soviet domination in Asia led to the
buildup of American forces in Vietnam and the Vietnam War.
In the tradition of social action built during the civil rights movement and in response to U.S.
involvement in a foreign war that took over 50,000 American lives and seemed unwinnable, a vocal
minority of Americans formed the antiwar movement. Supporters and critics of the war often opposed
each other bitterly.
The 1960s was a time of dramatic social engagement and action. In addition to the civil rights and
antiwar movements, a powerful women’s rights movement also took root.
1970s-2000
The Cold War varied in intensity during this 30-year period. Nevertheless, it dominated foreign policy
throughout the era and influenced domestic policy, as well. The Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of
the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world stage changed dramatically. U.S. interests ceased to be so
easily defined, because there was no longer a huge entity to oppose. As the sole superpower, the U.S.
debated about but ultimately maintained its role as an international policeman.
Domestically, the United States underwent cycles of economic boom and bust, and shifted between
Republican and Democratic presidents.
Thank You Sparknotes!