U.S interest in increasing foreign tade, expanding its national borders, and isolating itself from European conflicts shaped the nation's foreign policy and spurred government and private initiatives. 

 

Important Events:

• Opening and Closing of the Frontier

• War of 1812

• Louisiana Purchase

• Manifest Destiny

• Battle at the Alamo

• Birth of the 'Republic of Texas'

• Oregon Territory

• California Gold Rush

• Forty-Niners to California

 

Important Documents:

• 1820 Missouri Compromise

• Proclamation of 1763

 

Important Vocabulary:

• overcultivation

• sectional tensions

• institution of slavery 

 

Notes

 - North: was becoming industrialized. Technological advances in communicayiond, transportation, industry, and banking were helping it become the nation's commercial center. Farming played less of a role in the Northeastern economy than it did elsewhere in the country, and legal slavery became increasingly uncommon in this region's states throughout the early 1800s.

 

 - South: remained almost entirely agrarian. Its cheif crops - tobacco and cotton - required vast acreage, and so Southerners were constantly looking west for more land. Anxious to protect slavery, which the large landholders depend on, Southerners also looked for new slave territories to include in the Union in order to strengthen their position in Congress and protect slavery from Northern legislators, who in ever-increasing numbers sought to make slaverly illegal.

 

 - Western: economic interests were varied but were largely rooted in commercial farming, fur trapping, and rel-estate speculation. Westerners generally distrusted the North, which they regarded as the home of powerful banks that could take their land away. They had little more use for the South, whose rigidly hierarchical society was at odds with the egalitarianism of the West. Most Westerners wanted to avoid involvement in the slavery issue, which they regarded as irrelevant to their lives. Ironically, Western expansion was the core of the most important conflicts leading up to the Civil War

Practice of Isolation

Developments in technology, agriculture, and commerce precipitated profound changes in U.S. settlement patterns, regioal identities, gender and family relations, political power, and distribution of consumer goods. 

 

Important Events:

• Internal Slave Trade

• Rise of Global Markets

• Introductio of the Spoils System

• Passage of the Tariff of 1832

• Force Bill asked by Jackson

• Boom-and-Bust Cycles (1819-1837)

• War of 1812

• Commercial Banks

• Growth of Transportation Industry

• Erie Canal

• National Road

• End of the Canal Era 1850

 

Important People:

• John C. Calhoun

• Eli Whitney

 

Important Innovations:

• Steam engines - Steamships

• Railroads

• Canals

• Telegraph

• Morse Code

• Agricultural inventions

• Machine-Tool Industry

• Assembly Line Production

• Interchangeable parts

• Communications revolution

• The National Bank

• National Road

• Cotton Gin

• Lowell System (Waltham System)

• Power Loom 1813

 

Important Vocabulary:

• Tariffs

• Old Northwest

• States' Rights

• Market Economy

• Labour Unions

• Retailers

• Brokers

• Distribution of Wealth

• Middle Class

• Cult of Domesticity

• Working Class

• Southern Paternalism

• Yeomen

• Landless Whites

• Free Blacks

Trade in the U.S