History: The South and West Lecture Notes

New South Booster

Promoted the idea of a changed South. Sought to attract manufacturing and commerce (wanted investment and capital)

Henry Grady

journalist for the Atlanta Constitution, propane of Georgia tech institution, seeking northern capitalist investment(he was a booster)

Key changes in New South

Urbanization, Industrialization, and Transportation

Birmingham

“New South” city - industrial center - most segregated city

Plessy vs. Furguson

Supreme Court approves Louisiana law to segregate rail cars

“Redeemer” Governments

Conservative old line Govs ran by the elite - afraid of populist movements

Disenfranchisement

Grandfather clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests

Booker T. Washington

working within the confines of segregation - first economic equality (gradual)

W.E.D. DuBois

resistance and more immediate equality - “talented tenth”

98th meridian

Geographic West - line of rainfall - agriculture to ranching economy

Owen Wister

Wrote “The Virginian” - set standard for Western novels and films

Theodore Roosevelt

Early historian

Frederick Jackson Turner

Frontier Thesis - writes about the transformative nature of the Western frontier on the individual and American identity

New Western Historians

Challenge previous conceptions

Traditional View of Nature and the Myth of the Garden

wilderness must be tamed and transformed into the pastoral

Transcendentalists

importance of nature and wilderness to the human spirit

Thomas Jefferson

Agrarian, Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark

Gadson Purchase

from Mexico because it was determined to be the best area for one of the proposed roads for a transcontinental railroad

Military Mapping expeditions

set the path ppl use to go westward

“Great American Dessert” to

“The Rain will Follow the Plow”

Homestead Act

Republican Party

Settler characteristics

relatively young with families and some capital

Pacific Railroad Act

provides for the building of the transcontinental railroad