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History 17
Steamboat
Paddlewheelers that could travel both up- and down-river in deep or shallow waters; they became commercially viable early in the nineteenth century and soon developed into America's first inland freight and passenger service network.
Erie Canal
Most important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation's largest port.
Cotton Kingdom
Cotton-producing region, relying predominantly on slave labor, which spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and reached as far north as southern Illinois.
Command Shift
Invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, the machine that separated cotton seed from cotton fiber, speeding cotton processing and making profitable the cultivation of the more hardy, but difficult to clean, short-staple cotton; led directly to the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of slavery in the South.
Porkopolis
Nickname of Cincinnati, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, after its numerous slaughterhouses.
American System of Manufactures
A system of production that relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products; first perfected in Connecticut by clockmaker Eli Terry and by small-arms producer Eli Whitney in the 1840s and 1850s.
Mill Girls
Women who worked at textile mills during the industrial revolution who enjoyed new freedoms and independence not seen before.
Nativism
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent from the 1830s through the 1850s; the largest group of its proponents was New York's Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854.
Dartmouth College v. Woodward
1819 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the original charter of the college against New Hampshire's attempt to alter the board of trustees; set the precedent of support of contracts against state interference.
Gibbons v. Ogden
1824 U.S. Supreme Court decision reinforcing the "commerce clause" (the federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce) of the Constitution; Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the State of New York's granting of steamboat monopolies.
Commonwealth v. Hunt
Landmark 1842 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court establishing the legality of labor unions.
Manifest Destiny
Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage U.S. settlement of European colonial and Native lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.
Transcendentalist
Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self-reliance.
Second Great Awakening
Religious revival movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the growth of secularism and rationalist religion; began the predominance of the Baptist and Methodist churches.
Individualism
Term that entered the language in the 1820s to describe the increasing emphasis on the pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Religious sect founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; it was a product of the intense revivalism of the "burned-over district" of New York. Smith's successor Brigham Young led 15,000 followers to Utah in 1847 to escape persecution.
Cult of Domesticity
The nineteenth-century ideology of "virtue" and "modesty" as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.
Family Wage
Idea that male workers should earn a wage sufficient to enable them to support their entire family without their wives having to work outside the home.
