26.1 - Democratic Reform and Activism

• Women in both the United Kingdom and the United States fought for the right to vote during the 1800s.

  • Women in the United Kingdom formed reform societies and challenged unjust laws and customs.

  • Resistance to women's demands grew as they became more vociferous.

  • Many people, both men and women, believed that women's suffrage was an excessively drastic departure from tradition.

• Following the Franco-Prussian War, France experienced a series of difficulties. Between 1871 and 1914, France had virtually a yearly change of administration.

  • There were a dozen political parties vying for power. The National Assembly did not agree on a new administration until 1875.

  • The members eventually decided to become a republic.

26.2 - Self-Rule for British Colonies

• Conflict arose in Canada as a result of religious and cultural differences between the predominantly Roman Catholic French colonists and the predominantly Protestant English-speaking colonists.

  • Both factions demanded that Britain give them more power over their own affairs.

  • The British Parliament attempted to address both issues in 1791 by establishing two new Canadian provinces.

• Tensions were briefly calmed by the split of Upper and Lower Canada. The royal governor and a tiny group of rich British held much of the power in both colonies.

  • However, middle-class professionals in both colonies began to demand political and economic reforms in the early 1800s.

• Many Canadians believed that the country needed a central government by the mid-nineteenth century.

  • A centralized government would be better equipped to defend Canadian interests against the US, whose territory now spanned the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

• John MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister, pushed the country westward by buying territory and persuading frontier areas to join the union.

  • By 1871, Canada had reached the Pacific Ocean. MacDonald started building a transcontinental railroad, which he finished in 1885.

• In both Australia and New Zealand, free British settlers eventually joined the former convicts.

  • An Australian settler experimented with sheep breeds in the early 1800s until he discovered one that produced high-quality wool and thrived in the country's warm, dry climate.

  • Despite the fact that sheep are not native to Australia, wool production and export has become the country's most lucrative industry.

• Ireland endured one of the greatest famines in modern history in the 1840s. For many years, Irish peasants relied on potatoes as their primary source of nutrition.

  • A plant disease damaged nearly all of Ireland's potato crop from 1845 to 1848.

  • Over the next few years, about a million people died of starvation and disease out of an 8 million-strong population.

26.3 - War and Expansion in the United States

• Many Americans believed in manifest destiny, the notion that the US had the right and responsibility to control North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.

  • Manifest destiny was used by government leaders to justify evicting Native Americans from their tribal territories.

• Mexico's borders encompassed the lands west of the Louisiana Purchase when it declared independence from Spain in 1821.

• American settlers moved into the Mexican territory of Texas with Mexico's approval.

  • The settlers, on the other hand, were dissatisfied with Mexico's rule.

• Between May 1846 and February 1848, the two countries were at war. Mexico eventually gave up.

  • Mexico gave territory to the United States as part of the Mexican-American War settlement.

• The North's economy was diverse, with agriculture and industry coexisting. The North relied on free labor for both its factories and farmland.

  • The economy of the South, on the other hand, was dependent on a few cash crops, primarily cotton.

  • Slave labor was used by Southern landowners.

26.4: Nineteenth-Century Progress

• Thomas Edison patented almost 1,000 inventions during his career, including the light bulb and the phonograph.

  • Edison established a research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, early in his career.

  • The majority of his significant discoveries were developed there, with the assistance of the researchers he hired, including African-American inventor Lewis H. Latimer.

• Others contributed to the use of electricity to transport sound over long distances. Alexander Graham Bell was a deaf student's teacher who, in his leisure time, invented the telephone.

  • At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, he demonstrated his invention.

• Wilbur and Orville Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, solved the age-old puzzle of flight.

  • They flew a gasoline-powered flying aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.

• Although the longest flight was only 59 seconds long, it was the beginning of the aviation industry.

• The germ theory of disease was a significant development in medical history. Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, invented it in the mid-1800s.

  • Pasteur discovered that microscopic organisms he dubbed bacteria were responsible for the fermentation of alcohol while studying it.

  • He also discovered that bacteria were killed by heat.