Exam Review Notes

First Great Awakening

  • Religious revival offering an alternative to traditional church services.
  • Challenged religious authority.

The Enlightenment

  • Promoted new ways of thinking and challenged distant authority.
  • Influenced founding fathers like Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson.

Seeds of Discontent

  • Both the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment contributed to revolutionary sentiment by:
  • Challenging religious authority.
  • Questioning British rule.

French and Indian War

  • Fought over Native land, particularly the Ohio River Valley.
  • Ended with the Treaty of Paris.

Causes of the American Revolution

  • Taxation without representation.
  • The Stamp Act: A direct tax that caused significant alarm.
  • Colonists desired actual representation, not virtual representation.

Key Events

  • Boston Massacre.
  • Boston Tea Party.
  • Quartering Act.
  • Writs of Assistance: Legal search warrants that were considered illegal by today's standards.

Revolutionary War

  • First shots fired at Lexington and Concord.
  • Major battles: Yorktown and Saratoga (Saratoga led to French alliance).

Articles of Confederation

  • First attempt to unify the states, lasting six years.
  • Reaction against central authority, placing power with the states.
  • National government lacked power to tax, raise a military, or establish a central bank.
  • Successes: Land Ordinance and Northwest Ordinance (banning slavery in the Northwest).
  • Shays' Rebellion highlighted the weaknesses of the Articles.

The Constitution

  • Resulted from compromise.
  • Great Compromise: Established Senate and House of Representatives.
  • Three-Fifths Compromise: Addressed slavery representation.
  • Missouri Compromise (1820) and Compromise of 1850: Addressed slavery expansion.
  • Failure to compromise led to the Civil War.

First Two Parties

  • Federalists (Adams, Hamilton): Supported the bank, favored Britain, and were composed of the wealthy.
  • Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson, Madison): Opposed the bank, favored France, and consisted of yeoman farmers.

Jefferson's Presidency

  • Ideal vision: A nation of farmers.
  • Louisiana Purchase: Required loose interpretation of the Constitution.
  • Accepted the bank as a necessary evil.

War of 1812

  • Causes: Impressment of troops and British aid to Native Americans.

Jacksonian Era

  • Jackson: Champion of the common man.
  • Opposed the bank, leading to economic recession.

Second Great Awakening Reforms

  • Resulted from the first Industrial Revolution.
  • Led to reforms in women's rights, abolition, temperance, and mental health.
  • Key figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth.

Transcendentalism

  • Response to industrialization; sought utopia in nature.
  • Key figures: Emerson and Thoreau.

Republican Motherhood vs. Cult of Domesticity

  • Republican Motherhood: Women raise children to be good citizens.
  • Cult of Domesticity: Women as the moral fabric of the family.

The American System

  • Successes: Industrialization, transportation revolution, and market revolution.
  • Failures: Sectionalism and issues leading to the Civil War.

Manifest Destiny

  • Driven by: God, gold, and Polk's expansionist policies.
  • Nativism and the concept of the "safety valve" (opportunity to move west).

Causes of the Civil War

  • Failure to Compromise

Reconstruction

  • Ended in 1877.
  • Initial Successes: Military Reconstruction, Black suffrage and political participation, Freedmen’s Bureau.
  • Failures: Jim Crow laws and Black Codes after military withdrawal.

Responses of Farmers and Industrial Workers

  • Industrial Workers: Unions (AFL more successful); viewed as nuisances by many Americans.
  • Farmers: The Grange, Populist Party (limited success; absorbed by the Progressive Party).

Social and Economic Changes of the Industrial Age

  • Urbanization, political machines, new immigration, and social issues like crime and poverty.
  • Settlement houses as a positive social change.

Expansion in the 1840s vs. 1890s

  • 1840s: Manifest Destiny (God-driven).
  • 1890s: Imperialism (Spanish-American War); driven by economic and strategic interests.

Progressive Era

  • Goals: increasing democracy and addressing social inequality.
  • Key figures: Teddy Roosevelt, efforts related to the 17th, 18th, 19th amendments
  • Reforms: Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act, women's suffrage (19th Amendment).

World War One

  • US shifted to isolationism.
  • Republican presidents, high tariffs, and immigration restrictions followed.

Causes of the Great Depression

  • Easy credit, unbalanced foreign trade, and uneven distribution of income.
  • Hoover's response: rugged individualism and trickle-down economics.
  • FDR's response: deficit spending and the New Deal.

US Policy of Containment

  • Successes: Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • Failures: Vietnam War, Bay of Pigs, Red Scare/McCarthyism.

Counterculture Influence

  • Active in: Women's rights, gay rights, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements.