Settlers In West : APUSH

  • Western settlement offered the promise of economic opportunity, but life in the west was filled with hardship.

  • With white settlement rapidly spreading westward, Plains Indians faced the harsh choice of resistance or assimilation.

  • Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans faced discrimination.

  • <strong>HomesteadAct(1862)</strong><strong>Homestead Act (1862)</strong>
      * 160 acres
      * Small fee
      * Live there for five years and “improve” the land
      * Passed during Civil War
        * Union control of the west
        * Free-Soilers

  • Buffalo Soldiers

  • Women’s Sufferage in the west

  • <strong>Nativism</strong><strong>Nativism</strong>
      * Continuation of Irish discrimintation
      * Chinese discrimination and contributions to American grownth
      * Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
      * Assimilation Schools

  • Railroads Begin the Guilded Age
      * John Muir (TR) and the Conservation movement
      * Government support ($)
        * \
      * Low-wage immigrant labor
      * Steam power
      * Impact on other industries
        * Finance
        * Steel
        * Mining
        * Agriculture
      * Interstate commerce… requires federal regulation

  • Federick Jackson Turner
      * “Frontier Thesis”
      * Westward expansion defines the American character
        * Economic opportunity
        * Initiative
        * Self-sufficiency

  • Plessy v. Ferguson
      * Deals with Jim Crow laws on trains
      * Allows for “separate but equal”
      * Not successfully overturned until 1954

  • Opposing Views
      * W.E.B. DuBois (voting)
      * Booker T. Washington (Bootstraps)
      * Fighting against sharecropping

  • Women working for equality$$
      * Ida. B. Wells (anti-lynching)
      * Anthony and Stanton (suffrage)
      * Frances Willard (WCTU)