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The impact of the transcontinental railroad
The impact of the transcontinental railroad
The transcontinental railroad impact
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Many of Americas historians would agree that one of the United States greatest achievements in technological advancement during the nineteenth century was the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. With the completion of this vast railway America became not only the youngest but also the first country to build the Transcontinental railroad, successfully connecting our country from “sea to shining sea.” Notwithstanding the fact that this was an extraordinary invention, the construction had both lasting negative and positive effects on minorities in living in America. These minorities consisted of Chinese and Irish immigrants along with Blacks and Native American, all of which were impacted in some way because of the the United States need to expand westward. In the earlier stages of this country much west was occupied by Native Americans many of which had settled on this land long before the appearance of the “white man.” Other having migrated after being removed from their lands due to treaties and acts formulated by the U.S government. After a few of America’s earlier P...
It had previously been the policy of the American government to remove and relocate Indians further and further west as the American population grew, but there was only so much...
In Henry George’s article, What the Railroad Will Bring Us, it discusses the main social, political, and economic transformations that the trans-continental railroad would bring to the state of California. More importantly, he discusses not only the benefits, but also discusses the major drawbacks with the arrival of the railroad. Henry George stated the railroad would be the “greatest work of the age” (297). With a railroad stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, multiple benefits would be brought to the state of California. First, the railroad will not only create a new means of transportation across the United States, it additionally would also become “one of the greatest material prosperity” of its time (298). This means more people, more houses,
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
The English immigrants are given a brief introduction as the first ethnic group to settle in America. The group has defined the culture and society throughout centuries of American history. The African Americans are viewed as a minority group that were introduced into the country as slaves. The author depicts the struggle endured by African Americans with special emphasis on the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. The entry of Asian Americans evoked suspicion from other ethnic groups that started with the settlement of the Chinese. The Asian community faced several challenges such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the mistreatment of Americans of Japanese origin during World War II. The Chicanos were the largest group of Hispanic peoples to settle in the United States. They were perceived as a minority group. Initially they were inhabitants of Mexico, but after the Westward expansion found themselves being foreigners in their native land (...
The lives of the Plains Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century were greatly affected by the technological development and government actions. The development of the transcontinental railroad was the most devastating technological development that affected the Plains Indians. Although the railroad was powerful and helpful to the white man, it was not for the Plains Indians. The transcontinental railroad was the reason why the westward movement of the white man happened so quickly. With the white man moving westward they found valuable land for agriculture, which was the Plains Indians land, and they found a lot of gold mines.
The essay starts with the “Columbian Encounter between the cultures of two old worlds “ (98). These two old worlds were America and Europe. This discovery states that Native Americans contributed to the development and evolution of America’s history and culture. It gives the fact that indians only acted against europeans to defend their food, territory, and themselves.
Railroads first appeared around the 1830’s, and helped the ideas of Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion; however, these were weak and didn’t connect as far as people needed, thus causing them to be forced to take more dangerous routes. On January 17th, 1848, a proposal was sent to Congress by Asa Whitney to approve and provide federal funding...
Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, turns many heads as Richter changes the traditional outlook of the Westward expansion all the way to the American Revolution by viewing certain events through the eyes of the Native Americans who were settled in this land years before the new colonizations started. It was not easy to try and make a complete work about the different perspectives that the Natives had, due to the fact that many sources are works from Europeans or they were filtered by them. Richter explains that Native people sketch out elaborative paintings in their house or on barks of living trees, many of these sources obviously have not lasted long enough for us to examine. This book, however gives great detail and fully analyzes the "aggressively expansionist Euro-American United States" (p. 8-7) that rose from what belonged to Indian Country. Richter challenges you to compose a new framework of the Indian and European encounters reforming the "master narrative" of early American colonization from the Native point of view.
The transcontinental railroad would eventually become a symbol of much-needed unity, repairing the sectionalism that had once divided the nation during the Civil War. The construction of the transcontinental railroad was also an extension of the transportation revolution. Once commodities such as gold were found in the western half of America, many individuals decided to move themselves and their families out west in search of opportunity. Not only did the railroad help to transport people, but it also it allowed for goods to be delivered from companies in the east. In the end, the American transcontinental railroad created a national market, enabling mass production, and stimulated industry, while greatly impacting American society through stimulated immigration and urbanization.
Bibliography: Bibliography 1. John Majewski, History of the American Peoples: 1840-1920 (Dubuque: Kent/Hunt Publishing, 2001). 2.
After the Civil war political, economic and cultural factors made a humongous contributed for Western expansion. Railroad owners, Railroad Workers, Homesteader, Immigrants, African Americans, Cowboys, Ranchers, Miners and U.S Government were all part of the Western Expansion. The two groups that you would be inform about in this essay are Railroad Worker and the Immigrants. Both of these groups had an exceeding role in Western Expansion. Both the Railroad workers and the Immigrants had to faced oodles amount challenges. For instances the Chines have the no respect and they were treated poorly even though they help build the Transcontinental Railroad. Another challenge was the amount of motivation that each group felt being involved in the Western expansion. Immigrants and Railroad worker had many other problems than not being respected. For example, weather or not they
In Rereading America “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, ideas from an author of A New Guide for Immigrants (Mid-American Frontier) by the name of Peck were used to further stress the significance of the Turner thesis in our world today (Peck 42). In his book, Peck identified three different stages or waves of western civilization. The first stage is sort of the epitome of what is now recognized to be American character: the pioneer or farmer (Peck 43). This was a man who provided for his family by depending on vegetation and hunting. He did not care whether the land he temporarily occupied was in his ownership or not. When the area became too civilized, the pioneer moved on to make new discoveries and left his soil and house for the new wave of immigrants. Thus, introducing the second stage of western civilization. These immigrants purchased the pioneer’s land and created a way of life best described as frugal and simple, consisting of school houses and mills (Peck 44). The third and final stage, labeled as “the men of capital and enterprise”, is when the small villages created by the immigrants became...
Early American history began in the collision of European, West African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans “discovered” America by accident, then created empires out of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction—interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process.
Many people today know the story of the Indians that were native to this land, before “white men” came to live on this continent. Few people may know that white men pushed them to the west while many immigrants took over the east and moved westward. White men made “reservations” that were basically land that Indians were promised they could live on and run. What many Americans don’t know is what the Indians struggled though and continue to struggle through on the reservations.
In the article review “ How the West was Lost” the author, William T. Hagan explains that in a brief thirty-eight year period between 1848 and 1886, the Indians of the Western United States lost their fight with the United States to keep their lands. While nothing in the article tells us who Hagan is, or when the article was written, his central theme of the article is to inform us of how the Indians lost their lands to the white settlers. I found three main ideas in the article that I feel that Hagan was trying to get across to us. Hagan put these events geographically and chronologically in order first by Plains Indians, then by the Western Indians.