The Great Courses
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The broad stretch of coastal territory between the Chesapeake and Long Island had been settled by the Swedes along the Delaware Bay and the Dutch along the Hudson River. Dutch settlements (renamed New York) developed into a major commercial center. Quaker William Penn's Pennsylvania emerged, by the 1750s, with a commercial aristocracy similar to that of New England.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The sense that the American Republic represented the vanguard of a new age of freedom spawned campaigns to advance American perfection and freedom. Their common message was one of optimism, but it carried the threat that a democracy would find itself incapable of achieving stability. Alexis de Tocqueville, in "Democracy in America," gave a favorable reading to the American future.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
This episode highlights the failure of national institutions to push compromise on slavery and its extension into the territories. It also emphasizes the Dred Scott case of 1857, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and the impact of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. These controversies helped set the stage for the breakup of the Union in 1860-1861.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Southern cotton sharecroppers, black and white, and Midwestern farmers were falling into debt. They tried cooperative marketing schemes but decided to turn to politics to legislate for better conditions. The Populist Party enjoyed local and state-level successes in the early 1890s, but were unable to build a stable party structure nationally.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The surprise development in the new republic's political life was the formation of political parties. James Madison became the organizer of the Democratic-Republicans, and Hamilton recruited his Congressional supporters into the Federalist Party. The Federalists only barely managed to elect their candidate, John Adams, as Washington's successor in 1796.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The War of 1812 collapsed the US Treasury, bankrupted hundreds of businesses, and soaked up the tiny hoard of American financial capital by government borrowing. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun became the principal spokesmen for rebuilding the infrastructure of the American economy after 15 years of Jeffersonianism.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
In 1812, Madison sent a request to Congress for a declaration of war, but the War of 1812 was a debacle. In October 1814, the Massachusetts legislature passed a peace resolution and threatened secession from the Union. Only the signing of the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814 ended talk of a New England separatist movement.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Prohibition created ideal conditions for organized crime; the alcohol ban became unenforceable. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics and Jews as much as African Americans. A brighter side: high levels of employment; rising real wages; improving city conditions; the rapid spread of cars, refrigerators, and radios among ordinary families; and the maturing of the movie industry.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Few people liked John Adams, so it was fortunate that the first major challenge of his administration involved a foreign policy problem, where few had more expertise than he. But Adams squandered all the political capital he accumulated. By persuading the Federalists to dump Adams before the election of 1800, Hamilton succeeded in guaranteeing the Democratic-Republicans would win.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
America and the Soviet Union disagreed over the future of eastern Europe. A temporary dividing line drawn through Europe became permanent. Soviet possession of nuclear weapons by 1949 created a geopolitical stalemate. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to a point of mutually assured destruction caused anxiety and an intense moral debate about their legitimacy inside the United States.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown case (1954) and the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956) inaugurated the activist phase of the civil rights movement. Disputes over busing and affirmative action clouded bitter political disagreements. The interracial civil rights coalition broke up in the face of militant Black Power.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
This episode stresses that either side could have won the Civil War and offers a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses each brought to the early stages of the fight. The war mushroomed from a limited military contest at the time of First Bull Run in July 1861 into a massive struggle by the time of Shiloh and the Seven Days battles in the spring and early summer of 1862.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Middle-class Americans emphasized differences between the two sexes. Doctors said political rights for women would make them mannish, threatening differences embedded in nature itself. Early advocates of suffrage, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, argued that women, with their nurturing virtues, would purify and ennoble the political world.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The coming of settlers with the railroads made continuation of the Indians' independent life impossible, in addition to the near extinction of the buffalo and gold rushes. Plains tribes were warrior societies that lived to fight and ought not to be romanticized. After the Battle at Little Bighorn in 1876, the US Army intensified its campaign against them and broke all resistance within a year.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The Industrial Revolution involved the invention or reinvention of machines, power, labor, and capital. But industrial growth could not go on forever without serious social consequences, manifested in the first labor strikes, union organizations, and workingmen's political parties in the 1830s.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
From the 1820s, Americans embraced the appeal of Romanticism. In literature, it was manifested in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; in religion, it was illustrated by the Mercersburg theology; and in politics, it was reflected in the rhetoric of Whigs and Democrats and the argument over passion.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The year between the summer of 1862 and the summer of 1863 convinced Americans on both sides that the war would be long and bitter. This episode traces some of the major military campaigns of this year, underscoring the enormous swings of morale behind the lines in the North and South as each side won victories and suffered defeats.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin determined how to engage their forces over Europe and North Africa. A year of hard campaigning led to the defeat of Germany, a junction with Soviet forces in central Europe, and discovery of the Holocaust's full horror. America itself was transformed into a high-wage, high-employment economy, with women taking on jobs previously reserved for men.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
In the late 19th century, the scale of American industry increased dramatically. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie built massive corporations and dominated entire sectors of the economy. With brilliant inventors, and a succession of improvements in manufacturing, the United States became one of the three world leaders in industry by 1890, rivaling Britain and Germany.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
In the late 1960s, the women's liberation movement came into being. The National Organization for Women campaigned successfully for the abolition of gender discrimination in employment. Attacks on sexism in advertising and media, and criticism of gender bias in society and law gave rise to radical feminism. Women campaigned in vain for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.