TIMELINE

WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGYPEOPLINGPOLITICS & POWERIDEAS, BELIEFS, & CULTUREIDENTITY
1810
  • Congress approves funds for a National Road (1806)

  • First American textile factory opens in Waltham, Massachusetts (1814)

  • Congress outlaws Atlantic slave trade (1776–1809)

  • Andrew Jackson forces Creeks to relinquish millions of acres during War of 1812

  • Struggle to expand the suffrage begins with Maryland reformers

  • Martin Van Buren creates first statewide political machine (1817–1821)

  • Missouri crisis (1819–1821) over slavery

  • In rural areas, people of different ranks share a common culture

  • Upper-class women sponsor charitable organizations

  • American Colonization Society (1817)

  • Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1818) spreads notion of the self-made man

1820
  • New England shoe industry expands

  • Erie Canal completed (1825)

  • Henry Clay’s “American System” of government-assisted development

  • Market economy expands nationwide

  • Slave trade moves African Americans west

  • Rural women take factory work, alter gender roles

  • Rise of Andrew Jackson and Democratic Party

  • Anti-Masonic Party and Working Men’s Party rise and decline

  • Benevolent reform movements

  • Emerson champions transcendentalism

  • Charles Finney and others advance revivalist religion

  • Industrialism fragments society into more distinct classes and cultures

  • David Walker’s Appealto the Colored Citizens (1829) attacks slavery

  • Rise of southern sectionalism

1830
  • U.S. textiles compete with British goods

  • Canal systems expand trade in eastern U.S.

  • Financial panic of 1837 begins six-year depression

  • Boom in cotton output

  • Increase in waged work sparks conflict between labor and capital

  • Indian Removal Act (1830) forces native peoples west

  • Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears” (1838)

  • Tariff battles (1828, 1832) and nullification

  • Whig Party forms (1834)

  • Jackson destroys Second Bank, expands executive power

  • Temperance crusade expands

  • Joseph Smith and Mormonism

  • Middle-class culture spreads

  • Slavery defended as a “positive good”

  • Urban popular culture (sex trade and minstrelsy)

  • W. L. Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society (1833)

  • Female Moral Reform Society (1834) defines gender identity

  • Texas gains independence (1836)

1840
  • American machine tool industry expands

  • Walker Tariff moves U.S. toward “free trade” system and principles of “classical liberalism”

  • Working-class districts emerge in cities

  • German and Irish immigrants spark nativist movement

  • Mormons resettle in Utah

  • Log cabin campaign (1840)

  • Second Party System flourishes

  • Lawyers emerge as political leaders

  • Fourierist and other communal settlements

  • Seneca Falls Convention (1848) calls for women’s rights

  • Antislavery Liberty Party (1840)

  • New African American culture develops in Mississippi Valley

1850
  • Severe recession cuts industrial jobs (1858)

  • Railroads connect Midwest and eastern ports

  • Cotton production and prices rise, as does the cost of enslaved laborers

  • Immigrants replace native-born women in textile mills

  • White farm families settle trans-Mississippi west

  • Reform becomes political: states enact Maine-style temperance laws (1851 on)

  • “Mormon War” over polygamy (1858)

  • American Renaissance: Melville, Whitman, and Hawthorne

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

  • Black and white preachers promote Christianity among slaves

  • Free blacks in North become politically active