United States History Themes And Trends

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America Before the Europeans
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Humans first came to the Americas over a land bridge connecting Asia to Alaska more than 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age.
* Over time, these nomadic hunting groups dispersed across the continent.
* As the groups founded permanent settlements and learned to farm, they formed tribes with distinct cultural and social practices.
* Tribes adapted their ways of life to the geographical regions in which they lived.

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The Colonial Period
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Spain dominated the early years of European exploration of the New World, with France a distant second. England did not get seriously involved in the New World until nearly a century after Columbus landed.
* After England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the balance of power in the New World (and in Europe) shifted. After initial hardship in the colonies, English settlements showed the New World could bring profit and offered religious freedom. A quick buildup of colonial settlements began along the east coast of North America and continued through the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries.
* Under its mercantilist economic policy, England created laws ensuring that its colonies existed primarily to enrich the mother country. England did not enforce these laws too strictly, employing a policy of “salutary neglect,” for fear of alienating the colonists and thereby helping France’s interests in the New World.
* After the 1763 French and Indian War, England no longer worried about France as a threat, but faced huge war debts. England believed the colonies should bear the brunt of the debt because the war was for their benefit. England ended salutary neglect to the colonist’s dismay and anger.

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Revolution and Constitution
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Increased British taxation of the colonies after the French and Indian war led to tension. Colonists felt they were being taxed without representation in government. The British felt the colonists were getting the benefits of English citizenship without paying the taxes required.
* The colonies resisted British taxation and other legislation. The British responded by implementing stricter taxes and reprisals, which the colonists opposed more fiercely and violently. During this period, colonial resistance efforts became increasingly unified.
* Colonists felt the British were denying them their natural rights, as described by John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. As revolution became more likely, many colonists hoped to implement a government independent of the British crown and based on Enlightenment ideals.
* After the Revolution, the states reacted against their experience with the strong central government of Parliament by creating a loose federation under the Articles of Confederation. When this loose federation proved too weak, the colonists wrote the Constitution, which outlined a strong central government that, through the system of checks and balances, was still limited in scope. The Constitution represented a desire for a strong but limited government that was dedicated to preserving individual and state freedoms.
* Two debates during the writing and ratification of the Constitution highlighted issues that would generate conflicts in the newly formed United States: (1) the separate interests of northern and southern states, and the role of slavery; (2) the proper balance between states’ rights and federal power.

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A New Nation
Trends and Themes of the Era

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# The U.S. government began to build and define itself under George Washington’s leadership.
# The debates over ratification of the Constitution spawned the development of two separate political parties. New England Federalists supported a loose interpretation of the Constitution and a strong central government. Southern Republicans supported a strict interpretation of the Constitution and a more limited central government. Enmity between the two parties deepened, until the events of the War of 1812 finally eliminated the Federalists as a significant political party.
# The U.S. made a concerted effort to stay out of European entanglements and maintain neutrality during its effort to build its national infrastructure. Often, though, the U.S. was caught in a tug-of-war between Britain and France. Eventually, British aggression and America’s desire to increase its territory and prove itself as an international force led to the War of 1812.
# After the war, the U.S. enjoyed a period of optimism and general cooperation under a single political party: the Republicans. In this period, the U.S. asserted its dominance in the Western Hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine.
# Westward expansion began in earnest after the Louisiana Purchase. The sectional tensions created by expansion, made apparent in the Missouri Compromise, illustrated the increasing role slavery and regionalism would play in the politics of the nineteenth century.
# Through various rulings, the Supreme Court established itself as a body able to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional and supportive of Federalist policies.

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The Age of Jackson
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Cracks based on regional differences began to appear in the Republican Party, resulting in a split into two parties: Democratic and Republican.
* Coupled with lowered voting restrictions, the two-party system ushered in a newly democratic age, marked by greater choice in representation and increased voter turnout. Andrew Jackson, the first candidate from the West to win the presidency, appealed to the “common man.” Politics were increasingly swayed by the public, rather than by the elites.
* The Nullification Crisis revealed deep regional differences in economic needs and attitudes about states’ rights versus federal power. The Nullification Crisis introduced the possibility of state secession from the Union.
* Jackson turned the presidency into a vastly more powerful office, using the presidential veto to assert his political and legislative will and more deeply embedding the government in party politics.

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Cultural Trends: 1781–Mid-1800s

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During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans worked hard to carve out a national identity in religion and culture, as well as in politics. This chapter covers the trends of the first 60 years of the United States, which is why we don’t include a trends and themes list.

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Westward Expansion and Sectional Strife
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States and its citizens were moved by a belief in manifest destiny, which held that it was the right and fate of the United States to cover the continent.
* Technology, specifically in the form of the railroad, dramatically accelerated expansion.
* Expansion intensified the sectional tension between the North and South by bringing to the forefront the issue of the extension of slavery into the West. Brief compromises relieved the tension from time to time, but no compromise was able to resolve the fundamental differences between the North and South.

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Civil War and Reconstruction
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* After Lincoln’s election, sectional differences over slavery and the question of states’ rights versus federal power erupted in the Civil War.
* After the war, Lincoln favored a mild Reconstruction of the South, though Congress was dominated by Radical Republicans who favored a harsher reconstruction plan in order to punish the South for secession and for slavery. After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress overwhelmed Andrew Johnson, who had taken over as president, and instituted punitive Reconstruction policies.
* Blacks in the South, freed during the Civil War, gained considerable rights during radical Reconstruction. Through both legal and illegal means, Southerners fought against the granting of these rights. After the failure of radical Reconstruction, Southerners used the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision to institutionalize segregation and the discrimination of blacks.

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Industrial Revolution
Trends and Themes of the Era

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# Big Business, first in the form of massive corporations and then in even larger trusts, built up monopolies over markets and made astronomical profits. Big Business drove industrialization and helped foster the belief in America as the land of opportunity, where anyone who worked hard could get rich. It also, however, generated a vast imbalance between the rich and the poor.
# The government at first followed a hands-off policy with Big Business. As business abuses increased, state governments and then the Federal government passed a spate of regulatory legislation. True regulation of business would not begin until the early twentieth century, however.
# Industrialism attracted rural Americans and many European immigrants to cities in the United States. As a result, the U.S. shifted from an agrarian to an urban society. Immigration became a key ingredient in the success of industrialism, since immigrants were willing to work as cheap labor.
# Politics were dominated by local political parties, called Machines, rather than individuals. Politics and politicians were often corrupt, complicit with Big Business interests. Beginning with the Pendleton Act in the 1880s, the government began to attempt to clean itself up.
# Technology, in the form of railroads and other innovations that increased efficiency and communication, drove industrialism. Industrialism, in turn, created the wealth and impetus that drove the need for better technology. Technology became essential to American economic success.

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The Age of Imperialism
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* American industrialization created a need for foreign markets in which to sell manufactured goods and from which to buy raw materials.
* Early efforts to find foreign markets involved economic expansionism, which focused on opening markets through investment rather than military involvement. Under President McKinley, near the end of the nineteenth century, the United States wanted to increase its exposure in foreign markets and shifted to a more militaristic and imperialist policy.
* Victory in the Spanish-American War gave the U.S. an empire, and also marked the ascendance of the U.S. as a world power.

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The Progressive Era
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Backlash against the excesses and corruption of the Industrial Revolution led to a fervor for reform. Reform stretched across economic, environmental, social, and racial lines.
* In foreign affairs through the first half of the Progressive Era,the U.S. continued to assert its power through militaristic and economic means, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Woodrow Wilson rejected this aggressive foreign policy in favor of a more idealistic one, but the outbreak of World War I interrupted his plans.

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World War I
Trends and Themes of the Era

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# Although the U.S. wanted to stay neutral in the war, it could not. U.S. involvement in the war helped turn the tide in favor of the Allies. If the Spanish-American War had left any doubt, World War I firmly established the U.S. as a dominant world power.
# Woodrow Wilson saw the war as an opportunity to prevent future wars. He wanted to end the war through a liberal peace agreement, but Allied nations and Republicans in Congress rejected his attempts. The U.S. also refused to join the League of Nations, which was conceived by Wilson.
# The war effort brought blacks and women into the workforce in record numbers. It also prompted the migration of nearly 500,000 blacks from the South to the North. Women’s contributions to the war effort resulted in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment (women’s right to vote).
# Progressivism continued throughout the war, securing its last great success with the prohibition of alcohol in the form of the Eighteenth Amendment.

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The Roaring Twenties
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* America turned away from the ideals of progressivism. Even the prohibition amendment was not always strictly enforced. Republicans regained the presidency and ushered in a new era of pro-business policies.
* Government policies, progress in technology, and a new consumer society produced a booming economy. Radio helped transform the U.S. into a single national market, and a mass popular culture developed based largely on the consumption of luxury items. To take full advantage of the profits to be made, businesses merged and grew ever larger.
* Tired from the war and disillusioned by Wilson’s failure with the League of Nations, America entered a period of isolationism. The U.S. aimed to stay out of European affairs and severely limited immigration. New immigrants were often subject to suspicion and hatred.
* The younger generation rebelled against traditional morals. College students took to drinking and throwing wild parties. Women became more forward in dress and behavior. Premarital sex became less taboo. The two symbols of this new, looser social behavior were jazz and the “flapper.”

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The Great Depression and the New Deal
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* The frenzied speculation and mergers of the booming economy in the 1920s led to the economic depression of the 1930s.
* Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government committed itself to unprecedented levels of regulation and control over the national economy. These policies of the New Deal made FDR and the Democrats extremely popular and changed the role of government in American’s lives forever.
* FDR’s policies changed the demographics of the political parties. His support for blacks, the poor, and labor unions won him and the Democrats support from those groups—a support base that remains in place today. Up until that time, blacks tended to vote for Republicans (Republicans had been the antislavery party during the Civil War and Reconstruction). FDR’s policies also lost Democrats their traditional support from the white South.
* The Depression, a worldwide phenomenon, created the circumstances that allowed for Fascists to rise to power in Germany and Italy.

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World War II
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* The strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the Depression of the 1930s created the terms under which fascism and extreme nationalism arose in Germany and Italy. The expansionist designs of these fascist regimes started World War II.
* During the years before the war began and in its first two years, the U.S. maintained its isolationist policies. As the war continued, though, American sympathies increasingly moved toward the Allies. American isolationism shifted first to indirect involvement and then to full involvement after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
* The war effort brought the American economy out of the Great Depression. Socially, blacks and women played large roles in the war effort.
* As the war neared its end, relations between the United States and the USSR became increasingly hostile. The discussions between the Allies about how to divide and rebuild Europe after Germany fell were an occasion for the U.S. and the USSR to jockey for power. The endgame of World War II was in many ways the beginning of the Cold War.
* When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it changed the nature of war. A country now had the capacity to destroy vast regions with a single bomb. The dropping of the bomb presaged the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the USSR.

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The 1950s: Cold War, Civil Rights, and Social Trends
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* The U.S. and the USSR emerged from World War II as the two sole superpowers in the world. The two quickly became enemies and rivals, battling in politics, technology, and military power. The arms race, in which each nation developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could destroy the other numerous times over, was a defining fact and metaphor of the conflict. Neither side wanted to face destruction, however, which is what made the Cold War cold: though crisis after crisis loomed, the two sides avoided direct conflict. Policies of containing communism influenced virtually all U.S. foreign policy decisions.
* Fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government led to intense domestic anticommunist fervor. Communists and suspected communists were closely watched, vilified, blacklisted, and, in one case, tried and executed. Domestic anticommunism reached its peak in the mid-1950s with the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and waned after he lost influence and power. But fear of communism remained a part of American culture for decades to follow.
* Bolstered by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v.Board of Education, the civil rights movement began to come into its own. Following an ethic of nonviolence, blacks in the South began to win their first battles for equality.
* 1950s postwar prosperity helped propel the creation of suburbs and the popularization of the automobile, which in turn caused the decline of cities as wealthy whites left urban areas for suburban ones. Prosperity also led to a baby boom and the promotion of conservative values. In the late 1950s, artists began to rebel against this conservatism.

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The 1960s
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* Democrats, who held the presidency in the 1960s, tried to bring about the liberal social reforms that were the hallmarks of their party’s philosophy.
* Led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement achieved its greatest successes, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement gained massive public support and helped convince the nation of the power of social action.
* The Cold War continued throughout the decade, and nearly erupted in nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Cold War anxieties and concerns over Soviet domination in Asia led to the buildup of American forces in Vietnam and the Vietnam War.
* In the tradition of social action built during the civil rights movement and in response to U.S. involvement in a foreign war that took over 50,000 American lives and seemed unwinnable, a vocal minority of Americans formed the antiwar movement. Supporters and critics of the war often opposed each other bitterly.
* The 1960s was a time of dramatic social engagement and action. In addition to the civil rights and antiwar movements, a powerful women’s rights movement also took root.

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1970s–2000
Trends and Themes of the Era

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* The Cold War varied in intensity during this 30-year period. Nevertheless, it dominated foreign policy throughout the era and influenced domestic policy, as well. The Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union.
* After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world stage changed dramatically. U.S. interests ceased to be so easily defined, because there was no longer a huge entity to oppose. As the sole superpower, the U.S. debated about but ultimately maintained its role as an international policeman.
* Domestically, the United States underwent cycles of economic boom and bust, and shifted between Republican and Democratic presidents.