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Course: AP®︎/College US History > Unit 6
Lesson 3: Westward expansion: social and cultural development- The Homestead Act and the exodusters
- Westward expansion: social and cultural development
- Chinese immigrants and Mexican Americans in the age of westward expansion
- The reservation system
- The Dawes Act
- The Indian Wars and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
- The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
- Westward expansion: social and cultural development
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Westward expansion: social and cultural development
Westward expansion in the 19th century transformed the U.S., sparking conflicts with Native Americans, altering the environment, and reshaping society. The government encouraged migration, leading to violence against minorities and loss of Native American lands. This period also saw significant cultural shifts and environmental changes.
Want to join the conversation?
- Who originally came up with the concept of the Manifest Dynasty?(9 votes)
- The term "Manifest Destiny" was coined by a newspaper editor, John O'Sullivan, in an 1845 essay for the journal Democratic Review. In this essay, he argued that Texas and Oregon should both be annexed to the United States.(21 votes)
- how did having a fence hurt the natives?(7 votes)
- Many Natives in the Great Plains were nomads. Nomads are people who do not live in one place for too long but move around a lot, usually following herds of animals that they eat. When the American settlers put up fences, their patterns of moving around were disturbed. The bison that they followed had their migration and reproduction patterns disturbed, reducing their population. This made food scarce for the natives.(16 votes)
- At0:11Kim says the discovery of gold in California in 1849. Didnt gold get discovered in 1848?(8 votes)
- Gold was discovered in 1848 but the craze started in 1849 and that is why the miners were called fourty-niners.(12 votes)
- How did the Homestead act have a social impact on the westward expansion?(8 votes)
- The Homestead Act gave government land to adult citizens to help boost the economy, give people job opportunities, and convince people to move westward. Because living in rural, western areas was so different from dense cities in the northeast that the drastic change in everyday life eventually led to cultural and social change.(5 votes)
- In reference to the near-extinction of the American bison, wasn't this also part of the US government's effort to eradicate Native Americans? I thought bison were an important food source for many Native American nations.(5 votes)
- Yes, this is documented in an article published in The Atlantic in May of 2016, where you can read the following sentences: "...for a long time, the country’s highest generals, politicians, and even then President Ulysses S. Grant saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s 'Indian Problem.' "(4 votes)
- What did progress mean for many Americans during westward expansion? Explain.(3 votes)
- Progress meant killing Native Americans and taking their land for the use of European-Americans and the profit of those who owned stock in railroad companies headquartered in New York City and Chicago.(6 votes)
- Where did the idea of manifest destiny come from?(4 votes)
- Someone else in the comments asked the very same question, and a fantastic answer was posted in response. That answer should give you plenty of information, but in short, the term "Manifest Destiny" was coined by a newspaper editor named John O'Sullivan, in 1845.(2 votes)
- How did the westward expansion increase(3 votes)
- Population pressure in the East and the loss of fertility from overfarmed land in the East drove and drew people westward.(4 votes)
- Who thought of the homestead act and why did they hate Chinese,Mexicans and native Americans(3 votes)
- Those who promulgated the Homestead act did not "hate" the Chinese, Mexicans or Native Americans. They merely preferred people like themselves (white and northern European).
The language of "hate" has become rampant since the MAGA trend took hold in America. Please be careful not to fall into other language traps set by these people and their political movement.(4 votes)
- who made up the concept of the manifest(3 votes)
- Racist white Americans distorted their religion to give themselves a license to oppress Native American people and take the resources found there. This is from history.com, "Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. The philosophy drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes."(4 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] In other videos, we've discussed the causes and effects of westward expansion in the 19th century, focusing on the period that
began with the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and ending shortly after the Civil War. But westward expansion was a long process. Eight new states entered the Union between 1876 and 1896. And not until nearly the
turn of the 20th century did the superintendent of the US Census declare that the frontier was now closed. US territories stretched all
the way to the Pacific Ocean. We've talked a bit about what
caused people to move west and what effects the
immigration of millions of non-native people
west of the Mississippi had on that region and on
the United States as a whole before and during the Civil War. In this video, I want to pick up the story after the Civil War and
discuss how westward expansion affected the society
and culture of the West at the end of the 19th century. Let's quickly review some of the causes of westward expansion that
were already established by the end of the Civil War. Starting in the 1840s, Americans and European
immigrants began moving west looking for farmland. And the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought people from all over the world into the region to either pan for gold or to make some money off the people who were panning for gold. The construction of the
transcontinental railroad also provided many jobs for
those who didn't strike it rich. The US government facilitated
this westward expansion by granting millions of
acres to railroad companies, making it easier to get west and to get goods from the West back East. The government also encouraged settlement through grants of 160 acres of free land to anyone willing to improve it over the course of five years. Lastly, many American
migrants were convinced through cultural messaging
that American civilization was divinely ordained
to occupy North America from Atlantic to Pacific in an ideology known as Manifest Destiny. All of these things continued
to motivate westward expansion in the years after the Civil War, but there were a few unique aspects in this era that intensified the changes wrought by westward expansion. First, the US government
began to take a new approach towards its interactions
with Native Americans. Instead of treating Native American tribes as independent nations,
the government began to cast them as wards of the state, relics of an earlier time that had to take up American ways or face extinction. They began to confine Native Americans to reservations and
classify any individual or group that refused as hostile. Another related thing that changed was that after the Civil War, the US Army could apply its full might to subduing the West through
a series of conflicts with Native Americans
called the Indian Wars. One thing I find fascinating
about these conflicts was that many of the
generals who led campaigns in the Indian Wars were
former Union generals who had fought to end slavery in the South during the Civil War,
including Oliver O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. What do you think their
approach to Native Americans versus African Americans
says about how they conceived of American citizenship
in this time period? The effects of westward
expansion also intensified after the Civil War. As we've already mentioned, one effect of Americans' westward push was violence against Native Americans and other minorities. The US Army forced Native
Americans onto reservations or hunted them down when Native Americans attempted to prevent white settlers from encroaching on those reservations, like when gold was discovered
on the Sioux reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The US Army also
prevented Native Americans from engaging in rituals
like The Ghost Dance, which they feared would kindle resistance among Native Americans. In 1890, an Army regiment disarmed a Lakota Sioux encampment
near Wounded Knee Creek. And while the Lakotas were
giving up their weapons, one rifle accidentally discharged. The US Army then massacred somewhere between 200 and 300 men,
women, and children. Other minorities in the West were also subject to racial violence including Mexican Americans, who were driven off their lands by force, and Chinese immigrants, who were targeted in race riots throughout California. Minorities also faced
the loss of their land and their cultures in the West. The most significant land
loss came as a result of the Dawes Act of 1887. The Dawes Act sought to
force Native Americans to stop living communally
and take up American culture and farming by splitting up reservations and awarding 160 acres of land
to each head of household, sort of like the Homestead Act. But unlike the Homestead Act, Native Americans had to improve the land and behave like whites for 25 years to get title and American
citizenship, not just five. And due to corruption in
administering this policy, Native Americans were placed on the worst land for farming, or their land allotments were given to white settlers instead. All in all, the Dawes
Act resulted in the loss of over 80 million acres
of Native American land. Similarly, government
agents turned a deaf ear towards the claims of Mexican Americans whose land was claimed by white settlers even though Mexican Americans
had been US citizens since the end of the Mexican War. The same impulse to force Native Americans to assimilate into
American living patterns also drove the creation of Indian boarding schools in this era. Native children were
removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There they would be forced
to cut off their long hair, change into American-style clothing, and take up new American-sounding names. These schools lasted until the 1970s. Chinese immigrants, by contrast, were judged incapable of assimilation. In 1882, Congress passed
the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration restriction to prevent all members of an ethnic group from entering the United States. Restrictions on Chinese immigration would not be completely
abolished until 1965. There were also some far-reaching environmental transformations resulting from westward expansion. One of these was the near
extinction of the American bison, also known as the buffalo. Huge herds of buffalo
roamed the American West for all of recorded history in the area. Plains Indians had over-hunted them in the years before large-scale
immigration to the West, but the coming of the railroad signed the buffalos' death warrant. There were about 15
million buffalo in the West at the end of the Civil War, but less than 20 years later there were fewer than
1,000 buffalo remaining due to whites hunting them for sport or clearing them from rail lines. This left Plains Indians, who depended on the buffalo
for meat and clothing, in a state of near-starvation, making it even more difficult for them to resist being forced onto reservations. Plains Indians were also affected by the development of
barbed wire in this era, which white settlers used to fence off what had been communal grazing lands. This was also a hardship for cowboys, who once had driven herds
of cattle to railroad depots over long stretches of open range. By the end of the 19th century, there was little to no
open range left at all. Lastly, the spread of settlers into the arid western
part of the Great Plains led to massive irrigation projects in order to supply lands that weren't really naturally
suited to farming with water. This meant damming and diverting rivers and the use of farming techniques that would later contribute to the ravages of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Who has access to water
and for what purposes is still a major source of conflict in the American West. So as we look forward
into the 20th century from our vantage point here at the edge of the American Frontier, let's take some time to think about what the story of westward expansion tells us about how Americans
thought about citizenship and access to resources
in this time period. How will those ideas
influence the United States once it begins to step on the world stage and look for new frontiers
outside of North America?