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Transatlantic Slave Trade
For more than 2,000 years people in many different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery. Between about 1500 and 1900, Europeans forcibly by millions of people from throughout West Africa and West Central Africa and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. -
Spinning Jenny
James Hargreaves invented an improved spinning jenny, a hand-powered multiple spinning machine that was the first machine to improve upon the spinning wheel by making it possible to spin more than one ball of yarn or thread. Its speeded up the time to spin yarn. -
Cotton Gin
The modern Mechanical Cotton Gin was invented on March 4, 1794 in the United States by Eli Whitney. It was a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds. It impaacted the South because it boosted the speed of their work. -
John Brown
John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, in a Calvinist household and would go on to have a large family of his own. Facing much financial difficulty throughout his life, he was also an ardent abolitionist who worked with the Underground Railroad and the League of Gileadites, among other endeavors. He believed in using violent means to end slavery, and, with the intent of inspiring a slave insurrection, eventually led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry. -
Irish Immigration
Immigration affected almost every city and almost every person in America. From 1820 to 1870, over seven and a half million immigrants came to the United States more than the entire population of the country in 1810. Also Because of their poverty, most Irish people depended on potatoes for food. When this crop failed three years in succession, it led to a great famine with horrendous consequences. -
Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, tensions began to rise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions within the U.S. Congress and across the country. They reached a boiling point after Missouri’s 1819 request for admission to the Union as a slave state, which threatened to upset the delicate balance between slave states and free states. -
The Cult of Domesticity
The period of 1820 to 1860 saw the rise in America of an ideology of feminine behavior and an ideal of womanliness that has come to be known as the Cult of True Womanhood or Cult of Domesticity. The features of this code, which provided social regulations for middle class families with newly acquired wealth and leisure, -
Sewing Machine
Elias Howe was American inventor who patented an improved sewing machine in 1846. His revolutionary machine used two separate threads, one threaded through the needle, and one in a shuttle. It was powered by a hand crank. A sideways-moving needle with its eye at one end would pierce the fabric, creating a loop of thread on the other side; a shuttle would then push thread through the loop, creating a tight lock stitch. -
Temperance Movement
The temperance movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries was an organized effort to encourage moderation in the consumption of intoxicating liquors or press for complete abstinence. The movement's ranks were mostly filled by women who, with their children, had endured the effects of unbridled drinking by many of their menfolk. -
Lowell Mill Girls
The factories in Lowell employed at some estimates more than 8,000 textile workers, known as mill girls or factory girls. These operatives so-called because they operated the looms and other machinery were primarily women and children from farming backgrounds. -
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War. She was born in Maryland in 1820, and successfully escaped in 1849. Yet she returned many times to rescue both family members and non-relatives from the plantation system. She led hundreds to freedom in the North as the most famous "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. -
The Middle Passage
The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves -
The First Great Migration
The black African American were driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War.
