1. Objectives Explain why American cities grew in the 1800s.
List the new inventions and advances in agriculture and manufacturing.
Describe the improvements in transportation during the early 1800s.
Discuss the wave of immigration to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
Describe the problems African Americans faced in the North.

2. Terms and People
urbanization – the growth of cities due to the movement of people from rural areas to cities
telegraph – a device that used electrical signals to send messages
Samuel F. B. Morse – the inventor of the telegraph

3. Terms and People (continued)
famine – widespread starvation
nativists – people who wanted to preserve the country for white, American-born Protestants
discrimination – the denial of equal rights or equal treatment to certain groups of people

4. How did urbanization, technology, and social change affect the North?
During the Industrial Revolution, the differences between the North and South widened.
Northern cities, industries, and transportation technologies grew rapidly, with both benefits and drawbacks for citizens.

5. Early American cities were small by today’s standards, but in the 1800s, U.S. cities grew larger.
The Industrial Revolution spurred urbanization, as agricultural workers moved to the cities for jobs.
Farm laborers who had been replaced by machines went to work in city factories and shops.

6. As cities grew, a variety of problems emerged.
filthy streets
structures made mostly of wood
a lack of clean drinking water
poorly trained fire fighters
the absence of good sewage systems
rival fire companies fought each other instead of fires
disease
fires

7. The Industrial Revolution also provided many benefits.
New inventions and technological advances affected many industries and caused many changes in people’s ways of life, in the following areas.
Agriculture
Clothing and manufactured goods
Communication
Transportation

8. Agriculture
Inventions made it easier for farmers to cultivate more land and harvest their crops with fewer workers.
Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper cut stalks of wheat.
Threshers separated grains of wheat from their stalks.
The reaper and the thresher were put together into one machine called a combine.

9. Clothing and Manufactured Goods
Sewing machines made it much more efficient to produce clothing in quantity.
By 1860, factories in New England and the middle Atlantic states were producing most of the nation’s manufactured goods.

10. Communications
Samuel F. B. Morse began working on the telegraph in 1835.
Morse code used shorter (“dots”) and longer (“dashes”) bursts of electricity to represent the letters of the alphabet.
Soon, thousands of telegraph wires were strung across the nation.

11. The telegraph worked by sending electrical signals over a wire.
Messages could be sent quickly over long distances.

12. Transportation
Improvements in transportation spurred the growth of American industry.
Factories could make use of raw materials that were farther away.
Factory owners could ship their goods to distant markets.

13. In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat.

14. Side-paddle steamboats traveled well on rivers, but not on oceans.
In 1850, American-built clipper ships—the fastest ships in the world at the time—were introduced.
But by the 1850s, Britain was producing ocean-going steamships that were faster than and could carry more cargo than clipper ships.

15. Railroads could be built almost anywhere.
Railroads tied together raw materials, manufacturers, and markets better than any other form of transportation.
Railroads could be built almost anywhere.
Steamboats had to follow the paths of rivers, which sometimes froze in winter.

16. Cars were drawn along the track by horses on America’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, which was begun in 1828.
In 1830, Peter Cooper built the first American-made steam locomotive.
By 1840, about 3,000 miles of railway track had been built in the United States.

17. United States Population
Not only was America’s way of life changing, immigrants were changing who Americans were.
United States Population
The American population grew rapidly in the 1840s because millions of immigrants, mostly from Western Europe, entered the United States.

18. Some immigrants came for land, others for opportunity, and still others because they could not survive in their home countries.
As cities along the eastern coast became crowded, newly arrived immigrants headed west.

19. In 1845, a fungus destroyed the potato crop in Ireland, which led to a famine.
During the Great Hunger, more than a million people starved to death, and a million more left Ireland.

20. Most of the Irish immigrants who came to the United States during this period found work:
laying railroad track in the East and Midwest.
as household workers.
in construction.

21. Germans also came to America during this period, many to escape political persecution.
Unlike the Irish, German immigrants came from many different levels of society.
Many Germans settled in the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region.

22. Some Americans, called nativists, worried about the growing foreign population.
Nativists especially opposed Irish immigration because most Irish were Roman Catholic.
One New York nativist group became the powerful Know-Nothing political party, but the party eventually dissolved over the issue of slavery.

23. Even more so than immigrants, African Americans in the North faced discrimination.
Slavery had largely ended in the North by the early 1800s, but free African Americans did not receive the same treatment as whites.

24. Discrimination in the North
Suffrage
African Americans were often denied the right to vote.
Job Market
African Americans were not allowed to work in factories or in skilled trades.
Many employers preferred to hire whites.
Segregation
Schools, public facilities, and churches were segregated, so African Americans formed their own churches.
The Media
White newspapers often portrayed African Americans as inferior, so African Americans started their own newspapers.

25. Section Review
QuickTake Quiz
Know It, Show It Quiz 25