The Reconstruction and after

LECTURE 15

15.1. The Recon­struction.

15.1.1. As the Civil War ended, the United States faced unprecedented tasks: to bring the defeated Confederate states back into the Union and to determine the status in American society of almost 4 million former slaves. These goals dominated the years from 1865 to 1877, the era known as Reconstruction. In the meantime, southern landowners, who had lost their slaves, found a new way of making money from their land. The landowners allowed farmers to live and work on their plantations. In exchange, the farmers gave the landown­ers a large share of the crops grown on the land. This system was called sharecropping: a system of farming in which farmers rented land from land-owners and paid their rent with a share of the crops which they grew. Many of the newly freed blacks became share­croppers.

15.1.2. The Civil War had brought free­dom from slavery, but many a former slave's life was still filled with days of hard work and hunger. White landowners and white voters generally opposed Republican rule. They tried to dismantle Republican power by terrorizing blacks to prevent them from voting. The best-known terrorist group was the Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1866 to suppress black suffrage and restore white supremacy.

15.1.3. In the last third of the XIX century, Americans turned to their economic future — to developing the nation’s vast resources, to wrestling profit from industry, and to the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West. The United States entered the industrial age. Mines, mills, factories and railroads were expanding and improving.

In the 1850's two men, working separately, worked out a way to speed up the steel-making pro­cess. They were an American, William Kelly, and an Englishman, Henry Bessemer. The new process became known as the Kelly-Besse­mer method. Alexander G. Bell invented the telephone. It changed the life of people in the whole world. The building of the railroads spurred western settlement. The Congress authorized construction of two railroads to link the Midwest and the West Coast. The meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 signified a new era in Western history.

15.1.4. Native American peoples defended their land and their way of life from the oncoming settlers. Fierce battles took place between the Plains peoples and federal troops. Ultimately, disease and conflict reduced the population and power of the tribes. In December 1890 US troops took a group of captive Sioux to a cavalry camp along Wounded Knee Creek. An accidental rifle shot caused nervous soldiers to fire into a group of Indians. Within a short time the federal troops had killed about 200 Sioux men, women, and children. Some 25 soldiers were killed too. The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of Native American resistance to settlement.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-07