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History of the Americas
Explore questions in the History of the Americas category that you can ask Sparky!
- Why would a Southerner care? If I'm a slaveowner, I own a plantation in South Carolina or Georgia, why do I care if Missouri enters as a free state?
- The issue of whether to permit slavery in the territories organized in this new land consumed Congress at the end of the 1840s. During the war, Congressman David Wilmot introduced the _________, a proposal to ban slavery in any new territory acquired from Mexico. The measure passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate.
- In the spring of 1846, tensions mounted between the United States and Mexico, and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) started, in part, over a border dispute between the two countries. Mexico claimed the Nueces River to be Texas's southern border, but the United States insisted the border lay further south at the __________ .
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act re-affirmed the legality of the Missouri Compromise of 1820,
- "We're gonna keep this compromise going "to make sure that there are the same number "of free and slave states, so we'll let ____ in "as a slave state at the same time "we let ____ in as a free state."
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act established that in these territories, the principle of ________ would apply, meaning that the white residents of each territory would vote on whether to permit slavery when applying for statehood.
- He becomes this very famous legislator because he's good at compromising. He's called the "Great Compromiser". Who is "he?"
- One of the things you get out this Compromise of 1850 is a really strong backlash of Abolitionist sentiment in the North. For example,
- This drive to expand the United States West to the Pacific is often called manifest destiny, based on a phrase that was coined by New York journalist __________ , who wrote in 1845 that westward expansion would be "The fulfillment of our manifest destiny "to overspread the continent allotted by Providence "for the free development "of our yearly multiplying millions."Selected:
- Southerners increasingly fought criticism and began to use this phrase which down-played the word, "slavery."
- Another reason if you're, say, a ____________, why you might care whether a new state is a slave state, is you're worried about opportunities for yourself out in the West. We know that Horace Greeley, this famous newspaper editor, he says, "What do you do if you're a ______ in New York, a young white man, who doesn't know how to get ahead?" He says, "Go West,______ . "You can go out there, you can get some land, "you can start a farm, but if you go out there "and you find that all of the land has been bought up "by rich slaveholders from the South, "you might not be able to get any land, "and you certainly might not be able to, "for example, sell your corn at a rate low enough "that you could beat somebody who has free labor." So, there's this interesting economic argument which is it's hard to compete with slavery. I mean, you're literally talking about labor that does not need traditional wages.
- Most important, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave rise to the _______________ , a new political party that attracted northern Whigs, Democrats who shunned the Kansas-Nebraska Act, members of the Free-Soil Party, and assorted abolitionists.
- The Mexican-American War confirmed Texas's southern border, indicating the United States victory. The United States also acquired ____________ , New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.
- Meanwhile, the debate over the __________ was one of the major events leading up to the Civil War. The legislation, which was strongly opposed by the slaveholding South, asserted that the Mexican-American War had not been fought for the purpose of expanding slavery, and stipulated that slavery would never exist in the territories acquired from Mexico in the war.
- What made the slave owners angry about the Compromise of 1850?
- Before there were gold miners flooding San Francisco, most people who went to the West were farmers. As land became scarcer in the East, a trickle of farming families headed to the fertile of ___________ Oregon, through the Oregon Trail.
- The most appropriate title for the image blow is... (image showing expansion of the south)
- Until 1836, Texas had been part of Mexico, but in that year a group of settlers from the United States who lived in Mexican Texas
- This is a print showing the San Francisco Harbor in 1848 (below left). There's a little smattering of houses, and a few boats in the water. It looks pretty peaceful, and it was. San Francisco only had about a thousand residents, and California had only newly become a U.S. territory at the close of the Mexican-American War. And this is a photograph of San Francisco Harbor in 1850 (below right). The water is crowded with ships, and the land is crowded with houses. Less than two years later, San Francisco had 30-thousand residents, mainly young men who had come from all over the world, making the city perhaps the most culturally-diverse place on earth at that time period. What happened?
- This (picture) transformed cotton into a profitable crop by reducing its processing time and making large-scale cultivation possible. What is it?