THE RECONSTRUCTION AND AFTER

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.

More development.

15.2.1.At the turn of the XX centurythe United States became the world’s foremost industrial nation. It emerged as the leader in meatpacking, in production of timber and steel, and in the mining of coal, iron, gold, and silver. By the turn of the century, industrialization had transformed commerce, business organization, the environment, the workplace, the home, and everyday life. Many factors fueled industrial growth: abundant resources, new technology, cheap energy, fast transport, and the availability of capital and labor. Mines, forests, and livestock in the west provided raw materials for major industries. Railroad expansion enabled businesses to move raw materials to factories and to send products to urban markets. A steady stream of immigrants arrived to work in America’s mines and factories.

15.2.2. Technological advances transformed production. A trail of inventions, including the telephone, typewriter, phonograph, electric light, cash register, air brake, refrigerator car, and automobile, led to new industries. Thomas Edison registered more than 1,000 patents for devices, including electric light and an electrical generation system. One hundred years ago there were 178 compa­nies in America which made cars. But cars were expensive. They were made for the rich. Henry Ford wanted to make a cheap car. To keep prices low, he looked for ways to build cars quickly. Ford decided to build cars using an assembly line. In the end, Ford's fac­tory in Detroit could make a car from start to fin­ish in just 93 minutes.

At about the same time that Ford was building his first cars in Detroit, Wilbur and Orville Wright were building an air­plane in Dayton, Ohio. They tried it out on a windy beach in North Carolina on December 17,1903. The age of air transportation began on that day.

15.2.3.At the same time,strikes and lockouts were taking place, and workers often succeeded in winning shorter hours. The Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886 grew out of a strike against a company that built agricultural machinery. Union leaders called a protest meeting at which police intervened and a bomb exploded, causing many deaths. Eight workers were convicted of murder, and four were hanged. This is how the international holiday began, May 1.

15.2.4.Workers' organizations emerged, one of which was the Industrial Workers of the World (it still exists). One activist of the organization was an immigrant from Sweden, songwriter and poet Joe Hill (also known as Joseph Hillstrom). In 1915, at the age of 36, he was executed after a controversial trial. His last poem was written the night before his execution. After his death, he became a legendary figure and the subject of several folk songs. The contemporary songwriter Bob Dylan claims that Hill's story was one of his inspirations to begin writing his own songs. Author Stephen King and his wife Tabitha named their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, after Joe Hill.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 654