American lit dates

• 3rd Frontier - 1840 - 1900
• Manifest destiny - phrase first coined in 1845 by John O’Sullivan
• The US population exploded in the 1st half of the 19th century - around 5 million in 1800 to more than 23 million by 1850
• Economic depressions in 1819 and 1839 - would drive millions of Americans westward
• American Progress - 1872, by John Gast
• Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorised him to reserve land west of the Mississippi River and exchange it for Native American land to the east of the Mississippi
• Gold Rush - 1848 - 1852 —> more than 300,000 people came to California during the gold rish
• California gained statehood in 1850
• The Antebellum South - late 18th century - Civil War (1861)
• American Civil War - 1861 - 1865
• Homestead Act (1862) - farmers were granted public land in the West if they were able to settle on it for at least 5 years.
• The Reconstruction era (1865 - 1877)- effort to reintegrate the Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly freed people into the US.
• Civil Rights Act (1866) - allowed Black Americans to rent and own property, enter contracts, bring cases against other Black Americans and allowed those who infringed their rights to be sued.
• The Gilded Age - 1870 - 1900 —> the rapid expansion of industrialisation led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labour force.
• The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
• The Progressive Era - 1900 - 1920
• WWI - 1914 - 1918 —> Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 largely on the basis that America was going to be kept out of the conflict
• The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920-1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society”.
• The Great Migration - 1916 - 1970
• Women won the right to vote in 1920 —> more than 2 million women joined the workforce in the 1920s
• The population of Long Island doubled between 1920 and 1930, and bridges and tunnels to Manhattan made industrial development and commuting possible.
• Prohibition - 1919 - 1933
• The Harlem Renaissance - 1918 - 1937
• The Great Depression - 1929 - 1939 —> by 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the government’s banks had failed.
• The term the ‘American Dream’ was first coined in 1931.
• Wall Street Crash (1929) - increase in production of consumer goods, housing and soaring stock prices. High demand could not go on and the stock marker crashed —> more than 25% of the labour force were out of work.
• The Dust Bowl - 1930 - 1936
• The New Deal (FDR) - 1933 - 1939