Critical Thinking Discussion questions - History

Chapter 18: Chapter Outline

The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter.

Instructions: Review the outline to recall events and their relationships as presented in the chapter. Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar.

I. Women, Men, and the Solitude of Self

A.

Changes in Family Life

1.

The Victorian ideal of domesticity called for masculine restraint and female moral influence. But industrialization was transforming domesticity, as Americans confronted modern conditions of life. More and more, women sought to exert their influence outside the family, through involvement in reform movements and civic life.

2.

Americans were also wrestling with modernity: in an increasingly market-driven society, they championed the freedom of each individual to choose his or her path. They expressed anxiety and distress over attendant risks and upheavals. As industrialization transformed society, Americans reshaped (without necessarily discarding) their traditional attachments and beliefs.

3.

The average family—especially among the middle class—continued to get smaller in the post-Civil War decades. A long decline in the birth rate, which began in the late eighteenth century, continued in this era. In 1800, white women who survived to menopause had borne an average of seven children; by 1900, the average was 3.6.

4.

Several factors limited childbearing. Americans married at older ages, and many mothers tried—as they had for decades—to space pregnancies more widely by nursing young children for several years, which suppressed fertility. By the late nineteenth century, couples also used a range of other contraceptive methods, such as condoms and diaphragms, though they rarely wrote about using them.

5.

In 1873, Anthony Comstock, the crusading secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, secured a federal law that banned obscene materials from the U.S. mail. The law prohibited circulation of almost any information about sex and birth control.

6.

As they grew to adulthood, rural young people faced new dilemmas and choices. Traditionally, daughters had provided essential labor for spinning and weaving cloth, but industrialization had removed those tasks from the household to the factory.

7.

Finding themselves without a useful role in the household, many farm daughters sought paid employment. In an age of declining rural prosperity, many sons also left the farm and—like immigrants arriving from other countries—often set aside part of their pay to help the folks at home.

B.

The Rise of High School

1.

For young people who hoped to secure respectable and lucrative jobs, the watchword was education. A high school education was particularly valuable for boys from affluent families who hoped to enter to professional or managerial work. Daughters attended in even larger numbers than their brothers.

2.

By 1900, seventy-one out of every one hundred Americans between the ages of five and eighteen attended school. That figure rose even further in the early twentieth century, as public officials adopted and enforced laws requiring school attendance.

3.

Most high schools were co-educational. The curriculum included literature and composition, history and geography, biology and mathematics, and a mix of ancient and modern languages. Boys and girls engaged in friendly—and sometimes not-so-friendly—rivalry when girls captured an outsize share of academic prizes.

C.

College Men and Women

1.

Some high school graduates sought further degrees, as the higher education system expanded rapidly. Through most of the nineteenth century, the percentage of Americans who attended college had hovered around 2 percent. Driven partly by the expansion of public universities, that percentage began to rise steadily in the 1880s, reaching 8 percent by 1920.

2.

The curriculum at private colleges also changed. Under dynamic president Charles Eliot, between 1869 and 1909, Harvard College pioneered the use of liberal arts.

3.

In the South, one of the most famous educational projects was Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881. Washington, born in slavery, not only taught but also exemplified the goal of self-help.

4.

Washington became the most prominent black leader of his generation. His autobiography, Up from Slavery, became an immediate bestseller in 1901. Washington’s style of leadership, based on avoiding confrontation with whites and cultivating patronage and private influence, was well suited to the difficult era after Reconstruction.

5.

In the Northeast and South, women most often attended single-sex institutions or teacher-training colleges where the student body was overwhelmingly female.

6.

For female students from affluent families, private colleges offered an education equivalent to men’s. Vassar College started the trend when it opened in 1861; Smith, Wellesley, and others soon followed.

7.

Co-education was more prevalent in the Midwest and West, where state universities opened their doors to female students after the Civil War. Women were also admitted to most of the southern African American colleges founded during Reconstruction.

D.

Masculinity and the Rise of Sports.

1.

Gender expectations also changed for middle-class men. Traditionally, the mark of a successful American man was his economic independence: he was his own boss. But by the late nineteenth century, more and more men worked in salaried positions or for wages. Increasing numbers also did “brainwork” in an office, rather than using their muscles outdoors. Anxieties arose that the American male was becoming, as one magazine editor warned, “weak, effeminate, decaying.” One answer was athletics.

2.

Before the Civil War, there were no distinctively American games except for Native American lacrosse. The most popular team sport was cricket. Over the next six decades, however, sports became a fundamental part of American manhood—and a big business.

3.

One of the first promoters of physical fitness was the Young Men’s Christian Association. Adapted from Britain and introduced to Boston in 1851, the YMCA combined vigorous activities for young men with an evangelizing appeal.

4.

In cities and towns across America, the YMCA built gymnasiums and athletic facilities for men, and later women through the YWCA.

5.

In the post-Civil War years, no other sport in America was as successful as baseball. Earlier in the century, Americans had played various stick and ball games; the version called baseball was first played in New York around 1842.

6.

Rules continued to develop in the 1840s and 1850s, and baseball’s popularity spread in military camps during the Civil War.

7.

Big-time professional baseball arose after the war, with the launching of the National League in 1876.

8.

American men not only rooted for professional baseball teams, but they also got out on the diamond to play. Until the 1870s, most amateur players were clerks and white-collar workers who had leisure and the income to pay for uniforms.

9.

Shut out of white leagues, black players and fans turned instead to segregated professional teams. These had emerged as early as Reconstruction, showcasing both athletic talent and race pride.

10.

The most controversial sport was college football, which began at elite Ivy League schools during the 1880s.

11.

Like baseball and the YMCA, football soon attracted business sponsorship.

12.

The first professional teams emerged around the turn of the century in western Pennsylvania’s steel towns. Executives of Carnegie Steel organized teams in Homestead and Braddock, and the first league appeared during the anthracite coal strike of 1902.

E.

The Great Outdoors

1.

As the rise of sports suggests, Americans began to look back on Victorian life as stuffy and claustrophobic, and they revolted by heading outdoors.

2.

A craze for bicycling swept the country; in 1890, at the height of the mania, U.S. manufacturers sold an astonishing 10 million bikes.

3.

Those with leisure time used the rail networks to get outdoors and closer to nature. For people of modest means, this most often meant Sunday afternoon by the lake.

4.

As Americans went searching for such renewal, national and state governments set aside more public lands for preservation and recreation. The United States substantially expanded its park system, and during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, extended the reach of national forests, now overseen by a U.S. Forest Service.

5.

By 1916, President Woodrow Wilson provided consistent administrative oversight of the national parks, signing an act creating the National Park Service. A year later, the system numbered thirteen parks—including Maine’s Acadia, the first that lay east of the Mississippi River.

6.

Further preservation was carried out after 1906 through the Lacey Act, which allowed the U.S. president, without congressional approval, to set aside “objects of historic and scientific interest” as national monuments.

7.

Environmentalists worked not only to preserve land but also to protect wildlife.

8.

Many states also passed game laws to protect wildlife and regulate hunting and fishing, redefining these as recreational, rather than subsistence activities.

9.

In all parts of the country, new game laws triggered controversy over the uses of wildlife. In the South, conservationists got many game laws passed in the early twentieth century, but not until the late 1910s and 1920s did judges and juries begin taking them seriously.

II. Women in the Public Sphere

A.

Negotiating Public Space

1.

Gradually, women of all classes and backgrounds began to claim their right to public space. At the same time, middle-class women sought in a different way to expand their place beyond the household, by building reform movements and taking political action.

2.

No one promoted commercial domesticity more successfully than P. T. Barnum, who used the country’s expanding rail network to develop his famous traveling circus. Barnum condemned earlier circus managers who had opened their tents to “the rowdy element.”

3.

Finding Americans eager for excursions, railroad companies made their cars comfortable for respectable women and children.

4.

The purveyors of modern consumer culture designed one popular site specifically for women: the department store. In earlier generations, men had largely controlled the family pocketbook; women’s task was to labor at home to produce their families’ food and clothing.

5.

By the late nineteenth century, especially in towns and cities, women became the main family shoppers. Department stores attracted middle-class ladies by offering tearooms, children’s play areas, and other features to make women feel welcome.

B.

From Female Moral Authority to Feminism

1.

Changing expectations about the use of public space reflected a broader expansion of women’s public activities, from patriotic work to many types of reform. Starting in the 1880s, women’s clubs sprang up in cities and towns across the United States. So many clubs had formed by 1890 that their leaders created a nationwide General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

2.

Such groups frequently made maternalist arguments: they justified their work based on what they saw as women’s special talents.

3.

One of the first places women sought to reform was the saloon. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, spread rapidly after 1879, when the charismatic Frances Willard became its leader.

4.

It became the leading organization advocating prohibition of liquor. The WCTU, more than any other group of the late nineteenth century, launched women into public reform.

5.

The movement for women’s suffrage benefited from the influx of temperance support.

6.

Though it divided into two rival organizations during Reconstruction, the movement reunited in 1890 in the National American Woman Suffrage Organization.

7.

Soon afterward, suffragists won two victories in the West: Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.

8.

Like temperance work, patriotic activism became women’s special province in the post-Civil War decades. The Daughters of the American Revolution, founded in 1890, devoted themselves to celebrating the memory of Revolutionary War heroes.

9.

African American women did not sit idle in the face of discrimination and exclusion by white women from philanthropic organizations.

10.

By 1896, African American women created the National Association of Colored Women, a network of local women’s clubs that focused their attention on community support.

11.

Black club women arranged for the care of orphans, founded homes for the elderly, worked for temperance, and undertook public health campaigns.

12.

The largest black women’s group arose within the National Baptist Church (NBC), which by 1906 represented 2.4 million African American churchgoers.

13.

Founded in 1900, the Women’s Convention of the NBC promoted and funded night schools, health clinics, kindergartens, day care centers, and outreach programs for men and women in prison.

14.

Despite divisions of race and ethnicity, many women recognized that they shared problems across lines of economic class.

15.

Some created new organizations to call attention to the plight of poorly paid female workers and to agitate for better working conditions. The most famous example was the National Trade Union League, founded in New York in 1903.

16.

Financed by wealthy supporters, the league trained working-class leaders like Rose Schneiderman, who became a union organizer among garment workers. Although often frustrated by the patronizing ways of their well-to-do sponsors, such trade-union women identified their cause with the broader struggle for women’s rights.

17.

By the early twentieth century, the most radical women took a public stance against women’s “separate sphere.”

18.

A famous site of sexual rebellion was New York’s Greenwich Village, where radical intellectuals, including many gays and lesbians, created a vibrant community by the 1910s.

19.

Along with many other political activities, women in Greenwich Village founded the Heterodoxy Club (1912), which was open to any woman who pledged not to be “orthodox in her opinions.”

20.

The club brought together intellectuals, journalists, and labor organizers who supported voting rights, but had a more sweeping view of what was needed for women’s liberation. Such women began to call themselves feminists and to articulate broad goals for women’s personal development.

21.

As women entered the public sphere, feminists argued, they should not just fulfill Victorian expectations of self-sacrifice for others; they should work on their own behalf.

C.

Domesticity and Missions

1.

While few American women shared fully in the ideas of the Heterodoxy Club, hundreds of thousands engaged in more widely acceptable forms of public activism, through their churches and religious groups.

2.

Some sponsored Christian missions in the American West, which eastern women regarded as uncivilized and in need of uplift. The Women’s National Indian Association, for example, funded missionary work on reservations, arguing that women had a special duty to promote “civilized home life” among Indians.

3.

In San Francisco, elite and middle-class white women built a rescue home for Chinese women who had been sold into sexual slavery. The project was racially condescending, and it also generated fierce opposition from white residents who hated Chinese immigration.

4.

Nowhere was the rhetoric of domesticity more powerful than in the movement for overseas missions, which grew from a modest start in the pre-Civil War period to a peak in the early twentieth century.

5.

By 1915, American religious organizations sponsored over 9,000 overseas missionaries; these workers in the field were supported at home by millions of missionary society members, including over 3 million women.

6.

Missionaries who worked to foster Christianity and domesticity often showed considerable condescension toward their “poor heathen sisters.”

7.

In many places, missionaries won converts, particularly by offering medical care and promoting scientific progress and women’s education. Some missionaries came to love and respect the people among whom they served. But others became deeply frustrated.

III. Science and Faith

A.

Darwinism and Its Critics

1.

As the activities of missionaries showed, the United States continued to be a deeply religious nation. However, the late nineteenth century brought increasing public attention to another kind of belief: faith in science.

2.

Researchers in many fields became converts to the doctrine of positivism: the belief that one could rely only on hard facts and observable phenomena. In their enthusiasm, some positivists rejected all reform efforts as romantic and sentimental: they believed only a struggle for “survival of the fittest” could bring true progress.

3.

Evolution—the idea that species are not fixed, but ever-changing—was not a simple idea that scientists all agreed upon in the late nineteenth century. The term was widely associated with British naturalist Charles Darwin and his immensely influential book, On the Origin of Species (1859), which proposed the theory of natural selection.

4.

In nature, Darwin argued, all creatures struggle to survive. Individual members of a species are born with random genetic mutations that better fit them for their particular environment.

5.

Social Darwinism, as Spencer’s idea became known, found its American champion in William Graham Sumner, a sociology professor at Yale. Competition, said Sumner, is a law of nature that “can no more be done away with than gravitation.”

6.

The most dubious applications of evolutionary ideas were codified into new reproductive laws. Some Americans embraced eugenics, an emerging “science” of human breeding. Eugenicists argued that mentally deficient people should be prevented from reproducing.

7.

They proposed sterilizing those deemed “unfit,” especially residents of state asylums for the insane or mentally disabled.

8.

In the early twentieth century, almost half of U.S. states enacted eugenics laws. By the time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, about 20,000 people had been sterilized, with California and Virginia taking the lead.

B.

Realism in the Arts

1.

Inspired by the quest for facts, American authors rebelled against romanticism and Victorian sentimentality and took up literary realism.

2.

In the 1880s, William Dean Howells, one of the country’s most eminent editors and novelists, began to call for writers “to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible.”

3.

By the 1890s, a younger generation of writers took up the call. Theodore Dreiser dismissed “professional optimists” who limited their vision to “only our better selves, and arrive at a happy ending.”

4.

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), privately printed because no publisher would touch it, described the seduction, abandonment, and death of a slum girl.

5.

In Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a collection of stories based on his family’s struggle to farm in Iowa and South Dakota, Hamlin Garland turned the same unsparing eye on the hardships of rural life.

6.

Some authors believed realism did not go far enough to overturn Victorian morality. Jack London spent his teenage years as a factory worker, sailor, and tramp. In stories such as “The Law of Life” (1901) and “To Build a Fire” (1908), London dramatized what he saw as the harsh reality of an uncaring universe.

7.

London and Crane helped create literary naturalism. They suggested that human beings were not so much rational agents and shapers of their own destinies, but blind victims of forces beyond their control—including their own subconscious impulses and desires.

8.

America’s most famous fiction writer, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), came to take an equally bleak view. Mourning the loss of his wife and two daughters, Twain was also worn down by failed investments and bankruptcy.

9.

By the time Twain died in 1910, realist and naturalist writers had laid the groundwork for literary modernism. Modernists rejected traditional canons of literary taste. They tended to be religious skeptics or atheists. They questioned the whole idea of progress and order, and they focused their attention on the sub-conscious and the “primitive” mind.

10.

In the visual arts, technological changes helped introduce a new aesthetic: by 1900, some photographers argued that the rise of photography made painting obsolete.

11.

Painters invented their own form of realism. In 1913, New York Realists participated in one of the most controversial events in American art history, the Armory Show.

12.

Housed in an enormous National Guard building in New York, the Show introduced America to modern art. Some painters whose work appeared at the Armory Show were experimenting with such styles as cubism, characterized by abstract, geometric forms.

13.

A striking feature of both realism and modernism, as they developed, was that many of their leading writers and artists were men. They denounced nineteenth-century culture as hopelessly feminized and ridiculed popular sentimental novels, especially those written for women. In making their work strong and modern, these men also wanted to make it masculine.

C.

Religion: Diversity and Innovation

1.

By the turn of the century, new scientific, literary, and artistic ideas posed a significant challenge to religious faith. Some Americans argued that science would sweep away religion altogether.

2.

Nonetheless, American religious practice remained vibrant. Protestants developed creative new responses to the era of industrialization, while millions of newcomers built their own institutions for worship and religious education.

3.

By 1920, almost 2 million children attended Catholic elementary schools instead of public schools, and Catholic dioceses across the country operated over 1,500 high schools.

4.

Like Protestants, some Catholics and Jews succumbed to secular pressures and fell away from religious practice.

5.

Those immigrant Catholics who remained faithful to the church were anxious to preserve what they had known in Europe, and they generally supported the church’s traditional wing. But they also wanted church life to express their ethnic identities.

6.

In the late nineteenth century, many native-born, prosperous American Jews embraced Reform Judaism, abandoning many religious practices, from keeping a kosher kitchen to conducting services in Hebrew.

7.

But this was not the way of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. Generally much poorer and also eager to preserve their own traditions, they founded Orthodox synagogues, often in vacant stores, and practiced Judaism as they had at home.

8.

Like Catholics and Jews, Protestants found their religious beliefs challenged by modern ideas and ways of life. Some Protestant thinkers found ways to reconcile Christianity with Darwin’s theory of evolution and other scientific principles.

9.

While some Protestants enlisted in foreign missions, others responded by evangelizing among the unchurched and indifferent. They provided reading rooms, day nurseries, vocational classes, and other services; they funded YMCAs and YWCAs.

10.

This movement to renew religious faith through dedication to public welfare and social justice became known as the Social Gospel.

11.

Its goals were epitomized by Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps (1896), which told the story of a congregation whose members resolved to live by Christ’s precepts for one year.

12.

An example of the Social Gospel at work, the Salvation Army, which arrived from Great Britain in 1879, spread a message of repentance among the urban poor, offering assistance programs that ranged from soup kitchens to shelters for former prostitutes.

13.

Disturbed by what they saw as rising secularism and abandonment of belief, some conservative ministers and their allies held an annual series of Bible Conferences at Niagara Falls. The resulting "Niagara Creed" reaffirmed the literal truth of the Bible and the certainty of damnation for those not born again in Christ. These Protestants called themselves fundamentalists, based on their belief in the essential truth of the Bible and its central place in Christian faith.