- [Instructor] In this video
I want to take a look back
at the period from 1800 to 1848,
kinda from a bird's eye view.
This is a huge time in American history.
In 1800, the United States
was just a fledgling nation,
less than 20 years out from
winning its independence.
Political parties were in their infancy,
infrastructure was
practically non-existent,
and one disastrous war with a world power,
with the likes of Great Britain or France,
could easily have wiped it out.
But fast forward to 1848,
less than 50 years later,
and by then the United
States had developed
a great deal as a unified
independent nation.
It occupied a vast amount of
territory in North America,
trains and steamships transported
goods to distant markets,
factories churned out textiles,
and politics saw the rise and fall
of not one, but two party systems.
Despite all this growth,
in 1848 the United States
was just 12 years away from the onset
of an incredibly bloody
civil war that pitted
Southern states against
the U.S. government.
This seems like quite a contradiction.
Over the course of the first
half of the 19th century,
was the United States developing
a unified national identity?
Or were its geographic sections
developing a divided regional identity,
barely held together by the Constitution?
What we're doing here really
is asking a historical question.
If you saw this on the AP exam,
the question might look
something like this.
Explain the extent to
which politics, economics,
and foreign policy
promoted the development
of the American identity
from 1800 to 1848.
Sounds pretty fancy schmancy.
But we can translate that
to a simpler question.
What tied the United States
together as a country
over the course of 1800 to
1848, and what split it apart?
To answer this, let's review what
happened in this period
in these three areas,
politics, economics, and foreign policy,
and see if we think they contributed
to a unified American identity
or a divided regional identity.
And just to remind you
this is a big overview
of the historical developments
from 1800 to 1848.
I'm not gonna take a lot of time here
to explain everything in depth,
but if you find that you're unfamiliar
with some of the things we discuss,
make a note of it and then go back
to review that concept
when you've got some time.
Okay, as we set about
to answer this question,
let's just brainstorm some of
the major political, economic,
and foreign policy developments
in this time period.
It doesn't have to be an exhaustive
list of everything that happened,
just some key highlights.
I'll suggest a few, but
feel free to pause the video
and see what you can think of on your own.
Alright, what happened in politics?
Well, there was the development
of political parties.
First, the Federalists and
the Democratic Republicans,
and then later on they were replaced
with the Jacksonian
Democrats and the Whigs.
There was the expansion
of the right to vote
to almost all white men in this era,
and there were a lot of
political controversies.
Two that come to mind are
the Missouri Compromise
and the Nullification Crisis.
So which of these things
contributed to a unified identity,
and which contributed
to a regional identity?
Well, I would say that
the Missouri Compromise
and the Nullification
Crisis were both examples
of regional identity
trumping American identity,
since they concerned the balance of power
between free states and slave states,
and whether states or
the Federal Government
should have the final say.
The expansion of the right to vote
seems like a point for unification to me
since it celebrated American democracy
as the birthright of
white men from all states.
On political parties, I might
say this is inconclusive.
There are elements of both
unity and division among them
since political parties
weren't exclusively defined
by region in this time period,
but they were often defined by how
much power they believed
the Federal Government
should have compared to the states.
Okay, on to economics.
Major developments in
this time period include
the Market Revolution, the
controversy over tariffs,
and the increasing separation
between the economies
of the industrial North
and the agricultural South.
Of these, I would say that
separate economic systems
definitely promoted a
divided regional identity.
The controversy over tariffs
also promoted divisions
in that Southern plantation owners
thought that tariffs gave advantage
to Northern manufacturers
at their expense.
The Market Revolution is a
bit tricky to categorize.
It promoted some ties between the sections
because it became easier
to conduct business over
long distances due to innovations
in transportation and communication.
But a lot of the major networks
of transportation and
communication connected the North
and the West to each other, not the South.
Lastly, foreign policy.
In this era there was the War of 1812,
as well as westward expansion
that caused conflict
with Native Americans and with Mexico.
I'd say that the War of
1812 was a force that
brought Americans together in
a shared sense of patriotism
following victories like
the Battle of New Orleans.
The westward expansion was
a bit more of a mixed bag.
In general, most white Americans supported
the concept of Manifest Destiny
and thought that the
removal of Native Americans
for that purpose was justified.
But westward expansion also
led to regional conflict
because the admission of
new states into the Union
threatened the balance of power between
free and slave states in Congress.
So based on the evidence
we've gathered here,
let's see if we can formulate a
thesis statement to answer this question.
The prompt is asking us
to evaluate the extent
to which developments in politics,
economics, and foreign policy promoted
the development of an American identity.
So I think that we want
to approach this not as
an either-or, or a yes-no question,
but rather a question of degree.
I would say that the overall evidence
here points to a divided regional
identity with a few points of unity.
Americans agreed that the
United States needed to expand,
and that democracy was the
birthright of all white men,
but in almost every
other aspect of politics,
economics, and foreign policy they were
divided along sectional lines.
Would you come to the same conclusion?
Remember this is only one way
of answering this question.
You may have come up with
some different examples,
or you might interpret these examples
in a different way than
I have, and that's okay.
The next step now that you've
evaluated your evidence
and composed your thesis statement,
is to think about how you
might arrange the thoughts
you've gathered here into
an argumentative essay.
