The Second Great Awakening - part 3

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- [Instructor] Okay, so
we've been talking about

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The Second Great Awakening and its context

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in early 19th century America.

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The Second Great Awakening was this period

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of religious revival that was kind of

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at its hot point in 1820 to 1840

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and in the last couple of videos,

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we've been talking about just the nature

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of this society that produced
The Second Great Awakening,

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particularly how they responded to changes

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in how people related to
each other in business

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and also just broader social changes

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like the expansion of American democracy

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and the expansion of
American territory west.

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So in this last video,
I want to talk about

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some of the outgrowths of
The Second Great Awakening.

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So why do we care so much that

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there was this period
of religious revival?

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What did it lead to in American life?

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There are two major things
that were directly related

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to The Second Great Awakening
in this early 19th century.

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New religious movements
in the United States,

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some of which are still with us today

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and even more importantly
for the time period,

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major reform movements, including

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the Movement for Abolition,
the end of slavery,

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which is going to lead to the
outbreak of The Civil War.

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So let's look a little bit
closer at these two things.

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So as we've talked about,
The Second Great Awakening

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promoted both the idea that one should try

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to create heaven on earth

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and also, a more democratic
approach to religion in general,

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that it didn't matter who you were.

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If you were a man, a woman,
white, black, enslaved, free,

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you were still entitled to a
personal relationship with God

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and a chance at salvation.

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So one of the things this
meant in this time period

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is that there's just a lot
of religious experimentation.

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A lot of new American religions
emerge at this time period,

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some of which are still with us today,

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some of which are not.

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This here is a representation
of the Shakers,

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which were a religious community of,

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they embrace kind of simplicity.

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They separated the sexes.

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They practiced celibacy.

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Just as kind of trying to make
their daily lives more pure

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and unfortunately, the celibacy part

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meant that they more or
less died out by the 1940s,

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although there are a handful of Shakers

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who are still alive today

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and they were called the Shakers

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because they would have these kind of

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ecstatic religious experiences,

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which you can see are kind of similar to

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what happened in the camp meetings.

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So even though they didn't have sex,

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they would kind of get out their ecstasy

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in this process of
these big circle dances,

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which people looked at and they said

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they seemed like they were shaking,

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so they were the Shakers.

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On the other side of the spectrum,

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there was the Oneida community,

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which was led by a man
named John Humphrey Noyes

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and they preached the idea that

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one should have no earthly
attachments basically

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and that meant also to a spouse,

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so they believed in what
was called complex marriage

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or what we would really call free love.

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There was no such thing
as an individual marriage,

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that women and men could have

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sex with whomever they pleased.

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It's interesting that approaches to sex

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were very central to
these religious movements.

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Probably the most important
religious movement

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to come out of this time period

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was the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints,

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also known as the Mormons,

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who were founded by Joseph
Smith in Rochester, New York

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and Smith had a vision that
he was visited by an angel

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who presented him with gold plates

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and on these gold plates
was a new Scripture

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called The Book of Mormon

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and Smith's followers
really continued to be

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devoted to the religion, even though

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they faced a lot of persecution,

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particularly over their
early practice of polygamy

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until they continued to move west

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under the leadership of a
second man, Brigham Young,

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who took over after Smith was murdered

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by an angry crowd in Illinois

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who then led the Mormons to Utah

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where they continue to be a major

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religious group to this day.

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Oh, and one other interesting thing

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about this is the Oneida community.

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Although, it itself did not survive,

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one of the ways that they
made money as a community

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was by making silverware
and so Oneida Silverware

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is actually the descendant company

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of this really interesting
communal experiment

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and they lasted, I believe, until 2006,

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so if you ever had Oneida Silverware,

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you were looking at an artifact

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of a 19th century religious movement.

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So the last and probably
the most important part

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of The Second Great Awakening
that I wanna talk about

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is its influence on reform movements.

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So let me give myself a little
bit more space to write here.

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There are several 19th
century reform movements

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that are tied in to The
Second Great Awakening.

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One of these would be
The Temperance Movement,

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which hoped to reduce and or eliminate

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people's consumption of alcohol

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and you can kinda tie this back

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to the idea of heaven on earth, right?

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How can you have a stable family home,

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how can you have a godly society

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if everybody's drunk all the time?

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But I would say the most important

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reform movement associated
with The Second Great Awakening

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was the Abolitionist Movement

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and remember that Harriet Beecher Stowe,

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who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin,

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which was one of the greatest
abolition or anti-slavery

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advertisements in the world,

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was the daughter of Lyman Beecher,

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one of the greatest preachers
of The Second Great Awakening

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and so as people came to believe that

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everyone's life was equally valuable,

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they became more and more involved

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in the idea that slavery should not exist,

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that people who were enslaved had souls

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that were just as worthy of salvation

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as anyone who was already free

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and so they also saw this
as one of the perversions

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of God's word and a
perversion of the family,

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which they saw as the central unit

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of American democracy and Republicanism.

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So slavery should not exist.

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People who were really
motivated by their faith in God

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and their faith in trying to create

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heaven on earth and a better society

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campaigned really strenuously
for the end of slavery

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and ultimately, were successful.

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So this is a really complex topic,

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The Second Great Awakening.

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If we look back at our web again,

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we can see that this
wave of religious revival

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was connected in all
sorts of interesting ways

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to the economic and political
changes of the time period

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and in its way, led to all sorts of

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different social changes,

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so I think it's a good example of how

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it's sometimes really hard to separate

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things that happened in the past

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into really neat boxes, right?

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That, oh, there was politics.

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There was religion.

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There was culture.

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There were economics, but in many ways,

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they're all bound together
in a larger culture,

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within which everyday
individuals navigated their lives

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and it's also good to show us that

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sometimes we don't exactly know

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why things happened in the past.

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We know that people got really interested

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in religion in this time period,

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but historians have differing ideas

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about why that might have been.

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Some say that it was a form
of trying to control people

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as it was more and more important to have

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a dutiful workforce for a
factory-based industrial society

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and some people say that maybe,

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it was just about demographic
and political shifts

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in who had power, who had
money, and who got to vote,

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but we do know that The
Second Great Awakening

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and these ideas of trying
to improve America,

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to improve the world, and
to create heaven on earth

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led to all sorts of interesting things

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that are still with us today,

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including religious movements
and the end of slavery.


The Second Great Awakening - part 2

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- [Instructor] In the last video,

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I started discussing the
Second Great Awakening,

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which was this era of
increased religious fervor,

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religious conversion,

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and religiously inspired social action

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that happened in the early 19th century

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of the United States' history,

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so approximately 1790 to 1850,

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although I'd say that
the height of this time

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was from about 1820 to 1840.

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And the Second Great Awakening involved

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circuit riders, who were preachers

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without their own congregation going out,

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setting up these camp meetings,

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where they would preach
to thousands of people

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about a very emotional
version of Christianity.

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This included encouraging individuals

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to give up their ways as sinners

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and to work for the
creation of heaven on Earth.

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But when we think as historians,

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it's not enough just to say,

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okay, there was an explosion of religion

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in American culture in
the early 19th century.

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Instead we want to say

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what conditions in American
life led to this explosion?

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Why did this major cultural change happen?

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So let's explore some of what was going on

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in the early 19th century

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that led people to reinterpret religion.

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As I described in the last video,

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the Second Great Awakening
is part of this larger web

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of cultural, social,
and political movements

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and economic movements

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that are going on in this time period.

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Historians have spent a lot of time

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trying to figure out what
was going on in American life

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that led to this sudden
reemergence of religious devotion.

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So let's explore more
on this side of our web

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and I have two maps
for us to explore here.

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One is a map of the Erie Canal.

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And this canal, which
allowed goods and crops

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and all sorts of things to be transported

00:02:04.549 --> 00:02:08.897
from western New York down
to the Port of New York City,

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and this is kind of the area
that we're looking at here.

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Let's see if I can make
it a little more obvious.

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So this is a blow-up of that
little region right there.

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This canal was completed in 1825.

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And I tell you this not just
because canals are awesome,

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although they are,

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but because the Erie Canal
is a really important moment

00:02:31.430 --> 00:02:33.907
in what's called the Market Revolution.

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Now, I'll go more into
the Market Revolution

00:02:36.535 --> 00:02:38.137
in another video,

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but what's important about
the Market Revolution

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is that it's this time when
how Americans did business

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and their social interactions

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with people that they did business with

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really changed a lot.

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So there are a couple important aspects

00:02:52.382 --> 00:02:54.123
of the Market Revolution.

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One of these is a revolution
in transportation,

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which includes the invention

00:03:01.329 --> 00:03:03.996
and slow expansion of railroads,

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canals, like the Erie Canal,

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steamships.

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And steamships let you do things like

00:03:12.196 --> 00:03:14.388
go the wrong way up the Mississippi River

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and look at all the farmland that leads

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to this Port of New Orleans here.

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So these new forms of transportation

00:03:22.615 --> 00:03:25.219
make it much easier for farmers

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and people who produce goods

00:03:28.800 --> 00:03:31.967
to get those goods to distant markets.

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So if you're a farmer here in Buffalo,

00:03:38.593 --> 00:03:43.009
now, instead of only being
able to sell your apples,

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say, to people who live
within a certain radius

00:03:46.572 --> 00:03:49.176
before your apples go
bad, you can just put them

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on a nice little barge on the Erie Canal

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and send them down to New York City

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within a number of days.

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Likewise, if you're
farming wheat in Missouri,

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you don't have to sell
to just people in here.

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You can now sell to people

00:04:04.942 --> 00:04:07.048
all the way down in New Orleans.

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And that means you can also

00:04:07.881 --> 00:04:09.930
even sell to people
internationally, right?

00:04:09.930 --> 00:04:11.957
These are the big ports,

00:04:11.957 --> 00:04:15.290
New York City, Philadelphia, Charleston.

00:04:16.663 --> 00:04:18.348
So as a producer of goods,

00:04:18.348 --> 00:04:21.171
you are not just part
of a small local market.

00:04:21.171 --> 00:04:23.670
You're now part of an
international market.

00:04:23.670 --> 00:04:26.603
And it also means you're gonna
need ways of communicating

00:04:26.603 --> 00:04:28.328
with people who are far away,

00:04:28.328 --> 00:04:30.995
like the telegraph, for example.

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But one more anxious aspect

00:04:33.867 --> 00:04:36.222
of this new kind of market-based system

00:04:36.222 --> 00:04:38.860
is that you're no longer doing business

00:04:38.860 --> 00:04:41.363
quite so much with people that you know.

00:04:41.363 --> 00:04:45.530
So you might correspond only
by letter or by telegram

00:04:47.106 --> 00:04:50.669
to the main buyer for your crops.

00:04:50.669 --> 00:04:52.523
And likewise, someone
who's buying those crops

00:04:52.523 --> 00:04:55.672
might only be able to correspond distantly

00:04:55.672 --> 00:04:57.713
with the person who's producing them.

00:04:57.713 --> 00:04:59.718
So this personal relationship

00:04:59.718 --> 00:05:04.227
between people who are
exchanging goods and services

00:05:04.227 --> 00:05:08.098
starts to erode and that's very anxious

00:05:08.098 --> 00:05:09.944
for a lot of people.

00:05:09.944 --> 00:05:11.123
How do you know that the person

00:05:11.123 --> 00:05:13.521
on the other end of your transaction

00:05:13.521 --> 00:05:16.063
isn't going to con you in some way?

00:05:16.063 --> 00:05:18.362
You see this a lot in this time period.

00:05:18.362 --> 00:05:20.382
The United States also starts to urbanize

00:05:20.382 --> 00:05:23.470
and there's lots of writing
about how people worry

00:05:23.470 --> 00:05:25.606
that the people that they're
passing on the street

00:05:25.606 --> 00:05:28.935
might be con men or
otherwise out to get them.

00:05:28.935 --> 00:05:31.330
You know, in many ways,
up until this time,

00:05:31.330 --> 00:05:34.963
the United States had
something of a barter economy.

00:05:34.963 --> 00:05:37.575
If you look at people's personal ledgers,

00:05:37.575 --> 00:05:41.595
you know, everybody
kept a very detailed log

00:05:41.595 --> 00:05:46.113
of what they had given to
whom and who they owed what.

00:05:46.113 --> 00:05:49.059
In an average day, somebody might give you

00:05:49.059 --> 00:05:51.802
a carton of eggs on credit

00:05:51.802 --> 00:05:55.969
and you might build a log
cabin for somebody on credit

00:05:56.827 --> 00:06:00.577
because there was this
mutual community system

00:06:00.577 --> 00:06:04.301
of giving and owing that
everyone had a notion

00:06:04.301 --> 00:06:07.666
could be enforced, at
least through social mores.

00:06:07.666 --> 00:06:09.897
Now, as people begin dealing distantly,

00:06:09.897 --> 00:06:12.653
those social mores don't exist

00:06:12.653 --> 00:06:14.523
and it makes people really nervous.

00:06:14.523 --> 00:06:16.813
The other aspect of this Market Revolution

00:06:16.813 --> 00:06:18.306
that I think is pretty important

00:06:18.306 --> 00:06:20.574
is, in this time period,
more and more people

00:06:20.574 --> 00:06:23.071
start working for wages

00:06:23.071 --> 00:06:26.124
as opposed to being subsistence farmers.

00:06:26.124 --> 00:06:28.550
So, you know, in the
early Colonial period,

00:06:28.550 --> 00:06:31.767
most people worked, it's
kind of a family unit.

00:06:31.767 --> 00:06:35.498
Various tasks might be assigned
to various family members,

00:06:35.498 --> 00:06:38.100
but one way or another,
everybody worked in the home.

00:06:38.100 --> 00:06:40.830
Now, as factories start to spring up

00:06:40.830 --> 00:06:42.722
as part of the Market Revolution,

00:06:42.722 --> 00:06:45.978
people are going to work for wages

00:06:45.978 --> 00:06:49.502
and typically involves
a man leaving the home

00:06:49.502 --> 00:06:51.221
and the woman remaining in it.

00:06:51.221 --> 00:06:53.878
So we get what was known
as the cult of domesticity,

00:06:53.878 --> 00:06:56.850
where women are the guardians of the home

00:06:56.850 --> 00:06:59.451
and the moral guardians of their families

00:06:59.451 --> 00:07:02.900
and men go out into the
cruel world and toil away

00:07:02.900 --> 00:07:04.247
for their daily bread.

00:07:04.247 --> 00:07:05.717
So why does that matter?

00:07:05.717 --> 00:07:06.959
Well, one reason that it matters

00:07:06.959 --> 00:07:10.372
is because people are now
no longer their own bosses.

00:07:10.372 --> 00:07:12.397
Somebody else is the boss of that person.

00:07:12.397 --> 00:07:15.249
And they only have so much motivation

00:07:15.249 --> 00:07:16.913
to get something done, right?

00:07:16.913 --> 00:07:19.548
If your whole family's subsistence depends

00:07:19.548 --> 00:07:22.619
on you making sure that you
get this crop in on time,

00:07:22.619 --> 00:07:24.220
you're gonna make sure it happens.

00:07:24.220 --> 00:07:26.543
But if you're just being paid by the hour

00:07:26.543 --> 00:07:29.954
to run a spindle at a textile factory,

00:07:29.954 --> 00:07:32.312
how much money your boss
makes off your labor

00:07:32.312 --> 00:07:34.327
isn't really your concern.

00:07:34.327 --> 00:07:36.592
And so there's a lot of anxiety

00:07:36.592 --> 00:07:41.310
around making what had been
basically a farming nation

00:07:41.310 --> 00:07:43.334
into an industrial nation.

00:07:43.334 --> 00:07:47.688
How does one behave as
a worker in a factory

00:07:47.688 --> 00:07:50.499
and how does one, as a factory owner,

00:07:50.499 --> 00:07:54.401
make sure that you have
a sober, intelligent,

00:07:54.401 --> 00:07:58.424
hard-working, but not too rowdy workforce?

00:07:58.424 --> 00:08:01.400
So both of these innovations,

00:08:01.400 --> 00:08:04.691
the relationship between
buyers and sellers

00:08:04.691 --> 00:08:06.442
in distant markets,

00:08:06.442 --> 00:08:07.343
and the relationship

00:08:07.343 --> 00:08:10.542
between factory owners and factory workers

00:08:10.542 --> 00:08:13.501
create anxiety about
how you're going to know

00:08:13.501 --> 00:08:14.834
people are good,

00:08:16.078 --> 00:08:17.575
how you're going to know that people

00:08:17.575 --> 00:08:20.312
are holding up their end in society.

00:08:20.312 --> 00:08:25.067
And one way to promote
that is through religion,

00:08:25.067 --> 00:08:27.242
which tells you not to be a sinner,

00:08:27.242 --> 00:08:29.109
which tells you to do a good job,

00:08:29.109 --> 00:08:32.722
which tells you to be a
productive member of society

00:08:32.722 --> 00:08:34.349
and work for the common good,

00:08:34.349 --> 00:08:36.272
and promote your moral compass.

00:08:36.272 --> 00:08:37.620
Now, that's just one explanation

00:08:37.620 --> 00:08:39.572
for why the Second Great Awakening

00:08:39.572 --> 00:08:41.106
took off in this time period.

00:08:41.106 --> 00:08:43.857
And you can tell, it's
kind of a grim one, right,

00:08:43.857 --> 00:08:46.349
in terms of promoting religion

00:08:46.349 --> 00:08:48.727
basically to keep people in line.

00:08:48.727 --> 00:08:51.185
But that's not the only
possible explanation

00:08:51.185 --> 00:08:54.567
for why the Second Great
Awakening may have happened.

00:08:54.567 --> 00:08:56.624
There are also a bunch of social changes

00:08:56.624 --> 00:08:59.295
in this time period that could be

00:08:59.295 --> 00:09:03.168
serious contributors to
this explosion of religion.

00:09:03.168 --> 00:09:07.550
Now, one of these was just
westward expansion in general.

00:09:07.550 --> 00:09:10.467
So as the United States moved west,

00:09:11.813 --> 00:09:14.056
the rate of western expansion, really,

00:09:14.056 --> 00:09:16.248
actually increased in this time period.

00:09:16.248 --> 00:09:19.813
So about 1790, the center
of American population

00:09:19.813 --> 00:09:21.944
was about here, right?

00:09:21.944 --> 00:09:24.959
So let's think about both north and south,

00:09:24.959 --> 00:09:27.513
east and west, where people lived.

00:09:27.513 --> 00:09:29.889
If you kind of totaled them all up

00:09:29.889 --> 00:09:31.928
and put a dot right in the middle

00:09:31.928 --> 00:09:33.222
of where everybody lived,

00:09:33.222 --> 00:09:35.607
it would just be right here
kind of on the Eastern Seaboard,

00:09:35.607 --> 00:09:38.220
as everyone's pretty close to the coast.

00:09:38.220 --> 00:09:42.387
By 1840, the center of
population was way over here.

00:09:45.007 --> 00:09:47.608
So just think, if this is all the people

00:09:47.608 --> 00:09:51.017
who had to live there to be
on either side of that line,

00:09:51.017 --> 00:09:52.498
think of how many people have to be

00:09:52.498 --> 00:09:55.143
on either side of this line

00:09:55.143 --> 00:09:58.568
for the population to have
its center right there.

00:09:58.568 --> 00:10:02.184
So people have really spread
out in this time period.

00:10:02.184 --> 00:10:05.917
Where before, there was kind
of this east coast elite

00:10:05.917 --> 00:10:06.945
where all the money was,

00:10:06.945 --> 00:10:08.874
now the Market Revolution has meant

00:10:08.874 --> 00:10:12.248
that people who live along these byways,

00:10:12.248 --> 00:10:16.044
live along rivers and
canals and railroads,

00:10:16.044 --> 00:10:17.226
those towns are gonna start

00:10:17.226 --> 00:10:19.710
having people in them with some money.

00:10:19.710 --> 00:10:22.434
And so the middle class expands

00:10:22.434 --> 00:10:26.197
and the amount of people
who have the vote expands.

00:10:26.197 --> 00:10:29.979
So it's really a time of
expanding democracy in general,

00:10:29.979 --> 00:10:33.344
both in terms of wealth and
in terms of political power.

00:10:33.344 --> 00:10:35.888
And so you can see why a religion

00:10:35.888 --> 00:10:39.142
like that promoted in the
Second Great Awakening,

00:10:39.142 --> 00:10:41.633
the Baptists, the Methodists,

00:10:41.633 --> 00:10:44.578
that said anyone can have
a relationship with God,

00:10:44.578 --> 00:10:46.022
would become more popular

00:10:46.022 --> 00:10:48.408
as more and more people started to kind of

00:10:48.408 --> 00:10:50.650
take their own fates in
their own hands, right?

00:10:50.650 --> 00:10:53.967
This is the time of the rugged individual,

00:10:53.967 --> 00:10:56.740
a very popular idea that one, you know,

00:10:56.740 --> 00:10:59.399
pulled oneself by the bootstraps

00:10:59.399 --> 00:11:01.428
and that's the pioneering spirit.

00:11:01.428 --> 00:11:04.647
So very characteristic American values

00:11:04.647 --> 00:11:07.904
that went into making a type of religion

00:11:07.904 --> 00:11:09.956
with more individuality,

00:11:09.956 --> 00:11:12.670
with more possibilities for more people

00:11:12.670 --> 00:11:15.839
much more popular in this time period.

00:11:15.839 --> 00:11:16.763
And there's one case of this

00:11:16.763 --> 00:11:18.497
that I think is really interesting

00:11:18.497 --> 00:11:20.587
and it's in western New York.

00:11:20.587 --> 00:11:24.442
So in western New York,
there's the town of Rochester.

00:11:24.442 --> 00:11:28.250
And Rochester is really like a boomtown.

00:11:28.250 --> 00:11:29.730
It's along the Erie Canal,

00:11:29.730 --> 00:11:32.013
as we saw in the previous map.

00:11:32.013 --> 00:11:33.854
And Rochester becomes, kind of,

00:11:33.854 --> 00:11:37.525
almost the epicenter of
new religious movements

00:11:37.525 --> 00:11:38.837
in this time period.

00:11:38.837 --> 00:11:41.754
So within this radius of Rochester,

00:11:43.781 --> 00:11:48.081
people called this the
burned-over district

00:11:48.081 --> 00:11:52.473
because there were so
many religious revivals

00:11:52.473 --> 00:11:53.570
in this time period,

00:11:53.570 --> 00:11:55.439
that it was like the whole district

00:11:55.439 --> 00:11:57.150
was burned over with hellfire,

00:11:57.150 --> 00:11:58.541
these preachers coming past

00:11:58.541 --> 00:12:00.817
and talking about the apocalypse.

00:12:00.817 --> 00:12:02.703
And so we'll get to talking more

00:12:02.703 --> 00:12:04.212
about some of the religious movements

00:12:04.212 --> 00:12:05.760
that come out of this,

00:12:05.760 --> 00:12:09.497
but within just a couple
of miles of Rochester,

00:12:09.497 --> 00:12:11.997
the Oneida Community was born.

00:12:13.632 --> 00:12:16.632
Spiritualism, which was the religion

00:12:17.645 --> 00:12:21.284
that's kind of based
around seances was born.

00:12:21.284 --> 00:12:24.686
The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints,

00:12:24.686 --> 00:12:26.769
often called the Mormons,

00:12:28.499 --> 00:12:31.706
their religion was born outside Rochester.

00:12:31.706 --> 00:12:34.479
Even the Shakers were founded

00:12:34.479 --> 00:12:36.911
in upstate New York, near Albany.

00:12:36.911 --> 00:12:38.628
So I think it's noteworthy that,

00:12:38.628 --> 00:12:41.128
as new communities, new people

00:12:42.504 --> 00:12:46.518
are gaining prominence
through the Market Revolution,

00:12:46.518 --> 00:12:49.267
along with them comes a
new religious movement.

00:12:49.267 --> 00:12:51.937
And we'll talk more about what the impact

00:12:51.937 --> 00:12:55.101
of this new religious movement
was on American society

00:12:55.101 --> 00:12:56.332
in the next video.


The Second Great Awakening - part 1

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.192 --> 00:00:02.417
- The Second Great Awakening
was one of the most

00:00:02.417 --> 00:00:05.834
important social, religious, and cultural

00:00:07.006 --> 00:00:10.437
aspects of the early 19th
century in the United States.

00:00:10.437 --> 00:00:12.196
In fact, I might even
make the argument that

00:00:12.196 --> 00:00:15.743
it's impossible to understand
the early 19th century

00:00:15.743 --> 00:00:18.524
without understanding The
Second Great Awakening

00:00:18.524 --> 00:00:20.274
because as you can see here,

00:00:20.274 --> 00:00:23.168
it's kind of connected with everything,

00:00:23.168 --> 00:00:24.834
so what was The Second Great Awakening

00:00:24.834 --> 00:00:26.562
and why was it such a big deal?

00:00:26.562 --> 00:00:30.729
The Second Great Awakening was
a period of religious revival

00:00:33.385 --> 00:00:35.052
in the United States

00:00:36.591 --> 00:00:39.758
where church membership really soared.

00:00:40.634 --> 00:00:44.217
A lot of people had
conversion experiences,

00:00:45.702 --> 00:00:49.667
meaning that they had a moment where they

00:00:49.667 --> 00:00:53.401
came to understand their
personal relationship with God

00:00:53.401 --> 00:00:56.215
and want to change their
ways to become a more

00:00:56.215 --> 00:01:00.382
religious individual and give
up their ways as sinners.

00:01:01.229 --> 00:01:03.995
So church membership really soared

00:01:03.995 --> 00:01:08.162
and lots of new people joined
churches, particularly women.

00:01:11.114 --> 00:01:12.606
Now, you'll note that this is called

00:01:12.606 --> 00:01:14.692
The Second Great Awakening
because there was,

00:01:14.692 --> 00:01:16.346
in fact, a First Great Awakening,

00:01:16.346 --> 00:01:19.524
which happened in the 1730s, 1740s

00:01:19.524 --> 00:01:22.074
and that was the era of Jonathan Edwards

00:01:22.074 --> 00:01:24.785
and sinners in the hands of an angry God.

00:01:24.785 --> 00:01:26.971
It was very localized in New England

00:01:26.971 --> 00:01:28.999
and specifically, with Calvinism

00:01:28.999 --> 00:01:31.908
or Puritan religious awakenings,

00:01:31.908 --> 00:01:33.151
so that was a separate event

00:01:33.151 --> 00:01:35.185
that happened about 100 years before

00:01:35.185 --> 00:01:36.537
and The Second Great Awakening,

00:01:36.537 --> 00:01:38.569
as I have drawn here, generally,

00:01:38.569 --> 00:01:42.652
historians say it lasted
from about 1790 to 1850,

00:01:43.970 --> 00:01:47.421
but I would say that the real heyday

00:01:47.421 --> 00:01:49.181
of The Second Great Awakening would be

00:01:49.181 --> 00:01:51.181
from about 1820 to 1840.

00:01:53.197 --> 00:01:55.600
Those are hazy dates, but that's kind of

00:01:55.600 --> 00:01:58.355
the hot period of The
Second Great Awakening.

00:01:58.355 --> 00:02:00.671
In this series of videos, I wanna explore

00:02:00.671 --> 00:02:03.552
some of the aspects that led
to The Second Great Awakening,

00:02:03.552 --> 00:02:05.484
particularly the market revolution

00:02:05.484 --> 00:02:08.786
and a bunch of other
social, political, cultural,

00:02:08.786 --> 00:02:11.969
and even religious changes
that were happening beforehand

00:02:11.969 --> 00:02:14.684
and then also explore some of the

00:02:14.684 --> 00:02:16.928
consequences of The
Second Great Awakening.

00:02:16.928 --> 00:02:20.640
What parts of early 19th
century American culture

00:02:20.640 --> 00:02:24.621
are really tied up with
this wave in religiosity?

00:02:24.621 --> 00:02:26.927
So what was The Second
Great Awakening like?

00:02:26.927 --> 00:02:30.299
Well, here's a painting
of what I would call

00:02:30.299 --> 00:02:34.324
kind of the central aspect of
The Second Great Awakening,

00:02:34.324 --> 00:02:37.159
which were camp meetings.

00:02:37.159 --> 00:02:40.743
So unlike The First Great Awakening,

00:02:40.743 --> 00:02:43.387
which was definitely a New England thing,

00:02:43.387 --> 00:02:45.251
The Second Great Awakening took place

00:02:45.251 --> 00:02:48.407
largely more on the Western
part of the United States.

00:02:48.407 --> 00:02:50.085
Now, when we're talking
about Western part,

00:02:50.085 --> 00:02:52.723
we're talking about
Western part circa 1820,

00:02:52.723 --> 00:02:55.208
which is gonna be Western New York,

00:02:55.208 --> 00:02:57.541
Kentucky, around Appalachia.

00:02:58.750 --> 00:03:00.469
These were places that didn't have

00:03:00.469 --> 00:03:04.083
the kind of strong
established church religion

00:03:04.083 --> 00:03:06.829
that you might have found in
a place like Massachusetts

00:03:06.829 --> 00:03:10.162
and so preachers would
set up camp meetings.

00:03:10.162 --> 00:03:12.141
They'd have a big stage.

00:03:12.141 --> 00:03:14.135
People would come in tents

00:03:14.135 --> 00:03:17.151
and they would listen to these preachers

00:03:17.151 --> 00:03:20.956
and these preachers
would attempt to convert

00:03:20.956 --> 00:03:23.456
the audiences to a more active

00:03:24.822 --> 00:03:28.989
and particularly, evangelical
form of Christianity.

00:03:30.839 --> 00:03:34.672
Evangelical Christianity
comes from this word,

00:03:35.670 --> 00:03:37.975
evangelical, evangelist,

00:03:37.975 --> 00:03:40.249
like the four evangelists of the Bible,

00:03:40.249 --> 00:03:43.829
who were the men who wrote the gospels

00:03:43.829 --> 00:03:46.014
and the idea of evangelical Christianity

00:03:46.014 --> 00:03:48.952
was a real strong attachment to the Bible

00:03:48.952 --> 00:03:52.869
and an attempt to make
kind of heaven on Earth,

00:03:53.954 --> 00:03:56.516
so to make the world below

00:03:56.516 --> 00:03:59.400
the same as heaven above.

00:03:59.400 --> 00:04:01.407
So they're kind of trying to bring about

00:04:01.407 --> 00:04:04.521
a terrestrial paradise, if you will

00:04:04.521 --> 00:04:08.018
and many of the religious
movements that come out of this

00:04:08.018 --> 00:04:10.468
are particularly concerned with

00:04:10.468 --> 00:04:12.777
what we would call, really, the apocalypse

00:04:12.777 --> 00:04:15.542
or in more contemporary terms,

00:04:15.542 --> 00:04:18.875
sort of millennialism or millenarianism.

00:04:19.990 --> 00:04:23.394
I know this is a big
word, but more or less,

00:04:23.394 --> 00:04:26.647
the idea that they want Jesus Christ

00:04:26.647 --> 00:04:30.230
to return to Earth and
rule for 1,000 years

00:04:31.428 --> 00:04:34.867
over a perfect earthly paradise.

00:04:34.867 --> 00:04:36.502
Now, when you and I
think of the apocalypse,

00:04:36.502 --> 00:04:38.427
we usually think that's a bad thing,

00:04:38.427 --> 00:04:41.143
but most evangelical
Christians in this time period

00:04:41.143 --> 00:04:43.661
really wanted the apocalypse to happen

00:04:43.661 --> 00:04:46.683
because it meant that heaven
would happen on Earth.

00:04:46.683 --> 00:04:48.903
Now, these camp meetings
were really interesting.

00:04:48.903 --> 00:04:51.431
You know, they're happening
kind of out on the frontier,

00:04:51.431 --> 00:04:53.983
so it's kinda the coolest show in town,

00:04:53.983 --> 00:04:56.773
to go see this itinerant preacher.

00:04:56.773 --> 00:04:59.467
They're often called circuit riders,

00:04:59.467 --> 00:05:03.634
so that is a preacher who
literally rides around on a horse

00:05:05.334 --> 00:05:07.168
because he does not have an

00:05:07.168 --> 00:05:09.675
established congregation of his own,

00:05:09.675 --> 00:05:13.131
so he goes from town to
town, setting up meetings,

00:05:13.131 --> 00:05:15.392
preaching, and hopefully converting people

00:05:15.392 --> 00:05:16.973
to evangelical Christianity,

00:05:16.973 --> 00:05:19.775
but the camp meetings of
The Second Great Awakening

00:05:19.775 --> 00:05:21.985
were characterized by a really

00:05:21.985 --> 00:05:24.804
emotional response from individuals.

00:05:24.804 --> 00:05:27.286
People who were having
conversion experiences

00:05:27.286 --> 00:05:30.997
and you can see it here in this painting.

00:05:30.997 --> 00:05:33.195
They would kinda go into fits.

00:05:33.195 --> 00:05:37.219
They might fall over and
shake or bark like a dog

00:05:37.219 --> 00:05:39.461
because they had been so overcome

00:05:39.461 --> 00:05:40.954
by this religious spirit.

00:05:40.954 --> 00:05:43.433
So you can imagine how
camp meetings like this,

00:05:43.433 --> 00:05:45.188
as people heard about them,

00:05:45.188 --> 00:05:47.864
would've really affected
the general populous.

00:05:47.864 --> 00:05:50.293
If you heard about a
story where your friend

00:05:50.293 --> 00:05:51.974
went off to this camp meeting and they had

00:05:51.974 --> 00:05:54.023
this incredible conversion experience

00:05:54.023 --> 00:05:56.165
where they realized how important it was

00:05:56.165 --> 00:05:59.659
to give up sin and devote
one's life to Christianity

00:05:59.659 --> 00:06:01.624
and working to bring heaven on Earth,

00:06:01.624 --> 00:06:04.030
you might go check it out yourself.

00:06:04.030 --> 00:06:06.255
So two of the most famous preachers

00:06:06.255 --> 00:06:11.162
of The Second Great
Awakening were Lyman Beecher,

00:06:11.162 --> 00:06:15.141
who was based out of
Ohio later in his life,

00:06:15.141 --> 00:06:17.984
and you might be familiar
with this name, Beecher,

00:06:17.984 --> 00:06:20.260
because Lyman Beecher was the father of

00:06:20.260 --> 00:06:24.427
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who
wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

00:06:26.353 --> 00:06:27.990
One of Beecher's concerns was

00:06:27.990 --> 00:06:30.635
just that society in
general in the United States

00:06:30.635 --> 00:06:34.303
was becoming more
secular and taking a very

00:06:34.303 --> 00:06:36.609
rational approach to religion,

00:06:36.609 --> 00:06:39.654
as opposed to an emotional
approach to religion.

00:06:39.654 --> 00:06:43.081
He wanted people to feel
religion very deeply.

00:06:43.081 --> 00:06:47.666
He was kind of working toward
a period of religious revival

00:06:47.666 --> 00:06:50.367
and got one in The Second Great Awakening.

00:06:50.367 --> 00:06:52.402
The other really famous
preacher from this time period

00:06:52.402 --> 00:06:54.959
was Charles Grandison Finney

00:06:54.959 --> 00:06:57.473
and Finney traveled around

00:06:57.473 --> 00:07:00.971
and drew just crowds in the thousands.

00:07:00.971 --> 00:07:05.639
20,000, 30,000 people might
gather to hear him preach

00:07:05.639 --> 00:07:07.298
and you can notice here that I have

00:07:07.298 --> 00:07:11.039
Finney and Beecher facing
away from each other

00:07:11.039 --> 00:07:13.376
'cause they didn't entirely get along.

00:07:13.376 --> 00:07:14.737
One of the reasons they didn't get along

00:07:14.737 --> 00:07:18.546
was because Finney approved
of women preaching in public,

00:07:18.546 --> 00:07:22.629
which was definitely a
no-no for the time period.

00:07:25.104 --> 00:07:29.044
So what was unique and
new about the theology

00:07:29.044 --> 00:07:30.738
of The Second Great Awakening?

00:07:30.738 --> 00:07:33.505
Well, let me give myself a
little bit more space here.

00:07:33.505 --> 00:07:35.806
Well, I've already
mentioned some things here.

00:07:35.806 --> 00:07:39.146
One that, it's taking
place out on the frontier

00:07:39.146 --> 00:07:41.646
in huge ecstatic camp meetings

00:07:42.501 --> 00:07:44.157
where people were behaving in a way

00:07:44.157 --> 00:07:47.379
that would have been very
strange in a Puritan church,

00:07:47.379 --> 00:07:50.269
falling down, shaking, shouting aloud

00:07:50.269 --> 00:07:51.848
and also that it was concerned with

00:07:51.848 --> 00:07:53.662
this idea of millenarianism

00:07:53.662 --> 00:07:56.028
or trying to create heaven on Earth

00:07:56.028 --> 00:07:57.568
to bring about the rapture,

00:07:57.568 --> 00:07:59.918
to bring about the return of Jesus Christ

00:07:59.918 --> 00:08:02.100
to Earth for 1,000-year reign.

00:08:02.100 --> 00:08:05.175
Also, that it served to inspire

00:08:05.175 --> 00:08:08.008
many converts to be better people,

00:08:09.217 --> 00:08:11.489
to do good on Earth,

00:08:11.489 --> 00:08:13.922
to try to bring about
this heaven on Earth.

00:08:13.922 --> 00:08:17.837
Now, contrast this with some
of the religious establishment

00:08:17.837 --> 00:08:21.297
in the United States,
specifically the Puritans.

00:08:21.297 --> 00:08:23.964
Right, Puritans were Calvinists,

00:08:25.494 --> 00:08:29.618
which meant that they followed
the doctrine of John Calvin,

00:08:29.618 --> 00:08:33.189
which meant that they
believed in predestination.

00:08:33.189 --> 00:08:37.356
Predestination is the idea
that before you're born,

00:08:39.001 --> 00:08:41.847
God already knows and has decided

00:08:41.847 --> 00:08:46.467
whether or not you are
saved, one of the elect

00:08:46.467 --> 00:08:50.134
or whether you are
damned and going to hell,

00:08:51.249 --> 00:08:53.988
so there's really nothing you can do

00:08:53.988 --> 00:08:56.647
because either you are one of these elect

00:08:56.647 --> 00:08:58.265
or you're one of the damned,

00:08:58.265 --> 00:09:01.162
so your personal actions
make no difference

00:09:01.162 --> 00:09:03.657
in whether or not you're
going to get into heaven.

00:09:03.657 --> 00:09:07.824
The Second Great Awakening
really kinda rejects this notion.

00:09:08.744 --> 00:09:10.685
You can see that in
kinda two different ways.

00:09:10.685 --> 00:09:14.852
One, they do think that it
matters if you do good, right?

00:09:16.361 --> 00:09:19.230
So your time on Earth is not just kind of

00:09:19.230 --> 00:09:21.231
wading through a veil of tears,

00:09:21.231 --> 00:09:24.018
waiting until you get to heaven or don't,

00:09:24.018 --> 00:09:26.014
depending on what your status is,

00:09:26.014 --> 00:09:27.681
so doing good works,

00:09:29.999 --> 00:09:32.455
trying to improve the world around you

00:09:32.455 --> 00:09:36.027
does make a difference in your salvation

00:09:36.027 --> 00:09:37.704
and we'll see as this goes forward

00:09:37.704 --> 00:09:40.726
how that really animates people toward

00:09:40.726 --> 00:09:43.809
all kinds of social reforms
in this time period.

00:09:43.809 --> 00:09:47.976
The other thing this does is
really democratizes religion.

00:09:49.551 --> 00:09:53.027
Right, if the world
isn't already separated

00:09:53.027 --> 00:09:55.289
into the elect and the damned,

00:09:55.289 --> 00:09:58.466
then anyone has a chance of salvation

00:09:58.466 --> 00:09:59.873
and you see that in many aspects

00:09:59.873 --> 00:10:01.523
of The Second Great Awakening.

00:10:01.523 --> 00:10:03.773
They allow women to preach.

00:10:05.409 --> 00:10:08.307
Women become really strong members,

00:10:08.307 --> 00:10:12.364
influential members of
these communities of faith.

00:10:12.364 --> 00:10:14.864
They preach to whites, blacks,

00:10:16.055 --> 00:10:18.532
free, and enslaved people alike,

00:10:18.532 --> 00:10:21.782
so all races are eligible for salvation

00:10:24.218 --> 00:10:27.877
and you also don't have to
be a wealthy church father

00:10:27.877 --> 00:10:29.779
to be influential in religion.

00:10:29.779 --> 00:10:32.458
You know, people like Lyman
Beecher and Charles Finney.

00:10:32.458 --> 00:10:34.152
They weren't born wealthy.

00:10:34.152 --> 00:10:36.896
They weren't born as the scions of,

00:10:36.896 --> 00:10:40.041
say, the Mather family in Massachusetts,

00:10:40.041 --> 00:10:42.692
which had been one of the most important

00:10:42.692 --> 00:10:45.126
religious families in Massachusetts,

00:10:45.126 --> 00:10:48.638
so The Second Great
Awakening really attracted

00:10:48.638 --> 00:10:52.035
lots of poor people,
people on the frontier.

00:10:52.035 --> 00:10:54.825
It wasn't a religion of the elite.

00:10:54.825 --> 00:10:56.869
Now you don't have to be educated

00:10:56.869 --> 00:10:59.845
at the seminaries of Harvard or Yale

00:10:59.845 --> 00:11:02.527
to have a Christian conversion experience.

00:11:02.527 --> 00:11:05.477
So this is the essence of
The Second Great Awakening

00:11:05.477 --> 00:11:07.906
and in the next video,
I'll talk a little bit more

00:11:07.906 --> 00:11:10.381
about the social forces that caused

00:11:10.381 --> 00:11:13.512
The Second Great Awakening
and the consequences

00:11:13.512 --> 00:11:17.679
of its proliferation in
early 19th century America.


The Market Revolution -  part 3

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.567 --> 00:00:01.674
- [Instructor] So why do we care

00:00:01.674 --> 00:00:03.570
about the Market Revolution?

00:00:03.570 --> 00:00:05.805
The Industrial Revolution
and the Transportation

00:00:05.805 --> 00:00:09.175
and the Communication Revolutions
of the early 19th century

00:00:09.175 --> 00:00:11.945
had a major impact on American society,

00:00:11.945 --> 00:00:15.615
both in the short term
and in the long term.

00:00:15.615 --> 00:00:18.418
In this video, I want to talk
about three major effects

00:00:18.418 --> 00:00:21.454
of the Market Revolution,
and those were changes

00:00:21.454 --> 00:00:25.959
in labor, entry into a national

00:00:25.959 --> 00:00:28.862
and international market system

00:00:30.930 --> 00:00:32.932
and the Second Great Awakening.

00:00:34.262 --> 00:00:35.835
All right, so what effect

00:00:35.835 --> 00:00:38.004
did the Market Revolution have on labor?

00:00:38.004 --> 00:00:41.074
Well, we've already talked
about this a little bit

00:00:41.074 --> 00:00:45.512
in the earlier videos, but here is a view

00:00:45.512 --> 00:00:47.947
of a textile factory floor.

00:00:47.947 --> 00:00:50.550
Now this is from a slightly later period,

00:00:50.550 --> 00:00:53.920
but I think it gives you a
good sense of what it was like

00:00:53.920 --> 00:00:55.889
to work in a textile factory.

00:00:57.459 --> 00:01:01.561
With the Market Revolution
really comes the emergence

00:01:01.561 --> 00:01:05.799
of factory labor in the United States.

00:01:05.799 --> 00:01:09.402
And there are a couple of
ways that, that's important.

00:01:09.402 --> 00:01:12.238
One is that people
start working for wages.

00:01:14.158 --> 00:01:17.310
It's a move away from subsistence farming

00:01:17.310 --> 00:01:21.032
and a barter economy,
which also means that

00:01:21.032 --> 00:01:25.710
people aren't necessarily in
charge of themselves anymore.

00:01:25.710 --> 00:01:28.514
And there's a lot that
goes along with that,

00:01:28.514 --> 00:01:31.552
which means that people
stop being their own bosses.

00:01:31.552 --> 00:01:35.395
Instead, they report to other bosses.

00:01:35.395 --> 00:01:39.505
And that can be problematic because

00:01:41.100 --> 00:01:44.137
it means that you have a lot less control

00:01:44.137 --> 00:01:45.839
over your daily life.

00:01:45.839 --> 00:01:49.976
So imagine that you're a
farmer and you're really sick.

00:01:49.976 --> 00:01:53.413
Oh well, you know maybe you
don't plant some seed that day

00:01:53.413 --> 00:01:55.615
and you do it the next day.

00:01:55.615 --> 00:01:57.617
Imagine that you work at a textile mill

00:01:57.617 --> 00:02:00.119
and you get really sick,
you don't report to work

00:02:00.119 --> 00:02:01.588
and you get fired.

00:02:01.588 --> 00:02:05.625
So people are no longer
able to set the pace

00:02:05.625 --> 00:02:08.964
of their own lives by and large.

00:02:08.964 --> 00:02:13.312
And with things like
interchangeable parts, for example,

00:02:14.234 --> 00:02:19.234
fewer and fewer artisans,
so masters of a craft,

00:02:20.807 --> 00:02:23.743
are making goods from start to finish.

00:02:23.743 --> 00:02:28.653
So it used to be perhaps you
would be a master shoemaker,

00:02:28.653 --> 00:02:33.653
a master cobbler, and you would
make every part of that shoe

00:02:34.835 --> 00:02:39.498
from tanning the leather
to nailing in the sole.

00:02:41.215 --> 00:02:44.065
The system of interchangeable parts,

00:02:44.065 --> 00:02:47.898
which will later become even more codified

00:02:47.898 --> 00:02:51.140
as the assembly-line system,

00:02:51.140 --> 00:02:55.685
means that most people are only doing

00:02:55.685 --> 00:02:58.859
one part of a task.

00:02:58.859 --> 00:03:02.048
So instead of doing all of
making a shoe and saying

00:03:02.048 --> 00:03:04.317
at the end of it, "I made this shoe,

00:03:04.317 --> 00:03:08.688
"I am a master maker of
shoes," now your entire job

00:03:08.688 --> 00:03:12.392
might just be to hammer in one nail

00:03:12.392 --> 00:03:16.429
and then hand off the
shoe to the next person.

00:03:16.429 --> 00:03:19.132
So there's never anything
that you can point to

00:03:19.132 --> 00:03:21.234
and say, "I made that."

00:03:21.234 --> 00:03:23.703
So a lot of people say
that this is a period

00:03:23.703 --> 00:03:28.209
when people stop being able to
take pride in their own work

00:03:29.776 --> 00:03:32.039
or at least not as much pride.

00:03:32.879 --> 00:03:36.983
But what's even more
important about this process

00:03:36.983 --> 00:03:40.019
of interchangeable parts,
assembly-line labor,

00:03:40.019 --> 00:03:45.019
is that it leads to an overall,
what they call, deskilling.

00:03:45.224 --> 00:03:49.618
So removing the skill from labor.

00:03:50.730 --> 00:03:52.966
And what's important about that is that

00:03:52.966 --> 00:03:57.888
if you've broken down a
task into enough small parts

00:03:57.888 --> 00:04:01.578
that you've got people
literally hammering in

00:04:01.578 --> 00:04:05.612
the same nail on a different
shoe 12 hours a day,

00:04:05.612 --> 00:04:10.310
then you don't necessarily
need highly trained artisans

00:04:11.231 --> 00:04:13.086
to do that.

00:04:13.086 --> 00:04:18.086
And what happens if you
are not highly trained,

00:04:19.492 --> 00:04:24.030
we'll call this unskilled labor,
and you decide you want to

00:04:24.030 --> 00:04:25.765
strike for higher pay?

00:04:25.765 --> 00:04:28.935
Well, your boss doesn't
need to train anyone

00:04:28.935 --> 00:04:32.505
to hammer in that nail
so you'll just get fired.

00:04:32.505 --> 00:04:34.641
So it makes the labor force in general

00:04:34.641 --> 00:04:37.610
a little bit more precarious
because you don't need

00:04:37.610 --> 00:04:41.047
an exceptional skill
to have a factory job,

00:04:41.047 --> 00:04:45.284
but you are easily replaced.

00:04:45.284 --> 00:04:48.421
All right, let's talk about
entry into a market system.

00:04:48.421 --> 00:04:50.623
Now what do I mean by this?

00:04:50.623 --> 00:04:54.260
In this time period, the
United States develops

00:04:54.260 --> 00:04:57.130
what's called a market economy.

00:04:57.130 --> 00:05:01.501
And that's different from what
most people had been doing

00:05:01.501 --> 00:05:05.171
up until that point because
people in the United States

00:05:05.171 --> 00:05:09.008
had mainly shipped raw materials

00:05:09.008 --> 00:05:13.630
over to Europe, England particularly,

00:05:13.630 --> 00:05:16.816
to be processed and made
into finished goods.

00:05:16.816 --> 00:05:20.019
And this is similar to
the system of mercantilism

00:05:20.019 --> 00:05:23.856
that you might be familiar
with from the colonial era.

00:05:23.856 --> 00:05:26.826
Well, the war of 1812
and some of the conflict

00:05:26.826 --> 00:05:31.826
leading up to it, led the United
States to embargo England,

00:05:32.899 --> 00:05:34.901
which was a manufacturing center.

00:05:34.901 --> 00:05:37.003
So people couldn't send
their raw materials there.

00:05:37.003 --> 00:05:40.707
They responded by investing
in their own factories.

00:05:40.707 --> 00:05:45.044
So the war of 1812 is actually
a pretty important moment

00:05:45.044 --> 00:05:49.965
for the development of domestic
industrialization at home.

00:05:51.017 --> 00:05:55.722
And so now, instead of
this kind of import/export

00:05:55.722 --> 00:06:00.722
or barter economy, people are making deals

00:06:02.328 --> 00:06:07.300
with other investors all
over the United States,

00:06:07.300 --> 00:06:09.335
all over the world.

00:06:09.335 --> 00:06:13.506
So this gives people an
opportunity to invest

00:06:13.506 --> 00:06:16.743
and to speculate.

00:06:16.743 --> 00:06:19.479
And that means that as they're a part

00:06:19.479 --> 00:06:24.479
of an international market
of investment speculation,

00:06:24.917 --> 00:06:27.954
they're prone to the
kinds of booms and busts

00:06:27.954 --> 00:06:32.924
that characterize capitalism, right?

00:06:32.924 --> 00:06:35.194
Now we often think of the Great Depression

00:06:35.194 --> 00:06:38.464
as having been the first
major American depression.

00:06:38.464 --> 00:06:42.135
But really, it was the
largest and most recent

00:06:42.135 --> 00:06:46.205
up until that point, because
after the war of 1812,

00:06:46.205 --> 00:06:49.075
the United States kinda
goes through approximately

00:06:49.075 --> 00:06:51.611
a 20-year cycle of boom and bust.

00:06:51.611 --> 00:06:54.380
So boom is when things are getting better,

00:06:54.380 --> 00:06:57.717
things are looking up, the
economy is going really well,

00:06:57.717 --> 00:07:01.587
and then a bubble of some kind bursts.

00:07:01.587 --> 00:07:06.587
And in 1819, they had the very
first of these bubbles burst,

00:07:07.126 --> 00:07:12.126
it's called the Panic of
1819 in land speculation.

00:07:12.231 --> 00:07:14.267
And this is the first time
that the United States

00:07:14.267 --> 00:07:17.537
had actually experienced any
kind of economic depression.

00:07:17.537 --> 00:07:22.508
So imagine how frightening
that would have been to them.

00:07:22.508 --> 00:07:25.745
One of the hardest things
about market-based capitalism

00:07:25.745 --> 00:07:29.715
is that individuals
don't really have control

00:07:29.715 --> 00:07:31.150
over the larger market.

00:07:31.150 --> 00:07:34.554
It's not one person that made
the Great Depression happen.

00:07:34.554 --> 00:07:37.824
It was an overall loss
in consumer confidence

00:07:37.824 --> 00:07:40.092
or perhaps overproduction, right?

00:07:40.092 --> 00:07:43.796
If too many people are
supplying the same commodity,

00:07:43.796 --> 00:07:48.401
the price is dropping through
the laws of supply and demand.

00:07:48.401 --> 00:07:52.471
So now, the laws of supply
and demand and the pressures

00:07:52.471 --> 00:07:55.408
of an international
market are really changing

00:07:55.408 --> 00:07:58.244
the nature of American commerce because

00:07:58.244 --> 00:08:00.246
they're enmeshed in that market.

00:08:00.246 --> 00:08:04.784
And that has all kinds of
political and social ramifications

00:08:04.784 --> 00:08:06.986
for the United States.

00:08:06.986 --> 00:08:10.356
Understanding the volatility of belonging

00:08:10.356 --> 00:08:13.326
to an international market

00:08:13.326 --> 00:08:15.461
kind of helps explain why Andrew Jackson

00:08:15.461 --> 00:08:17.630
was so obsessed with the National Bank

00:08:17.630 --> 00:08:19.465
at this time period, right?

00:08:19.465 --> 00:08:23.636
Because it represents
this confusing matrix

00:08:23.636 --> 00:08:25.805
of international supply and demand

00:08:25.805 --> 00:08:29.242
and people getting credit
or not getting credit.

00:08:30.443 --> 00:08:33.712
And being part of this
international market

00:08:33.712 --> 00:08:36.082
is something that's going
to have a major effect

00:08:36.082 --> 00:08:38.317
on the American South, and particularly

00:08:38.317 --> 00:08:41.953
the enslaved population that
lives in the American South

00:08:41.953 --> 00:08:44.657
because they're going
to be supplying cotton

00:08:44.657 --> 00:08:46.659
to the world's textile mills.

00:08:46.659 --> 00:08:48.661
And those are textile mills in New England

00:08:48.661 --> 00:08:50.930
and textile mills in England.

00:08:50.930 --> 00:08:54.166
And as the world demands
cotton for processing,

00:08:54.166 --> 00:08:57.069
the South is going to supply that cotton,

00:08:57.069 --> 00:09:01.340
which is picked by enslaved individuals.

00:09:01.340 --> 00:09:05.511
And one of the reasons that
the Confederacy believes

00:09:05.511 --> 00:09:09.282
that it can succeed as
an independent nation

00:09:09.282 --> 00:09:12.218
is because they're
supplying cotton to England.

00:09:12.218 --> 00:09:15.254
And when England managed to
find its own supply of cotton

00:09:15.254 --> 00:09:20.254
from Egypt and India, the economic chances

00:09:20.259 --> 00:09:24.297
of the Confederacy were sunk.

00:09:24.297 --> 00:09:27.166
And the last thing that I
think is related to this

00:09:27.166 --> 00:09:29.835
Market Revolution is the
Second Great Awakening.

00:09:29.835 --> 00:09:32.038
Now I don't wanna go into
too much detail about this

00:09:32.038 --> 00:09:34.807
because of a whole
separate series of videos

00:09:34.807 --> 00:09:36.809
about the Second Great Awakening,

00:09:36.809 --> 00:09:40.713
but this Second Great Awakening
was kind of an explosion

00:09:40.713 --> 00:09:44.583
of religious fervor, which was happening

00:09:44.583 --> 00:09:49.583
at almost exactly the same
time as the Market Revolution.

00:09:50.735 --> 00:09:54.393
And many American
historians actually think

00:09:54.393 --> 00:09:57.797
that it's these confusing and confounding

00:09:57.797 --> 00:10:00.569
and anxious forces that
lead a lot of people

00:10:00.569 --> 00:10:02.134
to take up religion.

00:10:02.134 --> 00:10:05.438
Because as the world is
changing around them,

00:10:05.438 --> 00:10:09.075
as people now have to
relate in different ways

00:10:09.075 --> 00:10:13.179
to their neighbors as bosses and employees

00:10:13.179 --> 00:10:15.715
rather than bartering partners,

00:10:15.715 --> 00:10:20.252
and as they're swept up
in international markets

00:10:20.252 --> 00:10:23.155
that are outside their control,

00:10:23.155 --> 00:10:27.509
people look for new explanations

00:10:28.754 --> 00:10:33.335
and comfort in an increasingly

00:10:33.335 --> 00:10:35.507
confusing world.

00:10:36.969 --> 00:10:39.649
So that's one explanation for
the Second Great Awakening.

00:10:40.806 --> 00:10:44.210
So I started out this series
of videos by saying that

00:10:44.210 --> 00:10:48.080
some historians have argued
that the Market Revolution

00:10:48.080 --> 00:10:50.616
was actually more revolutionary

00:10:50.616 --> 00:10:52.852
than the American Revolution.

00:10:52.852 --> 00:10:55.388
Now that's a difficult question to answer

00:10:55.388 --> 00:10:58.758
because we're talking about
a revolution in politics

00:10:58.758 --> 00:11:03.295
as opposed to kind of a
revolution of economics.

00:11:03.295 --> 00:11:06.699
But I will say that though
the American Revolution

00:11:06.699 --> 00:11:11.203
dissolved the political bonds
between the United States

00:11:11.203 --> 00:11:16.203
and Great Britain, its
social and economic impact

00:11:16.308 --> 00:11:17.943
were relatively limited.

00:11:17.943 --> 00:11:21.580
Most people kind of ended
up in the same place

00:11:21.580 --> 00:11:24.950
socially after the American Revolution

00:11:24.950 --> 00:11:26.752
as they were before it.

00:11:26.752 --> 00:11:30.823
But the Market Revolution
changes an awful lot

00:11:30.823 --> 00:11:33.259
in American society in terms of

00:11:33.259 --> 00:11:36.962
how they participate internationally

00:11:36.962 --> 00:11:39.865
and how people organize their daily lives.

00:11:39.865 --> 00:11:43.769
So I think there is a
strong argument to be made

00:11:43.769 --> 00:11:48.374
that this revolution of
economics, technology,

00:11:48.374 --> 00:11:51.911
even religion, is
considerably farther reaching

00:11:51.911 --> 00:11:54.213
than the American Revolution.


The Market Revolution -  part 2

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:01.801 --> 00:00:03.277
- [Voiceover] So we
have been talking about

00:00:03.277 --> 00:00:04.848
the Market Revolution

00:00:04.848 --> 00:00:06.444
in the United States

00:00:06.444 --> 00:00:09.179
which was this period in the first half

00:00:09.179 --> 00:00:10.762
of the 19th century

00:00:11.800 --> 00:00:15.967
where the way that Americans
did business really changed.

00:00:16.918 --> 00:00:19.998
And it changed in a number of ways,

00:00:19.998 --> 00:00:23.665
so the kinds of work
that people did changed

00:00:26.159 --> 00:00:30.076
and the people they sold
their goods to changed

00:00:31.401 --> 00:00:33.651
in the form of new markets.

00:00:34.690 --> 00:00:36.489
And even the kinds of commodities

00:00:36.489 --> 00:00:38.572
that they were producing.

00:00:40.178 --> 00:00:42.370
All of these were
altered in the first half

00:00:42.370 --> 00:00:44.037
of the 19th century,

00:00:45.148 --> 00:00:48.648
thanks to a couple of simultaneous trends.

00:00:50.658 --> 00:00:54.801
The Industrial Revolution
in which new technologies

00:00:54.801 --> 00:00:58.801
were developed to make
production more efficient

00:01:00.150 --> 00:01:03.230
and revolutions in
transportation and communication,

00:01:03.230 --> 00:01:07.311
which made it easier
to get goods and people

00:01:07.311 --> 00:01:10.379
to far distances more quickly

00:01:10.379 --> 00:01:14.079
and to communicate over
considerable distances

00:01:14.079 --> 00:01:15.162
more quickly.

00:01:16.128 --> 00:01:19.530
And these really resulted
in a reorganization

00:01:19.530 --> 00:01:21.113
of American society

00:01:22.560 --> 00:01:25.260
that some historians have actually said

00:01:25.260 --> 00:01:29.427
was more revolutionary than
the American Revolution.

00:01:30.858 --> 00:01:31.707
So in the last video,

00:01:31.707 --> 00:01:35.810
we discussed some of the new technologies

00:01:35.810 --> 00:01:40.489
which changed American work
in the early 19th century.

00:01:40.489 --> 00:01:44.517
One of these was the
introduction of the textile mill,

00:01:44.517 --> 00:01:46.729
which was powered by a water wheel,

00:01:46.729 --> 00:01:48.146
by Samuel Slater,

00:01:49.089 --> 00:01:52.787
which helped textile mills
become the chief industry

00:01:52.787 --> 00:01:54.537
of New England,

00:01:54.537 --> 00:01:57.747
also helped women start
working outside the home

00:01:57.747 --> 00:02:01.565
in the Lowell Mills,
started by Charles Lowell

00:02:01.565 --> 00:02:04.858
and also began the system
by which factory owners

00:02:04.858 --> 00:02:09.508
would hire individuals,
rather than family units,

00:02:09.508 --> 00:02:12.407
to work for wages in their factories.

00:02:12.407 --> 00:02:16.366
The other major invention that
had a really important impact

00:02:16.366 --> 00:02:19.646
on American society was the cotton gin,

00:02:19.646 --> 00:02:23.563
which was a machine that
separated cotton seeds

00:02:25.039 --> 00:02:29.206
from the fiber and it made
the production of cotton

00:02:30.278 --> 00:02:32.678
considerably more profitable.

00:02:32.678 --> 00:02:36.666
And so, with cotton a profitable crop,

00:02:36.666 --> 00:02:40.327
the American south
really invested in cotton

00:02:40.327 --> 00:02:43.708
and investing in cotton
as its main cash crop

00:02:43.708 --> 00:02:47.084
meant they really entrenched
the system of slavery.

00:02:47.084 --> 00:02:50.501
So even though in the 1780s, early 1790s,

00:02:51.658 --> 00:02:53.676
many southern states were thinking perhaps

00:02:53.676 --> 00:02:57.828
they'd abolish slavery because
the institution was not

00:02:57.828 --> 00:02:59.648
overly profitable,

00:02:59.648 --> 00:03:03.315
as cotton became the
cash crop of the south,

00:03:04.580 --> 00:03:07.307
the institution of slavery
would be entrenched

00:03:07.307 --> 00:03:10.390
and continue to grow until the 1860s.

00:03:11.407 --> 00:03:14.838
So those are some of the new
technologies of production.

00:03:14.838 --> 00:03:17.948
In this video, I wanna spend
some time talking about

00:03:17.948 --> 00:03:21.220
the revolution in communication
and transportation

00:03:21.220 --> 00:03:24.470
that happened also in this time period.

00:03:26.009 --> 00:03:29.158
So just like inventions
like the textile mill

00:03:29.158 --> 00:03:33.158
or the cotton gin made
it easier to work faster,

00:03:34.588 --> 00:03:37.160
inventions in transportation
and communication

00:03:37.160 --> 00:03:40.408
in the early 19th century
also made it possible

00:03:40.408 --> 00:03:42.199
to transport goods faster

00:03:42.199 --> 00:03:45.249
and to transport information faster.

00:03:45.249 --> 00:03:47.188
So I wanna talk about just a few

00:03:47.188 --> 00:03:50.349
of these transportation inventions.

00:03:50.349 --> 00:03:52.709
One of these was the railroad.

00:03:52.709 --> 00:03:56.396
Now, the railroad was not
invented in the United States.

00:03:56.396 --> 00:04:00.718
Rather, the United States
imported the railroad technology

00:04:00.718 --> 00:04:02.519
from England and Germany

00:04:02.519 --> 00:04:05.538
and this is one of the
very first railroads

00:04:05.538 --> 00:04:07.118
in the United States,

00:04:07.118 --> 00:04:08.717
I think it's kind of adorable

00:04:08.717 --> 00:04:11.000
'cause you can see how it still is really

00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:14.333
owing a debt, stylistically, to a wagon.

00:04:15.429 --> 00:04:18.556
Even looks like a wagon here on the end.

00:04:18.556 --> 00:04:21.850
So railroads begin to come
into the United States

00:04:21.850 --> 00:04:26.017
in the early 1800s and first
they're mostly for cargo

00:04:27.828 --> 00:04:30.209
or helping to move stone,

00:04:30.209 --> 00:04:31.710
things to help build canals,

00:04:31.710 --> 00:04:33.750
which we'll get to in a second.

00:04:33.750 --> 00:04:37.583
But soon they're also
passenger rail stations.

00:04:38.890 --> 00:04:40.800
And the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,

00:04:40.800 --> 00:04:42.133
or B&O railroad,

00:04:43.270 --> 00:04:46.479
which you may know from
your Monopoly board

00:04:46.479 --> 00:04:49.547
was one of the first passenger rail lines

00:04:49.547 --> 00:04:51.548
in the United States.

00:04:51.548 --> 00:04:54.160
Another major transportation revolution

00:04:54.160 --> 00:04:57.620
of this time period was shipping on water.

00:04:57.620 --> 00:04:58.620
So, in 1807,

00:05:02.659 --> 00:05:04.492
inventor Robert Fulton

00:05:05.579 --> 00:05:07.746
came up with the steamship

00:05:09.018 --> 00:05:09.916
and so a steamship,

00:05:09.916 --> 00:05:13.328
and you can see the little
smokestacks right here,

00:05:13.328 --> 00:05:15.740
makes it much easier to power the ship

00:05:15.740 --> 00:05:18.771
and one thing you can do
then is go against the tide

00:05:18.771 --> 00:05:19.778
of a river,

00:05:19.778 --> 00:05:21.870
so instead of just, for example,

00:05:21.870 --> 00:05:23.809
going down the Mississippi River

00:05:23.809 --> 00:05:25.040
to the port of New Orleans,

00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:27.400
you can also go back up
the Mississippi River

00:05:27.400 --> 00:05:32.360
which means commerce can go
more easily in both directions.

00:05:32.360 --> 00:05:36.508
Another major innovation of
the time period are canals.

00:05:36.508 --> 00:05:39.925
And this here is a map of the Erie Canal,

00:05:41.916 --> 00:05:44.166
which was completed in 1825

00:05:46.011 --> 00:05:49.749
and a canal is a relatively narrow,

00:05:49.749 --> 00:05:52.828
relatively shallow waterway

00:05:52.828 --> 00:05:56.745
but it still allows cargo
barges to move across

00:05:58.079 --> 00:06:01.600
what otherwise would be really
hard to navigate territory,

00:06:01.600 --> 00:06:03.420
so, you know, it's hard to see here,

00:06:03.420 --> 00:06:07.059
but there are mountains here, right.

00:06:07.059 --> 00:06:08.726
So, now you can take

00:06:09.689 --> 00:06:11.759
cargo across mountains,

00:06:11.759 --> 00:06:15.478
across large stretches of land by ship,

00:06:15.478 --> 00:06:17.328
which is much faster

00:06:17.328 --> 00:06:18.600
than trying to do it on foot

00:06:18.600 --> 00:06:19.933
or with a wagon.

00:06:20.898 --> 00:06:24.505
I think it's actually hard
for us to imagine now,

00:06:24.505 --> 00:06:27.194
but in the early 19th century

00:06:27.194 --> 00:06:30.527
and really for most of time before then,

00:06:32.118 --> 00:06:35.668
waterways were the highways of the world.

00:06:35.668 --> 00:06:39.659
It was a lot easier to
get from Boston to London

00:06:39.659 --> 00:06:41.429
across the Atlantic by ship

00:06:41.429 --> 00:06:44.068
than it would have been to get from Boston

00:06:44.068 --> 00:06:47.748
to the Appalachian Mountains on foot.

00:06:47.748 --> 00:06:50.349
Before the invention of air travel,

00:06:50.349 --> 00:06:53.678
before the Interstate Highway System,

00:06:53.678 --> 00:06:58.319
and really, up until the
invention of the railroad,

00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:01.828
waterways were the
easiest way to get around

00:07:01.828 --> 00:07:02.911
in the world.

00:07:05.009 --> 00:07:07.427
And the last communication revolution

00:07:07.427 --> 00:07:12.167
that I wanna talk about is the
invention of the telegraph,

00:07:12.167 --> 00:07:15.043
which a portrait painter-turned-inventor

00:07:15.043 --> 00:07:16.543
named Samuel Morse

00:07:18.675 --> 00:07:20.508
first patented in 1844

00:07:22.916 --> 00:07:25.333
and Morse invented Morse Code

00:07:26.245 --> 00:07:29.914
because the telegraph worked by sending

00:07:29.914 --> 00:07:32.483
pulses down copper wires

00:07:32.483 --> 00:07:35.565
and so it made it easy to communicate

00:07:35.565 --> 00:07:39.065
through coded messages of dots and dashes.

00:07:40.264 --> 00:07:44.014
So, dots and dashes
corresponded with letters

00:07:46.255 --> 00:07:49.083
which allowed you to send messages over

00:07:49.083 --> 00:07:51.166
extremely long distances,

00:07:52.266 --> 00:07:54.763
so you could send a message by telegraph

00:07:54.763 --> 00:07:56.033
in an instant,

00:07:56.033 --> 00:07:57.873
as opposed to sending a letter,

00:07:57.873 --> 00:07:59.795
which might take days or even weeks

00:07:59.795 --> 00:08:02.416
to get to its destination.

00:08:02.416 --> 00:08:04.784
So, all of these revolutions
in transportation

00:08:04.784 --> 00:08:08.082
and communication kind of translate into

00:08:08.082 --> 00:08:12.163
two major transformations
in American business

00:08:12.163 --> 00:08:13.593
at this time period.

00:08:13.593 --> 00:08:15.426
One, is that the scope

00:08:17.925 --> 00:08:21.537
of business that you
can do is much greater

00:08:21.537 --> 00:08:25.827
because now, if you're
a farmer who lives in,

00:08:25.827 --> 00:08:27.077
say, Rochester,

00:08:28.953 --> 00:08:30.370
your radius of...

00:08:33.713 --> 00:08:36.743
your radius of people you
can sell your produce to

00:08:36.743 --> 00:08:40.251
before it goes bad is considerably larger.

00:08:40.251 --> 00:08:42.900
Now, instead of just being able to get to

00:08:42.900 --> 00:08:46.411
where you can get maybe in
a wagon's trip of a day,

00:08:46.411 --> 00:08:50.220
you can send your crops on the Erie Canal

00:08:50.220 --> 00:08:54.132
and suddenly, you're dealing
with a much larger market.

00:08:54.132 --> 00:08:59.092
So, they're not only creating
a national web of commerce,

00:08:59.092 --> 00:09:02.811
they're also creating an
international web of commerce

00:09:02.811 --> 00:09:05.429
because these canals and steamships

00:09:05.429 --> 00:09:08.212
go to international ports which mean that

00:09:08.212 --> 00:09:12.379
you can now do business from
the western part of New York

00:09:13.261 --> 00:09:15.982
with people who live in London.

00:09:15.982 --> 00:09:17.572
And the other thing that increases here

00:09:17.572 --> 00:09:19.572
is the pace of business,

00:09:21.918 --> 00:09:26.085
right, so instead of having
to negotiate a business deal

00:09:27.121 --> 00:09:28.651
through a series of letters,

00:09:28.651 --> 00:09:30.860
which might take you many weeks,

00:09:30.860 --> 00:09:33.260
now you can negotiate a business deal

00:09:33.260 --> 00:09:34.499
by the telegraph

00:09:34.499 --> 00:09:37.251
and it's only gonna take
you a couple of days.

00:09:37.251 --> 00:09:39.709
Likewise, it might have taken you weeks

00:09:39.709 --> 00:09:42.322
to send your logs for example,

00:09:42.322 --> 00:09:44.182
down the Mississippi River.

00:09:44.182 --> 00:09:45.719
Now you have them in a steamship

00:09:45.719 --> 00:09:47.851
and it takes just a couple of days.

00:09:47.851 --> 00:09:50.582
So there's an overall expansion

00:09:50.582 --> 00:09:54.660
in the number of people who
can participate in markets.

00:09:54.660 --> 00:09:57.020
The expansion of the distance at which

00:09:57.020 --> 00:09:59.351
you can participate in a market

00:09:59.351 --> 00:10:01.461
and the pace at which you can do it.

00:10:01.461 --> 00:10:04.044
You can do business much faster

00:10:05.170 --> 00:10:07.701
with these revolutions in transportation

00:10:07.701 --> 00:10:09.201
and communication.

00:10:10.212 --> 00:10:11.091
And in the next video,

00:10:11.091 --> 00:10:13.831
I'll talk more about how
these transformations

00:10:13.831 --> 00:10:14.914
in technology

00:10:16.020 --> 00:10:20.200
and the scope and pace of
American business affected

00:10:20.200 --> 00:10:21.900
the society of the United States

00:10:21.900 --> 00:10:23.939
in the early 19th century.


The Market Revolution - part 1

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.569 --> 00:00:02.400
- [Instructor] So some
historians have actually said

00:00:02.400 --> 00:00:05.579
that The Market Revolution
is more revolutionary

00:00:05.579 --> 00:00:07.448
than The American Revolution.

00:00:07.448 --> 00:00:11.969
Actually, this is a very
classic AP-US-history question.

00:00:11.969 --> 00:00:13.885
Which was more revolutionary:

00:00:13.885 --> 00:00:17.665
The American Revolution
or The Market Revolution?

00:00:17.665 --> 00:00:20.349
But how could something
actually be more revolutionary

00:00:20.349 --> 00:00:22.748
than The American Revolution?

00:00:22.748 --> 00:00:24.335
It's because The Market Revolution

00:00:24.335 --> 00:00:26.918
was a confluence of inventions,

00:00:28.482 --> 00:00:32.105
changes in the way that the
American people did business,

00:00:32.105 --> 00:00:35.932
and changes in the way that
people got goods to market

00:00:35.932 --> 00:00:40.324
that happened in this period
from about 1790 to 1850.

00:00:40.324 --> 00:00:43.337
So this is kind of a
large period of history,

00:00:43.337 --> 00:00:45.696
and I don't think it's
really important for you

00:00:45.696 --> 00:00:49.412
to have a laundry list
of dates of exactly when

00:00:49.412 --> 00:00:54.310
what thing was invented, but
just kind of take in the idea

00:00:54.310 --> 00:00:59.280
that in the first half or
so of the early 19th Century

00:00:59.280 --> 00:01:04.239
there were many new inventions
in both factory work

00:01:04.239 --> 00:01:07.043
and in transportation and communication,

00:01:07.043 --> 00:01:11.512
and that how people did
business changed a lot.

00:01:11.512 --> 00:01:14.318
So I wanna take some time to look into

00:01:14.318 --> 00:01:16.901
all three of these revolutions:

00:01:17.854 --> 00:01:19.995
The Industrial Revolution,

00:01:19.995 --> 00:01:23.791
The Revolution in Transportation
and Communication,

00:01:23.791 --> 00:01:26.159
and just the broader Market Revolution.

00:01:26.159 --> 00:01:30.067
So I know this is a subset of
itself, but I'll get to that.

00:01:30.067 --> 00:01:32.508
And in this video I wanna
start out by talking

00:01:32.508 --> 00:01:35.194
about The Industrial Revolution.

00:01:35.194 --> 00:01:38.083
OK, so what was The Industrial Revolution?

00:01:38.083 --> 00:01:40.035
This was, broadly speaking,

00:01:40.035 --> 00:01:43.202
a revolution in the kinds of machinery

00:01:45.159 --> 00:01:48.492
that people used to make finished goods.

00:01:50.935 --> 00:01:54.435
Now, if you think about the early republic

00:01:55.815 --> 00:01:57.686
in the United States you often think

00:01:57.686 --> 00:02:00.269
of kind of an agrarian society;

00:02:01.226 --> 00:02:04.684
and that was how Thomas Jefferson,

00:02:04.684 --> 00:02:07.247
the author of The
Declaration of Independence,

00:02:07.247 --> 00:02:09.769
really imagined the United States,

00:02:09.769 --> 00:02:12.781
as a nation of small farmers.

00:02:12.781 --> 00:02:15.585
But Thomas Jefferson
didn't necessarily see

00:02:15.585 --> 00:02:19.865
all of these revolutions
in industry coming.

00:02:19.865 --> 00:02:21.986
He couldn't anticipate that;

00:02:21.986 --> 00:02:24.819
and so, in the 1790s, early 1800s,

00:02:26.462 --> 00:02:30.533
a bunch of new inventions
came to the United States

00:02:30.533 --> 00:02:34.357
that completely revolutionized
how things were made.

00:02:34.357 --> 00:02:36.718
So in this time period the United States

00:02:36.718 --> 00:02:39.566
kinda slowly begins its transformation

00:02:39.566 --> 00:02:42.066
from being a nation of farmers

00:02:43.058 --> 00:02:46.641
to a nation of people
who worked for wages,

00:02:48.174 --> 00:02:49.679
by the hour,

00:02:49.679 --> 00:02:52.402
and then used the money that they made

00:02:52.402 --> 00:02:56.569
from that hourly labor to buy
the things that they need.

00:02:57.568 --> 00:02:59.530
So how did this happen?

00:02:59.530 --> 00:03:03.697
One event that historians often
point to is the introduction

00:03:05.038 --> 00:03:08.948
of the textile mill to the United States.

00:03:08.948 --> 00:03:13.017
So this fellow here, his
name is Samuel Slater,

00:03:13.017 --> 00:03:16.515
and Samuel Slater was an Englishman

00:03:16.515 --> 00:03:19.023
who worked in a textile mill.

00:03:19.023 --> 00:03:22.789
And remember that the United Kingdom was

00:03:22.789 --> 00:03:27.376
the world's capital of textile
production in this time.

00:03:27.376 --> 00:03:30.511
And they were so jealous of their position

00:03:30.511 --> 00:03:33.563
as the world's leading textile producer

00:03:33.563 --> 00:03:35.963
that they even made it illegal

00:03:35.963 --> 00:03:39.213
to export the plans for a textile mill.

00:03:41.167 --> 00:03:44.139
Samuel Slater decided that
even if it was illegal

00:03:44.139 --> 00:03:46.500
to export actual plans,

00:03:46.500 --> 00:03:50.972
it wasn't necessarily
illegal to export his brain,

00:03:50.972 --> 00:03:53.055
so he decided to memorize

00:03:56.296 --> 00:03:58.879
how these textile looms worked;

00:04:00.040 --> 00:04:03.123
and this is powered by a water wheel.

00:04:04.183 --> 00:04:07.266
And then he actually got in disguise,

00:04:08.902 --> 00:04:12.766
put himself on a ship,
and came to Rhode Island

00:04:12.766 --> 00:04:14.849
to set up a textile mill.

00:04:16.879 --> 00:04:21.107
In fact, people were so
angry that he did this that

00:04:21.107 --> 00:04:24.967
in his home town he's actually
known as Slater the Traitor.

00:04:24.967 --> 00:04:26.753
So what was new about this?

00:04:26.753 --> 00:04:30.330
Well, I think the water-wheel aspect

00:04:30.330 --> 00:04:33.173
is really one of the key innovations here.

00:04:33.173 --> 00:04:36.256
So instead of being powered by humans

00:04:37.125 --> 00:04:40.180
or perhaps being powered by animals,

00:04:40.180 --> 00:04:44.347
now American machinery can be
powered by an outside source:

00:04:45.917 --> 00:04:50.193
so water or steam; and
that means that these mills

00:04:50.193 --> 00:04:52.797
and factories later are
going to kinda congregate

00:04:52.797 --> 00:04:56.534
around sources of power,
like rivers for example.

00:04:56.534 --> 00:04:59.545
So if you've ever wondered
why so many American cities

00:04:59.545 --> 00:05:01.297
are next to rivers, it's usually because

00:05:01.297 --> 00:05:04.591
they needed them to power mills.

00:05:04.591 --> 00:05:07.436
So starting in the 1790s,

00:05:07.436 --> 00:05:10.524
and really into the early 19th Century,

00:05:10.524 --> 00:05:14.691
there's this slow transformation
toward factory labor.

00:05:15.608 --> 00:05:18.251
And you can see in this
image here that a lot

00:05:18.251 --> 00:05:21.351
of the people actually
laboring in these factories

00:05:21.351 --> 00:05:25.518
were women because young men
kind of had a pretty good path

00:05:26.608 --> 00:05:29.052
forward in life at this time period.

00:05:29.052 --> 00:05:31.815
They could be farmers, like their fathers;

00:05:31.815 --> 00:05:35.025
maybe they could learn a trade.

00:05:35.025 --> 00:05:37.786
But for young women
there wasn't necessarily

00:05:37.786 --> 00:05:40.304
a form of income outside the house,

00:05:40.304 --> 00:05:43.054
and so a man named Charles Lowell

00:05:44.878 --> 00:05:48.011
decided to set up a whole series

00:05:48.011 --> 00:05:51.836
of textile mills in what will be called

00:05:51.836 --> 00:05:53.283
Lowell, Massachusetts.

00:05:53.283 --> 00:05:55.621
It's just outside of Boston.

00:05:55.621 --> 00:05:59.114
And then he primarily employed young women

00:05:59.114 --> 00:06:01.191
to work in these textile mills.

00:06:01.191 --> 00:06:03.874
Think partly because young women

00:06:03.874 --> 00:06:07.761
were associated with working with fabric;

00:06:07.761 --> 00:06:09.649
women frequently did the spinning

00:06:09.649 --> 00:06:11.002
and the sewing in the household;

00:06:11.002 --> 00:06:13.810
but also because women
you could probably pay

00:06:13.810 --> 00:06:17.977
a little bit less than young
men for the same kind of labor.

00:06:21.328 --> 00:06:25.067
So this is kind of a very slow revolution

00:06:25.067 --> 00:06:26.984
toward individual work.

00:06:30.310 --> 00:06:32.893
Because as a nation of farmers,

00:06:34.184 --> 00:06:38.291
most people would have
worked in a family unit.

00:06:38.291 --> 00:06:41.221
And even some of the
very earliest factories

00:06:41.221 --> 00:06:44.397
in the United States
would hire family units.

00:06:44.397 --> 00:06:47.511
It was known as the Rhode Island System.

00:06:47.511 --> 00:06:50.178
By this time, by Lowell's mills,

00:06:51.842 --> 00:06:56.009
he started hiring individual
workers for individual wages.

00:06:56.900 --> 00:07:00.997
And the working conditions
were pretty brutal.

00:07:00.997 --> 00:07:04.080
Most women at the Lowell mills worked

00:07:05.169 --> 00:07:09.077
12-hour days with no air conditioning,

00:07:09.077 --> 00:07:11.735
remember, this is long before
there's air conditioning,

00:07:11.735 --> 00:07:13.230
for pretty low wages.

00:07:13.230 --> 00:07:17.134
I'd say probably about
three dollars a week.

00:07:17.134 --> 00:07:20.107
But despite the pretty harsh conditions,

00:07:20.107 --> 00:07:23.399
for many of them this was
a really good opportunity

00:07:23.399 --> 00:07:25.426
'cause this was the
first time in their lives

00:07:25.426 --> 00:07:28.967
they'd ever had any chance
to make money of their own,

00:07:28.967 --> 00:07:31.040
to be away from their families.

00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:35.432
It's kind of expected that
if you were a young woman

00:07:35.432 --> 00:07:39.745
in Massachusetts you wanted to
go work in the Lowell mills.

00:07:39.745 --> 00:07:43.000
You could go there for a
few years of your life,

00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:44.667
make a little bit of money,

00:07:44.667 --> 00:07:48.937
and then go back to your
hometown, meet someone,

00:07:48.937 --> 00:07:51.458
get married, start a family of your own.

00:07:51.458 --> 00:07:53.983
So if kinda makes work for women

00:07:53.983 --> 00:07:56.400
outside the home respectable.

00:07:57.525 --> 00:08:00.136
And textile production
is going to continue

00:08:00.136 --> 00:08:01.923
to ramp up in the United States.

00:08:01.923 --> 00:08:03.340
In the late 1840s

00:08:05.697 --> 00:08:07.530
a man named Elias Howe

00:08:08.583 --> 00:08:12.246
invents a really excellent sewing machine.

00:08:12.246 --> 00:08:15.537
He's not the first man ever
to invent a sewing machine.

00:08:15.537 --> 00:08:17.472
There were versions of
them stretching back

00:08:17.472 --> 00:08:20.119
to think even the 1750s,

00:08:20.119 --> 00:08:22.479
but Howe's sewing machine brought together

00:08:22.479 --> 00:08:25.162
a lot of different capacities that made it

00:08:25.162 --> 00:08:26.993
kinda the best sewing machine.

00:08:26.993 --> 00:08:31.489
And it will be even further
refined by Isaac Singer,

00:08:31.489 --> 00:08:34.177
who we associate today with
the Singer Sewing Machine.

00:08:34.177 --> 00:08:37.010
And so these massive textile mills

00:08:38.936 --> 00:08:43.103
really become the backbone
of New England commerce.

00:08:44.592 --> 00:08:46.627
But, they never would have gotten started

00:08:46.627 --> 00:08:50.794
without another invention,
which was the cotton gin.

00:08:52.409 --> 00:08:56.576
And the cotton gin was invented
by Eli Whitney in 1793.

00:08:59.169 --> 00:09:01.124
And what's important about the cotton gin,

00:09:01.124 --> 00:09:05.432
so here's the gin, and
basically it's kind of a box

00:09:05.432 --> 00:09:09.537
with some spikes on it
that allows you to take

00:09:09.537 --> 00:09:13.704
these balls of cotton and
separate them from the seeds.

00:09:14.784 --> 00:09:17.466
And separating cotton from the seeds

00:09:17.466 --> 00:09:20.883
was an extremely labor-intensive process.

00:09:22.436 --> 00:09:25.795
If you've never held a ball of cotton,

00:09:25.795 --> 00:09:29.949
it's extremely sticky, so you
kinda have to wade through

00:09:29.949 --> 00:09:34.342
the little bits of cotton,
pull out these seeds.

00:09:34.342 --> 00:09:35.931
It takes forever.

00:09:35.931 --> 00:09:39.102
And so an average day's
work would not produce

00:09:39.102 --> 00:09:43.007
all that much cotton that
was ready for market.

00:09:43.007 --> 00:09:46.269
Well, Whitney completely
revolutionizes this

00:09:46.269 --> 00:09:47.618
with the cotton gin.

00:09:47.618 --> 00:09:50.057
These little spikes help separate

00:09:50.057 --> 00:09:52.702
the cotton seeds from the cotton ball,

00:09:52.702 --> 00:09:56.364
and revolutionizes how
much cotton can be produced

00:09:56.364 --> 00:09:58.769
by a single person in a single day.

00:09:58.769 --> 00:10:01.943
Whitney's cotton gin made it
possible for a single person

00:10:01.943 --> 00:10:06.456
to process 50 pounds of
cotton in a single day,

00:10:06.456 --> 00:10:09.511
which is just an order of magnitude more

00:10:09.511 --> 00:10:12.073
than they were able to do beforehand.

00:10:12.073 --> 00:10:13.703
This is really interesting 'cause it had

00:10:13.703 --> 00:10:17.036
kind of a massive human cost in the form

00:10:18.344 --> 00:10:22.208
of really bolstering the
institution of slavery

00:10:22.208 --> 00:10:26.237
in the American South
because when farming cotton

00:10:26.237 --> 00:10:30.062
was so labor-intensive it
really wasn't very profitable;

00:10:30.062 --> 00:10:32.299
and so the institution
of slavery was actually

00:10:32.299 --> 00:10:34.863
starting to die out a little bit.

00:10:34.863 --> 00:10:37.857
Before the 1790s people were saying:

00:10:37.857 --> 00:10:42.039
"Eh, I don't know if it's
actually worth it to keep slaves."

00:10:42.039 --> 00:10:44.194
So if it weren't for the cotton gin,

00:10:44.194 --> 00:10:46.678
the United States might
actually have outlawed slavery

00:10:46.678 --> 00:10:50.845
considerably earlier than it
ended up doing in the 1860s.

00:10:52.339 --> 00:10:56.122
So it's interesting to
note that even though these

00:10:56.122 --> 00:10:59.942
inventions really changed the
fabric of American society,

00:10:59.942 --> 00:11:01.937
allowed some people to earn money

00:11:01.937 --> 00:11:04.379
who had never been able
to earn money before,

00:11:04.379 --> 00:11:08.045
it also meant that the
institution of slavery

00:11:08.045 --> 00:11:10.197
was really entrenched in the United States

00:11:10.197 --> 00:11:14.364
and would only continue
to expand until the 1860s.

00:11:15.807 --> 00:11:18.288
So that's a little bit of a peak into

00:11:18.288 --> 00:11:21.706
the human cost of The
Industrial Revolution.

00:11:21.706 --> 00:11:25.117
And we'll get more into what
some of those costs were

00:11:25.117 --> 00:11:29.284
and what some of the benefits
were in the next video.