Chronology

Updated September 24, 2001
© Mark Canada, 2001
mark.canada@uncp.edu

History and Culture

If the antebellum period of American history was a time of seeking and becoming, the postbellum era was a time of seeing and being. The Civil War, which ended in 1865, had largely resolved the division between the northern and southern states, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 marked the fulfillment of the country's "manifest destiny," at least in practical terms. Now that the period of division and expansion was largely over, America began to take shape as its modern self: a pluralistic, industrialized, and commercial society. During Reconstruction, the period of rebuilding after the Civil War, the United States ratified constitutional amendments designed to end slavery and to secure citizenship and voting rights for black Americans. Meanwhile, women widened their role in the culture, and immigrants started to flood into the United States. Between 1870 and 1910, some 16 million people immigrated to America from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other countries, many of them coming through Ellis Island in New York. Many Native Americans, on the other hand, remained on the margins, having been forced from their homes onto reservations. Over the course of the postbellum period, as well as the ensuing modern era, these various groups overcame Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and other forms of oppression and persecution on their way to entering and diversifying the American mainstream. Many of these "new" Americans helped to shape the new America by going to work in factories and stores. Despite Thomas Jefferson's early hope that America would be an agrarian paradise, the United States now was clearly an industrial and commercial country. Americans such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt made fortunes in the steel, railroad, and other industries. Like diversification, industrialization brought both adversity and growth as a strong labor movement developed to cope with poor working conditions, child labor, and other problems.

Some cornerstones of modern American culture were laid between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. As the modern populace and economy took shape, so did modern technology, transportation, and recreation. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone and Thomas Edison's work in the areas of lighting, the phonograph, and the motion picture revolutionized the culture perhaps more than anything else, setting the stage for the information age to come. Similarly, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford laid the foundations for modern transportation by developing the airplane and automobile. Even many modern forms of recreation took shape as Coney Island emerged as a popular amusement park, and spectator sports--especially baseball, boxing, automobile racing, and rowing--became major forms of entertainment.