America's Post-Civil War Growing Pains - Research Paper Example

irm understanding of the ways in which reconstruction affected the United States much necessarily break down into highly specialized examinations of key groups and individual changes as any broad judgments make the risk of glossing over the ways in which minor details worked together to create major differentials. As a function of this, this brief analysis will seek to answer the following 5 key questions with relation to reconstruction: identification and discussion of two major historical turning points during the Reconstruction period, the impact of these two major historical turning points on society, economy, culture, and politics, discussion of two ways the Reconstruction period may have been different had Lincoln lived, discussion of how industrialization and urbanization affected the life of the average working American, and two examples of how the federal and/or state courts and legislatures handed down decisions or passed laws during the period that served to discriminate against non-white citizens and immigrants (Nilsson 2012).

With reference to the first question, the two major historical turning points during the period under the Reconstruction can definitively be those of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad and the dawn of the industrial period ushered in by the Gilded Age (Bentrix 2007). Both of these factors helped to represent newfound opportunities for a host of disenfranchised and downtrodden individuals who had seen the hope of a better life all but implode as a result of the Civil War. With respect to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, this enabled poorer families from back East to risk it all and move West in hopes of building a better life.

In this way, the availability of the frontier was again able to absorb much of the historical difficulties that the American people had experienced. Secondly, the dawn of the industrial age helped to give a host of out of work farmers and others individuals well paying jobs