Empires, Nations, and Families in North American West - Assignment Example

Assignment QUESTION Families in the West functioned differently from those in the East in terms of philosophy and popular ideas about gender and human roles. During this period, romanticism and sentimentality stressed more on emotive attachment and the cultivation of emotion in western families. Novel concepts of human equality and liberty undermined older concepts of hierarchy and order within western families (Anne 70). On the other hand, families in Queensland, Australia acquired their functions from Victorian Britain during the 1800s. Victorian Britain served as a model for Queensland families through their roles for middleclass women, outlooks, and behavior. According to Anne Hydes, families molded different western societies during the first half of the 1800s (Anne 41). For instance, the United States employed the political philosophy of freedom and the “pursuit of happiness” from families into the declaration of independence. Afterwards, parents began pursued the love of their children rather than their economic offerings. Even though this ideal prevailed before the 1850s, authority, inequity, and aggression never faded away entirely in western families. Hydes points out some differences with eastern families in terms power of women new to marriage and their roles within and outside families (Anne 73). In western families, spouses obeyed their husbands out of affection rather than force. On the other hand, wives of eastern families had their roles passed on to them instead of demanding true power though economic liberty and legal rights. For eastern families, dominant authority was conditional on the status and quality of the personal relationship every wife has within a patriarchal household. The 1850s were truly a turning point in the west because it marked a significant change in how parents ruled their families and marital relationships (Anne 481). Families were still patriarchal during this period, but fathers and husbands used affection to rule their families more than force. However, this turning point is not applicable to eastern families to a significant extent, particularly for women. Men allowed the style of the “ideal woman,” adopted from Victorian England, to divide the scopes of employment for both genders and inspire middleclass eastern women (Anne 452). QUESTION 2 At first, Thomas Jefferson was at first not successful in establishing an “empire of liberty” that extends political freedom outside the United States (Cobbs-Hoffman 139). More specifically, the government failed the embargo in the course of the Maritime Crisis during Jefferson’s consecutive term. Evidently, Jefferson’s foreign policy of 1790 varied significantly from the one exercised by English ambassadors because he wanted to create a policy that is not driven by “reason of state” (139). As a result, Jefferson triggered a republican-federalist dispute with Alexander Hamilton that hindered the spread of self-government westward. However, the French Revolution peaked and Jefferson hoped liberty would prevail overseas to displace the monarchial regimes of the French centered on reason of state (111). However, this revolution swayed unpredictably, thereby discouraging Jefferson to causing him to shift from liberty to isolationism. Today, France is a democracy under its constitution, which reveals the success of Jefferson’s ideal of self-government through political freedom even though it took years after his death to realize it. Jefferson saw religious freedom as a variety of liberty achievable through “peaceable coercion.” Unlike political freedom, Jefferson achieved religious freedom within the United States during his lifetime by putting down the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom in 1777. Even Jefferson himself thought of this decree as one of his most profound achievements. However, the decree became a foundation for the First Amendment by proclaiming the freedom to religion a “natural” liberty (425). Economic and territorial growth surely intimidated and shaped Europe’s idea of American liberty. More specifically, Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana in 1803 essentially doubled the area of the United States. Europe, comprising mostly of federalists, saw such moves as an effort to alleviate fears concerning the government’s growing powers over the country’s social and economic aspects. More specifically, federalists sought the government, under Jefferson, to retaliate repressive legislation like the Alien and Sedition Acts (427). QUESTION 3 Americans put Thomas Paine’s words of beginning the world over again by instigating and succeeding in the American Revolution. Paine’s words motivated Americans to confront the challenges of struggling for independence (Cobbs-Hoffman 106). Evidently, revolutionary goals changed significantly after the spread of Paine’s pamphlets regarding the urge to restart America. The Civil War is a considerable indicator of the impact of Paine’s words on Americans. Americans considered Paine’s ideals groundwork for the “age of reason” that facilitates civil rights and the freedom of association, speech and religion (415). Paine also pushed forward prospects by American colonists about creating the noblest, wholesome constitution on the planet. In addition, Paine’s words allowed Americans to define the destiny of the nation by regaining it back from economic royalists who wanted to develop empires by amassing extreme power over all natural and human resources. Several political interventions and reform campaigns arose because of Paine’s ideal of starting America over again. Nonconformists, supporters of the abolition of slave trade, and socialists openly acknowledged Paine’s ideals even after the suppression of their radical nature by European federalists and royalists (107). More specifically, the early American labor campaign reformed its stance against equality and fair pay at the workplace in 1848 because of Paine’s ideas. Trade union and socialist campaign from both parts of the Atlantic echoed Paine in their reforms for significant change in their respective fields. Both parties were successful in forging the 1800s workers associating that even formed the foundations for Karl Marx’s pragmatic politics (Cobbs-Hoffman 108). These organizations thought of Paine as an intellectual founding father of the United States, which made it easier for them to take him as a mentor for egalitarian uprisings. QUESTION ONE The change to the livelihoods of Native American societies in the late 1400s was subtle (Faragher, Buhle, Armitage, and Czitrom 67). Social changes were the first to happen as religious cultures of the Creeks began teaching that their Creator “undercooked” the Europeans and cooked members of the Creek tribe well, which is the reason their skin tones and white and brown respectively. By the 1600s, economic changes began to occur as Native Indians such as the Iroquois of the southeast found themselves so dependent on European merchandise that hunting and gathering skills began fading away with each new generation (79). However, Native Indians used a majority of these goods on credit. This deficit became unsurmountable that conceding land to the British was the only way of caring it. The Cherokees voluntarily converted to Christianity as more Europeans arrived in the Native Americas (Hyde 229). Christianity became a more pragmatic trend for the Apaches of the northeast as they used their missionary endeavors to gain cultural domination. In the process, cultural domination over all other Indian tribes enabled the Apaches to set up economic ties with the Europeans (234). These ties prevented many of their people from being forced into reserves and deprived of natural resources, medical care, and other basic needs. These ties also entailed engaging in European warfare by taking their side. In 1763, thousands of Native Americans of the southwest partook in the French and Indian War (231). By the mid-1850s, Native Americans were selling captives from their own tribes to Europeans instead of incorporating them into their respective communities as they did back in the early 1500s (Faragher, Buhle, Armitage, and Czitrom 384). This radical change in their lives was attributed to dramatic death tolls induced by warfare with the colonialists, epidemics, and deprivation of resources in reserves. QUESTION TWO In colonial North America, slavery mostly entailed aid in agricultural production of profitmaking crops such as tobacco and cotton (Cobbs-Hoffman 46). During this period, slaves did not have specific owners who forced them to stay within their property under their watch, authority, and security. This meant slaves slept and ate outside these farms far from their places of labor. For instance, British men murdered African American Crispus Attucks in the course of the Boston massacre (Sparks 27). Attucks became a martyr amongst blacks and his death indirectly caused more than 5,000 African American men to fight against the British during the Revolutionary War (Faragher, Buhle, Armitage, and Czitrom 419). The ability to choose sides depicts the relative freedom of slaves during colonial America, at least in terms of political expression. On the other hand, slavery in nineteenth century North America largely entailed the residing of slaves in plantations under the rule of individual or organizational slave-owners (Faragher, Buhle, Armitage, and Czitrom 23). Slave owners treated slaves like property and exercised extreme power over them. Some slave owners took liberties with slave women, compensated obedient and the very hardworking with favors. On the other hand, slave owners treated disobedient or rebellious slaves inhumanely with torturous methods of punishment. The brutal rule of slave masters in the early 1800s triggered revolts, with the most notable ones led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 in Charleston and Nat Turner in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia (Cobbs-Hoffman 362). The main difference between slavery in these two periods was the kind of ownership of slaves. The public perception of slavery varied amongst American institutions of faith and political bases. For instance, in 1852, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison considered the emancipation of slaves a non-religious argument about free labor (Sparks 88). Under this argument, Garrison said owning slaves was a retrogressive, unproductive, and uneconomical approach to labor and true human capital. In contrast, colonial America considered slavery a respectable form of trade and necessary political approach towards spreading imperialistic ideals in Africa and the Middle East (53). African Americans did not have much power to support the abolition of slavery during colonial America. However, blacks played crucial roles in progressing the cause of abolition during the onset of the nineteenth century. Along with other antislavery movements, free African Americans assisted fugitive slaves run away from southern estates and head north through safe houses during the early 1780s (Cobbs-Hoffman 361). Challenges these movements faced include the strengthening of slave decrees in southern states to restrict the education, traveling, and congregation of fugitive slaves with free African Americans. Works Cited Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800- 1860. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Cobbs-Hoffman, Elizabeth. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3rd Edition. Los Angeles: Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc., 2012. Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Susan H. Armitage, and Daniel H. Czitrom. Out of Many: A History of the American People, Brief Edition, Volume 1. New York: Pearson, 2011. Sparks, Randy J. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009. Read More