Analysis of the Westward Expansion (1860 – 1890)
Instructions: This assignment is a “think piece,” which is an essay that requires you to interact with a subject and develop your own interpretation based on that experience. After your initial analysis of a specific topic, you should synthesize that with other outside research to support your ideas. You should use a minimum of two other scholarly, peer-reviewed resources found in the APUS library. .
Specifically for this assignment we will use an interactive map of westward expansion from 1860 to 1890. You can access it at this URL: http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/asset/akh10_int_expansion/ Once you have the map open, click on the boxes for Major Cities, Railroad Networks, Improved Agricultural Land, and States and Territories. At the bottom of the map, you will notice the decades 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1890. Click on each of these decades in succession and you will see the ways in which the country changed. The goal of this assignment is for you to interpret, synthesize, and analyze what you are seeing on the map. You will make a well-organized argument, support that through research, and then write a conclusion for your findings.
Analysis is the process whereby the researcher separates something into its component parts. In an analytical essay, the writer examines a subject relative to its own terms, and explains the problem by studying the individual parts. In contrast, synthesis requires that the researcher examine individual unrelated parts in an effort to discover something new. A good essay will utilize both analysis and synthesis. Instead of examining the simple facts of a problem, the writer will go beyond the obvious, making connections between different pieces of evidence to discover something new.
As an example, consider a modern map of the world illustrating the growth of the internet over the last thirty years. It demonstrates the new ways in which the world is connected by facilitating the spread of ideas through instantaneous communication. Access to much of the information that once required us to physically travel to a library is now accessible through a computer at home (or a mobile phone in your pocket). Social media has also given us the ability to discuss and debate ideas, not only with our friends and family, but with people we may have never met. We all have the power to disseminate knowledge around the globe within a matter of seconds.
If you were writing a paper on this topic (this is an example only, as your paper will focus on the period from 1860 to 1890) you could analyze this larger topic by focusing on a specific aspect like use of the internet in online education. You might make the argument that the internet has enabled more non-traditional students to pursue a higher education. Your synthesis would include understanding the connections between your outside research and your argument.
Solution.
Analysis of the Westward Expansion (1860 – 1890)
To begin with, immediately after the Civil War, Americans assumed control of the Mississippi River by driving out the natives and putting up homesteads, mines, and farms. American pioneers and European transients overcame the adversities of life on western residences as they had planned to amass new lives. A noteworthy part of the territory in the West affirmed by travelers was the nation of Native Americans that had used it for a significantly long time. That westward advancement was hugely helped by the accomplishment of a segment of the Homestead Act in 1862 and the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The marches gave free 160-section of the area in the disturbed West to any person who might file a case, live in the zone for quite a while and roll out improvements to it, including setting up a home. The incident to the railroads and the cattlemen changed this. By 1869 the original railroad reached out from the Pacific to Omaha, in Nebraska. In the following year, various diverse lines were assembled. In the end, men and the stock could be transported efficiently to the mainland. The dry conditions mainly contributed to a healthful stimulation of vegetation due to the convergence of sugars and supplements as well as declines in plant obstructions. Moreover, the dry conditions initiated decrease in infectious diseases that kill bugs and insects.
The first people to see the significance presented by the railways were the cattlemen in Texas. During the Civil War, farms had not been dealt with, and about five million semi-wild cows were mismanaged and wandered across the state to the change in ranch outcomes between 1850 and 1860. Such a phenomenon occurred due to a treatment gathering of localities who were bound to those that accessed the railroad amid the retro versus a control group that did not. The Americans at that time were denied from however those zones that had railroad joints in 1850 so that their usage cluster involved territories that grabbed railroad access in the midst of the 1850s versus those regions that did not have an entry up until 1860. Upgrading the region and bringing it into the new era, as will conventions about the future qualities. Railway construction was an enduring change in the face of the American populace, and along these lines it could be depended upon to make a rare rejoinder in region’s upgrades than the significant influx of westward augmentation that went with the ascension of assemblies in the nation’s urbanized regions and towns through a comprehensive organization of lanes, channels, and rail routes. The American Civil War pulverized the South undoubtedly. A substantial portion of the war struggled in the South, and a part of the southern area base destroyed. Confederate cash and securities became pointless, precluding the region from claiming a mind-boggling degree of its wealth. Slaves’ liberation also wrecked a vast part of the South’s capital, making the necessity for another work structure (James & Dippel, 2006).
Westward Expansion between 1870 and 1880
During this period the US government stopped the recurrent bargains with the Indians. The Congress intentionally agreed to treaties that do not perceive the tribes in America as free countries. During the end of the settlement period, the American-Indian tribes had control over ten percent of the 48 states and a quarter of the Rocky Mountains and Mississippi. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 was stipulated and passed by the Congress. Opinions had their catalyzer in the Puritan settlements, New England, as the possibility of that the world had a fresh start, an opportunity to the rights and freedom issues in the European administration and society. In the leaflet written by Thomas Paine in 1776, he stipulates that Americans have an open door and a consolation before them that can pave the way to shape the decent and wholesome constitution on earth. He also motivates Americans by giving them hope that they have the required energy to start over again. Be that as it may, a tiny bit at a time diminishing the degree of total agrarian inputs, finding out about changes in the gainfulness of estate authorities should help Americans to appreciate when and why full-scale proficiency has changed. Furthermore, shifts in the right compensation and wages of the farmers require development in the profitability of works in the homestead. It changed the total capacity to scrounge for the sustenance of America’s creative energies and interests. The libraries and documents that the US had quite recently yearned for were promptly accessible. The Internet conveyed with it the rush and the abundance of edges less hotel along with the sensitive and crippling force of de-altered inquiry in electronic talk records (Billington & Ridge, 2001).
Westward Expansion between 1870 and 1880
The Great Plains may be secluded into two geographic districts high fields toward the west and level regions toward the east. Sodbusters were the primary explorers changing rich prairies into wrinkled fields. Sodbusters in the eastern parts succeeded conveying traditional harvests (Smith, 1926). However, low yearly rainfalls made cultivating unfruitful in the extensive circles. Little annual rains were made regionally due to a deluge shadow effect presented by the Coastal and Rough Mountains. The United States could never have created at the rate she oversaw without the vibrant landscapes and minerals of the West. Her people couldn’t have been empowered, and her business ventures couldn’t have reached out without the sustenance from the prairies and the rough materials. America did not use her creating power on the planet of her energies (Roth, 2002).
Example
A considerable number of Missourians
overpowered into Kansas between 1854 and 1855 to vote erroneously for
subjection. “Free-soil” pioneers set up an adversary government, and
soon Kansas spiraled into basic war.
Numerous people lost their lives in combat that took after, known as After 30
years, the typical war in Kansas over the
advancement of subjugation was trailed by
a common national war over similar issues. As Thomas Jefferson had expected, it was
the subject of subjugation in the West, a place that gave off an impression of
being the badge of American freedom that ended up being to be the ring (Siddali,
2014).
References
Billington, R. A., & Ridge, M. (2001). Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. New York: UNM Press.
James, E., & Dippel, J. V. (2006). Race to the Frontier:” White Flight” and Westward Expansion. Sage Publishers.
Roth, M. P. (2002). Issues of Westward Expansion. Greenwood Press.
Siddali, S. R. (2014). Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents. Ohio University Press.
Smith, G. H. (1926). The Settlement and Present Distribution of Population in Wisconsin: A Geographical Interpretation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.