U.S. LITERARY, POLITICAL, AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE “ROMANTIC ERA”
1803: Louisiana Purchase -- West opens up – Jefferson turns to “loose construction” and “implied powers”
1803: Marbury v. Madison -- "judicial review"
1815: Treaty of Ghent -- ends War of 1812
1817: William Cullen Bryant, "Thanatopsis"
1819: Washington Irving, The Sketch Book
1819: McCulloch v. Maryland
1820-1821: Missouri Compromise – Missouri a slave state -- Maine a free state -- 36 30' line to Rockies
1820: British critic Sidney Smith asked, "Who would read an American book?"
1821: Bryant, Poems (1821)
1823: Monroe Doctrine
1823: James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823) -- first Leatherstocking Tale
1824: Gibbons v. Ogden
1825: Erie Canal opens
links Great Lakes with Hudson River (leads to NY City) – NY City becomes dominant seaport in U.S.
1828: Andrew Jackson elected U.S. President
1828: Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language
1829: word "technology" coined
1830: Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Old Ironsides" (in Boston Daily Advertiser)
1831: William Lloyd Garrison founds The Liberator (anti-slavery publication)
1831: Nat Turner leads slave revolt in Virginia
1832: Ralph Waldo Emerson resigns ministry of Unitarian Church
1833: Oberlin College becomes first co-educational college
1833: American Anti-Slavery Society founded by abolitionist groups from New York and New England
1834: anti-abolitionist riots break out in New York and Philadelphia
1835: Congress adopts "gag resolutions" against anti-slavery petitions and motions
1836: Samuel Morse invents telegraph
1836: Transcendental Club met the first time
1836: Emerson, Nature
1837: Emerson, "The American Scholar" -- calls for U.S. literary independence
1837: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
1837: Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary becomes first college-level institution for women – f. by Emma Willard
1839: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night
1839: founding of Liberty Party -- first anti-slavery political party -- national convention in Warsaw, NY
1840: founding of The Dial (transcendentalist magazine) – edited by Margaret Fuller
1840: World Anti-Slavery Convention (London) -- American churches condemned for supporting slavery
1840: Albert Brisbane, The Social Destiny of Men
1841: Emerson, Essays
1841: launching of George Ripley's Brook Farm (utopian experiment)
1841: Frederick Douglass addresses convention of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket
results in Douglass's employment as an agent
1843: William Hinkling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico
1844: Emerson, Essays: Second Series
1845: Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Poems
1846-1848: Mexican War -- ended by Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo
1846: Henry David Thoreau jailed for refusal to pay poll tax
1846: Herman Melville, Typee
1847: Emerson, Poems
1847: Longfellow, Evangeline
1848: California Gold Rush; California adopts constitution forbidding slavery
1848: Seneca Falls Convention
first official womens' rights convention -- adopts Declaration of Sentiments – vote first, then full equality
1848: James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics and The Biglow Papers
1849: Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"
1849: Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail
1850: Emerson, Representative Man
1850: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
1850: Harper's Magazine founded
1850: University of Utah becomes second co-educational college
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"Compromise of 1850" – California a free state, slave trade abolished in D.C., stricter fugitive slave law
Lucy Stone becomes first female to earn college degree (Oberlin College)
Charles Sumner becomes U.S. Senator from Massachusetts – leads fight against slavery
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Parkman, History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
New York and Chicago connected by railroad
Frederick Douglass, Heroic Slave (1853)
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Missouri Compromise unconstitutional
"popular sovereignty": all territories can decide to permit or prohibit slavery
wipes out Whig Party and Northern wing of Democrats
1854: beginnings of Republican Party -- anti-slavery
1854: Thoreau, Walden
1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (beginning)
1855: Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
1855: Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
1857: Dred Scott Case -- decision by U.S. Supreme Court
fugitive slaves in free states are not free -- Congress without power to prohibit slavery in territories
court says Missouri Compromise had always been unconstitutional
1857: Atlantic Monthly founded
1858: Lincoln-Douglas Debates
1859: Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (Britain)
1859: John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry, VA – Brown hanged: Hero/Martyr to North and Traitor to South
1859: first oil well (Titusville, PA)
1860: South Carolina secedes from Union
1860: Abraham Lincoln elected U.S. President
1861: telegraph links California to the East
1861-1865: Civil War
1862: Emancipation Proclamation (after Battle of Antietam)
1863: Gettysburg Address
1865: Lincoln assassinated (Ford's Theater, Washington, D.C., by John Wilkes Booth)
1866: John Greenleaf Whittier, Snowbound
1867: Alaska Purchase (Seward Purchase)
1869: first transcontinental railroad (Central Pacific and Union Pacific meet at Promontory Point, Utah)
National Growth
1810: 17 states -- population ~7 million -- population center: Eastern seaboard
1861: 34 states -- population ~30 million -- population center: Ohio
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