Posts Tagged ‘Antebellum Era’
Elias Howe, the Lockstitch, and the Sewing Machine War
How a patent granted in 1846 became a test of how the law should reward an inventor while still letting useful technology spread. On September 10, 1846, the United States Patent Office granted Patent No. 4,750 to Elias Howe Jr. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a new kind of sewing machine.1 The machine combined a needle…
Read MoreThe Panic of 1837: When the Banks Stopped Paying
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis that tested America’s banking system and a new president’s belief that lasting recovery required separating public money from private banks. On May 10, 1837, New York City banks did something extraordinary. They stopped exchanging their paper notes for gold and silver coin, a step known as suspending…
Read MoreThe “Tariff of Abominations”: The Tariff of 1828 and a Divided Nation
How a tax on imported goods became a test of who benefits from national economic policy, who pays for it, and what a state can do when it objects. On May 19, 1828, President John Quincy Adams approved a law raising duties on imported goods, including woolens, iron, hemp, and molasses.1 Its formal title was…
Read MoreThe Panic of 1819: When America’s Postwar Boom Went Bust
A young nation’s first great test of credit and banking, and the arguments it started about who should carry the cost when easy money runs out. In the years after the War of 1812, the United States seemed to be growing in every direction at once. Settlers poured into the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi Territory,…
Read MoreCatharine Beecher: Schoolroom, Home, and Public Life
How one of antebellum America’s best-known educators expanded what women could learn and earn — while arguing, in print, that women should keep out of public political agitation. In the decades before the Civil War, American women could not vote, and most formal routes to political power were closed to them. Some women challenged those…
Read MoreThe Lowell Mill Girls: Turn-Outs, Petitions, and the Price of Cloth
How the young women, known as the Lowell Mill Girls, who powered an early American industrial city tested what people without a vote could do to change the terms of their work. In the 1830s and 1840s, the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, ran on water power, Southern cotton, and the labor of thousands of…
Read MoreMaria W. Stewart: Claiming the Lecture Platform
How a free Black widow in 1830s Boston turned faith, grief, and political conviction into public speech — and why historians still weigh carefully what made her “first.” On September 21, 1832, a twenty-nine-year-old widow named Maria W. Stewart stood up in Franklin Hall in Boston and began a lecture with a question: “Why sit…
Read MoreHarriette J. Cooke: A Professor’s Rank and a Professor’s Pay
In 1871, Cornell College promoted a longtime teacher to professor and, by its own account, paid her the same as the men beside her. Her story raises a question worth asking of any “first”: how do we know?
Read MoreLaura Ingalls Wilder and the Homestead West
A full-life account of Andrew Jackson — frontier orphan, war hero, and seventh president — covering his military career, his presidency’s major controversies, including Indian removal, and his contested legacy.
Read MoreThe Indian Removal Act and Its Consequences
In 1850, Congress defused a crisis over slavery’s expansion by breaking it into five separate laws. One of those laws — a far more coercive Fugitive Slave Act — did more to divide the country than any of the concessions meant to hold it together.
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