Fiche de révision : America at the Dawn of 1900

📋 Plan du Cours

1. L’exposition universelle de Chicago
2. La conquête de l’Ouest
3. Les transformations de l’Ouest
4. Le Nouveau Sud ségrégationniste
5. Industrie et concentration capitaliste
6. Travailleurs et métropoles américaines
7. Équilibre politique et populisme
8. L’expansion impérialiste américaine

📅 Repères chronologiques

1. November 29, 1864Colorado soldiers murdered 200 Native Americans in the Sand Creek Massacre.
2. June 25, 1876Sioux fighters led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse won the Battle of Little Bighorn.
3. February 18921,300 delegates met in Nebraska and created the People’s Party as a third party outside the Democrats and Republicans.
4. 1898President McKinley intervened in Cuba’s rebellion against Spain, and U.S. forces defeated Spain in three months.
5. 1903Filipino resistance to American occupation led to a cruel and bloody civil war that continued until.

📖 1. L’exposition universelle de Chicago

★ À maîtriser

• The World’s Columbus Fair in Chicago in 1893 celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, although Columbus never reached North America.

• More than 21 million people visited the Chicago exposition in three months.

Compléments

• The fair’s White City consisted of neoclassical buildings recalling ancient Athens and Rome.

• The exposition showcased American inventions and industrial power while presenting the rest of the world in a caricatural and exotic way.

• African Americans were marginalized at the fair, and activists including Ida B. Wells refused to participate.

📖 2. La conquête de l’Ouest

★ À maîtriser

• From 1860 to 1890, white Americans displaced Native Americans, took remaining tribal lands west of the Mississippi, and repeatedly violated treaties, provoking a constant series of wars.

• In 1890, the final massacre forced all Native American tribes to leave for reservations.

📌 The 1887 Dawes Severalty Act aimed to assimilate Native Americans by treating them as individuals and granting individual property, while suppressing tribal life and leaving them excluded from U.S. citizenship.

Compléments

• Native American children were sent from reservations to boarding schools where speaking their native languages was forbidden, and many became marginalized.

📖 3. Les transformations de l’Ouest

★ À maîtriser

• Government funding for railroad construction began in 1862, and the railroads unified the North American continent for the first time.

📌 The 1862 Homestead Act offered settler families 160 acres for a small fee, although they still had to finance their other needs.

Compléments

• Chinese immigrant workers, including 63,000 railroad workers, labored in extreme conditions, and their contribution went unrecognized.

• Western settlement and migration from Europe helped create boom towns, while ranching and cattle drives contributed to the cowboy mythology of a violent and conflictual West.

• Organized labor hostility toward Chinese workers helped drive state and federal efforts to pass Exclusion Acts barring Chinese migrants from industrial work.

• Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was ending as the West’s history became mythologized and turned into entertainment, exemplified by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

📖 4. Le Nouveau Sud ségrégationniste

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• New South : An expression coined by journalist Henry Grady in 1895 to present the post-Civil War South as industrialized, dynamic, and equal.
• Sharecropping : A system in which Black farmers rented land and received crops and tools, then repaid white planters with a share of the harvest, trapping many farmers in poverty.

★ À maîtriser

• Southern states used three devices to prevent African Americans from voting :

  • grandfather clauses
  • literacy tests
  • poll taxes

• Bourbon Democrats sought to restore white supremacy, while racial terror including public lynchings intensified from the early 1890s.

Compléments

• The South developed rail connections with the North and produced steel and textiles; Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta in 1900 and marketed to the general public.

• Some African Americans responded to Southern racism by migrating to the North or West in the movement known as the Great Migration, while Ida B. Wells resisted.

💡 Astuce mémo

Le « Nouveau Sud » promet l’égalité, mais le métayage et la terreur raciale maintiennent la suprématie blanche.

📖 5. Industrie et concentration capitaliste

★ À maîtriser

• By 1900, the United States produced more than one third of the world’s manufactured goods, aided by abundant raw materials and cheap labor.

• Thomas Edison received 1,100 patents; his inventions included the electric bulb in 1879 and developments in motion-picture technology.

• Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and raised workers’ weekly pay to five dollars, twice the average offered by competitors.

• Andrew Carnegie used vertical concentration by acquiring firms from iron and coal suppliers through to steel production, and he was America’s richest man by 1900.

• John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil used low prices to drive competitors into bankruptcy, and Rockefeller controlled 80% of U.S. oil business by the end of the nineteenth century.

Compléments

• Advances in iron and steel production helped industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham grow, while oil was refined into gasoline for internal-combustion engines.

📖 6. Travailleurs et métropoles américaines

★ À maîtriser

• In 1900, Chicago joined New York and Philadelphia as a U.S. city with more than one million inhabitants; its population rose from 30,000 in 1850 to 500,000 in 1880 and 700,000 in 1900.

• Between 1860 and 1890, ten million immigrants came to the United States from Europe, especially Southern and Eastern Europe.

• By 1890, foreign-born residents and their children made up 87% of Chicago’s population and 80% of New York’s population.

Compléments

• Immigrants often lived in ethnic neighborhoods that served as refuges and ghettos within diverse and unequal cities.

• Urban entertainment included Coney Island, sports, music, theater, and Nickelodeons where a nickel bought access to movies and serial dramas.

📖 7. Équilibre politique et populisme

★ À maîtriser

• Party loyalty divided voters mainly between Republican-supporting North and Democratic-supporting South, and Republicans won the two presidential elections with a popular-vote margin of only 1.5%.

• Voter participation remained above 78%; Northern African Americans who could vote generally supported the party of Lincoln, while immigrants tended to favor Democrats.

• Falling crop prices, farmer debts, limited access to bank credit, and rising railroad transport costs led farmers to organize the Farmers’ Alliance.

• In 1896, the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, who supported bimetallism, but Republican William McKinley won 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176, settling the money question and ending the People’s Party.

Compléments

📌 In 1883, Congress introduced civil-service reform to replace patronage with recruitment based on merit.

💡 Astuce mémo

Les démocrates et républicains dominent l’équilibre partisan, tandis que les populistes proposent un troisième parti.

📖 8. L’expansion impérialiste américaine

★ À maîtriser

• American expansion in the Pacific included a naval base at Pearl Harbor, and white settlers’ 1893 revolution in Hawaii led to annexation in 1898.

• After the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain.

Compléments

• The Monroe Doctrine, established in 1823, expressed the U.S. position on European intervention in the Americas, while expansionists also sought influence in China and Africa.

• Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the United States needed a powerful navy to become a great nation and influence world affairs.

💡 Astuce mémo

Hawaï et Pearl Harbor, puis Cuba, Porto Rico et les Philippines.