Big American Story #5 -- Prosperity

Remember that I need postings every week, so if you need to go back and pick up last week's discussion go ahead.

Prosperity was instrumental in:

Providing a motive for exploration -- Columbus was followed back to the New World because there was gold. Puritans came from England with the promise of being land owners.

Sparking the revolution -- Many of the complaints raised in the Declaration of Independence were economic. The Tea Party was in response to a corporate bailout, after all.

Bringing people out of the east and across the plains to the west coast. -- Sure they believed in Manifest Destiny, but it took the promise of wealth to get people to act on it.

Launching the gilded age. -- Robber barons, tycoons, and the advance of technology led to decades of prosperity.

The Great Depression became the formative experience for multiple generations. (What ended the Depression -- FDR, World War II, or just better weather -- became an interesting discussion.)

The American message in the Cold War was western-style prosperity for all.

After the Cold War, we entered the era of bubbles. Beanie Babies, Internet stocks, Real-estate flipping, sub-prime mortgages. American economic theory since 1989 has been that people can consume as much as they want and not have to worry about paying off the debt. (A significant number of home foreclosures have been on people who put their credit card bills on their home mortgages.)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. When has America acted against its political interests in the quest for prosperity?

2. Can an American politician get elected if he tells people not to consume so much?

3. Which is more important to Americans – personal prosperity or collective opportunity?

Technology in America

Reminder -- The Presidents test is due next week.

Highlights:

Technology advantages (steel, boats, etc.) allowed Europeans to hold a position in the New World.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery profitable, then his invention of interchangeable parts allowed for much more massive slaughter in the Civil War.

While transportation technology allowed Americans to take up more space, industrialization compressed the population into smaller and smaller areas.

America's technological and industrial might made them a deciding factor in both World Wars.

The Cold War was in a lot of ways a battle of technology -- Space Race, RAND corporation.

The advent of the Internet allows America to be an even smaller country even as more and more people fill up the available space.

EXTRA CREDIT ALERT!!!

Go to historybee.com for details on entering the National History Bee. The regionals are in Nashville in January. There will also be an event in Owensboro, date TBD.

If enough folks want to go, we can even enter a team. Let me know if you're interested.

The Five Big Stories

Link to class audio here

We talked the last couple of weeks about historical significance. Here is one way of assessing significance: How big an impact did the person or event make on one of the major stories in American history?

EXPLORATION
Christopher Columbus
Lewis & Clark
Manifest Destiny
Apollo Program

LIBERTY
Pilgrims & Puritans (vs. Roger Williams)
Declaration of Independence & First Amendment
States Rights
Fascism, Nazism, and Communism
Culture Wars & the Supreme Court, 1960-2000
God, faith, and country in the 21st Century

EQUALITY
America vs. the rest of the world
Jacksonian Democracy
Black equality (Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Post-WW2, King, & Obama)
Immigrant Assimilation

PROSPERITY
European explorers
Jamestown, Georgia, New Amsterdam
Alexander Hamilton (Bank of the US, Western empire)
Gold Rush
Gilded Age
Great Depression & Dust Bowl
“Great Society” & the Welfare State

TECHNOLOGY
Education as means to virtue
Agricultural inventions (cotton gin, reapers, tractors)
Transportation inventions (steamboat, railroad, cars, airplanes, spacecraft)
Communication inventions (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, computers, Internet)
Medical & quality of life inventions (vaccination, refrigeration, electric lights, scanners, DNA & the human genome)

Questions for Discussion:

Choose one of the five big stories and answer one of these questions about it:

Who (not a President) did the most to advance the story?
Which story had the biggest effect on a President's legacy?
What event shows the most overlap between multiple stories?