11. The American Civil War.

With two fundamentally different labor systems at their base, the economic and social changes across the nation's geographical regions – based on wage labor in the North and on slavery in the South – underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by the mid-nineteenth century in the North and in the South. The American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 until 1865 between the United States – forces coming mostly from the 23 northern states of the Union – and the newly-formed Confederate States of America, which consisted of 11 southern states that had declared their secession. The Confederate Army did well in the early part of the war, and some of its commanders especially General Robert E. Lee, were brilliant tacticians. But in the summer of 1863 Lee took a gamble by marching his troops north into Pennsylvania. He met a Union army at Gettysburg, and the largest battle ever fought on American soil ensued. After three days of desperate fighting, the Confederates were defeated..

Two years later, after a long campaign involving forces commanded by Lee and Grant, the Confederates surrendered. But it resolved two matters that had vexed Americans since 1776. It put an end to slavery, and it decided that the country was not a collection of semi-independent states but an indivisible whole. Significant Southern leaders included Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, etc.

Northern leaders included Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George G. Meade,etc

12. U.S. Industrialization and immigration.

From 1865 to about 1900, the U.S. became the world's leading industrial nation. The availability of land; the diversity of climate and the economic diversity; coastal waterways; the abundance of natural resources; fast transport, and the availability of capital

-Second Industrial Revolution.

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, - by 1900 the United States had more rail mileage than all of Europe. The petroleum industry prospered, and John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company became one of the richest men in America. Andrew Carnegie, who started out as a poor Scottish immigrant, built a vast empire of steel mills. Series of inventions: the telephone, the light bulb, the phonograph, the alternating-current motor and transformer, motion pictures.

From 1840 to 1920 an immigrants came to the United States approximately 37 million in total. They came from a variety of locations and for a variety of reasons, ranging from economic opportunities to the search for land, to escaping from the Irish Potato Famine. Many fled from religious or political persecution. In the United States these new immigrants were subject to discrimination.

Industrialization brought with it the rise of organized labor. The life of a 19th-century U.S. industrial worker was far from easy: wages were low, hours long and working conditions hazardous. The situation was worse for women and children. The first major effort to organize workers' groups on a nationwide basis appeared with The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor in 1869, then it fell into decline – new one the Am. federation of labour. The objectives: increasing wages, reducing hours and improving working conditions.