Essential Question: What forces unite and divide a nation?

American Industrial Revolution

Guiding Question: How was the North transformed by industrialism?

1. What was the Industrial Revolution? Why do you think that new changes in technology produced a “revolution?”

2. How did the Industrial Revolution begin in the United States?

3. What economic and geographical factors made the North more suitable for industrialization than the South?

4. What major industries developed in the North in the first half of the 1800s?

5. What were the benefits of American Industrialization? What problems resulted from industrialization?

6. How did the Industrial Revolution change working life in the United States? Family life?

7. In what ways does industry in the United States today differ from industry during the early 1800s? In what ways is it the same?

(LANDS OF PROMISE)

(TEXTILE MILLS)

(Was There an Industrial Revolution? Americans at Work Before the Civil War)

There an Industrial Revolution? New Workplace, New Technology, New Consumers)

(Multiple videos and resources)

The Plantation Economy

Guiding Question: Why was the South known as the Cotton Kingdom?”

1. What geographical factors contributed to the South being a largely agricultural region?

2. How did the invention of the cotton gin change the South’s economy?

3. What was the relationship between an increased demand for cotton and the growth of slavery in the South?

4. How widespread was slavery in the South? Why did most non-slaveholding Southerners support slavery?

5. What was life like for enslaved persons in the South? For free African Americans in the South? Why did some enslaved persons rebel?

6. How might the Southern economy have developed without the use of slave labor? In what ways would this development have affected the South’s relations with the North?

(Rural way of life)

(Cotton is King)

(EXTENSION OF SLAVERY)

(SLAVERY AND SECTIONALISM)

Transportation Networks

Guiding Question: In what ways did expanding transportation networks aid the growth of the nation?

1. What forms of transportation were developed or improved in the early 1800s?

2. How did advances in transportation help the nation’s economy grow? Specific examples?

3. What type of transportation links were developed in the early 1800s? What areas did these links connect?

4. How did transportation networks promote national unity?

5. Why did westward expansion require improved transportation?

6. In what ways did these advances in transportation affect the lives of ordinary Americans?

(TWO AMERICAS)

(Erie Canal)

(National Road)

(BUILDING UNITY, WESTWARD)

(Transportation: Trails & Roads, Canals and Railroads)

(Westward expansion)