United States

Lowell was marveled at by foreign and domestic visitors alike but lost its idyllic character as competitive pressures within the industry resulted in larger workloads, longer hours, and smaller wages. When, in the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee young women formed embryonic unions and struck, they were replaced by French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, early New England industrialism carried the imprint of a conscious sense of American exceptionalism.

Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell, Mass.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Bernard A. Weisberger

Social developments

In the decades before the American Civil War (1861–65), the civilization of the United States exerted an irresistible pull on visitors, hundreds of whom were assigned to report back to European audiences that were fascinated by the new society and insatiable for information on every facet of the “fabled republic.” What appeared to intrigue the travelers above all was the uniqueness of American society. In contrast to the relatively static and well-ordered civilization of the Old World, America seemed turbulent, dynamic, and in constant flux, its people crude but vital, awesomely ambitious, optimistic, and independent. Many well-bred Europeans were evidently taken aback by the self-assurance of lightly educated American common folk. Ordinary Americans seemed unwilling to defer to anyone on the basis of rank or status.

Birth of American Culture

“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of “high culture,” he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere—the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

Melville, HermanHerman Melville, etching after a portrait by Joseph O. Eaton.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c35949)

A detail of a page from William Clark's expedition diary, including a sketch of evergreen shrub leaves.North Wind Picture Archives

Lewis and Clark ExpeditionMap of Lewis and Clark Expedition by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, 1804–06.Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.CBut setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes, were the American books on the desks of sea captains, naturalists, biologists, and geologists throughout the world. By 1860 the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.

P.T. Barnum's mammoth tent housing his menagerie and exhibits.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Stephen Foster, 1859Courtesy of the Foster Hall Collection, University of Pittsburgh