Complete History Primary Source Assignment NO PLAGIARISM

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greenaprxvatngy

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  • InstructionsChoose and Read any 2 of the following (2 primary source documents from the same collection are acceptable): You are always welcome to choose from other primary sources at the Fordham University Modern History Source Book. You may also select your own primary sources, provided that they are from a credible site. For a quick reference to determining site credibility, see:
    Write a 500 word essay citing the primary sources and Hine & Faragher at least 5 times. Cite at least two primary sources and Hine & Faragher. In your essay, think back to the readings from Hine & Faragher. The Primary Source essay is less formal than the Textbook Essay. You have some freedom with the Primary Source essay in that you may write in the first person if you would like. You may choose to write in a reflective manner as well. Think along these lines:
    • Where do the primary sources help you understand the Hine & Faragher text better?
    • How do the primary sources help you understand the people who wrote them?
    • How do the primary sources fit with what you understood of the History of this period before reading the sources?
    • Do they support what you have long thought regarding the period?
    • Do they challenge your views of the period?
    • Do they make you aware of things you had never heard of?
    • What surprises you in the primary sources?
    Conversely, you may write in a scientific fashion, thinking along these lines:
    • Who are the authors?
    • What are the authors' arguments?
    • What are the authors' audiences?
    • Why did the authors produce the sources? What is going on in their worlds to prompt the sources' production?
    • What were the primary sources' effects on the world?
    • Why do the primary sources matter?
    • How do your primary sources bolster an argument in favor of one of your own theological, political, social, etc., theory
    • How do your primary sources support or refute Hine & Faragher.
    Identify your chosen primary sources clearly so that I can find them. If they are from an outside source, be sure to include a link at the bottom of the essay. Citations can be simple parenthetical citations. I simply need to be able to find what you are citing. For example:
    • (Hine & Faragher, 17)
    • (de las Casas, A Short Account, 2)
    • (Cortés, Letter)
    If you are citing outside sources that I have not assigned, please provide a link at the bottom of the page, along with a title that matches the citation.Always quote any words that are taken verbatim from Hine & Faragher or anyone else in order to prevent plagiarism. Citations go within the essay immediately after the sentence they support. Using the example from the Textbook Essay instructions, I might say:
    • The Civil War had a dramatic effect on the West in many ways, including an outward migration of African Americans from the South. (Hine & Faragher, 370-373) For example, Hine & Faragher describe "yet another mass exodus to the western promised land" in 1879 when free black Americans moved to western lands. (Hine & Faragher, 370-371)
    Remember:
    • 500 words
    • Cite the primary sources and Hine & Faragher at least 5 times.
    • Cite at least 2 different primary sources, unless the instructions specifically state that one primary source will beenough.(This occasionally happens in lessons with longer primary sources.)
    • Identify your chosen primary sources clearly so that I can find them.

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Mullins, who cowboyed in Wyoming during this period, knew "some mighty fine boys carrying little irons” that they used to put their own brand on mavericks. In spite of the law, many cowboys believed that this was only fair play. Hadn't the early ranchers done the same thing in Texas? Although Mullins claimed that he “never in- dulged in this questionable game," he sympathized with the rustlers, pointing out that the cattle barons "had cut off every avenue for advancement." In the words of an old cowboy adage, "If you stole a few cattle you were a rustler. If you stole a few thou- sand you were a cattleman." Such views were widely held. When the association's "stock detectives"brought accused rustlers into court, juries of local citizens refused to convict them. In fact, the rustling charges were really just a cover for the association's attempt to eliminate competition. "The rustler," wrote Asa Mercer in his classic history of the conflict, "is the cattle baron's convenient scarecrow."Failing in the courts, the cattle- men turned to violence. Their first strike came against James Averell and his lover, Ella Watson, who were living on homestead claims that the association considered part of the "open range.” The cattle barons first tried to force them out by spreading rumors that Averell was the leader of a rustler band, and that Watson, known as “Cat- tle Kate," was a notorious prostitute who had built her fine herd by accepting steers for sexual services. Historians still dispute the truth of the charges. The pair refused to be intimidated, however, and Averell published angry denunciations of "land monopolists” in the newspaper. Finally, in 1889 a group of vigilante cattlemen in- vaded their ranch and lynched the couple. Although the murderers were well known, they walked free when the witnesses to the crime mysteriously"disappeared."37 The lynching of Averell and Cattle Kate stirred up animosity toward the cattle- men. The small ranchers organized a competing organization, the Northern Wyoming Farmers and Stockgrowers Association, and in 1892 they arranged to drive-rather than ship-their cattle east, avoiding the big interests and their rail- road connections. Nathan Champion, a trail boss with a tough reputation was to lead the drive. The big interests responded by sending fifty gunmen into Johnson County, where they killed three men and besieged Champion in a cabin along the Powder River. He held them off for twelve hours before the invaders burned him out and murdered him. Outraged Johnson County citizens organized into a vigilante mob of their own and surrounded the invaders, determined to hang them all. But the screams of the cattle magnates were heard as far away as Washington, D.C., and President Benjamin Harrison sent in United States troops to restore order. It is de batable whether federal intervention brought law and justice, for the cases against those who killed Champion and his friends were quietly dropped when the witnesses again disappeared. In the Johnson County War the most powerful political forces in Wyoming stood in opposition not only to the rustler but to any cowboy individual- istic enough to remain on his own. OPEN BANOS 327 11 The Safety Valve Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans were believers in the Jeffersonian promise that ordinary citizens-armed only with courage, stamina, and self-reliance- could move West, stake modest claims to the land, and make a success of it. The promise depended on the availability of western land, boundless, fertile, and cheap, and in post-Civil War America it was underwritten by the Homestead Act. Congress passed this historic legislation in the spring of 1862, as Union and Confederate troops fought and died for control of western Virginia and Tennessee, earlier Wests. But homestead enthusiasts would not allow the dying to spoil their legislative achieve- ment. “We doubt whether any endowment on so magnificent a scale has ever been conferred on the moneyless sons of labor," read one rhapsodic editorial; the Home- stead Act would shape American society "upon ages to come, when the battles on the Potomac and Tennessee will be regarded as mere incidents in history." Before the Homestead Act, the principles of American land policy were embod- ied in a sequence of emendations and elaborations to the foundational Land Ordi- nance of 1785, which opened the western public domain to settlers—but at a price, for the sale of public lands was to constitute a principal source of federal revenue. Over the next fifty years, in response to citizen complaints that the land law favored capitalists and speculators over actual settlers, Congress gradually lowered the price to $1.25 per acre and reduced the size of the minimum purchase from 640 to 40 acres. But what settlers most wanted was the legalization of squatting the right to select and improve lands anywhere on the public domain—even before they were sur- veyed—with the guarantee that when the land was officially "opened" they would be granted the opportunity to buy at the minimum price. In the American vernac- ular this right became known as “preemption." Representative Balie Peyton of Ten- nessee presented the plight of the squatter to Congress in 1835. "He had chosen that 330 spot as the home of his children. He had toiled in hope. He had given it value, and he loved the spot. It was his all. When the public sales were proclaimed, if that poor man attended it, he might bid to the last cent he had in the world, and mortgage the bed he slept on to enable him to do it. He might have his wife and children around him to see him bid; and when he had bid his very last cent, one of those speculators would stand by his side and bid two dollars more. And thus he would see his little home, on which he had toiled for years, where he hoped to rear his children and find a peace ful grave, pass into the hands of a rich moneyed company." A New York editor, by contrast, declared that preemption amounted to "granting bounties to squatters en- gaged in cheating the government out of the best tracts of land." During the presi- dential election of 1840, however, both the Whig and Democratic platforms en- dorsed a preemption law, and in 1841, soon after the election of William Henry Harrison ("Old Tippecanoe") to the presidency, Congress passed what was known as the "Log Cabin Bill," granting preemption rights to all Americans. The land was still not free, however, for sooner or later squatters, like everyone else, had to pay for the acres they tilled. The passage of the Log Cabin Bill set Americans to arguing whether the time had not come for dropping the revenue principle altogether and providing free land for settler families. The most vocal proponent for such a "homestead" law was labor leader George Henry Evans, editor of the New York Working Man's Advocate. Urging the laboring man to "Vote Yourself a Farm," Evans proposed a federal program to grant 160 acres of the public domain in the West to any citizen who was willing to improve it. Free land, he believed, like the "safety valve" on a steam boiler, would "carry off the superabundant labor (of eastern cities) to the salubrious and fertile West." Like many other nineteenth-century reformers, Evans was disturbed by the increasing concentration of land in the hands of wealthy Americans—what his con- temporaries referred to as “land monopoly." Evans urged that strict legal limits be placed on the quantity of public land an individual could acquire. Even more radi- cal proposals to eliminate land monopoly were circulating, Firebrand labor leader Thomas Skidmore argued that the government should confiscate large landed es- tates and redistribute them to ordinary workingfolk. Horrified capitalists de nounced both Skidmore and Evans as "agrarians" a term conservatives had pre- viously used to deride the Shays rebels in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts.? Evans's proposals were rescued from the political fringe by another New Yorker, Horace Greeley, editor of the nationally distributed New York Weekly Tribune, the most influential newspaper in nineteenth-century America. Greeley spoke to a wide constituency that included merchants and manufacturers. "Every smoke that rises in the Great West," he reminded them, "marks a new customer to the counting rooms and warehouses of New York." Western expansion was good for eastern business. Greeley, too, was an avid believer in the notion of a western safety valve, emphasiz- HATITT VALVE 331 Horace Greeley, 1872. Beinecke. 332 SAFETY VALVE ing the benefits that free land would have for employers: strikes, he argued,"will be glaringly absurd when every citizen is offered the alternative to work for others or for himself, as to him shall seem most advantageous." Editorials in the Weekly Tribune kept the homestead issue at the top of the polit- ical agenda during the 1850s, and in the minds of millions of Americans Greeley's name became indelibly linked to the promise of free western lands for settlers. “I turned my face westward with the spirit of Horace Greeley," wrote African-Ameri- can homesteader Oscar Micheaux more than a half-century after the passage of the Homestead Act, "his words go west, young man,'ringing in my ears." Fact was, Gree- ley did not coin this famous phrase, so identified with him, but quoted it from an In- diana newspaper. Tell that to the thousands of pioneers like Micheaux who located the source of their westering inspiration in the New Yorkeditor who made the home- stead law his crusade. In the mid-1850s the new Republican Party embraced the homestead program as part of its effort to build an alliance between northeastern and western politicians. In exchange for eastern votes for homestead legislation, westerners would support higher tariffs to protect "infant industries" like textiles and iron. Under Republican auspices the homestead program took on an antislavery cast. "A country cut up into small farms, occupied by many independent proprietors who live by their own toil." George Washington Julian of Indiana told his fellow congressmen, would presenta "formidable barrier against the introduction of slavery." Southern legislators, fear- ing that the agitation for free land inevitably would lead to "Free Soil"—the politi- cal movement to bar slavery from the territories—became implacable opponents of the homestead bill. One Alabama senator warned that the plan was "tinctured with abolitionism." In 1859 the Republican coalition succeeded in pushing the legislation through Congress, only to have it vetoed by Democratic President James Buchanan, deeply in debt to southern supporters. The issue immediately became fodder for the presidential campaign of 1860. “Does anyone suppose that Abraham Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?"Greeley editorialized. The secession of the southern states and the mass departure of southern con gressmen from Washington after the Republican electoral triumph of 1860 removed the final obstacle to the passage of the "Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain." It took effect on January 1, 1863, the same day as the Eman- cipation Proclamation. Persons over the age of twenty-one-both men and women, citizens and immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens—were eligible to file for up to 160 acres of surveyed land on the public domain. Home- steaders had to cultivate the land improve it by constructing a house or barn, and reside on the claim for five years, after which they would receive full title, paying only a $10 fee. Alternately, after only six months of residence they could exercise a "com- mutation clause" allowing them to purchase the claim at the minimum cash price SAFETT VALVE 333
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HISTORY

In the late American history transportation was a major key in development some of the best
inventions were made and successfully changed the whole sector. Despite it all who were the
beneficiaries of this inventions? Who were the manpower in all this ? and did they stand to reap
the benefits? Anyway, Hine and Faragher have made clear history and therer is primary
source in support of it.
In the nineteenth century the Europeans ,Americans and native Americans all wanted to
journey to the west where they could get land. They were basically herdsmen and hostlers
who believed in cattle as a source of pride. Being herdsmen the native Americans were fairly
in their comfortable state. Well infiltration of the Europeans in the west brought changes that
the natives had to write about to give primary sources,letters to each other and journals are
just but a sample.
During this century the construction of the railroad took place as it was transcontinental it
passed through the west and in so doing made transport easier but also brought conflict
between the native Americans and Indians . its stated in text history that in this period after
the railroad construction that Avarell and his wife Watso...


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