Fun Facts:


On March 2, 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act. This divided the South into military districts. Each district had a military governor that was aided by a full force of troops. Men that fought against the Union were not allowed to run for president of any other political office. The Reconstruction Era was part of a ten year period of rebuilding after the Civil War.
Chris A
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_era_of_the_United_States



Transportation:

Some transportation that people used during the Reconstruction Era were railroads, horse and buggy, or steamboats. In the 1800s, Americans were settling in the west and needed a way to get supplies to the new settlements. Railroads were developed to move things more quickly to the settlers. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10, 1869. It connected Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California. In the 1800s they even had horse drawn trollies that ran on rails through the cities and towns. Steamboats transported people and goods up and down the Mississippi River and other rivers. More info on Transcontinental Railroad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad

Transport or transportation is the movement of people and goods from one place to another. The term is derived from the Latin trans ("across") and portare ("to carry"). Industries which have the business of providing transport equipment, transport services or transport are important in most national economies, and are referred to as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation

-Nick H

The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell.
The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell.

Chris A

Communication:

1876
-- Bell files his patent application. First telephone patent (U.S. No. 174,465) allowed and issued to Bell on March 7th. - - March 10th, Bell speaks the first complete sentence transmitted by variable resistance transmitter ... "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!" - - Bell lectures on and exhibits telephone apparatus at the Society of Arts, Boston; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston and the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. - - The world's first long distance telephone call (one-way) was received at Paris, Ontario by Bell from his father and uncle at Brantford, Ontario over "borrowed" telegraph lines. - - Gardiner Greene Hubbard, one of Bell's financial backers and sharer in Bell's patents, offers to sell the telephone invention to Western Union Telegraph Company for $100,000. Western Union refuses the offer. - - The world's first two way long distance telephone conversation over an outdoor wire (borrowed telegraph line) takes place between Cambridgeport and Boston, Massachusetts between Bell and Watson.



Communication is the process of conveying information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood by both sender and receiver. It is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged, There are auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, or the use of writing. Communication is defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, and evaluating. Use of these processes is developmental and transfers to all areas of life: home, school, community, work, and beyond. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.[1] Communication is the articulation of sending a message, through different media [2] whether it be verbal or nonverbal, so long as a being transmits a thought provoking idea, gesture, action, etc.
-NickH
Communication happens at many levels (even for one single action), in many different ways, and for most beings, as well as certain machines. Several, if not all, fields of study dedicate a portion of attention to communication, so when speaking about communication it is very important to be sure about what aspects of communication one is speaking about. Definitions of communication range widely, some recognizing that animals can communicate with each other as well as human beings, and some are more narrow, only including human beings within the parameters of human symbolic interaction.
Nonetheless, communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Content (what type of things are communicated), source, emisor, sender or encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through which medium), destination, receiver, target or decoder (to whom), and the purpose or pragmatic aspect. Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings).

Clay M.

Fashion
Boys during the Reconstruction Era didn't wear Etnies(R), Nikes (R) or any other shoes we have today.Weathy boys during that time wore Fauntleroy suits. Black stockings wore worn with this suit but later white would be worn. Fautleroy suits, pants and jackets were made of velvet and silk. A popular accessory was a salior hat. Farmer's sons wore no shoes and other country fashions such as overalls and straw hats.




Entertainment
During the 1800's people had many different ways to entertain themselves. They would go see plays, carve, paint, and external image 24583.jpg
do many other things. Music was also a big part of the Reconstructive Era for entertainment. They did not have gaming
systems or Ipods like we do today, but they were just as entertained without them. During the 1800's people would be
outside playing, not stuck in front of the television. They did not have many sports during the 1800's, lacrosse is the
oldest sport in North America, and it was used to train Indians for war.

Mark B.
They also played outside and like in the book Tom Sawyer they played pirates with there friends. So I guess that could be some form of entertainment that they could of had back then.
Clay M.

SLAVERY

Slavory is an economic system in which people are deprived of their freedom and rights. They are usually forced to work. They don't receive pay, the right to leave, or the chance to refuse work. Slavory was a huge problem in the U.S., especially in the south. Slaves were brought over from Africa on ships.

-Austin M.



"Slavery (also called thralldom) is a social-economic system under which certain persons—known as slaves—are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to work.
Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages) in return for their labor. As such, slavery is one form of unfree labor.

In its narrowest sense, the word slave refers to people who are treated as the property of another person, household, company, corporation or government. This is referred to as chattel slavery."

Ben S.
Wikipedia



Education

Education during the Reconstruction Era was very different than today's system.
First of all, the school houses were very different from the 21st century's modern external image ore-valley-one-room-schoolhouse%20b.jpg
buildings. They were usually only one room. A good example of a vintage one-room
schoolhouse during the Reconstruction Era is the one to the right. In the 1800's
children of all ages were taught all together for example, there would maybe be a 20 year old in the same room as a 6 year old. Also, kids didn't start school in
September. That was the time that they had to pick apples, milk cows , husk corn,
carry water, and other chores. Usually, men would be the ones to go to school.
So, do you wish that you went to school in the Reconstruction Era?


-Austin M.


Inventions not Yet Inventedexternal image typewriter.gif:
The inventions in the 1800's were much different than the ones now. A big one would be the type-writer. The type-writer was invented between 1800 and 1850. Current day Inventers have now created computers to replace typewriters. Another invention not yet invented is the television. People would read for entertainment or make up their own games.
Some more inventions not yet invented are the air conditioning or heating system that I know we all have! Another one is video game systems (PS3, XBO 360, PSP, PS2, Wii......). Even though these systems are a great source of entertainment, people back then just played outside. YOU SHOULD TOO!!!!!! Also the cars we know today,(sports cars, mini-vans, and SUVs.)
Chris A.



Photography:

Photography was very different in the 1800s from what it is today. The very first photo was produced by a French Inventor named Nicéphore Niépce. The picture was permanent but the process of taking the photo took 8 hours. He then began trying to find a new process of taking a photo that is faster. Nicéphore Niépce then partnered up with Louis Daguerre and they both experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in
Nicéphore Niépce photo.
Nicéphore Niépce photo.
1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. In 1833, Nicéphore Niépce died, but Johann continued to work and developed a new type of photography called daguerreotype in 1837. France agreed to pay Daguerre for his formula, in exchange for his promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.
"Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype process, now familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used to "fix" pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.
In March of 1851, Frederick Scott Archer published his findings in "The Chemist" on the wet plate collodion process. This became the most widely used process between 1852 and the late 1880s when the dry plate was introduced. There are three subsets to the Collodion process; the Ambrotype (positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (positive image on metal) and the negative which was printed on Albumen or Salt paper.
Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made in through the nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.
In 1908 Gabriel Lippmann won the Nobel Laureate in Physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference, also known as the Lippmann plate." quoted from //wikipedia//

Kacey C.

Carpet Baggers:

Wikipedia

"In United States history, carpetbaggers was the term southerners gave to northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction, between 1865 and 1877. They formed a coalition with freedmen (freed slaves), and scalawags (southern whites who supported Reconstruction) in the Republican Party. Together they politically controlled former Confederate states for varying periods, 1867–1877.

The term carpetbaggers was used to describe the white northern Republican politicians who came South, arriving with their travel carpetbags. Southerners considered them ready to loot and plunder the defeated South.[1] Although the term is still an insult in common usage, in histories and reference works it is now used without derogatory intent.[citation needed]"

Ben S.



Image:Carpetbagger.jpg
Image:Carpetbagger.jpg





"Many carpetbaggers were businessmen who purchased or leased plantations and became wealthy landowners, hiring Freedmen to do the labor. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings in this promising new frontier, and civilians lured south by press reports of "the fabulous sums of money to be made in the South in raising cotton." The investors were warmly received.[6] However, Foner also notes that "joined with the quest for profit, however, was a external image money.jpgreforming spirit, a vision of themselves as agents of sectional reconciliation and the South's "economic regeneration." Accustomed to viewing Southerners—black and white—as devoid of economic initiative and self-discipline, they believed that only "Northern capital and energy" could bring "the blessings of a free labor system to the region."[7]
Carpetbaggers tended to be well educated and middle class in origin. Some had been lawyers, businessmen, newspaper editors, and other pillars of Northern communities. The majority (including fifty-two of the sixty who served in Congress during Reconstruction) were veterans of the Union Army.[8]
Leading "black carpetbaggers" believed the interests of capital and labor identical and the freedmen entitled to little more than an "honest chance in the race of life."[9]" Wikipedia


Kacey C.

Architecture
Architecture in the 1800s was very different then architecture today. One major difference is that there weren't many tall buildings, for example they didn't have many skyscrapers. Another big difference is the materials used to build buildings. The difference that most people had to deal with in their everyday lives was the size of the rooms or houses, they weren't as big as the are today.

Ben S.

Women's Changing Roles
The womens roles have changed a lot since the 1800's. Current day women could do all that men can do. Back in the day women with jobs usually only worked in factories. Education was available to both genders but was usually ment for women. Some women were even stay at home moms. I would agree the women were not treated fairly in the 19th century.

Mark B

Medicines and cures:


In the 1800s many new medical technologies were invented. For example the stethescope we know today was invented by Rene Laennec in 1816. Another major medical technology that was developed in the 1800s was the x-ray machine. Those are some of the things they did have but they didn't have many others. For example the MRI was not developed until 1970. Those are some of the medical advantages and disadvantages they had in the 1800's.

Ben S.
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Laennec


external image 1-3-3-2-1-0-0-0-0-0-0.jpg



Electricity:


During the 1800's nobody had electricity. Ben Franklin had discovered electricity in the 1700's. He did that bye tying a key to a kite and leting it fly douring a thunder storm.All buildings would not have air conditioning unlike the current day. No one had television to keep them
entertained. The electriity during the reconstruction era is very different than it is in the 21st century. The first light bulb was invented in 1879, so you would have to be a wealthy person to own this piece of electricity. So most of the people only had candles do use for light. I think that would be hard because if your candle went out you would ave no light.
Mark B.
Clay m.

The word electricity really comes from the latin word electricus, meaning amber-like.The word electricity refers to a number of physical effects that take place in the stages of electricity. Last, a few concepts of electricity are electric charge, electric current, electric field, electric potential, and electromagnetism. -nick haven


external image 11_12_52---Electric-Light-Bulb_web.jpg

Fashion:

The men wore faded,gray suits. They also wore their hair all slicked back on their heads and boots on their feet. Also, the women wore walking dresses all the time and also wore house dresses. The girls at that time kind of wore the same stuff as the adult women because they were kind of the same.
The boys in that time wore overalls and a button down shirts and sometimes a hat. The boys also never wore shoes unless you were rich in that time, not too many people were rich at that time.
Clay M.
external image 435px-Tom_Sawyer_1876_frontispiece.jpg



Fashion refers to styles of dress (but can also include cuisine, literature, art, architecture, and general comportment) that are popular in a culture at any given time. Such styles may change quickly, and "fashion" in the more colloquial sense refers to the latest version of these styles. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole.
The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current or even not so current, popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour, beauty and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads and trends, and materialism. A number of cities are recognized as global fashion centers and are recognized for their fashion weeks, where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences. These cities are New York City, Milan, Paris, and London. Other cities, mainly Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Miami, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Sydney, Barcelona, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, New Delhi and Dubai also hold fashion weeks and are better recognized every year.
gotten from...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion


-NickH





African American officeholders
Republicans took control of all Southern state governorships and state legislatures, leading to the election of numerous African-Americans to state and national offices, as well as to the installation of African-Americans into other positions of power. About 137 black officeholders had lived outside the South before the Civil War. Some had escaped from slavery to the North and returned to help the South advance in the postwar era. Many of them had achieved education and positions of leadership elsewhere. Other African American men who served were leaders in their communities, including a number of preachers. As was the case in white communities, all leadership did not depend on wealth and literacy.[32]
Race of delegates to 1867
state constitutional conventions

State
White
Black
% White
Statewide
white
population
(% in 1870)[33]
Virginia
80
25
76%
58
North Carolina
107
13
89%
63
South Carolina
48
76
39%
41
Georgia
133
33
80%
54
Florida
28
18
61%
51
Alabama
92
16
85%
52
Mississippi
68
17
80%
46
Louisiana
25
44
36%
50
Texas
81
9
90%
69
Source: Rhodes (1920) v 6 p. 199; no report on Arkansas
There were very few African Americans elected or appointed to national office. African Americans voted for white candidates as well as for blacks. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote, but did not guarantee that the vote would be counted or the districts would be apportioned equally. As a result, even states with majority African American population often only had one or two African American representatives in Congress, with the exception of South Carolina. At the end of Reconstruction, four of its five Congressmen were African American.
African Americans in Office 1870-1876
State
State Legislators
U.S. Senators
U.S. Congressmen
Alabama
69
0
4
Arkansas
8
0
0
Florida
30
0
1
Georgia
41
0
1
Louisiana
87
0
1*
Mississippi
112
2
1
North Carolina
30
0
1
South Carolina
190
0
6
Tennessee
1
0
0
Texas
19
0
0
Virginia
46
0
0
Total
633
2
15
See E. Foner, Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 (NY: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 354-5.
A list of the 15 African American Representatives elected during Reconstruction
A list of the 2 African American Senators elected during Reconstruction

By: Ashley Robie Period 7
Public schools
W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the first historians to document the freedmen's deep commitment to education and demonstrated that African Americans played a critical role in establishing universal public education as fundamental to southern state constitutions during congressional Reconstruction.[34] Many slaves had taken risks to learn to read although forbidden to do so by law; African Americans started "native schools" before the end of the war; Sabbath schools were another widespread means freedmen created for teaching literacy.[35] When they gained suffrage, black politicians took this commitment to public education to state constitutional conventions.
African Americans and white Republicans joined to build education at the state level. They created a system of public schools, which were segregated by race everywhere except New Orleans. Most blacks approved the segregated schools because they wanted to control education for their children, the schools provided jobs for black teachers, and kept their children in a much safer learning environment[citation needed]. In general, elementary and a few secondary schools were built in the cities. But the South had relatively few cities.
In the rural areas the public school was often a one-room affair that attracted about half the younger children. The teachers were poorly paid, and their pay was often in arrears.[36] Conservatives contended the rural schools were too expensive and unnecessary for a region where the vast majority of people were cotton or tobacco farmers. They had no vision of a better future for their residents. One historian found that the schools were less effective than they might have been because of "poverty, the inability of the states to collect taxes, and inefficiency and corruption in many places prevented successful operation of the schools."[37]
1868 Republican cartoon identifies Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour (right panel) with KKK violence and with Confederate soldiers (left panel)
1868 Republican cartoon identifies Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour (right panel) with KKK violence and with Confederate soldiers (left panel)
1868 Republican cartoon identifies Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour (right panel) with KKK violence and with Confederate soldiers (left panel)
Numerous private academies and colleges for Freedmen were established by northern missionaries. Every state created state colleges for Freedmen, such as Alcorn State University in Mississippi. The state colleges created generations of teachers who were critical in the education of African American children.
In 1890, the black state colleges started receiving federal funds as land grant schools.[38] They received state funds after Reconstruction ended because, as Lynch explains, "there are very many liberal, fair-minded and influential Democrats in the State who are strongly in favor of having the State provide for the liberal education of both races."[39]Before this period, however, planters had opposed public education for freedmen and underfunded schools.
By:Ashley Robie Period 7



The 14th Amendment is Ratified

1868



The Fourteenth Amendment was originally ratified to protect the freedman from the abrogation of his rights by the Southern states. Looking to protect the African American, the amendment made him a citizen and forced the federal government to be responsible for him. The Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the States from denying or abridging the fundamental rights of every citizen and required them to grant all persons equal protection and due process .
Back to "The Reconstruction Era" Chronology
It was obvious that the "political rights" part of the proposed change was intended to open the way for Black voting on a national scale . The wording of the amendment looked something, though obviously not completely, like this: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of citizens of the United States; provided that whenever in any State civil or political rights or privilege shall be denied or abridged on account of race or color, all persons of such race or color shall be excluded from the basis of representation or taxation."
Ratification of the document took a horribly long time due to the fact that it occurred toward the end of the Civil War. Ironically, the amendment was ratified on July 28, 1868. Southern states were required to ratify it in order to be readmitted into the Union . However, the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases diluted the amendment so much that all federal control over state police powers was virtually eliminated .
The Fourteenth Amendment was also very important much later on, in the 1950s and 1960s. While originally constructed to deal with the rights of freedmen, cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education, turned to a quite similar issue. Its interpretation came to be the legal heart of the civil rights movement of the `60s. The fourteenth amendment was arguably the most important of all. It radically changed the definition of the United States Citizen.

By:Ashley Robie Period 7

The Compromise of 1877



The Compromise of 1877 between the Republicans and Democrats, occurring in January of that year, was the solution to the contested Presidential election of 1876 and furthermore brought an end to the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
Back to "The Reconstruction Era" Chronology
Both Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, and Samuel L. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, were moderate reformers, and the election was very close. Tilden led in the popular vote, but the count from four states, which represented a total of 20 votes in the electoral college, was disputed. No precedent had yet been set for dealing with contested votes, and tenacious partisanship during Reconstruction intensified the matter. Congress eventually, in January 1877, set up a special electoral commission with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to decide the disputed votes. The tiebreaker member swayed to the Republican side, and the commission awarded all disputed votes to Hayes, who won the election with 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184.
The Compromise came about as Democrats in the Senate threatened to prevent the commission from reporting with a filibuster. Republicans negotiated with the Democrats to abandon the filibuster by offering the following: the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, appointment of at least one Southerner to Hayes's cabinet, and economic benefits to industrialize the South. Unfortunately, withdrawal of troops meant the Republicans essentially abandoning the enforcement of racial equality in the South.
The era of Reconstruction was characterized by the attempt to restore the Union after the Civil War, but it was perceived differently by Southerners, Northerners, and African-American former slaves. The South saw it as tyrannical; the North saw it as necessary to prevent the reoccurrence of ante-bellum South; and African-Americans hoped to gain political and economic freedom from the policies of the Reconstruction.
Various political plans were proposed and instituted to deal with the South after the war. The Republicans held the Presidency and Congress, but they could not agree on an appropriate policy. The party was divided into the moderates and conservatives and the radicals. The radical Republicans, led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens (PA) and Senator Charles Sumner (MA), held racial equality and strict retribution as their platform. The moderates were represented by President Lincoln, who proposed a less punitive plan.
Lincoln's 1863 Reconstruction plan required that 10% of the voters in a state needed to pledge allegiance to the Union for the state to be readmitted. The Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which Lincoln vetoed, required a majority to pledge allegiance and swear the "Ironclad Oath" that they had never borne arms against the Union.
President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln as a Republican but had been a Democrat until joining Lincoln's ticket, devised a plan was known as "Restoration" which really required nothing from the South to rejoin the Union except some formalities which satisfied his personal thirst for power. Opposed to Johnson's "Presidential Reconstruction" was "Congressional Reconstruction" from the radical Republicans. As a response to the South's instituting Black Codes, the radicals expanded the Freedman's Bureau and proposed the first Civil Rights legislation. The Fourteenth Amendment gave citizenship to black men. Later the Fifteenth Amendment was also passed which granted suffrage to black men. Reconstruction failed, however, to provide economically for the freed slaves.
After Lincoln and Johnson's moderate policies, the Congressional Reconstruction seemed particularly harsh to Southerners. Post-Reconstruction, Southern Democrats began to assert their power.

By:Ashley Robie Period 7
Durning the recontuction era the people wore long train like dresses and train like suits
They also had high colars
They also had high colars
By:Charmaine Hennessee