HIST 2112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Pacific Railroad Acts, Transcontinental Railroad, Homestead Acts
Document Summary
Gave 160 acres of unappropriated lands to heads of families after 5 years occupation for very small fee. 1850-1871, railroads received 131 million acres of land. 1st transcontinental railroad completed 1869, promontory point, ut. 1866, 37,000 miles of track; 1900: 193,000 miles of track. Commercial cattle frontier- result of civil war. Industrial innovations: barbed wire, windmills, improved plows. Bonanza wheat farms in late 1870s in dakotas. Belief in permanent inferiority of native americans, mexicans, asians, blacks. Railroads, mining, large ranches, homesteading = evidence of expanding world economy that displaced na"s and hispanics. Californios: original white colonizers: u. s. citizens, systematically swindled. Las gorras blancas: hispanic resistance in the 1880s & 1890s. 200,000 chinese came to western ports 1876-1890, mostly men. 1906- san francisco ordered segregated schools for asians. Developments in the west were in line with racial attitudes in the rest of the u. s.
