Educator Resources Educator Resources

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. This law granted the President the ability to exchange land west of the Mississippi for Indigenous territories within the boundaries of existing states. An additional act was passed in 1834. This act designated land, including what would later become the state of Oklahoma, as Indian Territory. As a result of the precedent set by these acts, over sixty tribes were either willingly or forcibly removed from their lands over the next fifty years.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum explains: “Catlin mistranslated Ah-jon-jon, whose name means ‘The Light,’ as ‘Pigeon's Egg Head.’ The Light was an Assiniboine leader who was invited in 1831 to represent his tribe in Washington. During a winter in the nation's capital, he traded his native dress for European clothes and customs. In Catlin's before-and-after portrait, the once proud warrior, with a liquor bottle in his pocket, swaggers in high-heeled boots and carries a fan and umbrella. For Catlin, this transformation illustrated the tragic gulf between Native American and white cultures.”

In 1835, in the “Treaty of New Echota,” a group of Cherokees – without consent of the majority of their nation – agreed that the Cherokee people would move West and vacate their land. This letter, a protest against the Treaty, was sent by Chief John Ross and other Cherokee leaders to Congress in an effort to declare that treaty invalid.

During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly marched from their lands. Known as the “Trail of Tears,” this forced removal resulted in the deaths of thousands of Cherokee. The Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole also were forced to travel along the trail of tears.

In 1839, the enslaved people aboard the Amistad were captured by Portuguese slave traders in Sierra Leone, and they were being taken to a Caribbean plantation. The enslaved Africans seized control of the ship, killed two of their captors, and ordered the ship to sail to Africa, but it was seized off of the coast of Long Island and the enslaved Africans were brought to trial in Connecticut. As the National Archives explains, “Had it not been for the actions of abolitionists in the United States, the issues related to the Amistad might have ended quietly in an admiralty court. But they used the incident as a way to expose the evils of slavery and generate significant opposition to the practice.” In an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams “passionately and eloquently defended the Africans' right to freedom on both legal and moral grounds, referring to treaties prohibiting the slave trade and to the Declaration of Independence. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, stating that they were free individuals.”

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo held a direct correlation to westward movement and migration. Americans forged west with the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California which was the first major gold rush in the United States. By the following year, tens of thousands of “forty-niners” had come to the area in hopes of striking it rich. Most did not become wealthy in California, but many stayed there. The region continued to grow rapidly, and, in 1850, California became a state. With the expansion of available land and the gold rush, people from all over the USA and the world came and new businesses developed, including the pony express, transcontinental railroad jobs, Chinese laundry, the cattle industry, and free and enslaved Africans seeking freedom.

The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws designed to ease sectional tensions between the North and South. The law benefitted southern enslavers by requiring northern law enforcement to assist in capturing and returning enslaved persons who had run away from their enslavers. Southern bounty hunters were also permitted to operate in the North. The law put both enslaved and free Blacks at risk. After the law was passed, thousands of freedom seekers attempted to escape to free states in the North and Canada as well, where they would be beyond the reach of the law.

During the peak of the Gold Rush, over 20,000 Chinese men immigrated to the United States to mine gold in California. Chinese immigrant labor contributed significantly to not only the mining industry, but also the expansion of the national railroad and the development of services supporting laborers. Nonetheless, xenophobic, anti-Chinese sentiment rose in California and nationally, ultimately leading to both the Chinese Massacre of 1871 (in which a violent mob lynched 18 Chinese men) and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This book, The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims, published in 1861, was an antislavery text, arguing for the abolition of slavery by providing accounts of the Fugitive Slave Laws’ effects and victims. The book was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York.-

Popular images and music from the former Confederate states during Reconstruction created the image of the Northern “carpetbagger,” a derogatory term for an opportunistic outsider who has arrived from the Northern states to exploit the Southern states out of self-interest and greed.

Images like this one helped to portray the West as vast, unpopulated, uncharted territory ready for U.S. expansion.

According to the Digital Public Library of America, “Benjamin Singleton established the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association to help organize travel and settlement for African Americans departing Tennessee for Kansas.” Singleton was a formerly enslaved man who escaped to freedom in 1846, and he helped to organize the migration of approximately 300 African Americans to Kansas in 1877 - 1878. These migrants were not only seeking opportunity, but they were also fleeing the racial violence of white supremacists.

The United States Government policies and practices of Indian removal forced multiple indigenous nations Westward, off of their land and into smaller, isolated reservations in the Western territories and states.

According to the Library of Congress, this chart was “prepared by [W.E.B.] Du Bois for the Negro Exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 to show the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation.”

In the early nineteenth century, many people left their home countries seeking a better life in the United States, perceived to be a land of opportunity and wealth. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Germany, Ireland, and England. In the 1900s immigrants from Italy arrived in large numbers.

While immigrants often came seeking a better life or escape from oppression and economic hardship, Immigrants faced many challenges in the United States. Lack of jobs and discrimination posed barriers to many immigrant communities and many faced pressures of assimilation and hostility.

Throughout shifting immigration policies over the course of American history, there is also an ongoing debate about how best to assimilate new Americans.  According to the Library of Congress, “though nativists may have abhorred the increasing ethnic diversity in the United States, others saw the opportunity to steep newcomers in American traditions. With four million Americans of Irish descent, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans with strong ties to Eastern Europe, and ten million citizens hailing from nations aligned with the Central Powers, organizations like the New York National Americanization Day Committee hoped to use patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July as a means to unify the country's diverse populations.”

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported from the United States to Mexico. As unemployment increased during the 1930s, white Americans viewed Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans as competition for scarce agricultural jobs and resources. In response, many local and state governments, often with the federal government's support, initiated a program of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. Some Mexicans, many of whom were recruited as farmworkers in the 1910s and 1920s, were offered free train rides to the border. In addition, Mexican Americans were coerced into giving up their jobs and land, forcing them to move to Mexico or find work elsewhere in the United States.

Between 1936 and 1967, The Green Book was published annually for African Americans traveling throughout the United States and North America. The Green Book’s original author, Victor Hugo Green, intended for the publication to act as a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow Era, when laws prohibited many establishments from offering service to Black patrons. The Green Book offered suggestions to travelers seeking places and businesses which were safe for African Americans and which would treat Black patrons with dignity.

During the 1930s, the fallout from the Great Depression and environmental disaster struck the Great Plains region of the United States. Severe drought and resulting dust storms rendered the land in the Great Plains unfit for farming. Due to the drastic loss of jobs and income as well as the overwhelming amount of dust, which made living conditions unsafe and unbearable, millions of people left the Great Plains and headed west to California. Migrants faced a long and often dangerous journey to California as well as discrimination once they arrived.

Dorothea Lange, a photographer whose work was funded by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, documented struggling workers during the Great Depression.  In this photograph, a Mexican family seeks work in the fields of California.

As a response to increasing anti-Japanese sentiment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Using national security as a justification, the order called for the relocation of persons of Japanese descent living in the United States. The newly formed War Relocation Authority moved nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were citizens, to “relocation centers”, most of which were located throughout the West.

The Japanese Americans who were affected by the Civilian Exclusion Order were given little time to leave their homes and dispose of their property before being transported from assembly centers to more permanent relocation centers.

While they were not required to work, the movement of the incarcerated Japanese Americans was limited by barbed wire and guard towers.

This is a print depicting the 1807 voyage of Robert Fulton’s steamboat the Clermont. Its steam powered engine enabled the Clermont to travel up the Hudson River.

This is an image of the Lippitt MIll in Rhode Island, a cotton textile mill that opened in 1810. This image represents an example of how the factory system replaced cottage industry.

This 1823 print shows an image of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, patented in 1794. The illustration shows the components inside that removed the seeds from cotton.  As described on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), “While an enslaved person needed about ten hours to separate the seeds from one pound of cotton fiber by hand, two people using the cotton gin could produce about fifty pounds of cotton in the same timeframe….The cotton gin made cotton tremendously profitable, which encouraged westward migration to new areas of the US South to grow more cotton. The number of enslaved people rose with the increase in cotton production, from 700,000 in 1790 to over three million by 1850.”

This is an 1827 broadside for the steamboat Nyack. The text on the notice shows how steamboats were becoming a common mode of traveling for families and for shipping freight.

This print of a Lowell mill girl represents both the role of textiles in the industrialization of the United States and the employment of women in textile mills.

This is one of four images of the patent for Samuel Morse’s telegraph in 1846.  As revolutionary as the Internet in its day, the telegraph not only radically changed the speed of communication across large distances, but in doing so, it also changed commerce and trade forever.

This is an image of the first message sent over Samuel Morse’s telegraph. The translation of the series of raised dots and dashes reads, “What hath God wrought?”

This map shows the railroads, canals, and telegraph lines in the United States in 1850. A legend can be found to the left of the title.

Samuel Colt, whose name is still famous for his Colt revolvers, contracted with Eli Whitney to design and “manufacture the revolvers to his specifications.”  Colt built his factory in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was able to use new factory systems to manufacture guns in volume.

This 1860s image shows a .36 caliber Navy revolver assembled by the Eli Whitney Firearms Company in Connecticut using interchangeable parts.

This map shows the relationship between the invention of the cotton gin and the expansion of slavery across the South in the first half of the nineteenth century. Printed during the Civil War, it carries the inscription, “Sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army.”

This photograph shows the coming together of the Union and Central Pacific railroads and Promontory Summit in 1869, completing the first transcontinental railroad and opening the west to faster and cheaper settlement and easier transportation of goods.

The construction of the transcontinental railroad was completed largely through the exploitation of Chinese immigrant workers, under harrowing conditions and with ongoing discrimination and immigration restrictions.

This image of New York represents the city’s growth as a result of industrialization, including the increase in factories and workers and the opening of the Erie Canal.