Two Essays

#2

From the years 1800-1850 the nation was full of battles and prosperity. Territorial expansion was a cause in most of the battles, but also gained prosperity for the nation. There were many impacts on national unity between those time periods, but the main impact was territorial expansion. This is true because of the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Oregon territory, and the Mexican War.


The Louisiana Purchase was the most important event of President Thomas Jefferson's first Administration. In this transaction, the United States bought 827,987 square miles of land from France for about $15 million. This vast area lay between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian Border. The purchase of this land greatly increased the economic resources of the United States, and cemented the union of the Middle West and the East. Eventually all or parts of 15 states were formed out of the region. When Jefferson became president in March 1801, the Mississippi River formed the western boundary of the United States. The Florida's lay the south, and the Louisiana Territory to the west. Spain owned both these territories.


The first major debate over the issue of territorial expansion arouse when Missouri wanted to join the union as a slave state. Missouri, which was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which was part of the Northwest Ordinance. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories. In 1817, when Missouri applied to the Union as a slave state, the issue of anti slavery vs. pro slavery (North vs. South) came up. Not only will the ordinance be broken, but the balance between slave and free states will be gone. By Missouri’s entrance to the union, there would be more slave states than free states. In December of 1819, Maine applied to become a free state. A compromise was then reached, so that Maine would enter as a free state, while Missouri would enter as a slave state, balancing free and slave states. New territories that would enter above the 36’30’ line had to be free states.

 The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories. In 1817, when Missouri applied to the Union as a slave state, the issue of anti slavery vs. pro slavery came up. The Ordinance was broken, and the balance between slave and free states will be gone. By Missouri’s entrance to the union, there were more slave states than free states. 

#1

Far beneath that abyss of conformity, however, resided a dissident ideology, a rebellious teenager listening to Church Berry with a copy of On the Road in his young, naïve hands. This was the ambivalent decade typified by the conformists and the anti-conventionalists, the parents and the youth, the conservative Christian, and the innovative intellectual.

• The youth of the 1950s represented a desire to stand against something, anything, typically the conformist values of their conventional parents.”
• Supporting evidence: James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause, Steve McQueen, The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Cold War, restraints of tradition, sit-ins, Elvis Presley, Byrd Parker, Dave Brubeck.
• “Fueling this ardent fire were the works of great intellectuals from beatnik poetry (Howl) to anti-conventional literature (Jack Kerouac and André Gide), independent film (John Cussavetes’ (sic) Shadows and the foreign films of Ingmer (sic) Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard) to cynical philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartes’ existentialism and Camus’ absurdism).”
• Supporting evidence: other than that included in the sub-thesis statement: self-expression, rebellious generation
• “Indeed this was a generation fighting for a lost cause, just as their children and grandchildren would. A counterculture, a small revolution in small suburban towns; and as the world turned, the Chuck Berry song finished, the teenage turned a page in On the Road contemplating the cruelties of conformity, convention, something and nothing, again and again, over and over, as history chiseled his place on the tombstone of the 1950s.”