The Unification of Germany

Germany, like Italy, was made up of separate states in the early 1800s. In 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat, 38 states joined together to form the German confederation. Austria and Prussia were the two most powerful states to join this group of nations.

From the start, Austria and Prussia competed against each other for leadership of the Confederation, and, in 1866, Prussia declared war on Austria. After Prussia won a battle at Sadowa on the Elbe river, Otto von Bismarck, the chief Prussian minister, set up a separate North German Confederation dominated by Prussia.

The French, threatened by the growing power of Prussia, declared war in 1870. Led by Napoleon III, the French army of 120,000 men was heavily defeated at the Battle of Sedan by a German force of more than 200,000 men. Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner. In response, the people of Paris rose up against him and the French Second Empire was overthrown. The Prussian army then besieged Paris.

When the Franco-Prussian War ended on 10 May, 1981, Germany took control of Alsace and Lorraine from the French, forcing them to pay five billion francs in reparations. The German Second Empire was declared, with William I, the king of Prussia, as emperor and Otto von Bismarck as the chancellor.

The Unification of Italy

In the early 1800s, Italy was united under the control of Napolean. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, Italy’s states were handed back to their former rulers. Only Piedmont-Sardinia stayed independent.

Of the Italians states’ foreign rulers, Austria was the most powerful. During the 1820s, opposition to foreign rule grew. The ‘Risorgimento’ movement encouraged people to campaign for an independent and united Italy. Revolutions broke out in many Italian states in 1858, Piedmont-Sardinia allied itself with France and defeated Austria. This was followed in 1860 by a successful revolt led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army of ‘Redshirts’.

Garibaldi conquered Sicily, then Naples. Meanwhile, the northern states had joined up with Piedmont-Sardinia and accepted Victor Emmanuel II as their new king. Garibaldi handed Naples and Sicily to him in November 1860 and, in 1861, Italy was declared a kingdom.

Civil War

Civil war between the Northern and Southern states split United States of America and left a legacy of bitterness. The war was fought to prevent the South breaking away from the Union.

The northern states had the biggest cities and the most factories. Slavery there was banned by 1820, but in the Southern states, which had little industry, plantations relied on large numbers of slave workers. Here slave owning was accepted. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. He pledged to end slavery in the United States. Many Southerners saw this as a threat to their way of life and, in 1861, eleven Southern states announced that they were breaking away from the Union to form own Confederacy. When the government told them they had no right to do this, civil war broke out.

The 23 Union (Northern) states had more soldiers and more money than the Confederacy, as well as railways and the industry to provide weapons and supplies for war. With control of the navy, they were able to blockade Southern ports, cutting off supplies to the South from abroad, and preventing the export of cotton – a major source of wealth to the South.

The early battles were won by the South, but in July 1863 Union troops defeated Confederate forces at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

A NEW KIND OF WARFARE

The American Civil War was fought with new weapons, such as quick-loading rifles, ironclad (armoured) ships, submarines and even balloons (for observing enemy movements). Railways and telegraphs speeded up communications. Faced with deadly gunfire, soldiers were killed in large numbers as they tried to attack across open ground.

Another Union army captured Vicksburg, Mississippi. In April 1865, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia. By this time, much of the South was in ruins. Over 600,000 soldiers had died, more than half from disease. Five days after the surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. Though the war was over and slaves were set free, conditions for them hardly improved.

The American West

After the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776, many more settlers arrived from Europe. Most of the first settlers made their homes in the eastern states, but a few travelled further west towards what are now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois.

Many more people moved into the area around the Great Lakes after 1825, when the opening of the Erie Canal made transport much easier. To the west of the Mississippi, explorers and traders set up routes, or trails, to be followed by settlers. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, people started travelling to the newly acquired land in the West. Known as pioneers, they made the journey in long trains of covered wagons. On reaching their destinations, families chose place to settle. They chopped down trees to build homes and cleared land for farming. If crops failed, families went hungry or gathered food from the wild.

GOLD RUSH

The discovery of gold in California in 1848, and in Nevada and Colorado in 1859, attracted thousands of prospectors. They washed river gravel in large pans, hoping to find gold, but few of them made their fortunes.

   

In 1862, the US government passed the Homestead Act, which offered – for a small fee – 65 hectares of land to each family who would settle and farm for at least five years.

Thousands took up the offer, and towns sprang up all over the Great Plains and the West. The land the government was selling so cheaply was taken from the Native Americans, who were forced onto reservations.

The arrival of Europeans soon had a disastrous effect on the Native Americans, who had no resistance to diseases such as measles and smallpox. They died, too, in disputes over land, as more and more Europeans moved west looking for places to settle. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced all Native Americans in the eastern states to live on reservations. Their lands were taken over by European settlers.

Native Americans came under more pressure in the 1860s, when the railroads spread westwards. The buffalo (bison), on which many Plains peoples depended, were hunted almost to extinction, partly to feed the construction gangs. In 1876, the Sioux and their allies defeated the US cavalry at the Little Bighorn river. But a final massacre of over 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 brought to an end the tragic story of the ‘Indians wars’.

GERONIMO

Geronimo (1829-1909) was a leader of the Apaches. When Mexican troops killed his family, he became a guerrilla fighter, feared by both Mexican and American soldiers. He eventually surrendered and in 1905 took part in President Roosevelt’s election victory parade.