American History: "How Our Country Grew" 1950 Progressive Pictures

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Focuses on growth of farming; manufacturing; transportation and how they have contributed to the country's development.'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The history (and prehistory) of the United States, started with the arrival of Native Americans before 15,000 B.C. Numerous indigenous cultures formed, and many disappeared before 1500. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the year 1492 started the European colonization of the Americas. Most colonies were formed after 1600, and the early records and writings of John Winthrop make the United States the first nation whose most distant origins are fully recorded. By the 1760s, the thirteen British colonies contained 2.5 million people along the Atlantic Coast east of the Appalachian Mountains...

Armed conflict began in 1775. In 1776, in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress declared the independence of the colonies as the United States. Led by General George Washington, it won the Revolutionary War with large support from France. The peace treaty of 1783 gave the land east of the Mississippi River (except Canada and Florida) to the new nation. The Articles of Confederation established a central government, but it was ineffectual at providing stability as it could not collect taxes and had no executive officer. A convention in 1787 wrote a new Constitution that was adopted in 1789...

Encouraged by the notion of manifest destiny, U.S. territory expanded all the way to the Pacific Coast. While the United States was large in terms of area, by 1790 its population was only 4 million. It grew rapidly, however, reaching 7.2 million in 1810, 32 million in 1860, 76 million in 1900, 132 million in 1940, and 321 million in 2015. Economic growth in terms of overall GDP was even greater. Compared to European powers, though, the nation's military strength was relatively limited in peacetime before 1940. Westward expansion was driven by a quest for inexpensive land for yeoman farmers and slave owners. The expansion of slavery was increasingly controversial and fueled political and constitutional battles, which were resolved by compromises. Slavery was abolished in all states north of the Mason–Dixon line by 1804, but the South continued to profit from the institution, mostly from the production of cotton. Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery.

Seven Southern slave states rebelled and created the foundation of the Confederacy. Its attack of Fort Sumter against the Union forces there in 1861 started the Civil War. Defeat of the Confederates in 1865 led to the impoverishment of the South and the abolition of slavery. In the Reconstruction era following the war, legal and voting rights were extended to freed slaves. The national government emerged much stronger...

The United States became the world's leading industrial power at the turn of the 20th century, due to an outburst of entrepreneurship and industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers and farmers from Europe. A national railroad network was completed and large-scale mines and factories were established...

After a prosperous decade in the 1920s, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the onset of the decade-long worldwide Great Depression. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Republican dominance of the White House and implemented his New Deal programs, which included relief for the unemployed, support for farmers, Social Security and a minimum wage. The New Deal defined modern American liberalism. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States entered World War II and financed the Allied war effort and helped defeat Nazi Germany in the European theater. Its involvement culminated in using newly-invented nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific theater.

The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers in the aftermath of World War II. During the Cold War, the two countries confronted each other indirectly in the arms race, the Space Race, proxy wars, and propaganda campaigns...