The History and Culture of the USA

The Homestead Act offered free farms in the West. Each homestead consisted of 160 acres of land and any head of a family who was at least twenty-one years of age and an American citizen could claim one. So could immigrants who intended to become citizens. All that homesteaders had to do was to move onto a piece of public land that is land owned by the government live on it for five years and the land became theirs. If a family wanted to own its homestead more quickly than this it could buy the land after only six months for a very low price of ₴ 1.25 an acre.   Transcontinental railroad companies like the Union Pacific also provided settlers with cheap land. These companies had been given land beside their tracks by the government. To increase their profits they were keen for people to begin farming this land so they advertised fur settlers. They did this not only in the eastern United States, but as far away as Europe. They shipped immigrants across the Atlantic, gave th...

One day the foreman ill charge of the workers saw golden specks glittering in the water. Picking up a handful of black gravel from the bed of the stream. he looked more closely, It was gold! By the middle of the summer a gold rush had begun. The governor of California reported to Washington that "mills are lying idle,   fields of wheat are open to cattle and horses, houses vacant and farms going to waste" as men and women from all over the territory hurried to the gold fields to make themselves rich. In the next twenty years gold discoveries attracted fortune-seekers to other parts of the far West. By the late 1850s they were milling all the mountains of Nevada and Colorado. By the 1860s they had moved into Montana and Wyoming and by the 1870s they were digging in the Black Hills of the Dakota country. Thousands of miles separated these western mining settlements from the rest of the United States. Look at the map of the country at the end of the Civil War in 1865. ...

On the night of April 13. 1865. crowds of people moved through the brightly lit streets of Washington   to celebrate Lee's surrender at Appomattox. A man who was there wrote in his diary: "Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering, all, all are jubilant." At exactly 10:13. when the play was part way through. A pistol shot rang through the darkened theatre. As the President slumped forward in his s e at, a man in a black f let hat and high boo ts jumped from the box on to the stage. He waved a gun in the air and shouted "Sic semper tyrannist ”   and then ran out of the theatre. It was discovered later that the gunman was an act or named John Wilkes Booth .   He was captured a few days later, hiding in a barn in the Virginia countryside . The president Lincoln was assassinated. Lincoln was succeed ed as President by his Vice President. Andrew Johnson. The biggest problem the new President faced was how to deal...