The Big Eras of American History

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to name the major eras in United States history through 1877 and describe what caused each one and what it changed.

Think about how you describe your own life in chapters: elementary school, middle school, the summer you moved to a new town. Historians do the same thing with a country. An era is a block of years that share a big idea or struggle, and each one usually begins because of something that happened in the era before it. To identify an era, look for three clues: the years it covers, the main conflict or goal of the people living then, and the lasting change it left behind.

The first era is colonization, when European countries built settlements in North America because they wanted land, trade, and religious freedom; the effect was thirteen English colonies with their own local governments. Tight British taxes and control caused the American Revolution, and the effect was independence and a weak first government. Because that government could not tax or keep order, Americans held a convention, leading to the creation and ratification of the Constitution, meaning the approval of the new plan of government by the states, which gave the nation a stronger federal system with a Bill of Rights. The early republic followed, when leaders tested that Constitution, built a national bank, and kept the country out of European wars.

Next came the Age of Jackson, when more white men gained the vote and the presidency grew more powerful, with the harsh effect of Native American removal. Westward expansion pushed settlers, including Texans, across the continent in search of land, causing war with Mexico and fresh arguments over slavery. At the same time, reform movements, which are organized efforts to fix social problems, worked for abolition, women's rights, better schools, and fair treatment of prisoners.

Those arguments over slavery produced sectionalism, a loyalty to your own region instead of the whole nation, which split North and South. Sectionalism caused the Civil War, and the war's effects were the end of slavery and a preserved Union. Finally, Reconstruction rebuilt the South, added the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and ended in 1877.

Try it: which era came directly before the Civil War, and how did it help cause that war?