Sam Patch Summary

Poverty has been a big issue over the past century or so and continues to be a problem to this day in the United States. Due to the Civil War, rural areas and industrial areas were affected by poverty. The poverty of rural sharecroppers in 1877 was different from the poverty of unemployed industrial workers in 1939. Even though both situations were dealing with a form of poverty, both were two completely different situations. There were several major events that happened that caused poverty of rural sharecroppers in 1877. Although there were various events leading up to the poverty of unemployed industrial workers in 1939, poverty in the year of 1877 was just as bad, if not worse, as in the year of 1939.

Throughout the 1800’s in the U.S , a lot of people were aware of big problems that we still have an issue with today . As people would walk down the street and when you would listen to conversations between other people, you would see that the children’s poverty was a main subject to speak of. For many more reasons children had began to fall into situation to be in poverty. The children were helpless, freezing during climate change, starvation, and lonely . And the adults wanted this issue to change for the better sake of children.

In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s the United States was in a transformation from the Jeffersonian vision of an agricultural nation, into Alexander Hamilton’s vision of an industrial America. The book Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper gives a good idea of what America was like during the Early Republic period. The industrial life would turn America into a country that is dependent on the work of manufactories.

Paul E. Johnson’s 2004 book Sam Patch: The Famous Jumper uses a mill worker’s personal background to relay a series of socio-economic changes that occurred during the 1800’s. The Industrial Revolution, for many, was the beginning of something new. Due to the development and proliferation of technology, the economic gain from the Industrial Revolution was formidable. Unfortunately, the working class was forced to endure hazardous working conditions. For Sam Patch— a nineteenth century daredevil exhibitionist with nothing to his name— leaping from tall cliffs was a form of visual oppression designed to challenge the authority of well-respected political leaders of the upper class. The ideology that a simple man rose to fame by performing acts that, by many, was considered foolish, contradicted the beliefs of the upper class. This publication highlights several broad changes that occurred during this time period. Society’s perception of fame changed dramatically. Sam Patch went from being a simple mill worker to being a celebrity overnight. This work also highlights issues regarding domestic textile industries, including poor working conditions and child labor. Sam Patch began working at the age of seven; that was not entirely uncommon during this time period. Children were subjected to dust-filled rooms that were either “hot in the summer or cold in the winter.” Furthermore, this book also emphathizes the growing hostility between the Whig Party and the Jacksonian Party.

Paul Johnson utilizes monograph to recount the story of Sam Patch, an intoxicated working class spinner who got praised for leaping off waterfalls in the late 1820s. In spite of the fact that the chronicled record is spotty, Johnson arranges Patch inside an arrangement of more extensive subjects dependent upon the areas of his bounced. To start with, experiencing childhood in the factory town of Pawtucket, Johnson tells an account of seized patriarchy: Sam's father was a craftsman shoemaker who lost his business in the face of industrialization. This was some piece of a more extensive story of the rise of compensation work and diminishing area holding, both of which served to undermine the control and position of fathers. After the grown-up Sam Patch moves to Paterson, NJ, he does his first public/political hops. To begin with, he bounced to undermine the opening festival of a center privileged nature hold assembled by a neighborhood ambitious person who was attempting to prohibit the working population from his more cultured ideas of relaxation. Johnson utilizes the fairly interesting story of Sam Patch and his ascent to celebrity to investigate various expansive progressions happening in America throughout this time period. Industrialization, Rise of popular, self-made celebrity culture, Sam Patch as Jacksonian democracy - Whig vision vs. Democratic vision, Rise of wage labor mirroring decline of patriarchy are all wide-ranging changes that happen during the late

A second thing that enamored me was the cotton. On the Sam Davis Home property, there is a large field of cotton, a field so large that it all looks like snow when the cotton is in full bloom. Learning about the cotton intrigued me because I learned how intense it was to harvest and work in the field. I was informed that the cotton workers were required to carry giant sacks to and from the fields. They were required to fill the sacks with a minimum of twenty-five pounds of cotton before they could take it and have the seeds picked out. Picking the cotton seeds out was not an easy task either. Workers often ended up with bloody fingers from picking so many

The topic of this research is about a man who has been mostly forgotten by most people in America today, but helped shaped the outcome of the American revolution and holds his own compared to those who are remembered. Even with a few such as James Graham to say that “After examining all the sources of information within my reach, I became convinced that few, if any, of the heroes of that day furnished larger contributions than he did to the glory of our arms, or surpassed him in the amount and value of their services.” This man he highly speaks of is Daniel Morgan, or know by his nickname of “Old Wagoneer” for his past work as a Teamster, which was a person who drove a wagon filled with goods and products from town to town, their version of truck drivers for that

Knowledge of trends and events that we learn about on a larger scale become easier to grasp when we focus on them on a smaller scale; by looking at the property at 215 John Street and its former residents, we discover an important connection to Greenwich’s past: an illustration of what life was like during the Civil War for our small town. Through the inquiries Silas Edward Mead makes back to his family during his service and the clues found within the house and barn of Clover Farm themselves, the lives of the Mead family are proven to be nearly the same during the war as before it; other than facing the absence of 437 of its young men sent off to fight for the Union, Greenwich families did not suffer in the same ways that many other regions

Although some people believe that “farmers play hours of cards a day”, or that “African slaves make fortunes by trading cloth for rum”, life in the colonies is not so easy. If somebody wants something they most likely have to make it themselves meaning that there is always work to do to make dinner, feed the animals, and take care of the fields.

As reflected in the writings of several authors’ writings such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s How We Kept Thanksgiving at Oldtown, Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood, and Robert Frost’s The Black Cottage, many saw New England as a place lost in the past (lecture notes, HST 158, 3/21/13). For many it offered a nostalgic look at what America used to be. However, this view is not entirely accurate given the fact that New England was actually more technologically advanced and industrial than most of the rest of the country. Still, a new view of an “Olde” New England had been invented, and thousands of people traveled to small towns and farms to see it. Tourism to these places was billed as giving you something that modern life could not.

Fictional/semi-fictional sources like ‘The Pox Party’ and non-fictional sources such as ‘The Cover Wagon Women’ and ‘Andrew Jackson’, craft a realm in which current historians can narrow down the strength and weaknesses of early American society. Although it is not able to give its readers a credible account to what actually happened during those times of American development, it is able to give us a vivid image of what people thought was important during their time. Readers are able to witness strangers’ dreams, their views of history and most importantly, what our ancestors found to be relevant enough to document. Authors like Sean Wilentz and M.T Anderson shape and somehow make a clear elaboration of the paradoxical nature of life in the early Americas and the development of American society. These sources are able to help us narrate a more flamboyant story of our own on how things were in the past and how certain aspects and factors of life aided tremendously to the up’s and down’s in American history. These theatrical sources delineate on the strengths and weaknesses of American history such as the rise of a new nation that grew to become one of the “first world” countries as well as the dark shadows of enslavement of various races. Furthermore, how the role of literature and personal items such as diaries and letters can convey heart-warming yet heart-breaking stories from beyond the grave.

The setting of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean is 1904 Pittsburgh. It has been 40 years since the abolition of slavery and the Second Industrial Revolution is alive and well. Between 1870 and 1914 the United States saw an important change in the labor and working-class, technological advancements took production from a handmade to an automated factory setting. The development of manufacturing produced a necessity for numbers of factory laborers. These laborers faced extensive hours, unfortunate working conditions and job insecurity.

Going into “The Shoemaker and The Tea Party” I was expecting two-hundred and sixty-two page of misery. I found something much more than that, what I found was a story. A story I got stuck into it from the first time my eyes encountered the first words. I was pleasantly woken by a story that I was not able to put down until my fingers ached from turning the pages. As you could tell I loved the book, and the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes. The desire and aspirations of Hewes to change who he wanted to be, is an inspiration. An inspiration that led this country to what it is today. The actions and thinking of Hewes as well as many other brave men and woman. Helped coin what we all as Americans, call home.

The lowborn workers toiled away for hours in physically exhausting jobs only to afford apartments that were sterile and cold. “There were some nine cots in the place . . . he was sick of the bareness and privation connected with his venture” (Dreiser, 304). The pay affected the men and woman’s own mode of life. They were forced to share living spaces with other families and more often than naught, had to bunk with complete strangers. The very comforts associated with a home, such as wood and furniture, were often too large of an expense. Even with Governmental/ Charity handouts the citizens had no money in which they could afford better living conditions. The rooms they were given to stay in were cold and sterile, and they were not guaranteed a place to stay every night.

Here, this essay is mainly focused on a couple of aspects regarding the book by Emile Guillaumin: The Life of a Simple Man. The first is based on the Métayers otherwise known as sharecroppers. From what they were like,