The American Worker

1. The American Worker

2. 3 Historical Periods of American Labor • Colonial Workers: 1607-1776 Pre-industrial workers II. 19th Century Workers Workers respond to the Industrial Revolution III. 20th Century Workers Workers respond to the change from Industrial to Post-Industrial Change

3. Pre-Industrial Workers in Colonial America – 13 British Colonies • I. Colonial Workers • A. New England • B. Middle Colonies • C. Southern Colonies

4. American Colonial Society and Culture

5. 13 British Colonies

6. Ethnic Diversity in Colonial America • Colonial society was a unique mix of European immigrants by the dawn of the Revolution. • Besides the English-- Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, and French immigrants were also prominently represented in English Colonial society. • They were loyal to the English Crown, and most regarded the New World as their new homeland.

7. Colonial New England • New England: Pre-Industrial Society • Major Economic Activity • Subsistence Agriculture • Urban Areas: Trade and Commerce • Fishing

8. Colonial New England

9. Colonial New England Farmer • The New England was a society of small independent farmers known as yeomen. • These farmers owned more than 70 percent of the land and worked to maintain a society of equal property owners. • The first settlers divided their large farms among their children, and the next generation did the same thing.

10. New England dock workers

11. New England colonial sailors

12. Africans in Colonial America • Of the 2.5 million people, about half a million were black.

13. Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America [Gary Nash] • Written by highly acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash, this book presents an interpretive account of the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans, and Euroamericans during the colonial and revolutionary eras.

14. Colonial American 17th Century slave market/auction in New England

15. Colonial slaves in New England were often domestic help

16. Slave craftsman/artisan

17. Middle Colonies • MIXED ECONOMY • RURAL AND AGRARIAN • New York • Pennsylvania • Delaware • New Jersey

18. Middle Colonies Middle Colonies The mid Atlantic colonies were a mix of various ethnic and religious communities who were tied together by trade and political institutions.

20. Social Classes in Middle Colonies • Small independent farms were prevalent through most parts of mid-Atlantic colonies. • However, the society and classes in these colonies were formed based on ethnicity and religion. • New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware hosted a rolling landscape of grain fields and iron mines, and these resources created a thriving middle class. • The cities of New York and Philadelphia were crammed with diverse nationalities that created the first steps toward a unique level of tolerance in America.

21. Europe’s poor come to Americaas Indentured Servants

22. Indentured Servants

23. Indentured Servants In a dreary Scottish prison, convicts await transport to the colonies and a hard, brutal existence as indentured servants. The prisons held "idle vagabonds and beggars," poverty being itself sufficient grounds for imprisonment and transport. Photo by Dave Doody

24. Indentured Servants • Always exploited, often brutalized, indentured servants were slaves without shackles. Liz Wiley, here, finds a moment of rest. Photo by Dave Doody

25. Colonial Craftsman/Blacksmith

26. Coopers at Work

27. Colonial carpenters

28. Colonial PrintersMasters, Journeymen, Apprentice

29. Colonial teamster

30. Southern Colonies • Chesapeake Colonies Virginia and Maryland • North Carolina • South Carolina • Georgia

31. Southern Colonies

32. Southern Society • The southern colonies included Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. • These colonies all boasted plenty of good, cleared land and a mild climate conducive to growing staple and exotic cash crops. • Tobacco became the staple crop and the economic foundation of Virginia and North Carolina. • South Carolinian soil, though unfit for tobacco, was perfect for growing rice and indigo, a dye used to dye textiles blue. • The southern colonies also produced lumber, tar, pitch, turpentine, furs, and cattle.

33. Southern Society • The South quickly developed an aristocratic slave-owning society that produced the so-called “Virginia Dynasty”

34. Native Americans were the first laborers in all the 13 American colonies: It did not work out. Why?

35. Indentured Servants worked on the tobacco plantations of the colonial South

36. Freed indentured servants moved to the frontier of the colonies

37. In 1676 settlers led by planter Nathaniel Bacon fought Virginia’s colonial government for failing to protect them from raids by the Susquehannock people. During Bacon’s Rebellion, settlers marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital. The rebellion faded later that year after Bacon died from disease. This illustration shows settlers defending their property from Native Americans during the rebellion.

38. After Bacon’s Rebellion African labor became the basis of the southern economy

39. The Triangular Trade

40. Slavery existed in all 13 colonies

41. Slave labor and tobacco • Slave Quarters

42. Slave labor in Carolina Rice Field • For over 4,000 years man has grown and consumed rice. • Probably originating in Southeast Asia; the Moors brought it to Spain in the 8th century • By 1718, South Carolinians were exporting 6,773 barrels of rice, each weighing 350 lbs., to England and 2,333 barrels to other colonies.

43. Slave labor contribution From the village that would one day become Manhattan to the small tobacco farms of British Virginia, from the sweltering fields of lucrative Carolina plantations to the construction sites of icons like the U.S. Capitol, it was millions of enslaved men, women and children who turned a barely charted territory with a shaky future into one of the strongest and richest nations in the world.