Having finished with slavery and the pro-slavery argument, Professor Blight heads North today. The majority of the lecture deals with the rise of the Market Revolution in the North, in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Blight first describes the causes of the Market Revolution--the rise of capital, a transportation revolution--and then moves to its effects on the culture and consciousness of antebellum northerners. Among these effects were a riotous optimism mixed with a deep-rooted fear of change, an embrace of the notions of progress and Manifest Destiny, and the intensification of the divides between North and South.

Reading assignment:

Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War, Introduction, chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave