Well, we’re back in the United States after talking about Queen Victoria and the British Empire, and honestly, I think I’m going to have to spend more time talking about the British Empire and how it grew during the 63 years of her reign, because the British really did a lot of conquering and colonizing in that era. But that’s going to have to wait for a bit, because for the next several episodes, I’m going to be looking closely at things going on in the United States.
We have to take a look at the wild west, and the Oregon Trail, the California Gold Rush, and then we’re going to bog down just a bit on the American Civil War and its aftermath, and I don’t think we’ll come back to jolly old England until after that. Because in the middle of the 1800’s, until the late 1860’s, there’s just a whole lot of stuff happening in America that does, truly, shape our modern world.
One of the biggest impacts that America had in the mid 1800’s was on immigration. People from all over Europe took the giant risk of emigrating to America, lured by the offers of cheap or even free land in the open spaces of the American west. Between 1800 and 1850, more than 5 million people from Europe emigrated to America. Granted, that’s only 2 years of immigration under the Biden administration, but back in the 1800’s, it was a huge movement of humanity, something the world hadn’t seen since maybe the massive migrations at the end of the Roman Empire. It was a lot of people moving to a new place in a short time.