Our website uses cookies to understand content and feature usage to drive site improvements over time. To learn more, review our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Frames in Unit 4
Frames in Unit 4
Reform movements in the 1800s grew through global networks, but the changes they brought did not benefit all people equally.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
According to this video, what was the goal of the earliest international reform network?
What kinds of networks developed to help improve conditions and rights for wage-earners?
What earlier networks contributed to the struggle for women’s rights?
: (music playing)
: The networks frame
: represent the ways humans connect
: and relate to each other as well as the paths
: through which we exchange
: not only goods and services,
: but also ideas, concepts, beliefs, and knowledge.
: The long 19th century was an era in which
: a global network allowed many important ideas to emerge,
: and in which many beliefs
: about the world changed dramatically.
: It was an era in which our fundamental understanding
: of the world shifted.
: Out of this era, the modern education system--
: including your own school-- was born,
: as was the modern university and its disciplines.
: Now just think about that.
: As new ideas developed and spread,
: political and economic transformation took effect
: within and among societies,
: and the shape of our networks changed.
: The concept of national communities
: raised questions about people's rights and responsibilities.
: These included political ideas
: like national and personal sovereignty.
: At the same time,
: the production and distribution system
: of the Industrial Revolution
: turned people into wage laborers for the very first time.
: It also raised questions about the role of individuals
: in the economy and the nation.
: Together, these transformations
: threatened some very old ideas about networks,
: about how we should relate to each other.
: They also created some new ones.
: We can see this in three types of relationships in particular:
: labor, childhood, and gender.
: First, let's talk about labor.
: The concept of personal sovereignty
: combined with the Industrial Revolution
: created a struggle to reform how people worked.
: Where these trends were strongest,
: people connected to each other
: to challenge oppressive institutions.
: The earliest of these networks
: was based on a growing awareness that slavery,
: a long-standing practice across the world,
: was immoral and should be abolished.
: This movement started among
: a few formerly enslaved people of African descent,
: along with European religious activists
: and allied political radicals.
: But it gradually spread
: to large numbers of working-class people
: around the globe.
: The first worldwide anti-slavery convention
: met in 1840 in London.
: This convention created a global network of abolitionists.
: Working together, these groups forced
: the abolition of slavery across much of the Atlantic world,
: often against fierce resistance.
: The abolitionist movement
: inspired and connected to other social movements.
: One such movement sought to create
: better working conditions and rights
: for wage-earning factory workers,
: miners, and other laborers.
: These workers created networks known as unions.
: Unions united workers and helped them share strategies
: to improve their working conditions.
: These strategies achieved some success
: in making life better for specific groups of workers.
: Labor activists around the world then reached out
: to learn from and organize with each other.
: By the 1860s,
: they were meeting in multi-country organizations
: like the International Workingmen's Association.
: This group brought together representatives
: from half a dozen countries.
: By the end of the long 19th century,
: labor organizing connected people
: across all of the world's populated continents.
: Networks, alliances, and connections
: played a similar role in other struggles.
: Some of these struggles came even closer to questioning
: some of the fundamental categories and roles of the era.
: Women, and their allies, connected across many regions
: to agitate for political and social rights.
: In many cases, they built on organizations
: that had already been created to fight for abolition.
: For example, in the United States,
: abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
: addressed the first women's rights convention
: in the United States at Seneca Falls in 1848.
: These networks also contributed to a movement
: to ensure rights and protections for children,
: and also to help discipline them.
: They advocated taking children out of factory work
: and putting them in schools for much of the year.
: Reformers-- whether calling for abolition of slavery,
: better working conditions, women's political rights,
: or new ways of raising and treating children--
: relied on local and international networks.
: But the changes they called for
: were often slow in arriving, fiercely resisted,
: and limited to just a few societies at first.
: As we will see,
: they often conflicted with big power structures,
: including corporations and governments.
: Sometimes, they succeeded
: in getting power structures behind them.
: Other times, they plotted
: to overthrow the power structures that held them back.
: In both cases, these networks of activists
: fundamentally reshaped the kinds of relationships
: people had with each other in the decades to come.