The country shifted from largely agrarian economy to become an industrial powerhouse.

The Indian Removal Act protected the Natives when they moved west of the Mississippi River.

The idea of "Manifest Destiny" was the belief that United States was destined to to expand to the Atlantic Ocean and into the Mexican Territory.

Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the war between United States and Mexico ended and promoted the purchase of lands.

The northern and southern states wrangled between free and slave states.

Southern states had to buy inexpensive manufactured goods from Great Britain.

'Sectionalism' is the placing of the interests of one's own region ahead of the nation as a whole.

Transcendentalism is the knowledge that exists beyond reason and experience.

A target of the Puritans was the transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalist liked the commercial side of American life.

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were American poets who broke with the traditional conventions of poetic forms.

Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorn have been called 'dark' Romantics.

Dark Romantics probe the inner lives of their characters, their emotions and fears, in their stories.

Poe and Hawthorne used elements common of the Gothic fiction such as sunny, optimistic settings.

to serve as a symbol or name for the meaning of something

being the only one of its kind; extraordinary