Northeastern North America (1828–1971 CE)

Industrial Heartlands, Atlantic Gateways, and Cold War Crossroads

Geography & Environmental Context

Northeastern North America includes all territory east of 110°W, except the lands belonging to Gulf and Western North America. This encompasses the Great Lakes basin, the St. Lawrence River corridor, Hudson Bay and Labrador, Newfoundland, Greenland, the Arctic, the Maritime provinces, and the Atlantic seaboard from New England through Virginia, the Carolinas, and most of Georgia. It also contains the Mississippi Valley north of Illinois’ Little Egypt and the Upper Missouri above the Iowa–Nebraska crossing, as well as northeast Alabama, central and eastern Tennessee, and nearly all of Kentucky.

Anchors included the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence corridor, the Appalachian piedmont, Hudson Bay, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Atlantic coastal plain. This was a region of forests and prairies, industrializing river valleys, and Arctic margins increasingly integrated into continental and global networks.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

The 19th century saw the close of the Little Ice Age, with harsh winters persisting into the mid-century before gradual warming by the 20th. The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence valleys endured blizzards and drought cycles. Greenland’s sea ice remained extensive until the early 20th century, then retreated. Atlantic storms reshaped seaboards, while the Dust Bowl’s fringes touched the upper Mississippi Valley. By the mid-20th century, industrial pollution, damming, and deforestation altered rivers and lakes. Warmer conditions opened some Arctic navigation and enabled agricultural expansion on the prairies.

Subsistence & Settlement

• United States:

  • The eastern seaboard and interior transformed into an industrial core. Wheat, corn, and cotton farming underpinned rural life, while cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago grew as manufacturing giants.

  • Immigration from Europe swelled urban populations; African Americans migrated north in the Great Migration, reshaping cities.

• Canada:

  • Confederation (1867) bound Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes; later provinces joined as prairie farming expanded through the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence corridor.

  • Industrial centers like Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax grew rapidly.

• Greenland:

  • Inuit sustained hunting and fishing lifeways; Danish colonial administrators introduced trade posts, missions, and modernization projects.

  • Sealing and cod fisheries dominated, while U.S. bases after WWII tied Greenland into Cold War strategy.

• Indigenous nations: Though often displaced or confined, Native communities persisted through fur trade, wage labor, and mixed economies, maintaining ceremonies and oral traditions despite assimilationist pressures.

Technology & Material Culture

• Industrialization: Steamships, canals (Erie, Welland), and railroads structured 19th-century movement. Iron, coal, and later oil fueled factories; by the 20th century, automobiles, telephones, and electricity reshaped life.

• Great Lakes: Shipyards, steel mills, and automotive industries (Detroit) symbolized industrial power.

• Urban landscapes: Skyscrapers rose in New York and Chicago; monumental civic buildings reflected republican ideals.

• Inuit technology: umiaks, sledges, and skin clothing persisted, gradually blending with rifles, aluminum boats, and modern textiles.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• St. Lawrence–Great Lakes corridor: Lifeline for grain, timber, coal, and manufactured goods; the St. Lawrence Seaway (1959) opened direct passage to the Atlantic.

• Atlantic ports: New York, Boston, Halifax, and Norfolk became hubs for immigration, finance, and shipping.

• Hudson Bay Company posts: Continued fur trading into the 19th century, later giving way to mining and forestry.

• Greenland: Danish trade routes and, later, U.S. airbases connected Inuit settlements to North Atlantic geopolitics.

• Railroads and highways: Linked Atlantic and Great Lakes cities to prairies; by mid-20th century, interstate highways and air travel reinforced northeastern dominance.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Indigenous resilience: Powwows, art, and oral tradition preserved identity despite reservation and assimilation policies.

• United States: Republican ideals, frontier and industrial myths, and later consumer democracy shaped identity; jazz, blues, and rock emerged from northeastern cities.

• Canada: Bilingual (French-English) traditions, maritime folklore, and Indigenous storytelling marked cultural life.

• Greenland Inuit: Shamanic traditions blended with Lutheranism; drum dances, carvings, and hunting songs remained central.

• Symbols of modernity: factories, bridges, skyscrapers, and lighthouses expressed progress and connection to the Atlantic.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• Farmers expanded into prairies with mechanization and fertilizers, though soil depletion and dust crises highlighted limits.

• Industrial growth degraded landscapes with smoke and effluent; the Great Lakes suffered heavy pollution by mid-20th century.

• Fisheries collapsed in parts of the Atlantic; conservation movements responded with national parks and wildlife protections.

• Inuit adapted to retreating sea ice by diversifying hunting practices and incorporating modern tools.

Political & Military Shocks

• United States: Civil War (1861–65) ended slavery and reshaped the Union; World Wars I & II propelled it to superpower status.

• Canada: Confederation (1867) and expansion west built a new nation within the British Empire; by 1931 (Statute of Westminster), Canada achieved near-full sovereignty.

• Greenland: Remained a Danish colony until 1953, when it became an autonomous province; Cold War airbases underscored its strategic value.

• Indigenous dispossession: Treaties, removals, and boarding schools stripped communities of land and autonomy, though resistance and renewal persisted.

Transition

By 1971 CE, Northeastern North America had become an industrial heartland and Atlantic hub. The United States emerged as a global superpower anchored in its eastern cities; Canada consolidated as a bilingual, industrial nation; and Greenland shifted into Cold War geopolitics under Danish and U.S. oversight. Indigenous nations endured profound losses but maintained cultural resilience. This subregion had become both the engine of the Atlantic world and a critical stage for modern geopolitics, carrying deep ecological and cultural legacies into the late 20th century.

The anarchist movement of several thousand, mostly immigrant, workers in Chicago centers about the German-language Arbeiter-Zeitung ("Workers' Times") edited by August Spies.

Some anarchists are members of a militant revolutionary force with an armed section that is equipped with guns and explosives.

Its revolutionary strategy centers around the belief that successful operations against the police and the seizure of major industrial centers would result in massive public support by workers, revolution, and establishment of a socialist economy.

There has been a rapid expansion of industrial production in the United States following the Civil War, particularly following the Depression of 1873–79, t.

Chicago is a major industrial center and tens of thousands of German and Bohemian immigrants are employed at pauper's wages, about $1.50 a day.

American workers work nine to fourteen hour days (on average just over ten hours), six days a week, all year long.

The city has become a center for many attempts to organize labor's demands for better working conditions.

Employers have responded with repressive tactics, including acts of violence.

These fights have been carried into the pages of the press, with established newspapers facing off against the labor and immigrant press.

Socialist and anarchist labor organizing has been very successful during the economic slowdown that extends from 1882 to 1886.

The date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard had unanimously been set as May 1, 1886, at a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in October 1884.

As the chosen date approaches, U. S. labor unions prepare for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.

Rallies are held throughout the United States on Saturday, May 1.

Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U. S. range from three hundred thousand to half a million.

In New York City, the number of demonstrators is estimated at ten thousand and ...

...in Detroit at eleven thousand.

Some ten thousand workers turn out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

An estimated thirty thousand-to-forty thousand workers have gone on strike in Chicago, the movement's center, and there are perhaps twice as many people out on the streets participating in various demonstrations and marches, as, for example, a march by ten thousand men employed in the Chicago lumber yards.

Though participants in these outdoor events adds up to eighty thousand, it is unclear if there was ever a single, massive march of that number down Michigan Avenue led by anarchist Albert Parsons, founder of the International Working People's Association [IWPA] and his wife Lucy and their children.

Striking workers in Chicago meet near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on May 3.

Union molders at the plant have been locked out since early February and the predominantly Irish-American workers at McCormick had come under attack from Pinkerton guards during an earlier strike action in 1885.

This event, along with the eight-hour militancy of McCormick workers, had gained the strikers some respect and notoriety around the city.

By the time of the 1886 general strike, strikebreakers entering the McCormick plant are under protection from a garrison of 400 police officers.

Although half of the replacement workers had defected to the general strike on May 1, McCormick workers continue to harass strikebreakers as they cross the picket lines.

Speaking to a rally outside the plant on May 3, August Spies advises the striking workers to "hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed." (Green, James R. (2006). Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon Books.)

Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point has remained largely nonviolent.

When the end-of-the-workday bell sounds, however, a group of workers surge to the gates to confront the strikebreakers.

Despite calls by Spies for the workers to remain calm, gunfire erupts as police fired on the crowd.

In the end, two McCormick workers are killed (although some newspaper accounts say there were six fatalities).

Spies will later testify, "I was very indignant. I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement." (Green, Death in the Haymarket, pp. 162–173.)

Local anarchists, outraged by this act of police violence, quickly print and distribute fliers calling for a rally the following day at Haymarket Square (also called the Haymarket), a bustling commercial center near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street.

Printed in German and English, the fliers allege police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice.

The first batch of fliers contains the words Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!

When Spies sees the line, he says he will not speak at the rally unless the words are removed from the flier.

All but a few hundred of the fliers are destroyed, and new fliers are printed without the offending words.

More than twenty thousand copies of the revised flier are distributed.

The rally begins peacefully under a light rain on the evening of May 4.

August Spies speaks to a crowd estimated variously between six hundred and three thousand while standing in an open wagon adjacent to the square on Des Plaines Street.

A large number of on-duty police officers watch from nearby.

Spies, in his speech, states, “The object of this meeting is to explain the general situation of the eight-hour movement and to throw light upon various incidents in connection with it." (In the Supreme Court of Illinois, Northern Grand Division. March Term, 1887. August Spies, et al. nv. The People of the State of Illinois. Abstract of Record. Chicago: Barnard & Gunthorpe. vol.II, p. 129. OCLC 36384114., quoted in Avrich, Paul, The Haymarket Tragedy, pp.199–200.)

Following Spies' speech, the crowd is addressed by Albert R. Parsons, the Alabama-born editor of the radical English-language weekly The Alarm.

The crowd is so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., who had stopped by to watch, walks home early.

Parsons speaks for almost an hour before standing down in favor of the last speaker of the evening, Samuel Fielden, who delivers a brief ten-minute address.

A New York Times article, with the dateline May 4 and headlined "Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago ... Twelve Policemen Dead or Dying", reports that Fielden spoke for twenty minutes, alleging that his words grew "wilder and more violent as he proceeded." ("Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago" (PDF). The New York Times. May 4, 1886. Retrieved October 15, 2012.)

At about 10:30 PM, just as Fielden is finishing his speech, police arrive en masse, marching in formation towards the speakers' wagon; their commander, Police Inspector Bonfield, orders the rally to disperse.

A homemade bomb with a brittle metal casing filled with dynamite and ignited by a fuse, is thrown into the path of the advancing police.

Its fuse briefly sputters, then the bomb exploded, killing policeman Mathias J. Degan with flying metal fragments and mortally wounding six other officers.

Witnesses maintain that immediately after the bomb blast there was an exchange of gunshots between police and demonstrators.

According to the May 4 New York Times, demonstrators began firing at the police, who then returned fire.

Others, notably historian Paul Avrich, point out that accounts vary widely as to how many returned fire at the police.

He maintains that the police fired on the fleeing demonstrators, reloaded and then fired again, killing four and wounding as many as seventy people. (Avrich, Paul (1984). The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

What is not disputed is that in less than five minutes the square was empty except for the casualties.

Policemen now carry their wounded comrades and some wounded demonstrators into the adjacent police station.

Other wounded demonstrators find aid where they can.

The exact number of dead and wounded among the demonstrators is unknown.

In his report on the incident, Inspector Bonfield will write that he "gave the order to cease firing, fearing that some of our men, in the darkness might fire into each other". (Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1886, quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 209.)

An anonymous police official tells the Chicago Tribune, "A very large number of the police were wounded by each other's revolvers...It was every man for himself, and while some got two or three squares away, the rest emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other." (Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 209.)

About sixty officers had been wounded in the incident, along with an unknown number of civilians.

In all, seven policemen and at least four workers had been killed, with one other policeman dying two years after the incident from complications related to injuries received on that day.

It is unclear how many civilians were wounded since many were afraid to seek medical attention, fearing arrest.

Police captain Michael Schaack wrote the number of wounded workers was "largely in excess of that on the side of the police".

The Chicago Herald described a scene of "wild carnage" and estimated at least fifty dead or wounded civilians lay in the streets.

The police assume that an anarchist had thrown the bomb as part of a planned conspiracy; their problem is how to prove it.

On the morning of May 5, they raid the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, arresting its editor August Spies, and his brother (who is not charged).

Also arrested are editorial assistant Michael Schwab and Adolph Fischer, a typesetter.

A search of the premises results in the discovery of the "Revenge Poster" and other evidence considered incriminating by the prosecution.

Police search the premises of Louis Lingg, where they find a number of bombs and bomb-making materials on May 7.

Lingg's landlord William Seliger is also arrested but cooperates with police and identifies Lingg as a bomb maker and is not charged.

An associate of Spies, Balthazar Rau, suspected as the bomber, is traced to Omaha.

Brought back to Chicago, Rau offers to cooperate with police.

He alleges that the defendants had experimented with dynamite bombs and accuses them of having published what he said was a code word, "Ruhe" ("peace"), in the Arbeiter-Zeitung as a call to arms at Haymarket Square.