merica can be laid in part to the fact that big-picture issues and the initial-capped sobriquets (e.g., Jacksonian Democracy, Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark) that went with them were decisive in framing American society during its decades of nationalization.
Geographically based sectionalism was the issue that preoccupied most Americans and was considered the "greatest danger to the Union forged at Philadelphia" (Miller 124). The California Gold Rush, Manifest Destiny, and railroads would further nationalist momentum in one way, and abolitionism, the secession crisis, the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, and Reconstruction would do the same thing in a different way. And meanwhile there was the Industrial Revolution, evolving right along with the United States and waiting to visit its implications on global geopolitical rivalries and cooperation.
Thus the forest narrative of emergent America. But if one focuses exclusively on initial-capped American macrohistory it is easy to miss other, seemingly less important social and cultural dynamics--the trees, as it were--that turned out to have significant impact on the way ordinary lives were led. And so, to recapitulate, we begin some few years before what is considered the seminal (if so it may be called) event in the history of women's organized political and social action: the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
Origins of Seneca Falls in 1848 can be sited in the context of social-reform advocacy taking place in the cities, especially in genteel New England, as well as in the free-form expansionism of the western frontier. Both of dynamics achieved momentum in the 1830s. Popular knowledge of the 1830s and 1840s in America is that, among the masses, there were a good deal of illiteracy, a good deal of activity, a good deal of experimentation at the cultural level, as American life put down its own--i.e., non-European--roots. Donald cites Tocqueville's portrait of t...