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I would say three main effects.The transcontinental railroad. Before the Civil War, most of Congress agreed that there should be a transcontinental railroad, but as you might guess, they wrangled about whether it should be in the North or the South. When the South pulled out of the Union, that left the North free to build the railroad in the North, which was completed in 1869. Other railroads followed, and riddled though they were with corruption, they got the job done. The rails brought floods of settlers westward, with their guns, plows, reapers, and other heavy equipment, and lugged back the millions of tons of wheat and corn that they grew, as well as the hides of millions of slaughtered bison that doomed the Natives’ way of life2. The Homestead Act. Before the Civil War, efforts to hand out free or low-cost land to settlers had been blocked by Southern Senators, and pro-Southern president James Buchanan, who wanted the land to be available to plantation owners. Although some Northern industrial interests were also against the Homestead Act, they were not enough to stop it from becoming law once the South left. Over 1.6 million settlers staked claims under the Homestead Act. The war also determined that the settlers would be primarily Northerners and immigrants; the 1866 Homestead Act barred anyone who had taken up arms against the U.S. (ex-Confederate soldiers) from getting the free land.3. Wars between the U.S. and Native Americans. The U.S. Army units assigned to the West were mostly withdrawn to fight the Civil War. Various Native American peoples, many reduced to desperation by corrupt government agents stealing money and supplies due to them under their treaties with the U.S., took advantage of this opportunity to attack. Native rebels seized food and other benefits promised to them under the treaties - one government agent who had said the Sioux could eat grass was found dead with grass stuffed in his mouth - but they also murdered hundreds of settlers, many of whom had done Natives no wrong, and many more settlers had to flee their homes. White militias raised in the absence of Federal soldiers often could not find the Native raiders, and simply murdered any Native they could get their hands on; at Sand Creek, Colorado, John Chivington massacred dozens of peaceful Arapaho and Cheyenne camped under a U.S. flag. In the end, the uprisings were harshly suppressed and several dozen Natives involved or thought to be involved were hanged.

They always were, the difference is the Democratic party used to be more of a big tent party rural farmers , white union workers in rural areas, populists and moderates even conservatives Blue Dog Coalition - Wikipedia the difference is today the party is now mostly urban and suburban and socially very liberal , the big tent got clipped How Democrats Conquered the CityThis fact may not seem worthy of inquiry, since the Democratic Party is the nation’s more progressive party, and—dating back to the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages—populous and diverse places have typically been more open to new ideas in science and politics. One hundred years ago, however, Democrats represented a wildly different constituency of rural white southerners and populist western farmers. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s support in America’s rural counties was, if anything, slightly higher than his support in urban counties.What started as an idiosyncratic local connection between urbanization and Democratic voting in New York quickly spread to the rest of the industrialized states in 1928 … [Smith’s platform] was not quite the agenda of the Socialists, but it was the beginning of the Democrats’ transformation into a party of the urban working class.Only in the past 20 years have dense counties in the South become reliably Democratic, Rodden writes. Since the 1990s, southern cities have become more similar to their northern kin, boasting a similar mix of large companies and explosive growth in college-educated adults. What’s more, the Great Migration has started to reverse itself. In the past few decades, with the deindustrialization of northern manufacturing towns, millions of black families have returned to metros in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, bringing their politics with them. Black families on the move have twice pushed Democrats toward becoming a party of the city—first in the North, and then in the South.There is no obvious reason why a 19th-century movement led by Irish Catholic noneducated factory workers should become a 21st-century party for college grads, nonwhite voters, and software developers that defends gay rights, women’s rights, and legalized abortion. But it makes sense if you understand the Democratic Party through the lens of the modern city. Starting in the 1970s through today, Democrats and Republicans have been compelled to take sides on issues that hadn’t previously been politicized. And they have routinely sorted themselves along urban-rural lines, creating a pattern where there was once merely a tendency.

Most of the other people who have answered this have focused on the loss of life caused by man-made disasters. I will focus more on the environment. The case of the Aral Sea is perhaps the worst man-made disaster from an environmental point of view.A comparison of the Aral Sea in 1989 (left) and 2014 (right)Most people have not heard of the Aral Sea. Many may still not see the significance of the Aral Sea drying up. Imagine if one of the great lakes of North America had dried up. That is how large the Aral Sea once was. A massive sea found between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the heart of Central Asia. It is known to be one of the planet’s worst ecological disasters in history, yet so few know about it or care.So how exactly did this great sea dry up and who is to blame? The simple answer to the latter would be the Soviet Union. In the 1960s the USSR decided to make use of its desert regions in Central Asia. To do so required a very large and steady supply of water. It was decided that the Amu river and Syr rivers would be used to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, rice and grain. All of these require large amounts of water. The problem with this was that these two great rivers of Central Asia drained into the Aral Sea.As it happens in most authoritarian governments, this began as a massive irrigation project. Many agricultural canals were constructed in the deserts and slowly the fruits of hard labor began to show. The desert was beginning to bloom. The sands were being replaced by massive farms. The large amounts of cotton grown were bringing in wealth to the USSR.One of the first mistakes made were the canals. They were poorly constructed and were not water-proof. This led to the wastage of much of the water. From the Karakum Canal in Turkmenistan, the largest of these canals, it is believed that about half of the water went to waste. The government however did not care so long as the cotton fields were doing well. According to Aleksandr Asarin, everyone knew the fate of the Aral Sea from the beginning. He said that, “It was part of the five year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo”. Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans, even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea." The Soviets decided that the short-term benefits outweighed the long-term loss and everyone was too afraid to speak against it.The Karakum Canal passes 1375 kilometers through the Karakum Desert.The Soviets are not the only ones to blame here though. After Uzbekistan’s independence things did not change. The power hungry new dictator of this new country could not care less about the sea. If anything, he made matters worse. At the time of independence, cotton was Uzbekistan’s most important export. And this made Islam Karimov rich and kept him in power. He increased the production of cotton even more. Not only that, during harvest season modern slavery was used to harvest the cotton at a cheap price. Thousands of random poor people would be arrested and forced to work in the fields. Not even children were spared from such misery.The end result as expected was the drying of the Aral Sea. The cool water was replaced by drifting sands. This resulted in the creation of the Aralkum desert at the seabed. The drifting sands would degrade the surrounding lands and decrease agricultural productivity. The chemicals that had poured into the sea over decades were now part of this sand alongside the salt. What little sea remained was far too salty to allow fish to survive and thus came an end to the fishing industry of the region that had existed for centuries.The Aralkum Desert, a hellish wasteland.Now the cool regions surrounding the ancient sea are gone. They are replaced by massive dust storms from this man-made desert. The dust with it carries chemicals and carcinogens from the decades before due to pesticides and weapon testing. The incidence of cancers and respiratory diseases has sky-rocketed.All of the local villages and industries dependent of the sea have been destroyed. The delta of the Amu and Syr rivers are almost destroyed as well, resulting in the loss of habitat and loss of many species. The entire ecosystem of the region has been decimated. To make matters worse, the region now has even less rainfall and is far more dry. The winters have become colder and the summers hotter.The destruction of the Aral Sea with timeTo end this on a positive note, Kazakhstan has really stepped up to try to save some of the sea by building a dam to disconnect the northern sea from the much larger south. The salinity has decreased and the number of fish increases by the day. Hopefully in the coming years the people of Central Asia will be able to undo the damage that was done over the past few decades.Revival of the Northern Aral Sea