American History MidTerms

Robber Barons

Who/What: Wealthy industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. | Time Period: 1880s. | Historical Context: Rapid industrialization created great fortunes and harsh working conditions. | Significance: Fueled debates over monopolies, inequality, labor rights, and government regulation.

Social Darwinism

Who/What: Applying survival-of-the-fittest ideas to society. | Time Period: Late 1870s. | Historical Context: Some thinkers misapplied evolution to explain wealth and poverty. | Significance: Used to justify inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, racial hierarchies, and imperialism.

Gospel of Wealth

Who/What: Andrew Carnegie's argument that wealthy people should use their fortunes for philanthropy. | Time Period: 1889. | Historical Context: Growing industrial fortunes raised concerns about inequality. | Significance: Encouraged charitable giving and funded libraries, universities, and public institutions.

Bonanza Farming

Who/What: Large-scale commercial farming using extensive land and machinery. | Time Period: 1870s-1890s. | Historical Context: Railroads and machinery expanded farming on the Great Plains. | Significance: Increased crop production but intensified competition, debt, and demands for reform.

Populism

Who/What: A political movement led largely by farmers seeking economic reforms. | Time Period: 1880s-1890s. | Historical Context: Farmers faced falling prices, high railroad rates, and debt. | Significance: Promoted railroad regulation, monetary reform, and a graduated income tax.

Omaha Platform

Who/What: The 1892 political platform of the Populist Party. | Time Period: 1892. | Historical Context: Farmers and laborers challenged the power of banks, railroads, and corporations. | Significance: Proposed reforms including direct election of senators, a graduated income tax, and government ownership of railroads.

Dawes Act

Who/What: A federal law dividing Native American tribal lands into individual allotments and opening much remaining land to non-Native settlers. | Time Period: 1887. | Historical Context: The government sought to assimilate Native Americans into white American society. | Significance: Weakened tribal sovereignty and led to the loss of millions of acres of Native land.

Ghost Dance

Who/What: A Native American religious movement promising spiritual renewal and the restoration of Indigenous ways of life. | Time Period: Late 1880s-1890, especially 1889-1890. | Historical Context: Native communities faced land loss, cultural suppression, and reservation confinement. | Significance: Fear of the movement contributed to tensions that preceded the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Wounded Knee

Who/What: The massacre of hundreds of Lakota people, including women and children, by U.S. troops. | Time Period: December 29, 1890. | Historical Context: U.S. authorities sought to suppress the Ghost Dance movement amid growing tensions with the Lakota. | Significance: Became a symbol of the violence of westward expansion and the devastating impact of U.S. policies on Native Americans.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Who/What: A federal law that suspended immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. | Time Period: 1882. | Historical Context: Anti-Chinese racism and fears of job competition fueled demands for immigration restrictions, particularly in the American West. | Significance: It was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on nationality and ethnicity and established a precedent for exclusionary immigration policies.

Frederick Jackson Turner

Who/What: An American historian who developed the Frontier Thesis, arguing that the American frontier shaped the nation's democracy and identity. | Time Period: 1893. | Historical Context: Turner presented his thesis after the 1890 census reported that a clear frontier line could no longer be identified. | Significance: Influenced American historical scholarship and debates about westward expansion and national identity.

Neurasthenia

Who/What: A historical diagnosis for nervous exhaustion, fatigue, and related symptoms associated with modern life. | Time Period: Late 1800s-early 1900s. | Historical Context: Industrialization, urbanization, and changing social expectations raised concerns about the pressures of modern society. | Significance: Reflected anxieties about modern life, class, gender, and expectations of masculinity.

White Man's Burden

Who/What: A phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem portraying Western imperialism as a duty to civilize other peoples. | Time Period: 1899; era of late-19th-century imperialism. | Historical Context: Western powers expanded overseas and often claimed racial and cultural superiority. | Significance: Illustrates how racist paternalism was used to justify colonial rule and deny colonized peoples self-determination.

Spanish-American War

Who/What: A war between the United States and Spain involving Cuba and Spain's colonial empire. | Time Period: 1898. | Historical Context: Cuban independence struggles, sensationalized journalism, the USS Maine explosion, and U.S. strategic interests contributed to the conflict. | Significance: Spain relinquished control of Cuba, and the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, expanding its overseas power.

Platt Amendment

Who/What: Provisions imposed on Cuba that restricted its independence and gave the United States significant rights to intervene in Cuban affairs. | Time Period: 1901; repealed in 1934. | Historical Context: After the Spanish-American War, the United States occupied Cuba and sought to maintain influence over its government. | Significance: Limited Cuban sovereignty, helped justify U.S. intervention, and provided the basis for the U.S. lease of Guantánamo Bay.

Filipino Insurrection (Philippine-American War)

Who/What: An armed conflict between the United States and Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo, who fought for Philippine independence. | Time Period: 1899-1902 officially, with resistance continuing afterward. | Historical Context: After the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. Filipino nationalists who had fought against Spain opposed American colonial rule. | Significance: Established U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, expanded American imperialism, and exposed tensions between American ideals of liberty and overseas expansion.

Roosevelt Corollary

Who/What: President Theodore Roosevelt's addition to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a U.S. right to intervene in Latin American countries in certain circumstances. | Time Period: 1904. | Historical Context: The United States sought to prevent European intervention over debts and expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere. | Significance: Expanded U.S. intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean and strengthened American regional power.

Chain Migration

Who/What: A pattern in which immigrants help relatives or community members move to the same destination. | Time Period: Throughout U.S. history, especially during immigration waves of the late 1800s and early 1900s. | Historical Context: Family and community connections helped newcomers find housing, jobs, and support. | Significance: Shaped settlement patterns, strengthened ethnic communities, and influenced immigration debates.

Nativism

Who/What: Favoring native-born Americans over immigrants and opposing immigration or immigrant cultural influence. | Time Period: Especially the 1840s-1850s and late 1800s-1920s. | Historical Context: Economic competition, religious prejudice, racism, and fear of cultural change fueled anti-immigrant movements. | Significance: Encouraged discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and restrictive immigration quotas in the 1920s.

Scientific Racism

Who/What: The misuse of scientific claims to argue that racial groups have an inherent hierarchy of ability or worth. | Time Period: Especially the 1800s and early 1900s. | Historical Context: Some thinkers used flawed racial classifications, phrenology, and distorted evolutionary theories to legitimize prejudice. | Significance: Falsely justified segregation, imperialism, immigration restrictions, and eugenics; its claims have been discredited.

Great Railroad Strike

Who/What: A nationwide railroad workers' strike protesting wage cuts, also known as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. | Time Period: 1877. | Historical Context: An economic depression led railroad companies to cut wages while workers faced poor conditions and limited protections. | Significance: The strike spread across multiple states and was violently suppressed, exposing labor tensions and encouraging labor organizing.

Knights of Labor

Who/What: A national labor organization that sought to unite workers across many occupations, including skilled and unskilled laborers. | Time Period: Founded in 1869; most influential in the 1880s. | Historical Context: Industrial workers sought shorter hours, improved conditions, and greater influence over employers. | Significance: Promoted the eight-hour workday and labor reforms, but declined after the Haymarket affair and other setbacks.

Haymarket Square Riot

Who/What: A violent confrontation following a bomb explosion at a Chicago labor rally supporting workers' rights. | Time Period: May 4, 1886. | Historical Context: Workers were campaigning for an eight-hour workday when police moved to disperse a rally and a bomb exploded. | Significance: Fueled anti-labor and anti-radical sentiment and became an international symbol of the struggle over workers' rights.

Sharecropping

Who/What: A farming system in which tenants worked land owned by another person and paid rent with a portion of their crops. | Time Period: After the Civil War, especially the late 1860s through the early 1900s. | Historical Context: Many formerly enslaved people lacked access to land and capital after emancipation, while poor white farmers also struggled financially. | Significance: Debt and crop liens trapped many families in poverty and preserved economic dependence and racial inequality in the South.

Poll Taxes

Who/What: Fees that people had to pay to vote. | Time Period: Particularly late 1800s-1960s in Southern states. | Historical Context: White supremacist governments used poll taxes and other restrictions to weaken Black political power and restrict poor voters. | Significance: Helped disenfranchise Black citizens. Federal law prohibited poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, and the Supreme Court invalidated them in state elections in 1966.

Literacy Tests

Who/What: Tests of reading or interpreting written material used as a requirement for voter registration. | Time Period: Primarily late 1800s-1960s. | Historical Context: Southern officials selectively administered tests to suppress Black voting, often alongside poll taxes and other barriers. | Significance: They were a major tool of voter suppression; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited discriminatory literacy tests.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Who/What: A U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld racial segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal. | Time Period: 1896. | Historical Context: Homer Plessy challenged Louisiana's law requiring racially segregated railroad cars. | Significance: The ruling supported Jim Crow segregation for decades until major civil rights rulings, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Lost Cause

Who/What: A historical narrative that romanticized the Confederacy and distorted the causes and consequences of the Civil War. | Time Period: After the Civil War, especially late 1800s-early 1900s. | Historical Context: Former Confederates and their supporters promoted Southern honor and states' rights while minimizing slavery's central role in secession. | Significance: Helped justify Confederate monuments, segregation, and white supremacy and shaped public memory of the Civil War.

Muckrakers

Who/What: Investigative journalists and writers who exposed corruption, monopolies, unsafe working conditions, and social problems. | Time Period: Mainly 1890s-1910s, especially the Progressive Era. | Historical Context: Industrialization and urban growth created problems often ignored by powerful business leaders and politicians. | Significance: Their reporting built public support for food safety, labor protections, corporate regulation, and political reform.

Settlement House Movement

Who/What: A reform movement that established community centers offering education, childcare, recreation, and social services in poor urban neighborhoods. | Time Period: Late 1800s-early 1900s. | Historical Context: Immigration, industrialization, overcrowding, and urban poverty increased the need for community support. | Significance: Settlement houses supported working-class and immigrant families and promoted social reform. Jane Addams's Hull House was a famous example.

Women's Suffrage

Who/What: The movement to secure women's right to vote. | Time Period: Organized movement began in the mid-1800s; the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. | Historical Context: Women challenged laws and customs excluding them from political participation through petitions, conventions, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. | Significance: The Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote based on sex, although racial barriers continued to prevent many women of color from voting.

Eugenics

Who/What: A movement claiming society could be improved by controlling reproduction based on supposed hereditary traits. | Time Period: Late 1800s-mid-1900s, especially the early 1900s. | Historical Context: Supporters misused ideas about heredity to promote racial, class-based, and disability-based hierarchies. | Significance: Eugenics inspired forced sterilization, immigration restrictions, and other human rights abuses.

Lusitania

Who/What: A British passenger liner sunk by a German submarine during World War I. | Time Period: May 7, 1915. | Historical Context: Germany used submarine warfare against shipping near the British Isles; 128 American citizens died in the sinking. | Significance: The sinking intensified American anger toward Germany and influenced public opinion, although the United States entered the war in 1917.

Zimmermann Telegram

Who/What: A secret German diplomatic message proposing an alliance with Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany. | Time Period: January-March 1917. | Historical Context: Germany planned to resume unrestricted submarine warfare and sought to distract or weaken the United States. | Significance: Its publication outraged Americans and helped shift public opinion toward war; the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917.

Espionage and Sedition Acts

Who/What: Federal laws restricting certain interference with the U.S. war effort and certain anti-government speech during World War I. | Time Period: Espionage Act, 1917; Sedition Act, 1918. | Historical Context: The government sought to prevent espionage, resistance to the draft, and antiwar dissent. | Significance: The laws restricted civil liberties and prompted lasting debates about free speech and government power during wartime.

Treaty of Versailles

Who/What: The peace treaty between Germany and the Allied powers that formally ended the state of war after World War I. | Time Period: Signed June 28, 1919; took effect in 1920. | Historical Context: Allied leaders negotiated a settlement that imposed territorial losses, military restrictions, and reparations on Germany. | Significance: Fueled German resentment and contributed to European instability. The United States never ratified the treaty or joined the League of Nations.

Influenza Epidemic

Who/What: The 1918 influenza pandemic, a worldwide outbreak that killed tens of millions of people. | Time Period: 1918-1920, with the deadliest wave in 1918. | Historical Context: World War I troop movements, crowded military camps, and international travel helped spread the virus. | Significance: Caused massive loss of life, strained public health systems, and highlighted the importance of disease prevention.

Harlem Hellfighters

Who/What: The nickname of the 369th Infantry Regiment, a predominantly Black American unit that served in World War I. | Time Period: 1917-1919. | Historical Context: Black Americans served in a segregated military while facing racism at home; the regiment served under French command for much of its combat service. | Significance: Its bravery and combat record challenged racist stereotypes and became an important part of Black military history.

Committee on Public Information

Who/What: A U.S. government agency created to build public support for American participation in World War I. | Time Period: 1917-1919. | Historical Context: The government sought to mobilize public opinion, encourage enlistment and bond purchases, and promote wartime unity. | Significance: Used posters, pamphlets, films, and public speakers to shape public opinion, illustrating the power of government propaganda.

Henry Ford

Who/What: An industrialist who helped popularize mass-produced automobiles through the Ford Motor Company. | Time Period: Early 1900s, especially the 1910s-1920s. | Historical Context: Factories increasingly adopted assembly-line methods, and Ford introduced a moving assembly line for automobile production in 1913. | Significance: Mass production made cars more affordable, transformed transportation, and expanded American consumer culture.

The Flapper

Who/What: A cultural image of a young woman associated with bobbed hair, shorter dresses, dancing, and greater social independence. | Time Period: 1920s. | Historical Context: Urbanization, consumer culture, and changing gender expectations influenced youth culture after World War I. | Significance: Symbolized changing gender roles and modern youth culture, although the image did not represent all women.

Harlem Renaissance

Who/What: A flowering of African American literature, music, visual art, and intellectual life centered in Harlem, New York City. | Time Period: Approximately 1920s-1930s. | Historical Context: The Great Migration brought Black Americans to Northern cities, where artists challenged racism and celebrated Black identity. | Significance: Transformed American culture through artists and writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington.

Marcus Garvey

Who/What: Jamaican-born Black nationalist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. | Time Period: Especially influential in the United States during the 1910s-1920s. | Historical Context: Black Americans faced segregation and racial violence, encouraging movements for equality, self-determination, and racial pride. | Significance: Promoted Black pride, economic self-reliance, Pan-African identity, and unity among people of African descent worldwide.

Scopes Trial

Who/What: A Tennessee trial prosecuting teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of state law. | Time Period: 1925. | Historical Context: The trial reflected tensions between religious fundamentalism and modern scientific ideas during the 1920s. | Significance: Drew national attention to debates about religion, science, and public education. Scopes was convicted, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

Hooverville

Who/What: A shantytown of makeshift shelters occupied by homeless Americans during the Great Depression. | Time Period: Mainly the early 1930s. | Historical Context: The economic collapse following the 1929 stock market crash caused mass unemployment, evictions, and poverty. | Significance: Symbolized widespread hardship and public dissatisfaction with President Herbert Hoover's response to the Depression.

Dust Bowls

Who/What: Severe dust storms and agricultural disasters across the Great Plains, collectively known as the Dust Bowl. | Time Period: Mainly the 1930s, especially 1934-1939. | Historical Context: Severe drought combined with intensive plowing and removal of native grasses to cause devastating soil erosion. | Significance: Displaced farming families, worsened the Great Depression, prompted soil conservation programs, and drove migration westward.

Bonus Army

Who/What: World War I veterans who marched on Washington, D.C., demanding early payment of their service bonuses. | Time Period: 1932. | Historical Context: The Great Depression left many veterans unemployed and impoverished, leading them to demand early payment of their military service certificates. | Significance: Federal troops forcibly cleared the veterans' encampments, damaging President Herbert Hoover's public image and highlighting the suffering caused by the Depression.

The New Deal

Who/What: President Franklin D. Roosevelt's federal programs and reforms designed to respond to the Great Depression. | Time Period: Beginning in 1933; mainly the 1930s. | Historical Context: Bank failures, unemployment, business collapse, and poverty followed the Great Depression. | Significance: Expanded federal responsibility for economic security through programs such as Social Security, bank regulation, and public works. It provided relief and reform but did not by itself end the Depression.