AP US History: Industrial America, Gilded Age Politics, and the Progressive Era (1860–1917)

Vocabulary flashcards covering the transcontinental railroads, Western expansion, industrialization, the rise of big business, urbanization, Gilded Age politics, and Progressive Era reforms from 1860 to 1917.

Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862

Federal legislation passed by Republicans in 1862 that authorized loans, subsidies, and land grants to private companies to construct a transcontinental line, resulting in the Union Pacific building west from Iowa and the Central Pacific laying track east from San Francisco until meeting at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.

Burlingame Treaty

An 1868 treaty negotiated by Secretary of State William Seward that guaranteed the rights of US missionaries in China and established official terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers to the United States.

Munn v. Illinois

An 1877 Supreme Court ruling that states could regulate certain private businesses, such as grain elevators and railroads, if those operations were "clothed in the public interest."

"Crime of 1873"

The term used by critics from the lower classes for the federal law that converted the United States to the gold standard, ending the minting of silver, eliminating Civil War greenbacks, and restricting the money supply.

Homestead Act of 1862

Federal law that granted 160 acres of free western public land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property for five years.

Morrill Act

An 1862 act that granted public lands to states to fund the establishment of land-grant colleges dedicated to agricultural, technical, and scientific education.

Comstock Lode

A rich deposit of silver ore discovered in Nevada in 1859 that created the boomtown of Virginia City and produced enough silver to prompt the United States' transition to the gold standard.

General Mining Act of 1872

A federal law allowing anyone who paid a $5 fee to extract minerals and keep the profits from discoveries on federal public lands.

Sand Creek Massacre

The November 28, 1864 attack in which Major John Chivington led the Colorado militia to slaughter over 100 Cheyenne people, mostly women and children, camped peacefully along Sand Creek.

Battle of Little Bighorn

An 1876 military engagement in Montana where Lakota Sioux and allied warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse defeated and killed Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry.

Ghost Dance Movement

A late-1880s Native American religious movement originating from the vision of Paiute shaman Wovoka, preaching that practicing the sacred dance would cause ancestors to return, the bison to replenish, and white settlers to disappear.

Wounded Knee Massacre

The December 29, 1890 massacre in South Dakota where the US 7th Cavalry killed 150 Lakota Ghost Dancers, marking the final major military clash of the Plains Wars.

Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

A law sponsored by Senator Henry Dawes intended to assimilate Native Americans by dividing communal reservations into individually owned 160-acre plots and auctioning "surplus" tribal land to white settlers.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock

A 1901 Supreme Court case ruling that Congress possessed plenary power over Native American relations and could unilaterally make, alter, or ignore existing treaties at will.

Management Revolution

The creation of an internal corporate management system that departmentalized operations by function and separated executive leadership from managers overseeing day-to-day work.

Vertical Integration

A business model pioneered by Gustavus Swift and Andrew Carnegie in which a single corporation controls every stage of industrial production, from raw materials sourcing to the marketing of final products.

Predatory Pricing

A market strategy where large corporations slash product prices below production costs in a targeted region to bankrupt smaller local competitors before raising prices once a monopoly is secured.

Horizontal Integration

A corporate strategy utilized by John D. Rockefeller in which a dominant firm pressures or forces competitors in the same industry to merge into a single massive conglomerate.

Trust

An organizational mechanism developed by Standard Oil's legal team where a board of trustees manages stock from multiple competing companies as a unified corporate entity.

"The Gospel of Wealth"

An 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie arguing that extreme wealth accumulation demonstrates Darwinian fitness to manage resources, tempered by a moral imperative to distribute riches through philanthropic endeavors.

Deskilling

An industrial manufacturing system that replaces artisanal craftsmanship with mechanized, repetitive tasks executed by low-wage, unskilled workers producing standardized components.

Scientific Management

A workplace management philosophy developed by Frederick W. Taylor that broke down industrial labor into timed, repetitive steps to coax maximum output from workers and eliminate inefficiencies.

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

An 1882 act of Congress that banned all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States and prohibited Chinese residents already in the country from obtaining citizenship.

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

A spontaneous nationwide strike by thousands of railroad workers in response to steep wage cuts during the depression of 1873, halted only when state militias and federal troops intervened with violence.

Producerism

The political-economic ideology asserting that economic wealth is generated strictly by physical laborers and producers, while financiers, speculators, and middlemen unfairly live off their toil.

Knights of Labor

A mass labor union founded in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and led by Terence Powderly that organized workers regardless of craft, gender, or race (excluding Chinese), advocating for workplace safety laws, child labor bans, and worker-owned cooperatives.

Haymarket Square Riot

An 1886 gathering of striking workers and anarchists in Chicago where a bomb killed eight police officers, provoking nationwide anti-union hysteria that brought about the decline of the Knights of Labor.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

An alliance of craft unions established in 1886 by Samuel Gompers that limited membership to skilled, white male artisans and emphasized "pure and simple unionism" focused strictly on wages, hours, and closed-shop workplaces.

Interstate Commerce Act of 1887

Federal legislation establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to investigate corporate abuses and regulate railroad shipping rates that discriminated against small shippers.

Social Darwinism

A 19th-century doctrine formulated by Herbert Spencer applying biological evolutionary theory to socioeconomic classes, asserting that financial dominance reflected the "survival of the fittest."

Eugenics

A pseudo-scientific movement advocating selective human breeding through institutional segregation and state-mandated sterilization of individuals classified as "mentally deficient" or socially unfit.

Social Gospel

A Protestant reform movement that urged churches and religious followers to address social inequities, fight urban poverty, and pursue Christian ideals through direct charitable service.

Literary Realism

A late-19th-century literary and artistic movement, practiced by authors like Jack London and Mark Twain, that discarded romanticized plots in favor of portraying daily human struggles, poverty, and urban strife truthfully.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The 1896 Supreme Court decision establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine, upholding racial segregation laws under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Muscular Christianity

A cultural ideal embraced by the YMCA and Theodore Roosevelt that integrated Christian piety with rigorous physical exercise to maintain traditional masculinity among urban white-collar men.

Sierra Club

An environmental organization established in 1892 by preservationist John Muir to explore, protect, and preserve the Sierra Nevada mountains and other wilderness areas from industrial development.

Atlanta Compromise

An 1895 speech by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton States Exposition advocating that African Americans temporarily accept social segregation and disenfranchisement while concentrating on practical vocational education and economic self-reliance.

Maternalism

The ideology that justified women's participation in public reform and politics based on their moral roles, maternal instincts, and duties to protect families and children.

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

A major reform organization led by Frances Willard that advocated the prohibition of alcohol as well as female suffrage, prison reform, and social justice programs under the slogan "Do Everything."

Chicago School of Architecture

A group of architects in late-19th-century Chicago who pioneered the structural steel frame, plate-glass construction, and elevators to design soaring skyscrapers whose outward form reflected their inner function.

Tenement

A multi-story, cramped urban apartment building, typically five or six stories tall, that housed dozens of working-class immigrant families under unsafe, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary conditions.

Yellow Journalism

Sensationalist newspaper reporting pioneered by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that relied on scandal, emotionalism, and exaggerated stories to capture urban readers.

Political Machine

A disciplined, hierarchical political organization—typified by Tammany Hall under "Boss" Tweed—that commanded electoral votes by distributing municipal patronage, social assistance, and contracts to working-class immigrants in exchange for power.

Honest Graft

A term coined by Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt to describe using insider government knowledge to buy land cheaply and sell it back to the municipality at exorbitant profits.

Galveston Plan

A municipal government structure originated after the 1900 Galveston hurricane that placed city administration in the hands of a nonpartisan commission of technical experts rather than an elected mayor and ward bosses.

Settlement House

A neighborhood community welfare center, exemplified by Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, where educated middle-class reformers lived alongside immigrant workers to provide social, medical, and educational resources.

Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

A consumer protection statute passed after public outrage over Upton Sinclair's The Jungle that established the Food and Drug Administration to monitor product labels and halt the sale of contaminated foods and medicines.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

A lethal industrial blaze in New York City on March 25, 1911, that claimed the lives of 146 locked-in female garment workers and accelerated legislative passage of municipal safety, fire, and labor codes.

Pendleton Act of 1883

Civil service reform law enacted following the assassination of President James A. Garfield that created the Civil Service Commission and mandated that federal appointments be filled via nonpartisan examinations rather than political patronage.

Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890

A federal law forbidding business combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, enacted to curb monopolistic trusts but frequently turned by federal courts against labor unions.

Omaha Platform

The 1892 political manifesto of the People's (Populist) Party calling for the unlimited coinage of silver, federal ownership of railroads and telegraphs, a graduated income tax, and an eight-hour workday.

Coxey's Army

A group of unemployed citizens led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey who marched on Washington, D.C., in 1894 to demand federal public works road-building programs funded by legal tender paper currency.

Lochner v. New York

A 1905 Supreme Court ruling striking down a New York 10-hour workday limit for bakery workers, asserting that the state violated the 14th Amendment's "due process" clause by infringing on individual freedom of contract.

Square Deal

President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 domestic agenda centering on the "Three Cs": corporate regulation, consumer protection, and natural resource conservation.

Wisconsin Idea

A Progressive policy approach championed by Wisconsin Governor Robert La Follette that utilized nonpartisan university academics and social scientists to draft and administer economic reform legislation.

Muller v. Oregon

A 1908 Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oregon state statute limiting women's factory workdays to ten hours, resting on Louis Brandeis's empirical brief describing the physiological toll of long hours on female maternal health.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

A revolutionary industrial labor syndicate founded in 1905 by "Big Bill" Haywood and radical socialists (known as the Wobblies) that promoted syndicalism, strikes, and class warfare to overthrow capitalism.

Talented Tenth

A concept advanced by W.E.B. Du Bois calling for the top ten percent of educated African Americans to cultivate intellectual leadership and lead direct legal and political battles for civil rights.

NAACP

A civil rights organization formed in 1909 following the Springfield race riot by Mary White Ovington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other activists that utilized legal challenges against segregation and published the journal The Crisis.

Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914

A federal law that expanded government oversight to prohibit anticompetitive corporate mergers, interlocking directorates, and price discrimination, while explicitly clarifying that labor unions were not illegal combinations in restraint of trade.