APUSH Chapter 18: The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880-1917

Thomas Edison

Created products like the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph

P.T. Barnum

Leader of his traveling circus who promoted domesticity in his performances

Plessy vs. Ferguson

Homer Plessy, a New Orleans man who was one eighth black, when he was told to leave first class for a colored car. He refused and was arrested. The supreme court said segregation was equal because of "separate but equal" conditions as the whites

YMCA

Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was the earliest promoter of athletic fitness and combined evangelism with fitness to make men "clean and strong", popular among working-class and middle-class men

Negro Leagues

African American professional baseball teams created to showcase athletic ability and race pride, survived until the desegregation of baseball after WWll

John Muir/Sierra Club

John Muir was an environmentalist who created the Sierra Club, which helped preserve America's mountains

National Park Service

a government agency that provided oversight of the growing national parks, created in 1916

National Audobon Society

a national organization that formed in 1901 to advocate for broader government protections of wildlife

Antiquities Act

enabled the president to set aside objects as national monuments, without congressional approval

Comstock Act

prohibited circulation of almost any information about sex and birth control.

Booker T. Washington

Owner of the Tuskegee Institute. He preached self-help and was known as a voice of the African Americans and for making the Atlanta Compromise.

Tuskegee

Institution lead by Washington that was founded in 1881. School was focused on Industrial Education and sent female graduates into teaching and nursing and men often into the industrial trades or farmed by the latest scientific methods.

Atlanta Compromise

Address made by Washington, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia (1885). For the exposition's white organizers, the racial "compromise" was inviting Washington to speak at all. It was a move intended to show racial progress in the South. Washington, in turn, delivered an address that many interpreted as approving racial segregation

maternalism

The belief that women should contribute to civic and political life through their special talents as mothers, Christians, and moral guides. Maternalists put this ideology into action by creating dozens of social reform organizations.

WCTU

An organization advocating the prohibition of liquor that spread rapidly after 1879, when charismatic Frances Willard became its leader. Advocating suffrage and a host of reform activities, it launched tens of thousands of women into public life and was the first nationwide organization to identify and condemn domestic violence.

Frances Willard

Leader of the WCTU (and Christian Socialist). Her motto was motto was "Home Protection". Willard investigated alcohol abuse, and confronted poverty, hunger, unemployment, voting rights, and other industrial problems

National Association of Colored Women

An organization created in 1896 by African American Women to provide community support. Through its local clubs, the NACW arranged for the care of orphans, founded homes for the elderly, advocated temperance, and undertook public health campaigns.

Ida B. Wells

As a young Tennessee schoolteacher sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for denying her a seat in the ladies' car. This launched her into a lifelong crusade for racial justice.

NAWSA

National American Woman Suffrage Association won full ballots for women in many states

feminism

a woman's full political, economic, and social equality

Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species

Book on evolution theory that creatures struggle to survive

Social Darwinism

theory of "survival of the fittest" from British philosopher Herbert Spencer

WG Sumner

Sociology professor at Yale whose idea was that competition was the law of nature, and that the "fittest" are millionaires

Eugenics

the idea that bad traits could bred out and that good traits could improve society, so breeding should be controlled- accomplished by sterilizing many criminals and handicapped

realism

A movement that called for writers and artists to picture daily life as precisely and truly as possible.

naturalism

A literary movement that suggested that human beings were not so much rational agents and shapers of their own destinies as blind victims of forces beyond their control.

Mark Twain

His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and he is the most famous American author. He took a bleak literary view regarding America's idea of progress, and was a controversial critic.

modernism

A movement that questioned the ideals of progress and order, rejected realism, and emphasized new cultural forms. Modernism became the first great literary and artistic movement of the twentieth century and remains influential today.

Armory Show

A controversial event in American Art history, it introduced Americans to modern art. New styles, artists, and ideas were seen.

American Protective Association

A powerful political organization of militant Protestants, which for a brief period in the 1890s counted more than two million members. In its virulent anti-Catholicism and calls for restrictions on immigrants, the APA prefigured the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

Social Gospel

A movement to renew religious faith through dedication to public welfare and social justice, reforming both society and the self through Christian service.

Niagara Creed

The result of the Niagara Conference, it reaffirmed the literal truth of the Bible and the certain damnation of those not born again in Christ.

fundamentalism

A term adopted by Protestants, between the 1890s and the 1910s, who rejected modernism and historical interpretations of scripture and asserted the literal truth of the Bible. Fundamentalists have historically seen secularism and religious relativism as markers of sin that will be punished by God.

Dwight Moody

The pioneer modern evangelist who won fame in the 1870's. He was formerly a Chicago shoe salesman and a YMCA official that promised eternal life could be had for the asking.

Billy Sunday

Moody's successor, a former baseball player that condemned booze traffic, child labor, advocated voting rights for women, and his views anticipated the nativism and anti radicalism that would dominate American politics after World War I.