APUSH Spring Final Vocabulary

APUSH Spring Final Vocabulary Flashcards

A railroad connecting the west and east coasts of the US

Transcontinental Railroad

The practice of backing a country's currency with its reserves in gold.

Gold Standard

The 1862 act that gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property.

Homestead Act

Immense silver ore deposit discovered in 1859 in Nevada that touched off a mining rush.

Comstock Lode

African Americans who walked or rode out of the deep south following the civil war, many settling on farms in Kansas.

Exodusters

On Nov 29, 1864, massacre of a hundred peaceful Cheyennes, largely women and children, by John M. Chivington Colorado Militia

Sand Creek Massacre

In 1887 Law that gave Native Americans severalty (Individual ownership of land) by dividing reservations into homesteads.

Dawes Severalty Act

Religion of the late 1880s and early 1890s that combined elements of christianity and traditional Native American Religion.

Ghost Dance Movement

The 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians by American Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, SD.

Wounded Knee

The 1892 lockout of workers at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill after Andrew Carnegie refused to review the union contract.

Homestead Strike

A business model in which a corporation controlled all aspects of production from Raw Materials to packaged products.

Vertical Integration

A business concept invented in the late nineteenth century to pressure competitors and force rivals to merge their companies into a conglomerate.

Horizontal Integration

A Small group of associates that hold stock from a group of combined forms, managing them as a single entity.

Trust

In 1977, a nationwide strike of thousands of railroad workers and labor allies; who protested the growing power of railroad managers amid a severe economic depression that had begun in 1873

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

A national political movement calling on the government to increase the money supply in order to assist borrowers and foster economic growth.

Greenback-Labor Party

The first mass labor organization created among America's Working class.

Knights of Labor

On May 4, 1886, conflict in Chicago in which both workers and policemen were killed or wounded during a labor demonstration by local anarchists.

Haymarket Square

A rural movement founded in Texas during the depression of the 1870s that spread across the plan states and the south.

Farmers’ Alliance

An 1887 act that created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a federal regulatory agency designed to oversee the railroad industry and prevent collusion and unfair rates.

Interstate Commerce Act

Organization created by Samuel Gompers in 1886 that coordinated the activities of craft unions and called for direct negotiation with employers in order to achieve benefits for skilled workers.

American Federation of Labor

An 1896 Supreme Court case that ruled that racially segregated railroad cars and other public facilities, if they claimed to be “separate but equal,” were permissible accord-ing to the Fourteenth Amendment

Plessy v. Ferguson

An 1895 address by Booker T. Washington that urged whites and African Americans to work together for the progress of all.

Atlanta Compromise

A high-density, cheap, five- or six-story housing unit designed for working-class urban populations.

Tenement

A derogatory term for newspapers that specialize in sensationalist reporting.

Yellow Journalism

A critical term, first used by Theodore Roosevelt, to describe investigative journalists who exposed political corruption, corporate abuses, and social injustices in the early 20th century.

Muckrakers

A complex, hierarchical party organization such as New York’s Tammany Hall, whose candidates remained in office on the strength of their political organization and their personal relationship with voters

Political Machine

A loose term for political reformers — especially those from the elite and middle classes who worked to improve the political system, fight poverty, conserve environ- mental resources, and increase government involvement in the economy.

Progressives

One of the first and most famous social settlements, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr in an impoverished

Hull House

A 1906 law regulating the conditions in the food and drug industries to ensure a safe supply of food and medicine.

Pure Food and Drug Act

A devastating fire that quickly spread through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City on March 25, 1911, killing 146 people.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

A term invented in the 1920s describing the late nine- teenth century as a period of ostentatious displays of wealth, growing poverty, and government inaction in the face of income inequality.

Gilded Age

Landmark 1890 act that forbade anticom- petitive business activities, requiring the federal government to investigate trusts and any companies operating in violation of the act

Sherman Antitrust Act

An 1892 statement by the Populists calling for a stronger government to protect ordinary Americans.

Omaha Platform

A policy of loosening the money supply by expanding federal coinage to include silver as well as gold.

Free Silver

The post-Reconstruction goal — achieved by the early twentieth century — of almost complete electoral control of the South by the Democratic Party.

Solid South

A pioneering progressive idea, enacted in Wisconsin, Ore- gon, California, and other states, that gave citizens the right to remove unpopular politicians from office through a vote

Recall

The process of voting directly on a proposed policy measure rather than leaving it in the hands of elected legislators; a progressive reform.

Referendum

An organization founded in 1910 by leading African American reformers and white allies as a vehicle for advocating equal rights for African Americans, especially through the courts

NAACP

A 1914 law that strengthened federal definitions of “monopoly” and gave more power to the Justice Department to pursue antitrust cases

Clayton Antitrust Act

The idea that the United States has a unique destiny to foster democracy and civilization on the world stage.

American Exceptionalism

A phrase associated with rallying support for the Spanish-American War

Remember the Maine

An amendment to the 1898 U.S. declaration of war against Spain disclaiming any intention by the United States to occupy Cuba.

Teller Amendment

A 1902 amendment to the Cuban constitution that blocked Cuba from making a treaty with any country except the United States

Platt Amendment

A claim put forth by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay that all nations seeking to do business in China should have equal trade access.

Open Door Policy

The 1904 assertion by President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States would act as a “policeman” in the Caribbean region and intervene in the affairs of nations that were guilty of “wrongdoing or impotence”

Roosevelt Corollary

A 1917 intercepted dispatch in which German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman urged Mexico to join the Central Powers and promised that if the United States entered the war, Germany would help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Zimmermann Telegram

A federal board established in July 1917 to direct military production, including allocation of resources, conversion of factories to war production, and setting of prices

War Industries Board

A federal agency founded in 1918 that established an eight-hour day for war workers (with time-and-a- half pay for overtime), endorsed equal pay for women, and sup- ported workers’ right to organize

National War Labor Board

An organization set up by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I to increase support for America’s participation in the war.

Committee on Public Information

Wartime law that prohibited any words or behavior that might promote resistance to the United States or help in the cause of its enemies.

Sedition Act of 1918

The migration of over 400,000 African Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North during and after World War I

Great Migration

Principles for a new world order proposed in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson as a basis for peace negotiations at Versailles.

Fourteen Points

The international organization bringing together world governments to prevent future hostilities, proposed by President Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of World War I.

League of Nations

The 1919 treaty that ended World War I. The agreement redrew the map of the world, assigned Germansole responsibility for the war, and saddled it with a debt of $33 billion in war damages.

Treaty of Versailles

guarantees the right to vote for women

19th Amendment

A term for anticommunist hysteria that swept the United States, first after World War I, and led to a series of gov- ernment raids on alleged subversives and a suppression of civil liberties.

Red Scare

A series of raids led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on radical organizations that peaked in January 1920, when federal agents arrested six thousand citizens and aliens and denied them access to legal counsel

Palmer Raids

Nickname for scandal in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall accepted $300,000 in bribes for leasing oil reserves on public land in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

Teapot Dome

Policy emphasizing the connection between America’s economic and political interests overseas.

Dollar Diplomacy

The ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol that went into effect in January 1920 with the Eighteenth Amend- ment. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

Prohibition

The 1925 trial of John Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating his state’s ban on teaching evolution.

Scopes Trial

1924 law limiting annual immigration from each country to no more than 2 percent of that nationali- ty’s percentage of the U.S. population as it had stood in 1890.

National Origins Act

A flourishing of African American artists, writers, intellectuals, and social leaders in the 1920s, centered in the neighborhoods of Harlem, New York City.

Harlem Renaissance

A Harlem-based group, led by charismatic, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, that arose in the 1920s to mobilize African American workers and champion black separatism.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

The idea that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, have a common heritage and destiny and should cooperate in political action

Pan-Africanism

The phrase coined by writer Gertrude Stein to refer to young artists and writers who had suffered through World War I and felt alienated from America’s mass-culture society in the 1920s.

Lost Generation

New forms of borrowing, such as auto loans and installment plans, flourished in the 1920s but helped trigger the Great Depression.

Consumer Credit

A group of 15,000 unemployed World War I veterans who set up camps near the Capitol building in 1932 to demand immediate payment of pension awards due to be paid in 1945

Bonus Army

A series of informal radio addresses Franklin Roosevelt made to the nation in which he explained New Deal initiative

Fireside Chats

A 1933 law that created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured deposits up to $2,500 (and now up to $250,000).

Glass-Steagall Act

New Deal legislation passed in May 1933 that aimed at cutting agricultural production to raise crop prices and thus farmers’ income.

Agricultural Adjustment Act

Federal agency established in June 1933 to promote industrial recovery during the Great Depression.

National Recovery Administration

A New Deal construction program established by Congress in 1933. Designed to put people back to work, the PWA built the Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam) and Grand Coulee Dam, among other large public works projects.

Public Works Administration

Federal relief program that pro- vided jobs to millions of unemployed young men who built thousands of bridges, roads, trails, and other structures in state and national parks, bolstering the national infrastructure

Civilian Conservation Corps

An agency established by the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that refinanced home mortgages for mortgage holders facing possible foreclosure

Federal Housing Administration

A commission established by Congress in 1934 to regulate the stock market.

Securities and Exchange Commission

A group of Republican business leaders and con- servative Democrats who banded together to fight what they called the “reckless spending” and “socialist” reforms of the New Deal.

Liberty League

A 1935 act that upheld the right of industrial workers to join unions and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

Wagner Act

A 1935 act with three main provisions: old-age pensions for workers; a joint federal-state system of compensa- tion for unemployed workers; and a program of payments to widowed mothers and the blind, deaf, and disabled

Social Security Act

Federal New Deal program established in 1935 that provided government-funded public works jobs to millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression in areas ranging from construction to the arts.

Works Progress Administration

A series of dust storms from 1930 to 1941 during which a severe drought afflicted the semiarid states of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas.

Dust Bowl

An agency funded by Congress in 1933 that integrated flood control, reforestation, electricity generation, and agricultural and industrial development in the Tennessee Valley area.

Tennessee Valley Authority

Legislation that sought to avoid entangle- ment in foreign wars while protecting trade.

Neutrality Act of 1935

identified by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most basic human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Four Freedoms

Legislation in 1941 that enabled Britain to obtain arms from the United States without cash but with the promise to reimburse the United States when the war ended.

Lend-Lease Act

A press release by President Roosevelt and Brit- ish prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941 calling for economic cooperation, national self-determination, and guarantees of political stability after the war.

Atlantic Charter

A naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that was attacked by Japanese bombers on December 7, 1941; more than 2,400 Americans were killed.

Pearl Harbor

An act that expanded the number of people paying income taxes from 3.9 million to 42.6 million.

Revenue Act

An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 that prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin”

Executive Order 8802

provided World War II veterans with funds for college education, unemployment insurance, and housing

GI Bill of Rights

a series of violent clashes in Los Angeles in June 1943, primarily between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths known as zoot suiters.

Zoot Suit Riot

An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 that authorized the War Department to force Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes and hold them in relo- cation camps for the rest of the war

Executive Order 9066

A meeting in Yalta of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in February 1945, in which the leaders discussed the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan.

Yalta Conference

An international body agreed upon at the Yalta Conference, and founded at a conference in San Francisco in 1945, consisting of a General Assembly, in which all nations are represented, and a Security Council of the five major Allied powers

United Nations

The July 1945 conference in which Ameri- can officials convinced the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, or far eastern part of Germany.

Potsdam Conference

President Harry S. Truman’s commitment to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Truman Doctrine

Aid program begun in 1948 to help European economies recover from World War II.

Marshall Plan

Military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and West- ern European nations to counter any possible Soviet threat

NATO

A Congressional committee especially prominent during the early years of the Cold War that investigated Americans who might be disloyal to the government or might have associated with communists or other radicals.

House Un-American Activities Committee

the term President Eisenhower used to refer to the military establishment and defense contractors who, he warned, exercised undue influence over the national govern- ment.

Military Industrial Complex