US History Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards for US History review.

Incorporation

Modernization of business involving selling stock to build capital and expand.

Standardization

Modernization of businesses through management, signals, and time zones.

Gilded Age

Era from 1877-1900 characterized by gold achievements covering unresolved social issues, rampant inequity, and poverty.

Ethnic Enclaves

Urban neighborhoods dominated by one set of immigrants, offering protection from hostility and discrimination.

Tenements

Buildings that housed many people in poor conditions.

Political machines

Powerful urban political organizations mobilizing working-class and immigrant voters, often engaged in corrupt activity.

Nativism

Anti-immigrant views and sentiments rising in the late 1800s, fearing job loss and radical troublemakers.

Settlement house

Institutions providing the poor with social and educational services.

City Beautiful movement

A movement that started in the 1880s, which planned to create a grand redesign of urban spaces to eliminate pollution and overcrowding

Women suffrage

The effort for women to be given the right to vote passed in the creation of the 19th Amendment (1920)

People's Party

3rd party effort launched in 1890 Coalitions of farmers' organizations, reformers, and labor unions dedicated to curbing corporate power and increasing the voice of the masses in politics

Farmers' Alliance

1870-1880 Supporting farms began to see that the Homestead Act did not give enough to become successful.

White Man's Burden

Belief that white men have a responsibility to civilize other races.

Manifest Destiny

The belief that Americans had the right to expand westward across the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

U-Boat

German submarine, a new weapon that launched surprise torpedo attacks against allied merchant and naval ships.

Scientific management

Utilizing the scientific method to find which people were suitable for a job. Race determined which people were employed.

Jim Crow Laws

Laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.

Muckraking Journal

Form of journalism in the 1900s aimed at uncovering corruption and social injustices.

The social gospel

‘was used to uplift society and convert.

New Right

A confederation of very different political and religious groups

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

The first treaty between the soviet union and the us that limited the deployment of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the creation of missile-defense systems

Detente

Relaxing cold war tension by using diplomatic encon and cultrual contact to improve us relation with China and the soviet union

Stagflation

Economic cycles in which prices keep going up (inflation) while the economy is losing jobs( or stagnating).

Sharecroppers

Trapped in a cycle of debt because they were tricked into the system of debt.

Lost Generation

American expatriate writers and artists in Paris after World War I who felt disillusioned by the war and alienated from American culture.

Booker T. Washington

Born enslaved, advocated vocational training for African Americans to demonstrate their potential and void inequality.

WAVEs

Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service in the Navy.

FEPC

Fair Employment Practice Committee allowed African Americans to work

Zoot suits

High-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders.

Levittown

Planned suburban communities where developers standardized every part of the construction process

American Indian Movement

Movement that sought to protect indians from police harassment, secure anti-poverty funds, and establish survival schools to teach indian history and values.

The National Liberation Front

guerrilla organization of South Vietnamese communist revolutionaries.

Tet Offensive

a massive coordinated communist assault against more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam

Vietnamization

A Nixon administration policy that turned the bulk of the ground fighting over to the South Vietnamese army

Silent Majority

Nixon's term for the large number of Americans who supported the war quietly in the privacy of their homes.

Agent Orange

A defoliant that stripped trees of their leaves to expose the Viet Cong because they could not see them, expose the Viet Cong hideouts, and kill crops.

NSC-68

Classified doc known as NSC-68, US diplomats warned The Soviet Union is uncontrollably aggressive