Key Figures and Movements in American History

New Immigrants

Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them.

political machines

A term used to describe political organizations that flourished in urban centers—such as Tammany Hall in New York—that captured the immigrant vote by promising them municipal jobs, housing, and rudimentary social services.

settlement house

Mostly run by middle-class native-born women, ______ in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States.

liberal Protestants

Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth.

Tuskegee Institute

A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama, focusing on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence.

land-grant colleges

Colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887.

pragmatism

A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems.

yellow journalism

A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women.

NAWSA

An organization that supported the war effort during World War I and lauded women's role in the Allied victory, leading to the achievement of nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat excessive alcohol consumption, it embraced a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women.

Realism

A mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, eschewing idealism and nostalgia.

Naturalism

An offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement applied detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme social environments.

Regionalism

A recurring artistic movement that aspired to capture the peculiarities, or 'local color,' of America's various regions in the face of modernization and national standardization.

City Beautiful movement

A turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners aimed at promoting order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying urban spaces with grand boulevards, parks, and monumental public buildings.

World's Columbian Exposition

A world's fair held in Chicago that was seen as an opportunity for Americans to claim a place among the world's most 'civilized' societies, honoring art, architecture, and science.

Jane Addams

(1860-1935) Founder of Hull House, America's first settlement house, which helped immigrants assimilate through education and reform efforts; advocated pacifism and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882) A British naturalist whose 1859 book On the Origin of Species outlined a theory of evolution based on natural selection, impacting science, religion, and society.

Booker T. Washington

(1856-1915) Head of the Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational education for African Americans to gain economic security, focusing on economic power without directly challenging the southern racial order.

W. E. B. Du Bois

(1868-1963) A Harvard-educated leader in the fight for racial equality who believed that liberal arts education would empower the 'talented tenth' of African Americans to participate fully in society. A founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who brought attention to racism in America and demanded legal and cultural change.

Joseph Pulitzer

A publisher whose newspapers, including the New York World, became a symbol of the sensationalist journalism of the late nineteenth century.

William Randolph Hearst

A newspaper magnate responsible for the spread of sensationalist journalism, who owned newspapers and magazines across the United States.

John Dewey

A leader of the pragmatist movement who advocated 'learning by doing' and applied philosophy to education and social reform.

Carrie Chapman Catt

A leader of the women's suffrage movement who served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and advocated for international peace.

Horatio Alger

The writer of novels for children who popularized the notion of 'rags to riches,' suggesting that hard work and luck could elevate a poor boy to the middle class.

Mark Twain

A satirist and writer best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, critiquing American politics and society.

Henry James

An expatriate novelist known for psychological realism, experimenting with point of view and interior monologue in works like The Portrait of a Lady.

Winslow Homer

A Boston-born artist known for portraying New England's pastoral farms and seas in a native realist style.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

An Irish-born sculptor who produced some of America's finest beaux arts sculptures, including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial.

Frederick Law Olmsted

A leading American landscape architect known for designing New York's Central Park and Boston's 'Emerald Necklace.'

Karl Friedrich May

A German author best known for his novels of travels and adventures set in various regions including the American Old West and the Orient.