HIST201 Midterm (UMD Chiles)

14th Amendment

(Passed Congress 1866; ratified 1868) Granted citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States," including formerly enslaved people, and provided all citizens with “equal protection under the laws.”

Freedman’s Bureau

Established by Congress, March, 1865. Provided assistance to formerly enslaved people and impoverished whites in the Southern States and D.C. in the years following the war. It helped freed people establish schools, purchase land, locate family members, and legalize marriages.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop.

• Rent a parcel of land in exchange for a large portion of harvest

• Solution to southern agricultural labor problem

• Often preferable to wage labor

• Leads to debt and eventually peonage

Black Codes

Black Codes restricted black people's right to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land, and move freely through public spaces.

Rep. Robert Smalls

Famous black leader of Civil War-Reconstruction era, hijacked Confederate ship and surrendered it to the Union, later elected into U.S. Congress

Push Factors

Poor conditions in the homeland. These can be social, political, or economic factors. These drive people to leave the land they were born in.

Reasons to leave the South, including segregation, sharecropping, disfranchisement, violence, and racism

Haymarket Affair

Chicago, Ill., May 4, 1886: Aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration.

Violent confrontation between police and labour protesters in Chicago on May 4, 1886, that became a symbol of the international struggle for workers’ rights. 

Pure Food and Drug Act

• Inspections by USDA

• Food and Drug Administration (eventually)

When Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle revealed food adulteration and unsanitary practices in meat production, public outrage prompted Congress to establish federal responsibility for public health and welfare. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce and laid a foundation for the nation’s first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Helen Hunt Jackson

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) was an accomplished poet, author, and activist in the nineteenth century. Many of Jackson's written works, notably A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884), spurred progress toward recompense for the mistreatment of the Native American peoples by the US government.

Pullman Strike

1894: Widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States.

Sherman Anti Trust Act

1890: Prohibit trusts, monopolies, and cartels. Its purpose was to promote economic fairness and competitiveness and to regulate interstate commerce.

Grangers

Granger movement,  coalition of U.S. farmers, particularly in the Middle West, that fought monopolistic grain transport practices during the decade following the American Civil War.

Grandfather Clause

The grandfather clause in voting did not allow anyone to vote if their grandfathers had not voted before 1867. It also required property ownership by someone who wanted to vote or their ancestors before 1867. Used to prevent African Americans from voting. Struck down in 1915

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s.

Examples of people: Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Zora Neal Hurston, Palmer Hayden.

Plessy v. Ferguson

1896: A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal."

Vertical Intergration

An expansion strategy where a company takes control over one or more stages in the production or distribution of its products.

Horizontal Intergration

The merger of two or more companies that occupy similar levels in the production supply chain. The business practice in the 19th century that is known as “monopolizing.” In this practice, a business completely operates one part of industry. The 19th century prime example of this is John D. Rockefeller's oil industry.

Ida B. Wells

Journalist: Tried to bring lynching to national attention. Wrote “Southern Horrors.”

Gospel of Wealth

Book by Carnegie. Argued that extremely wealthy Americans like himself had a responsibility to spend their money in order to benefit the greater good. Close widening wealth gap.

Chain Migration

Families like being together. People follow each other.

Tammany Hall

A political machine with many supporters that had political influence and power over politics and policymaking in New York. During the times when there was no social welfare, its politicians were known for providing help to the poor. Filled a void that the government was not filling. Boss Tweed.

Lillian Wald

An American nurse, humanitarian and author. She strove for human rights and started American community nursing. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate for nurses in public schools.

Ethnic Enclave

Created from similar people living in close proximity. Ex: Little Italy, China Town.

“Cross of Gold”

1896: speech delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former United States Representative from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In his address, Bryan supported "free silver", which he believed would bring the nation prosperity. “You shall not press down on the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”

The Dawes Act

1887: "An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations." U.S. law providing for the distribution of Indian reservation land among individual Native Americans, with the aim of creating responsible farmers in the white man’s image. Get rid of reservations, divide those states up into homestead plots for Native American families.

The Homestead Act

1862: Several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead.

Significant legislative action that promoted the settlement and development of the American West. It was also notable for the opportunity it gave African Americans to own land.

Chinese Exclusion Act

1882: Provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States.

Knights of Labor

Founded in 1869, the first major labor organization in the United States. They organized unskilled and skilled workers, campaigned for an eight hour workday, and aspired to form a cooperative society in which laborers owned the industries in which they worked.

Muckraker

Reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications.

Yellow Journalism

A style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. Hearst vs. Pulitzer

Gustavus Swift

An American business executive. He founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest. Founder of the meatpacking firm Swift & Company and promoter of the railway refrigerator car for shipping meat.

Red Shirts (N.C.)

White supremacist terrorist group and intimidation wing of the Democratic Party in North Carolina during the late nineteenth century. 

W.E.B DuBois

An American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. 

Tenement

Apartments built in city slums to house large numbers of immigrants. Dumbbell-shaped brick apartment buildings, four to six stories in height. 

Nat’l. Consumers’ League

Founded in 1899: American organization founded in 1899 to fight for the welfare of consumers and workers who had little voice or power in the marketplace and workplace.

Settlement House

Offered social, educational, and welfare services to migrant and impoverished communities.

• Enter into world of in migrant working classes, move into poor neighborhoods.

• Jane Addams: Co-founded Hull house in Chicago.

• Move into home and learn about community using social science methodology.

  • Many women went to college but couldn’t get jobs in fields.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

1911: Fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history, killing 196 people. Lead to the transformation of the labor code of New York State and to the adoption of fire safety measures that served as a model for the whole country.

Jane Addams

An American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Hull House Chicago.

Roosevelt Corollary

Foreign policy declaration by U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1904–05 stating that, in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American country, the United States could intervene in that country’s internal affairs.

Zimmerman Telegram

Feb 1917: A secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military contract between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany.

The note revealed a plan to renew unrestricted submarine warfare and to form an alliance with Mexico and Japan if the United States declared war on Germany. The message was intercepted by the British and passed on to the United States; its publication caused outrage and contributed to the U.S. entry into World War I.

Red Summer

A period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas.

Frances Perkins

An American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.

National Origins Act of 1924

Limited the number of immigrants from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

“The Man Nobody Knows”

1925: One of the most successful books of the 1920s due to the advertising executive Bruce Barton. It portrayed Jesus Christ as not only a religious prophet but also a super salesman. Bruce advertised the message that Jesus had been concerned with living a full and rewarding life and that men and women of the twentieth century should do the same

Dust Bowl

The term given to the Great Plain where a severe drought hit, killing all of the crops of the region. The topsoil turned to a fine powdery dust that blew away with the severe, hot winds that wreaked havoc on the farmers who remained.

Hooverville

Shanty towns that the unemployed built in the cities during the early years of the Depression; the name given to them shows that people blamed Hoover directly for the Depression.

Civilian Conservation Corps

A work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression.

Marian Anderson

African-American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the 20th century. Her 1939 Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – after being denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall because of her race – became one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement.

Robert F. Wagner

U.S. senator and leading architect of the modern welfare state from New York State from 1927-1949, he was responsible for the passage of some of the most important legislation enacted through the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was popularly known by his name in honor of the Senator. He also played a major role in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.