HIST 2112 - Chapter 17 Flashcards

Populists

founded in 1892, a group that advocated a variety of reform issues, including free coinage of silver, income tax, postal savings, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators.

Coxey’s Army

a march on Washington organized by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio member of the People’s Party. Coxey believed in abandoning the gold standard and printing enough legal tender to reinvigorate the economy. The marchers demanded that Congress create jobs and pay workers in paper currently not backed by gold.

American Federation of Labor

a federation of trade unions founded in 1881 composed mostly of skilled, white, native-born workers; its long-term president was Samuel Gompers.

New South

Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady’s 1886 term for the prosperous post-Civil War South he envisioned: democratic, industrial, urban, and free of nostalgia for the defeated plantation South.

Kansas Exodus

a migration in 1879 and 1880 by some 40,000-60,000 Blacks to Kansas to escape the oppressive environment of the New South.

National Association of Colored Women

an influential Black women’s reform organization founded in 1896 to overcome racial and sex discrimination.

Atlanta Compromise

speech to the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 by educator Booker T. Washington, the leading Black spokesman of the day; scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave the speech its derisive name and criticized Washington for encouraging Black people to accommodate segregation and disenfranchisement.

grandfather clause

loophole created by southern disenfranchising legislatures of the 1890s for illiterate white males whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the Civil War.

disenfranchisement

depriving a person or persons of the right to vote; in the United States, exclusionary policies were used to deny groups, especially African Americans and women, their voting rights.

Plessy v. Ferguson

U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites.

“separate but equal”

principle underlying legal racial segregation, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

lynching

practice, particularly widespread in the South between 1890 and 1940, in which persons (usually African American people) accused of a crime were murdered by mobs before standing trial. Lynchings often took place before large crowds, with law enforcement authorities not intervening.

Lost Cause

a romanticized view of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederacy that arose in the decades following the Civil War.

new immigrants

wave of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, including many Jews, who became a majority among immigrants to America after 1890.

Immigration Restriction League

a political organization founded in 1894 that called for reducing immigration to the United States by requiring a literacy test for immigrants.

Chinese Exclusion Act

1882 law that halted Chinese immigration to the United States.

yellow press

sensationalism in newspaper publishing that reached a peak in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s; the papers’ accounts of events in Havana Harbor in 1898 led directly to the Spanish-American War.

U.S.S. Maine

battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, resulting in 266 deaths; the American public, assuming that the Spanish had mined the ship, clamored for war, and the Spanish-American War was declared two months later.

Platt Amendment

1901 amendment to the Cuban constitution that reserved the right of the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs and that forced newly independent Cuba to host American naval bases on the island.

Open Door Policy

demand in 1899 by Secretary of State John Hay, in hopes of protecting the Chinese market for U.S. exports, that Chinese trade be open to all nations.

Philippine War

American military campaign that suppressed the movement for Philippine independence after the Spanish-American War; America’s death toll was over 4,000 and that of the Philippines was far higher,

Insular Cases

series of cases between 1901 and 1904 in which the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional protection of individual rights did not fully apply to residents of “insular” territories acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Anti-Imperialist League

coalition of anti-imperialist groups united in 1899 to protest American territorial expansion, especially in the Philippine Islands; its membership included prominent politicians, industrialists, labor leaders, and social reformers.