APUSH Unit 4: Birth of Modernization (1870-1900) Key Terms

Vertical Integration

Company's avoidance of middlemen by producing its own supplies and providing for distribution of its product.

horizontal expansion

The process by which a corporation acquires or merges with its competitors.

Battle of Little Bighorn

Sioux forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull surrounded and defeated Custer and his troops

Dawes Act

Law passed in 1887 meant to encourage adoption of white norms among Indians; broke up tribal holdings into small farms for Indian families, with the remainder sold to white purchasers.

Ghost dance

A spiritual and political movement among Native Americans whose followers performed a ceremonial "ghost dance" intended to connect the living with the dead and make the Indians bulletproof in battles intended to restore their homelands.

Wounded Knee Massacre

Last incident of the Indian Wars; it took place in 1890 in the Dakota Territory, where the U.S. Cavalry killed over 200 Sioux men, women, and children.

Gilded Age

The popular but derogatory name for the period from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, after the title of the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

Gold Standard

Policy at various points in American history by which the value of a dollar is set at a fixed price in terms of gold (in the post-World War II era, for example, $35 per ounce of gold).

Sherman Antitrust Act

Passed in 1890, first law to restrict monopolistic trusts and business combinations; extended by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

Social Darwinism

Application of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to society; used the concept of the "survival of the fittest" to justify class distinctions and to explain poverty.

Liberty of Contract

A judicial concept of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whereby the courts overturned laws regulating labor conditions as violations of the economic freedom of both employers and employees.

Great Railroad Strike

A series of demonstrations, some violent, held nationwide in support of striking railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, who refused to work due to wage cuts.

Knights of Labor

Founded in 1869, the first national union lasted, under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, only into the 1890s; supplanted by the American Federation of Labor.

Social Gospel

Ideals preached by liberal Protestant clergymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems generated by industrialization.

Haymarket Affair

Violence during an anarchist protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886; the deaths of eight, including seven policemen, led to the trial of eight anarchist leaders for conspiracy to commit murder.

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.

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 segrega- tion, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

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.

Chinese Exclusion Act

1882 law that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers.

Buffalo for Native Americans

Central of culture and way of life of plain Indian tribes.