Robber Barons and Industrialization

Robber Barons

• Refers to industrialists or big business owners who gained huge profits by paying employees extremely low wages
• Drove their competitors out of business by creating monopolies and then raising prices far above their original value

Mass Production

• The production of large amounts of standardized products

Social Darwinism

• The theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals.

The American Federation of Labor

• A national federation of labor unions in the United States founded in Columbus, Ohio, in December 1886

The Great Merger Movement

• A predominantly U.S. business phenomenon that occurred from 1895 to 1904

Eugene V. Debs

• An American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States

Free Silver

• A major economic debate in the late 19th-century United States that advocated for the coinage of silver dollars as a way to inflate the money supply and promote economic growth

The People's Party (Populist Party)

• A left-wing agrarian populist political party in the United States

The Pullman Strike

• A nationwide railroad strike in the United States in the summer of 1894.
• It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railroads, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland

The Frontier Thesis

• The argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier

The Sand Creek Massacre

• A massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army in 1864

Homestead Act

• Several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a "homestead", at little or no cost

Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce

• Chief Joseph was a leader of the Wal-lam-wat-kain band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe indigenous to the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon

The Dawes Act

• The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the President of the United States to survey American Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians

Transcontinental Railroad

• A contiguous network of railroad trackage that crosses a continental land mass with terminals at different oceans or continental borders

Cattle Drives

• The process of moving a herd of cattle from one place to another, usually to a market or a new pasture.

Ghost Dance

• A new religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems

Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell

• Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman
• Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer.

Tammany Hall & Boss Tweed

• Tammany Hall was a New York City political organization founded in 1786
• Boss Tweed was the name given to William M Tweed, the most notable boss of Tammany Hall

The Gospel of Wealth

• An article written by Andrew Carnegie in 1889 that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich

Jim Crow

• State and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in the history of the city, and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial building fire in U.S. history

Lynching

• An extrajudicial killing by a group

The Lost Cause

• A pseudo-historical negationist ideology that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery

Ida B. Wells

• An American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement

The Big Stick

• A foreign policy of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt

The Roosevelt Corollary

• An addition to the Monroe Doctrine articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in his State of the Union address in 1904 after the Venezuela Crisis of 1902–03

The Open Door Policy

• A concept in foreign affairs initially used to refer to the United States policy in the late 19th century and early 20th century that would grant multiple international powers with equal access to China, with none of them in total control of that country

The Boxer Rebellion

• An anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising that took place in China between 1899 and 1901

The Great White Fleet

• A popular nickname for the group of United States Navy battleships which completed a circumnavigation of the world from December 16, 1907, to February 22, 1909, by order of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt

The Rough Riders

• The name given to the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, one of three such regiments raised in 1898 for the Spanish–American War

The Chinese Exclusion Act

• A United States federal law signed on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers

Alfred Thayer Mahan

• A United States naval officer and historian, whom John Keegan called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century"

Muckrakers

• Reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt

Yellow Journalism

• A style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts

Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives

• Jacob Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer
• How the Other Half Lives is an 1890 book by Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s

Upton Sinclair and The Jungle

• Upton Sinclair was an American writer, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California
• The Jungle is a 1906 novel by Sinclair that portrays the lives of immigrants in the United States

Jane Addams

• An American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author

Booker T. Washington

• An American educator, author, orator, and advisor to multiple presidents of the United States

1912 Presidential Election

• The presidential election of 1912 saw Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate, win against the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft

16th and 17th Amendments

• 16th Amendment permits Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census
• 17th Amendment established the direct election of United States Senators by popular vote

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• A landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court upheld state laws requiring racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal"

Causes of WWI including the Immediate Cause

• Factors such as militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism played a role in leading up to the war
• The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the immediate cause

Triple Alliance & Triple Entente

• The Triple Alliance was a military alliance among Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy
• The Triple Entente was an alliance among France, Russia, and Great Britain

Reasons for US Entry into WWI including Precipitating Reason

• Factors such as German unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram played a role in the US entry into WW1
• The Zimmerman Telegram was the precipitating reason

Fourteen Points

• A statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I

Espionage Act & Sedition Act

• The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation
• The Sedition Act of 1918 extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light

League of Nations

• An intergovernmental organization founded on 10 January 1920 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War

Treaty of Versailles

• The most important of the peace treaties that brought an end to World War I

Flu Epidemic

• An unusually severe and deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus

Warren G. Harding & Return to Normalcy

• Warren G. Harding was the 29th president of the United States
• "Return to Normalcy" was Harding's campaign promise in the election of 1920

18th & 19th Amendments

• 18th Amendment effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol illegal
• 19th Amendment prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex

The Great Migration

• The relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West

The Jazz

• A music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana

Harlem Renaissance

• An intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City

The Scopes Trial

• A legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had outlawed the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools

The KKK

• The Ku Klux Klan is the name of several past and present American white supremacist terrorist hate groups

Christian Fundamentalism

• A religious movement characterized by a strict belief in the literal interpretation of religious texts, especially the Bible

Black Tuesday & Stock Market Crash

• Black Tuesday is the name given to October 29, 1929, when stock prices on Wall Street collapsed

The Dust Bowl

• An ecological and human disaster that took place in the Southern Plains region of the United States

The New Deal

• A series of programs and projects undertaken during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the goal of restoring prosperity to Americans

AAA, The Wagner Act, The Social Security Act, TVA

• The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses
• The Wagner Act is a foundational statute of United States labor law which guarantees basic rights of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and take collective action including strike if necessary
• The Social Security Act was enacted in 1935 and created Social Security, a federal safety net for elderly, unemployed, and disadvantaged Americans
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned corporation created in 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression

Court Packing Plan

• A legislative initiative proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court

Bonus Army

• A group of about 43,000 demonstrators – made up of 17,000 U.S. World War I veterans, together with their families and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1932 to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates

Herbert Hoover; Franklin D. Roosevelt

• Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the United States
• Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the United States