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Initiative and Referendum
In the politics of the United States, the process of initiatives and referendums allow citizens of many U.S. states to place new legislation on a popular ballot, or to place legislation that has recently been passed by a legislature on a ballot for a popular vote. Initiatives and referendums, along with recall elections and popular primary elections, are signature reforms of the Progressive Era; and they are written into several state constitutions, particularly in the West. -
Industrialization
Industrialization in America started slowly in the early 1800's and exploded in the latter half of the century. A new era of mass production arose in the United States of America due to new inventions and technological innovations. This article provides facts and information about the causes, effects and the impact of Industrialization in the United States of America. -
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a United States policy of opposing European colonialism in The Americas. It stated that further efforts by European nations to take control of any independent state in North or South America would be viewed as "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." At the same time, the doctrine noted that the U.S. would recognize and not interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. -
Indian Removal
Indian removal was a policy of the United States government in the 19th century whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory. In a matter that remains one of debate by scholars, description of the policy is sometimes elevated to being one of long-term genocide of Native Americans. -
Manifest Destiny
The term manifest destiny originated in the 1840s. It expressed the belief that it was Anglo-Saxon Americans’ providential mission to expand their civilization and institutions across the breadth of North America. This expansion would involve not merely territorial aggrandizement but the progress of liberty and individual economic opportunity as well. -
Bessemer Process
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten. -
Homestead Act
Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln the Homestead Act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers 160 acres of public land. In exchange, homesteaders paid a small filing fee and were required to complete five years of continuous residence before receiving ownership of the land. After six months of residency, homesteaders also had the option of purchasing the land from the government for $1.25 per acre. -
Political Machines
A political machine is a political group in which an authoritative boss or small group commands the support of a corps of supporters and businesses (usually campaign workers), who receive rewards for their efforts. The machine's power is based on the ability of the workers to get out the vote for their candidates on election day. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed in 1892 with the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States -
Haymarket Riot
At Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, a bomb is thrown at a squad of policemen attempting to break up a labor rally. The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The demonstration, which drew some 1,500 Chicago workers, was organized by German-born labor radicals in protest of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before. -
Dawes act
The Dawes Act adopted by Congress, authorized the President of the United States to survey American Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. Those who accepted allotments and lived separately from the tribe would be granted United States citizenship. The Dawes Act was amended in 1891, in 1898 by the Curtis Act, and again in 1906 by the Burke Act. -
Urbanization
Urbanization refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, "the gradual increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas", and the ways in which each society adapts to the change. It is predominantly the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas. -
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and is often identified as one of the richest people (and richest Americans) ever. His 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million. -
Jane Addams
Jane Addams is known as the "mother" of social work, and was a social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In 1889 she co-founded Hull House, and in 1920 she was a co-founder for the ACLU. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, feminist, Georgist, an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement, and was one of the founders of the NAACP. She documented lynching in the United States showing that it was often used in the South as a way to control or punish black people who competed with whites. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. -
Muckraker
The term was used in the Progressive Era to characterize reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt. In the US, the modern term is investigative journalism and investigative journalists in the USA today are often informally called 'muckrakers'. Muckraking magazines took on corporate monopolies and political machines while trying to raise public awareness and anger at urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, prostitution, and child labor. -
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and helped found the American Railway Union, one of the nation's first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts, Debs signed many into the ARU. He called a boycott of the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars, in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike. -
Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism. -
Klondike Gold Rush
The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon in north-western Canada between 1896 and 1899. Gold was discovered there by local miners on August 16, 1896, and, when news reached Seattle and San Francisco the following year, it triggered a stampede of prospectors. Some became wealthy, but the majority went in vain. It has been immortalized in photographs, books, films, and artifacts. -
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an orator and politician from Nebraska. In 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, standing three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States. He also served in the United States House of Representatives and as the United States Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Bryan delivered his "Cross of Gold speech" which attacked the gold standard and the eastern moneyed interests. -
Robber Barons
"Robber baron" is a derogatory metaphor of social criticism originally applied to certain late 19th-century American businessmen who used unscrupulous methods to get rich. -
Progressivism
It arose as a response to the vast changes brought by modernization, such as the growth of large corporations, pollution and fears of corruption in American politics. In the 21st century, progressives continue to embrace concepts such as environmentalism and social justice. Social progressivism, the view that governmental practices ought to be adjusted as society evolves, forms the ideological basis for many American progressives. -
Theodore Roosevelt
Following McKinley's assassination in September 1901, Roosevelt became the 26 president. As a leader of the Progressive movement, he championed his "Square Deal" domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness, breaking of trusts, regulation of railroads, and pure food and drugs. He began construction of the Panama Canal. He lead the Rough Riders during the Spanish–American War; his successful efforts to end of the Russo-Japanese War won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. -
Dollar Diplomacy
The outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for this approach in 1904 with his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine maintaining that if any nation in the Western Hemisphere appeared politically and financially unstable so as to be vulnerable to European control, the United States had the right and obligation to intervene. Taft continued and expanded the policy, starting in Central America, where he justified it as a means of protecting the Panama Canal. -
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry contributing in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, exposing American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. -
Pure food and Drug act
For preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes. That the introduction into any State or Territory or the District of Columbia ... of any article of food or drugs which is adulterated or misbranded, within the meaning of this Act, is hereby prohibited?. -
Populism
The People's Party, also known as the Populist Party or the Populists, was a populist political party in the United States. For a few years, 1892–96, it played a major role as a left-wing force in American politics. It was merged into the Democratic Party in 1896; a small independent remnant survived until 1908. It drew support from angry farmers in the West and South and operated on the left-wing of American politics. -
Recall
The right to recall a public officer was added to the Nevada Constitution in 1912. By circulating a petition and qualifying for the ballot, voters can remove any elected official except a United States Senator or Representative in Congress. Between 1993 and 2004, 108 notices of recall were filed with the secretary of state. -
17th amendment
The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution established the popular election of United States Senators by the people of the states. The amendment supersedes Article I, §3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution, under which senators were elected by state legislatures. It also alters the procedure for filling vacancies in the Senate, allowing for state legislatures to permit their governors to make temporary appointments until a special election can be held. -
16th Amendment
The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census. This amendment exempted income taxes from the constitutional requirements regarding direct taxes, after income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were ruled to be direct taxes in the court case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. -
Federal Reserve act
The Federal Reserve Act is an Act of Congress that created and established the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States, and which created the authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes and Federal Reserve Bank Notes as legal tender. The Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was an American lawyer, a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. He defended high-profile clients, including teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks; teacher John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, in which he opposed statesman and orator William Jennings Bryan; and Ossian Sweet in a racially-charged self-defense case. Called a "sophisticated country lawyer". -
The Gilded age
The Gilded Age in United States history is the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. The term for this period came into use in the 1920s and 1930s and was derived from writer Mark Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. The early half of the Gilded Age roughly coincided with the middle portion of the Victorian era in Britain and the Belle Époque in France. -
Nativism
Nativism is the political policy of promoting the interests of native inhabitants against those of immigrants. However, this is currently more commonly described as an anti-immigrant position. In scholarly studies nativism is a standard technical term. The term is typically not accepted by those who hold this political view, however. Dindar wrote "nativists... do not consider themselves as nativists. For them it is a negative term and they rather consider themselves as 'Patriots'". -
18th Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol illegal. The requisite number of states had ratified it by January 16, 1919. -
19th amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Until the 1910s, most states did not give women the right to vote. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. -
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. -
Immigration and the American Dream.
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." -
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a Protestant movement that was most prominent in the early-20th-century United States and Canada. The movement applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war. -
Susan B. Anthony
Anthony and Elizabeth founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society, they founded the Women's Loyal National League, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association as part of a split in the women's movement, and created the 19th amendment.
