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Robert La Follette
Robert M. La Follette was an American Republican and politician who is best known as a proponent of progressivism and a fierce opponent to corporate power. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Governor of Wisconsin and a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin during his career. -
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. -
John Dewey
As a philosopher, social reformer and educator, he changed fundamental approaches to teaching and learning. His ideas about education sprang from a philosophy of pragmatism and were central to the Progressive Movement in schooling -
Women's Christian Temperance Movement
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is an active international temperance organization that was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. -
Interstate Commerce Act
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is a United States federal law that was designed to regulate the railroad industry, particularly its monopolistic practices. The Act required that railroad rates be "reasonable and just," but did not empower the government to fix specific rates. -
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was a United States antitrust law that was passed by Congress under the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, which regulates competition among enterprises. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
The National American Woman Suffrage Association was an organization formed on February 18, 1890 to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. -
How the Other Half Lives
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
Anti-Saloon League
The Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was the leading organization promoting National Prohibition in the U.S. It was a non-partisan political pressure group that began in 1893. A single-issue lobbying group, it had branches across the country. It worked with churches in marshaling resources for the prohibition fight. -
Anthracite Coal Strike
The Coal strike of 1902 was a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays and the recognition of their union. The strike threatened to shut down the winter fuel supply to major American cities. -
Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln exposed Boss Tweed in his muckraking article "Tweed Days in St. Louis" -
Elkins Act
The Elkins Act is a 1903 United States federal law that amended the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The Act authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission to impose heavy fines on railroads that offered rebates, and upon the shippers that accepted these rebates -
Department of Commerce and Labor
The United States Department of Commerce and Labor was a short-lived Cabinet department of the United States government, which was concerned with controlling the excesses of big business. It was created on February 14, 1903, during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt. -
Ida Tarbell
The History of the Standard Oil Company is a 1904 book by journalist Ida Tarbell. It is an exposé about the Standard Oil Company, run at the time by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest figure in American history. -
Northern Securities Antitrust
Northern Securities Co. v. United States was a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1903. The Court ruled 5 to 4 against the stockholders of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad companies, who had essentially formed a monopoly, and to dissolve the Northern Securities Company. -
Square Deal Policy
The Square Deal was Theodore Roosevelt's domestic policy based on three basic ideas: protection of the consumer, control of large corporations, and conservation of natural resources. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the first of a series of significant consumer protection laws which was enacted by Congress in the 20th century and led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. -
Meat Inspection Act
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 is an American law that makes it a crime to adulterate or misbrand meat and meat products being sold as food, and ensures that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. -
The Jungle
The Jungle is a novel written in 1904 by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. -
Progressive (Bull Moose) Party
The Progressive Party was a third party in the United States formed in 1912 by former President Theodore Roosevelt after he lost the presidential nomination of the Republican Party to his former protégé, incumbent President William Howard Taft. -
17th Amendment
The Seventeenth Amendment (Amendment XVII) to the United States Constitution established the popular election of United States Senators by the people of the states. -
Underwood Tariff
Congress passed The Underwood Tariff Act in 1913. Its purpose was to reduce levies on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and to eliminate duties on most raw materials. -
Federal Reserve Act
The Federal Reserve Act is an Act of Congress that created the Federal Reserve System, and which created the authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes as legal tender. The Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. -
Clayton Antitrust Act
The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, was a part of United States antitrust law with the goal of adding further substance to the U.S. antitrust law regime; the Clayton Act sought to prevent anticompetitive practices in their incipiency. -
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly. -
Keating-Owen Child Labor Act
The Keating–Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 also known as Wick's Bill, was a short-lived statute enacted by the U.S. Congress which sought to address child labor by prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce. -
18th Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution established the prohibition of "intoxicating liquors" in the United States. -
19th Amendment
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
