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Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., often referred to as Teddy or by his initials, T. R., was an American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, naturalist, historian, and writer who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909.
His successful efforts to broker the end of the Russo-Japanese War won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, making him the first American to ever win a Nobel Prize. -
Henry Ford
Henry Ford was an American industrialist and business magnate. He was the founder of Ford Motor Company and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. He invented the first automobile. -
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan in recent decades, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Catholics, as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, and abortion providers. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is the study and implementation of various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics, and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in Western Europe and North America in the 1870s. Social Darwinism was extremely popular and influential among business magnates like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who used the theory to justify their wealth and privilege. -
Women’s Christian Temperance Union
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is an international temperance organization. It 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." -
Pendleton act
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is a United States federal law passed by the 47th United States Congress and signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur on January 16, 1883. The Pendleton Act provided that federal government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit and that government employees be selected through competitive exams. The act also made it unlawful to fire or demote for political reasons employees who were covered by the law. -
Harry S. Truman
Truman protected and reinforced the New Deal reforms of his predecessor, guided the American economy from a war-time to a peace-time footing, and advanced the cause of African-American civil rights. Historians now rank Truman among the nation's best Presidents. -
Hollywood
Hollywood was laid out as a subdivision in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, who was a prohibitionist from Kansas. However, real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and popular residential area. Hollywood became a municipality in 1903 and was incorporated into Los Angeles in 1910. Hollywood was an ideal place to produce movies since filmmakers couldn't be sued there for infringing on motion picture film patents held by Thomas Edison and his Motion Picture Patents Company. -
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. He becomes the dictator of Germany. Hitler used his power to orchestrate the deaths of 6 million Jews. -
Depression of 1893
The Panic of 1893 was an economic depression in the United States that began in 1893 and ended in 1897. It deeply affected every sector of the economy, and produced political upheaval that led to the political realignment of 1896 and the presidency of William McKinley. Investment, commerce, prices, employment, and wages remained depressed for several years. -
Imperialism
Imperialism is the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominance, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, combining expansionism and centralization, often through employing hard power, but also soft power. American imperialism refers to the expansion of American political, economic, cultural, media, and military influence beyond the boundaries of the United States. -
Spanish American War
The Spanish–American War began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to the United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. The main issue was Cuban independence. Revolts had been occurring for some years in Cuba against Spanish colonial rule. The United States backed these revolts upon entering the Spanish–American War. -
Muckrakers
The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the Progressive Era in the United States who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications. The work of muckrakers influenced the passage of key legislation that strengthened protections for workers and consumers. -
Great Migration
The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. -
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". -
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. -
National Woman’s Party (NWP)
The National Woman's Party was an American women's political organization formed in 1916 to fight for women's suffrage. After achieving this goal with the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the NWP advocated for other issues including the Equal Rights Amendment. -
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. As President, he set out to redeem his campaign pledge to get America moving again. His economic programs launched the country on its longest sustained expansion since World War II; before his death, he laid plans for a massive assault on persisting pockets of privation and poverty. -
Sedition Act of 1918
The Sedition Act of 1918 curtailed the free speech rights of U.S. citizens during time of war. Passed on May 16, 1918, as an amendment to Title I of the Espionage Act of 1917, the act provided for further and expanded limitations on speech.
The Act made it a crime to convey information intended to interfere with the war effort. -
Red Scare
A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. -
Eighteenth Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution established the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. Early temperance advocates aimed to reduce alcohol consumption and prevent alcoholism, drunkenness, and the disorder and violence it could result in. These early efforts promoted temperate consumption with hopes for eventual prohibition. -
Palmer Raids
The Palmer Raids were a series of raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 by the United States Department of Justice under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspected socialists, especially anarchists and communists, and deport them from the United States. -
American Exceptionalism
American Exceptionalism is the belief that the United States possesses qualities that make it unique, different, and special. Proponents of American exceptionalism argue that the United States is exceptional in that it was founded on a set of republican ideals rather than on a common heritage, ethnicity, or ruling elite. -
Fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. -
League of Nations
The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. -
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King led a nonviolent campaign for racial justice during the civil rights movement. His contributions to the movement and to American democracy make him a worthy and important figure to learn about. MLK helped bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. -
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. -
American Liberty League
The American Liberty League was an American political organization formed in 1934. Its membership consisted primarily of wealthy business elites and prominent political figures, who were for the most part conservatives opposed to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The group emphasized private property and individual liberties. -
Social Security Act
The Social Security Act of 1935 is a law enacted by the 74th United States Congress and signed into law by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The law created the Social Security program as well as insurance against unemployment. The law was part of Roosevelt's New Deal domestic program. -
Fair Labor Standards Act
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 29 U.S.C. § 203 is a United States labor law that creates the right to a minimum wage, and "time-and-a-half" overtime pay when people work over forty hours a week. It also prohibits employment of minors in "oppressive child labor". -
America First Committee
The America First Committee, an isolationist group formed in 1940, lobbied Congress against American involvement in foreign wars. The group was one of the largest antiwar organizations in the country with 800,000 members at its peak. -
Lend-Lease Act
Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, was a policy under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, China, and other Allied nations with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and 1945. -
Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The Japanese intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia. -
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. -
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. They provide low-interest loans, zero to low-interest credits, and grants to developing countries. -
International Monetary Fund
The IMF is an organization of 189 member countries that works to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world. -
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights. -
Baby Boom
The term "baby boom" is often used to refer specifically to the post–World War II (1946–1964) baby boom in the United States and Europe. In the US the number of annual births exceeded 2 per 100 women (or approximately 1% of the total population size). An estimated 78.3 million Americans were born during this period. Following World War II, the United States experienced a greatly elevated birth rate, adding on average 4.24 million new babies to the population every year between 1946 and 1964. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred $13.3 billion in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Fair Deal
The Fair Deal reforms helped to transform the United States from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. In the context of postwar reconstruction and the Cold War, the Fair Deal sought to preserve and extend the liberal tradition of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. All Americans have health insurance, the minimum wage (the lowest amount of money per hour that someone can be paid) would be increased, and, by law, all Americans be guaranteed equal rights. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. -
Sputnik
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries ran out. -
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. SNCC participated in several major civil rights events in the 1960s. One of the earliest was the Freedom Rides in 1961. Members of SNCC rode buses through the South to uphold the Supreme Court ruling that interstate travel could not be segregated. -
Freedom Rides
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme. The Freedom Rides of 1961 resulted in the ban of segregation laws in interstate travel facilities, including buses, restrooms, water fountains, and lunch counters. -
March on Washington
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as simply the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. -
Voting RIghts Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -
American Indian Movement
The American Indian Movement is a Native American grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968. It was initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Americans. -
War Powers Act
The War Powers Resolution is a federal law intended to check the U.S. president's power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of the U.S. Congress. The resolution was adopted in the form of a United States congressional joint resolution.