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Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony was an American social reformer who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. -
Civil Service Reform
Civil Service Reform in the U.S. was a major issue in the late 19th century at the national level, and in the early 20th century at the state level. Proponents denounced the distribution of office by the winners of elections to their supporters as corrupt and inefficient. They demanded nonpartisan scientific methods and credential be used to select civil servants. -
Indian Removal
Indian removal was a 19th-century policy of ethnic cleansing by the government of the United States to move Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 26, 1830. -
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. -
Suffrage
the right to vote in political elections. -
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was an American union leader, 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. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks. -
Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt, Jr.
Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt, Jr. was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States. -
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was a leading American politician from the 1890s until his death. He was a dominant force in the populist wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as the Party's candidate for President of the United States. -
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a pioneer American settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. -
Homestead Act
The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Anyone who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government (including freed slaves and women), was 21 years or older, or the head of a family, could file an application to claim a federal land grant. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. -
Urbanization & Industrialization
The Industrial Revolution itself refers to a change from hand and home production to machine and factory. The first industrial revolution was important for the inventions of spinning and weaving machines operated by water power which was eventually replaced by steam. This helped increase America’s growth. -
Political Machines
This system of political control—known as "bossism"—emerged particularly in the Gilded Age. A single powerful figure (the boss) was at the center and was bound together to a complex organization of lesser figures (the political machine) by reciprocity in promoting financial and social self-interest. -
Upton Sinclair, Jr.
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr., was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle. -
Immigration & the American Dream
In the late 1800s, people in many parts of the world decided to leave their homes and immigrate to the United States. Fleeing crop failure, land and job shortages, rising taxes, and famine, many came to the U. S. because it was perceived as the land of economic opportunity. -
Haymarket riot
The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre or Haymarket riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. -
Dawes Act
The Dawes Act of 1887 (also known as the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887), adopted by Congress in 1887, authorized the President of the United States to survey American Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. -
Populism
Populism is a political doctrine that appeals to the interests and conceptions (such as fears) of the general people, especially contrasting those interests with the interests of the elite. -
Nativism
As the direct result of written and broken treaties, catastrophic military failures, lack of competitive scientific and technological know-how, and of forced assimilation, the Indians were virtually destroyed by the European immigration that created the United States. -
Klondike Gold Rush
The Klondike Gold Rush, also called the Yukon Gold Rush, the Alaska Gold Rush, the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush, the Canadian Gold Rush, and the Last Great 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. -
Manifest Detiny
In the 19th century, Manifest Destiny was the widely held belief in the United States that American settlers were destined to expand throughout the continent. -
The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age, which spanned the final three decades of the nineteenth century, was one of the most dynamic, contentious, and volatile periods in American history. -
Initiative, Referendum, Recall
Initiative and referendum is a process that allows 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 and vote on it. -
Muckraker
The muckrakers would become known for their investigative journalism. Investigations publishers and journalists during the eras of "personal journalism" -
Pure Food and Drug Act
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the first of a series of significant consumer protection laws enacted by the Federal Government in the twentieth century and led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. -
Dollar Diplomacy
Dollar Diplomacy is the effort of the United States—particularly over President William Howard Taft—to further its aims in Latin America and East Asia through use of its economic power by guaranteeing loans made to foreign countries. -
Federal Reserve Act
The Federal Reserve Act enacted December 23, 1913 is an Act of Congress that created and set up the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States of America, and granted it the legal authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes (now commonly known as the U.S. Dollar) and Federal Reserve Bank Notes as legal tender. The Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. -
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel movement is a Protestant Christian intellectual movement that was most prominent in the early 20th century United States and Canada -
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1920 to 1923, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. 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.
