-
Period: to
Immigration and The American Dream
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. It's an ongoing thing, freedom is forever. -
Period: to
Manifest Destiny
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. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
Susan B. Anthony
womens rights activist. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
Eugene V. Debbs
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. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
Theodore Roosevelt
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. -
Period: to
The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the North and West. The increase of industrialization meant, despite the increasing labor force, real wages in the US grew 60% from 1860 to 1890, and continued to rise after that. However, the Gilded Age was also an era of poverty as very poor European immigrants poured in. Railroads were the major industry, but the factory system, mining, and finance increased in importance. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
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 -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
Upton Sinclair
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. The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. -
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. -
Period: to
Dawes Act of 1887
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. -
Period: to
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. -
Period: to
Initiative, Referendum, and Recall
the initiative is a process that enables citizens to bypass their state legislature by placing proposed statutes and, in some states, constitutional amendments on the ballot. Referendum is a general term which refers to a measure that appears on the ballot. Recall is a procedure that allows citizens to remove and replace a public official before the end of a term of office. -
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. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
An 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. -
Period: to
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. -
16th Amendment
The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) 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. (1895). The amendment was adopted on February 3, 1913. -
17th Amendment
The Seventeenth Amendment (Amendment XVII) to the United States Constitution established direct election of United States Senators by popular vote. -
The Federal Reserve Act
The Federal Reserve Act 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 and Federal Reserve Bank Notes as legal tender -
Period: to
The Teapot 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 -
18th Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment (Amendment XVIII) of the United States Constitution effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring illegal the production, transport and sale of alcohol, though not the consumption or private possession. -
19th Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. -
Nativism
Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. Nativism typically means opposition to immigration, and support of efforts to lower the political or legal status of specific ethnic or cultural groups who are considered hostile or alien to the natural culture, upon the assumption that they cannot be assimilated. -
Urbanization
Urbanization is a population shift from rural to urban areas, and the ways in which society adapts to the change. It predominantly results in the physical growth of urban areas, be it horizontal or vertical. -
Industrialization
Industrialization is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from a rural society into an industrial one. -
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. Populist sentiment contributed to the American Revolutionary War, and continued to shape the young United States afterward. -
Progressivism
Progressivism is a broad philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advancement in science, technology, economic development, and social organization are vital to improve the human condition. -
Political Machines
A political machine is a political organization 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. -
3rd Parties Politics
In electoral politics, a third party is any party contending for votes that failed to outpoll either of its two strongest rivals (or, in the context of an impending election, is considered highly unlikely to do so). The distinction is particularly significant in two-party systems. In any case "third" is often used figuratively, as in "the third parties", where the intent, literally stated, is "the third and succeeding parties". -
Muckraker
The term muckraker refers to reform-minded journalists who wrote largely for all popular magazines and continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption.