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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. This became widely used in the late 19th century and early 20th century during industrialization in the U.S. -
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a United States policy of opposing European colonialism in The Americas beginning in 1823. 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 -
Indian Removal
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. -
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny is a term for the attitude prevalent during the 19th century period of American expansion that the United States not only could, but was destined to, stretch from coast to coast. This attitude helped fuel western settlement, Native American removal and war with Mexico. The phrase was first employed by John L. O’Sullivan in an article on the annexation of Texas -
Homestead Act
The Homestead Acts were several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a "homestead," at no cost. In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River. -
Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. In 1852, they founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female. In 1863, they founded the Women's Loyal National League, which conducted the largest petition drive in United States history up to that time -
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. -
Chinese Exlusion Act of 1882
It was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. -
Haymarket Riot
The Haymarket affair was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square[2] in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. -
Dawes Act
The Dawes 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. 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. -
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. They were known as the captains of industry. -
Progressivism
Progressivism is the term applied to a variety of responses to the economic and social problems rapid industrialization introduced to America. Progressivism began as a social movement and grew into a political movement. The early progressives rejected Social Darwinism. -
Immigration & the American Dream
People from all around the world during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century all came to the U.S in hopes of starting a new life and getting freedom and riches. The thought of being able to decide what you wanted to do with your life and the promise of becoming successful was known as the American Dream. To get in the U.S though immigrants had to go through a harrowing process through Ellis Island and some often times were detained and sent back to their mother land for various reasons -
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was an American union leader. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, 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, affecting most lines west of Detroit, and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states -
William Jennings Byan
William Jennings Bryan was an American orator and politician from Nebraska. Bryan delivered his "Cross of Gold speech" which attacked the gold standard and the eastern moneyed interests. In a repudiation of incumbent President Grover Cleveland and his conservative Bourbon Democrats, the Democratic convention nominated Bryan for president, making Bryan the youngest major party presidential nominee in U.S. history -
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. -
Initiative & Referendum
In political terminology, 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. The first state to adopt the initiative was South Dakota in 1898. -
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. This was widely used during the Spanish-American War with highly biased and fake news articles published to influence readers about the war to form a negative opinion against the Spanish -
Urbanization
Urbanization is the concentration of people into cities. This process took place in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s and was accompanied by a corresponding shift in social, cultural and economic power. -
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 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. The Tammany Hall machine that controlled New York City's politics from late in the 18th century until midway into the 20th century was seldom dominated by a single "boss." -
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. -
Industrialization
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late 1700s, manufacturing was often done in people's homes, using hand tools or basic machines. Industrialization marked a shift to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass production. -
Recall
A recall election (also called a recall referendum or representative recall) is a procedure by which voters can remove an elected official from office through a direct vote before that official's term has ended. -
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodor Roosevelt became president at age 42, and remains the youngest 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. Making conservation a top priority, he established many new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the nation's natural resources. -
Andrew Carnegie
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. He became a leading philanthropist in the United States, and in the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away about $350 million. -
Dollar Diplomacy
A form of American foreign policy to further its aims in Latin America and East Asia through use of its economic power by guaranteeing loans made to foreign countries. President 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. -
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair Jr. was an American writer. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
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. -
Muckraker
The term muckraker was used in the Progressive Era to characterize reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in some popular magazines. In the US, the modern term is investigative journalism it has different and more pejorative connotations in British English and investigative journalists in the USA today are often informally called 'muckrakers'. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells, was an African-American suffragist, sociologist, 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 (NAACP) in 1909. In the 1890s, Wells documented lynching in the United States. She showed that lynching was often used in the South as a way to control or punish black people who competed with whites, rather than being based on criminal acts by black people, as was usually claimed by whites. -
Populism
Populism is the support for the concerns of ordinary people. In the early 1900's this was not a popular philosophy. With all the new immigrants that were entering the U.S most of them were treated bad and not really included in most laws that benefited people. Instead they were very limited and laws were made against them to limit their advancement in the economy. -
Jane Adams
Jane Addams known as the "mother" of social work, was a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She co-founded, with Ellen Gates Starr, an early settlement house in the United States, Chicago's Hull House that would later become known as one of the most famous settlement houses in America. -
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. 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. -
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 (though not the consumption or private possession) illegal. This caused moonshine to become a booming business -
Nativism
Nativists believed they were the true “Native” Americans, despite their being descended from immigrants themselves. In response to the waves of immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, Nativists created political parties and tried to limit the rights of immigrants. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer, a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.. He was also a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. -
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. It was adopted on August 18, 1920. 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 from 1921 to 1922, 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.
