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Frances Willard
was the head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 until her death, Willard changed the WCTU from a conservative organization into more of a woman’s rights movement with a bunch of social problems, including the right to vote. She created the phrase “Home Protection” to encourage women to expand their influence beyond the family circle, including fighting prostitution and venereal disease. -
Social Dawinsim
It has many definitions, and some of them are incompatible with each other. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics states:
Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist. The term emerged in the 1880s. -
Tin Pan Alley
It is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers & songwriters who dominated the popular music in the late 19th & early 20th century. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, & a plaque exists on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway & Sixth commemorates it.The start of Tin Pan Alley is dated to about 1885, when a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. -
Henry Ford
He was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company(June 16,1903), and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly line, he developed and manufactured the first car that many middle class Americans could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the car from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would profoundly impact the landscape of the 20th Century. -
Eleanor Roosevelt
She was an American politician, diplomat, and activist. She was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, & served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945-1952. President Harry S.Truman later called her "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements. She was a member of the Roosevelt & Livingston families, & a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt's. She married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1905. -
Jazz
Music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms". It was once illegal just because black people were the ones who did it. -
The Great Migration
Movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, & West that occurred between 1910 & 1970. Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South. By 1970, more than 80 percent of African-Americans lived in cities, & by 1960, of those African-Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas. -
William Jennings Bryan
He was an American orator and politician from Nebraska, and a dominant force in the populist wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as the Party's nominee for President of the United States (1896, 1900, and 1908). He served two terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Nebraska and was United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1915). He resigned because of his pacifist position on World War I. -
Federal Reserve System
central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act in response to a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907) that showed the need for central control of the monetary system if crises are to be avoided. Over the years, events such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System. -
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr.
Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a proponent of the Pan-Africanism movement, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism. This would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement. -
The Red Scare
Is the promotion of fear of a potential rise of communism or radical leftism. In the United States, the First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on national and foreign communists influencing society, infiltrating the federal government, or both. -
Harlem Renaissance
Cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance was considered to be a rebirth of African-American arts. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. -
Prohibition
Nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation & sale of alcoholic beverages that remained in place from 1920 to 1933. Prohibition was mandated in state after state, then finally nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Enabling legislation, known as the Volstead Act, set down the rules for enforcing the ban and defined the types of alcoholic beverages that were prohibited. For example, religious uses of wine were allowed. -
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
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. -
Return to Normalcy
A return to the way of life before World War I, was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding's campaign promise in the election of 1920. Although detractors believed that the word was a neologism as well as a malapropism, coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), there was contemporaneous discussion and evidence found that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857. -
Langston Hughes
American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", later paraphrased "when Harlem was in vogue." He serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending 6 months traveling to West Africa & Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S .Malone for a temporary stay in Paris. -
Clarence Darrow
He was an American lawyer, leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. He was best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924). He remains notable for his wit, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. -
Charles A. Lindbergh
American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. At age 25 in 1927, Lindbergh emerged from virtual obscurity as a U.S. Air Mail pilot to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. -
The Great Depression
Severe worldwide economic depression. The timing varied across nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. The depression originated in the United States, after a fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. -
Stock Market Crash (Black Tuesday)
Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929) got to Wall Street because investors created 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. Because of Black Tuesday America and the rest of the industrial world got into the Great Depression. -
New Deal
Series of programs, including, most notably, Social Security, that were enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938, and a few that came later. The programs were in response to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians refer to as the "3 Rs", Relief, Recovery, and Reform: relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. -
20th Amendment
Moved the beginning and ending of the terms of the president and vice president from March 4 to January 20, and of members of Congress from March 4 to January 3. It also has provisions that determine what is to be done when there is no president-elect. The Twentieth Amendment was adopted on January 23, 1933. -
Relief, Recovery, Reform
The 3 R's expanded the federal government to help the poor, the unemployed, youth, the elderly, & stranded rural communities. Total spending on relief rose from 3.9% in 1929-6.4% in 1932, & 9.7% in 1934; the return of prosperity in 1944 lowered the rate to 4.1%. In 1935–40, welfare spending accounted for 49% of the federal, state and local government budgets.In the years 1933-1941 the economy expanded at an average of 7.7% per year. Despite high economic growth, unemployment rates fell slowly. -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corperation
A United States government corporation providing deposit insurance to depositors in US banks. The FDIC was created by the 1933 Banking Act after the Great Depression to restore trust in the American banking system; more than one-third of banks failed in the years before the FDIC's creation, and bank runs were common.The insurance limit was initially US$2,500 per ownership category, the FDIC insures deposits in member banks up to US$250,000 per ownership category. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Commonly known as FDR, an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. Running as a Democrat, he won a record four presidential elections (no other President had served more than two terms), was the longest-running president in U.S. history. He directed the United States government during an era of worldwide economic depression and total war. He was inaugurated March 4, 1933. -
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
Federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter on May 18, 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression. TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to rapidly modernize the region's economy and society. -
21st Amendment
Repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 16, 1919. The Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933. It is unique among the 27 amendments of the U.S. Constitution for being the only one to repeal a prior amendment and to have been ratified by state ratifying conventions. -
Dust Bowl
Also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the U.S. and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–40, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. -
U.S Securities and Exchange Commission
An agency of the United States federal government. It holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws, proposing securities rules, and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other activities and organizations, including the electronic securities markets in the United States. -
Social Security Administration
An independent agency of the United States federal government that administers Social Security, a social insurance program consisting of retirement, disability, and survivors' benefits. To qualify for most of these benefits, most workers pay Social Security taxes on their earnings; the claimant's benefits are based on the wage earner's contributions. Otherwise benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are given based on need. Formed 8/14/1935 -
Dorothea Lange
American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.
