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Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
This organization advocated for the prohibition of alcohol, using women's supposedly greater purity and morality as a rallying point. -
Interstate Commerce Act
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 targeted unfair practices in the railroad industry by attempting to eliminate discrimination against small markets, outlawing pools and rebates, and establishing a "reasonable and just" price standard. -
Lincol Steffens
Lincoln Joseph Steffens was a New York reporter who launched a series of articles in McClure's that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. -
How the Other Half Lives
Studies among the Tenements of New York was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
It was the most mainstream and nationally visible pro-suffrage group. Its strategy was to push for suffrage at the state level, believing that state-by-state support would eventually force the federal government to pass the amendment. -
Sheman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts.This act was based on the constitutional power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. -
Eugene V. Debs
Debs promoted workers' right to organize unions and to strike in order to protect their interests, for shorter hours, and for restrictions on child labor.Debs formed the AMERICAN RAILWAY UNION in 1892. -
Ida B. Wells
Wells wrote and published The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. The pamphlet was a clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave. -
Anti-Saloon League
An interdenominational Protestant organization dedicated to advancing prohibition through political means. Anti-Saloon League is credited with being the first nonpartisan, single-issue interest group in modern American politics. -
John Dewey
He changed fundamental approaches to teaching and learning. His ideas about education sprang from a philosophy of pragmatism and were central to the Progressive Movement in schooling. -
Ida Tarbell
Ida wrote a book named "The History of the Standard Oil Company" in which she exposed Standard’s often questionable practices, including those surrounding the events that had so greatly others in their area decades earlier. Tarbell’s exhaustive study gave rise to a new style of investigative journalism sometimes referred to as muckraking. -
The Square Deal
The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor. -
Anthracite Coal Strike
The Anthracite Strike of 1902 was an effort by the United Mine Workers to get higher wages, shorter hours, and recognition of their union. The strike was ended in March 1903 and the miners received a wage increase. However, recognition of the union was not achieved. -
Elkins Act
The Act authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to impose heavy fines on railroads that offered rebates, and upon the shippers that accepted these rebates. -
Department of Commerce and Labor
The United States Department of Commerce and Labor was a short-lived Cabinet department of the United States government, which was concerned with controlling the excesses of big business. -
Northern Securities Antitrust
Northern Securities Co. v. United States was a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1903. The Court ruled 5 to 4 against the stockholders of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad companies, who had essentially formed a monopoly, and to dissolve the Northern Securities Company. -
Meat Inspection Act
Is a United States Congress Act that works to prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and meat products from being sold as food and to ensure that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. -
The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities -
Pure Food and Drug Act
Its main purpose was to ban traffic in adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products. It required that active ingredients be placed on the label of a drug’s packaging. It raised the standards in the food and drug industries. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan, New York was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and 23 men. -
17th Amendment
The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution established the popular election of United States Senators by the people of the states. -
Progressive (Bull Moose) Party
The Progressive Party of 1912 was an American political party. It was formed by former President Theodore Roosevelt, after a split in the Republican Party between him and President William Howard Taft. -
Underwood Tariff Act
Its purpose was to reduce levies on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and to eliminate duties on most raw materials. To compensate for the loss of revenue, the act also levied a graduated income tax on U.S. residents. -
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 granted it the legal authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes, and Federal Reserve Bank Notes as legal tender. -
Federal Trade Commission
Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly. -
Clayton Antitrust Act
The Clayton ANtitrust Act was a part of United States antitrust law with the goal of adding further substance to the U.S. antitrust law regime; the Clayton Act sought to prevent anticompetitive practices. -
Margaret Sanger
A police raid shut down the nation’s first birth control clinic that Sanger had opened just ten days before. Sanger chose Brownsville for her first clinic because she knew from her conversations with residents that the neighborhood would welcome the clinic. -
Keating-Owen Child Labor Act
This was a short-lived statute enacted by the U.S. Congress which sought to address child labor by prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce of goods produced by factories that employed children under fourteen, mines that employed children younger than sixteen, and any facility where children under sixteen worked at night or more than eight hours daily. -
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 illegal. -
19th Amendment
The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. -
Robert M. La Follette
Convinced the war had given big business too much influence in government, Robert La Follette began exposing flagrant corruption. He ran for president, but lost.
