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Industrialization
Industrialization is the development of industries in a country or region on a wide scale. It marked a shift to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass production. While it brought about an increased volume and variety of manufactured goods and an improved standard of living for some, it also resulted in often grim employment and living conditions for the poor and working classes. -
Urbanization
Urbanization was not always a positive thing, city services had a difficult time keeping up with the vast population growth. Cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s often lacked central planning. There were few sewer systems or clean water, many roads were not yet paved. -
Political Machines
Political Machines are a political organization in when a legit boss or small group commands the support of a corps of supporters and businesses, usually campaign workers, who receive rewards for their efforts. They are characterized by a disciplined and hierarchical organization, reaching down to neighbourhood and block organizers, that enables the machine to respond to the problems of individual neighborhoods in exchange for loyalty at the polls. -
Indian Removal
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, enabling 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 the 19th-century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable. But it was destined to stretch from coast to coast. This term originated in the 1840s. -
The Gilded Age
By the century's end, the nation's economy was dominated by a few, very powerful individuals. In 1850, most Americans worked for themselves and by 1900, most Americans worked for an employer. From the end of reconstruction in 1877 to the disastrous panic of 1893, the American economy nearly doubled in size. -
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers 160 acres of public land. In return, homesteaders paid a small filing fee and had to complete five years of continuous residence before receiving ownership of the land. Meaning they people who claimed that land had to make it better during that period of time. -
Susan B. Anthony
Susan founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and was the president from 1892-1900. Around this time, she and another creator made and produced The Revolution, a weekly publication that advanced for women’s rights. Susan was a pioneer crusader for the woman suffrage movement in the United States. What she did helped moved the way for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote during the 1920's. -
Eugene V. Debs
By 1881, he was national secretary of the brotherhood, increasingly its spokesman on labor issues, and its most tireless organizer. At the same time, he entered politics as a Democratic candidate for city clerk in 1879. Debs organized the American Railway Union, it waged a strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago in 1894. -
Populism & Progressivism
Progressivism is an up-down movement while populism is down-up in nature. Those who follow or support progressivism are mostly rich and powerful politicians while those who support populism are the generally masses. Populism is an older campaign theory than progressivism. -
Civil Service Reform
Civil Service Reform is a United States federal law, enacted in 1883, which established that positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political affiliation. It had made it illegal to fire or demote government officials for political reasons and prohibited soliciting campaign donations on federal government property. This act also allowed for the president, by executive order to decide which positions could be subject to the act & which would not. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was a lawyer whose work as defense counsel in many dramatic criminal trials earned him a place in American legal history. He took part in attempts to free the anarchists charged with murder in the Haymarket Riot on May 4, 1886. Darrow was chosen by Chicago city corporation counsel in 1890, and then he became general attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway. -
Haymarket Riot
At Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, a bomb is thrown at a squad of policemen attempting to break up a labor rally. The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. It drew in some 1,500 Chicago workers that was organized by German-born labor radicals in protest of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before. -
Dawes Act
President Grover Cleveland signs an act to end tribal control of reservations and divide their land into individual estate. The Dawes Act gave the president the power to divide Indian reservations into individual, privately owned sections of land. The act dictated that men with families would receive 160 acres, single adult men were given 80 acres, and boys received 40 acres, women received no land. -
Andrew Carnegie
After moving to the US, he worked many railroad jobs. By 1889, he owned Carnegie Steel Corporation, the largest kind in the world. He built plants around the country by using technology and methods that made manufacturing steel easier, faster and more productive. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida had led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s, and went on to found and become integral in groups striving for African-American justice. She became a critic of the condition of blacks only schools in the city. In 1891, she was fired from her job for these attacks. She defended another cause after the murder of a friend and his two business associates. -
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan became a Nebraska congressman in 1890. He starred at the 1896 Democratic convention with his Cross of Gold speech that favored free silver, but was defeated in his price to become U.S. president by William McKinley. Later in the time, he campaigned for peace, prohibition and suffrage, and increasingly criticized the teaching of evolution. -
Klondike Gold Rush
A group of people first found gold during august of 1896. In the beginning in 1897, an enormous group of gold seekers headed up north, unaware that most of the good Klondike claims were already staked, boarded ships in Seattle and other Pacific port cities. -
Initiative & Referendum
In the politics of the US, the process of initiatives and referendums allow 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 for a popular vote. Initiative, referendum, and recall are three powers reserved to enable the voters, by petition, to propose or repeal legislation or to remove an elected official from office. -
Third Parties Politics
A third party is a political party other than the Democrats or Republicans, such as the Libertarians and Greens. The term "minor party" is also used in a similar manner. In the context of an impending election, is considered highly unlikely to do so. -
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley. He had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War and started the construction on the Panama Canal. From the time of his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1901, Roosevelt said the progressive belief that government should deal between conflicting forces in order to stabilize American society. -
Upton Sinclair
He had developed for the upper class as a child had led Sinclair to socialism in 1903, and in 1904 he was sent to Chicago by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to write an exposé on the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry. Sinclair’s plan to reveal the plight of laborers at the meatpacking plants had vivid descriptions of the cruelty to animals and unsanitary conditions there caused great public complaint and ultimately changed the way people shopped for food. -
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. Meaning one who inquires into and publishes scandal and allegations of corruption among political and business leaders. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
This act was created for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of blended, misbranded, poisonous, deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic in them and for other purposes. This came only after two decades of wrangling and congressional opposition to federal regulation of food and drugs. Three political forces combined to force food and drug regulation onto the congressional agenda. -
Dollar Diplomacy
Dollar Diplomacy was a form of American foreign policy to further its aims in Latin America and East Asia through use of its economic power by promising loans made to foreign countries. This was created by Pres. William Howard Taft in 1912. It was created to ensure the financial stability of a region while protecting and extending U.S. commercial and financial interests there. -
Federal Reserve Act
In 1913, Federal Reserve Act was a U.S. legislation that created the current Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Act intended to establish a form of economic stability in the United States through the introduction of the Central Bank. In which would've been in charge of monetary policy. -
16th Amendment
The 16th amendment is an important amendment that allows the federal United States government to collect an income tax from all Americans. The federal government realized in 1913 that in order for it to collect taxes capably, and not have to share that tax money with the states, federal income tax was necessary. It was passed by Congress on July 2, 1909, and ratified February 3, 1913. -
17th Amendment
The 17th amendment provides for regular voters to elect their Senators. By the time the 17th amendment was proposed, almost thirty states were in favor of directly electing senators. It was then proposed in 1912 and was completely ratified by 1913. -
Jane Addams
She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, and worked for many years to get the great powers to strip and bring down peace agreements. When the USA entered war, Jane Addams spoke out loudly against it. She was labeled as a dangerous radical and a danger to US security. She was also the second woman to receive the Peace Prize. -
Nativism
It is a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants. In the 1920s a wide national consensus sharply restricted the overall inflow of immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe. The second Ku Klux Klan, which flourished in the U.S. in the 1920s, used strong nativist rhetoric, but the Catholics led a counterattack. -
Immigration & the American Dream
The American Dream was a simple idea that promises success to all who inhabit and work hard in the land of the free and home of the brave. While immigrants may have built the nation centuries ago, the United States has a history of an action towards newcomers. The tension has only increased and immigrants are not exactly welcomed into the country with open arms. -
18th Amendment
By the late 1800s, prohibition movements had sprung up across the United States, driven by religious groups who considered alcohol, specifically drunkenness, a threat to the nation. The movement reached its peak in 1920 when Congress ratified the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. -
19th Amendment
Women were given the right to vote. It was not until 1848 that the movement for women’s rights launched on a national level with a convention. Following the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women’s rights movement. -
Suffrage
It is the right to vote in public elections. Universal suffrage means everyone gets to vote, as opposed to only men, or property holders. Suffrage has nothing to do with "suffering," unless the wrong person is elected. -
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
Warren G. Harding transferred supervision of the naval oil-reserve lands from the navy to the Department of the Interior in 1921. Albert Fall secretly granted to Harry F. Sinclair of the Mammoth Oil Company exclusive rights to the Teapot Dome reserves in Wyoming of April 7, 1922. When the leases and contracts came under investigation by committees of the U.S. Senate, it was disclosed that shortly after the signing of the Teapot Dome lease.
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