chapter 25 // BOLDED Flashcards
New Immigrants
Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them. These new immigrants congregated in ethnic urban neighborhoods, where they worried many native-born Americans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of who introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate.
settlement houses
Mostly run by middle-class native-born women, settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States. Many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed lifelong passions for social activism in the settlement houses. Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent.
liberal Protestants
Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth. Many liberal Protestants became active in the “social gospel” and other reform movements of the era.
Tuskegee Institute
A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, AL. It focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence. Washington justified segregated, vocational training as a necessary step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too “accomodationist.”
land-grant colleges
Colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887. These grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of today’s public universities derive from them.
pragmatism
A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems. The pragmatists thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge. Among the most well-known purveyors of pragmatism were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James.
yellow journalism
A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards.
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women. NAWSA argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilities in the home and family made them indispensable in the public decision-making process. During World War I, NAWSA supported the war effort and lauded women’s role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
Founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, the WCTU went on to embrace a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women.
realism
Mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and America literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, in all its unvarnished detail. Adherent eschewed the idealism and nostalgia of the earlier romantic sensibility.
naturalism
An offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement purported to apply detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme or sordid social environments.
regionalism
A recurring artistic movement that, in the context of the late nineteenth century, aspired to capture the peculiarities, or “local color,” of America’s various regions in the face of modernization and national standardization.
City Beautiful movement
A turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners, who aimed to promote order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying the nation’s new urban spaces with grand boulevards, welcoming parks, and monumental public buildings.
World’s Columbian Exposition
Americans saw this world’s fair, held in Chicago, as their opportunity to claim a place among the world’s most “civilized” societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe. The fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a mini-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time. For many, this was the high point of the City Beautiful movement.
Jane Addams
Jane Addams co-founded one of the first settlements in the United States, the Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, and was named a co-winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.
