Historical Context

Question 1

International Copyright Law

Answer 1

1891

Question 2

A Doll’s House

Answer 2

1879

Question 3

Civil War

Answer 3

1861-1865

Question 4

Mexican War

Answer 4

1846-48

Question 5

Plessy v Ferguson

Answer 5

1896

Question 6

First Model T Ford

Answer 6

1908

Question 7

Poetry founded in Chicago

Answer 7

1912

Question 8

19th amendment

Answer 8

1920

Question 9

18th Amendment

Answer 9

1920

Question 10

The Cotton Club opens

Answer 10

1921

Question 11

Harlem Race Riots

Answer 11

1935

Question 12

Postbellum black literacy

Answer 12

–Within a year of black freedom, at least 8,000 former slaves were attending schools in Georgia.

–By 1900 the illiteracy rate of African Americans fell to 43% (from 81% in 1870)

Question 13

Civil War Amendments

Answer 13

The 13th (end slavery), 14th (citizenship), and 15th (suffrage) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

Question 14

Depressions

Answer 14

1837 FinancPanic(unemployment high 1840s)
1873
1930s

Question 15

Postbellum Racial Violence

Answer 15

–Upsurge in lynching (worst decade was the 1890s when there were almost 200 lynchings a year).

–Series of race riots in the various parts of the US: 6-100 African Americans dead in an 1898 riot in N Carolina.

–1900 race riot mobs of white men roamed NO for black victims (between 20 & 300 people dead according to differing accounts), and a similar riot broke out the same year in NY (more than 10 thousand white to the streets mobbing black passersby)

Question 16

Resistance from Bannocks, Paiutes, Sheepeaters, and Utes

Answer 16

1877-8

Ghost Dance

Question 17

Dawes Act

Answer 17

1887

Question 18

Downes v. Bidwell

Answer 18

1901

Business firm Downes sued NY Port to recover duties from Puerto Rico

–“while in an international sense PR was not a foreign country, it was foreign to the US in a domestic sense”

Question 19

Insular Cases

Answer 19

1901 (9 cases)

Question 20

Spanish-American War

Answer 20

1898

Question 21

US annexes TX

Answer 21

1845

Question 22

US declares war on Mexico

Answer 22

1846

Question 23

Seneca Falls

Answer 23

1848

Question 24

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Answer 24

1848

US buys California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada for $15 million

Question 25

Fugitive Slave Act

Answer 25

1850

Question 26

Comstock Act

Answer 26

1873, defines contraceptive info as ‘obscene’

Question 27

Dredd Scott

Answer 27

1857

Question 28

First transcontinental railroad

Answer 28

1869

Question 29

Chicago Haymarket Square Executions

Answer 29

1887

Question 30

Astor Place theater Riot

Answer 30

1849: 22 dead, British actor, highlight growing divergence of high/low culture

Question 31

Early mass culture

Answer 31

• Rise of the Penny Press in the 1830s
• 1st mass circulation newspapers like Benjamin Day’s NY Sun
• By 1840, more newspapers published in US than any other nation
• In 1850, 2,500 newspapers published throughout US
• 1840s: elite journals (North Am Review), sentimental publications (Godey’s Lady’s Book); cheap story papers (Flag of Our Union)
• Rise of minstrelsy (1828-1850): Working class, male; By 1850s Dan Emmett would offer tamer, more sentimental style of song & dance (cultural commodity applauded by respectable middle-class audiences)