History Mid-Term Flashcards
Companies combined to limit competition
Trusts
Company’s avoidance of middlemen by producing its own supplies and providing for distribution of its product
Vertical Integrations
The process by which a corporation acquires or merges with its competitors
Horizontal Expansion
Known as captains of industry, Gilded-Age industrial figures who inspired both admiration and innovation
Robber Barons
Large farms that covered thousands of acres and employed hundreds of wage laborers in the West
Bonanza Farms
Most famous battle of the Great Sioux War; took place in 1876 in the Montana Territory; combined Sioux and Cheyenne warriors massacred a vastly outnumbered U.S. Cavalry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
Battle of Little Bighorn
Broke up tribal holdings into small farms for Indian families, with the remainder sold to white purchasers
Dawes Act
A spiritual and political movement among Native Americans whose followers performed a ______ intended to connect the living with the dead
Ghost Dance
Last incident of the Indian Wars; it took place in 1890 in the Dakota Territory, where the U.S. Cavalry killed over 200 Sioux
Wounded Knee Massacre
The popular but derogatory name for the period from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, after the title of the novel by Mark Twain
The Gilded Age
Policy where the value of a dollar is set at a fixed price in terms of gold
Gold Standard
Law that established the Civil Service Commission and marked the end of the spoils system
Civil Service Act of 1883
Organization established by congress, in reaction to Wabash Railroad v. Illinois. Curbed abuses in the railroad industry by regulating rates
Interstate Commerce Commission
The first law to restrict monopolistic trusts and business combinations
Sherman Antitrust Act
Application of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society; used the concept of the “survival of the fittest” to justify class distinctions and to explain poverty.
Social Darwinism
A series of demonstrations, held nationwide in support of striking railroad workers who refused to work due to wage cuts
Great Railroad Strike
The first national union, supplanted by the American Federation of Labor
Knights of Labor
Concept of taxing only landowners as a remedy for poverty
Single Tax
Advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems generated by industrialization
Social Gospel
Violence during an anarchist protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886; the deaths of eight, including seven policemen, led to the trial of eight anarchist leaders for conspiracy to commit murder.
Haymarket Affair
Founded in 1892, a group that advocated a variety of reform issues, including free coinage of silver, income tax, postal savings, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators.
Populists
1882 law that halted Chinese immigration to the United States.
Chinese Exclusion Act
A march on Washington organized by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio member of the People’s Party. Coxey believed in abandoning the gold standard and printing enough legal tender to reinvigorate the economy. The marchers demanded that Congress create jobs and pay workers in paper currency not backed by gold.
Coxey’s Army
Speech to the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 by educator Booker T. Washington, the leading black spokesman of the day; black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave the speech its derisive name and criticized Washington for encouraging blacks to accommodate segregation and disenfranchisement.
Atlanta Compromise
Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady’s 1886 term for the prosperous post–Civil War South he envisioned: democratic, industrial, urban, and free of nostalgia for the defeated plantation South.
New South
A migration in 1879 and 1880 by some 40,000–60,000 blacks to Kansas to escape the oppressive environment of the New South.
Kansas Exodus
Loophole created by southern disenfranchising legislatures of the 1890s for illiterate white males whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the Civil War.
Grandfather Clause
A federation of trade unions founded in 1881, composed mostly of skilled, white, native-born workers; its long-term president was Samuel Gompers.
American Federation of Labor
To deprive of the right to vote; in the United States, exclusionary policies were used to deny groups, especially African-Americans and women, their voting rights.
Disenfranchisement
Sensationalism in newspaper publishing that reached a peak in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s; the papers’ accounts of events in Havana Harbor in 1898 led directly to the Spanish-American War.
Yellow Press
Battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, resulting in 266 deaths; the American public, assuming that the Spanish had mined the ship, clamored for war, and the Spanish-American War was declared two months later.
U.S.S. Maine
U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites
Plessy V. Ferguson
1901 amendment to the Cuban constitution that reserved the United States’ right to intervene in Cuban affairs and forced newly independent Cuba to host American naval bases on the island.
Platt Amendment
Principle underlying legal racial segregation, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
“Seperate But Equal”
Demand in 1899 by Secretary of State John Hay, in hopes of protecting the Chinese market for U.S. exports, that Chinese trade be open to all nations.
Open Door Policy
Practice, particularly widespread in the South between 1890 and 1940, in which persons (usually black) accused of a crime were murdered by mobs before standing trial. Lynchings often took place before large crowds, with law enforcement authorities not intervening.
Lynching
American military campaign that suppressed the movement for Philippine independence after the Spanish-American War; America’s death toll was over 4,000 and the Philippines’ was far higher.
Philippine War
A romanticized view of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederacy that arose in the decades following the Civil War.
The Lost Cause
Series of cases between 1901 and 1904 in which the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional protection of individual rights did not fully apply to residents of “insular” territories acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Insular Cases
Wave of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, including many Jews, who became a majority among immigrants to America after 1890.
New Immigrants
Coalition of anti-imperialist groups united in 1899 to protest American territorial expansion, especially in the Philippine Islands; its membership included prominent politicians, industrialists, labor leaders, and social reformers.
Anti-Imperialist League
A political organization founded in 1894 that called for reducing immigration to the United States by requiring a literacy test for immigrants.
Immigration Restriction League
