Period 6 Part I (Chapters 1-7)

Question 1

Transcontinental Railroad

Answer 1

The first transcontinental railroad tied California to the rest of the Union. Additional routes were completed in 1883: The Southern Pacific (tied New Orleans to Los Angeles), the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (tied Kansas City to Los Angeles), and the Northern Pacific (tied Minnesota to Washington). In 1893, the Great Northern was finished (tied Minnesota to Washington).

Question 2

Homestead Act

Answer 2

Encouraged farming on the Great Plains by offering 160 acres of public land free to any family that settled on it for a period of five years and improved the land.

Question 3

Dry Farming

Answer 3

The practice of using shallow cultivation to grow crops in the dry western environment.

Question 3

National Grange Movement

Answer 3

The National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry was organized in 1868 by Oliver H. Kelley primarily as a social and educational organization for farmers and their families. As this movement expanded, it became active in economics and politics to defend members against middlemen, trusts, and railroads.

Question 4

Turner’s Frontier Thesis

Answer 4

Frederick Jackson Turner published a provocative, influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, presenting the settling of the frontier as an evolutionary process of building civilization. Turner argued that 300 years of frontier experience had shaped American culture, promoting independence, individualism, inventiveness, practical-mindedness, and democracy while also causing people to become wasteful with natural resources.

Question 5

Assimilation

Answer 5

The act of bringing into conformity with the customs, attitudes, etc., of a group, nation, or the like. In regards to Native Americans in this time period, reformers advocated formal education, job training, and conversion to Christianity. They set up boarding schools such as the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania to segregate Native American children from their people and teach them White culture and farming and industrial skills.

Question 6

Dawes Severalty Act

Answer 6

Designed to break up tribal organizations, which many felt kept Native Americans from becoming “civilized” and law-abiding citizens. This Act divided the tribal lands into pots of up to 160 acres, depending on family size. U.S. citizenship was granted to thsoe who stayed on the land for 25 years and “adopted the habits of a civilized life”.

Question 7

Little Big Horn

Answer 7

Before the Sioux were defeated in a war in the northern plains, they ambushed and destroyed Colonel George Custer’s command at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Question 8

Ghost Dance

Answer 8

The religiously inspired last effort of Native Americans to resist U.S. government controls.

Question 9

Yosemite

Answer 9

Preserved as a California state park in 1864, becoming a national park in 1890.

Question 10

Yellowstone

Answer 10

The first national park, dedicated in 1872.

Question 11

Sharecropping

Answer 11

Paying for the use of land with a share of one’s crop.

Question 12

Tuskegee Institute

Answer 12

An industrial and agricultural school for African Americans established by Booker T. Washington in 1881 in Tuskegee, Alabama. There, African Americans learned skilled trades while Washington preached the values of hard work, moderation, and economic self-help.

Question 13

Plessy v. Ferguson

Answer 13

In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring “separate but equal accommodations” for White and Black railroad passengers. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s law did not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”

Question 14

Jim Crow Laws

Answer 14

A wave of segregation laws that southern states adopted beginning in 1870s. These laws required segregated washrooms, drinking fountains, park benches, and other facilities in virtually all public places. Only the use of streets and most stores was not restricted according to a person’s race.

Question 15

Literacy Tests

Answer 15

A test administered as a precondition for voting, often used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.

Question 16

Poll Taxes

Answer 16

Fees required to be paid in order to vote, often used as a tool to disenfranchise low-income individuals, particularly African Americans and poor whites in the South.

Question 17

Grandfather Clauses

Answer 17

Allowed a man to vote if his grandfather had voted in elections before Reconstruction.

Question 18

Lynch Mobs

Answer 18

Killed more than 1,400 Black men during the 1890s.

Question 19

Bessemer Process

Answer 19

In the 1850s, both Henry Bessemer in England and William Kelly in the United States discovered that blasting air through molten iron produced high-quality steel.

Question 20

Electric Light

Answer 20

Light produced by electricity, created by Thomas Edison with the first practical electric lightbulb in 1879.

Question 21

Consumer Economy

Answer 21

An economy driven by consumer spending as a percent of its gross domestic product, as opposed to the other major components of GDP (gross private domestic investment, government spending, and imports netted against exports). This type of economy began to dominate America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Question 22

US Steel

Answer 22

The first billion-dollar company, a new steel combination headed by J. Pierpont Morgan to which Andrew Carnegie sold his company in 1900 for more than $400 million in 1900. It was also the largest enterprise in the world, employing 168,000 people and controlling more than 3/5 of the nation’s steel business.

Question 23

Standard Oil

Answer 23

A company founded by John D. Rockefeller that would quickly eliminate its competition and take control of most of the nation’s oil refineries. By 1881, this company controlled 90% of the oil refinery business and had become a monopoly.

Question 24

Trust

Answer 24

An organization or board that manages the assets of other companies.

Question 25

Horizontal Integration

Answer 25

A process through which one company takes control of all its former competitors in a specific industry, such as oil refining or coal mining.

Question 26

Vertical Integration

Answer 26

A process through which one company takes control of all stages of making a product.

Question 27

Laissez-faire

Answer 27

Economics should occur without government regulation and should instead be guided by “the invisible hand” (impersonal economic forces) of the law of supply and demand.

Question 28

Social Darwinism

Answer 28

The belief that Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest should be applied to the marketplace.

Question 29

Iron Law of Wages

Answer 29

Dave Ricardo justified low wages by arguing that raising wages would only increase the working population, and the availability of more workers would in turn cause wages to fall, thus creating a cycle of misery and starvation.

Question 30

Collective Bargaining

Answer 30

The ability of workers to negotiate as a group with an employer over wages and working conditions.

Question 31

Knights of Labor

Answer 31

Began in 1869 as a secret society in order to avoid detection by employers. Under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, the union went public in 1881, opening its membership to all workers, including African Americans and women. Powderly advocated a variety of reforms:
1. Forming worker cooperatives “to make each man his own employer”
2. Abolishing child labor
3. Abolishing trusts and monopolies
4. Settling labor disputes by arbitration rather than strikes

Question 32

American Federation of Labor

Answer 32

Concentrated on “bread-and-butter unionism”, attaining narrower economic goals than the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1886 as an association of 25 craft unions of skilled workers, and led by Samuel Gompers until 1924, the AFL focused on just higher wages and improved working conditions. Gompers directed his local unions to walk out until the employer agreed to negotiate a new contract through collective bargaining.

Question 33

Homestead Strike

Answer 33

Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel plant near Pittsburgh, precipitated a strike in 1892 by cutting wages by nearly 20%. Frick used the weapons of the lockout, private guards, and strikebreakers to defeat the steelworkers’ walkout after five months. Sixteen people, mostly steelworkers, died in the conflict.

Question 34

Pullman Strike

Answer 34

In 1894, George Pullman announced a general cut in wages and fired the leaders of the workers’ delegation who came to bargain with him. The workers at Pullman laid down their tools and appealed for help from the American Railroad Union. The ARU’s leader, Eugene V. Debs, directed railroad workers not to handle any trains with Pullman cars. The union’s boycott tied up rail transportation across the country. Railroad owners supported Pullman by linking Pullman cars to mail trains. They then appealed to President Grover Cleveland, persuading him to sue the army to keep the mail trains running. A federal court issued an injunction forbidding interference with the operation of the mail and ordering railroad workers to abandon the boycott and the strike. For failing to respond to this injunction, Debs and other union leaders were arrested and jailed. The jailing of Debs and others effectively ended the strike. In the case of In re Debs (1895), the Supreme Court approved the use of court injunctions against strikes, which gave employers a very powerful legal weapon to break unions.