USA (1900s) Flashcards
A 1909 expedition to Africa sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, which resulted in thousands of specimens (including dozens of big game animals) collected for American natural history museums, was led by what man, who arranged the expedition in part to give room to new U.S. President W.H. Taft?
Theodore Roosevelt
On November 19, 1950 at 12:30 pm, the Chicago Historical Society celebrated a notable anniversary by displaying all five extant copies of what document?
The Gettysburg Address. The date is four scores and seven years after the speech was delivered.
William Alexander Morgan was one of roughly two dozen Americans to fight in this revolutionary conflict. He was only one of three foreign nationals to hold the rank of “comandante” among rebel forces.
Cuban Revolution
After World War II, the United States Time Corporation changed its name to this.
Timex
Boulder City was founded in 1931 to house people constructing this.
Hoover Dam
Who was Time’s first Man of the Year (a honor created, according to legend, because they had failed otherwise to put him on their cover during his glory year of 1927)?
Charles Lindbergh
Since Franklin Roosevelt (the only three-time honoree), every American president except one has been named Person of the Year. Which one failed to receive the honor?
Gerald Ford
Who is the only American to have been named Time’s Person of the Year twice without being president? He was first selected in 1943 and again in 1947?
George Marshall
What woman, whose Fort Peck Dam appeared on the first cover of Life magazine in 1936, was one of the original staff photographers for the magazine, and later became the first woman photographer to work with the U.S. armed forces during World War II?
Margaret Bourke-White
The 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act made unenforceable, and the 1935 Wagner Act made illegal, what colorfully named employment contract, which stipulates that a worker’s employment is conditional on not joining a trade union?
Yellow-Dog Contract
Retired California physician and businessman Francis E. Townsend developed a namesake plan which, with millions of members of “Townsend clubs” across the U.S., spurred the development of what federal program?
Social Security
Between 1973 and 1987, federal law mandated what maximum speed on U.S. highways?
55
In October 1984, Barbara Bush characterized whom as a “four-million-dollar—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich,” following a lively debate the person in question had with Mrs. Bush’s husband a few days prior?
Geraldine Ferraro
Oliver Sipple, a gay ex-Marine, foiled an assassination attempt on this person by Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco.
Gerald Ford
The farthest human-made object from the Earth, currently operating in interstellar space just over 13 billion miles from home, is one of the two probes built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a NASA space program whose original mission—to study the planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn—was completed in 1981? What is the name of that space program?
Voyager
Gregory Pincus, said one critic, sought to create a world where “man’s value was precisely zero.” Because his colleague, John Rock, was (said a supporter) “as handsome as a god, he can get away with just about anything.” What did Rock and Pincus invent?
Birth Control Pill
For whom was Rudolph Abel traded in 1960?
Francis Gary Powers (U2 pilot)
In what New York town did the Woodstock Festival actually take place?
Bethel
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965, declared unconstitutional a law forbidding the use of what?
Birth Control/Contraception
When the resolution that eventually became the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment (prohibiting citizens from being denied voting rights on the basis of sex) was brought before the House of Representatives in 1919, there was only one woman in Congress able to vote on it. Name that Republican from Montana, who was the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. (She voted Yes to the resolution.)
Jeanette Rankin
At the time of her death in 2007, an Inuit woman named Rose Okpeaha Leavitt was the last living witness to the 1935 deaths of what two famous Americans?
Rose and her father saw the Barrow, Alaska plane crash that killed Will Rogers and Wiley Post.
The five burglars arrested on June 17, 1972, at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel, were indicted by a federal grand jury on September 15 of that year, as were two other operatives. Name either of those two other men, both of whom served time in prison.
G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt
Walton Rodger of the American Nuclear Society is widely credited with coining a now-familiar phrase, which he used as a term of derision against residents protesting nuclear facilities in their locality. That phrase is also known (and perhaps even better known) by its acronym, which is what?
NIMBY
Name the man who served as Secretary of Defense for the duration of the presidency of John F. Kennedy (and continued in the role under Lyndon B. Johnson).
Robert McNamara
This actress became a controversial figure during the Watergate Era due to her outspoken comments about government and figures involved in the scandal. She was married to Nixon’s attorney general turned 1972 campaign director.
Martha Mitchell
Given his noted thriftiness and unadorned reticence, The Autobiography of ___________ is the fittingly titled (and at a brisk 246 pages, fittingly terse) 1929 autobiography of what American (whose name fills in the blank)?
Calvin Coolidge
In 1942, vice president Henry Wallace announced that the 20th century would belong to whom, inspiring Aaron Copland to write that honoree a “Fanfare”?
The common man
In 1914, she founded the Woman Rebel magazine and distributed pamphlets on family planning.
Margaret Sanger
The Danish West Indies were sold to the United States in 1917 for $25,000,000. What is the current name for this group of islands?
U.S. Virgin Islands
Prior to becoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, this man acted as Governor of California for 10 years.
Earl Warren
What was the more familiar name for the “Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” which Congress passed in March 1941 to provide military aid to the Allies?
Lend-Lease Act
What famous American was born to the Knauss family in northern Yugoslavia in 1970?
Knauss is the German-ized maiden name of the woman born in Slovenia as Melanija Knavs, today Melania Trump.
He was a long-time assistant to Robert E. Peary and a co-discoverer of the North Pole.
Matthew Henson
By Act of Congress on June 2, 1924, all members of this group were declared U.S. citizens.
Native Americans
Famed for its health care system & medical school, it also sold 15 acres for $10 in 1947 to build CDC headquarters.
Emory University
In 1968, Ralph Abernathy took over as president of this organization and led the Poor People’s March to Washington.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
This middle name of President Warren G. Harding is the name of a teacher of Paul in the Bible.
Gamaliel
These two individuals served as Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. The first from 1993-1997, the second from 1997-2001.
Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright
Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce and W’s Secretary of Transportation, he was the first Asian American cabinet member
Norman Mineta
What was the colorful term used by Jesse Jackson for the alliance of liberal and minority groups he constructed during his 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination?
Rainbow Coalition
Before he ran for President, this man worked to curb organized crimeand prosecuted several powerful mobsters.
Thomas Dewey
What two-word slogan and ideological term was used as the title of a 1954 book by Richard Wright and was later popularized by Stokely Carmichael during his time as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) before evolving into a broader (and potent) political movement?
Black Power
The 12th of this group of proposals from Pres. Wilson called for free passage for ships through the Dardanelles.
Fourteen Points
In 1972 the AP broke the story of experiments on unconsenting subjects at this Alabama institute
Tuskegee (“Tuskegee Syphillis Study”)
In 1963 he wrote to MLK seeking a United Front of “all Negro factions” against “a common problem posed by a Common Enemy.”
Malcolm X
Congressman Leo Ryan of California was one of five people shot and killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip on the afternoon of November 18, 1978; that night, hundreds more died (many in more compliant fashion). All were killed on the orders of what man?
Jim Jones
Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate President Truman at Blair House on November 1, 1950. Three and a half years later, four more gunmen led by Lolita Lebrón wounded five Congressmen in an attack at the United States Capitol. These six would-be assassins were all connected with, and hoped to draw attention to, what political cause?
Puerto Rican independence
From Interstate 294 east to Lake Michigan, the former 22nd Street in Chicago and several western suburbs bears the name of this man. The 34th mayor of the city, he held the office less than two years before his assassination in Miami (by a man believed to have been targeting Franklin D. Roosevelt).
Anton Cermak
The original law called this was passed in 1944; today there’s a “Post-9/11” version that also pays for 36 months of university education.
G.I. Bill
A year after his admission sparked a deadly riot, James Meredith became the first black graduate of this University.
Ole Miss
Prompted by the 1902-03 armed intervention of British and German forces in Venezuela to settle debt claims, an amendment to the Monroe Doctrine was issued stating that only the United States may act as an “international police power” in the Western Hemisphere. This supplement is commonly known by what name, after the man who issued it in 1904?
Roosevelt Corollary
The resolution by the US Congress in August 1964 that authorized President Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War is named after what body of water?
Gulf of Tonkin
This politician was the first Southern African-American woman elected to the House of Representatives. She is best known for her opening statement at the House Judiciary Committee hearings during the impeachment process against Nixon, and later being the first woman to deliver a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
Barbara Jordan
This Native American man came down from the Sierra Nevada in 1911 and the press called him “the last wild Indian in America.” He was the last known member of the Yahi tribe. The name by which he is known to posterity was not his personal name, just the Yahi word for man. Their custom was not to divulge your name yourself. Whoever introduced you would relate your name to the stranger. And there was no one left to introduce him.
He went from Oroville to San Francisco where he lived and worked as a researcher and informant at the Museum of Anthropology, then at UCSF.
So by what name was our Yahi fellow known?
Ishi
Police officers in Jackson, Mississippi are seen here blocking the funeral march of which civil rights activist? He was murdered on June 12, 1963 by a member of a White Citizens’ Council, who was not convicted until 1994.
Medgar Evers
This temperance crusader gave lectures billed as “The Famous & Original Bar Room Smasher”
Carrie Nation
What was the last name of the patriarch and self-made millionaire who was the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, chair of the powerful US Maritime Commission in 1937, and the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1938?
(Joseph P.) Kennedy
In 1917 this priest rented a boarding house in Omaha to care for 5 neglected boys; later, he bought a farm and it became Boys Town
Father Edward J. Flanagan
Colonel John T. Thompson was an inventor whose best-known creation is associated most closely with American gangsters of the Prohibition era. What is the common name used for this invention?
Tommy Gun
In every US presidential election starting 1952 and ending in 2004, there was either a Bush, a Dole, or a Nixon on the GOP ticket, except for one year. Give the name of either of the Republicans on the national ticket in that exception year. (Note, answer with a name, not the year.)
Barry Goldwater, William Miller
As published in the New York Charities Directory of 1917, what organization—incorporated six years prior—conceived as its mission to “make 12 million Americans physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free from disenfranchisement, and socially free from insult”?
NAACP
Martin Luther King Jr.’s August 28, 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech begins with the line “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” It ends—as Dr. King states, “in the words of the old Negro spiritual”—with what three words?
Free at Last
What word, not a neologism (as is commonly asserted) but not in frequent use at the time, was popularized by Warren G. Harding in the US presidential election of 1920, in connection with his promise to bring the country back to a calm social and political order after the turmoil of the Wilson years?
Normalcy
