AP®︎ US History: Unit 6 Flashcards

Late-19th-century era of surface prosperity but underlying inequality, corruption, economic crises, and intense party competition

Post–Civil War transformation centered on steel, petroleum, electricity, machinery, and national transportation and communication networks

Offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who lived on and improved it, encouraging western migration and farm ownership despite frequent hardship and fraud

The 1862 act and its 1864 amendments subsidized the Union Pacific and Central Pacific with loans and land to build a transcontinental railroad

Federal grants of public land that railroads sold to finance construction and connect western resources to national markets

Completed in 1869 when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Summit, Utah, linking the Pacific Coast to the eastern rail network

Use of improved farm machinery to cultivate more acreage with less labor, greatly increasing production and helping lower food prices

Large, capital-intensive Great Plains farms that used wage labor and machinery to grow crops such as wheat on thousands of acres

Farm organization promoting cooperation, education, and political action against railroad costs and other agricultural grievances

State laws supported by the Grange to regulate railroad freight charges and grain warehouse rates

Agrarian organizations advocating cooperation, railroad regulation, currency expansion, and the subtreasury plan

Rapidly growing settlements near mineral discoveries that often declined into ghost towns unless they developed other economic activities

Major silver deposit discovered in Nevada in 1859 that attracted migrants and investment and fueled the growth of Virginia City

Late-19th-century western cattle industry based on open-range grazing, long drives to railroad towns, and shipment to eastern markets

Unfenced cattle grazing system that declined with barbed wire, expanding farms, overgrazing, falling prices, and the severe winter of 1886–1887

Cheap fencing patented successfully in 1874 that protected crops, established property boundaries, and helped end the open range

African Americans who migrated from the post-Reconstruction South, especially to Kansas beginning in 1879, to escape oppression and seek land and autonomy

African American soldiers in segregated western Army regiments, including the 9th and 10th Cavalry, who participated in campaigns against Native nations

Turner’s 1893 theory that free land and repeated westward settlement shaped American democracy, individualism, innovation, and social mobility while overlooking conquest, Native ownership, federal power, women, and nonwhite labor

Federal system that confined Native peoples to restricted lands under extensive government control, freeing other territory for settlers and businesses

1864 attack in which Colorado militia killed about 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly women and children, at a camp whose inhabitants believed they were under federal protection

June 1876 Native victory in which Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated Custer's 7th Cavalry, provoking intensified U.S. retaliation

Chief Joseph became the best-known spokesman for Nez Perce bands that resisted confinement in 1877 and retreated about 1,000 miles toward Canada before surrendering

Commercial hunting, railroads, habitat loss, and military encouragement reduced the bison to fewer than 1,000 by about 1890, devastating Plains Indian life

The 1887 law that divided communal reservation land into individual allotments and opened “surplus” land to outsiders, causing massive Native land loss

Coercive federal policy intended to replace tribal identity, communal landholding, Native religions, and languages with private property, Christianity, English, and individual farming

Influential Native boarding school founded in Pennsylvania in 1879 that became a model for coercive cultural assimilation

The 1889–1890 Native religious movement promising renewal, the return of the dead and bison, and freedom from oppression; officials misread it as an uprising

The 1890 killing of approximately 150 to 300 Lakota, many women and children, by the 7th Cavalry during an attempted disarmament in South Dakota

Post-Reconstruction program for southern industrialization and investment; modernization remained limited by agricultural dependence, rural poverty, and white supremacy

Atlanta Constitution editor and leading New South spokesman who promoted industrialization, northern investment, sectional reconciliation, and continued white rule

Sharecroppers paid landowners with a share of their crop, while tenant farmers rented land and supplied more of their own equipment or capital, giving them somewhat greater independence

Credit system in which merchants claimed a farmer’s future crop as security, encouraging cotton production and recurring debt

Southern system of laws, customs, inequality, and violence that enforced racial segregation and Black subordination after Reconstruction

1883 Supreme Court decisions striking down major parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 because the Fourteenth Amendment restricted state, not private, discrimination

1896 Supreme Court decision upholding Louisiana’s state-mandated railroad segregation and giving constitutional protection to Jim Crow

Mob killing without trial used to terrorize African Americans and punish political activity, economic success, or resistance to white authority

Black journalist who investigated lynching, exposed its economic and political motives, and campaigned for protest and federal action

Tuskegee Institute leader who promoted vocational education, property ownership, economic self-help, and cautious accommodation to segregation

Washington’s 1895 position emphasizing Black economic and vocational progress while deferring demands for immediate social and political equality

Steelmaking process that forced air through molten iron to remove impurities, making steel faster and cheaper to produce

Developed a commercially practical incandescent lamp and an integrated system of generators, wiring, and direct-current distribution

Inventor who received a major telephone patent in 1876 and demonstrated the electrical transmission of speech

Uniform regional times adopted by railroads in 1883 to eliminate confusion caused by local solar time

Railcar that carried meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables over long distances without rapid spoilage

Business legally separate from its owners that can raise capital by selling stock and bonds, normally provides limited liability, and continues despite changes in ownership

Large-scale manufacture of standardized goods using machinery, specialized labor, and coordinated production to increase output and lower costs

Vertical integration gives one company control over successive stages of production and distribution, while horizontal integration absorbs or controls competitors at the same stage of an industry

Trusts centralized several corporations by transferring voting stock to trustees, while holding companies achieved similar control by owning controlling stock in other corporations

Market condition in which one seller controls all or nearly all of an industry, limiting effective competition

Steel industrialist who used vertical integration, modern machinery, and close cost control to build the dominant U.S. steel enterprise

Vertically integrated steel company that controlled key supplies and transportation, lowered costs, and dominated U.S. steel production in the 1890s

Oil industrialist who built Standard Oil through horizontal integration, railroad rebates, and later vertical integration

Oil corporation that absorbed competing refineries and expanded into pipelines, storage, transportation, and marketing, controlling roughly 90 percent of U.S. refining by the early 1880s

Powerful investment banker who reorganized indebted railroads, arranged mergers, and concentrated financial influence over major industries

Railroad leader who consolidated shorter lines into large systems such as the New York Central, improving regional and national service

Competing interpretations portraying industrialists either as monopolistic exploiters or as efficient innovators who created jobs, growth, and lower prices

Federal law outlawing restraints of interstate trade and monopolization, though early enforcement against corporations was weak

Belief that competition and private contracts should govern the economy with minimal regulation or public relief

Application of competitive evolution to society that portrayed inequality as natural and defended limited government

The first major interstate labor uprising spread from Martinsburg after wage cuts but was defeated when federal troops reopened rail traffic

A national labor organization that attempted to unite skilled and unskilled workers, including women and Black workers, and sought broad reforms and worker-owned cooperatives before declining after failed strikes and the Haymarket backlash

A federation founded in 1886 that organized mainly skilled craft workers and pursued practical gains through bargaining and strikes

Longtime AFL leader who promoted craft organization and bread-and-butter gains in wages, hours, and working conditions

Negotiation between an employer and workers acting through a union over wages, hours, and working conditions

An 1886 Chicago labor rally where an unknown person threw a bomb, leading the public to associate organized labor with anarchism and violence and contributing to the Knights of Labor’s decline

An 1892 strike at Carnegie Steel defeated after a Pinkerton battle, state-militia occupation, and reopening with nonunion labor

An 1894 wage dispute that became a nationwide rail boycott and collapsed after a federal injunction and troops restored service

Leader of the American Railway Union who organized the Pullman boycott and was jailed for violating a federal injunction

Old immigrants generally came from northern and western Europe; new immigrants increasingly came from southern and eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s

Push factors drive people from an origin, such as poverty or persecution; pull factors attract them to a destination, such as jobs, freedom, land, or family networks

First major federal law barring immigration by a particular nationality and labor category; it suspended Chinese labor immigration for ten years

Federal immigration station opened in New York Harbor in 1892 and became the best-known processing point for European immigrants

Opposition to immigrants and defense of native-born interests or culture, often based on economic, religious, racial, or political fears

Organized efforts by schools, reformers, employers, and officials to teach English and encourage conformity to dominant American customs and civic ideals

A neighborhood concentrated around one ethnic or national group that supplied housing, jobs, mutual aid, familiar languages, religion, businesses, and cultural institutions

Multifamily urban rental buildings divided into small apartments, often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, unsanitary, and vulnerable to disease and fire

The growth of cities and of the proportion of people living in urban areas, accelerated by immigration, internal migration, and industrial employment

Hierarchical party organizations that traded jobs, aid, and services for votes while often practicing graft, fraud, and favoritism

New York City Democratic political machine that mobilized immigrants and distributed services while engaging in extensive corruption

Tammany Hall boss who used control of New York City offices and inflated public contracts to obtain kickbacks; convicted in 1873

Reform movement in which educated residents provided services, studied urban conditions, and advocated for immigrant and working-class neighborhoods

Jane Addams co-founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889 as a settlement providing services, social investigation, and reform advocacy for immigrant and working-class neighborhoods

Growing urban group of salaried managers, professionals, clerical workers, and independent proprietors with more security and disposable income than industrial laborers

Salaried office, professional, clerical, or sales work associated with education, regular schedules, and middle-class status

Culture of mass purchasing encouraged by industrial production, advertising, national markets, and middle-class disposable income and status seeking

Department stores promoted urban mass consumption by gathering varied goods under one roof, while mail-order catalogs connected rural and small-town consumers with national markets

Belief that the wealthy should act as trustees of surplus fortunes and fund institutions for public benefit and self-improvement rather than give indiscriminate relief

Private donations by wealthy industrialists to libraries, colleges, museums, hospitals, parks, research, and other educational or urban institutions

Protestant movement applying Christian ethics to poverty and inequality and calling for institutional reform rather than charity or individual conversion alone

Henry George’s 1879 book Progress and Poverty blamed inequality on private capture of socially created land values and proposed a single tax on unimproved land

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward envisioned a peaceful transition from competitive capitalism to a nationally coordinated cooperative economy

Ideology holding that capitalism’s inequality arose from private ownership of major productive property and advocating collective, cooperative, or public ownership

Large women’s organization founded in 1874 that campaigned against alcohol and, under Frances Willard, expanded into suffrage and other reforms

Organization formed in 1890 by the reunion of the NWSA and AWSA to coordinate the campaign for women’s voting rights

Late-19th-century ideal of an educated and independent woman who entered higher education, paid work, politics, or reform and challenged traditional domestic restrictions

Practice of awarding government jobs to loyal party supporters, strengthening party organizations but encouraging favoritism and corruption

Scandal in which Union Pacific insiders used the Crédit Mobilier construction company to overcharge the railroad and distributed discounted stock to members of Congress to prevent investigation

Grant-era scandal exposed in 1875 in which distillers and federal officials conspired to evade liquor taxes and divide the stolen revenue

1883 law creating merit-based examinations for some federal jobs and barring required political contributions from covered employees

Stalwarts defended Republican patronage, while their Half-Breed rivals gave qualified support to civil service reform

Reform Republicans who rejected James G. Blaine as corrupt and supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884

Republican campaign tactic invoking Civil War memories and associating Democrats with secession and the Confederacy

Former Confederate states dominated by white Democrats after Reconstruction through disfranchisement, violence, and appeals to home rule and white supremacy

The 1877 Supreme Court decision upholding state regulation of private property, such as grain warehouses, when it affected the public interest

The 1886 Supreme Court decision ruling that states could not regulate railroad traffic crossing state boundaries

Prohibited certain discriminatory railroad practices and created the initially weak Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate interstate railroads

First permanent federal regulatory commission, created to oversee interstate railroads but initially weakened by limited resources and courts

Financial panic followed by bank failures, business collapse, unemployment, and depression without a federal safety net

Severe depression marked by railroad and bank failures, business collapse, unemployment, and intensified demands for federal action

1870s third party of farmers and some workers that sought continued paper currency and an expanded money supply

The gold standard limited currency to gold-backed value and favored creditors, while free silver sought unlimited silver coinage to expand the money supply, raise prices, and ease debt

Law ending standard silver-dollar coinage, later condemned by silver advocates as the “Crime of ’73.”

1878 law requiring limited monthly federal silver purchases, expanding coinage but falling short of free silver

1890 law increasing federal silver purchases; pressure on gold reserves led Cleveland to secure its repeal during the Panic of 1893

Agrarian third party seeking stronger government regulation, currency expansion, political democratization, and relief for farmers and workers

Populists’ 1892 program calling for free silver, an income tax, railroad control, a subtreasury, direct democracy, and other reforms

Democratic presidential nominee in 1896 who championed free silver and appealed to farmers and debtors against creditor interests

Bryan’s 1896 speech condemning the gold standard and demanding that ordinary producers not be sacrificed to creditor interests

McKinley defeated Bryan, preserving the gold standard and weakening Populism as an independent party while leaving its reform agenda alive