Period 6 Part I (Chapters 1-7) Flashcards
(35 cards)
Transcontinental Railroad
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).
Homestead Act
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.
Dry Farming
The practice of using shallow cultivation to grow crops in the dry western environment.
National Grange Movement
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.
Turner’s Frontier Thesis
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.
Assimilation
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.
Dawes Severalty Act
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”.
Little Big Horn
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.
Ghost Dance
The religiously inspired last effort of Native Americans to resist U.S. government controls.
Yosemite
Preserved as a California state park in 1864, becoming a national park in 1890.
Yellowstone
The first national park, dedicated in 1872.
Sharecropping
Paying for the use of land with a share of one’s crop.
Tuskegee Institute
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.
Plessy v. Ferguson
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.”
Jim Crow Laws
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.
Literacy Tests
A test administered as a precondition for voting, often used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.
Poll Taxes
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.
Grandfather Clauses
Allowed a man to vote if his grandfather had voted in elections before Reconstruction.
Lynch Mobs
Killed more than 1,400 Black men during the 1890s.
Bessemer Process
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.
Electric Light
Light produced by electricity, created by Thomas Edison with the first practical electric lightbulb in 1879.
Consumer Economy
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.
US Steel
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.
Standard Oil
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.
