Expanding the Continent
Bought from France in 1803 for $15 million, it doubled the size of the country and opened the road west.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
Declared in 1823, it warned European powers against replacing Spanish influence in the newly independent republics of the Americas.
What is the Monroe Doctrine?
This naval captain's two books of 1890 argued that sea power, overseas coaling stations and a canal across Panama made nations great. Roosevelt and Lodge agreed.
Who is Alfred Thayer Mahan?
Union Pacific and Central Pacific crews met at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869 to complete this.
What is the transcontinental railroad?
Passed in 1887 to prohibit unfair railroad practices, it created the first federal regulatory agency.
What is the Interstate Commerce Act?
He claimed the main objective in annexing the Philippines in 1899 was to Christianise a population that had been Catholic for three centuries.
Who is President William McKinley?
Signed in 1848, this treaty ended the war with Mexico and transferred most of the south-west to the United States for $15 million.
What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
Hawaii's last monarch: a nationalist who took the throne in 1891 and was overthrown by sugar planters two years later.
Who is Queen Liliʻuokalani?
This economic shock turned the desire for foreign markets into an urgent need, and forced tariff cuts in exchange for reciprocal deals with Latin America.
What is the depression of 1893?
Patented in 1856, it blasted air through molten pig iron. Steel rails fell from roughly $170 a ton in 1867 to under $20 by the 1890s.
What is the Bessemer process?
Founded in 1869 and open to skilled and unskilled alike, it peaked near 700,000 members in 1886 and collapsed once Haymarket was blamed on labour radicalism.
What are the Knights of Labor?
This Secretary of State arranged the 1867 purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million, arguing its harbours would open northern Asia to American trade.
Who is William H. Seward?
Passed in 1882, it reversed the free movement guaranteed by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 — once the railroads no longer needed the labour.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Delegates from 18 nations met in Washington in October 1889 to discuss a customs union, hemispheric free trade and international arbitration. The talks stalled when Argentine delegates argued the arbitration body would become a tool of US control.
What is the First Pan-American Conference?
America's first oil well was drilled here in 1859 — and the fortune that followed was built on lighting, not driving.
What is Titusville, Pennsylvania?
About 1.5 million arrivals between 1884 and 1903, heavily Italian, recruited and subsidised to replace enslaved labour on São Paulo coffee estates after abolition in 1888.
What is Brazil?
Ten million dollars and roughly 29,000 square miles bought from Mexico in 1853–54, chiefly to secure a southern railroad route to the Pacific.
What is the Gadsden Purchase?
Added in 1905, it turned a defensive warning into a claimed right to intervene in the internal affairs of hemispheric neighbours.
What is the Roosevelt Corollary?
This 1868 treaty guaranteed free trade and free movement of people between China and the United States because the railroads needed workers. It was gutted by the Chinese Exclusion Act fourteen years later.
What is the Burlingame Treaty?
Two names for the same men: one says they built productive capacity at an unheard-of scale, the other says they got rich by rigging markets, buying legislatures and crushing labor.
What are captains of industry and robber barons?
This 1890 law was supposed to break up monopolies and trusts that restrained trade.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
The census of 1890 reported that a continuous line of settlement no longer existed. Three years later Frederick Jackson Turner built a thesis on its closing that historians still argue about.
What is the frontier?
This 1844 unequal treaty gave the United States trade privileges in China and the right to send missionaries there.
What is the Treaty of Wanghia?
The most important American invention of the era was not a machine but this, born on the railroads: salaried middle managers, divisional structures, written operating rules and cost accounting.
What is the modern managed corporation?
In this 1889 essay, Carnegie admitted great fortunes were unjust in origin but argued the rich should act as trustees and give it all away before they died.
What is "The Gospel of Wealth"?
This 1892 strike at Carnegie's steel plant turned into a gun battle between workers and 300 Pinkerton guards, and ended when 8,000 state militia occupied the town.
What is the Homestead Strike?
Mexican historians name their overlapping period after a president rather than after corruption or after industry.
What is the Porfiriato?
Díaz's technocratic advisers, who argued that order and foreign investment would modernise Mexico and that democracy could wait. By 1910 foreigners owned most of the mines, oil and railways.
Who are the científicos?
By the 1890s the success of these had produced American fears that Japan had become a rival in the Far East; Japan then defeated China in 1894–95.
What are the Meiji reforms?
A headnote to this 1886 tax case recorded that corporations counted as "persons" under an amendment ratified in 1868 to protect freed people.
What is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific?
Eugene V. Debs led this 1894 railcar boycott, which was broken by a federal court injunction and then by federal troops sent over the governor's objection.
What is the Pullman Strike?