Civil War & Reconstruction
These slaveholding states stayed in the Union and brought advantages such as population, factories, and major rivers.
What are the Border States
These laws disenfranchised Black voters using literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation.
What are Jim Crow Laws?
This 1881 book by Helen Hunt Jackson exposed the federal government’s mistreatment of Native Americans.
What is A Century of Dishonor?
This company, formed by Rockefeller, controlled 95% of American oil refining by 1877.
What is Standard Oil?
This photographer exposed the horrors of child labor in Progressive-Era factories.
Who is Lewis Hine?
This 1862 battle gave Lincoln the moment he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
What is Antietam?
This Supreme Court case ruled “separate but equal” constitutional.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This act attempted to Americanize Native people by dissolving tribes and allotting land.
What is the Dawes Act?
This inventor held 1,000+ patents, including the lightbulb and motion pictures.
Who is Thomas Edison?
This act banned contaminated or mislabeled food and medicines.
What is the Pure Food and Drug Act?
This agency’s greatest success was expanding schools and providing education for freedpeople across the South.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
This postwar system forced prisoners—mostly Black men—into brutal labor for state governments.
What are Chain Gangs?
This Native leader defeated the U.S. Army during the Fetterman Fight and negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty.
Who is Chief Red Cloud?
These immigrants, arriving after 1880 from southern and eastern Europe, provided much of the industrial labor force that powered Gilded Age factories, but faced significant discrimination from earlier immigrant groups.
Who are "New" Immigrants?
This aggressive foreign policy attitude, fueled by sensationalist journalism and national pride in the late 19th century, helped push the United States into the Spanish-American War by demanding a more confrontational stance toward Spain.
What is Jingoism?
This political conflict over readmission plans showed the deep divide between Lincoln and Congress.
What is the Wade-Davis Bill?
This system legally trapped workers into endless repayment to employers, unlike sharecropping.
What is Debt Peonage?
The greatest challenge for Great Plains homesteaders in the 1870s — more than markets or land prices — was this.
What is the scarcity of water/resources?
Founded in 1886, this labor union became the most influential in the late 19th century by focusing on collective bargaining for skilled workers rather than broad social reform.
What is the American Federation of Labor (AFL)?
A pioneering journalist and civil rights activist, she exposed the reality that lynching was not a response to crime but a tool of racial terror designed to maintain white supremacy, launching an international anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s.
Who is Iba B. Wells?
This political bargain, which resolved the contested 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and effectively ended Reconstruction.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
Intended to protect formerly enslaved people, this amendment’s Equal Protection Clause later served as the basis for striking down segregation, expanding due process rights, and applying most of the Bill of Rights to the states.
What is the 14th Amendment?
Fear of Native resistance, combined with aggressive federal policing of reservations and the death of Sitting Bull in 1890, led directly to this violent final confrontation between the U.S. military and the Sioux.
What is the Massacre at Wounded Knee?
This 1886 labor protest turned violent when a bomb exploded in a Chicago crowd, causing public fear that unfairly weakened the labor movement—especially the Knights of Labor.
What is the Haymarket Riot?
This Filipino nationalist first fought alongside U.S. forces against Spain, but later led a guerrilla resistance against American annexation when the United States refused to recognize Philippine independence after the Spanish-American War.
Who is Emilio Aguinaldo?