Background Knowledge
This war increased sectional tensions by raising the question of whether slavery would expand into newly acquired lands.
What is the Mexican-American War?
Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe often took low-paying jobs and lived in these ethnic neighborhoods.
What are ethnic enclaves?
Workers joined unions during the Gilded Age to gain better wages, working conditions, and shorter hours.
What are labor unions?
This industrialist used vertical integration to control all stages of steel production.
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
This term describes government policy of limited interference in the economy.
What is laissez-faire capitalism?
This belief encouraged expansion and raised disputes over whether new territories would permit slavery.
What is Manifest Destiny?
Rising immigration from Southern/Eastern Europe and Asia contributed to this anti-immigrant sentiment
What is nativism?
This union accepted both skilled and unskilled workers.
What is the Knights of Labor?
This business leader used horizontal integration and trusts to dominate the oil industry.
Who is John D. Rockefeller?
These political organizations provided favors and services in exchange for votes.
What are political machines?
This political movement focused on stopping the expansion of slavery into new territories.
What is the Free-Soil Movement?
This 1882 law banned Chinese immigration for a period of time.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Employers often used this tactic—closing factories and hiring strikebreakers—to weaken unions.
What are lockouts and strikebreakers?
Critics called Gilded Age industrialists “robber barons” because they did this.
What is exploited workers and concentrated wealth?
This group of African Americans migrated to Kansas seeking escape from Southern violence and oppression.
Who were the Exodusters?
These three Reconstruction Amendments attempted to provide freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to formerly enslaved people.
What are the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?
Many immigrants supported political machines like Tammany Hall because machines provided these services.
What are jobs, assistance, and services?
This violent event in Chicago linked labor activism to radicalism and hurt union support.
What is the Haymarket Riot?
Supporters argued industrialists were innovators who helped modernize the nation.
Who were captains of industry?
This massacre became a symbol of federal violence against Native Americans.
What is Wounded Knee?
This act provided free land to settlers and encouraged westward expansion.
What is the Homestead Act?
Overcrowded, unsafe apartment buildings where many working-class immigrant families lived.
What are tenements?
This strike showed industrialists were willing to use force to break unions.
What is the Homestead Strike?
This financier is most closely associated with General Electric and modern finance.
Who is J.P. Morgan?
This term describes the destruction of buffalo herds and relocation to reservations that ended Plains Indians’ traditional life.
What is forced assimilation and cultural destruction?