Foundations
The Constitution prevents one part of the government from controlling everything by dividing responsibilities among three branches.
What is Separation of Powers?
A green card gets you closer, but an interview, civics knowledge, and an oath help complete this legal transformation.
What is naturalization?
A Nebraska farmer no longer needed Nebraska customers; because this made distant buyers reachable
What is the transcontinental railroad?
Tough prairie soil and enormous fields presented problems that muscle alone couldn't solve and led the these two innovations.
What is the steel plow and mechanical reaper?
When a pick and shovel weren't enough, miners aimed powerful streams of water at entire hillsides in this appropriately forceful technique.
what is hydraulic mining?
The destruction of this resource attacked more than a food supply—it helped make displacement increasingly difficult for Native peoples to resist.
What is buffalo?
The meaning of E Pluribus Unum.
What is Out of many, one?
A ballot box and a jury summons have this in common: both offer citizens a chance to practice this.
What is Civic Responsibility?
They arrived from opposite directions and faced plenty of prejudice, but their labor eventually met at Promontory Summit.
What is Irish and Chinese immigrants?
These seemingly appeared overnight as people rushed west hoping to strike it rich.
What are Boomtowns?
Before barbed wire started drawing lines across the Plains, cattle could graze across vast stretches of unfenced land known by this
What is the Open Range?
For federal policymakers, success often meant making cultural differences disappear rather than protecting them.
What is assimilation?
This principle means government officials must follow the law and cannot simply exercise unlimited authority.
What is Limited Government?
This economic idea would tell Uncle Sam to keep his hands off the marketplace.
What is Laissez-Faire?
A Chicago businessman could learn western prices before his goods ever arrived there due to this innovation.
What is the telegraph?
This 1862 law turned “Go West” from advice into an offer that hundreds of thousands of Americans found difficult to refuse.
What is the Homestead Act?
The product walked itself hundreds of miles before finishing the journey by rail—a strange supply chain that made this western industry profitable.
What is the Cattle Industry?
In 1887, Congress tried to make “mine” replace “ours” on Native American lands through this.
What is the Dawes Act?
What is the 4th & 7th... the Bill of Rights?
DOUBLE JEOPARDY - Name the two values of Tocqueville that meant: equal opportunity & freedom to own success.
What is egalitarianism & individualism?
These two geographical features made building the railroad that much harder.
Farmers did this to adapt living in the great plains.
What is built homes from sod?
DOUBLE JEOPARDY - Droves of people headed north to get rich not knowing what they'd face along the way.
What is the Klondike Gold Rush?
Americans & ExpansionAt places like Carlisle, a haircut, a uniform, and an English name were considered part of the “education.”
What is Boarding schools?
Jefferson's famous trio wasn't a promise of wealth or property: it named three things people possessed before government ever entered the picture.
What is Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness?
Sofia's parents moved to the United States from Argentina shortly before she was born in Dallas. Her parents later naturalized, but Sofia never did. She is this type of citizen.
What is birthright?
Where the rails went, people followed; by the late 1800s, the West was experiencing this change that could be measured without counting a single mile of track.
What is population growth?
Barbed wire, Homestead, Dawes, Railroad... all of these things led to this being closed.
What is the frontier?
A strike could begin with a handful of prospectors and end with enough permanent residents to eventually earn a western territory this political promotion.
What is statehood?
For settlers, westward expansion meant more land to occupy; for many Native Americans, federal policy increasingly meant less land on these.
What is reservations?