What period in U.S. history, from 1865 to 1898, was characterized by the rise of industrial capitalism, westward expansion, and significant social change?
Period 6, also known as the Gilded Age.
The American cattle industry borrowed many of its practices from Mexican cowboys known as _____.
vaqueros
The conservation movement of the Gilded Age led to the creation of the first national parks, such as _____ and Yosemite.
Yellowstone
What agricultural system kept many Southern farmers, both black and white, in a cycle of debt by having them trade a portion of their harvest for land use?
Sharecropping.
What were the state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the South called?
Jim Crow laws.
What two major types of migration fueled urban growth in the Gilded Age?
International migration (especially from southern and eastern Europe) and internal migration from rural areas.
What invention was a major factor in ending the open-range cattle era by enclosing the plains?
Barbed wire.
The _____ of 1887 was a law aimed at assimilating Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands and granting individual plots to families.
Dawes Act
Which African American leader advocated for economic self-help and vocational training as a path to racial equality?
Booker T. Washington.
Which African American leader demanded an immediate end to segregation and the granting of full civil rights?
W.E.B. Du Bois.
The federal government's general policy toward business during the Gilded Age, characterized by minimal regulation, is known as a _____ approach.
laissez-faire
What 1862 act offered 160 acres of free land to citizens who would settle and farm it for five years?
The Homestead Act.
What U.S. government policy toward Native Americans involved confining them to specific, often undesirable, tracts of land?
The reservation policy.
What 1896 Supreme Court case established the doctrine of "separate but equal," upholding the legality of racial segregation?
Plessy v. Ferguson.
Cyrus Field's successful _____ in 1866 revolutionized global communication by linking all continents in a near-instantaneous network.
transatlantic cable
Where and in what year was the first transcontinental railroad completed, creating a national market?
Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.
Pioneering farmers on the Great Plains who built their homes from blocks of turf were known as _____.
sodbusters
Who was the historian that argued the frontier experience was essential in shaping American character, promoting individualism and democracy?
Frederick Jackson Turner.
Who was a key proponent of the "New South" vision, which promoted economic diversity and industrial growth in the post-Reconstruction South?
Henry Grady.
What two Gilded Age inventors were crucial for electrifying cities, one with the incandescent lightbulb and the other with alternating current (AC)?
Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.
What were the rapidly growing frontier settlements created by rushes for gold and silver called?
Boomtowns
What farmers' organization, a precursor to the Populist Party, demanded government regulation of railroads and the unlimited coinage of silver?
The Farmers' Alliances.
What was the platform adopted by the Farmers' Alliance in 1890 that demanded silver coinage, a graduated income tax, and government control of railroads?
The Ocala Platform.
What 1890 event is often considered the end of the Indian Wars, where U.S. troops killed over 200 Lakota men, women, and children?
The Wounded Knee massacre.
What ideology applied the theory of natural selection to human society to justify the concentration of wealth in the hands of the "fittest"?
Social Darwinism.