The Last Frontier
This 1862 law offered 160 acres free to anyone who farmed it for five years, drawing hundreds of thousands onto the Plains.
What is the Homestead Act?
Custer's Seventh Cavalry was annihilated at this June 1876 Montana battle by Lakota and Cheyenne forces.
What is the Little Bighorn?
This steelmaker controlled ore, ships, railroads, and mills — an approach called vertical integration — before selling out to J. P. Morgan in 1901
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
A bomb thrown at this 1886 Chicago rally killed seven police officers and destroyed the public standing of the Knights of Labor.
What is Haymarket Square?
Sequence these: Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, Dawes Severalty Act.
What is Little Bighorn (1876), Dawes Act (1887), Wounded Knee (1890)?
The golden spike driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May 1869 marked completion of this project, built largely by Chinese and Irish laborers.
What is the first transcontinental railroad?
Railroad construction and commercial hunting reduced this animal from tens of millions to a few hundred, collapsing the Plains economy.
What is the buffalo (bison)?
Rockefeller's Standard Oil pioneered this legal device in 1882, placing competitors' stock under a single board of trustees.
What is the trust?
Samuel Gompers founded this 1886 federation of skilled craft unions focused on "bread and butter" goals — wages, hours, and conditions.
What is the American Federation of Labor?
Of Haymarket, the Pullman Strike, and the Homestead Strike, this one came second.
What is the Homestead Strike
Joseph Glidden's 1874 patent gave farmers cheap fencing for a treeless landscape — and ended the open range.
What is barbed wire?
Pursued over 1,500 miles toward Canada in 1877, this Nez Perce leader surrendered with the words "I will fight no more forever."
Who is Chief Joseph?
Carnegie's 1889 essay argued that the wealthy were mere trustees of their fortunes, obligated to give them away in their lifetimes.
What is "The Gospel of Wealth"?
Henry Clay Frick's hiring of 300 Pinkerton agents turned this 1892 Pennsylvania steel strike into a pitched battle.
What is the Homestead Strike?
Order these: Roosevelt Corollary, Spanish-American War, Open Door Notes, opening of the Panama Canal
What is Spanish-American War (1898), Open Door Notes (1899–1900), Roosevelt Corollary (1904), Panama Canal (1914)?
Overgrazing, falling beef prices, and the brutal blizzards of 1886–87 destroyed this practice of driving Texas cattle north to railheads.
What is the long drive (open-range ranching)?
This 1887 law broke reservations into individual 160-acre allotments, aiming to turn Native people into private farmers and selling the "surplus."
What is the Dawes Severalty Act?
This 1890 law banned "combinations in restraint of trade" but was so vaguely worded that courts initially used it chiefly against labor unions.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
The 1894 Pullman boycott was broken when federal troops intervened on the grounds that strikers were obstructing this.
What is the U.S. mail (interstate commerce)?
This 1924 law set quotas at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the 1890 census, deliberately targeting southern and eastern Europeans.
What is the National Origins Act (Johnson-Reed Act)?
In an 1893 address in Chicago, this historian argued that the closing of the frontier marked the end of the first period of American history.
Who is Frederick Jackson Turner (the "frontier thesis")?
Army attempts to suppress this spiritual revival movement culminated in the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek
What is the Ghost Dance?
Thinkers like William Graham Sumner applied Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" to business competition under this label.
What is Social Darwinism?
Founded in 1905 and nicknamed the "Wobblies," this radical union welcomed unskilled workers and sought "One Big Union."
What is the Industrial Workers of the World?
Interior Secretary Albert Fall's secret leasing of naval oil reserves produced this defining scandal of the Harding administration.
What is Teapot Dome?