Reconstruction
This constitutional amendment officially abolished slavery throughout the entire United States, permanently making formerly enslaved people "FREE."
What is the 13th Amendment?
This 19th-century belief held that Americans had a "God-given right" to expand across the North American continent to spread democracy and seek new opportunities.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This massive population shift occurred as millions of people left rural farms to move into "exploding" cities for factory jobs.
What is urbanization?
This explosive slogan was used by journalists to rally public support for the Spanish-American War after an American warship sank in Cuba.
What is "Remember the Maine!"?
Ratified in 1920, this historic constitutional amendment granted women's suffrage, finally giving women the right to vote.
What is the 19th Amendment?
This labor system replaced plantations by renting land to farmers in exchange for a share of their crops, but it frequently trapped families in a lifetime cycle of debt.
What is sharecropping?
Passed in 1862, this landmark law drastically accelerated settlement by offering 160 acres of public land to citizens for a small filing fee.
What is the Homestead Act?
This cheap and fast manufacturing breakthrough allowed steel to replace iron, paving the way for skyscrapers and massive railroad expansion.
What is the Bessemer Process?
This processing center off the coast of California served as the primary entry point for Asian immigrants arriving in the United States.
What is Angel Island?
In his shocking book The Jungle, muckraker Upton Sinclair exposed the stomach-churning conditions of this specific American industry.
What is the meatpacking industry?
These state and local laws legally enforced racial segregation in public facilities like schools, restaurants, and transportation until the mid-1960s.
What are Jim Crow laws?
To fully own their land under the Homestead Act, settlers had to live on, cultivate, and improve the plot for this many years.
What is five years?
Because factory conditions were incredibly harsh and dangerous, workers began organizing into these groups to fight for better pay and safety.
What are labor unions?
This foreign policy proposal argued that all countries should have equal trading rights in Chinese markets, preventing any single monopoly.
What is the Open Door Policy?
This civil rights leader and co-founder of the NAACP demanded immediate social and political equality for African Americans through higher education.
Who was W.E.B. Du Bois?
This amendment grants automatic citizenship to any person born on U.S. soil, establishing equal protection under the law.
What is the 14th Amendment?
As settlers pushed west for farming and resources, the U.S. government forced Native Americans onto these designated areas to push assimilation.
What are reservations?
This manufacturing method allowed factories to produce goods significantly faster and cheaper, making everyday products affordable for the masses.
What is mass production?
Once mocked as "Seward's Icebox," this 1867 land purchase from Russia turned out to be incredibly rich in gold, timber, and oil.
What is Alaska?
This type of journalist specialized in digging up and exposing corruption in big business, political machines, and urban slums.
What is a muckraker?
Southern states bypassed the 15th Amendment using this specific legal loophole, which exempted citizens from literacy tests if their ancestors could vote before 1867.
What is the Grandfather Clause?
As expansion choked out indigenous territories, the U.S. government forced Native Americans onto reservations and pushed this policy to absorb them into white American culture.
What is assimilation?
This specific, newly emerging societal group sat economically between the wealthy factory owners and the struggling laborers.
What is the middle class?
This famous 50-mile engineering project took 10 years to build through disease-filled terrain to create a shortcut between two oceans.
What is the Panama Canal?
This progressive political reform gave ordinary citizens the power to completely remove a corrupt elected official from office before their term ended.
What is a recall?