Global Ambitions
This intercepted 1917 German diplomatic communication proposed a secret military alliance between Germany and Mexico against the United States.
What is the Zimmermann Telegram?
Investigative journalists and writers during the early 20th century who used powerful writing and photography to expose corporate corruption and social inequities.
What are Muckrakers?
This 1925 landmark legal battle in Dayton, Tennessee, pitted urban modernizers against rural traditionalists over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
What is the Scopes "Monkey" Trial?
This devastating structural environmental and economic collapse forced millions of "Okie" farmers to abandon their lands and migrate out of the Great Plains in the 1930s.
What is the Dust Bowl?
This 1941 program allowed the United States to act as the "Arsenal of Democracy" by piping billions in military hardware to Allied nations before formal U.S. entry into World War II.
What is the Lend-Lease Act?
Sensationalized newspaper reporting by publishers like Hearst and Pulitzer that inflamed public opinion and helped spark the Spanish-American War.
What is Yellow Journalism?
This author wrote The Jungle in 1906, shocking the nation and forcing the federal government to pass consumer safety laws.
Who is Upton Sinclair?
This transformative cultural movement in an upper Manhattan neighborhood celebrated and flourished African American art, literature, and music.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
hese makeshift shanty towns, built by homeless citizens during the early years of the economic collapse, were named mockingly after the sitting president.
What are Hoovervilles?
This wartime mobilization campaign organized by African American citizens demanded a double victory: over fascism abroad and over racism at home.
What is the Double V Campaign?
This naval strategist argued in 1890 that a powerful modern navy and overseas coaling stations were mandatory for global power projection.
Who is Alfred Thayer Mahan?
This constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, capped off decades of progressive activism by granting women the right to vote.
What is the 19th Amendment?
This constitutional amendment established national Prohibition, representing a major cultural victory for traditionalist social reformers seeking to police morality.
What is the 18th Amendment?
This 1935 New Deal programmatic crown jewel fundamentally altered the social contract by creating permanent retirement pensions and unemployment insurance.
What is the Social Security Act?
This 1947 presidential foreign policy declaration pledged economic and military support to nations threatened by Soviet expansion, legally cementing the Containment Consensus.
What is the Truman Doctrine?
This landmark 1919 Supreme Court case established that the federal government could restrict free speech during wartime if it creates a "clear and present danger."
What is Schenck v. United States?
Theodore Roosevelt championed this domestic program, which balanced aggressive trust-busting, conservation of natural resources, and consumer protection.
What is the Square Deal?
Driven by nativist anxieties, these laws passed in 1921 and 1924 strictly limited the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S., heavily targeting Southern and Eastern Europe.
What are Immigration Quotas (or National Origins Acts)?
This specific practice of investors buying stocks with borrowed money served as a primary economic structural flaw that triggered the 1929 market crash.
What is buying on margin?
Executed under Executive Order 9066, this homefront action resulted in the forced relocation and constitutional violation of over 120,000 citizens based on wartime panic and racism.
What is Japanese American Internment?
While the Teller Amendment promised Cuban independence, this later piece of U.S. legislation gave the United States significant, ongoing control over Cuban affairs.
What is the Platt Amendment?
This progressive social reformer founded Hull House in Chicago to provide vital social services, education, and healthcare to working-class immigrants.
Who is Jane Addams?
This industrial innovation, perfected by Henry Ford for the automobile, revolutionized manufacturing, lowered costs, and drove 1920s mass consumerism.
What is the Assembly Line?
While the First New Deal focused on immediate emergency recovery, this programmatic block from 1935-1938 focused on long-term structural social welfare and labor protections.
What is the Second New Deal?
These series of laws passed in the mid-1930s legally forbade the export of arms or travel on belligerent ships, reflecting the deep interwar isolationist sentiment of the American public.
What are the Neutrality Acts?