Manifest Destiny & The West
This term describes the 19th-century belief that the U.S. was destined by God to expand its dominion across the entire North American continent.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This 1857 Supreme Court ruling stated that African Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.
What is the Dred Scott Decision?
These three Constitutional Amendments (numbered) abolished slavery and granted citizenship and voting rights to African Americans.
What are the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?
This massive project, completed in 1869, relied heavily on immigrant labor and connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by rail.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
These centers, such as Jane Addams’ Hull House, were created in cities to provide education and child care for the urban poor.
What are Settlement Houses?
This 1862 act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers with 160 acres of public land in exchange for five years of improvement.
What is the Homestead Act?
This political party emerged in the North in the 1850s, primarily opposing the expansion of slavery into new territories.
What is the Republican Party?
This labor system trapped many Southern farmers, including freedmen, in a cycle of debt and "peonage" following the Civil War.
What is Sharecropping?
This 1890 legislation was the first federal attempt to limit the power of business monopolies and trusts.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
This New York City political organization, led by "Boss" Tweed, provided services to immigrants in exchange for political loyalty.
What is Tammany Hall?
This 1848 land acquisition from Mexico sparked intense debates over whether slavery should be allowed in the newly gained territories.
What is the Mexican Cession?
This 1854 act allowed for "popular sovereignty" in two territories, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise and leading to violence.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
This 1896 Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This group of investigative journalists exposed corruption in business and government, paving the way for future reforms.
Who are the Muckrakers?
This political party was formed by farmers to advocate for the free coinage of silver and government ownership of railroads.
What is the Populist (or People's) Party?
To increase trade, the U.S. launched economic and diplomatic initiatives to create more ties with this specific continent during the mid-1800s.
What is Asia?
This minority group in the North used moral arguments and sometimes violence to campaign against the institution of slavery.
Who are Abolitionists?
This federal agency was created during Reconstruction to provide social and economic infrastructure, like schools, for formerly enslaved people.
What is the Freedmen’s Bureau?
This ideology applied "survival of the fittest" to human society and was used by many to justify the gap between the rich and the poor.
What is Social Darwinism?
This 1882 law was the first major federal legislation to suspend immigration for a specific ethnic group.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
These were the two main European immigrant groups that arrived in the mid-1800s and often settled in ethnic communities to preserve their customs.
Who are the Irish and Germans?
Abraham Lincoln won the Election of 1860 without receiving a single electoral vote from this region of the country.
What is the South?
This 1877 political agreement resulted in the removal of federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
New business structures, such as these, allowed corporations to consolidate and concentrate wealth by controlling multiple companies.
What are Trusts (or Holding Companies)?
This religious movement sought to improve society through moral and political reforms, targeting poverty and social injustice.
What is the Social Gospel?