Rails & Trails
This 1862 Act incentivized Western migration by offering 160 acres of land to anyone who lived on and improved it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
Mark Twain coined this two-word term to describe an era of massive wealth masking deep social corruption.
What is the Gilded Age?
This 1887 law aimed to "Americanize" Native Americans by breaking up reservations into individual 160-acre plots.
What is the Dawes Act?
This term describes journalists like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair who exposed the "muck" of industrial corruption.
Who are Muckrakers?
Known as the "Rough Rider," he became president after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Who is Theodore Roosevelt?
In 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at this Utah location to complete the Transcontinental Railroad.
What is Promontory Summit (or Promontory Point)?
Andrew Carnegie utilized this specific chemical process to turn iron into cheap, mass-producible steel.
What is the Bessemer Process?
These two famous Lakota leaders fought to protect their ancestral lands against white settlers moving West for gold and land.
Who are Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse?
William Jennings Bryan delivered this famous speech in 1896, arguing that the gold standard would "crucify" the working class.
What is the "Cross of Gold" speech?
Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program aimed to balance the needs of workers, business, and consumers was called this.
What is the Square Deal?
This immigrant group provided the bulk of the dangerous labor for the Central Pacific, often blasting through the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Who are Chinese immigrants?
This Standard Oil founder used "Horizontal Integration" to control nearly 90% of the American oil refining industry.
Who is John D. Rockefeller?
This animal’s population dropped from 60 million to roughly 541 by 1889 as a result of a deliberate military strategy to destroy Native resources.
What is the Buffalo (or Bison)?
This African American journalist and activist led a lifelong crusade against lynching and for women's suffrage.
Who is Ida B. Wells-Barnett?
Despite being Roosevelt's hand-picked successor, this president actually busted twice as many trusts (over 80) as T.R.
Who is William Howard Taft?
Led by "Pap" Singleton, these African American migrants fled the Jim Crow South for Kansas and Oklahoma in the late 1870s.
Who are the Exodusters?
This French economic term describes a "hands-off" government approach to business regulation.
What is Laissez-faire?
Nearly 300 Lakota were killed at this 1890 event, which marked the end of the Ghost Dance movement and armed Native resistance.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre?
This was the name of Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic program, which aimed to balance the needs of workers, business, and consumers.
What is the Square Deal?
Roosevelt utilized the "Bully Pulpit" to push for the construction of this massive engineering project in Central America.
What is the Panama Canal?
The late 1890s gold rush in this northern region created "Boomtowns" and accelerated the infrastructure of the Pacific Coast.
What is the Klondike Gold Rush?
This ideology applied the concept of "survival of the fittest" to human society and was used to justify the vast wealth of industrial giants.
What is Social Darwinism?
This Nez Perce leader famously surrendered in 1877, declaring, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
Who is Chief Joseph?
This political party was formed by Western farmers to fight for "Bimetallism" and the regulation of railroad rates.
What is the Populist Party (or People's Party)?
This scandal involving protected land caused a major rift between Taft and Roosevelt, eventually turning them into rivals.
What is the Ballinger-Pinchot Scandal?