Unit 6

• Political Machine


  a party organization that recruits voter loyalty with tangible incentives and is characterized by a high degree of control over member activity
• Boss Tweed

  American politician most notable for being the political boss of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party's political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th-century New York City and state
• Urbanization


  the movement of populations from rural to urban areas increasing the number of people that live in urban areas;
• Homestead Act


  several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain; landowners were required to live on and cultivate or improve your plot of land in order to be entitled to the property free and clear after five years for a small fee
• Pacific Railway Act

  series of acts of Congress that promoted the construction of a "transcontinental railroad" in the United States through authorizing the issuance of government bonds and the grants of land to railroad companies; designated the 32nd parallel as the initial transcontinental route
• Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882


  passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur which provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States; aimed to restrict immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States in order to protect employment opportunities for American workers
• The Long Drive


  a system by which cowboys herded cattle hundreds of miles north from Texas to Dodge City and the other cow towns of Kansas
• Dawes Severalty Act


  passed in 1887 under President Grover Cleveland, allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands; an attempt to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions, and as a result, over ninety million acres of tribal land were stripped from Native Americans and sold to non-natives
• Massacre at Wounded Knee


  the deadliest mass shooting in American history, involving nearly three hundred Lakota people shot and killed by soldiers of the United States Army
• Battle of Little Big Horn


  a decisive victory for the Sioux in the short term, but in the long term, it only worsened relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government; following the battle, the government increased its efforts to drive Native Americans off of their lands and onto reservations
• Exodusters


  a name given to African Americans who migrated from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century
• Social Darwinism


  the belief that only the fittest survive in human political and economic struggle; a belief held by many that stated that the rich were rich and the poor were poor due to natural selection in society.
• Gospel of Wealth

  great wealth brought lots of responsibility and was the most efficient result of capitalism; Carnegie argued that extremely wealthy Americans like himself had a responsibility to spend their money in order to benefit the greater good in order to decrease the gap between the rich and the poor
• Laissez-Faire


  the less the government is involved in the economy, the better off business will be, and by extension, society as a whole; separation between economy and state
• Andrew Carnegie


  an American industrialist and philanthropist; lled the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history; promoted the Gospel of Wealth
• John D. Rockefeller

  an American business magnate and philanthropist; founded the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust; the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history
• Standard Oil

  John D. Rockefeller's company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age; controlled 95% of the oil refineries in the U.S and was one of the first multinational corporations
• Trust


  a new type of industrial organization, in which the voting rights of a controlling number of shares of competing firms were entrusted to a small group of men, or trustees, who thus were able to prevent competition among the companies they controlled
• American Federation of Labor

  a union of skilled laborers formed by Samuel Gompers in 1866; quickly became one of the most powerful unions in the United States; focused on winning economic benefits for its members through collective bargaining
• Horatio Alger Myth

  a fiction based on a fraudulent representation of his actual failed accomplishments and published stories of self-improvement; the belief that because limitless possibilities exists in the US, anyone can get ahead if they work hard
• Knights of Labor

  founded in 1869 as a secret society of garnet workers in Philadelphia, but emerged as a national movement by 1878; believed that fraternity was harnessed to labor reform, and intended to set up factories and shops that would lead to a cooperative commonwealth
• Samuel Gompers


  British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history; founded the American Federation of Labor
• Eugene Debs

  an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States
• Great Railroad Strike 1877


  after wages were cut, this was the country's first major rail strike and witnessed the first general strike in the nation's history; briefly paralyzed the country's commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic
• Homestead Strike

  an industrial lockout and strike that began on July 1, 1892, a bloody confrontation ensued between the workers and the hired Pinkerton security guards, ultimately killing 16 people and causing many injuries
• Scientific Management


  a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows; its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity
• Populist Party

  a political group that gained much support from farmers who turned to them to fight political unfairness; represented the interests of farmers and laborers; felt that the government was influenced by industrialists & bankers who favored gold to back U.S. dollars while they favored free coinage of silver and other reforms
• The Grangers


  a coalition of U.S. farmers, particularly in the Middle West, that fought monopolistic grain transport practices during the decade following the American Civil War; one of the forerunners of the Populist and Progressive movements
• Election of 1896


  Republican William McKinley defeated Democratic-Populist "Popocrat" William Jennings Bryan; McKinley won promoting the gold standard, pluralism, and industrial growth while Bryan lost promoting populist ideals
• William Jennings Bryan


  ran for president in 1896 against William McKinley; leader of the Democrats in the Chicago convention of 1896 who was a supporter of free silver and populist ideals; won his audiences with biblical fervor
• The "New" Immigration

  immigrants coming to America in the 1890's consistenting of Southern and Eastern Europeans as well as any Asians; often poor and uneducated, and many were members of non-Protestant religions; faced discrimination and prejudice from the earlier waves of immigrants and from native-born Americans, who viewed them as culturally and socially different;
• US vs. Won Kim Ark

  the Supreme Court ruling that determined the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted birthright citizenship to all persons born in the United States regardless of race or nationality
• Jim Crow

  any state or local laws that enforced or legalized racial segregation; lasted for almost 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until around 1968, and their main purpose was to legalize the marginalization of African Americans
• Plessy vs. Ferguson

  a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal"
• Grandfather Clause


  a provision that allowed a voter to avoid a literacy test if his father or grandfather had been eligible to vote on January 1st, 1867 OR a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases
• Literacy Tests

  a test administered as a precondition for voting, often used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote
• Poll Taxes


  a tax of a fixed amount per person and payable as a requirement for the right to vote
• The "New South"


  rapid and far-reaching environmental, economic, and social transformations in the south; Henry W. Grady, a newspaper editor in Atlanta, Georgia, coined this phrase urging the South to abandon its longstanding agrarian economy for a modern economy grounded in factories, mines, and mills
• WEB DuBois

  an important black protest leader in the United States; helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); also helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers
• Booker T. Washington

  as a black man and formerly enslaved person living in the South, he was criticized for being an "apologist" to white people as he urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of whites