13th Amendment (1865)
Abolished slavery without compensation for slave-owners
14th Amendment (1868)
Grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the US"; it forbids any state to deny any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.
15th Amendment (1870)
States cannot deny any person the right to vote because of race.
Alecander Graham Bell
Invented the telephone
American Federation of Labor
1886; founded by Samuel Gompers; sought better wages, hrs, working conditions
Black Codes
Laws denying most legal rights to newly freed slaves; passed by southern states following the Civil War
Booker T. Washington
African American progressive who supported segregation and demanded that African American better themselves individually to achieve equality.
Andrew Carnegie
Built a steel mill empire; US STEEL
Carpetbaggers
northern whites who moved to the south and served as republican leaders during reconstruction
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
law that suspended Chinese immigration into America. The ban was supposed to last 10 years, but it was expanded several times and was essentially in effect until WWII. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law that restricted immigration into the United States of an ethnic working group.
Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887
abolished communal ownership on Indian reservations; each family head got 160 acres of reservation land; 80 acres for a single person; 40 acres for each dependent child. More than two-thirds of Indians' remaining lands were lost due to this law.
W.E.B. DuBois
1st black to earn Ph.D. from Harvard, encouraged blacks to resist systems of segregation and discrimination, helped create NAACP in 1910
Thomas Edison
Invented the light bulb
Haymarket Affair
1886 incident that made unions, particularly the Knights of Labor, look violent because a bomb exploded during a protest of striking workers.
Interstate Commerce Act
1887 law passed to regulate railroad and other interstate businesses
Jim Crow Laws
Laws designed to enforce segregation of blacks from whites
Samual F.B. Morse
inventor of the telegraph
Open Door
A policy proposed by the US in 1899, under which ALL nations would have equal opportunities to trade in China.
Panama Canal
Ship canal cut across the isthmus of Panama by United States, it opened in 1915.
People's Party
formed in 1892, the populist party was created by farmers' alliances. The peoples' party supported the abolition of national banks and the government ownership of railroads
Plessy v. Ferguson
a 1896 Supreme Court decision which legalized state ordered segregation so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal
Radical Republicans
After the Civil War, a group that believed the South should be harshly punished and thought that Lincoln was sometimes too compassionate towards the South.
Railway Strike of 1877
striking workers responding to wage cuts, caused massive property destruction in several cities
John D. Rockefeller
Established the Standard Oil Company, the greatest, wisest, and meanest monopoly known in history
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)
Outlawed monopolies and practices that restrained trade, such as price fixing
Sharecropping
A system used on southern farms after the Civil War in which farmers worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops.
Spanish-American War
In 1898, a conflict between the United States and Spain, in which the U.S. supported the Cubans' fight for independence
Gustavus Swift
In the 1800s he enlarged fresh meat markets through branch slaughterhouses and refrigeration. He monopolized the meat industry.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
A railroad owner who built a railway connecting Chicago and New York. He popularized the use of steel rails in his railroad, which made railroads safer and more economical.