Modern U.S.

Study Guide for Midterm

Possible Key Terms:

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War,
abolished slavery in the United States. The 13th Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

John Wilkes Booth was an American actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's
Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865
Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson
assumed the presidency as he was vice president of the United States at the time of the assassination
of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, Johnson came
to office as the Civil War concluded. He favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union.
His plans did not give protection to the former slaves; he came into conflict with the Republican-
dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives. He was
acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Johnson's main accomplishment as president is the Alaska
purchase.

14th Amendment (1868) to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and
equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after
the American Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase “all persons born or naturalized in
the United States.

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 14,
1932, San Marino, California), American historian best known for the “frontier thesis.” The single
most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United
States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal
interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a
multicausal model of history, with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics, culture, and
geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential
and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Rutherford Hayes was the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881, having served also
as an American representative and governor of Ohio. Hayes was a lawyer and
staunch abolitionist who defended refugee slaves in court proceedings in the antebellum years.
He was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1876 and elected through
the Compromise of 1877 that officially ended the Reconstruction Era by leaving the South to govern
itself. In office he withdrew military troops from the South, ending Army support for Republican state
governments in the South and the efforts of African-American freedmen to establish their families as
free citizens. He promoted civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from
the Civil War and Reconstruction.

15th Amendment The 15th Amendment, granting African-American men the right to vote, was
adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory
practices were used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote, especially in the
South. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and
local levels if they denied blacks their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

Redemption In United States history, the Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern
United States during the Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War. Redeemers were the
Southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats, the conservative, pro-business faction in the Democratic
Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce white supremacy. Their policy
of Redemption was intended to oust the Radical Republicans, a coalition of freedmen,
"carpetbaggers", and "scalawags". They generally were led by the rich former planters, businessmen,
and professionals, and they dominated Southern politics in most areas from the 1870s to 1910.

Hiram Revels was a Republican U.S. Senator, minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
and a college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he
voted before the Civil War. He became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress when
he was elected to the United States Senate as a Republican to represent Mississippi in 1870 and
1871 during the Reconstruction era.
During the American Civil War, Revels had helped organize two regiments of the United States
Colored Troops and served as a chaplain. After serving in the Senate, Revels was appointed as the first
president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University) and served
from 1871 to 1873 and 1876 to 1882. Later in his life, he served again as a minister.

Henry Grady was a journalist and orator who helped reintegrate the states of the Confederacy into
the Union after the American Civil War. Grady encouraged the industrialization of the South and also
preached white supremacy, emphasizing that it was necessary for whites to remain in social control
over the newly free blacks.[2] Grady was the father-in-law of Federal Reserve Chairman Eugene
Robert Black and grandfather of banker and World Bank President Eugene R. Black Sr.

textile industry The American textile industry has been among the most important industries in
America since the invention of the cotton gin in 1790. In fact, the first factory every built in the United
States was a textile spinning plant, also built in 1790. That one factory in 1790 became nearly 3,000
textile factories by the 1860s as the Industrial Revolution brought about technological improvements,
making it possible for America to produce textiles more efficiently than any other nation at the time.
Textiles in America were then, as they are now, largely centered on cotton. ''King Cotton,'' as it was
known throughout the South, was the biggest cash crop for America in the 19th century as the
Southern U.S. became the world's biggest supplier of cotton, exporting over 3 million bales of cotton
to European mills in 1860. However, as the demand for American cotton increased, so too did the
American demand for African slaves.

Sharecropper Sharecropping is a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a
landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year.
Different types of sharecropping have been practiced worldwide for centuries, but in the rural South, it
was typically practiced by former slaves. With the southern economy in disarray after the abolition of
slavery and the devastation of the Civil War, conflict arose during the Reconstruction era between
many white landowners attempting to reestablish a labor force and freed blacks seeking economic
independence and autonomy.

Tenant A tenant farmer is one who resides on and farms land owned by a landlord.
Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and
often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor
along with at times varying amounts of capital and management.
In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim (tenancy at will); in others, the landowner
and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years (tenancy for years or indenture).

Booker T. Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the
United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-
American community.
Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the
leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South
by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-
Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

W. E.B. DuBois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author,
writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant
and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of
Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a
professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the
constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from
an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for
blacks. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court
ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks was not
unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations
based on race became commonplace.

George Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil
War and the American Indian Wars.
Custer graduated from West Point in 1861 at the bottom of his class, but as the Civil War was just
starting, trained officers were in immediate demand. He worked closely with General McClellan and
the future General Pleasonton, both of whom recognized his qualities as a cavalry leader, and he was
brevetted brigadier general of volunteers at age 23. Only a few days after his promotion, he fought
at Gettysburg, where he commanded the Michigan Cavalry Brigade and despite being outnumbered,
defeated J. E. B. Stuart's attack at what is now known as the East Calvary Field. In 1864, Custer
served in the Overland Campaign and in Sheridan's army in the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Jubal
Early at Cedar Creek. His division blocked the Army of Northern Virginia's final retreat and received
the first flag of truce from the Confederates, and Custer was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender
to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

Homestead Act President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862 granted
Americans 160-acre plots of public land for the price a small filing fee. The Civil War-era act,
considered one of the United States’ most important pieces of legislation, led to Western expansion
and allowed citizens of all walks of life—including former slaves, women and immigrants—to
become landowners.

Free silver was a major economic policy issue in late-19th-century America. Its advocates were
in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on
demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold
standard. Supporters of an important place for silver in a bimetallic money system making use of
both silver and gold, called "Silverites", sought coinage of silver dollars at a fixed weight ratio of 16-
to-1 against dollar coins made of gold. Because the actual price ratio of the two metals was
substantially higher in favor of gold at the time, most economists warned that the less valuable silver
coinage would drive the more valuable gold out of circulation.
monopoly/trust As business expanded natural predatory instincts took over as companies
sought to eliminate competition. It was survival of the fittest in an economy which did not regulate
business - laissez faire, social Darwinism, rugged individualism where the themes of the day.
Clearly the natural conclusion of laissez faire capitalism, or pure competition, is the end of
competition itself. It is the natural goal of any business to make as much profit as it can and to
eliminate its competition. When a corporation eliminates its competition it becomes what is known as
a "monopoly."
Monopolies took several organization forms including what were known as trusts.
Trust
Stockholders of several competing corporations turn in their stock to trustees in exchange for a trust
certificate entitling them to a dividend. Trustees ran the companies as if they were one.
This political cartoon published The Verdict on July 10, 1899 by C. Gordon Moffat shows an America
controlled by the trusts.

sub-treasury After President Andrew Jackson vetoed (July 10, 1832) the bill to recharter the
Second Bank of the United States , the deposits were removed and placed in state banks that came to
be called Jackson's pets. This process was accomplished by the President only with great difficulty,
for there was grave doubt as to its constitutionality (see McLane, Louis ; Duane, William John
; Taney, Roger Brooke ). The situation remained somewhat in suspension and debate until a
subtreasury system, as such, was established (July 4, 1840) with the act to set up the Independent
Treasury System . This act, never strictly carried out, was repealed (Aug. 13, 1841) by the Whigs. In
1846 the Independent Treasury was finally and rigidly established and with it the subtreasury system.
Public funds were not to be deposited in any bank but either kept in coin in the Treasury or
subtreasuries or retained by the public officers receiving them until paid out on proper authority. No
banknotes were to be received in payments to the government. The subtreasuries were maintained,
chiefly through political influence, until the passage of the General Appropriation Act (May 29, 1920)
and the transfer of their functions to the Treasury, the mints and assay offices, and the Federal Reserve
banks, which was completed in 1921.

Buffalo American buffalo or simply buffalo, is a North American species of bison that once
roamed North America in vast herds. Their historical range, by 9000 BCE, is described as the great
bison belt, a tract of rich grassland that ran from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, east to the Atlantic
Seaboard (nearly to the Atlantic tidewater in some areas) as far north as New York and south
to Georgia and, according to some sources, down to Florida, with sightings in North Carolina near
Buffalo Ford on the Catawba River as late as 1750.

Sutter’s Mill was a sawmill, owned by 19th-century pioneer John Sutter, where gold was found,
setting off the California Gold Rush, a major event of the history of the United States. It was located
on the bank of the South Fork American River in Coloma, California and is today part of the Marshall
Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

Seward’s Folly (Alaska)was the United States' acquisition of Alaska from the Russian Empire. Alaska
was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867, through a treaty ratified by
the United States Senate and signed by President Andrew Johnson.
‘
Vaudeville a farce with music. In the United States the term connotes a light entertainment popular
from the mid-1890s until the early 1930s that consisted of 10 to 15 individual unrelated acts, featuring
magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, jugglers, singers, and dancers.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, business magnate, and philanthropist.

Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of
the richest Americans in history.[5] He became a leading philanthropist in the United States and in
the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away $350 million (conservatively $65
billion in 2019 dollars, based on percentage of GDP) to charities, foundations, and universities –
almost 90 percent of his fortune.[6] His 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on
the rich to use their wealth to improve society, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy.

Henry Ford was an American industrialist and a business magnate, the founder of the Ford Motor
Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
Although Ford did not invent the automobile or the assembly line,[2] he developed and manufactured
the first automobile that many middle-class Americans could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the
automobile from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would profoundly impact the
landscape of the 20th century. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized
transportation and American industry. As the owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of
the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with "Fordism": mass production of
inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism
as the key to peace. His intense commitment to systematically lowering costs resulted in many
technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put dealerships throughout most
of North America and in major cities on six continents. Ford left most of his vast wealth to the Ford
Foundation and arranged for his family to control the company permanently.

John D. Rockefeller was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely

considered the wealthiest American of all time,[4][5] and the richest person in modern history.[6][7]
Rockefeller was born into a large family in upstate New York and was shaped by his con man father
and religious mother. His family moved several times before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio.
Rockefeller became an assistant bookkeeper at age 16 and went into several business partnerships
beginning at age 20, concentrating his business on oil refining. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil
Company in 1870. He ran it until 1897, and remained its largest shareholder.

Model T is an automobile produced by Ford Motor Company from October 1, 1908, to May
26, 1927.[7][8] It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that opened travel to
the common middle-class American; some of this was because of Ford's efficient fabrication,
including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting.

Social Darwinism is a loose set of ideologies that emerged in the late 1800s in which Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was used to justify certain political, social, or
economic views. Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that certain people
become powerful in society because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been used to
justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century and a
half.

Margaret Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger
popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and
established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Alice Paul A vocal leader of the twentieth century women’s suffrage movement, Alice Paul
advocated for and helped secure passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting
women the right to vote. Paul next authored the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, which has yet to
be adopted.
Born on January 11, 1885 in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, Paul was the oldest of four children of Tacie
Parry and William Paul, a wealthy Quaker businessman. Paul’s parents embraced gender equality,
education for women, and working to improve society. Paul’s mother, a suffragist, brought her
daughter with her to women’s suffrage meetings.

Carrie Catt A skilled political strategist, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Catt was a suffragist and peace
activist who helped secure for American women the right to vote. She directed the National American
Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and founded the League of Women Voters (1920) to bring
women into the political mainstream.

Strikes
dumbbell tenements Old Law Tenements are tenements built in New York City after the
Tenement House Act of 1879 and before the New York State Tenement House Act ("New Law") of
1901. The 1879 law required that every habitable room have a window opening to plain air, a
requirement that was met by including air shafts between adjacent buildings. Old Law Tenements are
commonly called "dumbbell tenements" after the shape of the building footprint: the air shaft gives
each tenement the narrow-waisted shape of a dumbbell, wide facing the street and backyard, narrowed
in between to create the air corridor. They were built in great numbers to accommodate waves of
immigrating Europeans. The early 21st century side streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side are still
lined with numerous dumbbell structures.

Jane Addams A progressive social reformer and activist, Jane Addams was on the frontline of the
settlement house movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She later became internationally
respected for the peace activism that ultimately won her a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first
American woman to receive this honor.
Born on September 6, 1860 in the small farming town of Cedarville, Illinois, Addams was the eighth
of John Huy and Sarah Weber Addams’ nine children. Only five of the Addams children survived
infancy. Her mother died in childbirth when Addams was only two years old. Nonetheless, she grew
up with privilege; her father was among the town’s wealthiest citizens. He owned a successful mill,
fought in the Civil War, was a local politician, and counted Abraham Lincoln among his friends.
Addams also grew up with liberal Christian values and a deep sense of social mission.

18th Amendment The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or
transportation of intoxicating liquors..." and was ratified by the states on January 16, 1919. The
movement to prohibit alcohol began in the United States in the early nineteenth century. On October
28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act ), which provided for the enforcement of the 18th
Amendment. Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment ..

19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right
known as women’s suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending almost a century of
protest. In 1848 the movement for women’s rights launched on a national level with the
Seneca Falls Convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Following
the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women’s rights
movement. Stanton and Mott, along with Susan B. Anthony and other activists, raised public
awareness and lobbied the government to grant voting rights to women. After a lengthy
battle, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Muckrakers were reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s)
who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in
popular magazines. The modern term is investigative journalism or watchdog journalism;
investigative journalists in the US are often informally called "muckrakers".
The muckrakers played a highly visible role during the Progressive Era.[1] Muckraking magazines—
notably McClure's of the publisher S. S. McClure—took on corporate monopolies and political
machines, while trying to raise public awareness and anger at urban poverty, unsafe working
conditions, prostitution, and child labor.[2] Most of the muckrakers wrote nonfiction, but fictional
exposés often had a major impact too, such as those by Upton Sinclair.[3]

Theodore Roosevelt was an American statesman, politician, conservationist, naturalist, and writer
who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He served as the 25th vice
president from March to September 1901 and as the 33rd governor of New York from 1899 to 1900.
As a leader of the Republican Party, he became a driving force for the Progressive Era in the United
States in the early 20th century. His face is depicted on Mount Rushmore alongside George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. He is generally ranked in polls of historians
and political scientists as one of the five best presidents.[4]

Upton Sinclair was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several
genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle, which
exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that
contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and
the Meat Inspection Act.[1] In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of
American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free
press" in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for
journalists was created.[2] Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and
silence".[3] He is also well remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."[4] He used this line in speeches
and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of
the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and
other progressive reforms.[5]

White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–
1902), which exhorts the U.S. to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.[1]
Kipling originally wrote the poem to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (22 June 1897),
but it was replaced with the sombre poem "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling work about empire. He
rewrote "The White Man's Burden" to encourage American colonisation and annexation of
the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American
War (1898).[2] As a poet of imperialism, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up
the enterprise of empire, yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an
empire;[3] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase The white man's burden to
justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilisation that is ideologically related to the continental-
expansion philosophy of Manifest Destiny of the early 19th century.

Spanish-American War was an armed conflict between Spain and the United States in 1898.
Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba,
leading to U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. The war led to emergence of U.S.
predominance in the Caribbean region,[15] and resulted in U.S. acquisition of Spain's Pacific
possessions. That led to U.S. involvement in the Philippine Revolution and ultimately in
the Philippine–American War.[16]

Woodrow Wilson was an American statesman, lawyer, and academic who served as the 28th president
of the United States from 1913 to 1921, and was the leading architect of the League of Nations. A
member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the
34th governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, he oversaw
the passage of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. He also led the
United States into World War I in 1917, establishing an activist foreign policy known as
"Wilsonianism."
Born in Staunton, Virginia, Wilson spent his early years in Augusta, Georgia, and Columbia, South
Carolina. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University, Wilson taught at
various schools before becoming the president of Princeton. As governor of New Jersey from 1911 to
1913, Wilson broke with party bosses and won the passage of several progressive reforms. His success
in New Jersey gave him a national reputation as a progressive reformer, and he won the presidential
nomination at the 1912 Democratic National Convention. Wilson defeated
incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and Progressive Party nominee Theodore
Roosevelt to win the 1912 presidential election, becoming the first Southerner to be elected president
since the American Civil War.

William Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth chief justice of the
United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president
in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for re-election by Woodrow
Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In
1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position in which he served
until a month before his death.
Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1857. His father, Alphonso Taft, was a U.S. Attorney
General and Secretary of War. Taft attended Yale and, like his father, was a member of Skull and
Bones. After becoming a lawyer, Taft was appointed a judge while still in his twenties. He continued a
rapid rise, being named Solicitor General and as a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In
1901, President William McKinley appointed Taft civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904,
Roosevelt made him Secretary of War, and he became Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Despite his
personal ambition to become chief justice, Taft declined repeated offers of appointment to
the Supreme Court of the United States, believing his political work to be more important.

Bull Moose Party Bull Moose Party, formally Progressive Party, U.S. dissident political faction that
nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt as its candidate in the presidential election of 1912;
the formal name and general objectives of the party were revived 12 years later. Opposing the
entrenched conservatism of the regular Republican Party, which was controlled by Pres. William
Howard Taft, a National Republican Progressive League was organized in 1911 by Sen. Robert M. La
Follette of Wisconsin. The group became the Progressive Party the following year and on August 7,
1912, met in convention and nominated Roosevelt for president and Gov. Hiram W.
Johnson of California for vice president; it called for revision of the political nominating machinery
and an aggressive program of social legislation.

Franz Ferdinand was the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary.[1] His assassination in
Sarajevo precipitated Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against Serbia, which in turn triggered a
series of events that eventually led to Austria-Hungary's allies and Serbia's declaring war on each
other, starting World War I.[2][3][4]

Allied Powers also called Allies, those countries allied in opposition to the Central
Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) in World War I or to the Axis
powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in World War II.
The major Allied powers in World War I were Great Britain (and the British Empire), France, and
the Russian Empire, formally linked by the Treaty of London of September 5, 1914. Other countries
that had been, or came to be, allied by treaty to one or more of those powers were also called Allies:
Portugal and Japan by treaty with Britain; Italy by the Treaty of London of April 26, 1915, with all
three powers. Other countries—including the United States after its entry on April 6, 1917—that were
arrayed against the Central Powers were called “Associated Powers,” not Allied powers; U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson emphasized that distinction to preserve America’s free hand. The Treaty
of Versailles (June 28, 1919) concluding the war listed 27 “Allied and Associated
Powers”: Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, the British Empire, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador,
France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hejaz, Honduras, Italy,
Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serb-Croat-Slovene State, Siam,
the United States, and Uruguay.
Central Powers consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria - hence
also known as the Quadruple Alliance[2] (German: Vierbund)—was one of the two main coalitions
that fought World War I (1914–18).
It faced and was defeated by the Allied Powers that had formed around the Triple Entente. The
Powers' origin was the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. Despite having nominally
joined the Triple Alliance before, Italy did not take part in World War I on the side of the Central
Powers; the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria did not join until after World War I had begun, even
though the Ottoman Empire had retained close relations with both Germany and Austria-Hungary
since the beginning of the 20th century.

Zimmerman Telegram was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign
Office in January 1917 that proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico. In the event
that the United States entered World War I against Germany, Mexico would
recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted and decoded by British
intelligence. Revelation of the contents enraged Americans, especially after German Foreign
Secretary Arthur Zimmermann publicly admitted on March 3 that the telegram was genuine, helping
to generate support for the United States declaration of war on Germany in April.[1] The decryption
was described as the most significant intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I,[2] and one
of the earliest occasions on which a piece of signal intelligence influenced world events

Lusitania was a British ocean liner that was sunk on 7 May 1915 by a German U-boat 11 miles
(18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland. The sinking presaged the United States declaration of war
on Germany two years later.
Lusitania held the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing and was briefly the world's
largest passenger ship until the completion of her sister ship Mauretania three months later.
The Cunard Line launched her in 1906 at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade. She
was sunk on her 202nd trans-Atlantic crossing.

Influenza Epidemic In all recorded history, no single event has taken as many lives as the 1918
influenza pandemic. The “Spanish flu” swept through crowded cities, small towns, and soldiers’
camps alike, then started to fade from public consciousness as its victims either died or recovered.
Like all influenza viruses, the 1918 influenza virus was particularly deadly to babies and the elderly—
but this virus also killed a disproportionate number of people between the ages of 20 and 40 years

Sedition Act was an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to
cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the
government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds.[1]
It forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States
government, its flag, or its armed forces or that caused others to view the American government or its
institutions with contempt. Those convicted under the act generally received sentences of
imprisonment for five to 20 years.[2] The act also allowed the Postmaster General to refuse to deliver
mail that met those same standards for punishable speech or opinion. It applied only to times "when
the United States is in war." The U.S. was in a declared state of war at the time of passage, the First
World War.[3] The law was repealed on December 13, 1920.[4]

Espionage Act is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry
into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title
50 of the U.S. Code (War) but is now found under Title 18, Crime. Specifically, it is 18 U.S.C. ch.
37 (18 U.S.C. § 792 et seq.)
It was intended to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment, to prevent
insubordination in the military, and to prevent the support of United States enemies during wartime. In
1919, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled through Schenck v. United
States that the act did not violate the freedom of speech of those convicted under its provisions.
The constitutionality of the law, its relationship to free speech, and the meaning of its language have
been contested in court ever since.

Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, New
York, spanning the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The
New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-
American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States
affected by the Great Migration,[1] of which Harlem was the largest.
Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City,
many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also
influenced by the movement,[2][3][4][5] which spanned from about 1918 until the mid-
1930s.[6] Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature",
as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924—
when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white
publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of
the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a rebirth of the African-
American arts

Gipson Girl was the personification of the feminine ideal of physical attractiveness as portrayed by
the pen-and-ink illustrations of artist Charles Dana Gibson during a 20-year period that spanned the
late 19th and early 20th century in the United States and Canada.[1] The artist saw his creation as
representing the composite of "thousands of American girls".

Flapper were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore skirts, bobbed their hair,
listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers
were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, smoking cigarettes, driving
automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual
norms.[1] Flappers are icons of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence and increased
transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of
American jazz culture to Europe.

Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be foreign or

strange.[1][2][3] Xenophobia can involve perceptions of an ingroup toward an outgroup and can
manifest itself in suspicion of the activities of others, and a desire to eliminate their presence to secure
a presumed purity and may relate to a fear of losing national, ethnic or racial identity.[4]
Xenophobia can also be exhibited in the form of an "uncritical exaltation of another culture" in which
a culture is ascribed "an unreal, stereotyped and exotic quality".[4] According to UNESCO, the terms
xenophobia and racism often overlap, but differ in how the latter encompasses prejudice based on
physical characteristics while the former is generally centered on behavior based on the notion of a
specified people being adverse to the culture or nation.

2nd KKK commonly called the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist hate group,
whose primary target is African Americans.[8] The Klan has existed in three distinct eras at different
points in time during the history of the United States. Each has advocated
extremist reactionary positions such as white nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later
iterations—Nordicism[9][10] and anti-Catholicism. Historically, the First Klan used terrorism – both
physical assault and murder – against politically active blacks and their allies in the South in the late
1860s, until it was suppressed around 1872. All three movements have called for the "purification" of
American society and all are considered right-wing extremist organizations.[11][12][13][14] In each
era, membership was secret and estimates of the total were highly exaggerated by both friends and
enemies.
Scopes Trial was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John
T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to
teach human evolution in any state-funded school.[1] The trial was deliberately staged in order to
attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure
whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he purposely incriminated himself so that the case
could have a defendant.