American History Exam 1 – Flashcards

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By the 1870s, homesteaders discovered that most of the prime land in the West was
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already in the hands of speculators
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Chinese immigrants made up what proportion of the workforce that built America's first transcontinental railroad?
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90 percent
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For what reason did hundreds of thousands of Americans migrate to the West in the three decades after 1870?
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to own their own land
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How did the invention of barbed wire revolutionize the cattle industry?
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allowed ranchers to fence in their cattle
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How did the Utah legislature counter the criticism of polygamy in 1870?
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gave women the right to vote
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What did the Homestead Act of 1862 promise to potential migrants to the West?
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one hundred sixty acres free to any citizen or prospective citizen who settled on land west of the Mississippi River for five years
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What occurred after Geronimo surrendered to General Miles in 1886?
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The government sent nearly five hundred Apaches to prisons in the South.
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What occurred under the "outing system" of the 1880s?
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indian children forced to live with white families over summer vacation
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What was the easiest way to get rich in the American silver mining industry?
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Selling claims to land or forming mining companies and selling stock
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What was the Ghost Dance?
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A religious ritual that was supposed to lead to the destruction of whites and the return of the buffalo.
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What was the outcome of the second Treaty of Fort Laramie?
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The treaty was violated by the U.S. government after gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
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What was the outcome of the transformation of agriculture to big business in the South and West during the post-Civil War era?
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increasing number of laborers worked land they would never own
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What was the purpose of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?
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to decrease the Chinese population of the American west
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Which group or groups composed the population of the area from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean during the last decades of the nineteenth century?
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people from various parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas
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Which of the following characterizes life for women on the western frontier in the late nineteenth century?
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forced to work hard to accomplish even the simplest tasks
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Which of the following describes African American cowboys in the West in the late nineteenth century?
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They had a substantial presence in the region but not in the fiction of the time.
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Which of the following describes women in Virginia City by 1870?
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they worked primarily as housekeepers
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Which of the following explains why the U.S. army gunned down unarmed Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota in 1890?
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American soldiers feared an uprising provoked by a militant interpretation of the Ghost Dance religion.
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Which of the following terms best characterizes Virginia City, Nevada, and other mining centers in the late nineteenth century?
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sprawling industrialized communities
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Who was Geronimo?
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An Apache warrior and chieftain who led raiding parties and burned ranches on both sides of the Mexican border
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According to American businessmen who subscribed to the economic theory of laissez-faire, what was the role of the government in the economy?
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should not interfere in economic affairs except to protect private property
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According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in
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economics and the shifting social structure of the south
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Democrats dubbed the Republican-dominated Fifty-first Congress the "Billion Dollar Congress" because it spent the nation's surplus on
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lawmakers own constituents
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Having stated that "the paramount issue this year is moral rather than political," supporters of Grover Cleveland in 1884 were chagrined to learn that Cleveland had
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fathered a child out of wedlock
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How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?
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He used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed both local and cross-country communication.
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How did Morgan achieve his stunning reorganization and consolidation of businesses in the late nineteenth century?
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He sometimes formed a community of interest comprised of a handful of directors.
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In her History of the Standard Oil Company published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as
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a man who had used illegal methods to take over the oil industry
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The economic theory of laissez-faire gained political clout in the late nineteenth century because
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the Supreme Court increasingly was reinterpreting the Constitution to protect business.
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The Greenback Labor party believed that the government should issue paper currency based on
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the country's total wealth
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The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the 1880s because
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it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services
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What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?
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Progress is the result of competition where the strong survived and the weak died out.
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What was an important consequence of the civil service reform of the 1880s?
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business became even more influential in politics than before
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What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?
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the desire among southerners to switch to an industrial economy
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What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?
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an increasing number of lynchings across the south
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When advocates of bimetallism referred to the crime of '73, they were talking about
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the decision by Congress in 1873 to stop buying and minting silver.
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Where had electricity been put to use in the United States by the late nineteenth century?
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mostly in urban areas
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Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?
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controlled more than 90 percent of the oil business
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Which relatively new building material both improved railroading in the late nineteenth century and depended on it?
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steel produced through the Bessemer process
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Which statement describes the oil industry before John D. Rockefeller's rise to power?
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low entry costs allowed riotous competition
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Why did John D. Rockefeller first organize Standard Oil as a trust?
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control the key elements of production and corner the market for oil
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After 1880, most new immigrants to America originated from
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eastern and southern Europe
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Along with the horse car, which mode of transportation first allowed late-nineteenth-century cities to expand into the suburbs?
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electric streetcar
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By 1900, the population in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia had each grown to exceed
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1 million
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During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor advocated for
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public ownership of the railroads, an income tax, and equal pay for women.
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How did most new women immigrants come to the United States in the late-nineteenth century?
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as wives, mothers, or daughters
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How did the percentage of children under age fifteen working in the paid labor force in the United States change during the years leading up to World War I?
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it increased decade by decade
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In the post-Civil War United States, a "city boss" was
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a professional politician who provided public works and social services for new residents.
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Southern blacks migrated to northern cities in the 1890s
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for economic opportunities and safety
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What circumstances enabled U.S. industrialists to hire cheap labor from around the world in the 1870s?
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Railroad expansion and low steamship fares brought many immigrants to America.
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What developed as a result of the opening of department stores in the late-nineteenth-century United States?
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a new consumer culture
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What development led to the emergence of the modern skyscraper in the 1890s?
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advent of structural steel
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What happened to the World's Columbian Exposition site after it closed its doors in October 1894?
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Chicago's unemployed and homeless took over its buildings.
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What late-nineteenth-century development did New York City's Brooklyn Bridge symbolize?
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the ascendancy of urban America
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What was the "Chicago school" of the late nineteenth century?
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A skilled group of architects who made commercial architecture a new art form
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What was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
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a spontaneous and unorganized event
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Which of the following describes the amenities of American city life in the 1890s?
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not easily accessible to the poor residents of cities
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Which of the following describes the economic survival of the nineteenth-century American working-class family?
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depended on the employment of every family member
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Which of the following describes the world economy at the turn of the twentieth century?
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An industrial core, an agricultural domain, and a third world tied to the industrial core by economic colonialism
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Which of the following was an outcome of the Haymarket affair?
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skilled workers turned toward the American Federation of Labor
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Why did Congress approve a literacy test for immigrants in 1896?
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As a means of limiting the influx of uneducated people into the country
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