APUSH Unit 7 (Period 7) Review: 1890–1945

Topics

7.1 Contextualizing Period 7
A Splendid Little War · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.1, Contextualizing Period 7, sets the scene for 1890 to 1945, when the United States became an urban, industrial world power. In 1890 the census could no longer find a continuous frontier line, American factories were out-producing Britain's, and the Panic of 1893 began a depression that lasted almost four years. Business leaders wanted overseas customers, European empires were dividing Africa and Asia, and in January 1893 a committee of white businessmen, backed by U.S. sailors and Marines ashore, overthrew Hawaiʻi's queen. Three threads run through the period: global conflict, reform from the Progressives to the New Deal, and migration.
Summary and transcript
7.2 Imperialism: Debates
A Splendid Little War · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.2, Imperialism: Debates, covers the argument over whether the United States should acquire overseas territory in the 1890s. Imperialists cited markets for surplus goods, Alfred Thayer Mahan's call for a navy and coaling stations, the closing of the frontier, rivalry with European empires, and racial and religious claims such as Josiah Strong's. Hawaiʻi became the test case: white businessmen overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, and Congress annexed the islands in 1898. Anti-imperialists, who organized the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, answered that colonies violated consent of the governed and the tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements.
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7.3 The Spanish–American War
A Splendid Little War · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.3, The Spanish–American War, covers the 1898 war with Spain and the overseas empire that followed. After the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, Congress went to war over Cuba, and Commodore George Dewey destroyed Spain's Pacific fleet at Manila Bay. In the Treaty of Paris, Spain gave up Cuba and handed Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States. Filipino nationalists fought the Philippine–American War, and the Platt Amendment, Foraker Act and Open Door notes extended American power in the Caribbean, the Pacific and China.
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7.4 The Progressives
The Other Half · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.4, The Progressives, covers the reform movement of about 1890 to 1920 that asked government to curb corruption, regulate business and ease social problems. Muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair exposed abuses, and Theodore Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Under Woodrow Wilson, Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913, and four amendments between 1913 and 1920 brought the income tax, elected senators, Prohibition and woman suffrage. Progressives disagreed about segregation, immigration and whether to trust voters or experts.
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7.5 World War I: Military and Diplomacy
He Kept Us Out of War · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.5, World War I: Military and Diplomacy, covers how the United States moved from neutrality in 1914 to war in 1917 and then refused the peace Woodrow Wilson designed. Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram led Wilson to ask Congress for war on April 2, 1917, to make the world safe for democracy. American troops arrived in force in 1918 and helped tip the balance toward the Allies. Wilson's Fourteen Points proposed a League of Nations, but in 1919 and 1920 the Senate would not ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
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7.6 World War I: Home Front
Safe for Democracy · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.6, World War I: Home Front, covers how the war of 1917 to 1918 changed life in the United States. Federal agencies such as the War Industries Board and the Food Administration directed the economy, and Liberty Bonds paid for much of the war. The Espionage and Sedition Acts limited free speech, and Eugene V. Debs went to prison for a speech. War jobs opened factories to women and drew Black Southerners north in the Great Migration, and after the war came the Red Scare and the 1921 immigration quotas.
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7.7 1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology
Static · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.7, 1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology, covers the machines and media that built a national mass culture in the 1920s. Henry Ford's moving assembly line helped cut the Model T's price from $850 in 1908 to as little as $260 by 1925, and installment buying put cars and appliances in more homes. Radio, which became a national medium after Pittsburgh's KDKA broadcast the 1920 election returns, and movies, which began to talk in 1927, gave Americans shared heroes and songs. Rural families and farmers shared the prosperity least.
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7.8 1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies
Static · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.8, 1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies, covers the sharp divides of the 1920s between city and country, native-born and immigrant, modern and traditional Americans. The 1920 census showed that most Americans lived in urban places, the Great Migration helped create the Harlem Renaissance, and Congress passed immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. The Ku Klux Klan revived, Prohibition split dry small towns from wet cities, and the 1925 Scopes trial pitted fundamentalism against modern science. Herbert Hoover's 1928 victory over Catholic Al Smith showed the same divides at the polls.
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7.9 The Great Depression
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.9, The Great Depression, covers why the economy collapsed after 1929 and how Herbert Hoover responded. The stock market crash of October 1929 triggered the collapse, but deeper causes included heavy debt, buying stocks on margin, uneven incomes and farm distress. About 9,000 banks failed between 1930 and 1933, the money supply shrank, and the Hawley–Smoot Tariff hurt world trade. Unemployment rose from about 3 percent in 1929 to about 25 percent in 1933. Hoover relied on voluntary action and loans, and Franklin Roosevelt won the 1932 election.
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7.10 The New Deal
Fear Itself · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.10, The New Deal, covers Franklin Roosevelt's program of relief, recovery and reform from 1933 to 1939. After a bank holiday in March 1933, Congress passed fifteen major laws in the Hundred Days, including the Glass–Steagall Act, which created the FDIC. The Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but the Wagner Act (1935) protected the right to organize and the Social Security Act (1935) began old-age pensions. The New Deal did not end the Depression, but it built a limited welfare state and a Democratic coalition.
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7.11 Interwar Foreign Policy
Outlawing War · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.11, Interwar Foreign Policy, covers how the United States acted abroad between the world wars. Americans rejected the League of Nations but led the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and 1922, lent money to Germany under the Dawes Plan, signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 and kept Marines in Haiti until 1934. As Japan, Italy and Germany attacked other nations, Congress passed Neutrality Acts to avoid repeating 1917. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the nation aided Britain, and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 brought it into the war.
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7.12 World War II: Mobilization
Double V · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.12, World War II: Mobilization, covers how the United States turned its economy and society toward war after Pearl Harbor. Federal spending grew about tenfold, factories converted to war goods, and unemployment fell from about one worker in seven in 1940 to about one in eighty in 1944, ending the Depression. Income taxes, now withheld from paychecks, and war bonds paid for the war while rationing stretched scarce goods; nearly five million more women took jobs, and Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in defense industries. The war also brought the internment of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry under Executive Order 9066.
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7.13 World War II: Military
Trinity · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.13, World War II: Military, covers how the United States and its allies defeated the Axis powers between 1941 and 1945. After Pearl Harbor the Allies chose to defeat Germany first, with the Soviet Union carrying the heaviest burden on the ground and American industry supplying the Allies. The D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 opened the way to Germany's surrender in May 1945, while in the Pacific the Navy won at Midway and American forces advanced by island hopping. Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 hastened Japan's surrender and began a debate about their morality.
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7.14 Postwar Diplomacy
Trinity · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.14, Postwar Diplomacy, covers how wartime conferences and the war's devastation left the United States the most powerful nation on Earth in 1945. At Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin planned occupation zones in Germany and Soviet entry against Japan. After Roosevelt died in April, Truman attended the Potsdam Conference in July, and the Potsdam Declaration warned Japan of "prompt and utter destruction" if it did not surrender. The United Nations Charter, signed in June 1945 and approved by the Senate, committed the United States to international leadership.
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7.15 Comparison in Period 7
The American Century · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 7.15, Comparison in Period 7, asks how to rank the forces that shaped the United States between 1890 and 1945: the Spanish–American War, Progressive reform, World War I, the Great Depression and New Deal, and World War II. By 1945 more than twelve million Americans were in uniform, Washington taxed incomes, insured bank deposits and paid pensions, and the nation held a permanent place in world affairs. Each shock changed groups differently, so a strong argument corroborates a claim, qualifies it with Black, Mexican American, Japanese American and immigrant experiences, and then modifies it.
Summary and transcript

Key terms

Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: Topic 7.1
An independent monarchy with its own constitution, legislature, courts and flag, recognized by the United States and the European powers. Liliʻuokalani had been queen since January 1891.
Committee of Safety: Topic 7.1
In January 1893, thirteen businessmen and lawyers, many of them Americans or sons of American missionaries, organized to overthrow Queen Liliʻuokalani. They wanted Hawaiʻi annexed to the United States.
Provisional Government (1893): Topic 7.1
The government the Committee of Safety proclaimed on January 17, 1893, headed by Sanford B. Dole. It was meant to rule only until Hawaiʻi could be annexed to the United States.
Yielding under protest: Topic 7.1
Giving way to force while stating formally that you do not accept the result as legitimate. Liliʻuokalani used it to keep her claim alive and to ask Washington to reverse what its minister had done.
Contextualization: Topic 7.1
Placing a specific event or trend inside the broader events and processes around it.
Panic of 1893: Topic 7.1
A financial collapse that began with railroad failures and bank runs and set off a depression lasting until 1897.
Frontier thesis: Topic 7.1
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 argument that the frontier shaped American democracy and the American character.
New Imperialism: Topic 7.1
The late-1800s push by industrial powers, mostly in Europe, to take colonies and markets in Africa and Asia.
Sea power (Mahan): Topic 7.2
Alfred Thayer Mahan's argument in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890): a nation grows rich and strong through overseas trade, a merchant fleet, a battle fleet to guard it and overseas bases for refueling. It pushed the United States toward a modern navy and colonies.
Social Darwinism: Topic 7.2
The idea that Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' applies to human societies and races. Late-1800s writers used it to defend inequality, empire and racial hierarchy.
Anglo-Saxonism: Topic 7.2
The belief that English-speaking Protestant peoples were racially and religiously superior and meant to lead the world. Strong wrote that the Anglo-Saxon race would 'spread itself over the earth.'
Monroe Doctrine: Topic 7.2
President Monroe's 1823 warning that European powers must not colonize or interfere in the Americas. In 1895 the United States used it to demand a say in a border dispute between Britain and Venezuela.
Venezuela boundary dispute: Topic 7.2
The 1895 crisis over the border between Venezuela and British Guiana. The United States demanded arbitration; Britain agreed, and a Paris tribunal in 1899 gave Britain most of the disputed land.
McKinley Tariff (1890): Topic 7.2
A law that raised many import duties but let foreign raw sugar in free and paid U.S. growers a bounty. It erased Hawaiʻi's tariff advantage and gave its planters a new reason to want annexation.
Bayonet Constitution (1887): Topic 7.2
A constitution forced on King Kalākaua by an armed militia. It stripped most of the king's power, barred Asian residents from voting, and set property tests that shut many Native Hawaiians out of the upper-house vote.
Committee of Safety (1893): Topic 7.2
A group of white businessmen and lawyers in Honolulu who organized the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani. They asked the U.S. minister for troops, then asked the United States to annex Hawaiʻi.
Republic of Hawaiʻi (1894): Topic 7.2
The government proclaimed on July 4, 1894 by the men who had overthrown the queen. Sanford Dole was its president. It sought annexation to the United States, and Cleveland had refused to restore the monarchy.
Kūʻē Petitions (1897): Topic 7.2
Petitions against annexation, organized by two Hawaiian patriotic leagues, the Hui Aloha ʻĀina for men and for women. They carried 21,269 signatures, roughly half the Native Hawaiian population, and Senator George Hoar presented them in Washington.
Reconcentration: Topic 7.3
Spain’s 1896 policy of forcing Cuban country people into fortified towns to cut off the rebels. Hunger and disease in the camps killed at least 100,000 by historians’ estimates, and American newspapers made the camps a cause.
Yellow journalism: Topic 7.3
Sensational, often exaggerated news written to sell papers. In the 1890s Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal used Cuba’s war to win readers.
de Lôme letter: Topic 7.3
A private letter from Spain’s U.S. minister that insulted President McKinley. Cuban sympathizers stole it, the Journal printed it on February 9, 1898, and it inflamed American opinion against Spain.
Teller Amendment: Topic 7.3
Colorado Senator Henry Teller’s amendment to the April 1898 war resolution. The United States disclaimed any intention to annex Cuba and promised to leave its people in control once the fighting was over.
Emilio Aguinaldo: Topic 7.3
Leader of the Philippine revolution against Spain. Exiled in 1897, he came home on an American ship in May 1898 and proclaimed independence on June 12.
Rough Riders: Topic 7.3
The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, raised in 1898 by Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt from cowboys, ranchers and college athletes. It fought dismounted at Kettle Hill.
Buffalo Soldiers: Topic 7.3
Black regulars of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, regiments formed after the Civil War and led by white officers.
Annexation by joint resolution (Newlands Resolution, 1898): Topic 7.3
A resolution passed by simple majorities of both houses instead of a treaty needing two-thirds of the Senate. Hawaiʻi was annexed this way: House 209–91 on June 15, Senate 42–21 on July 6, signed July 7, 1898.
Imperialists (1898–1899): Topic 7.3
Americans who wanted to keep the Philippines. They cited new markets, a duty to “civilize” and convert other peoples, racial theories, rivalry with Europe's empires, and a frontier the census had called closed.
Treaty of Paris (1898): Topic 7.3
The treaty that ended the Spanish–American War, signed December 10, 1898. Spain gave up Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and Guam, and ceded the Philippines in return for $20 million. The Senate ratified it on February 6, 1899.
Ratification (two-thirds rule): Topic 7.3
The Constitution requires two-thirds of the senators present to approve a treaty. On February 6, 1899, that meant 56 of the 84 senators voting.
Anti-imperialists: Topic 7.3
Americans who opposed taking colonies. They cited the Declaration's “consent of the governed,” the tradition of avoiding entanglements abroad, and, in some cases, racial theories of their own.
The White Man's Burden: Topic 7.3
Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem, addressed to Americans, calling on them to take up the duty of governing and 'civilizing' other peoples. Supporters of expansion quoted it as a moral case for empire. It rests on a racial hierarchy, and opponents saw the empire it was selling.
Anti-Imperialist League: Topic 7.3
Organized in Boston in 1898 by Americans who opposed annexing the Philippines. Members argued that ruling a people without its consent betrayed the Declaration of Independence. Its members included Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain.
Insular Cases (1901): Topic 7.3
Supreme Court rulings in 1901 that the Constitution did not fully apply in the territories won from Spain. Congress could govern them differently from the states, and their people did not automatically gain the rights of citizens.
Foraker Act (1900): Topic 7.3
The 1900 law that set up civil government in Puerto Rico. The president appointed the governor and the upper house; Puerto Ricans elected only the lower house. They were not U.S. citizens.
Platt Amendment (1901): Topic 7.3
A law Congress attached to an Army bill in 1901. It let the United States intervene in Cuba's affairs, limited Cuba's treaties and debts, and gave the U.S. land for naval stations, including Guantánamo. U.S. troops would leave only if Cuba put it in its constitution.
Open Door policy: Topic 7.3
The U.S. demand, set out in Hay's notes of 1899 and 1900, that every nation trade with China on equal terms and that China not be carved up. The powers had to go along; the U.S. could not force them.
Boxer Rebellion: Topic 7.3
A 1900 Chinese uprising against foreign influence and Christian missions. Boxers besieged Peking's foreign legations until an eight-nation force, including U.S. troops, arrived in August.
Big Stick diplomacy: Topic 7.3
Roosevelt's way of dealing with other nations: talk calmly while keeping strong military force ready. It came from his saying 'speak softly and carry a big stick.' In Panama the warship was the stick.
Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty: Topic 7.3
The 1903 treaty giving the United States a canal zone ten miles wide 'in perpetuity,' with a sovereign's powers, for $10 million plus a yearly fee. Bunau-Varilla signed it; Panama ratified it weeks later.
Roosevelt Corollary: Topic 7.3
Roosevelt's 1904 addition to the Monroe Doctrine: the United States would act as an 'international police power' in Latin America to head off European intervention. It was used to justify U.S. interventions in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti.
Tenement: Topic 7.4
A crowded, cheaply built apartment building, often with dark rooms, shared toilets and little fresh air. In 1890 Riis estimated that about three-fourths of New Yorkers lived in them.
Documentary photography: Topic 7.4
Photographs used as evidence of how people really live and work. Riis was among the first Americans to use them to argue for reform.
Tenement House Act (1901): Topic 7.4
New York State law that required new tenements to have a window to the outdoors in every room, running water, and a toilet in each apartment. Riis's photographs and writing helped build the case for it.
Progressivism: Topic 7.4
A reform movement of about 1890 to 1920. Reformers believed government could and should fix the harms of industrial cities: corruption, unsafe work, monopoly and poverty. Progressives often disagreed about how, and for whom.
Political machine: Topic 7.4
A party organization run by a boss, who traded jobs, contracts and favors for votes and bribes. Machines such as New York's Tammany Hall ran many big-city governments in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
McClure's Magazine: Topic 7.4
A popular monthly founded in 1893 by S. S. McClure. It paid reporters to spend months investigating monopolies and city governments, and its articles helped start the muckraking era.
Standard Oil: Topic 7.4
John D. Rockefeller's oil company. It grew until it refined most of the oil in the country, helped by secret railroad rebates and by squeezing out rivals. The Supreme Court ordered it broken up in 1911.
The Shame of the Cities (1904): Topic 7.4
Lincoln Steffens's book of magazine articles on corruption in big American cities. He argued that bosses could not have ruled without respectable businessmen who paid them and voters who looked away.
Muckrakers: Topic 7.4
Journalists of the early 1900s who exposed corruption, monopoly and social problems in magazines and books. Progressives used their reporting to argue for new laws.
Square Deal: Topic 7.4
Roosevelt's promise to treat labor, business and consumers fairly. In the 1902 coal strike he pressured the owners to accept arbitration instead of sending troops against the strikers.
Trust-busting: Topic 7.4
Using the federal government to break up monopolies that hurt competition. Roosevelt pursued the 'bad' trusts, like Northern Securities, and left the 'good' ones alone.
The Jungle: Topic 7.4
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel about immigrant workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants. Readers worried most about the meat, and the outcry helped pass federal food-safety laws.
Meat Inspection Act & Pure Food and Drug Act (1906): Topic 7.4
Two 1906 laws. The first required federal inspection of meatpacking plants; the second banned mislabeled and adulterated food and drugs sold across state lines.
Antiquities Act (1906): Topic 7.4
Lets a president protect historic and scientific sites on federal land as national monuments, without waiting for Congress. Roosevelt used it to create 18, starting with Devils Tower.
U.S. Forest Service (1905): Topic 7.4
Federal agency created in 1905 to manage the national forests, with Gifford Pinchot as its first chief. Its rule: use the forests wisely, for lasting benefit.
Newlands Reclamation Act (1902): Topic 7.4
Used money from selling western public land to build irrigation dams and canals, turning dry land into farms. The Roosevelt Dam in Arizona was one of its projects.
Preservation: Topic 7.4
Protecting wild places from development so they stay as they are. John Muir’s approach, and the idea behind national parks.
Conservation: Topic 7.4
Managing natural resources for wise, lasting use: timber, grazing, water and mining under federal rules. The approach of Roosevelt and Pinchot.
Hetch Hetchy: Topic 7.4
A valley on the Tuolumne River inside Yosemite National Park. San Francisco wanted to dam it for drinking water. John Muir and the Sierra Club fought the plan.
Raker Act (1913): Topic 7.4
Federal law that let San Francisco dam Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park for the city’s water and power. President Wilson signed it on December 19, 1913.
National Park Service (1916): Topic 7.4
Federal agency created by the Organic Act to manage the national parks and keep them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
National Child Labor Committee (1904): Topic 7.4
Reform group that sent investigators and photographers, most famously Lewis Hine, into mills and mines to build the case for state child labor laws.
Lochner v. New York (1905): Topic 7.4
The Supreme Court struck down New York's ten-hour limit for bakers, 5–4, ruling that it violated workers' and employers' 'liberty of contract' under the Fourteenth Amendment.
National Consumers' League (1899): Topic 7.4
Group led by Florence Kelley that asked shoppers to buy only from firms with fair wages and safe workshops, and lobbied for wage and hours laws.
Muller v. Oregon (1908): Topic 7.4
The Court unanimously upheld Oregon's ten-hour day for women laundry workers, persuaded by the Brandeis Brief's evidence. But it reasoned that women's bodies and role as mothers justified special limits, which later kept many women out of better-paid work.
Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911): Topic 7.4
A fire at a New York garment factory that killed 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women. Locked exits and too-short ladders made it the era's clearest case for state factory-safety laws.
secret (Australian) ballot: Topic 7.4
A government-printed ballot marked in private, so party workers could not watch or buy votes. First used statewide in Massachusetts, 1888.
direct primary: Topic 7.4
Voters, not party bosses, choose a party's nominees. Wisconsin led the way in 1903.
initiative, referendum, recall: Topic 7.4
Initiative: voters propose laws. Referendum: voters approve or reject laws. Recall: voters remove an official. Oregon led (1902, 1908).
commission plan, city manager: Topic 7.4
Commission plan: a few elected commissioners each run a city department (Galveston, 1901). City manager: a hired professional runs the city for the council (Dayton, 1913).
scientific management: Topic 7.4
Frederick W. Taylor's method: time every task and find the one best way to do it. Many Progressives wanted government run the same way.
Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party: Topic 7.4
Party formed in 1912 by Roosevelt's supporters after the Republicans renominated Taft. It promised votes for women, an end to child labor and stronger federal regulation of business. It split the Republican vote and helped elect Wilson. The nickname came from Roosevelt saying he felt as strong as a bull moose.
16th Amendment (1913): Topic 7.4
Lets Congress tax incomes without dividing the tax among the states by population. It overturned the effect of the Supreme Court's 1895 ruling against the income tax and made the modern income tax possible.
17th Amendment (1913): Topic 7.4
Voters, not state legislatures, elect U.S. senators. Progressives pushed it to weaken party bosses and the business interests that had influence over legislatures.
Federal Reserve Act (1913): Topic 7.4
Created twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks under a board in Washington. They can lend to banks in a crisis and issue currency, so the country no longer depends on one banker to end a panic.
Clayton Antitrust Act (1914): Topic 7.4
Listed specific practices that hurt competition, such as price discrimination and interlocking boards of directors. It also said unions are not illegal trusts. The Federal Trade Commission, created the same year, investigates unfair business practices.
Color line: Topic 7.4
W. E. B. Du Bois's name for the barrier of racial discrimination and segregation that divided Black and white Americans. In 1903 he predicted that it would be the great problem of the twentieth century.
Niagara Movement (1905): Topic 7.4
A civil rights group founded in 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and other Black leaders. It demanded full political, civil, and social equality and rejected Booker T. Washington's policy of patience.
NAACP (1909): Topic 7.4
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed by Black and white reformers, including W. E. B. Du Bois. It fought lynching and segregation through publicity, protest, and lawsuits.
The Crisis: Topic 7.4
The NAACP's monthly magazine, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1910. It reported on lynching, discrimination, and Black achievement to a national audience.
Segregation of federal offices (1913): Topic 7.4
After Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, his cabinet secretaries began separating Black and white workers in federal departments, ending decades of mixed offices in Washington.
NAWSA and the National Woman's Party: Topic 7.4
NAWSA, under Carrie Chapman Catt, won the vote state by state, then pushed for an amendment. Alice Paul's National Woman's Party used pickets and parades to pressure Congress and the president.
Anti-Saloon League: Topic 7.4
Founded in 1893. It backed any candidate, of either party, who would vote dry.
18th Amendment (1919): Topic 7.4
Banned making, selling and transporting alcohol. The Volstead Act set the enforcement rules. The 21st Amendment repealed it in 1933.
Ratification: Topic 7.4
Approval of an amendment by three-fourths of the states, after two-thirds of Congress votes for it. In 1920 that meant 36 of 48 states.
19th Amendment (1920): Topic 7.4
Barred the United States and every state from denying the vote 'on account of sex.' Racial barriers such as poll taxes and literacy tests stayed in place.
Progressive amendments: Topic 7.4
The 16th (income tax), 17th (senators elected by voters), 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (women's suffrage), ratified 1913 to 1920. AP tie-in: reformers used the Constitution itself to change who held power.
Federal Reserve System (1913): Topic 7.4
The central bank Congress created in 1913. It gave the federal government a tool to steady credit and the money supply, a job private bankers like J. P. Morgan had done by hand.
Jim Crow laws: Topic 7.4
State and local laws, mostly in the South, that enforced racial segregation and kept Black citizens from voting. The Supreme Court allowed separate-but-equal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): Topic 7.4
A federal law that barred Chinese laborers from entering the country. It was the first U.S. law to block immigrants by nationality, and Congress made it permanent in 1902.
Zimmermann Telegram: Topic 7.5
A secret telegram sent in January 1917 by Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. It proposed an alliance with Mexico if the United States entered the war, and offered to help Mexico win back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. British codebreakers read it, and its publication in March 1917 hardened American opinion against Germany.
Unrestricted submarine warfare: Topic 7.5
Sinking merchant ships, neutral ones included, on sight and without warning inside a declared war zone. Germany announced it for February 1, 1917, ending the promise it had made after the Sussex attack in 1916. Attacks on American ships followed, and they were a main immediate cause of U.S. entry into the war.
Election of 1916: Topic 7.5
Democrat Woodrow Wilson narrowly beat Republican Charles Evans Hughes, 277 electoral votes to 254. His party campaigned on peace and prosperity, and on a slogan that gave Wilson the credit for keeping the United States out of the European war: “He kept us out of war.”
Allied Powers: Topic 7.5
The coalition that fought Germany and its partners in World War I. It began as Britain, France and Russia, and later added Italy (1915) and the United States (1917).
Central Powers: Topic 7.5
Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, joined by Bulgaria in 1915. They fought the Allied Powers from 1914 to 1918.
Neutrality: Topic 7.5
A nation's refusal to take sides in other countries' wars. Wilson declared it in August 1914 and asked Americans to stay impartial too, in the tradition of noninvolvement that began with Washington and Jefferson.
Propaganda: Topic 7.5
Information, often slanted or exaggerated, spread to win support for a cause. After Britain cut Germany's cables, American newspapers got their war news through London, including stories of German atrocities in Belgium. Some were true. Some were invented.
Freedom of the seas: Topic 7.5
The principle that neutral ships may carry goods to any country in wartime without being seized or sunk. Wilson demanded it from Britain, which stopped American cargoes, and from Germany, whose submarines sank ships.
Ethnic influences: Topic 7.5
How immigrants' ties to their homelands shaped American opinion. Many German Americans wanted Germany to win, and many Irish Americans wanted Britain beaten. Many Americans of British descent leaned toward the Allies.
Submarine warfare: Topic 7.5
Germany's use of U-boats to sink ships on sight, with little or no warning. After Britain's blockade cut off German trade, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone (announced February 4, in force February 18, 1915). Neutral ships, and Americans aboard Allied ships, were now at risk.
Lusitania: Topic 7.5
Cunard's fast British passenger liner, sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915. Of the 1,198 people who died, 128 were Americans. The sinking turned much American opinion against Germany, but Wilson kept the country out of the war for nearly two more years.
Strict accountability: Topic 7.5
Wilson's warning, in a February 10, 1915 note, that the U.S. would hold Germany to "strict accountability" for any American ships or lives lost to its submarines. After the Lusitania, Wilson sent Germany two more sharp notes (May 13 and June 9). Bryan, who wanted to keep Americans off belligerent ships, thought they risked war and resigned before the second went out.
Sussex pledge: Topic 7.5
Germany's promise of May 4, 1916, made after Wilson threatened to cut off relations, to stop sinking merchant ships without warning. It came with a condition: Germany said it could change course if the U.S. did not make Britain obey the rules of blockade too. Germany kept the pledge until February 1917.
Preparedness: Topic 7.5
The 1915–1916 campaign to build up the U.S. army and navy in case the war reached America. Wilson took it up in 1916 and signed the National Defense Act in June. Peace progressives such as Bryan and Jane Addams opposed it as a step toward war.
Peace without victory: Topic 7.5
Wilson's plan, announced January 22, 1917, to end the war with no winner and no loser. He argued that only a peace between equals could last. Neither side accepted it.
Russian Revolution: Topic 7.5
The March 1917 uprising in Petrograd that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. It removed the autocrat from the Allied side and let Wilson describe the war as democracies against autocracy.
Humanitarian and democratic principles: Topic 7.5
The College Board's phrase for the aims Wilson gave the war: spreading democracy and protecting human rights abroad. It marked a break with the tradition of noninvolvement in European wars.
Convoy system: Topic 7.5
Merchant ships sailing together under warship escort instead of alone. A convoy was harder for U-boats to find and easier to fight. The U.S. Navy joined it in 1917, and troopships crossed the same way.
American Expeditionary Forces (AEF): Topic 7.5
The U.S. Army sent to Europe in 1917–18 under Gen. John J. Pershing. About two million Americans reached France. Pershing fought to keep them together as their own army, not scattered among British and French units.
Segregated units: Topic 7.5
The U.S. Army kept Black and white soldiers in separate units, mostly under white officers, and assigned most Black soldiers to labor and supply work. The four Black combat regiments of the 93rd Division fought under French command.
Western Front: Topic 7.5
The main line of battle in France and Belgium, where Germany faced Britain, France and, from 1917, the United States. Trench warfare held it nearly still until 1918.
Meuse-Argonne offensive: Topic 7.5
The American First Army's attack of September 26 to November 11, 1918, between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest in northeastern France. It was the largest battle in American history and the AEF's last big offensive of World War I.
Hello Girls: Topic 7.5
The nickname for the American women who ran Army telephone switchboards in France in 1918. Fluent in French and English, more than 200 of them worked in France for the Signal Corps, connecting headquarters, units and the French.
Limited, but it tipped the balance: Topic 7.5
AP shorthand for the American role: compared with Britain, France or Germany, the AEF fought in force for a short time, so its combat role was relatively limited. But it arrived when the other armies were exhausted, with fresh troops and supplies, and that helped tip the balance toward the Allies.
Armistice: Topic 7.5
An agreement to stop fighting. It is not a peace treaty: the terms of peace came later, at Versailles in 1919.
Sound ranging: Topic 7.5
A way to find enemy guns without seeing them. Microphones spaced along the front recorded when each gun's boom arrived, and the tiny differences in timing pinpointed where the gun stood.
American Expeditionary Forces: Topic 7.5
The U.S. Army in Europe, under General Pershing. Its combat role was relatively limited, but its arrival helped tip the balance toward the Allies.
Fourteen Points (1918): Topic 7.5
Wilson's January 1918 program for a lasting peace: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, fewer weapons, fair colonial claims, new borders drawn by nationality, and a League of Nations. Germany asked for an armistice on this basis.
Self-determination: Topic 7.5
The idea that each people should choose its own government. Wilson pointed it at Europe's nationalities. Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa hoped it would apply to them too.
Big Four: Topic 7.5
Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, the leaders who made the main decisions at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Wilson gave way on most of the Fourteen Points but held out for the League.
Treaty of Versailles (1919): Topic 7.5
The peace treaty with Germany, signed June 28, 1919. It made Germany accept guilt for the war (Article 231), pay reparations, give up territory and colonies, and limit its army. It also created the League of Nations.
League of Nations: Topic 7.5
The international organization created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to keep peace by collective security. Article X pledged members to protect one another's territory and independence. Wilson later called Article X 'the heart of the whole matter.'
Article X: Topic 7.5
Article X of the League covenant: members promise 'to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.' Lodge feared it could commit the United States to war without a vote in Congress. Wilson answered that the League's Council could only advise.
Irreconcilables: Topic 7.5
About sixteen senators (historians' counts run from about twelve to eighteen), mostly Republicans, who opposed joining the League in any form, however the covenant was worded. Borah of Idaho, Hiram Johnson of California and La Follette of Wisconsin were among them.
Reservationists: Topic 7.5
Senators led by Lodge who would accept the League only if the Senate attached changes, called reservations, to the ratification. One of Lodge's fourteen said the United States would take on no Article X duty unless Congress voted for it.
Collective security: Topic 7.5
A system in which nations promise to act together against an aggressor, so an attack on one becomes everyone's problem. It was the idea behind the League of Nations. Wilson argued for it; the Senate declined to join.
Normalcy: Topic 7.5
Warren Harding's 1920 campaign word for a return to peacetime quiet after the war and the reform crusades. In May 1920 he said the country needed "not nostrums but normalcy." Voters agreed: he won about 60 percent of the popular vote.
Socialist Party of America: Topic 7.6
Party founded in 1901 that wanted public ownership of the biggest industries and opposed U.S. entry into World War I. Its candidate, Eugene V. Debs, won about 900,000 votes in 1912, 6 percent of the total.
Eugene V. Debs: Topic 7.6
(1855–1926) Socialist Party leader and five-time candidate for president. Convicted under the Espionage Act for this 1918 antiwar speech and sentenced to ten years in prison.
"Safe for democracy": Topic 7.6
Wilson's phrase for America's war aim in April 1917: to defend and spread democratic government, not to win territory. Debs, Emma Goldman and the marchers on Fifth Avenue all threw it back at the government.
War Industries Board: Topic 7.6
Federal agency that set production priorities, shared out scarce materials like steel, and fixed prices for war goods.
Food Administration: Topic 7.6
Agency led by Herbert Hoover that asked Americans to conserve food at home so more could ship to the Allies.
Railroad Administration: Topic 7.6
Federal agency that ran the nation's railroads under government control from December 1917 to March 1920.
National War Labor Board: Topic 7.6
Wartime board that mediated labor disputes in exchange for a no-strike pledge, and backed workers' right to organize.
Liberty Bonds: Topic 7.6
Loans the Treasury sold to ordinary Americans to pay for the war, in four Liberty Loan drives.
Selective Service Act (1917): Topic 7.6
The draft law Wilson signed on May 18, 1917. Men 21 to 30 (later 18 to 45) had to register. About 2.8 million were called up by lottery, and almost 2 million more volunteered.
Claims and evidence (skill 3.D): Topic 7.6
Her claim: if the war is for democracy, democracy should begin at home. Her evidence: the draft, a law that forces men to fight. Is that enough? What happened next: two years in prison. Reel 6 fills in the rest.
Committee on Public Information (CPI): Topic 7.6
The government's wartime propaganda agency (1917–1919), run by George Creel. It produced posters, films and pamphlets, and organized volunteer speakers called Four Minute Men.
Espionage Act (1917): Topic 7.6
Made it a crime to obstruct the draft or recruiting, or to help the enemy, with up to 20 years in prison. About 2,000 people were prosecuted, and about half were convicted.
"Clear and present danger": Topic 7.6
The test from Schenck v. United States (1919): speech can be punished when it creates a clear and present danger of harms Congress has the power to prevent.
Anti-German hysteria: Topic 7.6
Wartime fear of anything German. Foods, streets and towns were renamed, German was pushed out of schools, churches and public life, and German Americans were accused of disloyalty. Some were attacked.
Sedition Act (1918): Topic 7.6
A May 1918 amendment to the Espionage Act. It made "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, the Constitution, the flag or the military a crime. Congress repealed it in 1920.
American Protective League (APL): Topic 7.6
A private volunteer group, approved by the Justice Department in March 1917, whose members spied on neighbors and helped arrest suspected draft dodgers. It claimed about 250,000 members.
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): Topic 7.6
The "Wobblies": a radical union that organized unskilled and immigrant workers and opposed the war. Federal raids in 1917 and a mass trial in 1918 broke it.
Immigration peaked before the war: Topic 7.6
Immigration from Europe peaked in the early 1900s. World War I cut it sharply, so employers with war orders looked for workers at home.
Jobs for women: Topic 7.6
Labor shortages opened war-plant, rail-yard and streetcar jobs to women. About a million worked in war industries, most moving up from lower-paid jobs. Many lost them when the soldiers came home.
Migration of Mexicans: Topic 7.6
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910. Violence at home, plus jobs on U.S. farms, mines and railroads, drew hundreds of thousands north.
Great Migration: Topic 7.6
The movement of Black Southerners to northern and western cities, starting about 1916. Segregation, racial violence, boll-weevil ruin on the cotton farms, and factory jobs drove it.
Chicago Defender: Topic 7.6
A Black weekly published in Chicago. It urged Southern Black readers to come north, and Pullman porters carried it into towns where it was unwelcome.
East St. Louis massacre (1917): Topic 7.6
White mob violence against Black residents of East St. Louis, Illinois, the worst of it on July 2, 1917. It grew out of a strike, strikebreaking and fear of job competition during the wartime migration. AMSCO calls it the largest of the wartime race riots; historians now call it a massacre.
NAACP: Topic 7.6
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 by Black and white reformers. It fought lynching and segregation through court cases, publicity and protest, and published The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois.
Close Ranks: Topic 7.6
Du Bois's July 1918 editorial in The Crisis, urging Black Americans to put their grievances aside until the war ended. Critics such as Hubert Harrison answered that those grievances were lynching, segregation and disfranchisement, and could not wait.
service by African Americans: Topic 7.6
Almost 400,000 Black Americans served in World War I, in segregated units; only a few were allowed to be officers, and all were barred from the Marine Corps. Du Bois hoped their service would win equal rights at home.
1918 pandemic: Topic 7.6
A worldwide influenza outbreak that reached the United States in 1918 and killed about 675,000 Americans (AMSCO says 500,000 to 675,000). Army camps and troop ships helped it spread, and cities closed schools, churches and theaters to slow it.
Strikes of 1919: Topic 7.6
About one American worker in five walked out in 1919 as prices rose after the war. The Seattle general strike, the Boston police strike and the steel strike all failed, and many Americans blamed radicals for them.
Red Scare: Topic 7.6
Fear of a Communist revolution in 1919 and 1920. Anger at Germans during the war turned against radicals, unions and immigrants, and the government arrested and deported people it called dangerous.
Palmer raids: Topic 7.6
Justice Department raids in November 1919 and January 1920 on radical groups, mostly immigrants. Agents arrested more than 6,000 people, often without warrants, and 556 were deported. Courts and Labor Department officials soon pushed back.
Emergency Quota Act (1921): Topic 7.6
The first law to put a numerical cap on European immigration: each nationality could send 3 percent of its 1910 U.S. population, about 357,000 people a year in all. It favored northern and western Europe and reflected nativism, hostility to immigrants, especially the 'new' immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Canadians and Latin Americans were exempt.
Race riots (1917–1921): Topic 7.6
The textbook name for the wave of racial violence from East St. Louis in 1917 to Tulsa in 1921. Many were white mobs attacking Black residents, so historians now call the worst of them massacres.
Claims and evidence: Topic 7.6
Skill 3.D. Officials claimed Black farmers plotted an insurrection. Wells tested that claim against the scene itself: a plot does not begin by killing its own members and burning its own church.
Moore v. Dempsey (1923): Topic 7.6
Supreme Court case from the Elaine trials. Justice Holmes wrote that a trial dominated by a mob violates due process, so federal courts may review such state convictions.
New Negro movement: Topic 7.6
A movement of Black writers, artists and activists, strongest in the 1920s, who rejected deference and demanded full citizenship. McKay's sonnet is one of its early landmarks.
Commutation: Topic 7.6
A president shortens a sentence but leaves the conviction on the record. Debs went free; his conviction stood.
Butler Act (Tennessee, 1925): Topic 7.7
A Tennessee law that made it a crime for public-school teachers to teach that humans descended from “a lower order of animals.” It set up the Scopes Trial, a national fight over evolution, the Bible and who decides what public schools teach.
Scopes Trial (1925): Topic 7.7
The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, of a high-school teacher charged with teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act. Reporters called it the “Monkey Trial.” It became a national argument over science, religion and who decides what public schools teach.
Mass media: Topic 7.7
Radio, movies, records and newspapers that reach millions of people at once. In the 1920s they helped spread one national culture, and they showed Americans how differently their neighbors lived.
Assembly line: Topic 7.7
A way of making things in which the work moves past workers who each repeat one task. Ford's Highland Park plant put its chassis on a moving line in 1913–14.
Mass production: Topic 7.7
Making huge numbers of identical goods with standard parts and machines, so each one costs less. Ford's Model T became the model example.
Fordism: Topic 7.7
Mass production paired with wages high enough that workers could afford to buy the product. Ford's five-dollar day is the classic example.
Installment buying: Topic 7.7
Buying on credit: a down payment, then monthly payments while you use the product. It put cars and appliances within reach of families who couldn’t pay all at once, and it left them owing money.
Consumer culture: Topic 7.7
A way of life built around buying goods, pushed along by advertising, credit and mass production. In the 1920s it changed what an ordinary family expected to own.
Advertising: Topic 7.7
Paid messages that sell products and ways of life. In the 1920s ad agencies grew into a major industry, and ads sold status and feelings as well as goods.
Farm surpluses: Topic 7.7
More crops than the market could buy at a good price. After World War I, European demand fell, prices dropped, and farmers who had borrowed to plant more fell behind on their loans.
Radio broadcasting: Topic 7.7
Sending programs through the air to anyone with a receiver, not one message to one person. KDKA’s 1920 election returns are a landmark of the early years.
Race records: Topic 7.7
The record industry’s own 1920s label for blues and jazz sold to Black buyers. ‘Old-time’ records did the same for rural white buyers.
Talkies: Topic 7.7
Movies with synchronized sound. The Jazz Singer (1927) is credited with starting the shift away from silent film.
Urbanization: Topic 7.8
The growth of cities and the move of Americans from farms and villages to urban places. In 1920 the census counted a majority of the population, 51.2 percent, as urban for the first time.
Harlem Renaissance: Topic 7.8
The flowering of Black literature, music and art centered in Harlem in the 1920s. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and musicians such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, drew on Black life and pride.
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA): Topic 7.8
Marcus Garvey's organization, which grew rapidly in Harlem after 1917. It promoted Black pride, Black-owned businesses and emigration to Africa, and its red, black and green flag became a symbol of the movement.
Nativism: Topic 7.8
Favoring native-born Americans over immigrants. After World War I it drove the Red Scare, a revived Ku Klux Klan, and laws to restrict immigration.
Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act): Topic 7.8
Capped immigration at 2 percent of each nationality living in the U.S. in 1890, favoring northern and western Europe. It barred immigrants "ineligible to citizenship" (in effect, all Asians) and set no quotas for the Western Hemisphere.
Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Thind (1923): Topic 7.8
Supreme Court rulings that only "free white persons" could become naturalized citizens. First "white" meant Caucasian, so a Japanese immigrant did not qualify. Then it meant "white" as the common man understands it, so an Indian immigrant did not either.
Eugenics: Topic 7.8
The belief that people could be "improved" through selective breeding. It was used to justify immigration limits and laws forcing people to be sterilized.
Buck v. Bell (1927): Topic 7.8
The Supreme Court upheld Virginia's forced-sterilization law, 8 to 1, in an opinion by Justice Holmes. The ruling let states sterilize people they called "unfit."
The Birth of a Nation (1915): Topic 7.8
D. W. Griffith's blockbuster silent film. It shows the Reconstruction-era Klan as heroes and Black Americans as villains, and its history is false. The NAACP protested it, and many historians link its success to the Klan's revival in 1915.
Second Ku Klux Klan: Topic 7.8
The Klan revived in 1915. It was open only to native-born, white, Protestant men (a women's order followed in 1923) and it targeted Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants. It peaked around 1924–25 with an estimated 3 to 5 million members.
Invisible Empire: Topic 7.8
What the Klan called itself. Members swore secrecy and wore hoods, yet in the 1920s the order recruited openly, marched in public and backed candidates for office.
Volstead Act (1919): Topic 7.8
The federal law that enforced the 18th Amendment. Passed over President Wilson's veto, it banned making, selling and transporting drinks with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.
Flapper: Topic 7.8
The 1920s image of a young woman with bobbed hair and a short skirt who smoked, drove and went out unchaperoned. Magazines and movies made it famous; most women lived very differently.
Comstock Act (1873): Topic 7.8
A federal law that banned mailing 'obscene' material. It classed birth-control information as obscene, so Sanger's work risked prosecution.
Equal Rights Amendment: Topic 7.8
A proposed amendment guaranteeing equal legal rights regardless of sex. First introduced in 1923, it did not pass Congress until 1972 and never became part of the Constitution.
Society for Human Rights (1924): Topic 7.8
The first documented gay rights group in the United States, chartered by Illinois in December 1924. It fell apart after police arrested its founder in 1925.
Fundamentalism: Topic 7.8
A movement of conservative Protestants in the 1920s who held that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. They fought teachings, such as evolution, that seemed to contradict it.
Modernism (in religion): Topic 7.8
The view, common among liberal Protestants, that the Bible should be read in light of modern science and scholarship, so that faith and evolution could fit together. Fundamentalists fought it.
Prohibition: Topic 7.8
The ban on making and selling alcohol under the 18th Amendment, in force from 1920 to 1933. "Wet" meant against the ban and "dry" meant for it. The fight split cities from small towns and immigrants from native-born Protestants.
Solid South: Topic 7.8
The Democratic Party's dependable hold on the former Confederate states after Reconstruction. In 1928 Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas voted Republican. All five returned to the Democrats in 1932.
Election of 1928: Topic 7.8
Republican Herbert Hoover beat Democrat Al Smith in a landslide. The vote followed the decade's fault lines: Prohibition, religion, immigration, and city against country.
Mass culture: Topic 7.8
Shared entertainment and news carried by radio, movies and mass-circulation magazines to a national audience. It spread common habits and brands. It did not end the country's arguments over religion, race and immigration.
Bonus Army: Topic 7.9
About 20,000 jobless First World War veterans, many with their families, who camped in Washington in the summer of 1932 to demand early payment of their bonus. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Army troops drove them out on July 28.
The bonus (1924): Topic 7.9
In 1924 Congress voted First World War veterans a bonus, paid as certificates worth about $1,000 on average that could not be cashed until 1945. By 1932, with jobs gone, veterans wanted the money right away.
Great Depression: Topic 7.9
The worst economic collapse in U.S. history, lasting through the 1930s. Between 1929 and 1933, unemployment rose from about 3 percent to about 25 percent, and from 1930 to 1933 about 9,000 banks failed.
Rugged individualism: Topic 7.9
Hoover's phrase for the idea that Americans do best by their own effort and private enterprise. He argued that government should help business organize itself, then stay out of the way. In 1928 he used it against government running industry.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: Topic 7.9
An index that tracks the stock prices of 30 large American companies, used as a quick measure of how the market is doing. It stood above 381 in September 1929, more than four times its mid-1924 level.
Buying on margin: Topic 7.9
Buying stock with borrowed money. You put down part of the price and your broker lends you the rest, holding the shares as security. Rising prices made you rich fast. Falling prices left you owing the loan. In the early 1920s a down payment could be as low as 10 percent.
Black Thursday: Topic 7.9
October 24, 1929: the day the panic selling began. A record 12.9 million shares changed hands.
Margin call: Topic 7.9
A broker’s demand for more cash when the shares behind your loan fall in price. Pay up, or the broker sells them.
Black Tuesday: Topic 7.9
October 29, 1929: the worst day of the crash. The Dow fell almost 12 percent, and 16,410,030 shares traded.
Lay an egg: Topic 7.9
Show-business slang for flopping on stage.
Trigger vs. underlying causes: Topic 7.9
The trigger is the event that sets a crisis off, like the 1929 crash. Underlying causes are the long-running conditions that made the crisis possible.
Excessive use of credit: Topic 7.9
Buying cars, appliances and stocks with borrowed money. It made the boom look richer than it was and left families and banks owing more than they could repay.
Uneven distribution of income: Topic 7.9
Profits and top incomes grew much faster than wages. Most families could not keep buying what the factories made.
Overproduction and underconsumption: Topic 7.9
Factories and farms made more than customers could afford to buy. Unsold goods meant layoffs, and laid-off workers bought even less, so the slump fed itself.
Bank run: Topic 7.9
Many depositors demanding their money at once. A bank keeps only part of its deposits as cash, so a rush can sink even a sound bank. With no federal deposit insurance, fear alone could cause bank failures.
Federal Reserve: Topic 7.9
The central bank, created in 1913 to steady the banking system. It controls the money supply. Between 1929 and 1933 the supply fell by about a third, and many economists blame that for making the Depression so deep.
Hawley–Smoot Tariff (1930): Topic 7.9
A 1930 law that raised U.S. tariffs on thousands of imports to one of the highest levels in the country's history. Other countries answered with their own tariffs, and world trade shrank.
Hooverville: Topic 7.9
A shantytown of scrap-wood and tin shacks where families lived after losing their homes or jobs. The name blamed President Hoover; Democratic publicity chief Charles Michelson probably coined it. Newspapers used as blankets were called “Hoover blankets,” and empty pockets turned out were “Hoover flags.”
Voluntarism: Topic 7.9
Hoover's belief that businesses, charities and local governments should fight the Depression by choice rather than by federal order. He asked employers to hold wages and keep workers on, and he asked private groups to give relief.
Farm Board: Topic 7.9
A federal agency created by the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929. It lent money to farm co-operatives and bought surplus crops to prop up prices. Farmers kept growing more than the market could absorb, prices kept falling, and its funds ran out.
Debt moratorium (1931): Topic 7.9
In June 1931 Hoover proposed a one-year pause on payments of war debts and reparations between governments. He hoped it would ease Europe's banking crisis and protect American exports. It calmed markets briefly, but banks in Europe kept failing.
Self-reliance: Topic 7.9
Hoover's principle that Americans, their families and their communities should take care of themselves and each other, with Washington as a last resort. He feared a direct federal dole would weaken people's independence and give the government too much power.
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC): Topic 7.9
A federal agency created in January 1932 to lend money to banks, railroads, insurance companies and other large businesses. The idea was to steady the credit system so that jobs would follow. Critics said it helped those at the top and left those at the bottom to charity.
Bonus Army (Bonus Expeditionary Force): Topic 7.9
Jobless First World War veterans and their families who marched on Washington in 1932 to demand early payment of their service bonus. Army troops drove them out on July 28, and newsreel images of the eviction badly damaged Hoover's reputation.
A new deal: Topic 7.9
Roosevelt's 1932 pledge to use federal action against the Depression. It became the name for his programs of relief, recovery and reform in the 1930s.
Election of 1932: Topic 7.9
A landslide for Franklin Roosevelt over President Hoover. Voters blamed the party in power for the Depression, and Democrats also won both houses of Congress, so Roosevelt took office with a mandate to try something new.
Pecora Investigation: Topic 7.9
A Senate inquiry, led by chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, into how banks and brokers had behaved before the crash. Its headlines fed public demands for stronger federal regulation of banking and the stock market.
Bank holiday: Topic 7.9
A legal closing of the banks, ordered to stop depositors from draining them. Michigan's governor closed every bank in the state on February 14, 1933, and other states followed. Roosevelt would order a national one two days after taking office.
Fireside chat: Topic 7.10
One of Roosevelt's radio talks to the whole country. The first, on March 12, 1933, explained the banking crisis in plain words.
Hoarding: Topic 7.10
Pulling your cash out of the bank and keeping it at home. Enough people doing it can drain banks and make them fail.
Brain Trust: Topic 7.10
Professors and experts Roosevelt brought in as advisers, first as governor of New York and then as president.
Emergency Banking Act (1933): Topic 7.10
The first law of the New Deal, passed the day Congress met. It let federal examiners inspect the closed banks and reopen the sound ones with government backing.
Hundred Days: Topic 7.10
The special session of Congress from March 9 to June 16, 1933, when Roosevelt's first big New Deal programs became law.
The three Rs: Topic 7.10
The New Deal's three goals. Relief: help unemployed and poor people right away. Recovery: restart the economy. Reform: change banking, business and labor rules to prevent another depression.
Glass–Steagall Act (1933): Topic 7.10
The Banking Act of 1933. It separated ordinary commercial banks from investment banks and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insures bank deposits.
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Topic 7.10
A federal corporation created May 18, 1933, to control floods, improve navigation, make fertilizer, sell cheap electricity and plan the development of a whole river valley. It is the New Deal's best-known example of regional planning.
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): Topic 7.10
Created March 31, 1933. Unmarried young men, at first ages 18 to 25, from families on relief planted trees and built parks, trails and dams for $30 a month, of which $25 went home to their families. About 3 million served before it ended in 1942.
Relief, recovery, reform: Topic 7.10
The three goals historians use to sort New Deal programs. Relief: help for people in need right now. Recovery: restarting the economy. Reform: changing the rules so a crash like this one can't happen again.
Rural Electrification Administration (REA): Topic 7.10
Created by executive order in May 1935 and made permanent by Congress in 1936. It lent money to farmer-owned electric cooperatives to run power lines to farms that private companies said were too costly to reach.
Tennessee Electric Power Co. v. TVA (1939): Topic 7.10
The Supreme Court held that private utilities had no legal right to be protected from competition from the TVA, so their suit to stop it failed.
National Recovery Administration (NRA): Topic 7.10
Created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (June 16, 1933). Each industry wrote a code of fair competition setting prices, wages, hours and a ban on child labor, and the government approved it. Struck down in 1935.
Section 7(a): Topic 7.10
The clause in the National Industrial Recovery Act that promised workers the right to organize and bargain collectively. The Wagner Act (1935) made that right stronger after the NRA died.
Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA): Topic 7.10
Passed May 12, 1933. It paid farmers to cut production of crops such as cotton, wheat and hogs so prices would rise, and it was funded by a tax on food processors. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1936.
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (1934): Topic 7.10
Founded in July 1934 near Tyronza, Arkansas, by seven Black and eleven white men after a planter evicted twenty-three families. It had more than 35,000 members by 1938.
Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935): Topic 7.10
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the NRA gave Congress's lawmaking power to industry codes, and that it reached businesses that were not in interstate commerce.
Townsend Plan: Topic 7.10
$200 a month for every retired American 60 and over, paid for by a 2 percent tax on every business transaction, and to be spent within 30 days.
Share Our Wealth: Topic 7.10
Long’s plan (1934): cap personal fortunes and incomes, guarantee each family about $5,000 in wealth and an income of about $2,000, plus pensions and free college.
American Liberty League (1934): Topic 7.10
Business leaders (the du Pont brothers, John J. Raskob) and conservative Democrats (Al Smith, John W. Davis) who argued that the New Deal was destroying the Constitution and free enterprise.
Second New Deal: Topic 7.10
Historians' name for the wave of 1935 laws that went further than the first New Deal: the WPA, the Wagner Act, Social Security and higher taxes on the wealthy.
Social Security Act (1935): Topic 7.10
The law that created old-age insurance paid for by taxes on workers and employers, unemployment insurance run by the states, and aid for dependent children and the blind. Farm and household workers were left out.
WPA: Topic 7.10
Works Progress Administration (1935): a federal agency that paid millions of jobless Americans to build roads, schools and parks, and to paint murals and write guidebooks.
Wagner Act (1935): Topic 7.10
The National Labor Relations Act. It gave most private-sector workers a federal right to form unions and bargain with their employers, and it made it illegal for employers to fire workers for union activity. It replaced the NRA's Section 7(a) after the Supreme Court killed the NRA.
Collective bargaining: Topic 7.10
Workers negotiating with an employer as a group, through representatives they choose, instead of one at a time. The Wagner Act made employers legally required to bargain in good faith with the union a majority of workers picked.
NLRB: Topic 7.10
The National Labor Relations Board, created by the Wagner Act. It runs union elections and can order employers to stop firing workers for organizing.
CIO: Topic 7.10
The Committee for Industrial Organization, formed by Lewis and seven other union leaders in November 1935 (renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938). It organized whole industries, skilled and unskilled, including Black and women workers.
Sit-down strike: Topic 7.10
A strike in which workers stop work but stay inside the plant instead of walking out. The company can't bring in replacements or restart the line, and it risks damaging its own machinery if it tries to force them out. Flint's began December 30, 1936; the Supreme Court ruled sit-downs illegal in 1939.
Dust Bowl: Topic 7.10
The southern Great Plains in the 1930s (the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, western Kansas, and parts of southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico), where drought and plowed-up grassland turned topsoil into dust storms.
Soil Conservation Service (1935): Topic 7.10
A Department of Agriculture agency created by Congress in April 1935 and led by Hugh Bennett. It taught and helped farmers stop erosion with contour plowing, terraces, cover crops and tree windbreaks.
“Okies”: Topic 7.10
The insulting name Californians gave to Dust Bowl-era migrants from Oklahoma and nearby states, whether or not they came from Oklahoma.
Repatriation: Topic 7.10
In the early 1930s, local and federal officials pressured or forced hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, to leave the United States. The drives were meant to cut relief costs and free jobs.
Resettlement Administration: Topic 7.10
A New Deal agency created in 1935 to help poor farm families with loans and resettlement. Its Historical Section hired photographers, including Lange, to document rural poverty. It became part of the Farm Security Administration in 1937.
Court-packing plan (1937): Topic 7.10
Roosevelt's proposal to add a new justice for each sitting justice over seventy, up to six. He said aging judges could not keep up with their work; critics said he wanted a Court that would uphold his laws. Congress refused, but the Court soon began upholding New Deal laws anyway.
Keynesian economics: Topic 7.10
The idea that when families and businesses stop spending, the government should spend more to make up the difference, even if that means borrowing. The 1937–38 recession, after Roosevelt cut spending, seemed to prove the point.
Conservative coalition: Topic 7.10
Conservative Democrats, mostly Southern, who began voting with Republicans in 1937 to block new New Deal programs. Their Conservative Manifesto, drafted by Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, called for a balanced budget, lower taxes, more power for the states and private enterprise.
Fair Labor Standards Act (1938): Topic 7.10
The last big New Deal law. It set the first national minimum wage (25 cents an hour), required overtime pay after a set number of hours (down to 40 a week by 1940), and limited child labor. At first it covered only about one worker in five. Farm workers were left out, and so were domestic workers until 1974.
Black Cabinet: Topic 7.10
Bethune's Federal Council on Negro Affairs, formed in 1936: Black advisers in New Deal agencies who pushed from inside for fair treatment of Black Americans.
New Deal coalition: Topic 7.10
The voters who made the Democrats the majority party from the 1930s on: union households, big-city immigrants and their children, Black voters, farmers, liberals and white Southerners.
Political realignment: Topic 7.10
A lasting shift of whole groups of voters from one party to another. In the 1930s many Black, ethnic and working-class voters left the Republicans for the Democrats.
Limited welfare state: Topic 7.10
Government programs that protect citizens from poverty, old age and unemployment, on a smaller scale than in many other rich countries. The New Deal built it, and Americans still argue about its size.
Modern American liberalism: Topic 7.10
The view, built in the New Deal, that the federal government should regulate business, help manage the economy and guarantee citizens a basic level of security.
Instrument of national policy: Topic 7.11
The Pact's phrase for a nation choosing war to get what it wants, such as territory or influence. Kellogg's diplomatic notes said the Pact left every nation free to defend itself.
Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928): Topic 7.11
A 1928 treaty, also called the Pact of Paris, named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. Nations renounced war as an instrument of national policy. It had no way to enforce itself, and more than sixty nations eventually joined.
Isolationism: Topic 7.11
Avoiding alliances and commitments that could pull the country into foreign wars. In the 1920s Americans still traded, lent and sent troops abroad.
Five-Power Treaty (1922): Topic 7.11
Set navy limits at the Washington Conference: battleship tonnage of 5 for the U.S., 5 for Britain, 3 for Japan, and less for France and Italy. A companion Four-Power Treaty covered the Pacific.
Nine-Power Treaty (1922): Topic 7.11
Nine nations, including the U.S., Britain and Japan, promised to respect China's borders and the Open Door: equal trade access to China. It had no way to enforce the promise.
War debts and reparations: Topic 7.11
War debts: what the Allies owed the U.S. for wartime loans. Reparations: what Germany owed the Allies for war damage. Each side tied its payments to the other.
Dawes Plan (1924): Topic 7.11
A 1924 plan that let American loans to Germany pay reparations to Britain and France, who used the money to repay war debts to the U.S. It also lowered Germany's yearly payments.
Good Neighbor Policy: Topic 7.11
Roosevelt’s policy of respecting Latin American nations’ independence, announced in 1933. The U.S. pledged not to intervene in their affairs, ended its occupations and repealed the Platt Amendment (1934).
Pan-American conferences: Topic 7.11
Meetings of the United States and Latin American governments, held since 1889. At Montevideo in 1933 the delegates signed a pledge that no state may intervene in another’s affairs.
Recognition of the USSR (1933): Topic 7.11
In 1933 the U.S. finally opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet government, which it had refused to recognize since the 1917 revolution. Trade was a main hope.
Reciprocal Trade Agreements (1934): Topic 7.11
A 1934 law letting the president cut U.S. tariffs by up to 50 percent in deals with countries that cut theirs, to win back foreign markets during the Depression.
Tydings–McDuffie Act (1934): Topic 7.11
1934 law promising the Philippines independence in 1946, after a ten-year transition as a self-governing commonwealth.
Stimson Doctrine: Topic 7.11
U.S. policy of refusing to recognize territory taken by force, announced in 1932 after Japan seized Manchuria. It carried no penalty.
Fascism: Topic 7.11
Extreme nationalist, dictatorial movement that glorifies the nation and race through aggressive force. Mussolini led Italy's; Hitler, Germany's.
Nye Committee: Topic 7.11
Senate inquiry (1934–36) led by Gerald Nye that blamed arms makers and bankers for pulling the U.S. into World War I.
Neutrality Acts: Topic 7.11
1935–37 laws banning arms sales and loans to nations at war, meant to keep the U.S. out of another European war.
Spanish Civil War: Topic 7.11
1936–39 war in which General Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, overthrew Spain's elected Republic. The U.S. stayed neutral.
Quarantine speech (1937): Topic 7.11
Roosevelt's Chicago speech urging peace-loving nations to isolate aggressors the way a community isolates a contagion. He named no country and no plan. Isolationists attacked it, and he dropped the idea.
Ludlow Amendment: Topic 7.11
A proposed constitutional amendment (1937–38) requiring a national vote before Congress could declare war, except after an invasion. On January 10, 1938, the House voted 209–188 not to take it up.
Appeasement: Topic 7.11
Giving in to an aggressor's demands to avoid war. At Munich in 1938, Britain and France let Hitler annex the Sudetenland, and Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later.
Sudetenland: Topic 7.11
The border region of Czechoslovakia where many people spoke German. Hitler took it after the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Czechoslovakia was not invited to the talks.
Cash and carry: Topic 7.11
The 1939 neutrality rule letting warring nations buy U.S. arms if they paid up front and carried them home in their own ships. It was technically neutral but strongly favored Britain and France.
Blitzkrieg: Topic 7.11
German for "lightning war": tanks and warplanes striking together, fast enough to break an army before it can regroup. Germany used it to overrun Poland in 1939 and France in 1940.
Destroyers-for-bases deal: Topic 7.11
September 1940: the United States gave Britain 50 old Navy destroyers. Britain gave the United States 99-year leases on bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana. Roosevelt did it by executive agreement, with no vote in Congress.
Selective Training and Service Act (1940): Topic 7.11
The first peacetime draft in U.S. history, signed September 16, 1940. Men aged 21 to 35 registered, and a lottery decided who served a year of training.
America First Committee: Topic 7.11
Founded in September 1940, it argued the United States should build up its own defense and stay out of Europe's war. It fought aid to Britain that it feared would lead to war.
Third term: Topic 7.11
No president had won a third term. George Washington set the two-term custom when he stepped down in 1796, and the 22nd Amendment made it law in 1951.
Arsenal of democracy: Topic 7.11
Roosevelt's phrase (December 29, 1940) for a United States that would not fight but would build and ship the planes, ships and tanks that Britain and others needed to keep resisting Germany and its partners.
Four Freedoms: Topic 7.11
Roosevelt's January 1941 statement of what the fight against the Axis was for: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. It gave aid to Britain a purpose beyond staying out of trouble.
Lend-Lease Act (1941): Topic 7.11
Law signed March 11, 1941 that let the President lend or lease war supplies to any country whose defense he said mattered to U.S. security. It ended 'cash and carry' and made America the Allies' supplier before it entered the war.
Atlantic Charter: Topic 7.11
Joint statement of war aims by Roosevelt and Churchill, released August 14, 1941, before the U.S. entered the war: self-determination, free trade, no territorial gains, freedom of the seas. A declaration of principles, not a treaty.
Charles Lindbergh: Topic 7.11
Aviator who became the best-known voice of the America First Committee and argued against aiding Britain. His September 1941 Des Moines speech blamed the British, Jewish Americans and the Roosevelt administration for pushing the country toward war, and leaders of both parties condemned it.
Axis powers: Topic 7.11
Germany, Italy and Japan, allied by the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. Each promised to help the others if the United States attacked one of them.
Oil embargo (1941): Topic 7.11
After Japan occupied southern Indochina, the United States froze Japanese assets and stopped selling Japan oil. Japan's leaders saw two ways out: leave China, or seize the oil fields of Southeast Asia.
Hull note (November 26, 1941): Topic 7.11
Secretary of State Cordell Hull's last proposal to Japan. Among its terms: Japan must withdraw its forces from China and Indochina. Japan's leaders had already sent their fleet to sea.
Pearl Harbor: Topic 7.11
The U.S. Pacific Fleet's base on Oahu, Hawaii. On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier planes attacked it and nearby Army and Navy airfields. The attack ended the long argument over whether the United States would stay out of the war.
Declaration of war: Topic 7.11
A formal act of Congress, the branch the Constitution gives the power to declare war. Congress passed the declaration against Japan on December 8, 1941, and Roosevelt signed it that afternoon.
Internationalism: Topic 7.11
The view that the United States should work with other nations, through alliances and organizations, to keep the peace and protect its interests. It is the opposite of isolationism, and it is the last pair of terms on the dials.
Unilateral foreign policy: Topic 7.11
A nation acting on its own, without allies or binding commitments to others. After 1920 the United States refused the League of Nations and peacetime alliances, yet it still lent money, signed treaties and sent troops abroad on its own terms.
Nuremberg trials: Topic 7.11
Trials of Nazi leaders before an international tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946. The judges ruled that planning and waging aggressive war was a crime under international law, and cited the Kellogg–Briand Pact.
Segregation: Topic 7.12
The separation of Black and white Americans in jobs, schools, housing and public places. Laws required it across the South; custom enforced it in much of the rest of the country.
Double V campaign: Topic 7.12
A 1942 campaign launched by the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper. It called for victory over the Axis abroad and over racial discrimination at home, and tied the fight for civil rights to the war effort.
Mobilization: Topic 7.12
Organizing a nation's people, factories and money for war. After Pearl Harbor, U.S. war production took millions of jobless workers back to work and helped end the Great Depression.
Home front: Topic 7.12
Civilian life during a war: the factories, farms, families and government agencies that produced and paid for the fighting.
War Production Board (1942): Topic 7.12
The federal agency that ran war industry. It set production priorities, assigned scarce raw materials and halted civilian goods.
Cost-plus contract: Topic 7.12
A government contract that paid a firm's costs plus a fixed fee as profit, so the company carried little risk.
Arsenal of democracy (1940): Topic 7.12
Roosevelt's December 1940 phrase for America's role: it would make the weapons Britain and its allies needed, even before it entered the war.
Manhattan Project (1942–45): Topic 7.12
The secret federal program that built the first atomic bombs, with research and production sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford.
Office of Price Administration (OPA): Topic 7.12
The wartime agency that froze prices and rents and rationed scarce goods, such as gasoline and meat, to fight inflation.
Black market: Topic 7.12
Illegal buying and selling of rationed or price-controlled goods, usually above the legal price.
Withholding: Topic 7.12
Income tax taken straight out of each paycheck before the worker sees it. It began in July 1943; some textbooks say 1944.
Office of War Information (OWI): Topic 7.12
The wartime agency that used posters, radio shows and photographs to keep Americans working, saving and buying war bonds.
Smith–Connally Act (1943): Topic 7.12
A wartime law, passed over Roosevelt's veto, that let the government seize war plants shut by strikes and required a cooling-off period before a strike.
Rosie the Riveter: Topic 7.12
The symbol of the millions of women who took factory and shipyard jobs in World War II. The name comes from a 1942 song, and the image was attached to a wartime poster decades later.
Second Great Migration: Topic 7.12
The movement of millions of Black Americans from the South to cities in the North and West, from about 1940 to 1970. War jobs drew the first big wave.
Auxiliary local: Topic 7.12
A second-class branch of a union, set up for workers the main local would not admit. Black members paid dues but had no vote and little say over their jobs.
Magnuson Act (1943): Topic 7.12
The law that repealed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in December 1943. It let Chinese immigrants become citizens but set a quota of only 105 new immigrants a year.
For the duration: Topic 7.12
Wartime shorthand for 'until the war ends.' Many war jobs, and many of the rules that opened them, were promised only for that long.
Executive Order 8802 (1941) and the FEPC: Topic 7.12
Roosevelt's 1941 order banning racial discrimination in defense industries and government. It created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints.
Hate strike: Topic 7.12
A walkout by white workers to protest working beside, or under, Black workers.
Smith v. Allwright (1944): Topic 7.12
Supreme Court ruling that excluding Black voters from party primaries violated the Constitution.
Executive Order 9066 (1942): Topic 7.12
President Roosevelt's order letting the military set up zones from which “any or all persons” could be excluded. It named no group, but the Army used it to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
Internment: Topic 7.12
The forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during the war. Most were U.S. citizens, so the government's own 1983 commission and many historians now also call it “incarceration.”
Issei and Nisei: Topic 7.12
Issei were the immigrants from Japan, barred by law from becoming citizens. Nisei were their children, born in the United States and citizens by birth.
Korematsu v. United States (1944): Topic 7.12
The Supreme Court upheld, 6–3, the conviction of a U.S. citizen who refused to obey the exclusion order. In 1983 a federal court overturned Korematsu's conviction.
Ex parte Endo (1944): Topic 7.12
The Supreme Court ruled on the same day as Korematsu that the government could not keep holding a citizen it conceded was loyal. Mitsuye Endo, a Nisei from Sacramento, had challenged her confinement in court.
Repatriation (1930s): Topic 7.12
The removal of people of Mexican descent from the United States to Mexico during the Great Depression, by deportation or by pressure to leave. Many of those who went were U.S. citizens.
Bracero Program (1942–1964): Topic 7.12
A U.S.–Mexico agreement that brought Mexican men to work on U.S. farms and railroads on short contracts. Bracero comes from brazo, Spanish for arm: a man who works with his arms.
Sleepy Lagoon case (1942): Topic 7.12
A Los Angeles case in which police rounded up hundreds of young Mexican Americans after a man was found dying near a reservoir; 17 were convicted. An appeals court threw out the convictions in 1944.
Zoot Suit Riots (1943): Topic 7.12
Six days of attacks in June 1943 in which U.S. servicemen beat young Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and tore off their zoot suits. The police arrested mostly the victims.
Last hired, first fired: Topic 7.12
The usual order of layoffs: the newest workers go first. Women and Black workers had been hired last in the war boom, so many lost their jobs first.
The Good War: Topic 7.12
The nickname many Americans later gave World War II. Unity behind its democratic ideals helped that generation remember it as a just, shared cause. The home front also held segregation, riots and internment.
Wartime solidarity: Topic 7.12
Fighting or working side by side softened prejudices based on nationality, ethnicity and religion, and the wartime migrations opened many Americans' eyes to racial discrimination. Other prejudices hardened.
March on Washington (1963): Topic 7.12
The August 28, 1963 rally at the Lincoln Memorial for jobs and freedom. About 200,000 people came, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A. Philip Randolph, who had planned a march in 1941, directed it.
Perry's expedition (1853–54): Topic 7.15
Commodore Matthew Perry sailed a U.S. Navy squadron into Edo Bay in July 1853 and pressed Japan's government to open ports to American ships. The Treaty of Kanagawa (1854) gave U.S. ships access to two ports.
Surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945): Topic 7.15
Japan's government and armed forces signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The United States and eight other Allied nations signed for the Allies, formally ending World War II.
Superpower: Topic 7.15
A nation strong enough to act in every part of the world. After 1945 the United States, with the largest navy and the atomic bomb, was one of two: the other was the Soviet Union.
Quotas (1921, 1924): Topic 7.15
Laws that capped immigration by nationality. They gave southern and eastern Europeans the smallest numbers and barred nearly all immigrants from Asia.
Four Minute Men: Topic 7.15
Volunteer speakers the Committee on Public Information sent to theaters in 1917–18. Each gave a four-minute talk, often while the projectionist changed reels, to promote the war effort.
For the war's duration: Topic 7.15
The promise on many wartime jobs opened to women and minorities: the job was theirs only until the war ended. Most went back to returning men in 1945–46.
Newsreel: Topic 7.15
A short filmed news roundup shown before the feature in movie theaters. In the 1930s and 1940s it brought the war to the whole country at once.
Historical significance: Topic 7.15
How much an event mattered: how many people it reached, how deeply, and for how long. To argue it, compare the event with others and back your claim with evidence.
Complex argument (skill 6.D): Topic 7.15
Corroborate: add evidence that backs the claim. Qualify: show where it stops being true. Modify: rewrite it to fit the evidence.
Japanese American internment: Topic 7.15
Executive Order 9066 (1942) forced Japanese Americans on the West Coast out of their homes and into camps. Many historians now call it incarceration.
Bracero program (1942): Topic 7.15
A U.S.–Mexico agreement that brought Mexican workers for farms and railroads, at wages and in conditions the workers often had no power to change.
The American Century (1941): Topic 7.15
Henry Luce's name for the 1900s in a 1941 essay in Life. He argued that the United States should accept its power and lead the world.
Century of the Common Man (1942): Topic 7.15
Vice President Henry Wallace's reply to Luce: the war should lead to a world where ordinary people everywhere gain freedom and a better living, not to one nation's rule.
The color line (1903): Topic 7.15
W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase, in The Souls of Black Folk, for racial division as the defining problem of the 1900s, in the United States and around the world.

Unit 7 Review: 1890–1945

Topics

Key terms

The exam

All units