Reading...
Play button
Play button
Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;
Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;
H to show hint;
A reads text to speech;
23 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
|
Sacco & Vanzetti
|
Italian immigrants who were accused and convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in Massachusetts. After a controversial trial and a series of appeals, the men were executed on August 23, 1927.[1][2]The case is controversial along two separate but related lines:
|
|
|
Margaret Sanger
|
An American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League.
|
|
|
Scopes Trial
|
An American legal case that tested the Butler Act which made it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" in any Tennessee state-funded school and university. The trial drew intense national publicity, with modernists pitted against traditionalists over the teaching of evolution in the schools and a Fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The trial also proved a critical turning point in the American creation-evolution controversy
|
|
|
Second Continental Congress
|
A convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that met beginning on May 10, 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, soon after warfare in the American Revolutionary War had begun. It succeeded the First Continental Congress, which met briefly during 1774, also in Philadelphia. The second Congress managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence, adopting the United States Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. By raising armies, directing strategy, appointing diplomats, and making formal treaties, the Congress acted as the de facto national government of what became the United States.
|
|
|
Seneca Falls
|
An early and influential women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York over two days, July 19–20, 1848. The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including organizer and featured speaker Lucretia Mott, as but a single step in the continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, but it was viewed by others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men.
|
|
|
Shay's Rebellion
|
An armed uprising in central and western Massachusetts (mainly Springfield) from 1785 to 1786. The rebellion is named after Daniel Shays, a veteran of the American Revolution who led the rebels, known as "Shaysites" or "Regulators". Most of Shays's compatriots were poor farmers angered by crushing debt and taxes. Failure to repay such debts often resulted in imprisonment in debtor's prisons or the claiming of property by the government. Seeking debt relief through the issuance of paper currency and lower taxes, they attempted to prevent the courts from seizing property from indebted farmers by forcing the closure of courts in western Massachusetts.
|
|
|
Sherman Anti-trust Act
|
Required the United States Federal government to investigate and pursue trusts, companies and organizations suspected of violating the Act. It was the first Federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies, and today still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by the United States federal government. However, for the most part, politicians were unwilling to use the law until Teddy Roosevelt's Presidency (1901-1909) this occurred in the gilded age and the progressive reform.
|
|
|
Upton Cinclair
|
A Pulitzer Prize-winning American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the 20th century, acquiring particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act
|
|
|
Adam Smith
|
A Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.
|
|
|
Social Darwinism
|
A belief, popular in the late Victorian era in England, America, and elsewhere, which states that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die. The theory was chiefly expounded by Herbert Spencer, whose ethical philosophies always held an elitist view and received a boost from the application of Darwinian ideas such as adaptation and natural selection.
|
|
|
Spanish American War
|
A conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States. While many historians and experts routinely include the indigenous struggles for independence in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands under this heading, the name Spanish-American War (explicitly suggesting the period of US military involvement, as it does) narrowly refers to the US-sponsored punctuation to the late-nineteenth-century turmoil in the Spanish colonies. Ostensibly fought over the issue of Cuban independence, the four-month war developed into a global conflict as the U.S. Navy sought to dislodge Spain from longstanding colonial outposts in both the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
|
|
|
Specie Circular
|
An executive order issued by U.S. President Andrew Jackson in 1836 and carried out by President Martin Van Buren. It required payment for government land to be in gold and silver.
|
|
|
Spoils System
|
A practice where a political party, after winning an election, gives government jobs to its voters as a reward for working toward victory, and as an incentive to keep working for the party—as opposed to a system of awarding offices on the basis of some measure of merit independent of political activity.
|
|
|
Sputnik
|
The first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, and was the first in a series of satellites collectively known as the Sputnik program. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1's success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race within the Cold War.
|
|
|
Square Deal
|
President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking the plutocracy and trusts while at the same time protecting business from the extreme demands of organized labor.
|
|
|
Joseph Stalin
|
The first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin's death in 1924, he rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin launched a command economy, replacing the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans and launching a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivization. The upheaval in the agricultural sector disrupted food production, resulting in widespread famine, such as the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932-1933, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor
|
|
|
Stamp Act
|
A tax imposed by the British Parliament on the colonies of British America. The act required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London and carrying an embossed revenue stamp. These printed materials were legal documents, magazines, newspapers and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies. Like previous taxes, the Stamp tax had to be paid in valid British currency, not in colonial paper money.
|
|
|
John Steinback
|
An American writer. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He wrote a total of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories. In 1962, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
|
|
|
Thaddeus Stevens
|
A Republican leader and one of the most powerful members of the United States House of Representatives. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Stevens, a witty, sarcastic speaker and flamboyant party leader, dominated the House from 1861 until his death and wrote much of the financial legislation that paid for the American Civil War. Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner were the prime leaders of the Radical Republicans during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
|
|
|
Lucy Stone
|
A prominent American abolitionist and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women. In 1839, Stone was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery at a time when women were discouraged and prevented from public speaking. Stone was the first recorded American woman to retain her own last name after marriage.
|
|
|
Charles Sumner
|
An American politician and statesman from Massachusetts. An academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the United States Senate during the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and the counterpart to Thaddeus Stevens in the United States House of Representatives. He jumped from party to party, gaining fame as a Republican. One of the most learned statesmen of the era, he specialized in foreign affairs, working closely with Abraham Lincoln. He devoted his enormous energies to the destruction of what he considered the Slave Power, that is the scheme of slave owners to take control of the federal government and block the progress of liberty.
|
|
|
William Howard Taft
|
The 27th President of the United States and later the 10th Chief Justice of the United States. He is the only person to have served in both offices. In his first and only term, President Taft's domestic agenda emphasized trust-busting, civil service reform, strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission, improving the performance of the postal service, and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. Abroad, Taft sought to further the economic development of undeveloped nations in Latin America and Asia through the method he termed "Dollar Diplomacy."
|
|
|
Lincoln Steffens
|
An American journalist, lecturer, and political philosopher, and one of the most famous practitioners of the journalistic style called muckraking. He is also known for his 1921 statement, upon his return from the Soviet Union: "I have been over into the future, and it works."
|
