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100 Cards in this Set
- Front
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Alien and Sedition Acts
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A series of laws, passed during the presidency of John Adams at the end of the eighteenth century, that sought to restrict the public activities of political radicals who sympathized with the French Revolution and criticized Adams’s Federalist policies. In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which asserted states’ rights. [1798]
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Dred Scott Case
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A controversial ruling made by the Supreme Court in 1857. Dred Scott, a slave, sought to be declared a free man on the basis that he had lived for a time in a “free” territory with his master. The Court decided that, under the Constitution, Scott was his master’s property and was not a citizen of the United States. The Court also declared that the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in certain areas, unconstitutionally deprived people of property. The Dred Scott decision was a serious blow to abolitionists.
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Monroe Doctrine
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A statement of foreign policy issued by President James Monroe in 1823, declaring that the United States would not tolerate intervention by European nations in the affairs of nations in the Americas. Monroe also promised that the United States would not interfere with European colonies already established or with governments in Europe.
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Compromise of 1850
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A set of laws, passed in the midst of fierce wrangling between groups favoring slavery and groups opposing it, that attempted to give something to both sides. The compromise admitted California to the United States as a “free” state but allowed some newly acquired territories to decide on slavery for themselves. Part of the Compromise included the Fugitive Slave Act, which proved highly unpopular in the North. Senator Henry Clay was a force behind the passage of the compromise.
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manifest destiny
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A popular slogan of the 1840s. It was used by people who believed that the United States was destined—by God, some said—to expand across North America to the Pacific Ocean. The idea of manifest destiny was used to justify the acquisition of Oregon and large parts of the Southwest, including California.
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Fort Sumter
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A fort at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina; the location of the first military engagement of the Civil War. In April 1861, several months after South Carolina had declared its secession from the United States, the militia of South Carolina demanded that the commander of the fort surrender. He refused, and the South Carolinians fired on the fort. There were no deaths in the incident. In response, however, President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the “insurrection,” and the American Civil War began.
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Fugitive Slave Act
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A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. The law was highly unpopular in the North and helped to convert many previously indifferent northerners to antislavery.
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Embargo Act
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An 1807 bill that barred trade between the United States and other nations. It was created at the request of President Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to prevent American involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. The bill proved unpopular and unenforceable and was repealed in 1808.
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Emancipation Proclamation
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A proclamation made by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 that all slaves under the Confederacy were from then on “forever free.”
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War of 1812
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A war between Britain and the United States, fought between 1812 and 1815. It began over alleged British violations of American shipping rights, such as the impressment of seamen—the forcing of American merchant sailors to serve on British ships. American soldiers attacked Canada unsuccessfully in the war, and the British retaliated by burning the White House and other buildings in Washington, D.C. The greatest victory for the Americans came in the Battle of New Orleans, in which Andrew Jackson was the commanding general—a battle fought, ironically, two weeks after the peace treaty ending the war had been signed, but before the armies could be informed.
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Mexican War
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A war fought between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. The United States won the war, encouraged by the feelings of many Americans that the country was accomplishing its manifest destiny of expansion. Mexico renounced all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and yielded a vast territory that embraces the present states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
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Whisky Rebellion
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An insurrection that broke out in the early 1790s in western Pennsylvania. Hundreds of residents took arms against federal officials charged with collecting a tax on liquor distilled at home. Federal troops then put the rebellion down. Occurring only a few years after the adoption of the Constitution, the Whisky Rebellion was an important test of the power of the new federal government to enforce its laws.
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Kansas-Nebraska Act
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A law passed by Congress in 1854 that divided the territory west of the states of Missouri and Iowa and the territory of Minnesota into two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The law was extremely controversial because it did not exclude slavery from either territory, despite the fact that the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in these territories. By effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise, the law outraged many northerners, led to the collapse of the Whig party and the rise of the Republican party, and moved the nation closer to civil war.
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Missouri Compromise
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A settlement of a dispute between slave and free states, contained in several laws passed during 1820 and 1821. Northern legislators had tried to prohibit slavery in Missouri, which was then applying for statehood. The Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and prohibited slavery in territory that later became Kansas and Nebraska.
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“Civil Disobedience”
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(1849) An essay by Henry David Thoreau. It contains his famous statement “That government is best which governs least,” and asserts that people’s obligations to their own conscience take precedence over their obligations to their government. Thoreau also argues that if, in following their conscience, people find it necessary to break the laws of the state, they should be prepared to pay penalties, including imprisonment.
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Lincoln-Douglas Debates
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A series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, when both were campaigning for election to the United States Senate from Illinois. Much of the debating concerned slavery and its extension into territories such as Kansas. The debates transformed Lincoln into a national figure and led to his election to the presidency in 1860.
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Reconstruction
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The period after the Civil War in which the states formerly part of the Confederacy were brought back into the United States. During Reconstruction, the South was divided into military districts for the supervision of elections to set up new state governments. These governments often included carpetbaggers, as former officials of the Confederacy were not allowed to serve in them. The new state governments approved three amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, which had a provision keeping some former supporters of the Confederacy out of public office until Congress allowed them to serve; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights for black men. Once a state approved the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, it was to be readmitted to the United States and again represented in Congress. The official end of Reconstruction came in 1877, when the last troops were withdrawn from the South.
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Appomattox Court House
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A village in Virginia where General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865, effectively ending the American Civil War.
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Gettysburg Address
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A speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Lincoln was speaking at the dedication of a soldiers’ cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. The opening and closing lines are particularly memorable: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…. [We must] be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”
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spoils system
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The practice of appointing applicants to public offices as a reward for their loyalty to the political party in power. The term comes from a statement by a senator in the 1830s: “To the victor belong the spoils.” Reform of the system commenced in the 1880s with the introduction of merit as the basis of appointment to office.
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William Jennings Bryan
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A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bryan, claiming to be the candidate of the ordinary American, lost three presidential elections as the nominee of the Democratic party, although he gathered substantial votes in the South and West. At the 1896 Democratic national convention, he delivered the much-remembered “Cross of Gold” speech in favor of unlimited coinage of silver and against the gold standard. A fundamentalist in religion, Bryan opposed the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools and assisted in the prosecution at the Scopes trial.
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Scopes trial
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The trial of John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, for teaching the theory of evolution in violation of state law. The trial was held in 1925, with eminent lawyers on both sides—William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Although Scopes was convicted, he was given a nominal fine, and the outcome was widely seen as a victory for Darrow.
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Sherman Antitrust Act
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A federal law passed in 1890 that committed the American government to opposing monopolies. The law prohibits contracts, combinations, or conspiracies “in the restraint of trade or commerce.” Under the authority of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal government initiated suits against the Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company.
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Spanish-American War
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A war between Spain and the United States, fought in 1898. The war began as an intervention by the United States on behalf of Cuba. Accounts of Spanish mistreatment of Cuban natives had aroused much resentment in the United States, a resentment encouraged by the yellow press. The incident that led most directly to the war was the explosion of the United States battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, an incident for which many Americans blamed Spain. The United States won the war easily. The best-remembered incidents in the Spanish-American War were the charge of the Rough Riders, led by Theodore Roosevelt, in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba, and the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. The United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the war and gained temporary control over Cuba.
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yellow journalism
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Inflammatory, irresponsible reporting by newspapers. The phrase arose during the 1890s, when some American newspapers, particularly those run by William Randolph Hearst, worked to incite hatred of Spain, thereby contributing to the start of the Spanish-American War. Newspapers that practice yellow journalism are called yellow press.
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Roosevelt’s Court packing plan
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A move by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to increase the size of the Supreme Court and then bring in several new justices who would change the balance of opinion on the Court. Roosevelt proposed to pack the Court in the 1930s, when several conservative justices were inclined to declare parts of his program, the New Deal, unconstitutional. Congress would not allow the number of justices to be increased, and Roosevelt was criticized for trying to undermine the independence of the Court.
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New Deal
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A group of government programs and policies established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s; the New Deal was designed to improve conditions for persons suffering in the Great Depression. The projects of the New Deal included the Social Security System, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Works Progress Administration.
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Tennessee Valley Authority
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A corporation created by the federal government in the Great Depression to promote the economic development of the Tennessee River and adjoining areas. The TVA, known as a builder of dams, is responsible for flood control, the generation of electric power, soil conservation, and other areas of economic development. The TVA was part of the New Deal.
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Works Progress Administration
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A program of the New Deal in the 1930s. The WPA built sidewalks, government buildings, and similar public works throughout the United States. During the Great Depression, the WPA employed many people who could not find other work.
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Dust Bowl
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A parched region of the Great Plains, including parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, where a combination of drought and soil erosion created enormous dust storms in the 1930s. The novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, describes the plight of the “Okies” and “Arkies” uprooted by the drought and forced to migrate to California.
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Hoovervilles
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The encampments of the poor and homeless that sprang up during the Great Depression. They were named with ironic intent after President Herbert Hoover, who was in office when the depression started.
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Progressive movement
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A movement for reform that occurred roughly between 1900 and 1920. Progressives typically held that irresponsible actions by the rich were corrupting both public and private life. They called for measures such as trust busting, the regulation of railroads, provisions for the people to vote on laws themselves through referendum, the election of the Senate by the people rather than by state legislatures, and a graduated income tax. The Progressives were able to get much of their program passed into law. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were associated with the movement.
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Fourteen Points
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Fourteen goals of the United States in the peace negotiations after World War I. President Woodrow Wilson announced the Fourteen Points to Congress in early 1918. They included public negotiations between nations, freedom of navigation, free trade, self-determination for several nations involved in the war, and the establishment of an association of nations to keep the peace. The “association of nations” Wilson mentioned became the League of Nations.
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Walter Lippmann
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A journalist and author of the twentieth century. Lippmann wrote a widely read newspaper column and several books, including The Public Philosophy. He has been mentioned as a prime example of a political pundit.
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Truman-MacArthur controversy
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A dispute between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, during the Korean War. MacArthur, who commanded the troops of the United Nations, wanted to use American air power to attack the People’s Republic of China. Truman refused, fearing that an American attack on China would bring the Soviet Union into the war. When MacArthur criticized Truman’s decision publicly, Truman declared MacArthur insubordinate and removed him as commanding general. MacArthur returned to the United States, received a hero’s welcome, and told Congress, “Old soldiers never die; they only fade away.”
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Douglas MacArthur
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A general of the twentieth century, who commanded the forces of the Allies in the Pacific region in World War II. After the final defeat of Japan, he supervised the occupation of that country by the Allies and helped revise the Japanese constitution. During the Korean War, he commanded troops of the United Nations but was removed as commander by President Harry S. Truman.
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Fair Deal
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President Truman's 21-point program proposing the expansion of Social Security, a full-employment program, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act, and public housing and slum clearance. The program, Truman wrote, "symbolizes for me my assumption of the office of President in my own right."
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Truman Doctrine
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A set of principles of U.S. foreign policy declared by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 in which Truman declared that as leader of the "free world" the United States must support freedom-loving peoples wherever communism threatened them. The approach was conceived with the help of George Marshall and Dean Acheson, two influential associates of Truman.
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Joseph Stalin
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A Soviet political leader of the twentieth century. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, often with extreme brutality, from the death of Lenin in the early 1920s until his own death in the early 1950s. His policies of collectivization, which abolished private ownership, were followed by political purges in which thousands of Communist party officials were killed, usually on trumped-up charges of treason. Stalin led the Soviet Union in its costly victory in World War II. Stalin’s expansion of Soviet influence after World War II contributed to the cold war.
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Yalta agreement
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An agreement reached near the end of World War II between President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. The three met in Yalta, in the southern Soviet Union, in February 1945, and discussed issues such as the occupation of Germany, free elections in the liberated countries of eastern Europe, the postwar boundaries of Poland and Russia, and a common strategy against Japan. Stalin aided the United States against Japan, as he had promised; but he expanded Soviet influence rapidly into eastern Europe after the war, and the elections he agreed to were never held.
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Russian Revolution
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A revolution in Russia in 1917–1918, also called the October Revolution, that overthrew the czar and brought the Bolsheviks, a Communist party led by Lenin, to power. The revolution was encouraged by Russian setbacks in World War I.
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Robert Kennedy
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A younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, who served as attorney general during his brother’s presidency and was his brother’s closest adviser. Robert Kennedy, also known as Bobby, was a champion of the civil rights movement and a foe of organized crime. He was elected to the Senate after John Kennedy’s assassination. In 1968, while running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, evidently because of Kennedy’s position favoring Israel.
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Cuban missile crisis
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A confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 over the presence of missile sites in Cuba; one of the “hottest” periods of the cold war. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, placed Soviet military missiles in Cuba, which had come under Soviet influence after the success of the Cuban Revolution three years earlier. President John F. Kennedy of the United States set up a naval blockade of Cuba and insisted that Khrushchev remove the missiles. Khrushchev did so.
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Nikita Khrushchev
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A Soviet political leader of the twentieth century. Khrushchev, who was premier of the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, led a campaign, called de-Stalinization, to remove the influence of the late premier Joseph Stalin from Soviet society. He urged peaceful coexistence between his country and Western nations. Within the Soviet Bloc, however, Khrushchev suppressed resistance to communist government, sending troops into Hungary in 1956. He also aided the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. He had Soviet military missiles installed there but removed them at the insistence of the United States.
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Eugene V. Debs
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A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Debs was five times the presidential candidate of the Socialist party. He was imprisoned in the 1890s for illegally encouraging a railway strike; Clarence Darrow was his defense attorney. During World War I, he was imprisoned again, this time for his criticism of the war.
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Jane Addams
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A social reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She founded a settlement house, Hull House, in Chicago, and also worked for peace and for women’s rights. In 1931, she won the Nobel Prize for peace.
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Susan B. Anthony
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A reformer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known especially for her advocacy of women’s suffrage. She was also active in the cause of abolitionism before the Civil War.
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Apollo 11
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The space vehicle that carried three American astronauts to the moon and back in July 1969. The astronauts were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.
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Arthur Ashe
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An African-American tennis player who rose to fame in a sport previously dominated by whites. Ashe won many championships, including the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. He died in 1993 of AIDS, which he contracted from a blood transfusion.
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Bakke decision
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An important ruling on affirmative action given by the Supreme Court in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, was denied admission to a medical school that had admitted black candidates with weaker academic credentials. Bakke contended that he was a victim of racial discrimination. The Court ruled that Bakke had been illegally denied admission to the medical school, but also that medical schools were entitled to consider race as a factor in admissions. The Court thus upheld the general principle of affirmative action.
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Bay of Pigs
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The location of a failed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961. The invaders, numbering about fourteen hundred, had left after the Cuban Revolution and returned to overthrow the new Cuban leader, Fidel Castro; they were trained and equipped by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The operation was a disaster for the invaders, most of whom were killed or taken prisoner. The Bay of Pigs incident is generally considered the most humiliating episode in the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who had approved the invasion.
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Mary McLeod Bethune
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An African-American educator and civil rights leader who in 1904 founded a school for girls that later became part of Bethune-Cookman College. In the late 1930s and early 1940s she held an administrative position under the New Deal. In 1949 she founded the National Council of Negro Women, which opposed the poll tax and racial discrimination and which promoted the teaching of black history in the public schools.
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Billy the Kid
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An outlaw of the late nineteenth century in New Mexico, who claimed to have killed over twenty people; he was gunned down himself at age twenty-one. His real name is uncertain.
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Hugo Black
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A judge of the twentieth century; he served on the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. Black was a strong defender of the civil liberties of the individual against intrusion by the state.
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Black Panthers
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A militant Black Power organization founded in the 1960s by Huey Newton and others.
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Black Power
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A movement that grew out of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Black Power calls for independent development of political and social institutions for black people and emphasizes pride in black culture. In varying degrees, Black Power advocates called for the exclusion of whites from black civil rights organizations. Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of the movement and the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), stated: “I am not going to beg the white man for anything I deserve. I’m going to take it.”
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Bonnie and Clyde
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Two outlaws, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who went on a two-year spree of murder and bank robbery in the 1930s in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas before being killed in an ambush.
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Lizzie Borden
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A woman charged with the ax murder of her father and stepmother in the 1890s in Fall River, Massachusetts. A jury found her not guilty. The crime has never been solved.
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Omar Bradley
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A general of the twentieth century. Bradley commanded the United States ground forces in the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany in World War II.
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Louis D. Brandeis
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A judge of the twentieth century, he served on the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. Brandeis believed that economic and social facts had to take precedence over legal theory. He was the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court.
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Brown versus Board of Education
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A case regarding school desegregation, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. The Court ruled that segregation in public schools is prohibited by the Constitution. The decision ruled out “separate but equal” educational systems for blacks and whites, which many localities said they were providing. The Court departed from tradition by using arguments from sociology to show that separate educational systems were unequal by their very nature.
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Ralph Bunche
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An African-American diplomat and prominent official of the United Nations, Bunche won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1950 for negotiating an armistice between Israelis and Arabs.
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The business of America is business
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A statement made by President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.
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Richard E. Byrd
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An explorer of the twentieth century; he was navigator on the first flight over the North Pole. He also made one of the first flights over the South Pole and went on several extended expeditions to Antarctica.
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Al Capone
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A leader of organized crime in Chicago in the late 1920s, involved in gambling, the illegal sale of alcohol, and prostitution. He was sent to prison in the 1930s for income tax evasion.
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carpetbaggers
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Northerners who went to the South after the Civil War to take part in Reconstruction governments, when persons who had supported the Confederacy were not allowed to hold public office. Some of them arrived, according to legend, carrying only one carpetbag, which symbolized their lack of permanent interest in the place they pretended to serve.
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George Washington Carver
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An African-American scientist and agricultural innovator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carver aided the economy of the South by developing hundreds of industrial uses for crops such as the peanut and the sweet potato.
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Chinese Exclusion Act
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A federal law passed in 1882 in response to complaints by workers on the West Coast that competition from Chinese immigrants was driving down their wages and threatening white “racial purity.” It suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and declared Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization as American citizens. The law was renewed in 1892 for another ten years, and in 1902 Chinese immigration was permanently banned. Chinese immigrants did not become eligible for citizenship until 1943.
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Civil Rights Act of 1964
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A federal law that authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment. The law was passed during a period of great strength for the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson persuaded many reluctant members of Congress to support the law. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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Ty Cobb
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A baseball player of the early twentieth century. Cobb long held the world record for runs batted in and stolen bases in a career in the major leagues. He still holds the record for lifetime batting average.
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Richard Daley
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A mayor of Chicago in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. One of the last and toughest of the big-city political “bosses,” he ran a powerful political machine, repeatedly and easily gaining reelection. He was also given much of the credit for the victory of John F. Kennedy in the close presidential election of 1960; Kennedy won by only a few thousand votes in Illinois. In 1968, when demonstrators against involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War threatened to disrupt the Democratic national convention, meeting in Chicago, the Chicago police, with Daley’s approval, responded with violence. An official investigation later described the response as a “police riot.” Daley died in 1976.
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Dawes Act
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A federal law from 1887 intended to turn Native Americans into farmers and landowners by providing cooperating families with 160 acres of reservation land for farming or 320 acres for grazing. In the eyes of supporters, this law would “civilize” the Indians by weaning them from their nomadic life, by treating them as individuals rather than as members of their tribes, and by readying them for citizenship. Although generally well intentioned, the law undermined Indian culture, in part by restricting their hunting rights on former reservation lands. Much of the best reservation land eventually passed into the hands of whites.
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John Dillinger
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A notorious bank robber of the early twentieth century, who escaped from prison twice. Dillinger was finally gunned down by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1934, outside a movie theater in Chicago.
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doughboys
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United States infantry soldiers who served in World War I.
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William O. Douglas
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A justice of the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was a committed liberal, who urged that the Court take bold steps in the application of the Constitution.
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W. E. B. DuBois
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A black author and teacher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A radical thinker on racial questions, he helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). DuBois criticized the position of Booker T. Washington that blacks should accept their inferior status in American society and “accommodate” to white people. Later in his life, DuBois joined the American Communist party. His best-known book is The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays.
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John Foster Dulles
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Secretary of state under President Eisenhower, he was known for his moralism and militant anti-communism.
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Amelia Earhart
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An aviator of the twentieth century. Earhart was the first woman to pilot an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. She disappeared in a flight over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
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Wyatt Earp
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A law officer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He served as the United States marshal in Dodge City, Kansas, and took part in a famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881.
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Ellis Island
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An island in the harbor of New York City. The chief immigration station of the United States was on Ellis Island from 1892 to 1943, a time when millions of people, especially from Europe, came to the United States.
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Fannie Farmer
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An educator, author, and cooking expert of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote the first distinctively American cookbook, The Boston Cooking School Cook Book.
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Fourteen Points
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Fourteen goals of the United States in the peace negotiations after World War I. President Woodrow Wilson announced the Fourteen Points to Congress in early 1918. They included public negotiations between nations, freedom of navigation, free trade, self-determination for several nations involved in the war, and the establishment of an association of nations to keep the peace. The “association of nations” Wilson mentioned became the League of Nations.
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Treaty of Versailles
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The treaty that officially ended World War I, signed at the Palace of Versailles in France. The leading figures at the treaty negotiations were Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, and President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. The treaty was far more punitive toward Germany than Wilson’s Fourteen Points; it required Germany to give up land and much of its army and navy and to pay extensive reparations for damages to civilians in the war. The treaty also created the League of Nations.
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Felix Frankfurter
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A judge of the twentieth century, he served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962. Frankfurter believed in judicial restraint, the idea that judges should decide cases and not try to shape public policy (or “legislate”) from the bench.
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Freedom Riders
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A group of northern idealists active in the civil rights movement. The Freedom Riders, who included both blacks and whites, rode buses into the South in the early 1960s in order to challenge racial segregation. Freedom Riders were regularly attacked by mobs of angry whites and received often belated protection from federal officers.
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Betty Friedan
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An author and political activist of the twentieth century, who has worked for the extension of women’s rights. In 1963, Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that proved fundamental to the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. She was a founder of the National Organization for Women.
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Marcus Garvey
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Jamaican-born black nationalist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s to encourage self-help among blacks. Opposed to colonialism, Garvey advocated black separatism and nationalism. The Black Star shipping line, which facilitated emigration of American blacks to Africa, was among his projects. He was eventually jailed for mail fraud and deported to Jamaica by the U.S. government, which feared his influence in the black community.
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Geronimo
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An Apache leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A brave and unrelenting warrior, Geronimo was among the last to lead Native Americans against white settlers. He took to farming at the end of his life.
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Charlotte P. Gilman
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A reformer and feminist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she wrote Women and Economics (1898), a plea for female economic independence. Gilman believed that prohibiting or discouraging women from earning their livelihood made them overly dependent on men and incapable of contributing to the larger life of the community. Her belief that inequality between men and women would not be remedied merely by giving women the vote inspired feminists, especially in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Barry Goldwater
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A political leader of the twentieth century. Goldwater represented Arizona for over thirty years in the Senate and was a leading spokesman for American conservatism. As the Republican nominee, he lost the presidential election of 1964 to President Lyndon Johnson.
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Samuel Gompers
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A labor leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he cofounded the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an organization composed of skilled workers in craft unions. In the 1930s the AFL was challenged by the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an organization whose member unions were composed of all workers, unskilled as well as skilled, in specific industries such as mining or automobiles. The two organizations later merged.
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Billy Graham
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An American evangelist of the twentieth century. Graham began conducting religious revivals in the 1940s and calls his meetings, which he has held around the world, Crusades for Christ.
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Great Society
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The name President Lyndon Johnson gave to his aims in domestic policy. The programs of the Great Society had several goals, including clean air and water, expanded educational opportunities, and the lessening of poverty and disease in the United States.
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Griswold versus Connecticut
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A 1965 Supreme Court decision that overturned an old Connecticut law (1879) that made it illegal to use or disseminate information about contraception. The Court found that the law invaded the constitutional right of privacy.
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William F. "Bull" Halsey
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An admiral of the twentieth century. Halsey commanded United States fleets in the Pacific Ocean during World War II and achieved notable victories at the island of Guadalcanal and on the Japanese coast.
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Harding scandals
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Major incidents of corruption in government that occurred while Warren Harding was president in the early 1920s. The most notable, called the Teapot Dome scandal, involved the lease of federally owned oil reserve lands to private interests, in return for bribes. Several high officials, including the secretary of the interior, were ultimately convicted for their part in the affair. Although not personally implicated in the wrongdoing, Harding had clearly made a bad choice of associates and was shaken by the scandals.
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William Randolph Hearst
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A journalist and newspaper publisher in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hearst was a pioneer in the kind of sensational reporting often called yellow journalism. In the 1890s, his newspapers helped whip up public hostility against Spain, which led to the Spanish-American War.
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Alger Hiss
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An official in the Department of State who, in 1948, was accused by a former communist, Whittaker Chambers, of having been a secret agent for the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Hiss denied the charge but was later convicted of lying under oath and was imprisoned. The Hiss case is still controversial.
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Jimmy Hoffa
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A labor leader who built the Teamsters Union into a powerful organization despite repeated charges of corruption. After his imprisonment from 1967 to 1971 for misuse of pension funds and jury tampering, Hoffa disappeared in 1975. It is widely assumed that he was murdered.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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A judge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holmes served on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. He was celebrated for his legal wisdom and frequently stood in the minority when the Court decided cases. He insisted on viewing the law as a social instrument rather than as a set of abstract principles. He delivered a famous opinion concerning freedom of speech, holding that it must be allowed except when it presents a “clear and present danger.”
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