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20 Cards in this Set
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John Hancock (1737-1793)
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American Revolutionary leader. He entered the mercantile business of his wealthy uncle in Boston in 1754. His adherence to the patriot cause dates from the Stamp Act, which, as a leading merchant, he protested. In 1769, soon after the British seized one of his ships, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and he chaired the Boston town committee formed after the Boston Massacre. He became president of the provincial congress (1774 – 75), and he and Samuel Adams led the Massachusetts Patriots. In 1775 both were forced to flee from British troops sent to arrest them for treason. Hancock was a member of the Continental Congress (1775 – 80), serving as its president (1775 – 77); the bold flourish with which he signed the Declaration of Independence has made his name synonymous with "signature." As governor of Massachusetts (1780 – 85, 1787 – 93), he presided over the state's ratification of the Constitution in 1788.
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Mark Hanna (1837-1904)
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U.S. industrialist and political kingmaker. He became a businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, with interests in banking, coal and iron, transportation, and publishing. Convinced that the interests of big business would best be served by the Republican Party, he began in 1880 to gather support among industrialists for its candidates. In 1892 he helped William McKinley secure the Ohio governorship. For McKinley's 1896 presidential campaign Hanna helped the Republicans raise an unprecedented $3.5 million, enough to overwhelm the grassroots campaign of William Jennings Bryan. He served in the U.S. Senate (1897 – 1904).
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Warren G. Harding (1865-1923)
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29th president of the U.S. (1921 – 23). He became a newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, where he was allied with the Republican Party's political machine. He served successively as state senator (1899 – 1902), lieutenant governor (1903 – 04), and U.S. senator (1915 – 21), supporting conservative policies. At the deadlocked 1920 Republican presidential convention, he was chosen as the compromise candidate. Pledging a "return to normalcy" after World War I, he defeated James Cox with more than 60% of the popular vote, the largest margin to that time. On his recommendation, Congress established a budget system for the federal government, passed a high protective tariff, revised wartime taxes, and restricted immigration. His administration convened the Washington Conference (1921 – 22). His ill-advised cabinet appointments, including Albert Fall as secretary of the interior, led to the Teapot Dome scandal and earned his administration a reputation for corruption.
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Harlem Renaissance
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A blossoming (c. 1918 – 37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, centred in Harlem in New York City. As a literary movement, it laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had a significant impact on black literature and consciousness worldwide. Its leading literary figures included James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Alain Locke (1886 – 1954), and Wallace Thurman (1902 – 34). Their work both fed and took inspiration from the creative and commercial growth of jazz and a concurrent burgeoning of work by black visual artists such as Aaron Douglas. Central to the movement were efforts to explore all aspects of the African American experience and to reconceptualize "the Negro" independent of white stereotypes.
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Harper's Ferry
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On 9 September 1862, in Frederick, Maryland, General Robert E. Lee issued his famous "lost order." To clear the enemy from his rear, Lee directed General Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson to capture the garrison at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and then hurry northward to rejoin the main army. The combined forces would then move through Hagerstown into Pennsylvania. But the "lost order" had come into the Union general George B. McClellan's possession. The defenders of Harpers Ferry put up unexpected resistance against Jackson's siege on September 14 and did not surrender until the following day. Jackson rejoined Lee at Sharpsburg twenty-four hours late, a delay that nearly led to disaster at the Battle of Antietam.
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Hartford Convention
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(Dec. 5, 1814 – Jan. 5, 1815) Secret meeting of Federalist Party delegates from New England states who opposed the War of 1812. It adopted a strong states'-rights position in opposition to the mercantile policies of Pres. James Madison and the Embargo Act of 1807 and other measures that prohibited trade with Britain and France. News of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the war, discredited the nascent separatist movement at the convention and weakened Federalist influence.
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Haymarket Square Riot
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(May 4, 1886) Violent confrontation between police and labour protesters in Chicago that dramatized the labour movement's struggle for recognition. Radical unionists had called a mass meeting in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality in a strike action. A bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing seven policemen and injuring 60 others. Police and workers fired on each other. Public demand for action led to the arrest of eight anarchists (see anarchism). Convicted of conspiracy to murder, they were sentenced to death; four were executed and one committed suicide. In 1893 the three survivors were pardoned by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.
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Headright System
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The headright system was used in Jamestown, Virginia, starting in 1618 as an attempt to solve labor shortages due to the advent of the tobacco economy, which required large plots of land with many workers. It was also a way to attract immigrants. Virginian colonists were each given two headrights of 50 acres (200,000 m²); immigrant colonists who paid for their passage were given one headright, and individuals would receive one headright each time they paid for the passage of another individual. This last mechanism increased the division between the wealthy land-owners and the working poor. The headright system was only for males.
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William Randolph Hearst
(1863-1951) |
U.S. newspaper publisher. Hearst in 1887 took over the struggling San Francisco Examiner, which he remade into a successful blend of investigative reporting and lurid sensationalism. After buying the New York Morning Journal (later New York Journal-American) in 1895, he fought fierce circulation wars with other papers and helped bring about the era of yellow journalism, employing circulation-boosting strategems that profoundly influenced U.S. journalism. Distorted reportage in Hearst papers fanned public sentiment against Spain that led to the Spanish-American War. He served in Congress (1903 – 07) but ran unsuccessfully for other offices. In the 1920s he built a grandiose castle in San Simeon, Calif.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki
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(1945). The atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 represents arguably the most important and most sinister development in warfare in the 20th century. By the early 1940s scientists in Britain and the USA were rapidly developing the technology that would lead to an atomic weapon. It was research conducted under the deepest secrecy for fear that Nazi scientists would be able to obtain the necessary data to enable them to produce a weapon of their own. In mid-1942 a programme code-named the Manhattan Project was set up to develop a bomb.
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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
(Suicide) |
Dictator of Nazi Germany (1933 – 45). As a soldier in the German army in World War I, he was wounded and gassed. In 1920 he became head of propaganda for the renamed National Socialists (Nazi Party) and in 1921 party leader. He set out to create a mass movement, using unrelenting propaganda. The party's rapid growth climaxed in the Beer Hall Putsch (1923), for which he served nine months in prison; there he started to write his virulent autobiography, Mein Kampf. Believing that "races" were unequal and that this was part of the natural order, he exalted the "Aryan race" while propounding anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and extreme German nationalism. The economic slump of 1929 facilitated Hitler's rise to power. In the Reichstag elections of 1930 the Nazis became the country's second largest party and in 1932 the largest. Hitler ran for president in 1932 and lost but entered into intrigues to gain power, and in 1933 Paul von Hindenburg invited him to be chancellor. Adopting the title of Führer ("Leader"), H
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Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1841-1935) |
U.S. jurist, legal historian, and philosopher. He was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a Massachusetts supreme court justice. As an officer in the American Civil War, he was seriously wounded three times. He practiced law in Boston from 1867, eventually serving as an associate justice (1882 – 99) and then chief justice (1899 – 1902) of the state supreme court. In The Common Law (1881), he advanced the notion of law as accumulated experience rather than science. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes advocated judicial restraint, maintaining that lawmaking was the business of legislative bodies rather than the courts. In Schenk v. U.S. (1919), he articulated the "clear and present danger" test for proposed restrictions on freedom of speech. Many of his vigorous and lucid opinions, including dissenting opinions (he was known as "The Great Dissenter"), became classic interpretations of the law, and he is regarded a
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Homestead Act
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An act passed by Congress in 1862 promising ownership of a 160-acre tract of public land to a citizen or head of a family who had resided on and cultivated the land for five years after the initial claim.
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Homestead Strike
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U.S. labour strike at Andrew Carnegie's steelworks in Homestead, Pa., in July 1892. When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers went on strike following a wage cut, the company's manager, Henry Clay Frick, hired strikebreakers, with Pinkerton Agency detectives to protect them. A gun battle resulted in which several people were killed and many injured; the governor sent state militiamen to support the company. The broken strike represented a major setback to the union movement that was felt for decades.
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Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)
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31st president of the U.S. (1929 – 33). After graduating from Stanford University (1895), he became a mining engineer, administering engineering projects on four continents (1895 – 1913). He then headed Allied relief operations in England and Belgium. As U.S. national food administrator during World War I, he instituted programs that furnished food to the Allies and to famine-stricken areas of Europe. Appointed U.S. secretary of commerce (1921 – 27), he reorganized the department, creating divisions to regulate broadcasting and aviation. He oversaw commissions to build Boulder (later Hoover) Dam and the St. Lawrence Seaway. In 1928, as the Republican presidential candidate, he soundly defeated Alfred E. Smith. His hopes for a "New Day" program were quickly overwhelmed by the Great Depression. In response, he called business leaders to the White House to urge them not to lay off workers or cut wages, and he urged state and local governments to join private charities in caring for destitute Americans. Be
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House of Burgesses
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Representative assembly in colonial Virginia, the first elective governing body in a British colony. It was one division of the legislature established in 1619 by the colonial governor at Jamestown; the other included the governor himself and a council, all appointed by the colonial proprietor (the Virginia Company). Each Virginia settlement was entitled to elect two delegates, or burgesses (citizens of a borough in England).
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HUAC
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House Un-American Activities Committee
Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, established in 1938 under Martin Dies as chairman, that conducted investigations through the 1940s and '50s into alleged communist activities. Those investigated included many artists and entertainers, including the Hollywood Ten, Elia Kazan, Pete Seeger, Bertolt Brecht, and Arthur Miller. Richard Nixon was an active member in the late 1940s, and the committee's most celebrated case was perhaps that of Alger Hiss. Its actions resulted in several contempt-of-Congress convictions and the blacklisting of many who refused to answer its questions. Highly controversial for its tactics, it was criticized for violating First Amendment rights. Its influence had waned by the 1960s; in 1969 it was renamed the Internal Security Committee, and in 1975 it was dissolved. |
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Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957)
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U.S. politician. He was a Wisconsin circuit judge (1940 – 42) before enlisting in the Marine Corps in World War II. In 1946 he upset Robert La Follette, Jr., to win election to the U.S. Senate. He remained little known until 1950, when he publicly charged that 205 communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. Reelected in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations, and for the next two years he investigated various government departments and questioned innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations. To his supporters, McCarthy was a dedicated patriot and a guardian of genuine Americanism; to his detractors, he was an irresponsible witch-hunter who was undermining the nation's traditions of civil liberties. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being communists and the forced conformity that this practice engendered in American public life came to be known as McCarthyism.
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Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
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Langston Hughes published more than three dozen books during his life, starting out with poetry and then expanding into novels, short stories, and plays. He is closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African-American literature and music in New York City following World War One, but he wrote poetry, books, and newspaper columns right through into the 1960s. Hughes's work often spoke plainly about the lives of ordinary black people, which in later years earned him a reputation as one of the major black voices of the 1900s. His works include the poetry volumes The Weary Blues (1926) and Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), the novel Not Without Laughter (1930), and the short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). He wrote two personal memoirs: The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956).
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Hungarian Revolt
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(1956) Popular uprising in Hungary following a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in which he attacked the period of Joseph Stalin's rule. Encouraged by the new freedom of debate and criticism, a rising tide of unrest and discontent in Hungary broke out into active fighting in October 1956. Rebels won the first phase of the revolution, and Nagy Imre became premier, agreeing to establish a multiparty system. On November 1 he declared Hungarian neutrality and appealed to the UN. Western powers failed to respond, and on November 4 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the revolution. Nevertheless, Stalinist-type domination and exploitation did not return, and Hungary thereafter experienced a slow evolution toward some internal autonomy.
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