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FSWE Cultural Literacy -- American History Since 1865

Terms

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A baseball player of the twentieth century; he hit a record 755 home runs in his major league career, which ran from 1954 to 1976. The previous record holder was Babe Ruth, who hit 714.
Henry (Hank) Aaron
The first woman to become secretary of state. The daughter of a Czech diplomat, she was born in Czechoslovakia but fled to England with her family when the Nazis invaded in 1939. (Three of her grandparents, all Jews, died in Nazi concentration camps.) Sh
Madeleine Albright
A tribe of Native Americans who live in the southwestern United States. Geronimo was a member of this tribe.
Apaches
Words from the inaugural address of President John F. Kennedy, delivered in 1961.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country
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 t
Bay of Pigs
A group of prominent midwestern universities known for high academic standards and keen athletic competition. Nine of the ten are state universities: the universities of Illinois (at Urbana), Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (at Madison); Michiga
Big Ten
A radical movement for Black Power that reached a peak of influence in the United States during the 1960s, partly under the leadership of Malcolm X. Members rejected Christianity as a religion of white people and embraced Islam. Like many other _________
Black Muslims
Two outlaws, ___________ and _______________, 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.
Bonnie and Clyde
A group of intellectuals and planners who act as advisers, especially to a government. The phrase is particularly associated with the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
brain trust
A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ______, 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 th
William Jennings Bryan
An American political leader of the late twentieth century; elected president as a Republican in 1988 after he pledged: “Read my lips; no new taxes.” Once in office, however, he reached an agreement with Congress to raise taxes. Despite this, ______â
George H. W. Bush
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.
Richard E. Byrd
A political leader of the twentieth century; the president from 1977 to 1981. In 1976, ________ was a peanut farmer who had been a naval officer and the governor of Georgia; he stood outside the main power groups of the Democratic party. He gained the pa
James Earl (Jimmy) Carter
Chief of Oregon’s Nez Perce Indians who led his people in the 1870s on a desperate attempt to reach Canada rather than submit to forcible settlement on a reservation. Forced to surrender to U.S. troops just south of the border, he reportedly stated: â€
Chief Joseph
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
Civil Rights Act of 1964
A lawyer and the wife of William Jefferson Clinton. She attended law school with her future husband, and after their marriage she was his indispensable ally during his rise in Arkansas politics. After Bill Clinton became president, he appointed her to he
Hillary Rodham Clinton
A baseball player of the early twentieth century. ________ 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.
Ty Cobb
A political leader of the early twentieth century. A Republican, he rose to prominence as governor of Massachusetts when he broke a strike by policemen in Boston, saying, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any
Calvin Coolidge
An address by the presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to the national convention of the Democratic party in 1896. Bryan criticized the gold standard and advocated inflating the currency by the free coinage of silver, a measure popular among the
Cross of Gold speech
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
Richard Daley
A federal law 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
Dawes Act of 1887
The great slowdown in the American economy, the worst in the country’s history, which began in 1929 and lasted until the early 1940s. Many banks and businesses failed, and millions of people lost their jobs.
Great Depression
Nickname for United States infantry soldiers who served in World War I.
doughboys
Secretary of state under President Eisenhower, he was known for his moralism and militant anti-communism.
John Foster Dulles
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.
Wyatt Earp
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.
Fannie Farmer
A nickname given to young women in the 1920s who defied convention by refusing to use corsets, cutting their hair short, and wearing short skirts, as well as by behavior such as drinking and smoking in public.
flappers
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-
the Fourteen Points
An author and political activist of the twentieth century, who has worked for the extension of women’s rights. In 1963, _________ published The Feminine Mystique, a book that proved fundamental to the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. She was
Betty Friedan
Jamaican-born black nationalist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s to encourage self-help among blacks. Opposed to colonialism, _________ advocated black separatism and nationalism. The Black Star shipping line, which fa
Marcus Garvey
A law passed in 1944 that provided educational and other benefits for people who had served in the armed forces in World War II. Benefits are still available to persons honorably discharged from the armed forces.
GI Bill
A political leader of the twentieth century. __________ 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 Lyndo
Barry Goldwater
The name President Lyndon Johnson gave to his aims in domestic policy. The programs of the _______________ had several goals, including clean air and water, expanded educational opportunities, and the lessening of poverty and disease in the United States
Great Society
A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who served as president from 1921 to 1923. As Republican party candidate in the campaign of 1920, he described his goal as a return to “normalcy” after the ambitious foreign and
Warren G. Harding
A frontier settler and United States marshal of the nineteenth century, known for his pursuit of some of the worst outlaws of the old West. Like his friend Buffalo Bill Cody, he was a rider for the Pony Express in his youth.
Wild Bill Hickok
A judge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holmes served on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, retiring when past ninety. He was celebrated for his legal wisdom and frequently stood in the minority when the Court decided cases. He in
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
Hoovervilles
A scandal in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, which came to light when it was revealed that in the mid-1980s the United States secretly arranged arms sales to Iran in return for promises of Iranian assistance in securing the release of Amer
Iran-Contra Affair
An African-American clergyman and political leader of the twentieth century. _________, a leader in the civil rights movement, has energetically encouraged self-confidence in young people, especially blacks. He ran for president in the primaries of 1984
Jesse Jackson
The 1920s in the United States, a decade marked not only by the popularity of jazz, but also by attacks on convention in many areas of American life.
Jazz Age
A political leader of the nineteenth century. __________ was elected vice president in 1864 and became president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. _________ is one of two presidents to have been impeached (see impeachment); the House of Repr
Andrew Johnson
An educator and author of the twentieth century. Though blind and deaf from an early age, she learned to read, write, and communicate with sign language.

⬡ ______________ is often mentioned as an example of persistence and courage in the fac
Helen Keller
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. ____________ was a champion of the civil rights movement and a foe of organized crime. He was electe
Robert Kennedy
An African-American clergyman and political leader of the twentieth century; the most prominent member of the civil rights movement. King became famous in the 1950s and 1960s through his promotion of nonviolent methods of opposition to segregation, such
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1963) A letter that Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed to his fellow clergymen while he was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, after a nonviolent protest against racial segregation (see also sit-ins). King defended the apparent impatience of peopl
"Letter from Birmingham Jail"
A political leader of the 1920s and 1930s who served as governor of Louisiana and represented that state in the Senate. He promised every family enough money for a home, car, radio, pension, and college education. A demagogue, Long dominated Louisiana’
Huey Long
A general of the twentieth century, who commanded the forces of the Allies in the Pacific region in World War II. When Japanese forces were about to conquer the Philippines, MacArthur was forced to leave, but vowed, “I shall return.” He did return tw
Douglas MacArthur
The code name for the effort to develop atomic bombs for the United States during World War II. The first controlled nuclear reaction took place in Chicago in 1942, and by 1945, bombs had been manufactured that used this chain reaction to produce great e
Manhattan Project
The opposition of many white leaders in the South to the decision of the Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. The Court had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The expression massive resistance was used in
massive resistance
A political leader of the twentieth century, who, after representing South Dakota in the Senate, lost the presidential election of 1972 to President Richard Nixon. McGovern, a liberal Democrat, was an outspoken opponent of the involvement of the United S
George McGovern
A secretive right-wing movement composed of self-styled militia men who established encampments in sparsely populated areas, primarily in the western states, and whose philosophy mixed racism and anti-Semitism with conspiracy theories and hostility to th
militia movement of the 1990s
A mass killing of helpless inhabitants of a village in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, carried out in 1968 by United States troops under the command of Lieutenant William Calley. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he
My Lai massacre
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 Se
New Deal
The commander of the United States Pacific Fleet during World War II.
Admiral Chester Nimitz
A political leader of the twentieth century. A member of Congress in the late 1940s, Nixon came to national attention through his strong support for the investigation of the alleged communist Alger Hiss. He was elected vice president twice under Presiden
Richard Nixon
The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Sandra Day O'Connor
A statement from the first inaugural address of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt was speaking at one of the worst points of the Great Depression.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
A black seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who, in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white person, as she was legally required to do. Her mistreatment after refusing to give up her seat led to a boycott of the Montgomery b
Rosa Parks
A major United States naval base in Hawaii that was attacked without warning by the Japanese air force on December 7, 1941, with great loss of American lives and ships. In asking Congress to declare war on Japan the next day, President Franklin D. Roosev
Pearl Harbor
A political leader and reformer of the twentieth century. After briefly serving at Jane Addams’s Hull House, she worked in various reform activities and government positions. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt made her the first woman to hold a ca
Frances Perkins
A case decided by the Supreme Court in the 1890s. The Court held that a state could require racial segregation in public facilities if the facilities offered the two races were equal. The Court’s requirement became known as the “separate but equal”
Plessy versus Ferguson
A broad movement for educational reform in the twentieth century. Progressive education is principally associated with John Dewey, but it contains many different and often conflicting ideas. In general, progressive educators view existing schools as too
progressive education
Words attributed to William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad executive of the late nineteenth century. They were supposedly spoken to a newspaper reporter.
‡ “The public be damned” has often been recalled when business leaders have been accused of sh
The public be damned
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 govern
Reconstruction
A slogan of the Spanish-American War. The United States battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, in 1898. Stirred up by the yellow press (see yellow journalism), the American public blamed the sinking on Spain, which
Remember the Maine
An African-American athlete of the twentieth century. In 1947, he became the first black person to play baseball in the major leagues.
Jackie Robinson
The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her humanitarian and diplomatic efforts were known and respected all over the world. She represented the United States in the General Assembly of the United Nations from 1949 to 1952.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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
Roosevelt’s Court packing plan
The nickname of a volunteer group of cavalry led by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. They were famous for a victorious charge at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba.
Rough Riders
The founder in the 1910s and 1920s of the birth control movement (she coined the term). Sanger overcame the initial hostility of the medical profession and combated laws that in most states prohibited contraception. She later headed the Planned Parenthoo
Margaret Sanger
The most destructive attack of terrorism ever launched against the United States. On September 11, 2001, a group of Islamic terrorists, widely believed to be part of the Al Qaeda network, hijacked three commercial airliners in midair, took over the contr
September 11 attacks
A system of farming that developed in the South after the Civil War, when landowners, many of whom had formerly held slaves, lacked the cash to pay wages to farm laborers, many of whom were former slaves. The system called for dividing the crop into thre
sharecropping
A common name for the Dakota people, a tribe of Native Americans inhabiting the northern Great Plains in the nineteenth century. They were famed as warriors and frequently took up arms in the late nineteenth century to oppose the settlement of their hunt
Sioux
A religious movement that arose in the United States in the late nineteenth century with the goal of making the Christian churches more responsive to social problems, such as poverty and prostitution. Leaders of the movement argued that Jesus’ message
Social Gospel
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
spoils system
A political leader of the twentieth century, who served as governor of Illinois and as the United States ambassador to the United Nations. The Cuban missile crisis occurred during his ambassadorship. He was nominated for president twice by the Democratic
Adlai E. Stevenson
A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Republican, Taft was president between 1909 and 1913. At the beginning of his presidency, he stayed close to the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, who had been president before him.
William Howard Taft
A series of major attacks by communist forces in the Vietnam War. Early in 1968, Vietnamese communist troops seized and briefly held some major cities at the time of the lunar new year, or Tet. The Tet offensive, a turning point in the war, damaged the h
Tet offensive
A train route across the United States, finished in 1869. It was the project of two railroad companies: the Union Pacific built from the east, and the Central Pacific built from the west. The two lines met in Utah. The Central Pacific laborers were predo
transcontinental railroad
A New York City political leader, known as Boss Tweed, who in the late 1860s ran a network of corrupt city officials called the Tweed Ring. Under Tweed, city officials extorted kickbacks from contractors and others doing business with the city. His name
William Marcy "Boss" Tweed
A political leader of the twentieth century. As governor of Alabama in the 1960s, he resisted integration and promised to “stand at the schoolhouse door” to bar black people from admission to the University of Alabama. The National Guard eventually f
George Wallace
A political leader and judge of the twentieth century. Warren was governor of California before being named chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, and he served on the Court until 1969. His time as chief justice was marked by boldness in interpretin
Earl Warren
A group of violent disturbances in Watts, a largely black section of Los Angeles, in 1965. Over thirty people died in the Watts riots, which were the first of several serious clashes between black people and police in the late 1960s.

⬡ Los
Watts riots
A movement to secure legal, economic, and social equality for women, also called the feminist movement. It has its roots in the nineteenth-century women’s movement, which sought, among other things, to secure property rights and suffrage for women. The
women's movement
Words used by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to justify his call for a declaration of war on Germany. The words implied that Germany’s militarism threatened democracy everywhere.
The world must be made safe for democracy
A creek in South Dakota where United States soldiers killed large numbers of Dakota Native Americans—Sioux—in 1890. The Sioux, under Chief Big Foot, had been resisting settlement of the area and had fled to Montana, but United States troops brought t
Wounded Knee
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.
Jane Addams
An African-American boxer of the twentieth century, who was world champion in the heavyweight class for several years between 1964 and 1979. He was known in his boxing career for his flamboyant personality and aggressive self-promotion, as well as for hi
Muhammad Ali
The space vehicle that carried three American astronauts to the moon and back in July 1969. The vehicle consisted of a command module, which stayed in lunar orbit, and a lunar module, which carried two of the three crewmen to a safe landing on the moon.<
Apollo 11
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
Bakke decision
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 t
Mary McLeod Bethune
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.
Billy the Kid
A militant Black Power organization founded in the 1960s by Huey Newton and others. Newton proclaimed: “We make the statement, quoting from Chairman Mao, that Political Power comes through the Barrel of a Gun.”
Black Panthers
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.
Lizzie Borden
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.
Louis D. Brandeis
William F. Cody, a frontier settler, scout, and soldier of the nineteenth century. He was involved in several military actions against Native Americans and later turned to entertainment, founding the celebrated “Wild West Show.”
Buffalo Bill
The son of former president George H. W. Bush, he was elected governor of Texas in 1994. In 2000, he secured the Republican nomination for the presidency and narrowly defeated Al Gore, the Democratic party nominee, in an election marred by charges of irr
George W. Bush
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.
Al Capone
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.

â
George Washington Carver
Laws passed over many decades, beginning in the 1830s, by state and federal governments, forbidding the employment of children and young teenagers, except at certain carefully specified jobs. Child labor was regularly condemned in the nineteenth century
child labor laws
The national effort made by black people and their supporters in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate segregation and gain equal rights. The first large episode in the movement, a boycott of the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was touched off by the refus
civil rights movement
An American political leader of the late twentieth century. A Democrat, he handily defeated President George H. W. Bush’s bid for reelection in 1992. Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, had served as governor of Arkansas. Although harried by questions ab
William Jefferson Clinton
A leading organization in the civil rights movement. CORE launched the Freedom Riders and came under the influence of the Black Power philosophy.
Congress on Racial Equality
An enormous decrease in stock prices on the stock exchanges of Wall Street in late October 1929. This crash began the Great Depression.
Crash of 1929
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
Cuban missile crisis
A lawyer and author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was known for his defense of unpopular causes and persons, including Eugene V. Debs. Darrow was defense attorney in the Scopes trial.
Clarence Darrow
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 att
Eugene V. Debs
A philosopher and educational reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a philosopher, Dewey followed pragmatism, and its practical orientation carried over into his educational ideas, which became the basis of progressive educati
John Dewey
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.

⬡ Douglas served for thirty-six years, longer than any other justice in the h
William O. Douglas
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 t
Dust Bowl
A general and political leader of the twentieth century. As supreme commander in Europe of the forces of the Allies during World War II, he directed the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and led in the overthrow of the Nazi government of Germany. He later or
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A politician of the twentieth century. She served as a representative in Congress and was nominated by the Democratic party for vice president in 1984; the presidential candidate was Walter Mondale. Ferraro was the first woman to run for the vice preside
Geraldine Ferraro
A political leader of the twentieth century who served as president from 1974 to 1977. A prominent Republican in Congress, Ford was named vice president in 1973, after the resignation of Spiro Agnew. He succeeded to the presidency in 1974, when President
Gerald Ford
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.
Felix Frankfurter
Scholarships for the exchange of students and scholars between the United States and other nations, funded originally by the sale of United States military surplus after World War II. The program was conceived by Senator J. William Fulbright.
Fulbright scholarships
A baseball player of the early twentieth century. A teammate of Babe Ruth, Gehrig set a record for the major leagues, not broken until 1999, by playing in over two thousand consecutive games.

⬡ While still in his thirties, Gehrig died from a
Lou Gehrig
A nickname for United States soldiers, particularly during World War II. GI is short for government issue, a descriptive term for supplies distributed by the government.
GI Joe
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 Indu
Samuel Gompers
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.
Griswold versus Connecticut
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
Harding scandals
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 im
Alger Hiss
A political leader of the twentieth century, who was president from 1929 to 1933. Hoover became famous for his direction of relief work in Europe after World War I. He had been president only a few months when the Great Depression began (see stock market
Herbert Hoover
A phrase from the most celebrated speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered at a large rally in Washington, D.C., in 1963 to supporters of the civil rights movement. King stressed the importance of nonviolent resistance and vividly painted his vision
I have a dream
A group of eight old, distinguished colleges and universities in the East, known for their ivy-covered brick buildings. The members of the Ivy League are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities; Dartmouth College; and the Univ
Ivy League
An outlaw of the nineteenth century. Jesse, his brother Frank, and their gang committed many daring robberies of banks and trains, especially in the 1870s. After a reward had been offered for James’s capture, one of his own gang shot him in the back an
Jesse James
A descriptive term for the segregation of institutions, businesses, hotels, restaurants, and the like. It also refers to the laws that required racial segregation.
Jim Crow
A Democratic party political leader of the twentieth century, who was president from 1963 to 1969. Johnson rose to power in the Senate. He was elected vice president in 1960, running with John F. Kennedy, and became president after Kennedy was assassinat
Lyndon Baines Johnson
The younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy, a Democrat, has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 1963 and is a leading liberal. He has been mentioned over the years as a possible candidate for president but has never b
Edward Kennedy
A controversial incident in 1970, in which unarmed students demonstrating against United States involvement in the Vietnam War were fired on by panicky troops of the National Guard. Four students were killed and nine wounded. The shooting occurred at Ken
Kent State
A scholar and government official of the twentieth century. As an adviser and later secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, Kissinger prepared for the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of Chin
Henry Kissinger
A political leader of the twentieth century. A beloved mayor of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, La Guardia worked to free the city of corruption and began a great number of construction projects. La Guardia was called the “Little Flower” (fiore
Fiorello La Guardia
An aviator of the twentieth century. In 1927, __________ flew alone from New York City to Paris across the Atlantic Ocean, traveling nonstop in The Spirit of St. Louis. His was the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic and the first solo flight across
Charles A Lindbergh
An African-American boxer of the twentieth century, who held the world championship in the heavyweight class from 1937 to 1949.

‡ _______ was called the “Brown Bomber” and was a source of racial pride for America’s blacks.
Joe Louis
A criminal organization that originated in Sicily and was brought to the United States by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The _____ is also called the Syndicate, the Mob, and the Cosa Nostra (Our Thing). The _____ built its power throu
Mafia
A soldier and diplomat of the twentieth century. He was a leading planner of strategy for the Allies in World War II. _______ served as secretary of state from 1947 to 1949, during which time he put forth the _______ Plan. In 1953, he received the Nobel
George C. Marshall
A political leader of the twentieth century. _______, a Republican, represented Wisconsin in the Senate from 1947 until his death in 1957. He led an effort to identify communists who, he said, had infiltrated the federal government by the hundreds, altho
Joseph R. McCarthy
A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he was president from 1897 to 1901. ________, a Republican, led the United States during the Spanish-American War, although he at first opposed taking action against Spain. The Unit
William McKinley
Authors who specialize in exposing corruption in business, government, and elsewhere, especially those who were active at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Some famous _________s were Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, an
muckrakers
A social reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who argued forcefully for abstinence from alcohol. Known for taking direct action, she and her followers often used hatchets to smash beer kegs and liquor bottles in saloons.
Carry Nation
A slogan used by President John F. Kennedy to describe his goals and policies. Kennedy maintained that, like the Americans of the frontier in the nineteenth century, Americans of the twentieth century had to rise to new challenges, such as achieving equa
New Frontier
A word used by President Warren Harding to describe the calm political and social order to which he wished to return the United States after the idealism and commotion of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

⬡ _________ has been used as a gener
normalcy
The destruction of a federal office building in ___________ in 1995 by a truck loaded with explosives; the blast killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier, and two conspirators were convicted of the crime; McVeigh was executed.

Oklahoma City Bombing
The presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy. _______ allegedly shot Kennedy from a high window of a building in Dallas on November 22, 1963, as Kennedy rode down the street in an open car. ______ was captured the day of the assassination but was n
Lee Harvey Oswald
A general in World War II, known for his expertise at warfare using tanks and other vehicles. He led operations in north Africa and in the Battle of the Bulge. A few months after the end of the war, he was fatally injured in a car accident in Germany.
George Patton
An explorer of the Arctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The claim that he and his team were the first people to reach the North Pole, in 1909, is now doubted.
Robert E. Peary
A twentieth-century businessman and politician. _______ founded the Electronic Data Systems Corporation in Dallas in 1962, became extremely wealthy, and in 1992 ran for president of the United States as an independent. He ran again in 1996 as the candida
H. Ross Perot
A third-party movement that sprang up in the 1890s and drew support especially from disgruntled farmers. The ________ were particularly known for advocating the unlimited coinage of silver. The party endorsed William Jennings Bryan, a champion of free si
Populist Party
A movement for reform that occurred roughly between 1900 and 1920. _________ 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,
Progressive movement
A suffragist and pacifist (see pacifism), ______ in 1917 became the first woman to serve in Congress. She has the distinction of being the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into both World Wars.
Jeanette Rankin
The rounding up and deportation of several hundred immigrants of radical political views by the federal government in 1919 and 1920. This “scare” was caused by fears of subversion by communists in the United States after the Russian Revolution.
Red Scare
One of the two major political parties in the United States. The party began in 1854 (see under “American History to 1865”); Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was the first _______ president. During Reconstruction, many ________s were eager to punish
Republican party
A political leader of the twentieth century, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller. He was governor of New York from 1957 to 1971 and sought the Republican nomination for president several times. _____________ was known as a moderate or liberal Republica
Nelson Rockefeller
A political leader of the twentieth century. ___________ was president from 1933 to 1945, longer than anyone else in American history; he was elected four times. _________, a Democrat who had been governor of New York, defeated President Herbert Hoover i
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The oldest and most famous of the “bowl games”—college football games held after the regular college football season between teams that are invited on the basis of their record in the regular season. The _____________ game is played in Pasadena, Ca
Rose Bowl
A baseball player of the early twentieth century, known for hitting home runs. He hit sixty home runs in 1927, a record for a 154-game season that stood until the late twentieth century. ______ supposedly once pointed to a spot in the seats where he woul
Babe Ruth
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
Scopes Trial
Social and cultural centers established by reformers in slum areas of American cities during the 1890s and the early 1900s. Jane Addams founded the most famous ________________, in Chicago. (See Progressive movement.)

⬡ _________________s at
settlement houses
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 ___________________, the federa
Sherman Antitrust Act
A form of nonviolent protest, employed during the 1960s in the civil rights movement and later in the movement against the Vietnam War. In a ________, demonstrators occupy a place open to the public, such as a racially segregated (see segregation) lunch
sit-ins
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 encourage
Spanish-American War
A reformer and feminist who joined with Lucretia Mott in issuing the call for the first women’s rights convention in America, which was held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. __________ later worked in close partnership with Susan B. Anthony for wome
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A disturbance that grew out of a police raid on the ________ Inn, a popular hang-out for gays in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969. Such raids long had been routine, but this one provoked a riot as the crowd fought back. The riot led to the formati
Stonewall Riot
A major law concerning labor, passed by Congress in 1947. President Harry S. Truman vetoed it, but it became law by a two-thirds vote of Congress. It marked a reversal of the pro-labor policies pursued under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For e
Taft-Hartley Act
An athlete of the twentieth century, known for his ability in several sports. A Native American, he was a leading college football player and also the best performer in track and field events at the 1912 Olympic Games.
Jim Thorpe
A political leader of the twentieth century. A Democrat, ______ was president from 1945 to 1953. In 1944, after representing Missouri in the Senate, ______ was elected vice president under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and became president when Rooseve
Harry S. Truman
A war in Southeast Asia, in which the United States fought in the 1960s and 1970s. The war was waged from 1954 to 1975 between communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam, two parts of what was once the French colony of Indochina. Vietnamese c
Vietnam War
A statement attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman, a leader of the Union army in the Civil War. Sherman supposedly said this several years after the war, in an address to a group of cadets.
War is hell
An African-American educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who headed Tuskegee Institute, a college for African-Americans in Alabama. ___________ urged African-Americans to concentrate on economic gains rather than on the pursuit
Booker T. Washington
The best-known song of the civil rights movement. It contains these words: “Deep in my heart I do believe / That we shall overcome some day.”
"We Shall Overcome"
Popular name of Eldrick Woods, a golfer who in 1997 set three Masters tournament records: he won by the fewest strokes ever (18-under-par 270 for four rounds), beat the runner-up by twelve strokes, and became at twenty-one the youngest man ever to win. H
Tiger Woods
A series of baseball games held each October between the champions of the two major baseball leagues, the American League and the National League.
World Series
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-A
yellow journalism
A political leader of the twentieth century. Agnew was elected vice president in 1968 and 1972 as the running mate of Richard Nixon. He attacked opponents of the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, calling them “an effete corps of impu
Spiro Agnew
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.
Susan B. Anthony
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. He is honored by a st
Arthur Ashe
A reformer and nurse of the nineteenth century, who founded the American Red Cross in the 1880s. She had organized nursing care for Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Clara Barton
International negotiations backed by the threat of force. The phrase comes from a proverb quoted by Theodore Roosevelt, who said that the United States should “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
big stick diplomacy
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.
Hugo Black
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 calle
Black Power
A general of the twentieth century. _____________ commanded the United States ground forces in the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany in World War II.
Omar Bradley
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,
Brown versus Board of Education
An African-American diplomat and prominent official of the United Nations, ________ won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1950 for negotiating an armistice between Israelis and Arabs.
Ralph Bunche
A statement made by President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.

‡ Coolidge’s words are often mentioned as typical of the overconfidence in the American economy that preceded the Great Depression.
The business of America is Business.
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 (see Fourteenth Amendment). Some of them arrived, according to legend,
carpetbaggers
An automobile accident in 1969 that greatly affected the career of Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy of Massachusetts. A woman on Kennedy’s staff drowned at Chappaquiddick Island, off the Massachusetts coast, after a car that Kennedy had been driving, and i
Chappaquiddick incident
A federal law passed 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 Chine
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
A Democratic party political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who was president from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897—the only president ever to serve nonconsecutive terms. ___________’s presidencies were marked by
Grover Cleveland
During his second term, President William Jefferson Clinton was accused of having perjured himself when he denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, an intern with the federal government, and of having attempted to suborn the testimony of
Clinton impeachment
A policy aimed at controlling the spread of communism around the world, developed in the administration of President Harry S. Truman. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 was an important step in the development of _____
containment
A Sioux chief of the nineteenth century. ______________ was one of the leaders of the Native American forces at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Crazy Horse
The defeat of Colonel George A. Custer and his cavalry detachment by a large force of Native Americans at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Custer had been pursuing a group of Sioux, led by Sitting Bull, who had risen in arms against settlement o
Custer's last stand
A description by President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—December 7, 1941. Roosevelt was addressing Congress, asking it to declare war on Japan.
A date which will live in infamy
One of the two major political parties in the United States; the Democrats. The origins of the Democrats are in the Democratic-Republican party, organized by Thomas Jefferson in the late eighteenth century; the first president elected simply as a Democra
Democratic party
A notorious bank robber of the early twentieth century, who escaped from prison twice. _____________ was finally gunned down by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1934, outside a movie theater in Chicago.
John Dillinger
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). __________ criticized the position of Booke
W.E.B. DuBois
An aviator of the twentieth century. ___________ was the first woman to pilot an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. She disappeared in a flight over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Amelia Earhart
An island in the harbor of New York City. The chief immigration station of the United States was on _______________ from 1892 to 1943, a time when millions of people, especially from Europe, came to the United States.

⬡ ______________ lies n
Ellis Island
A series of informal radio addresses given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. In his _____________s, Roosevelt sought to explain his policies to the American public and to calm fears about the Great Depression.
fireside chats
Four kinds of freedom mentioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a speech in 1941 as worth fighting for: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt spoke of the Four Freedoms before the
Four Freedoms
A group of northern idealists active in the civil rights movement. The _____________, who included both blacks and whites, rode buses into the South in the early 1960s in order to challenge racial segregation. _______________ were regularly attacked by m
Freedom Riders
A Republican party political leader of the nineteenth century, who served as president in 1881. After only a few months in office, he was assassinated by a man who had been angered by not having received a public job under the spoils system. ___________â
James A. Garfield
An Apache leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A brave and unrelenting warrior, __________ was among the last to lead Native Americans against white settlers. He took to farming at the end of his life.
Geronimo

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