APUSH - Unit 5 + Midterm (Free Response)

Nullification

A constitutional doctrine holding that a state has a legit right to declare a national law null and void within its borders. It was a theory promoted by John C Calhoun and other South Carolinians that said states have the right to disregard federal laws to which they objected. This was issued on December 10, 1832 by President Andrew Jackson.

Women's Rights Movement

A diverse social movement, largely based in the United States, that in the 1960s and '70s sought equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women. It coincided with and is recognized as part of the "second wave" of feminism. While the first-wave feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on women's legal rights, especially the right to vote (see women's suffrage), the second-wave feminism of the women's rights movement touched on every area of women's experience—including politics, work, the family, and sexuality. Organized activism by and on behalf of women continued through the third and fourth waves of feminism from the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, respectively. For more discussion of historical and contemporary feminisms and the women's movements they inspired, see feminism.

Erie Canal

A historic waterway of the US, connecting the Great Lakes with New York City via the Hudson River at Albany. Taking advantage of the Mohawk River gap in the Appalachian Mountains, it, 363 miles long, was the first canal in the US to connect western waterways with the Atlantic Ocean. Construction began in 1817 and was completed in 1825. Its success propelled New York City into a major commercial center and encouraged canal construction throughout the US. In addition, construction of the canal served as a training ground for many of the engineers who built other American canals and railroads in the ensuing decades.

Industrial Workers of the World

A labor organization founded in Chicago in 1905 by representatives of 43 groups. It opposed the American Federation of Labor's acceptance of capitalism and its refusal to include unskilled workers in craft unions. This radical union aimed to unite the American working class into one union to promote labor's interests. It worked to organize unskilled and foreign-born laborers, advocated social revolution and led several major strikes, and it stressed solidarity.

American Federation of Labor

A labor union founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers (a British immigrant) that was comprised of only skilled craftworkers and was hostile towards black people and women. They also rejected bankers and gamblers. They supported strikes, with which they had a 60% success rate, but disapproved of political activism. They advocated for an 8-hour work day, higher wages, collective bargaining, and better working conditions. Unlike the Knights of Labor, they were organized, due to their divisions based on specific crafts, and had better cohesion which led to discipline and unity between the workers.

Temperance

A movement dedicated to promoting moderation and, more often, complete abstinence in the use of intoxicating liquor. Although an abstinence pledge had been introduced by churches as early as 1800, the earliest organizations seem to have been those founded at Saratoga, New York, in 1808 and in Massachusetts in 1813. The movement spread rapidly under the influence of the churches; by 1833 there were 6,000 local societies in several U.S. states.

Compromise of 1850

A series of measures proposed by the "great compromiser," Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and passed by the U.S. Congress in an effort to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the threat of dissolution of the Union. The crisis arose from the request of the territory of California (December 3, 1849) to be admitted to the Union with a constitution prohibiting slavery. The problem was complicated by the unresolved question of slavery's extension into other areas ceded by Mexico the preceding year.

Great Uprising

A series of violent rail strikes across the United States in 1877. That year the country was in the fourth year of a prolonged economic depression after the panic of 1873. The strikes were precipitated by wage cuts announced by the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad—its second cut in eight months. Railway work was already poorly paid and dangerous. Moreover, the railroad companies had taken advantage of the economic troubles to largely break the nascent trade unions that had been formed by the workers before and after the American Civil War. Workers responded by uncoupling the locomotives in the station, confining them in the roundhouse, and declaring that no trains would leave Martinsburg unless the cut was rescinded. West Virginia Gov. Henry M. Mathews dispatched the militia when police were unable to break up the supportive crowd that had gathered. When the militia then proved incapable of freeing the 600 or so trains stranded in Martinsburg, Mathews requested and received assistance from federal troops, which worked.

Webster-Ashburton Treaty

A treaty between the U.S. and Great Britain establishing the northeastern boundary of the U.S. and providing for Anglo-U.S. cooperation in the suppression of the slave trade. The treaty established the present boundary between Maine and New Brunswick, granted the U.S. navigation rights on the St. John River, provided for extradition in enumerated nonpolitical criminal cases, and established a joint naval system for suppressing the slave trade off the African coast. The treaty was negotiated by Daniel Webster, at that time secretary of state, and Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton.

Homestead Strike

A violent labor dispute between the Carnegie Steel Company and many of its workers that occurred on July 6, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania. The strike pitted the company's management, the replacement workers who had been hired, and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency against members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, who worked for the company. The striking workers were all fired on July 2, and on July 6 private security guards hired by the company arrived. The guards and workers exchanged gunfire, and at least three guards and seven workers were killed during the battle and its aftermath. The Homestead Strike was ended after the Carnegie Steel Company asked Pennsylvania Governor Robert Emory Pattison for help and he responded by sending in 8,500 soldiers of the state National Guard.

Tariffs of 1828

Also called the Tariff of Abominations, raised rates substantially (to as much as 50 percent on manufactured goods) but for the first time also targeted items most frequently imported in the industrial states in New England. Southern Democrats hoped that the latter levies would prove unpalatable to northerners and that the bill would fail, but lawmakers in other northern states carried the bill, which was signed into law by Pres. John Quincy Adams. It was labeled the Tariff of Abominations by its southern detractors because of the effects it had on the antebellum Southern economy.

French and Indian War

Also known as the Seven Years' War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial struggle between Britain and France. When France's expansion into the Ohio River valley brought repeated conflict with the claims of the British colonies, a series of battles led to the official British declaration of war in 1756. Boosted by the financing of future Prime Minister William Pitt, the British turned the tide with victories at Louisbourg, Fort Frontenac and the French-Canadian stronghold of Quebec. At the 1763 peace conference, the British received the territories of Canada from France and Florida from Spain, opening the Mississippi Valley to westward expansion.

Canals

Americans integrated the country's water transport system by connecting rivers flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River valleys. The best-known conduit, the Erie Canal, connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, linking the West to the port of New York City. Other major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio joined Philadelphia and Baltimore to the West via the Ohio River and its tributaries. Canal building was increasingly popular throughout the 1820s and '30s, sometimes financed by states or by a combination of state and private effort. But many overbuilt or unwisely begun canal projects collapsed, and states that were "burned" in the process became more wary of such ventures.

Specie Circular

An executive order issued by President Andrew Jackson requiring that payment for the purchase of public lands be made exclusively in gold or silver. In an effort to curb excessive land speculation and to quash the enormous growth of paper money in circulation, Jackson directed the Treasury Department, "pet" banks, and other receivers of public money to accept only specie as payment for government-owned land after Aug. 15, 1836. But actual settlers and bona fide residents of the state in which they purchased land were permitted to use paper money until December 15 on lots up to 320 acres. It, by seriously curtailing the use of paper money, was highly deflationary and at least in part produced the ensuing credit crunch and the economic crisis called the Panic of 1837. On May 21, 1838, a joint resolution of Congress repealed it.

Missouri Compromise

It's measures worked out between the north and the south and passed by the US Congress that allowed for admission for Missouri as a 24th state. It marked the beginning of the prolonged sectional conflict over the extension of slavery that led to the Civil War. Sectional conflict would grow to the point of civil war after the Missouri compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott Decision of 1857.

Haymarket Square Riot

Occurred on May 4, 1886, when a labor protest rally in Chicago turned into a riot after someone threw a bomb at police. At least eight people died as a result of the violence that day. Despite a lack of evidence against them, eight radical labor activists were convicted in connection with the bombing. It was viewed as a setback for the organized labor movement in America, which was fighting for rights like the eight-hour workday. At the same time, many in the labor movement viewed the convicted men as martyrs.

Steamboats

Popular credit for the first steamboat goes to Robert Fulton, who found the financing to make his initial Hudson River run of the Clermont in 1807 more than a onetime feat. From that point forward, on inland waters, steam was king, and its most spectacular manifestation was the Mississippi River paddle wheeler, a unique creation of unsung marine engineers challenged to make a craft that could "work" in shallow swift-running waters. Their solution was to put cargo, engines, and passengers on a flat open deck above the waterline, which was possible in the mild climate of large parts of the drainage basin of the Father of Waters.

Compromise of 1833

Proposed by Henry Clay with the cooperation of John C. Calhoun to defuse the gravity of the Nullification Crisis. They were passed by Congress in March 1833 and gradually lowered the tariff rates over the next 10 years until, in 1842, they would be as low as they were by the Tariff Act of 1816. The Compromise Tariff ended the Nullification Crisis.

Abolitionism

The antislavery movement. Passionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity, it appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in politics. Yet by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of "race," over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When it became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released. If the reform impulse was a common one uniting the American people in the mid-19th century, its manifestation in abolitionism finally split them apart for four bloody years

Kansas-Nebraska Act

The critical national policy change concerning the expansion of slavery into the territories, affirming the concept of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise had excluded slavery from that part of the Louisiana Purchase (except Missouri) north of the 36°30′ parallel. It, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, provided for the territorial organization of Kansas and Nebraska under the principle of popular sovereignty, which had been applied to New Mexico and Utah in the Compromise of 1850. Pres. Franklin Pierce signed An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas into law on May 30, 1854.

Indian Removal Act

The first major legislative departure from the U.S. policy of officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American Indians. The act authorized the president to grant Indian tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable territories within state borders (especially in the Southeast), from which the tribes would be removed. Pres. Andrew Jackson (1829-37) vigorously promoted this new policy, which became incorporated in it. Although the bill provided only for the negotiation with tribes east of the Mississippi on the basis of payment for their lands, trouble arose when the US resorted to force to gain the Indians' compliance with its demand that they accept the land exchange and move west.

Bank War

The struggle between President Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle, president of the Bank of the US, over the continued existence of the only national banking institution in the nation during the second quarter of the 19th century. The first Bank of the US, chartered in 1791 over the objections of Thomas Jefferson, ceased in 1811 when Jeffersonian Republicans refused to pass a new federal charter. In 1816 the second Bank of the US was created, with a 20-year federal charter.

Mexican War

The war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846-February 1848) stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim). The war—in which U.S. forces were consistently victorious—resulted in the United States' acquisition of more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km) of Mexican territory extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean.

Knights of Labor

They began as a secret society of tailors in Philadelphia in 1869. Named by its first leader, Uriah Smith Stephens, it originated as a secret organization meant to protect its members from employer retaliations. The organization grew slowly during the hard years of the 1870s, but worker militancy rose toward the end of the decade, especially after the great railroad strike of 1877, and their' membership rose with it. They were the first important national labor organization in the United States, founded in 1869. Secrecy also gave the organization an emotional appeal.

Independent Treasury System

To confront the country's economic woes, Martin Van Buren proposed the establishment of an independent treasury to handle the federal funds that had been moved to state banks and cut off all federal government expenditures in order to ensure the government would remain solvent. The measures passed Congress, though the bitter debate over them drove many more conservative Democrats into the Whig Party.

Panic of 1837

Van Buren inherited Andrew Jackson's financial policies, which contributed to what came to be known as the Panic of 1837. Jackson thought the Bank of the United States hurt ordinary citizens by exercising too much control over credit and economic opportunity, and he succeeded in shutting it down. But the state banks' reckless credit policies led to massive speculation in Western lands. By 1837, after Van Buren had become president, banks were clearly in trouble. Some began to close, businesses began to fail, and thousands of people lost their land.

Public Education

With increased birthrates, urbanization, the outlawing of child labor, the increase of voting rights, and the influence of socialism, families were changed by the children spending much of their time in free community-sponsored it. Between 1830-1850, many northern states opened free public schools. Education allowed kids more chances. (Leaders; Horace Mann). a universal education system provided by the government and funded by tax revenues rather than student fees

Railroads

railroads were very efficient in covering the great distances underserved by the road system and indispensable in the trans-Mississippi West. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio line, the first railroad in the United States, was begun in 1828, and a great burst of construction boosted the country's rail network from zero to 30,000 miles (50,000 km) by 1860. The financing alone, no less than the operation of the burgeoning system, had a huge political and economic impact.

Pullman Strike

widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June-July 1894. Responding to falling revenue during the economic depression that began in 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut more than 2,000 workers and reduced wages by 25 percent. When it did not also reduce rents and other expenses at Pullman, the company town near Chicago where most Pullman workers lived, many workers and their families faced starvation. A delegation of workers tried to present their grievances to company president George M. Pullman, but he refused to meet with them and ordered them fired. The delegation then voted to strike, and Pullman workers walked off the job on May 11, 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike. Amid the crisis, on June 28 Pres. Grover Cleveland and Congress created a national holiday, Labor Day, as a conciliatory gesture toward the American labour movement.