Midterm Exam

Midterm grades are now available on the Grade page.

Use the Answer Key to double-check your answers.

Please use Netforum for any questions or anything you think might be in error.

The Midterm Exam is scheduled for Monday, September 29. If the class so desires, we can have a review session for the exam during the previous class period (Friday, September 26). The exam will cover chapters 16 to 23 in the textbook (A People and a Nation), Sinclair's The Jungle, lectures, discussions, and films we have viewed in class. The exam will be in the format of 50 multiple-choice questions. Each question will have four answers, and only one of those will be correct. You will fill out the answers on a optical scan sheet (remember to bring a #2 pencil!). If you have granted me permission, I will post your grade to this web page, hopefully by 5 p.m. the day of the exam.

The following terms and questions are designed to help you study for the exam. You should be able to identity and give the significance of each term and answer each question. Be sure that you can also answer the study questions for The Jungle and Matewan. I reserve the right to add additional material to this study guide depending on the direction that lectures and classroom discussions take. I will mark any new items with an asterisk (*). Please make use of the Netforum class discussion group to discuss material you do not understand. If you have any questions about the exam, please feel free to contact me at mbecker@ilstu.edu.

Chapter 16 and Week One

Terms

Civil War
Emancipation Proclamation
Wade-Davis Bill
Black codes
Radical Republicans
Freedmen's Bureau
Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875
* Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments
Reconstruction
Carpetbagger
Ku Klux Klan
Birth of a Nation
Sharecropping system
Henry Grady

Questions

What was the cause of the Civil War?
Once slaves were freed, what was to be their relation to the rest of society?
What were the economic relations between the North and the South after the Civil War?
What were the predominate racial attitudes of white northerners?
Contrast executive, legislative, and judicial reconstruction plans.
What legacy did reconstruction leave for the United States?

Chapter 17 and Week Two

Terms

Manifest Destiny
Frederick Jackson Turner
Sand Creek Massacre
Battle of Little Big Horn
Dawes Severalty Act
Bureau of Indian Affairs
Ghost Dance movement
Wovoka
Wounded Knee
Buffalo
Assimilation
John Muir
Conservation movement
Homestead Act of 1862
Westward expansion
Oregon Trail
Railroad
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Barbed wire
Jim Crow laws

Questions

What role did the West play in developing United States society?
What economic forces were at work in the development of the West?
What was life like for settlers on the plains?
Discuss the evolution of Federal Indian policy.
What was the rational behind the reservation policies?
When did Indians gain United States citizenship?

Chapter 18 and Week Three

Terms

Industrialization
Henry Ford
Assembly Line
Frederick W. Taylor
Child labor
Knights of Labor
Haymarket Riot
American Federation of Labor
Homestead and Pullman strikes
Eugene V. Debs
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wooblies)
Mother Jones
Emma Goldman
John D. Rockefeller
Horizontal and vertical integration
Laissez-faire capitalism
Edward Bellamy
Social Darwinism

Questions

What impact did industrial development have on the United States?
Discuss changes in the nature of work and working conditions during the late nineteenth century.
What was the impact of labor unions on workers?
What was the role of women in the labor force?

Chapter 19 and Week Four

Terms

"New" and "Old" immigration
The New Colossus
African-American migration
Chinese exclusion laws
Return migration
Melting pot
Xenophobia
Nativism
Yellow journalism
Muckrakers
Political machines
Political bosses
Urban reform movement
Social gospel
Settlement house

Questions

What were the push and pull factors which brought immigrations to the U.S.?
Describe a "typical" immigrant.
Describe changes in federal immigration policy.
Was life better for immigrants in the U.S. than in their former country?
What was the impact of immigration upon the U.S.?
What were the urban problems which the United States faced in the late nineteenth century?

Chapters 20 & 21 and Week Five

Terms

Women's suffrage movement
Susan B. Anthony
Grange
Farmers' Alliances
* Subtreasury plan
* Coxey's Army
Populism
William Jennings Bryan
Gold and silver standards
Progressive Era
Women's Christian Temperance Union
White slavery
Land-grant colleges
W.E.B. Du Bois
Booker T. Washington
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Society of American Indians
Margaret Sanger
Feminism

Questions

Discuss the nature of politics in the United States during the Gilded Age.
What controversies existed over federal regulation of industry?
What was the Populist Party, and what did it stand for?
Trace the history of the women's suffrage movement.
What were the causes of the economic depression in the 1890s?
Compare the approaches which W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington took to the problems which African-Americans faced.

Chapters 22 & 23 and Week Six

Terms

United Fruit Company
Pan-American Conference of 1889
José Martí
Maine
Teller Amendment
The Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War
Platt Amendment
George Dewey
Imperialism
"Dollar Diplomacy"
Panama Canal
Roosevelt Corollary
Augusto César Sandino
Zimmermann Telegram
Peace movement
Conscientious objectors
Socialist Party
"Red Summer" of 1919
Bolshevik
Red Scare
Palmer Raids
League of Nations

Questions

Examine the domestic sources of United States imperialism in the late nineteenth century.
Examine the debate between imperialists and anti-imperialists.
What was the impact of the First World War on workers, women, and African-Americans?
What were the underlying causes of the Red Scare?