USH Terms 1

• Enlightenment thinkers

  • Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas

• Founding documents: Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution

  • Based of enlightenment ideas of equality, rights, liberty, opportunity, democracy

  • declaration of independence - after the revolutionary war, declared the US a independent country

  • Articles of confederation: the original constitution of the 13 colonies, ineffective

  • Constitution: articles discuss how states should interact with each other, says the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, creates the three branches of the U.S. government, includes additions to the Constitution (amendments), tells how to amend the Constitution, tells how to ratify the Constitution

• Westward Expansion

  • Texas and California were annexed

  • Destroyed Native Americans’ way of life and land

• The Civil War

  • caused by the imbalance of slave and free states

  • Union vs Confederacy

  • included Battle of Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Bull Run, Sherman’s March, and Appomattox

  • Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse

• Reconstruction

  • Era after Civil War

  • amendments were made to attempt to establish security and stability in society, especially since the newly freed black population faced violent racism

  • Supreme court rulings contradicted amendments: ‘separate but equal’ (Jim Crow segregation) states decided freedoms, do not protect from violence by private individuals

• 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments

  • 13th - Slavery, or involuntary servitude, is outlawed in the US except in cases where it is a punishment for a crime.

  • 14th - All people born or naturalized in the US are citizens and citizen rights are backed by federal law that state laws cannot overcome.

  • 15th - All citizens have the right to vote despite their race and this right cannot be taken away by the federal or state government.

• Sharecropping

  • System where black people could supposedly make money

  • Even though African Americans were free, they were stuck in an endless loop of poverty making them dependent on white people who treated them poorly.

• Black Codes & Jim Crow laws

  • Black codes were laws passed in order to criminalize activities that would make it easy to imprison African Americans which would pass a loophole in the 13th Amendment and effectively force African Americans back into servitude.

  • Jim Crow laws - public spaces were segregated, ‘separate but equal’ but it wasn’t really equal

• Transcontinental Railroad

  • Connected east and west coast

  • Built because gold rush caused population increased on the then isolated west coast

  • Pacific Railway Company got support to build with the Pacific Railway Act

  • Conflicted with tribal lands on the Great Plains

• Telegraph & Telephone

  • Revolutionized communications

• Rise of Big Business

  • Trusts and monopolies concentrated capital/power in the hands of few people

  • Less competition → larger, more profitable companies (industrial giants)

  • Business was impersonal, profit-driven, responsive to investors, not workers

  • Expanded with horizontal and vertical integration

  • Govt was unwilling to stop the rise of big business

• Monopolies, Horizontal & Vertical Integration

  • Monopoly - a company that completely dominates a particular industry, illegal, eliminates competition, the result of horizontal integration

  • Horizontal integration - a corporate expansion strategy that involves joining together as many firms from the same industry as possible

  • vertical integration - a corporate expansion strategy that involves controlling each step in the production and distribution of a product, from acquiring raw materials to manufacturing, packaging, and shipping

• Robber Barons & Captains of Industry: Carnegie, Rockefeller

  • Robber barons/captains of industry - extremely wealthy industry owners who used ruthless/unethical means to acquire wealth (horizontal integration)

  • Carnegie - the owner of Carnegie Steel (vertical integration), lived lavishly but paid workers poorly

  • Rockefeller, the owner of Standard Oil (horizontal integration), undercut competitors by making deals with railroads to discount oil prices → forced competitors to go bankrupt or be sold to Standard Oil 

• Social Darwinism

  • Darwin’s theory of evolution (survival of the fittest) applied to humans and businesses

  • Led to racism (paternalistic ‘need’ to take over other countries)