CLEP History of the United States II cheat sheet

Reconstruction amendments: Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery; Fourteenth (1868) guaranteed citizenship, due process, and equal protection; Fifteenth (1870) barred denial of suffrage on account of race.

Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883) replaced patronage with competitive examinations after the assassination of President Garfield.

Interstate Commerce Act (1887) created the ICC to regulate railroad rates; the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) outlawed monopolistic restraints of trade.

Seventeenth Amendment (1913) moved Senate elections to direct popular vote; Nineteenth Amendment (1920) enfranchised women.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld segregation as 'separate but equal'; Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned it in public schools.

Baker v. Carr (1962) made redistricting a justiciable question; Reynolds v. Sims (1964) required state legislative districts of roughly equal population.

New Deal pillars: Social Security Act (1935), Wagner Act (1935) protecting union organizing, Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) setting minimum wage and maximum hours.

Great Society legislation: Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Medicare/Medicaid created by the Social Security Amendments of 1965.

Twenty-Sixth Amendment (1971) set the voting age at 18; Nixon resigned in August 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved impeachment articles over Watergate.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was the first federal law barring immigration by a specific nationality; it was repealed in 1943.

The 'new immigration' of 1880-1920 came mainly from southern and eastern Europe; the Immigration Act of 1924 imposed national-origin quotas favoring northern Europeans.

The Great Migration (roughly 1915-1970) moved millions of African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities.

Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a leading settlement house serving immigrant neighborhoods.

The GI Bill (1944) funded veterans' college tuition and home loans, helping produce postwar suburban growth such as Levittown (1947).

The baby boom ran from 1946 to 1964, swelling school enrollments in the 1950s and college enrollments in the 1960s.

Second-wave feminism: The Feminine Mystique (1963), formation of NOW (1966), Title IX (1972), and Roe v. Wade (1973).

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas, increasing immigration from Asia and Latin America.

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, integrating national markets.

Munn v. Illinois (1877) upheld state regulation of grain elevator rates; Wabash v. Illinois (1886) limited state power over interstate commerce and prompted the Interstate Commerce Act.

Federal Reserve Act (1913) created a central bank; the Clayton Antitrust Act and the FTC (both 1914) strengthened antitrust enforcement.

The stock market crashed in October 1929; the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) raised duties and triggered retaliation, deepening the Depression.

New Deal agencies: TVA (1933) for regional development, NRA (1933) for industrial codes (struck down in Schechter, 1935), and WPA (1935) for public employment.

Glass-Steagall Act (1933) separated commercial from investment banking and created the FDIC; a national bank holiday followed the banking crisis of 1933.

Bretton Woods (1944) created the IMF and World Bank; Nixon ended dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, dissolving the fixed exchange-rate system.

Stagflation in the 1970s combined high inflation with high unemployment; the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker raised interest rates sharply to break inflation in the early 1980s.

Social Darwinism applied 'survival of the fittest' to society and was invoked against minimum-wage laws and labor regulation.

Andrew Carnegie's 'Gospel of Wealth' (1889) argued that the rich should fund public institutions such as libraries, exemplifying the era's philanthropic ideal.

Muckrakers included Ida Tarbell (Standard Oil), Lincoln Steffens (city machines), and Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle (1906) prompted the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act.

Pragmatism, associated with William James and John Dewey, judged ideas by practical consequences; Dewey shaped progressive, child-centered education.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s produced work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, expressing Black identity through modernist forms.

The Scopes Trial (1925) in Tennessee dramatized the fundamentalist-modernist conflict over teaching evolution in public schools.

Mass culture spread through radio in the 1920s (commercial networks; FCC created 1934) and through television in the 1950s.

The Beat Generation (Kerouac's On the Road, 1957; Ginsberg's Howl, 1956) rejected 1950s conformity and prefigured the 1960s counterculture.

The Spanish-American War (1898) ended with the Treaty of Paris; the US acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and the Platt Amendment (1901) constrained Cuba.

Open Door Notes (1899-1900) sought equal commercial access to China; the Roosevelt Corollary (1904) asserted US police power in the Western Hemisphere.

US entry into World War I followed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram (1917); the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1919-1920.

Neutrality Acts (1935-1937) imposed arms embargoes; Lend-Lease (1941) ended strict neutrality; Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

Containment: Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), and NSC-68 (1950) framed Cold War policy.

Cold War flashpoints: Korean War (1950-1953), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Vietnam War, authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) and ended by the Paris Accords (1973).

Détente: Nixon visited China in 1972 and signed SALT I and the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union the same year.

Camp David Accords (1978) led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (1979); the INF Treaty (1987) with Gorbachev reduced intermediate-range nuclear missiles.