CLEP History of the United States II: Social Developments

Migration, cities, and reform

The social domain traces how Americans moved, organized, and demanded rights. Distinguish the "old" immigration of northern and western Europe before the 1880s from the "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia between the 1880s and 1920s, which fueled nativism, the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and the quota system of 1921–1924. Urbanization produced settlement houses (Hull House, Jane Addams), machine politics, and public health reform. The Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South into northern and western cities reshaped politics and culture across the 20th century.

Rights and movements

Know the sequence of African American strategies: Booker T. Washington's vocational accommodation versus W. E. B. Du Bois's agitation and the Niagara Movement/NAACP; then legal victory in Brown, grassroots protest (Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins), and legislation. Women's activism runs from Seneca Falls (1848) through suffrage (19th Amendment, 1920) to second-wave feminism and Title IX. Labor, immigrant, Latino, Native American, and LGBTQ movements also appear.

Traps and a rule of thumb

Questions confuse de jure segregation (law) with de facto segregation (housing and custom), and they misattribute leadership. Postwar suburbanization, the GI Bill, highway construction, and white flight are linked causes, not a single cause. A reliable rule: when a question asks why a movement succeeded, separate legal strategy, direct protest, economic pressure, and federal intervention.

Worked example: A question asks which leader favored immediate political agitation and helped found the NAACP. Washington favored gradual vocational progress; Du Bois fits agitation and the NAACP. Match the strategy, then the name.