U.S. History from 1877 to the Present
This domain traces industrialization and its discontents, reform, war, and the remaking of citizenship from 1877 to the present.
Industry and reform
- Gilded Age: railroads, vertical integration (Carnegie's steel), and trusts; the Pullman Strike (1894) showed federal courts using injunctions against unions.
- Populists (Omaha Platform, 1892) demanded free silver, a graduated income tax, and direct election of senators; in 1896 the Democrats absorbed them under Bryan and lost to McKinley's gold-standard, industrial coalition.
- Progressive Era: muckrakers, the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), and the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments (1913) - but many Progressives accepted segregation and eugenics.
War, depression, and rights
- World War I mobilization and the Great Migration; the 1920s credit economy; the 1929 crash; the New Deal (FDIC, Wagner Act, Social Security Act of 1935).
- Cold War containment, the civil rights movement (Brown 1954, Civil Rights Act 1964, Voting Rights Act 1965), the Great Society, and the conservative realignment.
Worked example
Why did the New Deal coalition fracture by 1968? Reasoning: the coalition joined white southerners, northern industrial workers, and African Americans. Civil rights legislation alienated white southerners; urban uprisings and Vietnam split northern liberals; suburbanization moved voters out of machine cities. The best answer names several simultaneous pressures; single-cause options are incomplete.
Traps
- Equating Progressive with racially liberal.
- Treating New Deal agencies as one uniform program.
- Claiming the Depression ended with the New Deal rather than wartime production.
- Assuming the civil rights movement was confined to the South or to the 1960s.