US History - The American Promise Ch 17-18

Which of the following developments was a key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age?

The growth of industrialism in the United States

To what did the term solid South refer in the decades after Reconstruction?

The states of the old Confederacy, which voted Democratic in every election for the next seventy years

The turn of the twentieth century saw individual entrepreneurship in the United States yield to 

finance capitalism

Which of the following describes the Gilded Age?

An era marked by personal greed and a corrupt partnership between business and politics

Which group of Republicans fiercely supported the patronage system?

Stalwarts

Which of the following factors explains the high voter turnout in national elections during the last three decades of the nineteenth century?

Voting was an important way to get a government job

Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?

It controlled more than 90 percent of the oil business

According to American businessmen who subscribed to the economic theory of laissez-faire, what was the role of the government in the economy?

It should not interfere in economic affairs except to protect private property

Which of the following factors boosted nineteenth-century railroad construction in America significantly?

Monetary aid and land grants from federal and state governments

According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in

economics and the shifting social structure of the South

Which group enthusiastically supported the tariff in the nineteenth century?

Industrialists

What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?

The desire among some southerners to shift to an industrial economy

What was the purpose of vertical integration, which was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century?

It placed all aspects of the business, from mining raw materials to marketing and transporting finished products, under the control of the chief operating officer

What did the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act have in common?

Both testified to the nation's growing willingness to use federal measures to intervene in big business on behalf of the public interest

How effective was the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first federal regulatory agency?

It was so weak in its early years that it served as little more than a historical precedent

The presidents who served in the last part of the nineteenth century—Rutherford B. Hayes through William McKinley—

were overshadowed by party politics at state and local levels

What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?

Progress is the result of competition where the strong survived and the weak died out

In her History of the Standard Oil Company published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as

a man who had used illegal methods to take over the oil industry

The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the 1880s because

it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services

How did American women respond to the denial of their right to vote in the late nineteenth century?

They participated in the political process though the antilynching, suffrage, and temperance movements

Which of the following big businesses came to dominate American life in the second half of the nineteenth century?

Railroading

How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?

He used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed both local and cross-country communication

What message did Andrew Carnegie promote in his gospel of wealth?

Millionaires should be trustees and agents for the poor

What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?

An increasing number of lynchings across the South

Where had electricity been put to use in the United States by the late nineteenth century?

Mostly in urban areas

Along with the Homestead Act of 1862, which factor helped stimulate the land rush in the trans-Mississippi West?

The opening of the transcontinental railroad

What was the outcome of the transformation of agriculture to big business in the South and West during the post–Civil War era?

An increasing number of laborers worked land they would never own

Which of the following describes African American cowboys in the West in the late nineteenth century?

They had a substantial presence in the region but not in the fiction of the time

What was the easiest way to get rich in the American silver mining industry?

Selling claims to land or forming mining companies and selling stock

What was the purpose of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?

To decrease the Chinese population of the American West

What happened to the Sioux after their victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn?

They were hunted down by the American army

Which of the following is true of labor unions in the western mining industry?

They formed early and held considerable bargaining power

By the 1870s, homesteaders discovered that most of the prime land in the West was

already in the hands of speculators

Which was the largest ethnic group in the western mining district of the United States in the late nineteenth century?

The Irish

What did the state and federal governments do to encourage railroad construction in the decades after the Civil War?

They gave railroad companies 180 million acres of public land

How did the landscape of the trans-Mississippi West change between 1870 and 1900?

Family farms gave way to commercial farming

For what reason did hundreds of thousands of Americans migrate to the West in the three decades after 1870?

To own their own land

Which of the following describes the impact of the wealth produced in the Nevada mining industry?

It enriched speculators in San Francisco

In what manner did William Tecumseh Sherman successfully defeat the Comanchería?

Using the scorched-earth policy he'd perfected during his March to the Sea

What impact did the discovery of precious metals on the Comstock have for Native Americans?

Destruction of their land

For what reason were African American troops, known as Buffalo soldiers, serving in the West during the Indian Wars?

Native Americans thought their hair resembled that of the bison

Chinese immigrants made up what proportion of the workforce that built America's first transcontinental railroad?

90 percent

Which group or groups decimated the buffalo herds on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century?

Railroads and irresponsible hide hunters

Which statement describes the U.S. government's Indian policy during the middle of the nineteenth century?

The government pushed Indians off their lands and into reservations

Why did the Plains Indians sign the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which ceded some of their land to allow the passage of wagon trains?

They hoped to preserve their culture in the face of white onslaught

What was the outcome of the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887?

Division of reservations and allotment of individual plots of land to Native Americans

Which of the following characterizes life for women on the western frontier in the late nineteenth century?

They were forced to work hard to accomplish even the simplest tasks

Which of the following explains why the U.S. army gunned down unarmed Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota in 1890?

American soldiers feared an uprising provoked by a militant interpretation of the Ghost Dance religion

Of the 2.5 million farms established between 1860 and 1900, homesteading accounted for what proportion?

One-fifth

Which statement describes life on the Indian reservations?

Poverty and starvation stalked Indian reservations