-
The Formal Declaration of Independence established the new revolutionary American government and officially declared the war against Britain. The main purpose of the Declaration was to help the Second Continental Congress get help from other countries. -
"E Pluribus Unum" was the motto proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. -
The United States Constitution, the Basic Law of the United States Federal Government System, and the original documents of the Western World. The Constitution is the oldest national constitution in use and defines the major government agencies and their responsibilities, as well as the basic rights of citizens. -
The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution. It defines Americans' rights to their government. We guarantee individual civil rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. -
“American imperialism” is a term that refers to the economic, military, and cultural influence of the United States on other countries. First popularized during the presidency of James K. Polk, the concept of an “American Empire” was made a reality throughout the latter half of the 1800s. -
An American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. -
Alexis de Tocqueville's five values crucial to America's success as a constitutional republic: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire. -
Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States naval officer and historian, whom John Keegan called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century. -
Sanford Ballard Dole was a lawyer and jurist from the Hawaiian Islands. He lived through the periods when Hawaii was a kingdom, protectorate, republic, and territory. -
The second woman to receive the Peace Prize. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, and worked for many years to get the great powers to disarm and conclude peace agreements. -
John J. Pershing was one of America's most accomplished generals. He is most famous for serving as commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. -
To help develop the American West and spur economic growth, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm the land. The act distributed millions of acres of western land to individual settlers. -
She established the first black kindergarten, organized black women, and helped elect the city's first black alderman, just a few of her many achievements. The -
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. -
The most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). -
Eminent domain refers to the power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use. The Fifth Amendment provides that the government may only exercise this power if they provide just compensation to the property owners. -
The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in England and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social interconnectedness.
-
Douglas MacArthur was an American military leader who served as General of the Army for the United States, as well as a field marshal to the Philippine Army. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s, and he played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. -
“Eugenics” comes from the Greek roots for “good” and “origin,” or “good birth” and involves applying principles of genetics and heredity for the purpose of improving the human race. The term eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton in the late 1800's. -
George Smith Patton Jr. was a general in the United States Army who commanded the Seventh United States Army in the Mediterranean theater of World War II, and the Third United States Army in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. -
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. ONH was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. -
He was one of the most decorated United States Army soldiers of World War I. He received the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest. -
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, and achieved the five-star rank of General of the Army. -
The Homestead Strike was a violent labour dispute between the Carnegie Steel Company and many of its workers that occurred in 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania. The striking workers were all fired on July 2, and on July 6 private security guards hired by the company arrived. -
Omar Nelson Bradley was a senior officer of the United States Army during and after World War II, rising to the rank of General of the Army. Bradley was the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and oversaw the U.S. military's policy-making in the Korean War. -
The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of Yukon, in north-western Canada, between 1896 and 1899.
-
The Spanish–American War was a period of armed conflict between Spain and the United States. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence.
-
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, military officer, author, inventor, and activist. At the age of 25, he achieved instantaneous world fame by making the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris on May 20–21, 1927. -
The United States, led by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, negotiated the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, giving the U.S. control of the Canal Zone. Work under U.S. supervision began in 1904, and the Panama Canal was completed in 1914. The Panama Canal was built to lower the distance, cost, and time it took for ships to carry cargo between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. -
He pioneered the kind of journalism known as "muckraking. He wrote the infamous "The Jungle." -
The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution allows Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states on the basis of population. It was passed by Congress in 1909 in response to the 1895 Supreme Court case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co -
The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution established the direct election of United States senators in each state. -
In June 1914, a Serbian-nationalist terrorist group called the Black Hand sent groups to assassinate the Archduke.
-
President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service, a new federal bureau in the Department of the Interior responsible for protecting the 35 national parks and monuments then managed by the department and those yet to be established. -
The main reasons are The Lusitania and The Zimmerman telegram. -
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution established the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. -
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the United States and its states from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, in effect recognising the right of women to a vote. -
Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation. Such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. -
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s.
-
Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a seminal investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh.
-
The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. -
Indian Citizenship Act. On June 2, 1924, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S. The right to vote, however, was governed by state law; until 1957, some states barred Native Americans from voting. -
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region -
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is one of two agencies that supply deposit insurance to depositors in American depository institutions, the other being the National Credit Union Administration, which regulates and insures credit unions. -
The United States Social Security Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that administers Social Security, a social insurance program consisting of retirement, disability and survivor benefits. -
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War, also referred to as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, was a war of aggression which was fought between Italy and Ethiopia from October 1935 to February 1937. In Ethiopia it is often referred to simply as the Italian Invasion, and in Italy as the Ethiopian War.
-
An executive order called the Mexican Farm Labor Program established the Bracero Program in 1942. This series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States permitted millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts. -
Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland. -
The 84th Congress of 1956 passed a joint resolution "declaring IN GOD WE TRUST the national motto of the United States." "In God We Trust" appeared on all American currency after 1956