Term | Definition |
Palmer Raids | raids that deported over 600 citizens accused of participating in a radical plot to overthrow the govt. during the Red Scare |
Red Scare | following the Russian Revolution, many in the US panicked that labor unions and immigrants from Eastern Europe would lead a communist revolution in America |
J. Edgar Hoover | assistant to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer during the Red Scare, who would later become head of the FBI for decades |
Sacco & Vanzetti | Italian immigrants who were caught up in anti-communist hysteria and executed without clear evidence of committing murder |
Nativism | a strong dislike of foreigners and their cultures, which were seen as threats to the dominance of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant White American culture |
Ku Klux Klan | a new version arose in opposition to immigrants, Catholics, and Jews, besides African-Americans |
Teapot Dome Scandal | two of president Harding's friends were accused of asking for bribes in exchange for granting leases to oil companies on govt. lands |
Herbert Hoover | president who believed in the "rugged individualism" of America based on free education, equal opportunities, and a will to succeed with no govt. interference in the economy |
Henry Ford | car entrepreneur who used the assembly line techniques to mass produce the model T; he paid workers more so they could afford to buy it |
Model T | first mass-produced car that many Americans could buy |
Glenn Curtiss | designed sea planes for the US Navy that could cross the Atlantic |
assembly line | method of production in which unskilled workers used machinery to create cars and other products rapidly |
credit | retailers created new installment payments where consumers could purchase expensive goods with little or no money down |
speculation | the purchase of stocks using credit, in hopes of re-selling at a higher price |
Frances Willard | temperance movement leader who advocated for women's rights, suffrage, 8-hour work day, and pushed for prohibition |
18th Amendment | prohibited the sale of alcoholic drinks in 1919 |
21st Amendment | repealed the unpopular prohibition of alcohol in 1933 |
19th Amendment | gave women the right to vote (suffrage) |
Scopes Monkey Trial | trial that pitted the older, religious, traditional values versus the new scientific theories like evolution |
Immigration Acts of 1921, 1924 | immigration laws designed to exclude immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe & Asia by creating quotas based on ethnicity, religion, and political ideology |
Social Darwinism | belief that human races competed for survival and that Anglo-Saxon race was superior to darker-skinned races |
Flappers | young women who had entered the workforce and refused to conform to traditional roles & behavior for women; they wore short hair & skirts, smoke & drank, and lived independently |
Tin Pan Alley | section of NYC where song writing & musical ideas mixed to form American popular sheet music of blues, jazz, and ragtime music for shows and individuals |
Lost Generation | American writers disillusioned by WWI and the materialistic society of the 1920s, who moved to Europe |
The Great Migration | large migration of African-Americans to northern cities to escape the segregation of Jim Crow Southern society and lynchings in search of factory jobs |
Harlem Renaissance | cultural explosion of African American literature, music, and politics as they moved into northern cities from the South |
Langston Hughes | African-American poet & writer of Harlem Renaissance |
Charles Lindbergh | American pilot who flew solo across the Atlantic |
F. Scott Fitzgerald | writer of the Great Gatsby which captured the spirit of the Jazz Age and moral corruption |