AP U.S. History › Facts and Details in U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History from 1790 to 1898
Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel about the grim reality of slavery is called ____________.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Jungle
Silent Spring
Free at Last!
The Abolitionist
Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel is entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Which prolific author's works, The Souls of Black Folks and Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing notion that African Americans were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era?
W. E. B. Du Bois
Booker T. Washington
Langston Hughes
Richard Wright
James Baldwin
The Souls of Black Folks (1903)and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which challenged the prevailing notion that African Americans were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era, were written by W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most prominent voices of the African American Civil Rights movement. Racist thinkers of the early twentieth century in America waged a continued campaign to demonize and vilify African Americans, and to scapegoat them for any social or economic failures seen during the Reconstruction Era. Dubois' clear, lucid prose directly and implicitly challenged these racist propaganda talking points.
In 1845, periodical editor John L. O'Sullivan coined which of the following terms, used to describe the American desire to expand throughout the entire North American continent as providentially destined?
Manifest Destiny
Providential Fortune
Emancipation Proclamation
Effective Call
Predestination of the Nation
In 1845 in his periodical United States Magazine and Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan famously wrote that it was America's "manifest destiny" to expand and inhabit the rest of the continent. Manifest Destiny refers to the 19th century U.S. policy of expansion towards the Pacific coast.
Who authored The Age of Reason?
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
Benjamin Franklin
Samuel Adams
Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason was written by Thomas Paine and published at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Paine was an American revolutionary who lived in France throughout the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. In The Age of Reason Paine attacks organized religion and paints the Catholic Church as corrupt and morally bankrupt. It is a classic example of Enlightenment and deist literature. It was also a bestseller in the United States and led to a massive revival of Deism amongst the American middle and upper classes.
Which is an example of "muckraking journalism?"
All of these.
Ida Tarbell's expose of the Standard Oil Company's practices, which brought to light many of the unscrupulous practices and monopolization going on in big industries.
Nellie Bly pretended to be insane in order to be admitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and document first-hand the appalling conditions there.
Lincoln Steffens' investigation of local government in New York City and subsequent discovery of abundant corruption of politicians by businessmen seeking special privileges.
Uptown Sinclair posed as a worker in a Chicago meat packing factor for seven weeks, seeking to investigate and bring to the public eye the struggles of immigrant workers. However, the numerous health risks and disgusting practices he documented ended up being what roused the public's attention instead, and his work directly contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Each of these writers was referred to as "muckraking journalists." The term muckraker was used in the Progressive Era to characterize reform-minded American journalists who wrote largely for all popular magazines. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckrakers represented the beginning of modern investigative journalism and "watchdog" journalism as we still know it today.
What historical term is used to describe the period of United States history prior to the Civil War?
The Antebellum Era
The Gilded Age
The Era of Good Feelings
The Era of Manifest Destiny
The Reconstruction Era
The term used to describe the historical period between the American Revolution and the Civil War is the Antebellum Era. The term "antebellum" directly means before the war. In the context of the United States it is generally used to refer to the Southern United States prior to the Civil War.
Which of the following is NOT true about Joseph Smith?
Smith claimed to have found tablets written by a lost tribe of Israel.
Smith published the Book of Mormon from the tablets he found, and hoped it would replace the Bible.
Smith was killed in the Illinois Mormon War after being jailed.
Smith started Mormonism in New York.
Smith practiced and preached polygamy.
Smith said he had found tablets from a lost tribe of Israel. He wrote the tablets into a book called the Book of Mormon, which he believed should not replace the Bible. All other answer choices are true. After finding trouble in New York, Smith moved his followers to Ohio, Missouri, and then Illinois. After Smith was killed in Illinois, Brigham Young moved the Mormons to Utah.
A person who wanted to end slavery in the United States was known as what?
An abolitionist
A prohibitionist
A teetotaler
A sectionalist
An advocate
A person who wanted to abolish slavery in the United States (and elsewhere) was known as an abolitionist.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is closest to which of the following, in terms of its portrayal of slavery?
The Liberator by William Lloyd Garrison
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Slavery: In Defense of an Advantageous System, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
This had the potential to be a very difficult question, but the answer choices should have pointed you in the right direction:
The Liberator (founded in 1831) is the correct answer—William Lloyd Garrison was a staunch abolitionist and even created a newspaper to that effect. His portrayal of slavery was not positive—similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a massively-popular novel depicting the horrors of slavery.
Gone with the Wind (1936) is incorrect. While the book doesn’t necessarily praise slavery, it paints it in a much more positive light than the Liberator, and is written (essentially) from the perspective of a southern woman. Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) in incorrect. This pamphlet was, of course, massively influential during the pre-Revolutionary War. Slavery . . . is incorrect. It’s a great red herring, and it’s there simply to give you a tempting answer that is dead wrong. Moreover, and more importantly, while Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was a real person (he was a statesman from South Carolina) that book title is completely made up.
The principle of separate but equal was established by .
Plessy v. Ferguson
Brown v. Board of Education
Wesbery v. Sanders
Freemen v. United States Government
Gibbons v. Ogden
Plessy v. Ferguson was a case that appeared before the Supreme Court in 1896. It established the legality and constitutionality of state laws, mostly in the South, that had required segregation of public facilities under the guise of “separate but equal.” It remained protected by law until 1954, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision reversed it.