Answers to the Middle-Course Memory Checks

REFERENCE · CHAPTERS 13–28 ANSWER KEY

Use these answers only after you have completed the matching chapter memory check with your notes closed. The point is to compare your explanation with the model, then repair whatever you could not retrieve or connect.

Chapter 13 Answers: Follow the Market Revolution Through Daily Life

1. The Erie Canal sharply lowered the cost and time of moving western grain to the Hudson River and Atlantic markets, making commercial production for distant buyers more profitable.

2. The Lowell system concentrated mechanized textile production in large mills and recruited many young unmarried women, often housing them in company boardinghouses under supervised conditions.

3. Cheaper transportation made distant buyers economically reachable, so farmers had an incentive to specialize in market crops beyond household subsistence.

4. Transportation, credit, and trade linked regions into one market, but that market encouraged specialization: manufacturing and commercial farming in the Northeast, cotton slavery in the South, and grain and livestock production in the West.

5. Some young unmarried women entered paid mill work outside the household, while middle-class culture increasingly idealized married women as domestic managers in a separate household sphere.

Chapter 14 Answers: Test the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy

1. Most states had removed or reduced property requirements for white male voting before Jackson took office, creating a much larger white male electorate.

2. Jackson’s supporters believed the 1824 House decision had denied the popular plurality winner, so they built a disciplined national party with newspapers, rallies, local committees, and broader voter mobilization for 1828.

3. Jackson argued that the Second Bank concentrated public privilege and financial power in an institution that benefited wealthy stockholders and threatened republican equality.

4. South Carolina claimed it could nullify the federal tariff. Jackson rejected that claim, supported a Force Bill authorizing enforcement, and accepted a compromise tariff that reduced the immediate confrontation.

5. Jackson opposed national economic privilege in the Bank War but defended federal supremacy during nullification and supported a federal removal policy that destroyed Native sovereignty. His use of power depended on the issue.

Chapter 15 Answers: Connect Revival Religion to Reform

1. Many revivalists emphasized free will, conversion, and human agency. Reformers extended the idea that people could change themselves into a belief that institutions and society could be improved through organized action.

2. Gradual approaches accepted a slow end to slavery or colonization schemes; Garrisonian immediatism demanded slavery’s prompt abolition and rejected postponement as morally unacceptable.

3. 1831 shows simultaneous radicalization on both sides of the slavery conflict: Garrison launched an uncompromising abolitionist publication, while Nat Turner’s revolt intensified white southern fear and repression.

4. The cotton gin made short-staple cotton far more profitable across the Deep South, encouraging plantation expansion and increasing demand for enslaved labor through the domestic slave trade.

5. Examples include slowing work, damaging tools, feigning illness, preserving religious and cultural practices, maintaining family networks, and running away temporarily or permanently.

6. Public abolitionist speaking exposed the Grimkés to criticism for violating gender norms. Defending their right to speak led them to connect antislavery activism with women’s claims to public and political equality.

Chapter 16 Answers: Follow Slavery Into the New Western Territories

1. Manifest Destiny justified continental expansion. It helped support Texas annexation in 1845 and the Oregon boundary settlement with Britain in 1846, while also framing broader expansionist ambitions.

2. Mexico recognized the Nueces River as the Texas boundary while the United States claimed the Rio Grande. Polk sent troops into the disputed zone, where fighting helped trigger the U.S. declaration of war.

3. The Wilmot Proviso proposed banning slavery in territory acquired from Mexico. Its repeated sectional voting pattern showed slavery expansion cutting across and destabilizing older party loyalties.

4. Popular sovereignty moved the decision from Congress to territorial settlers. It did not resolve the conflict because proslavery and antislavery forces could simply fight over who controlled settlement and voting.

5. Examples: California admitted free; Utah and New Mexico organized under popular sovereignty; slave trade ended in Washington, D.C.; Texas boundary and debt settled; stronger Fugitive Slave Act passed. The Fugitive Slave Act angered northerners because it required participation in returning alleged fugitives and limited protections for accused people.

Chapter 17 Answers: Rebuild the 1850s Sectional Breakdown

1. Kansas-Nebraska organized the territories and applied popular sovereignty north of the Missouri Compromise line, effectively repealing the old restriction. Douglas wanted territorial organization and hoped popular sovereignty would resolve the issue while winning southern support.

2. Bleeding Kansas showed that popular sovereignty could turn a political compromise into violent competition over settlement, voting, and legitimacy. It became a national symbol of compromise failure.

3. Republicans were united primarily by opposition to the expansion of slavery into western territories, even though members differed on abolition and racial equality.

4. Dred Scott held that Scott could not claim federal citizenship and that Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the territories. The second holding mattered because it attacked the constitutional basis for future territorial restriction and narrowed compromise options.

5. Lincoln won without southern electoral support as the candidate of a party committed to blocking slavery’s expansion. Deep South leaders concluded that their political power and slavery’s future were increasingly insecure inside the Union.

Chapter 18 Answers: Trace How Emancipation Changed the War

1. Union advantages included larger population, greater industry, rail mileage, finance, and naval capacity. Confederate advantages included fighting defensively on familiar territory and needing to survive rather than conquer; early senior military experience also helped.

2. Butler’s contraband policy treated escaped enslaved people reaching Union lines as confiscated enemy property rather than returning them. Congress then broadened the policy through the Confiscation Acts, moving federal policy toward emancipation.

3. Lincoln wanted a military success so emancipation would not look like an act of desperation and to manage political risk in loyal slave states. The final proclamation applied to areas in rebellion, not loyal border slave states or already Union-controlled exempted areas.

4. Black enlistment added roughly 180,000 soldiers to Union manpower and strengthened claims that people fighting for the Union and freedom could not logically be denied citizenship and liberty.

5. Grant pursued continuous pressure against Confederate armies, while Sherman targeted transportation, supplies, and economic capacity in Georgia and the Carolinas. The strategy made war on Confederate capacity more relentless than many earlier Union campaigns.

Chapter 19 Answers: Separate Reconstruction’s Gains From Its Retreat

1. Johnson favored rapid restoration with limited protection for Black rights. Congressional Republicans demanded stronger civil-rights guarantees, Black male political participation, and federal conditions for readmission.

2. Black Codes restricted freedpeople’s movement, labor, and legal autonomy. Congress responded with measures including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and eventually the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction Acts.

3. 13th: abolished slavery, except as punishment for crime. 14th: national citizenship, due process, and equal protection. 15th: prohibited denial of voting rights on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

4. Examples include Black voting, election to local, state, and federal office, independent churches, schools, mutual-aid societies, conventions, and community institution-building.

5. Reconstruction governments were undermined by organized white-supremacist violence, fraud, intimidation, court restrictions, economic crisis, and declining federal enforcement. The older incompetence-only interpretation ignores those forces and Black political agency.

6. The contested 1876 election ended with Hayes taking office and federal troops leaving the remaining Republican southern governments. The political cost was the collapse of sustained federal protection for Black voting and officeholding.

Chapter 20 Answers: Follow Federal Power Across the West

1. Federal land grants and subsidies under the Pacific Railway Acts gave railroad corporations land and financial support that made construction of the transcontinental railroad possible.

2. The Homestead Act distributed federal land on specified conditions, showing that western settlement was actively organized and subsidized by national policy rather than occurring through private migration alone.

3. Plains communities depended heavily on buffalo for food, clothing, materials, and economic life. Destroying the herds weakened the ability of many communities to remain independent of reservation control.

4. The Dawes Act divided communal reservation land into household allotments and opened remaining surplus land to non-Native settlement, accelerating Native land loss despite its assimilationist language.

5. The Black Hills were guaranteed to Lakota people by treaty, but gold discoveries drew miners and federal pressure. The resulting conflict shows how resource extraction and settlement repeatedly overrode treaty commitments.

Chapter 21 Answers: Explain Why Workers Confronted Corporate Power

1. Rockefeller used trusts and horizontal consolidation to coordinate or absorb competing oil companies. Carnegie used vertical integration to control inputs, transportation, and production stages within steel.

2. The Gospel of Wealth defended fortunes if wealthy people used them for public benefit. Social Darwinist arguments treated unequal economic outcomes as a natural product of competition and often opposed intervention.

3. The Knights pursued broad membership and wider social and labor reform, while the AFL concentrated more on skilled craft workers and immediate goals such as wages, hours, and conditions.

4. Great Railroad Strike: national rail walkout suppressed with troops. Haymarket: bomb and gunfire deaths produced backlash against radical labor. Homestead: strikers fought Pinkertons before state militia broke the strike. Pullman: Debs-led boycott was broken through federal injunction and troops.

5. Government often used troops, injunctions, and conspiracy or antitrust reasoning against strikes and boycotts, which generally strengthened employers’ position during major conflicts.

Chapter 22 Answers: Track Migration Through the Gilded Age

1. After about 1880, immigration shifted toward larger numbers from southern and eastern Europe while Asian immigration remained important on the West Coast under increasingly restrictive federal law.

2. Machines exchanged jobs, food, legal help, and other services for votes and loyalty. That aid could be real, but bosses also used patronage, graft, and control of contracts for private political advantage.

3. The Chinese Exclusion Act sharply restricted Chinese labor immigration and blocked naturalization for Chinese immigrants. It marked a major expansion of federal immigration restriction based on nationality and race.

4. Sharecropping and crop-lien debt kept many farmers dependent on landowners and merchants, so limited southern industrial growth did not eliminate agricultural poverty or racial economic hierarchy.

5. Plessy accepted state-mandated segregation under separate but equal. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses then reduced Black voting while claiming formally race-neutral rules, reinforced by violence and intimidation.

Chapter 23 Answers: Rebuild the Populist Argument

1. Deflation meant crop prices and farm income could fall while the nominal amount of debt stayed fixed, increasing the real burden of repayment.

2. The Grange pushed state railroad-rate regulation through Granger laws. Farmers’ Alliances added cooperatives and a broader political program aimed at credit, currency, transport, and market power.

3. Any three: free silver, graduated income tax, direct election of senators, government ownership or control of railroads and the telegraph, and other democratic or regulatory reforms in the Omaha Platform.

4. Populists endorsed Bryan for president while retaining Thomas E. Watson as their own vice-presidential nominee, and fusion arrangements varied by state. Bryan’s defeat and the costs of fusion weakened an independent Populist organization, even though several of the movement’s demands later became law.

5. The Sherman Act’s broad restraint-of-trade language let courts apply it to union boycotts and collective action, while early antitrust doctrine was less effective against large corporate combinations.

Chapter 24 Answers: Follow Reform Into Federal Regulation

1. Beyond markets, motives included naval strategy, nationalism and great-power competition, racial and civilizational ideology, missionary ideas, and security concerns.

2. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; Spain relinquished control over Cuba, which later became formally independent under Platt Amendment limits allowing U.S. intervention and a naval base.

3. The United States claimed to liberate Cuba from empire but then fought Filipino independence forces and governed overseas subjects without full consent, exposing tension between republican ideals and colonial rule.

4. Examples include the initiative, referendum, and recall, direct election of senators through the 17th Amendment, primary reform, women’s suffrage campaigns culminating in the 19th Amendment, and selected municipal or state reforms.

5. Progressives expanded regulation and democratic mechanisms, but some also supported segregation, eugenics, coercive moral reform, exclusion, and forced sterilization. Reform did not equal universal egalitarianism.

Chapter 25 Answers: Trace the Home-Front Expansion of Federal Power

1. Strong examples include Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, U.S. economic and financial ties to the Allies, the Zimmermann Telegram, and repeated submarine attacks involving American lives and commerce.

2. The War Industries Board coordinated industrial production while Liberty Bond campaigns mobilized private savings to finance government war spending, both showing expanded federal coordination of the economy.

3. The Espionage and Sedition Acts restricted antiwar, anti-draft, and antigovernment expression. Schenck specifically upheld a conviction under the Espionage Act and announced the ‘clear and present danger’ test in the wartime context; it should not be cited as a ruling on the Sedition Act itself.

4. The Great Migration was large-scale movement of Black southerners to northern and midwestern cities, accelerated by wartime jobs and reduced European immigration. It expanded Black urban communities but also intensified housing, labor, and racial conflict.

5. Versailles compromised Wilson’s program and included reparations and war-guilt provisions. Senate opponents objected especially to League obligations; Wilson refused enough compromise to secure the required two-thirds ratification vote.

Chapter 26 Answers: Explain What Made the 1920s Culturally New

1. Assembly-line mass production lowered prices, while installment credit let households buy automobiles, radios, and appliances before paying the full cost.

2. National radio networks and Hollywood films exposed millions of people in different regions to the same entertainers, advertisements, news, and cultural references.

3. Examples include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Cultural achievement challenged stereotypes and built Black artistic institutions, but segregation, discrimination, and racial violence remained.

4. The 1921 and 1924 quota laws sharply favored immigration from northern and western Europe over southern and eastern Europe. The 1924 law also barred immigration by aliens ineligible for naturalization, closing the principal legal route for Japanese immigration and reinforcing earlier Asian exclusions. Western Hemisphere countries were outside the national-origins quota system.

5. Scopes became a national symbol of conflict between modern scientific education and Protestant fundamentalism, reflecting broader urban-rural, modern-traditional tensions.

Chapter 27 Answers: Reconstruct the New Deal’s Federal Legacy

1. Possible causes include banking weakness and failures, monetary contraction, debt and speculation, weak demand, unequal purchasing power, agricultural distress, reduced investment, and international debt and protectionism.

2. Drought and damaging farming practices reduced Plains production and drove migration while farm prices were already depressed, intensifying rural poverty and displacement.

3. Veterans were demanding early payment during severe hardship; the violent federal dispersal made Hoover appear unsympathetic and coercive during a national emergency.

4. Examples: the Emergency Banking Act stabilized banks; the CCC employed young men in conservation; the AAA tried to raise farm prices by reducing output; the WPA later created large public-employment projects.

5. New Deal programs stabilized institutions, employed millions, and changed federal policy, but unemployment remained high until wartime mobilization produced full-scale industrial demand and employment.

6. Many agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from early Social Security and Wagner Act protections. Because Black workers were heavily represented in those occupations, the occupational exclusions produced major racial inequality in access.

Chapter 28 Answers: Follow Wartime Mobilization Into the Postwar World

1. Pearl Harbor triggered formal entry. Before that, Lend-Lease, rearmament, and aid to Allied nations had already moved policy far from strict neutrality.

2. Examples include conversion of factories to war production, rationing, war bonds, draft and military mobilization, women entering industrial work, and federal production coordination.

3. EO 9066 enabled exclusion and removal from military zones that produced mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. Korematsu upheld the exclusion order under claimed military necessity and is condemned for accepting racialized wartime deprivation of liberty.

4. Double V demanded victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. Randolph’s threatened march pressured Roosevelt to issue EO 8802 barring discrimination in defense-industry hiring and creating enforcement machinery.

5. Historians debate the relative importance and necessity of the atomic bombings, Soviet entry into the war, blockade, conventional bombing, and the projected costs of invasion in producing Japan’s surrender.