U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History from 1790 to 1898 - SAT Subject Test in United States History

One of the primary causes of the Spanish-American War, were sensationalized accounts of news events, for example the sinking of the USS Maine. These accounts provided by The New York Journal and New York World, owned respectively by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, focused on the implied responsibility of the Spanish government for the sinking of the ship, even though most of the evidence supported that it had been an accident. Whilst it is true that the editors championed Imperialistic responses and the use of photos engendered a strong visceral response among the United States’ population, the most significant contribution was the so called “Yellow Journalism” that sensationalized detail and often completely fabricated facts when evidence did not exist to support the claims being made. The American public, already angered by Spanish involvement in Cuba, became increasingly more supportive of war.

Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel is entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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.

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.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse is credited as co-inventor of Morse Code: a way of sending text as a series of on-off tones, clicks, or lights that can be deciphered by a trained listener.

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.

A person who wanted to abolish slavery in the United States (and elsewhere) was known as an abolitionist.

Held captive during the attack on Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key wrote his poem "Defence of Fort McHenry" from which the lyrics for the Star-Spangled Banner were taken.

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.

In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his weekly newspaper, The Liberator, which advocated the abolition of slavery. Garrison, a white man from Massachusetts, was one of the abolition movement's most prominent figures.

The invention of the telephone was an ongoing and convoluted process throughout the mid-nineteenth century; however, popular history and patent law credits Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson with the invention of the telephone, in 1875.

Noah Webster was an early American lexicographer and educational reformer. Webster wrote extensive textbooks teaching generations of young Americans how to read, write, and spell. He is credited with helping secularize and nationalize the American education process.

The antebellum period saw a wide range of social reform movements develop. Most of these had their roots in the burgeoning evangelical Christianity of the time period. Abolitionism, women's rights and suffrage, public education, and temperance all saw reform societies founded on their behalf. The labor movement did not begin in force until the late nineteenth century and more widespread factory work in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville was minor French noble who undertook a tour of America in 1831, officially to study the American prison system, but instead analyzed all of American society. In 1835, he published his analysis of American society in his book Democracy in America. De Tocqueville's book is still widely read and considered one of the chief sources on society in Jacksonian America. In particular, de Tocqueville makes many claims about why America can produce a vibrant democracy.

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 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.

The Second Great Awakening, a nation-wide religious revival that occurred from roughly 1801 to 1850, had widespread influence beyond just religious measures. Abolitionism, education reform, the women's rights movement, temperance, and prison reform were among the many outgrowths of the Awakening. As compared to later religious movements such as Fundamentalism, the Second Great Awakening promoted action over strict doctrine and theology.

Plessy is important because it represents an example of significant legislative gains in racial equality being surreptitiously undermined by judicial mandate. The court in Plessy ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was not violated when Homer Plessy was expelled from a "whites-only" train car, because so long as there existed "separate, but equal" facilities, there was no violation of equal rights.

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.