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Unit 7
10–17% of examBetween 1890 and 1945 the United States grew from a rising industrial nation into the most powerful country on Earth. You'll follow Progressive reformers, an overseas empire, two world wars, the boom of the 1920s, and the Great Depression that led Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to make Washington responsible for Americans' economic security. All along, Americans argued about how big government should be and how involved the country should get in the rest of the world.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
By 1890 the U.S. was an industrial giant with booming cities, deep inequality and a growing appetite for overseas markets. Those pressures shaped the reform movements, wars and economic swings of the next 55 years.
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In the 1890s Americans argued over building an overseas empire. Supporters pointed to new markets, a stronger navy (as Alfred Thayer Mahan urged) and spreading American influence, while the Anti-Imperialist League, including Mark Twain, said ruling other peoples betrayed the nation's founding ideals.
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In 1898 the U.S. went to war with Spain after Cuba's fight for independence, sensational 'yellow journalism' and the explosion of the USS Maine. Victory brought Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines under U.S. control, followed by a long, deadly war against Filipinos fighting for independence (1899–1902).
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From about 1900 to 1920, Progressive reformers attacked corrupt political machines, unsafe workplaces and powerful trusts, helped by muckraking journalists, and presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson expanded federal regulation. Their work produced the 16th–19th Amendments (income tax, direct election of senators, Prohibition and women's suffrage), though many Progressives ignored or even supported racial segregation.
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The U.S. stayed neutral at first but entered the war in 1917 after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram proposed a German alliance with Mexico. American troops helped the Allies win in 1918, but the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and Wilson's League of Nations.
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The war expanded government power over the economy and speech: the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to jail critics such as Socialist leader Eugene Debs, and the Supreme Court upheld limits on wartime speech in Schenck v. United States (1919). War jobs drew African Americans north in the Great Migration and Mexican workers across the border, and fear of radicals after the war set off the First Red Scare.
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New production methods like Henry Ford's moving assembly line and scientific management made goods such as cars cheaper, while radio and movies spread a shared national culture. Advertising and buying on credit helped build a consumer economy in the 1920s.
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By 1920 most Americans lived in cities, and the decade saw sharp clashes between modern and traditional values over Prohibition, women's roles, and science versus religion in the 1925 Scopes Trial. Nativism brought immigration quotas aimed mainly at southern and eastern Europeans and a revived Ku Klux Klan, while the Great Migration helped spark the Harlem Renaissance.
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The 1929 stock market crash exposed deeper weaknesses, including overproduction, unequal wealth, risky speculation and fragile banks, and the economy collapsed, with unemployment reaching about 25% by 1933. President Herbert Hoover relied mostly on voluntary cooperation and limited federal help, which many Americans felt was not enough, while drought turned the southern Plains into the Dust Bowl.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal used relief, recovery and reform programs such as the CCC, WPA, FDIC, the Wagner Act and Social Security to fight the Depression, making the federal government responsible for a basic safety net. Populist critics like Senator Huey Long said it did too little for ordinary people, while conservatives in Congress and on the Supreme Court said it gave government too much power. It did not end the Depression, but it left lasting reforms and a New Deal coalition of voters that backed the Democrats for decades.
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After World War I the U.S. avoided alliances but stayed active abroad through arms limits (Washington Naval Conference), the Kellogg–Briand Pact and the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. In the 1930s the Neutrality Acts tried to keep the country out of war, but once fighting began in Europe in 1939, FDR moved toward helping Britain through cash-and-carry and Lend-Lease (1941).
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After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. turned its whole economy to war production, ending the Depression and drawing millions of women and African Americans into war jobs. The war also brought injustice at home: more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were forced into incarceration camps, which the Supreme Court upheld in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
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The Allies agreed to defeat Germany first, and U.S. forces fought in North Africa, Italy and the D-Day invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944) while 'island hopping' across the Pacific toward Japan. Germany surrendered in May 1945 and Japan in August, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a decision people still debate.
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Wartime meetings like the Yalta and Potsdam conferences (1945) shaped the postwar world, and this time the U.S. helped found and joined a world peace organization, the United Nations. Victory left the U.S. the strongest nation on Earth, but disagreements with the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe planted the seeds of the Cold War.
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This skill topic asks you to compare developments across the period, such as how Progressive reforms differed from the New Deal, or how America's path into World War I compared with its path into World War II. Practice naming both similarities and differences and explaining why they matter.
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