AP US History
Mr. Cooper
Reading Guide
Ch 17
Rural America in the Industrial Age
You should be able to answer the following questions after you have read Chapter 17:
1. How was farming changing in the last half of the 19th century?
2. What problems were farmers facing? What caused these difficulties?
3. How did developments in technology affect farmers?
4. Explain the rise and fall of the open range and the cattle drive.
5. How did the economic developments of this period hurt America’s natural resources?
6. What caused the hostilities between Native and White Americans?
7. What was the white perspective on the future of Native Americans?
8. How did Native Americans respond to whites in this period?
9. How did the Dawes Act of 1887 affect Native Americans?
10. What kind of changes did men like Henry Grady and other advocates of the New South want
to make in the economy of the New South?
11. Why did the South make only limited economic progress in the years after Reconstruction?
12. How did southern reliance on King Cotton doom many Southerners, both white and black, to
lives of debt, poverty and bad health?
13. Describe the treatment of blacks in this period.
14. Identify and explain the different black responses to conditions in the South.
15. Who did the Grange blame for the farmers’ troubles?
16. What actions did the Grange advocate to improve farmers’ lives?
17. What was the significance of the Grange movement?
18. How successful were court suits against the railroads under the Interstate Commerce Act?
Why?
19. What problems faced farmers in the 1880s and 1890s?
20. How did the Southern Farmers’ Alliance propose to help farmers?
21. What were the main ideas of the Ocala Platform of 1890?
22. How did the Omaha Platform of the Populist Party expand the Ocala Platform of 1890?
23. What obstacles prevented the Populists from achieving more success?
People to know:
Joseph Glidden
Willa Cather
John Muir
Sitting Bull
Crazy Horse
George Custer
William Tecumseh Sherman
Oliver Kelley
Grangers
Leonidas Polk
James B. Weaver
Tom Watson
Terms to know:
Bonanza farms
Deflation
Twine binders
Homestead Act
Great Plains
Giants in the Earth (O. E. Rolvaag, 1927)
Sod house
Cattle drive
Blizzard of 1886
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)
Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876)
Dawes Act (1887)
Wounded Knee (1890)
Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (National Grange)
Rebates
Granger laws
Grain elevators
Munn v. Illinois (1877)
Wabash v. Illinois (1886)
Interstate Commerce Act and Interstate Commerce Commission (1887)
Southern Farmers’ Alliance
Cooperatives
Colored Farmers’ Alliance
National Alliance
Ocala Platform (1890)
Populist Party
Omaha Platform
Direct democracy
Graduated income tax