Exam 1
HIST 1302 – U.S. History II
Example Assessment
This is an example of an assessment for HIST 1302. It will be completed in approximately 1
hour.
PART I – Multiple Choice
Select the best answer for each of the following questions, and mark the
corresponding letter on your Scantron. One (1) point each.
1.
In 1895, the Supreme Court crippled the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act by
ruling that:
a) Monopolies were beneficial to the public
b) The act was constitutional
c) Monopolies were perfectly constitutional
d) Manufacture and trade was not the same thing
2.
The White City, constructed in 1893 five miles down the shore from
Chicago, was:
a) The site of newly constructed tenements for Chicago’s slaughterhouse workers
b) The home of the Columbian Exposition
c) An art exhibit about the dangers of rapid technological advancements
d) A shelter for Chicago’s homeless and unemployed
3.
Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor in 1886 to
coordinate the labor activities of __________ throughout the United States.
a) Craft unions
b) Socialists and anarchists
c) Middle-class professionals
d) Unskilled workers
4.
Mugwumps were late-nineteenth-century Republicans who believed that the:
a) Republican economic platform was insufficient
b) Government needed to be reformed
c) Government was flagrantly corrupt but who did not want much reform
d) Party should remain loyal to Grant
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
5.
John D. Rockefeller organized Standard Oil as a trust. That decision was
made to:
a) Offer legal protection to oil refineries
b) Control the key elements of production and so corner the market for oil
c) Allow the liquidation of assets to purchase shares of stock in competing companies
d) Divide the oil market among the top five competitors in the business
6.
After an investigation in 1893, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld blamed
__________ for the violence of the 1886 Haymarket riot.
a) Immigrants and anarchists
b) Cyrus McCormick Jr.
c) Carter Harrison, the pro-labor mayor of Chicago
d) Police captain John “Blackjack” Bonfield
7.
An oligopoly is:
a) A competitive business system in which several large companies control production in
an industry
b) An innovative way to organize a trust
c) A system in which smaller companies combine their influence to set the pricing
structure in a particular industry
d) A way to divide the markets served by an industry so that the industry achieves
regional control of sales
8.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882:
a) Had led to a sharp decline in the Chinese population of the American West by 1900
b) Limited the number of Chinese immigrants to America for a period of three years
c) Was a response to the demands of Chinese laborers for higher wages and better
working conditions
d) Reduced anti-Asian prejudice in the West
9.
The Great Fire of 1871 allowed Chicago to take the lead in:
a) Eliminating urban slums
b) Beginning the process of suburbanization
c) Developing the modern skyscraper
d) Decentralizing business districts
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10. The Homestead Act of 1862 promised:
a) 640 acres to any citizen at a guaranteed price of $1.25 an acre
b) 160 acres free to any citizen or prospective citizen who settled on land west of the
Mississippi River for five years
c) Free agricultural implements and enough money to live for one year to all citizens
willing to cultivate land west of the Mississippi River
d) 160 acres to any citizen or prospective citizen at a guaranteed price of $2 an acre
11. James Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1884 election,
narrowly lost the campaign at least in part because:
a) A supporter insulted Roman Catholics
b) He actively refused to campaign.
c) He was a dull candidate.
d) He was accused of fathering an illegitimate child.
12. Photojournalist Jacob Riis’s 1890 best-selling book, How the Other Half
Lives, demonstrated that:
a) Upper-class New Yorkers lived lives of wasteful self-indulgence
b) New York’s poor population lived in comfort
c) Life in New York’s tenements was miserable
d) New York’s wealthy residents had a strong social conscience
13. The U.S. army gunned down unarmed Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South
Dakota, in 1889 primarily because:
a) It was rumored that the Indians were waiting to ambush the troops
b) The soldiers feared an uprising provoked by a militant interpretation of the Ghost
Dance religion
c) The Sioux had refused to sign a new treaty
d) The troops had been ordered to wipe out all Native Americans in the area
14. Congress’s 1887 Dawes Act was intended to:
a) Make amends for the slaughter of the buffalo
b) Restore Indian lands in the East to ease population pressure in the West
c) Encourage Indians to adopt white culture
d) Provide reservations with more efficient service from the government
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
15. A key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age was:
a) The growth of industrialism in the United States
b) Urban political reform
c) Massive government programs to help the poor
d) The separation of business and politics
16. After Californios were granted United States citizenship by the 1848 Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo, they were:
a) Subject to intense discrimination
b) Treated like any other Americans in the West
c) Forced to migrate to Mexican lands
d) Given favored treatment in courts of law
17. Political bosses were able to defeat “good government” reformers in the
American cities of the late nineteenth century because:
a) Reformers were not as honest as they claimed to be
b) The machines engaged in electoral intimidation
c) Immigrant voters did not understand the importance of clean government
d) The machines aided cities’ immigrant and poor populations
18. Anger over the Supreme Court’s Wabash v. Illinois decision resulted in:
a) The destruction of railroad property
b) Widespread rioting
c) The passage of the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act
d) The Republican Party’s loss of the White House in 1892
19. The Indian Wars on the Great Plains lasted from:
a) 1872 until 1898
b) 1850 until 1876
c) 1861 until 1890
d) 1880 until 1903
20. The Knights of Labor, a prominent labor organization of the late nineteenth
century that advocated a “universal brotherhood” of all workers, pursued:
a) Narrow objectives like improved working conditions
b) The punishment of capitalists
c) Broad social reforms
d) The destruction of the railroads
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21. Henry Miller and Charles Lux can best be described as:
a) The Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller of the far West
b) Small ranchers
c) The enlightened benefactors of migrant laborers
d) Adherents to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer
22. According to Herbert Spencer in Britain and William Graham Sumner in the
United States, Charles Darwin’s ideas were relevant to:
a) The American governmental system
b) Academic institutions
c) All human society
d) Biology alone
PART II – Definitions
Given a definition of a key term, identify the term from the list of choices. Mark
the corresponding letter on your Scantron. One (1) point each.
23. A June 1876 battle in Montana Territory in which Sioux warriors routed
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his men. Although a clear
victory for Indians’ resistance to the United States’ efforts to remove them
from lands granted them by the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the battle did not
forestall the United States’ ultimate victory in the West.
a) Battle of Little Bighorn
b) Battle of Palo Duro Canyon
c) Battle of Summit Springs
d) Battle of Washita River
24. Institution established in Pennsylvania in 1879 to educate and assimilate
American Indians. It pioneered the “outing system” in which Indian students
were sent to live with white families in order to accelerate acculturation.
a) Reading Indian School
b) Lancaster Indian School
c) Altoona Indian School
d) Carlisle Indian School
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
25. Group of over 15,000 African Americans who left behind extremely difficult
economic and political circumstances in Mississippi and Louisiana to take up
land in Kansas.
a) Carpetbaggers
b) Scalawags
c) Exodusters
d) Texodusters
26. A social and educational organization for farmers, also known as the Patrons
of Husbandry, which was established in 1867. It became an independent
political movement that contributed to the passage of state laws aimed at
regulating the railroads and their unfair shipping practices.
a) Grange
b) Redeemers
c) Tammany Hall
d) Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
27. Self-educated inventor who developed scores of inventions in his Menlo Park
laboratory and became an American folk hero. His inventions included the
phonograph and the filament for the light bulb.
a) Alexander Graham Bell
b) John Pierpont Morgan
c) Thomas Alva Edison
d) William Graham Sumner
28. Company founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1872, which, through vertical
integration and uncompromising management, he built into the biggest steel
business in the world in the late nineteenth century.
a) Carnegie Steel
b) Standard Oil
c) United States Steel
d) Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
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29. System of business organization pioneered by Andrew Carnegie that
organized all aspects of a business under a single manager. For example, in
Carnegie’s business it meant controlling everything from the mining of ore
to the sale of refined steel.
a) Holding company
b) Horizontal integration
c) Trust
d) Vertical integration
30. Movement of populations across large distances such as oceans and
continents. In the late nineteenth century, large-scale movement of peoples
from southern and Eastern Europe into the United States contributed to the
growth of cities and changes in American demographics.
a) Middle passage
b) Grand migration
c) Great migration
d) Global migration
31. Republican representative from Ohio who was elected president in 1880. His
assassination less than four months after taking office by Charles Guiteau, a
disgruntled office seeker, led to severe criticism of Republican factionalism
and intensified demands for civil service reform.
a) Benjamin Harrison
b) James A. Garfield
c) Rutherford B. Hayes
d) William McKinley
32. Sioux chief of the Oglala band who refused to sign the 1868 Treaty of Fort
Laramie and accept reservation lands. After discovery of gold in the Black
Hills in 1874 and the United States’ attempt to remove Indians from the
land, he, along with Sitting Bull, led the Sioux resistance to United States
aggression until his death in 1877.
a) Geronimo
b) Crazy Horse
c) Wovoka
d) Red Cloud
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
33. Site of a large immigration office constructed in 1900 in New York harbor
through which millions of European immigrants passed upon arrival in the
United States.
a) Ellis Island
b) Coney Island
c) Angel Island
d) Castle Clinton
34. German immigrant radical who helped lead the movement for an eight-hour
workday in the mid-1880s, culminating in a large, peaceful May day rally in
Chicago. He addressed the crowd at a rally in Haymarket Square on May 4,
1886, before the event devolved into violence that left several people dead
and the labor movement greatly weakened. He was executed for his part in
the Haymarket riot.
a) August Spies
b) Adolph Fischer
c) Albert Parsons
d) John Bonfield
35. Preeminent finance capitalist of the Gilded Age who increased his fortune by
acquiring and reorganizing industries, including the railroads and United
States sSteel. His management focus on stock price and short-term profit
often worked to the detriment of the businesses he controlled by
discouraging technological and organizational innovation.
a) Andrew Carnegie
b) Jay Gould
c) John D. Rockefeller
d) John Pierpont Morgan
36. Paiute shaman who in 1889 established the Ghost Dance religion, a form of
nonviolent resistance to white control of the land that drew adherents from
diverse Indian tribes across the West.
a) Geronimo
b) Wovoka
c) Sitting Bull
d) Chief Joseph
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37. A recreation destination for many Manhattanites, who could easily
reach the small stretch of sand by trolley or steamship. Its entertainments
became increasingly commercialized during the late nineteenth century as its
penny arcades and dance pavilions began to share space with elaborate
amusement parks.
a) Ellis Island
b) Castle Clinton
c) Angel Island
d) Coney Island
38. A geographic region on both sides of the North Atlantic that included a high
concentration of urban industrial centers. In the late nineteenth century,
Chicago and St. Louis formed the western boundary of the region; Warsaw,
the eastern; Toronto, Glasgow, and Berlin, the northern; and Richmond,
Louisville, Milan, and Barcelona, the southern.
a) Rural core
b) Industrial core
c) Industrial periphery
d) Rural periphery
39. Enormous new vein of ore discovered in Nevada by miners in 1873. It drew
corporate mining interests to invest heavily in the area, dramatically
changing the economic and social environment of Virginia City.
a) Comstock Lode
b) Cripple Creek gold rush
c) Big Bonanza
d) California gold rush
40. Political cartoonist whose vivid, trenchant critiques of William Marcy
Tweed in cartoons published in Harper’s Weekly contributed to Tweed’s
downfall.
a) William Graham Sumner
b) Lincoln Steffens
c) Jacob Riis
d) Thomas Nast
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
41. Severe winters of 1886-87 and 1887-88 that decimated herds of cattle in the
West. Fencing, which restricted cattle’s movement, their primary defense
against cold, and overcrowding of the range contributed to the devastation
of the herds. The losses marked the end of the open range.
a) “Great Die Up”
b) “Big Die Up”
c) “Huge Die Up”
d) “Vast Die Up”
42. Architect who helped create the “Chicago school” of commercial
architecture. An adherent to the principle “form follows function,” he built
innovative modern structures that became Chicago landmarks.
a) Jens Jensen
b) Frederick Law Olmstead
c) John Roebling
d) Louis Sullivan
43. Charles Darwin’s magisterial work, published in 1859, which laid out his
theory of evolution explaining that competition for survival and the process
of environmental adaptation produced natural selection, resulting in
evolutionary progress.
a) On the Origin of Species
b) The Gilded Age
c) “The Gospel of Wealth”
d) What Social Classes Owe to Each Other
44. Immortalized in the dime novels of the nineteenth century as Buffalo Bill, he
had been a gold prospector, army scout, and buffalo hunter. In 1883 he
formed a touring Wild West Company that entertained the public with
displays of western skills like shooting and roping, as well as by reenacting
scenes from United States history such as Custer’s Last Stand.
a) William F. Cody
b) George Armstrong Custer
c) John M. Chivington
d) William J. Fetterman
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45. Extraordinarily wealthy New York family whose extravagant
spending and ostentatious living typified the excesses of the Gilded Age.
The family’s fortune dated back only to “Commodore” Cornelius’s
construction of the New York Central Railroad, marking them as part of a
new but increasingly powerful class of Americans made rich by industry.
a) The Van Rensselaers
b) The Vanderbilts
c) The Rockefellers
d) The Astors
PART III – Map Questions
Identify the letter from each map that corresponds with the given location. One (1)
point each.
Map #1
46. On Map #1, where is Birmingham?
a) Letter B
b) Letter C
c) Letter D
d) Letter F
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
47. On Map #1, where is St. Louis?
a) Letter A
b) Letter C
c) Letter D
d) Letter E
48. On Map #1, where is New Orleans?
a) Letter A
b) Letter C
c) Letter E
d) Letter F
Map #2
49. On Map #2, where is Sutter’s Mill?
a) Letter A
b) Letter C
c) Letter D
d) Letter E
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50. On Map #2, where is Virginia City?
a) Letter B
b) Letter D
c) Letter E
d) Letter F
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HIST 1302 Example Assessment
Answer Key
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D
B
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A
A
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B
C
A
A
D
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C
C
A
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A
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C
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A
C
A
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D
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B
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D
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A
B
A
D
B
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C
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