Name:_____________________________________________________________________Period:__________Date:_______________
Chapter 15 Review Questions
Use the following to review Chapter 15. You may write right on here.
A. Identification
Supply the correct identification for each numbered description.
1. _____________Nation where potato famine in the 1840s led to a great migration of its people to
America
2. _____________Semisecret Irish organization that became a benevolent society aiding Irish immigrants
in America
3. _____________Liberal German refugees who fled failed democratic revolutions and came to America
4. _____________Americans who protested and sometimes rioted against Roman Catholic immigrants
5. _____________The transformation of manufacturing that began in Britain about 1750
6. _____________Whitney’s invention that enhanced cotton production and gave new life to black slavery
7. _____________Principle that permitted individual investors to risk no more capital in a business
venture than their own share of a corporation’s stock
8. _____________Morse’s invention that provided instant communication across distance
9. _____________Common source of early factory labor, often underpaid, whipped, and brutally beaten
10. _____________Working people’s organizations, often considered illegal under early American law
11. _____________McCormick’s invention that vastly increased the productivity of the American grain
farmer
12. _____________The only major highway constructed by the federal government before the Civil War
13. _____________Fulton’s invention that made river transportation a two-way affair
14. _____________”Clinton’s Big Ditch” that transformed transportation and economic life across the
Great Lakes region from Buffalo to Chicago
15. _____________Beautiful but short-lived American ships, replaced by “tramp steamers”
B. Matching People, Places, and Events
Match the person, place, or event in the left column with the proper description in the right
column by inserting the correct letter on the blank line.
a. Inventor of the mechanical reaper that transformed grain
_______1. Samuel Slater
growing into a business
_______2. Eli Whitney
b. New York governor who built the Eerie Canal
_______3. Elias Howe
c. Inventor of a machine that revolutionized clothing industry
_______4. Samuel F.B. Morse
d. Agitators against immigrants and Roman Catholics
_______5. Know-Nothings
e. Wealthy New York manufacturer who laid the first temporary
transatlantic cable in 1858
_______6. Commonwealth v. Hunt
_______7. Cyrus McCormick
_______8. Robert Fulton
_______9. Cyrus Field
f. Immigrant mechanic who initiated American industrialization
by setting up his cotton-spinning factory in 1791
g. Painter turned inventor who developed the first reliable
system for instant communication across distance
_______10. Molly Maguires
h. Developer of a “folly” that made rivers two-way streams of
transportation
_______11. DeWitt Clinton
i. Radical, secret Irish labor union of the 1860s and 1870s
j. Yankee mechanical genius who revolutionized cotton
production and created the system of interchangeable parts
k. Pioneering Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that
declared labor union unconstitutional
C. Putting Things in Order
Put the following events in correct order by numbering them from 1 to 5.
1. _________ First telegraph message—“What hath God wrought?”-is sent from Baltimore to
Washington.
2. _________ Industrial Revolution begins in Britain.
3. _________ Telegraph lines are stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and North American continent.
4. _________ Major water transportation route connects New York to Lake Eerie and points west.
5. _________ Invention of cotton gin and system in interchangeable parts revolutionized southern
agriculture and northern industry.
D. Matching Cause and Effect
Match the historical cause in the left column with the proper effect in the right column by
writing the correct letter on the blank line.
Cause
Effect
1. ______ The open, rough-and-tumble society of
a. Made the fast-growing United States the fourth
the American West
most populous nation in the Western World
2. ______ Natural population growth and
b. Opened the Great Lakes states to rapid
increasing immigration from Ireland and
Germany
economic growth and spurred the development
of major cities
3. ______ The poverty and Roman Catholic faith of
most Irish immigrants
c. Encouraged western farmers to specialize in
cash-crop agricultural production for eastern and
European markets
4. ______ Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin
d. Made Americans strongly individualistic and
5. ______ The passage of general incorporation and self-reliant
limited-liability laws
e. Aroused nativist hostility and occasional riots
6. ______ The early efforts of labor unions to
organize and strike
f. Bound the two northern sections together
across the mountains and tended to isolate the
7. ______ Improved western transportation and
South
the new McCormick reaper
g. Aroused fierce opposition from businesspeople
8. ______ The completion of the Eerie Canal in
and guardians of law
1825
h. Enabled businesspeople to create more
9. ______ The development of a strong east-west
powerful and effective joint-stock capital
rail network
ventures
10. ______ The replacement of household
production by factory-made, store-bought goods
i. Transformed southern agriculture and gave
new life to slavery
j. Weakened many women’s economic status and
pushed them into a separate “sphere” of home
and family
E. Developing Historical Skills
Examine a bar graph on pg. 300 to learn more about the character of the American population from
1790-1860.
1. Which decade showed the largest absolute increase in total population?
2. During which decade did the nonwhite population begin to decrease as a percentage of the total
population?
3.In which census year did the nonwhite population surpass the white population of 1790?
4. Using the bar graph, indicate about how many times larger the total population was in 1860 than it
had been in 1820.