Electric lighting allowed factories to run around the clock, which drew workers to live near urban factories.
Correct Answer
True
True. Electric lights and powerful machinery let factories operate day and night with long shifts, so workers crowded into nearby city neighborhoods. This was one of the forces behind rapid urbanization.
Category: Urban Growth
Question 2
The telephone, patented in 1876, remained a rare novelty, with only a few thousand in use by 1900.
Correct Answer
False
False. Telephone use spread quickly, and well over a million telephones were in use by 1900. Phone networks sped up business and helped cities spread outward.
Category: City Technology
Question 3
Elevators and steel-frame construction let crowded cities grow upward with skyscrapers.
Correct Answer
True
True. Steel frames carried the weight of tall buildings, and elevators made upper floors practical to reach. Cities with little room to expand outward, especially in the East, built upward instead.
Category: City Technology
Question 4
Jacob Riis's photographs and writings defended landlords and argued that tenements needed no government regulation.
Correct Answer
False
False. Riis criticized landlords and weak laws and urged comfortable Americans to care about the poor. His work helped win state laws limiting tenement abuses.
Category: Urban Problems
Question 5
Settlement houses offered childcare, evening classes and health services to working-class neighbors, many of them immigrants.
Correct Answer
True
True. Settlement houses such as Hull House and the Henry Street Settlement were staffed largely by educated, middle-class women. They also pushed for laws on housing and child labor.
Category: Urban Reform
Question 6
Most African Americans who left the rural South in the late nineteenth century moved to farms in the Far West.
Correct Answer
False
False. Those who left mostly went to towns and cities, including Southern cities and, increasingly, Northern ones such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, where they sought wage work and greater safety. Smaller groups, such as the Exodusters who moved to Kansas in 1879, settled on farmland on the Plains.
Category: African American Migration
Question 7
African American migrants to Northern cities in the late nineteenth century often faced housing discrimination that confined them to crowded, run-down districts.
Correct Answer
True
True. Landlords and White neighbors kept many Black families out of better neighborhoods, so migrants crowded into the poorest housing. In the twentieth century, restrictive covenants and mortgage discrimination known as redlining deepened this segregation.
Category: African American Migration
Question 8
Compared with earlier immigrants, the new immigrants of the late 1800s typically arrived with more money and moved west to buy farmland.
Correct Answer
False
False. Earlier immigrants from Germany, Britain and Scandinavia more often had funds to buy western land. The newer immigrants usually had less money and settled in the port cities where they arrived.
Category: New Immigration
Question 9
Many new immigrants of the late nineteenth century were Catholic or Jewish, which made them targets of nativist hostility.
Correct Answer
True
True. Southern and eastern European immigrants often practiced Catholicism or Judaism and spoke unfamiliar languages. Nativists blamed them for job shortages, crowding and supposed threats to American values.
Category: Nativism
Question 10
Doctors at Ellis Island turned away the majority of arriving immigrants for medical reasons.
Correct Answer
False
False. Only about 2 percent of arrivals were refused entry, for illness or criminal history. Most immigrants passed through after a brief medical check and a look at their papers.
Category: New Immigration
Question 11
Political machines operated in many cities beyond New York, including Boston, Philadelphia and Kansas City.
Correct Answer
True
True. Machine politics was common across urban America. Bosses built loyalty by trading favors and jobs for votes, often while profiting from city business.
Category: Machine Politics
Question 12
Dime novels were expensive hardcover books read mainly by wealthy collectors.
Correct Answer
False
False. Dime novels were cheap paperbacks that sold for a dime or a nickel to a mass audience. Women were among both their avid readers and their authors.
Category: Leisure and Culture
Question 13
Professional baseball teams helped urban newcomers, including immigrants, build a shared civic identity with their cities.
Correct Answer
True
True. Cheap tickets let working-class fans cheer for the home team, giving people of many backgrounds something in common. The National League was organized in 1876.
Category: Leisure and Culture
Question 14
Public school enrollment fell sharply between 1870 and 1920 as children left school to work in factories.
Correct Answer
False
False. Public school enrollment roughly tripled in that period, and the number of high schools grew dramatically. Education became a key path into the growing middle class.
Category: Education
Question 15
Women's colleges such as Vassar, Smith and Wellesley opened in the decades after the Civil War.
Correct Answer
True
True. These colleges opened between 1865 and 1880 and widened higher education for women. They were part of a broad expansion of colleges in the late nineteenth century.
Category: Education
Question 16
Social Darwinists argued that government should actively aid the poor because society depends on helping its weakest members.
Correct Answer
False
False. Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner opposed government aid, arguing that competition rewarded the fittest. Their ideas were used to justify the great fortunes of the era.
Category: Ideas and Literature
Question 17
John Dewey believed education and the scientific method were key tools for reforming American society.
Correct Answer
True
True. Dewey's philosophy, called instrumentalism, treated ideas as tools for solving problems. He championed school reform to produce informed citizens.
Category: Ideas and Literature
Question 18
Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward imagined a future United States run on unregulated capitalism.
Correct Answer
False
False. Looking Backward described a cooperative, socialist utopia in the year 2000. The bestseller influenced reformers, and Eugene Debs said it shaped his turn to socialism.
Category: Ideas and Literature
Question 19
Realist writers such as Stephen Crane depicted harsh social conditions, including slum life, rather than idealized scenes.
Correct Answer
True
True. Realism reacted against sentimental writing by portraying ordinary people and difficult conditions as they were. Crane wrote stark stories about slum life and the Civil War.
Category: Ideas and Literature
Question 20
Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening was widely praised by critics when it appeared in 1899.
Correct Answer
False
False. Critics attacked The Awakening for its frank portrayal of a woman's desires and independence. Scholars rediscovered and praised Chopin's work in the late twentieth century.
Category: Ideas and Literature