New York State's Erie Canal, opened in 1825, ran from Albany to Buffalo and sharply cut the cost of shipping goods between the East Coast and the Great Lakes region.
Missing Word
Erie
The Erie Canal stretched 363 miles across upstate New York. By linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie, it made New York City the main gateway to western markets.
Category: Transportation Revolution
Question 2
In the 1820s the Boston Associates built the planned mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and staffed its mills with young women from New England farms.
Missing Word
Lowell
Lowell, named for Francis Cabot Lowell, was a company town of brick mills and boarding houses on the Merrimack River. Its owners imposed strict rules on the young women to reassure their families.
Category: Rise of the Factory
Question 3
Jefferson's Embargo of 1807, which halted American trade with Britain and other foreign nations, pushed many merchants to invest in domestic manufacturing.
Missing Word
Embargo
The Embargo of 1807 cut off imported British goods and hurt merchants' trading profits. With imports gone, investors turned to building mills, and dozens of new textile factories appeared in New England by 1812.
Category: Rise of the Factory
Question 4
Samuel Morse's electric telegraph used a code of dots and dashes to send messages over wires almost instantly.
Missing Word
telegraph
The telegraph sent electrical pulses along a wire, which an operator read as Morse code. It let news, prices, and orders travel across the country in moments rather than days.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 5
Blacksmith John Deere improved the design of the plow, helping farmers break the tough soil of the midwestern prairies.
Missing Word
Deere
John Deere's polished steel plow cut through thick prairie sod that clogged older iron plows. It helped make Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio major farming states.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 6
Using moral persuasion rather than new laws, middle-class reformers in the temperance movement urged people to pledge to give up alcohol.
Missing Word
temperance
The temperance movement promoted moderation in or abstinence from alcohol, which reformers blamed for poverty and family breakdown. It drew strong support from the northern middle class and from many workers as well.
Category: Class and Society
Question 7
In the late 1840s, many daughters of Irish farmers fleeing the potato famine took jobs in New England textile mills for lower pay than native-born women had earned.
Missing Word
Irish
Irish immigrants, driven out by the potato famine, accepted lower wages and worse conditions in the mills. Many native-born mill women, who called themselves daughters of freemen, left factory work as a result.
Category: Workers and Labor
Question 8
The self-made New York manufacturer Peter Cooper built the Tom Thumb, an early American steam locomotive, and later used his fortune to found a tuition-free school.
Missing Word
Cooper
Peter Cooper rose from modest beginnings to wealth in manufacturing and iron making, and his Tom Thumb showed that steam locomotives could work on American rails. He embodied the new northern manufacturing class's ideal of rising through hard work, and his school in New York City offered free education.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 9
In the traditional craft system, a journeyman ranked between apprentice and master, working for wages but not yet owning a shop.
Missing Word
journeyman
A journeyman had completed an apprenticeship and worked for wages while hoping to become a master artisan with his own shop. Factory production undercut this path to independence.
Category: Rise of the Factory
Question 10
The movement known as nativism favored native-born Americans over newcomers and grew as Catholic immigration from Europe rose in the 1840s and 1850s.
Missing Word
nativism
Nativism was hostility toward immigrants, especially Catholics, by native-born Protestant Americans. It grew among workers who feared that newcomers would take jobs and lower wages.
Category: Class and Society
Question 11
When state banks flooded the economy with paper money in the years before 1819, a general rise in prices known as inflation followed.
Missing Word
inflation
Inflation is a general rise in prices, and it followed when banks issued far more notes than their gold and silver reserves could back. Easy money also fueled the land speculation that collapsed in the Panic of 1819.
Category: Market Economy
Question 12
European farms, ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, created strong demand for American wheat in the years after 1815.
Missing Word
Napoleonic
The Napoleonic Wars left European agriculture in ruins, so American crops sold at high prices and land values rose. When European farming recovered, prices fell and the boom turned into the Panic of 1819.
Category: Market Economy
Question 13
Showman P. T. Barnum opened his American Museum in New York City in 1841, drawing working-class crowds with exhibits that were often hoaxes.
Missing Word
Barnum
P. T. Barnum's museum offered cheap entertainment such as the Feejee Mermaid. It was part of a lively working-class popular culture that offered relief from long days of factory work.
Category: Class and Society
Question 14
Inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that quickly separated seeds from cotton fiber.
Missing Word
Whitney
Eli Whitney received his patent for the cotton gin in 1794. The machine made cotton growing highly profitable, which helped spread slavery across the South.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 15
The evangelist Charles Grandison Finney preached that people had free moral agency and could choose salvation, a message that appealed to the northern middle class.
Missing Word
Finney
Charles Grandison Finney taught that individuals could change their lives and win their own salvation. His message fit middle-class values of self-improvement and moral reform.
Category: Class and Society