History Exam



History Exam

Answer # 1

Reconstruction was the period after the Civil War that extended from roughly 1865-1877 in the span of American history immediately following the Civil War and involved the re-integration of states of the Confederacy. It was a highly volatile time because while many Northerners saw this as a chance to completely end slavery and have the South integrated back into the Untied States, many in the South saw this period as a further insult added to the injury of the loss of the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln was president during the beginning era of Reconstruction and although he did have plans to free more slaves and grant more sweeping freedoms, some groups, such as the Radical Republicans, thought the process was moving along too slow. Eventually, there was some progress made but at the end of the Reconstruction era, the freedoms granted under the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were not entirely effective. With Reconstruction, slaves were freed and although there were supposed to be radical reforms that would grant them equality, racism persisted and some argue that the anti-slavery goals of the Reconstruction were not fully realized until the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s when African Americans were finally granted full rights enjoyed by whites rather than the “separate but equal” clause that emerged from Plessy versus Ferguson (Lieven, 2001).

While Reconstruction began with a positive push to grant freedom to blacks in the South, this was not an easy process and there were many complications. For instance, even thought Abraham Lincoln might have been moving too slow for some of the Radical Republicans. His efforts to peacefully reintegrate the Southwithout a great deal of hostility worked, albeit it a little slowly. After his assassination, Andrew Johnson took over and the process became confused and less efficient. Johnson forgave a number of ex-Confederates and did not take the same steady approach as his predecessor did (Howard, 2006). It was under Johnson that the “black codes” were allowed to be passed which only lowered the status of African Americans and did not give them the right to vote, even if they had fought in the war. It should also be noted that Johnson vetoed passage of a renewal of a new Freedman's Bureau, which had served as a positive organization for African Americans, which would have allowed free black war veterans to vote. One can only wonder if Reconstruction might have been more successful if only Lincoln had been able to see his patient plan through.

Answer # 2

The Progressive Era The decades between 1890 and 1920 was a period of vital reform activity that historians have called, The Progressive Era. In this era millions of Americans organized in voluntary associations to come up with solutions to the many problems. Industrialization, with all its increase in productivity and the number of consumer goods, created unemployment and labor unrest, wasteful use of natural resources and abuses of corporate power. Growing cities added to the problems of poverty, disease, crime and ...