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| Jane Addams | was an American social reformer, pacifist, and women's rights advocate. In 1889, influenced by British precedents, she founded Hull House, an institution in Chicago where she and other social reformers lived and worked to improve conditions in the city's slums. Became president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919. |
| Florence Kelley | she strove to improve industrial working conditions. A forceful advocate of protective wage and labor laws for women and an end to child labor, served as the first chief factory inspector in Illinois (1893-97) and, from 1899, as secretary of the National Consumers' League. |
| Mary Baker Eddy | was an American religious leader and the founder of Christian Science. |
| Charles Darwin | a British naturalist, revolutionized biology with his theory of evolution through the process of natural selection. He also made significant contributions to the fields of natural history and geology. The theory of evolution, which held that all living species have evolved from preexisting forms, aroused great controversy and brought about a reevaluation of the position of humans in relation to all other living forms. |
| Booker T. Washington | was an American educator and a black leader. He advised Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft on racial matters. He believed that black people would advance only if they were educated. |
| W.E.B. Du Bois | was a lifelong advocate of world peace and a leading champion of the liberation of Africans and people of African descent. His argument, expressed lyrically and with passion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an educated black elite should lead blacks to liberation, contrasted sharply with Booker T. Washington's emphasis on industrial training for blacks and virtual silence on the questions of social and political equality. |
| William James | an American philosopher and psychologist who was one of the founders and leading proponents of pragmatism. In his famous work The Principles of Psychology (1890), developed the view, in opposition to the more traditional associationism, that consciousness functions in an active, purposeful way to relate and organize thoughts, giving them a streamlike continuity. |
| Horatio Alger | An ordained Unitarian minister the author of such juvenile novels as Ragged Dick (1867), Luck and Pluck (1869), and Tattered Tom (1871). |
| Mark Twain | an author, lecturer, satirist, and humorist. Author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. One of the most influential authors of the 20th century. |
| Charlotte Perkins Gilman | one of America's most prominent feminist intellectuals. Today, she is best remembered for "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a short story depicting the mental breakdown of a young wife. |
| Carie Chapman Catt | a US women's suffrage and peace advocate, played a major role in the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. |
| megalopolis | an extensive, heavily populated, continuously urban area that may include many cities and is ethnically diverse. |
| settlement house | furnished such services as day care for working mothers; i.e. Hull House |
| nativism | anti-foreignism, prominent among the know-nothing party of the 19th century. |
| evolution | is the process by which all living things have developed from primitive organisms through changes occurring over billions of years, a progression that includes the most advanced animals and plants. Made famous by Charles Darwin. |
| philanthropy | Foundations are organizations that distribute private wealth for the public good, usually by making grants to other nonprofit organizations and individuals engaged in social welfare, educational, charitable, or religious activities. |
| pragmatism | a philosophical movement, developed in the United States, which holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea is a function of its practical outcome. |
| yellow journalism | has come to mean nonobjective or florid newspaper reporting that is used in combination with other sensational journalistic practices, such as distorted or mislabeled pictures and illustrations and large type headlines, to appeal to readers' emotions and thus to increase newspaper circulation. |
| new immigration | In the 1880s, some of the people that came renewed outburst of bitter anti-Catholic nativism in the 1880s. The large cities, with their saloons, theaters, dance halls, and immigrant slums, were feared by many native American Protestants, who lived primarily in small cities and the rural countryside. |
| social gospel | movement, led by American Protestants of liberal theological orientation, was an attempt to bring the message and power of faith to bear on the social problems of the day. |
| Hull House | founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and others, was one of the first settlement houses in the United States. Its initial programs included providing recreational facilities for slum children, fighting for child labor laws, and helping immigrants become U.S. citizens. |
| Chautauqua Movement | Began as the Fair Point Sunday School Assembly, founded in 1874 by the clergyman John Heyl Vincent and the businessman-inventor Lewis Miller . It soon developed a curriculum that ranged from temperance lectures to contemporary science courses. |
| Women's Christian Temperance Union | a group of women who worked to adopt the 18th amendment |
| Eighteenth Amendment | prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" and their importation and exportation. |
| American Protective Association | Nativist orgainization determined to keep immigrants from seeking advancement in American society. |
| Morill Act | provides funds to start U.S. land-grant colleges for the scientific education of farmers and mechanics 1862;1890 |