State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness United States History
One hundred eight questions on United States history from 1877 to the present.
These questions are original. This is not an official State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test, and FreeExam is not affiliated with the Texas Education Agency.
1.Andrew Carnegie owned iron mines, the ships that carried the ore, and the mills that made the steel. What is that business method called?
2.Standard Oil, led by John D. Rockefeller, took over rival refineries until it handled most of the country's oil refining. What method is that?
3.Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. What did the law forbid?
4.In the 1880s railroads often charged small shippers more than large ones and kept rates secret. What did the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 do about that?
5.Samuel Gompers built the American Federation of Labor around skilled craft unions. What did that federation concentrate on winning?
6.On May 4, 1886, someone threw a bomb at a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, killing police officers. What followed for unions?
7.In 1892 managers at Carnegie's Homestead steel plant locked out the union and brought in armed Pinkerton agents. What was the result?
8.In the 1894 Pullman strike, railway workers refused to handle trains that carried Pullman cars. How did the federal government respond?
9.After 1892, millions of newcomers from Europe were examined at a station in New York Harbor before they could stay. What was that station?
10.What did the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 do?
11.In the fast-growing cities of the late 1800s, many poor families lived in tenements. What were those buildings like?
12.Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889. What was it?
13.The Dawes Act of 1887 split reservation land into individual plots. What happened to Native land because of that policy?
14.On December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, what did United States troops do?
15.What did the Supreme Court decide in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896?
16.Southern states added poll taxes and literacy tests in the decades after Reconstruction. What was the main effect?
17.In the 1890s Ida B. Wells investigated lynchings and published what she found. What did her research show?
18.As head of the Tuskegee Institute, what strategy did Booker T. Washington urge in public during the 1890s?
19.W. E. B. Du Bois helped found the NAACP in 1909. What did he insist Black Americans should demand?
20.Farmers in the Populist Party of the 1890s demanded that the government coin silver freely. What did they expect that to do?
21.Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel about Chicago packinghouses described rotten meat and filthy plants. Which laws followed the public outcry?
22.A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York on March 25, 1911, killed 146 workers. Why were so many unable to escape?
23.Progressives added the initiative, the referendum, and the recall in several states. What could voters do with those three tools?
24.In 1904 the Supreme Court ordered the Northern Securities Company broken up. What had that company done?
25.Theodore Roosevelt greatly expanded national forests and created federal wildlife refuges. What was the aim of that conservation work?
26.The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. What power did it give Congress?
27.Who chose United States senators before the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913?
28.The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. What rule did it set for elections?
29.Congress created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 after a series of bank panics. What was it built to do?
30.Employers had used the Sherman Antitrust Act in court against unions. How did the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 respond?
31.The United States defeated Spain in 1898. Which lands did it take from Spain under the peace treaty?
32.The battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing more than 250 sailors. What is established about the cause?
33.The Platt Amendment of 1901 restricted Cuba after the war with Spain. What did Cuba have to accept?
34.How did the Hawaiian Islands become a United States territory?
35.In 1899 Secretary of State John Hay sent the Open Door notes to the powers active in China. What did he ask them to do?
36.The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 added a claim to the Monroe Doctrine. What did Theodore Roosevelt assert the United States could do?
37.How did the United States secure the right to build the Panama Canal?
38.Why did the United States enter World War I in April 1917?
39.What did the Selective Service Act of 1917 require?
40.What did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 punish during World War I?
41.President Wilson wanted the United States to join the League of Nations through the Treaty of Versailles. What did the Senate do?
42.During and after World War I, large numbers of Black Americans left the rural South for northern cities. What pulled and pushed them?
43.Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered raids in 1919 and 1920. Who was targeted?
44.What was the Teapot Dome scandal?
45.Henry Ford's moving assembly line, introduced in 1913, changed how cars were made. What was the result by the 1920s?
46.Many people in the 1920s bought shares on margin. What were they doing?
47.What happened on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929?
48.What was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s?
49.The Twenty-first Amendment was ratified in 1933. What did it do?
50.What did the Immigration Act of 1924 do?
51.What happened in Tulsa's Greenwood district at the end of May 1921?
52.In 1932 unemployed World War I veterans camped in Washington and asked Congress to pay a promised bonus early. What did the government do?
53.What turned parts of the southern Great Plains into the Dust Bowl in the 1930s?
54.President Franklin Roosevelt declared a bank holiday in March 1933. What was the immediate goal?
55.The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created in 1933. What does it protect?
56.The Civilian Conservation Corps put unemployed young men to work in the Depression. What did the corps have them do?
57.What was the main work of the Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933?
58.Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, why did the government pay many landowners?
59.The Works Progress Administration began in 1935. How did it deal with unemployment?
60.The Social Security Act of 1935 created which national protections?
61.What did the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the Wagner Act, guarantee?
62.The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set federal rules in interstate commerce for which issues?
63.Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. What did the United States do the next day?
64.Why is the Battle of Midway, in June 1942, treated as a turning point in the Pacific war?
65.What did the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, accomplish?
66.Under Executive Order 9066 in 1942, the government removed people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and held them in camps. Which statement is true?
67.What did Executive Order 8802, issued in June 1941, require of defense contractors?
68.How did women's paid work change in the United States during World War II?
69.What did the United States do at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945?
70.What was the Holocaust?
71.What did the GI Bill of 1944 provide for many returning service members?
72.In March 1947 the Truman Doctrine offered US aid to Greece and Turkey. What policy did that announcement set?
73.What was the Marshall Plan, passed in 1948?
74.In June 1948 the Soviet Union blocked roads, rails, and canals into West Berlin. How did the United States and Britain keep the city supplied?
75.What did members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agree to when NATO was formed in 1949?
76.North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and the United States led a United Nations force in the war. What was true when the fighting stopped in 1953?
77.Why did the Senate formally condemn Joseph McCarthy in 1954?
78.The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957. Which step did the United States take the next year?
79.In October 1962 the United States found Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. How did that crisis end?
80.What did the Supreme Court hold in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954?
81.In 1957 the governor of Arkansas used the National Guard to block nine Black students from Central High School in Little Rock. What did President Eisenhower do?
82.Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. What did the boycott that followed achieve?
83.On February 1, 1960, four Black college students sat at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. What spread from that sit-in?
84.Freedom Riders boarded interstate buses into the South in 1961. What were they testing?
85.What was the purpose of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963?
86.What did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaw?
87.What did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 do in places that had blocked Black voters?
88.The Twenty-fourth Amendment was ratified in 1964. What did it ban?
89.What did the Fair Housing Act, passed in April 1968, outlaw?
90.In the late 1960s, California farm workers asked shoppers across the country to stop buying table grapes. What was the aim of that boycott?
91.What authority did the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution give the president in August 1964?
92.During the Tet Offensive in January 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces attacked cities across South Vietnam. Why did the offensive change opinion in the United States?
93.What was Vietnamization, the policy President Nixon announced in 1969?
94.On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, what did National Guard troops do?
95.What did the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 require of the United States?
96.What happened in Saigon on April 30, 1975?
97.The War Powers Resolution, passed over President Nixon's veto in 1973, tried to limit which power?
98.Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 as part of President Johnson's Great Society. Who did the two programs cover?
99.Why did Richard Nixon resign the presidency on August 9, 1974?
100.Why did drivers in the United States face gasoline shortages in the winter of 1973-1974?
101.President Carter brought Egypt and Israel to Camp David in 1978. What did those talks produce?
102.Students seized the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. What happened to the Americans held there?
103.What did the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 do?
104.What was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s?
105.What happened to the Soviet Union in December 1991?
106.Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. What was the result of the war a United States-led coalition fought against Iraq in early 1991?
107.On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda hijackers seized four airliners. What did they do with the planes?
108.In 2008 falling house prices and unpaid risky mortgages pushed major financial firms toward collapse. What did Congress do that October?