APUSH Periods 6–7 — 1865 to 1945
Eighty years in which the United States became an industrial country, argued about what that had done to it, and then fought two wars. Ten questions, five from each period.
The Gilded Age five start with the distinction the course keeps returning to: horizontal integration against vertical, with a note on why naming a trust or a holding company never answers the question, because that is the vehicle rather than the strategy. Then an invented 1894 letter from a Pullman worker, in which the whole dispute is visible in two sentences — the pay cut by a third, the rent of the company's house not moved a cent. Then the New Immigration and how it was received, the Dawes Act and what allotment was for, and the Populist demand for free silver.
The five from 1890 to 1945 begin with an invented 1912 pamphlet that refuses, in its opening line, to argue for breaking up the trusts, and asks instead for one to be watched — which is the case for a standing regulator rather than for litigation, and the difference that ran through the 1912 election. Then the Espionage and Sedition Acts and what they did to dissent. The Scopes trial. An invented 1935 speech whose mention of a post office mural is what identifies the Works Progress Administration and nothing else. And internment, asked strictly as what the government stated its reason to be.
That last framing is deliberate and runs through the whole set. On immigration, on allotment, on the New Deal and on internment, the questions ask what a position held and on what grounds it was argued at the time. Where historians disagree, the explanation says so and takes no side.
Sources here are invented and labelled invented in their own first lines. Nothing is fabricated and put into a real person's mouth.
Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the AP examinations, and it is not an exam centre.
- Distinguish horizontal from vertical integration, and separate both from the legal vehicles through which they were carried out
- Explain what a company town did to the real value of a wage, using the Pullman dispute
- Characterise the New Immigration by origin and by reception, and state what the Dawes Act set out to do
- Give the central economic demand of Populism and the reasoning behind it
- Distinguish regulating a trust from dismantling one, and say which reform each position implies
- Describe what the Espionage and Sedition Acts did to wartime dissent, and what the Scopes trial exposed about the 1920s
- Identify a New Deal programme from what it actually paid people to do, and state the government's stated justification for internment
An invented letter from a worker at Pullman, written in May 1894: 'They have cut my pay by a third since the autumn, and not a cent off the rent of the house, which is theirs, nor off the water, which is theirs, nor off the gas. I am paid less to live in the same place at the same price.' What grievance is the writer describing?
Sample question
In the late nineteenth century some industrialists built their position through horizontal integration. What did that strategy consist of?
- Controlling every stage of production, from the raw material in the ground to the final retail sale.
- Reorganising the work itself into timed and measured tasks in order to raise output per worker.
- Buying up or merging with rival firms making the same product, until few or none were left to compete.
- Selling shares to the public in order to raise the capital for expansion.
See the answer
Buying up or merging with rival firms making the same product, until few or none were left to compete.
Horizontal means sideways: you absorb the people making the same thing you make, and what you gain is the market rather than the supply chain. Standard Oil's refineries are the textbook case. Controlling the whole chain from ore to shop counter is VERTICAL integration, for which Carnegie's steel is the usual example, and it is the other half of the pair the course asks you to tell apart. Reorganising the work into timed tasks is scientific management, which is about the shop floor rather than the market. And selling shares is how a firm raises money; it says nothing about whom it competes with. A trust or a holding company is the legal vehicle through which either kind of integration was often carried out, so naming the vehicle never answers a question about the strategy.