United States History - GED Social Studies

In the American system of federalism, the federal government makes the supreme law of the nation that all the states must follow; however, to prevent a tyranny of the national government (something greatly feared by the states and the Constitutional framers) the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution declares that all powers that are not explicitly reserved for the federal government fall to the state governments.

For many Americans the freedom to practice their religion was one of the reasons why they moved to the colonies in the first place. Many colonists had been persecuted for their religion in Europe, and so when it came time to establish their own government, freedom of religion was considered extremely important. The Establishment Clause in the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing a state religion.

The Free Exercise Clause is included in the part of the Constitution that features the Establishment Clause, and thus it is related to freedom of religion. The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. The Free Exercise Clause forbids the government from preventing any religious group from freely practicing their religious beliefs.

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution states that the government can make no law establishing a state religion, and the Free Exercise Clause says that the government cannot stop any American group or individual from freely practicing their religious beliefs.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in American history. Certainly it is the most famous case of the civil rights era. It overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, which had originally ruled that segregation was legal under the "separate, but equal" idea. The Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" segregation was inherently not equal and violated the Equal Protection Clause established in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case of the Scottsboro boys centered around a group of African-Americans who were found guilty of raping two white teenage girls on a train in 1931 and were sentenced to the death penalty. The case was appealed on numerous occasions on the grounds that the boys had been denied a fair and equal trial process. It has come to represent the extent of institutionalized racism in the American legal system during the first half of the twentieth century.

The revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, was written by Thomas Paine in 1776. It is considered to be the most important document for galvanizing public support for the cause of the Revolutionary War that was published in the early years of the American War for Independence.

Common Sense was written by Thomas Paine during the early stages of the Revolutionary War with Britain. The pamphlet argued that America had both the right to seek independence from Britain and the means to achieve this goal. It was important for swaying countless individuals to side with the revolutionaries and for convincing common Americans that their goal could be achieved.

The Gettysburg Address was a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, during the height of the Civil War conflict. It is generally considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

Poor Richard’s Almanack was written and published by Benjamin Franklin. The almanac made Franklin rich and famous, and it helped spread Enlightenment ideas to the common people.

A charter was a legal document granted by the English King, or British government, that granted an individual or corporation the right to establish a colony in the New World in the years before independence. There were different types of charters—proprietary charters gave control of land to one man, who was effectively autonomous but owed allegiance to the British crown; a joint stock charter allowed a corporation, or group of individuals, collectively to own land and establish a colony; royal charters created colonies directly controlled by the crown.

The Intolerable Acts were passed by the British Empire in the wake of the Boston Tea Party and were designed to deter future potential rebels from contemplating revolution; however, this only served to heighten the angered feelings of the colonists and contributed directly to the calling together of the First Continental Congress.

The Wade-Davis Bill was proposed by radical Republicans in 1864, when it was becoming clear that the Confederacy was going to lose the Civil War. The Wade-Davis Bill represented an attempt to make it more difficult, and more humiliating, for the states of former Confederate politicians to reintegrate themselves into the Union. The Bill was opposed by Abraham Lincoln, who favored a ten-percent plan, which required only ten-percent of those who had voted in 1860 to swear allegiance to the Union government. Lincoln felt that the Wade-Davis Bill would hinder the development of positive relationships between the North and South and so employed his veto.

The Wade-Davis Bill was proposed by two radical republicans in 1864 in an attempt to make readmittance into the Union very challenging and humiliating for former Confederates. Under the plan, the Union army would take control of enforcing the end of slavery, and any Confederate politician who wanted to reenter Union political life would have to swear both complete loyalty and that he or she had never been personally culpable for encouraging rebellion during the Civil War.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States engaged in a massive railroad construction project. This linked communities over vast distances for the first time in American history. The First Transcontinental Railroad was built between 1863 and 1869 and finished in 1869, with the initial first destination being San Francisco.

Given that Andrew Johnson was the first President to be impeached (his trial famously failed to convict in the Senate by one vote) and that radical Republicans controlled the House after the Civil War, it is obvious that their relationship would have been negative. The radical Republicans wanted harsh terms imposed on the former Confederate states, whereas Johnson favored reintegrating smoothly and easily. The disagreement between the two groups led to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1867.

Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were generals in the Union Army. Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The leadership of the Confederate army was considered one of the strengths of the South during the Civil War.

The Underground Railroad is a metaphor for a system of known routes and safe houses used by slaves escaping from the South to the North. The Railroad was used by several tens of thousands of escaped slaves in the years immediately before and during the Civil War.

The Nobel Peace Prize was first given out in 1901, so Abraham Lincoln is immediately disqualified, regardless of his wonderful accomplishments. The correct answer is that Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, for his work in founding the League of Nations in the years immediately after World War One.

Decolonization, in which the majority of European powers lost most of their foreign colonies, either willingly or unwillingly, took place in the years immediately after World War Two. Primarily this took place from 1946 to 1966. It was a time period that witnessed Britain and France in particular, but all the European powers, abandoning their massive imperial landholdings and returning to small nation-states. The primary motivating factors were the declining wealth and influence of European powers following the horrors of World War Two; the increased importance placed on individual and national rights in the second half of the twentieth century; and pressure from the United Nations and the United States.