Main Facts to Remember

The main causes of the Depression were: overproduction of consumer goods: by the late 1920s people weren’t buying overproduction of farm crops: as Europe recovered from WW I, they didn’t too much credit – many people and businesses were buying the new consumer speculation on the stock market –people got rich in the 1920s buying risky as many toasters, washing machines, cars, etc. anymore; but the factories kept on making them in high numbers – many companies went bankrupt (out of business). need food from the US anymore, but US farmers kept growing many crops; this led to an oversupply of farm crops and very low prices –many farmers had trouble surviving.

Main Facts to Remember

Civil War

As the US expanded westward, disputes between the North and South over slavery increased. The two sides tried to resolve the issue through a number of compromise laws, such as: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas- Nebraska Act, and the passage of a fugitive slave law. You should be familiar with each of these laws. In the end, these compromises failed to prevent civil war.

In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court said that slaves were not citizens and therefore had no rights and that the “property rights” of slave owners could not be violated – in effect, they said that slavery would always be legal in the US. This was a major push towards the Civil War because it caused greater division between the North and the South.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president – soon after, the South seceded because they feared that he would try to get rid of slavery.

Lincoln refused to allow the South to secede. he send military troops to the South inorder to force them to remain part of the U.S. This was how the Civil War started.

After the Civil War ended, three important Amendments were added to the Constitution – the 13th, 14th, and 15th. You must know what these amendments said and how they attempted to protect the rights of African-Americans in the South.

But the Southern states did not want to follow these Amendments (they wanted to deny African Americans their rights) so they passed Jim Crow laws to prevent blacks from voting – for example, literacy tests, the “grandfather clause” and the poll tax.

In 1894, the Supreme Court upheld [supported] Southern segregation laws in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. They said that “separate but equal” facilities were legal.