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Political Movements

Ideologies, parties, and political traditions — from Federalism to Progressivism to Populism — that organized American public life.

Abolitionism
The movement to end slavery in America, from moral argument to political force
Black Lives Matter
The movement against racism and police violence born of a hashtag
Black Power
A movement demanding Black self-determination, pride, and political independence
Checks and Balances
The constitutional design that prevents any branch of government from becoming supreme
Civil Disobedience
The deliberate, nonviolent refusal to obey unjust laws as a form of moral protest
Due Process
The constitutional guarantee that government cannot deprive citizens of life, liberty, or property without fair procedures
Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that government must treat similarly situated people equally under the law
Executive Order
The presidential tool the Constitution never named — and no president has stopped using
Isolationism
The foreign policy doctrine that kept America out of two world wars — until it didn't
Judicial Review
The power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution
Machine Politics
The urban political organizations that traded services for votes and ran American cities for a century
McCarthyism
The anti-communist witch hunt that suppressed dissent and defined postwar American politics
Nativism
The recurring American belief that immigrants threaten the national character
Populism
The agrarian movement that challenged corporate power and reshaped American democracy
Red Scare
Two Episodes of Anti-Communist Hysteria That Reshaped American Civil Liberties
Sectionalism
The regional rivalry between North and South that drove America toward Civil War
Separation of Powers
The constitutional division of government authority among three independent branches
Temperance Movement
The campaign against alcohol that reshaped American social and political life
The American Indian Movement
The activism that revived Native rights and demanded the treaties be honored
The Counterculture of the 1960s
The cultural rebellion that challenged postwar conformity and permanently altered American life
The Frontier Thesis
The argument that the American frontier made America — and what happened when it closed
The Great Society
Lyndon Johnson's legislative program to end poverty and expand opportunity
The Iroquois Confederacy
The Haudenosaunee league that united nations under one Great Law of Peace
The Minutemen
The citizen-soldiers who answered the alarm at a minute's notice
Transcendentalism
The New England movement that gave America its philosophy of individual conscience
Women's Liberation Movement
The feminist uprising of the 1960s and '70s that transformed American law and culture
Yellow Journalism
The Sensational Press That Helped Start a War and Shaped American Media