AP US History — Unit 7: Period 7: 1890–1945

What AP US History Unit 7 covers

The College Board Course and Exam Description breaks Unit 7 into 13 topics:

1. 7.2 Imperialism: Debates
2. 7.3 The Spanish-American War
3. 7.4 The Progressives
4. 7.5 World War I: Military and Diplomacy
5. 7.6 World War I: Home Front
6. 7.7 1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology
7. 7.8 1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies
8. 7.9 The Great Depression
9. 7.10 The New Deal
10. 7.11 Interwar Foreign Policy
11. 7.12 World War II: Mobilization
12. 7.13 World War II: Military
13. 7.14 Postwar Diplomacy

AP US History Unit 7 practice questions

• Alfred Thayer Mahan argued every great nation built its power on naval dominance. His book convinced Congress to build a modern steel navy. Why did a book about history change foreign policy?

  Mahan's 'The Influence of Sea Power Upon History' (1890) gave imperialism a framework. Nations needed naval bases, coaling stations, and overseas territories to project power. Combined with Turner's Frontier Thesis, expansionists gained strategic and philosophical justification for empire.

• Imperialists said expansion would spread democracy. Anti-imperialists said it violated the 'spirit of 1776.' The twist: BOTH sides used racist arguments. How?

  Both sides argued from racial premises — but in opposite directions. Imperialists cited Anglo-Saxon superiority and duty to 'civilize' inferior races (Josiah Strong). Anti-imperialists feared annexing non-white populations would 'contaminate' American racial purity (Andrew Carnegie). The debate was over method, not whether non-white peoples were inferior.

• The USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898. Newspapers screamed 'REMEMBER THE MAINE!' before any investigation. A later probe suggested an accidental boiler explosion. Why did a likely accident start a war?

  Yellow journalism drove the U.S. to war by manufacturing outrage to sell newspapers. Hearst and Pulitzer printed sensational stories of Spanish atrocities, and the Maine gave them the perfect headline. Combined with U.S. economic interests in Cuba and the Monroe Doctrine, public pressure made war irresistible.

• The Teller Amendment (1898) promised Cuba independence. The Platt Amendment (1901) let the U.S. intervene whenever it wanted and forced Cuba to lease Guantanamo Bay. How do you go from promising freedom to denying it in 3 years?

  Teller was a wartime promise for public support; Platt was the postwar reality. The U.S. wanted economic and military control of Cuba without the responsibility of formal colonization, so Cuba got 'independence' in name while remaining a U.S. protectorate.

• Filipino nationalists fought alongside the U.S. to overthrow Spain — expecting independence. McKinley annexed the Philippines instead. What happened next?

  The Philippine-American War (1899–1902) began over promised Filipino independence. The U.S. responded with brutal force — concentration camps, torture, destruction of villages — and killed over 200,000 Filipinos before establishing colonial rule.

• Gilded Age reformers said government should leave business alone. Progressives said the exact opposite. What was the fundamental philosophical shift — and why did it happen?

  Progressives believed government intervention was the solution to social problems, not the cause. Decades of laissez-faire had produced monopolies, child labor, unsafe food, and extreme inequality, convincing enough people that unregulated capitalism was destroying the very freedom it claimed to protect.

• Upton Sinclair wrote 'The Jungle' to expose immigrant worker exploitation. The public fixated on the disgusting meat conditions instead. Two food safety laws passed. What's the irony?

  Sinclair wanted labor reform but by accident won consumer food safety protection instead. The Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act (1906) regulated food safety — but did nothing for the workers he was writing about. Sinclair famously said: 'I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.'

• Booker T. Washington said focus on economic self-improvement first — voting rights will follow. W.E.B. Du Bois said demand voting rights NOW — economic progress is impossible without political power. Who was right?

  Both men shared the same goal and had valid logic — they disagreed only on strategy and the pace. Washington's approach (Tuskegee Institute, vocational training) delivered immediate practical benefits in a violently racist environment. Du Bois's approach (NAACP, demanding civil rights) attacked the root cause of inequality.

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Key terms in Unit 7

These 12 terms show up in the Unit 7 cards. Each one links to its definition in the AP US History key-term reference.

• Checks and balances
• Chinese Exclusion Act
• Double V Campaign
• Harlem Renaissance
• Keynesian economics
• Korematsu v. United States
• Mexican-American War
• Philippine-American War
• Roosevelt Corollary
• Schenck v. United States
• Social Security Act
• Treaty of Versailles