Term | Definition |
13th Amendment | Abolished Slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime |
14th Amendment | Adopted in 1868 as one of the Reconstruction Amendments |
15th Amendment | Prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizens race or previous condition of servitude |
Freedmen's Bureau | Established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the south in the aftermath of the Civil War |
Sharecropping | a form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of crops produced on their portion of the land |
Scalawags | Southern whites who cooperated with Carpetbaggers and new Republican government. |
Carpetbaggers | Northerners who went south after the Civil War. They became involved in economic interests, as well as the Republican Party. |
Black Codes | laws passed in south with the intent of restricting African Americans freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. Ex. race was defined by blood, employment was required of all freedmen |
Jim Crow laws | State and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the South |
Ku Klux Klan (post civil war) | Dedicated itself to an underground campaign of violence against Republican leaders and voters in effort to reverse the policies of Radical Reconstruction |
Radical Republicans | Members of the Republican Party who were dedicated to emancipation of slaves and later to the equal treatment of freed blacks |
Literacy Tests (for voting) | Part of the voter registration process and used to deny suffrage to African Americans |
Segregation | The action of setting someone apart from other people |
Plessy vs Ferguson | A landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as they were equal in quality |
Transcontinental Railroad | 1,912 mile railroad that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha with the Pacific coast. |
Barbed Wire (impact) | Created by Lucien B. Smith in 1867. A type of steel fence that contains sharp points arranged at intervals along the strand |
Dawes Act | Authorized the President to survey American Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. |
Wounded Knee | A massacre that happened on December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee Creek on Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. |
Sand Creek Massacre | A massacre in the American Indian Wars in 1864, when a U.S. volunteer cavalry attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in Colorado territory |
Homestead Act | Several laws in the U.S. that an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain. |
Cowboys (cattle industry) | People who migrated west and adopted aspects of vaquero culture including their clothing style and cattle-driving methods |
Plains Indians | Native American tribes who first lived on the Great Plains. They were resistant to the U.S. and Canadian government and military forces. |
Battle of Little Bighorn (Custer's last stand) | an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th cavalry regiment of the U.S. |