Westward Expansion and Reconstruction

Flashcards covering key vocabulary related to Westward Expansion, Native American conflicts, agricultural developments, and Reconstruction era in U.S. history.

Bonanza Farms

Large farms that came to dominate agricultural life in much of the West, operated similar to factories.

Homestead Act

Provided free land in the West to anyone willing to settle there and develop it, encouraging westward migration.

Dawes Act

A law that distributed reservation land to individual Native American owners.

Exodusters

African Americans who migrated from the South to the West after the Civil War.

Agricultural Technology of 1880s

Innovations such as the reaper, thresher machines, barbed wire, and steel plow that led to an agricultural boom.

Indian Boarding Schools

Institutions Native Americans were forced to attend to learn new customs, religions, and language of the settlers.

Populist Party

A political party that mainly represented farmers, favoring free coinage of silver and government control of railroads and other monopolies.

Great Plains

A vast grassland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

Red Cloud’s War

A Sioux leader's struggle to keep U.S. miners off the Bozeman Trail, ending with a win for the Sioux and the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Sand Creek Massacre

An attack on a group of Cheyenne by a regiment of Colorado militiamen that resulted in the death of more than 200 tribal members.

Boomtown

A community experiencing a sudden growth in business or population, especially in the West.

Open Range

A vast area of grassland owned by the government where ranchers could graze their herds for free.

General Custer

A United States general who was killed along with all his command by the Sioux at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Dry Farming

A way of farming dry land in which seeds are planted deep in the ground where there is some moisture.

Sodbusters

A name given to Great Plains farmers because they had to break through thick soil, called sod, in order to farm.

Wounded Knee

The site in South Dakota where the 7th Cavalry rounded up Sioux and murdered 300 Natives after killing Sitting Bull.

Soddy

A frontier home usually dug into a hill or made from sod.

Farmers’ Alliance

A farmers' organization that worked for lower railroad freight rates, lower interest rates, and a change in the government's tight money policy.

Transcontinental Railroad

Connected the East and West Coast with the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines.

Chisholm Trail

A former cattle trail from San Antonio in Texas to Abilene in Kansas.

Battle of Little Bighorn

A battle fought after the Treaty of Fort Laramie was broken by the U.S. Government, where the Sioux fought and won against General Custer.

13th Amendment

Abolishes and prohibits slavery.

Reconstruction

The period after the Civil War in the United States when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union.

Sharecropping

A system used on southern farms after the Civil War in which farmers worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops.

Sharecropper

A tenant farmer who gives a part of each crop as rent.

14th Amendment

Declares that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens and are guaranteed equal protection of the laws.

Freedmen’s Bureau

An agency set up in 1865 to aid former enslaved persons, furnishing food and clothing to African Americans and helping them get jobs.

15th Amendment

States that the U.S. cannot prevent a person from voting because of race, color, or creed.

Amnesty

An official pardon for people who have been convicted of political offenses.

Andrew Johnson

President during Reconstruction who was impeached.

Radical Republicans

A group after the Civil War who believed the South should be harshly punished and thought that Lincoln was sometimes too compassionate.

Ku Klux Klan

A secret society created by white southerners in 1866 that used terror and violence to keep African Americans from obtaining their civil rights.

Poll Tax

A requirement that citizens pay a tax in order to register to vote.

Literacy Test

A test given to persons to prove they can read and write before being allowed to register to vote.

Segregation

Separation of people based on racial differences.

Jim Crow Laws

Laws designed to separate Blacks and Whites in public places.

Discrimination

Behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group.

Compromise of 1877

Resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops and abandonment of black rights in the South.

Plessy v Ferguson

A 1896 Supreme Court decision which legalized state-ordered segregation so long as the facilities for African Americans and whites were equal.