MUSH Unit 1: reconstruction test

placer mining

process of extracting shallow deposits of ore/minerals largely by hand

hydraulic mining

method of extracting minerals from mountains using water, damaging to the environment

bonanza farms

large farm that often brought their owners big profits

dry farming

planting seeds deep in the ground, where a water source was in the Great Plains

assimilate

to absorb fully, often forced, or make one's own; to adopt into American society as landowners, farmers, workers, and citizens.

Dawes Act

1887 law that distributed reservation land to individual Native American owners; goal was to make the Native Americans farmers (failed for most)

Carpetbaggers

A northerner who went to the South immediately after the Civil War; many Southerners thought they did this to gain political advantage or other advantages from the disorganized situation in southern states (ps. carpetbags were a form of suitcase)

Henry Comstock

prospector who found sticky blue-gray mud that turned out to be silver ore

Part 1 of a Defensible Claim

Noun/Subject/Topic

Juneteenth

June 19th, 1865 the date celebrated as the anniversary of Emancipation Day for enslaved people in Texas, the last to be freed

sharecroppers

a tenant farmer who gives a part of each crop as rent; seen as a continuation of slavery after the Civil War

President Johnson's plan for Reconstruction

He proclaimed that each former Confederate state had to call a constitutional convention to revoke its ordinance of secession and ratify the 13th Amendment (banned slavery)

Freedmen's Bureau

1865 - Agency set up to aid former slaves in adjusting themselves to freedom. While its main goal was to prevent mass starvation, it also provided clothing to needy blacks and whites and helped them get jobs

Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871

Also known as the KKK Acts, Congress made it a federal offense to interfere with a citizen's right to vote. Congress heard from many African Americans who had been abused by the KKK in the early 1870's.

Ghost Dance

A ritual the Lakota performed to bring back the buffalo and return the Native American tribes to their land.

Black Codes/Jim Crow Laws

Southern laws designed to restrict the rights of the newly freed black slaves; applied curfews, vagrancy laws, segregation, and forced labor contracts on African Americans

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Legalized segregation in publicly owned facilities on the basis of "separate but equal."

End of Reconstruction

Election of 1876 brought the Radical Republicans a loss of power and Northerners were tired of Reconstruction and wanted to forget the Civil War; so Congress removed the federal troops protecting African Americans from the South.

open range

vast areas of grassland owned by the federal government that cowboys used to feed the long horns

vigilance committees

self-appointed volunteers to track down and punish wrongdoers

Chisholm Trail

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

Great American Desert

name given by the first explorers to the Great Plains for the region

Stephen Long

explorer of the Great Plains in 1819; coined the concept of "Great American Desert"

Part 2 of a Defensible Claim

Opinion/Stance

Part 3 of a Defensible Claim

Why/Impact/Because/ "Line of Reasoning"

1 (one, yes, just one) complete sentence

The length of a Defensible Claim

Pull Factors that Drew Americans Out West/Great Plains

Homestead Act (160 acres of land for cheap); Gold; Silver; "safety-valve", adventure, railroads made moving easier, profit in the cattle market, new technology that made farming in the Great Plains easier ...

Struggles for Westward Migrants

- Most that went into mining never struck it rich
- Lawlessness in some boomtowns
- Conflicts over land with both Hispanic Americans and Native Americans
- Great Plains harsh weather
- Range Wars
- In farming: Expensive machinery - have to take out loans! Expensive to ship crops via trains. Surplus of crops leads to lower prices of crops and cattle. Farmers take out loans for more land and machinery and fall further into debt.

Impact on Westward migration on America

- Settlement of Americans across the continent for filling the Manifest Destiny belief
- New states (CA, NV, NM, AZ, CO, etc)
- New $$$ from mining gold, silver, and then eventually oil
- New businesses (cattle ranching)
- More RR built to meet the settlement, travel, and cargo movement demands across the Nation
- New inventions (mechanical reapers, refrigerated railcars, hydraulic mining)
- More immigration to the country
- Eventually, the ending of the "safety-value" with the closing of the frontier

Annuities

government issued payments to Native Americans living on reservations, often not received due to bureaucracy and corruption (lead to starvation)

Fetterman's Massacre

(1866) Sioux/Lakota attack on approx. 80 US Soldiers; their resistance forced the military to abandon its post along Bozeman Trail by 1868

Sand Creek Massacre

1864 incident in which Colorado militia killed a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians who were trying to negotiate peace; est. 60-600 Native Americans killed

Indian Peace Commission

Established in 1867 to end the Indian wars in the West, the commission's solution was to contain the Indians in a system of reservations.

Battle of Little Big Horn

1876 - General Custer and his men were wiped out by a coalition of Lakota and Cheyenne. However, the more US soldiers were sent to region and eventually they forced the Lakota to give up the Black Hills (had gold).

Sitting Bull

Wounded Knee Massacre

mass killing by U.S. soldiers of as many as 200 unarmed Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890 who had been following the Ghost Dance ritual

Geronimo

Apache leader who fought U.S. soldiers to keep his land. He led a revolt of 4,000 of his people after they were forced to move to a reservation in Arizona. His 1886 capture was considered the last resistance to forces reservation life.

White settlement impact on Hispanics in the American Southwest

- conflict with haciendas owners; loss of property
- violence between them and gold rushers
+ creation of barrios neighborhoods to keep culture and traditions alive
+ some were involved in local politics
+ vaqueros (taught the cowboys their skills)

close reading skills

A careful reading that is attentive to organization, figurative language, sentence structure, vocabulary, and other literary and structural elements of a text; returning to the text to respond to critical thinking questions

Always read the introduction to an article. ALWAYS

The introduction or brief abstract (provided in most database articles) provides valuable information and a breakdown of the article.

Evidence from the article "A century of trauma at U.S. boarding schools for Native American children"

- 100,000+ Native American children attended boarding schools which shamed them (cut their hair, did not allow them to practice their culture or speak their language) to force them to assimilate to American culture
- forced conversion to Christianity
- unmarked graves/deaths of children
- more than 350 treaties with tribes broken
-The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879 (same period of the conflicts we have learned in this chapter) --> blueprint for over 300 future NA schools in US (25 off-reservations); 12,000 NA children went to Carlisle
- Carlisle School philosophy "kill the Indian, save the man,"
- overcrowding fueled communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, and smallpox
- In some, students had to build their peers' coffins
- Native languages died for some tribes