AC Key Terms

Anasazi pueblo

Ancient Native American tribe in what is now Southwestern US

Cahokia Mounds (Woodhenge)

Mound builder settlement (largest: Illinois side of Mississippi River) - built large earthworks

Iroquis Confederacy

Alliance of 5 large tribes (Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida - today: upstate NY)

Columbus

Rejected by Portugal, then Spain - could eventually sail for Spain to spread Christianity

3 ships: Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria

During 3rd voyage: arrested for brutality and mismanagement - Spanish crown still founded 4th voyage

Puritans; Separatists

Total withdrawal from English church

Puritans; Non-Separatists

Sought to reform the church from within

Pilgrims

First English settlers in New England (Plymouth, MA)

Massachusetts Bay Colony

1629 - King Charles gave the Puritans a right to settle and govern a colony in the Massachusetts Bay area. The colony established political freedom and a representative government.

Virgin land/ Vacuum domicilium

America \= metaphorically female -\> male settlers can conquer it; Novelty of America always perceived in overtly sexual terms

Mercantilism

Economic policy that is designed to maximize exports & minimize imports for an economy

Salem witchcraft trials

trials in Salem, MA in 1691, that led to the deaths of twenty people

Great Awakening

1740s - 60s, protestant revival impacting English colonies (Whitefield, Edwards) - mass services

Sugar Act

(1764) British deeply in debt partl to French & Indian War. English Parliament placed a tariff on sugar, coffee, wines, and molasses. colonists avoided the tax by smuggling and by bribing tax collectors.

Stamp Act

1765; law that taxed printed goods, including: playing cards, documents, newspapers, etc.

Quartering Act

1765 - Required the colonials to provide food, lodging, and supplies for the British troops in the colonies.

Townshed Duties

1767 - more internal & external taxes

Tea Act

1773 - eliminated import tariffs on tea entering England and allowed the British East India Company to sell directly to consumers rather than through merchants

Boston Tea Party

1773 - protest against British taxes, Boston colonists disguised as Mohawks dumped valuable tea into Boston Harbor

(50 men/ 3 ships/ 92,000 pounds of tea destroyed)

Coercive/Intolerable Acts

1774: 4 laws as a punishment for the Boston Tea Party

1 closing Boston Harbor, cutting the city off

2 British general as governor of MA

3 repealed liberties (no more town meetings etc)

4 Quebec Act: redrawing the boundaries of Catholic Quebec

Continental Congress

meeting of representatives of the British colonies

(1st: Sept. 5 - Oct. 26 1774)

Patriot

American colonist who favored American independence

"Whigs", "rebels", "colonials", "sons of liberty"

Loyalist

American colonists who remained loyal to Britain and opposed the war for independence

"King's men", "tories", "royalists"

Treaty of Paris

1783 - agreement signed by British and American leaders; United States of America \= a free and independent country

Federalists

Commercial & diplomatic harmony with britain

Hamilton: manufactures, commerce; federal government should be strong; national bank like in England; against French Revolution's treatment of nobility

Democratic-Republican Party

Jefferson: agrarian traditions; people as governors; no national bank; welcomes French Revolution

Manifest Destiny

1800s belief that Americans had the right to spread across the continent

Louisiana Purchase

1803 - territory in western US purchased from France for $15 million

Lewis & Clark Expedition

an expedition sent by Thomas Jefferson to explore the northwestern territories of the United States

1804 - started in St. Louis & headed west up Missouri River

Accompanied by Sacagawea (Shoshone)

War of 1812

1812-1814 - between US and England which was trying to interfere with American trade with France - draw - peace treaty

Indian Removal Act

1830 - forced many Native American nations to move west of the Mississippi River

Monroe Doctrine

1823 - Declared that Europe should not interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere

Frontier

Cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American expansion

Gold Rush

1848 - 1856 - thousands of people came to California in order to search for gold

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

1848 - ends Mexican-American War, US gains 55% of Mexican territory

Seneca Falls Convention

1848 - the first national women's rights convention; Declaration of Sentiments was written

Cotton Gin

"Cotton engine", seperates cotton fibers from their seeds

Missouri Compromise

1820 - banning slavery in the North

Missouri \= slave state / Maine \= free state

Comprimise of 1850

designed to cool heated north-south tensions. calif. was admitted as a free state, due to pop. sovereignty, new mexico and utah were open to slavery, and a fugitive slave law was strengthened (escaped slaves to be returned to the South without trial / assisting slaves \= crime)

Abolitionism

Movement to end slavery

Kansas-Nebraska Act

1854 - Created Nebraska and Kansas as states and gave the people in those territories the right to chose to be a free or slave state

Impact 1 \= Whig & Free Soil - northeners found anti-slavery Republican Party

Impact 2 \= "Bleeding Kansas" - voilence among rivaling parties (1861 - Kansas as a free state)

Dred Scott v. Sanford

1857 Supreme Court decision that stated slaves were not citizens: slaves were property no matter where they were living and the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional

(Dred Scott taken by "owner" from Illinois to Wisconsin, then returned to Missouri)

Reconstruction

1865-1877 - reintegrating the South after the Civil War; seeking to remedy the inequities of slavery

Black Codes

Southern laws designed to restrict the rights of the newly freed black slaves & ensure their availability as a cheap labor force

Home Stead Act

incentive for people to move out west and farm after civil war (pay a small fee, build a house, plant crops & stay there for 5 years)

Result\= 4 million homestead claims

Transcontinental Railroad

Railroad connecting the west and east coasts of the continental US

Pacific Railroad Act, 1862: huge goverment loans

Finished at Promontory Point, Utah

Chinese Exclusion Act

1882 law that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years (then forever -\> repealed)

Jim Crow

Black stereotype / (-laws) racial segregation in the South

Plessy v. Ferguson

1896 - Separate but equal

(Plessy \= black "octroon" shoemaker forbidden to board a Louisiana railroad wagon for whites -\> challenged Lousiana state law & lost)

Social Photography

Documentary photography to draw public attention on social conflicts (Lewis Hine)

Gilded Age

late 1800s - tremendous increase in wealth caused by the industrial age and the ostentatious lifestyles it allowed the very rich, tycoons uprising at cost of the working class (term coined by Mark Twain)

conspicuous consumption

buying expensive services and products in order to flaunt your wealth

Seperate Spheres

A gender division of labor with the wife at home as mother and homemaker and the husband as wage earner

Cult of True Womanhood/Domesticity

piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity

Battle of Little Bighorn

1876 - Indian leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse defeat Custer's troops who tried to force them back on to the reservation, Custer and all his men die

Wounded Knee

1890 - after killing Sitting Bull, the 7th Cavalry rounded up Sioux at this place in South Dakota and 300 Natives were murdered and only a baby survived

General Custer

Cavalry commander in American Indian Wars

Crazy Horse

Military leader of the Sioux during the Sioux War

Sitting Bull

American Indian medicine man, chief, and political leader of resistance against US government

Geronimo

Apache leader and medicine man who fought U.S. soldiers to keep his land

Chief Joseph

leader of the Nez Perce in their retreat from United States troops (Oregon)

Progressivism/Progressive Era

1900-1920 - political philosophy & reform movement

Taylorism

A factory management system to increase efficiency

Frederick Winslow Taylor - Bethlehem Steel Works - stopwatch - everybody has to work as fast as the fastest worker

Muckraking

the action of searching out and publicizing scandalous information about famous people in an underhanded way

Roosevelt Corollary

1904 - extension of the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the United States has the right to protect its economic interests in South And Central America by using military force

Panama Canal

opened in 1914

1903 - TR encourages Panama to revolt against Columbia to secure rights from Panama to build the canal

~80km / traveling from NY to SF \= 13,000km shorter

Big Stick

Roosevelt's philosophy - In international affairs, ask first but bring along a big army to help convince them. Threaten to use force, act as international policemen ("speak softly and carry a big stick")

League of Nations

A world organization established in 1920 to promote international cooperation and peace. It was first proposed in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson, although the United States never joined the League. Essentially powerless, it was officially dissolved in 1946.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Italian radicals who became symbols of the Red Scare of the 1920s; arrested, tried and executed for a robbery/murder, they were believed by many to have been innocent but convicted because of their immigrant status and radical political beliefs

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)

an organization founded in 1909 to promote full racial equality

Harlem Renaissance

rich artistic period for African-Americans; cultural resurgence in painting, writing, music, photograpphy

Rugged Individualism

Herbert Hoover's belief that people must be self-reliant and not depend upon the federal government for assistance

Jazz Age

Name for the 1920s, popularity of jazz - a new type of American music that combined African rhythms, blues, and ragtime

Prohibition

1920-1933 - 18th Amendment

Speakeasies (secret bars), bootlegging (illegal production and distribution of liquor), gang violence

The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes

Scopes arrested for teaching the evolutionary theory to students (fundamentalism)

Edward Hopper

A twentieth-century American artist whose stark, precisely realistic paintings often convey a mood of solitude and isolation within common-place urban settings (Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks)