HUSH: Part 18 - The New South and the New West

Lost Cause Narrative

Southern whites' view of secession as a noble "lost cause."

A revisionist version of history that glamorized plantation culture and insisted that the Civil War had little to do with slavery and everything to do with a defense of states' rights from the Republican party and the "War of Northern Aggression."

Redeemers

Post-Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy.

Textile Industry

commercial production of thread, fabric, and clothing from raw cotton mills in New England during the first half of the nineteenth century, and later in the South in the late nineteenth century.

Crop-lien System

credit system used by sharecroppers and share tenants who pledged portion ("share") of their future crop to local merchants or land owners in exchange or farming supplies and food.

Mississippi Plan

series of state constitutional amendments that sought to severely disenfranchise black voters and were quickly adopted by other southern states.

- First, permanent (two years) residence required for voting

- Second, disqualified African Americans from voting if they were convicted of certain crimes.

- Third, required poll taxes to be paid to vote, which disproportionately affected poor black and white citizens.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

underlying legal racial segregation

court case in which 1/4 black man sued after being arrested for sitting in the whites-only section.

Brown v. Board of Education

court case in which the separate but equal policies were abolished.

Jim Crow Laws

laws that legally discriminated against blacks and whites, and followed with 1,880 lynchings between 1890 and 1899.

Wilmington Insurrection

racially charged mob attack of the majority black Wilmington, North Carolina in 1989.

Ida B. Wells

First woman to file suit against public racial discrimination by publishing statistics about lynching and aided the NAACP

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

WEB Du Bois

First African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard, also co-founded the NAACP.

Booker T. Washington

African American progressive who supported segregation and demanded that African American better themselves individually to achieve equality.

Atlanta Compromise

a speech by Booker T Washington that called for the black community to strive for education and vocational training to create economic prosperity before attempting political and social equality

Exodusters

African Americans who migrated West from the South in search of haven from racism and poverty after the collapse of Radical Republican rule.

Comstock Lode

Mine in eastern Nevada acquired by Canadian fur trapper Henry Comstock that between 1860 and 1880 yielded almost $1 billion worth of gold and silver.

Open Range

informal system of governing property on the frontier in which small ranchers could graze their cattle anywhere on unfenced lands; brought to an end by the introduction of barbed wire, which managed a low-cost way to fence off one's land.

Indian Wars

bloody conflicts between US soldiers and Native Americans that raged in the West from early 1860s to the late 1870s, sparked by American settlers moving into ancestral Indian lands.

Sand Creek Massacre

Colonel Chivington's unprovoked slaughter of the Cheyennes and Arapahos in Colorado, initially reported as a justified batle but soon exposed for the massacre that it was.

Great Sioux War

the largest military campaign since the Civil war, occurred between between Sioux and Cheyenne Indians and federal troops over lands in the Dakotas in the mid-1870s.

Battle of Little Bighorn

the largest battle in Montana during the Great Sioux War that the US lost.

Ghost Dance Movement

a spiritual and political movement among Native Americans whose followers performed a ceremonial "ghost dance" that was intended to connect the living with the dead and make the Indians bulletproof in battles.

Dawes Act

federal legislation that divided ancestral Native American Lands among the heads of each family in an attempt to "Americanize" them by forcing them to become farmers working individual plots of land.

Frederick Jackson Turner

a prominent historian who declared in 1893 that with the end of the Indian Wars and the settling of the West, the frontier era was over and the west now resembled the south.