U.S. History: Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Native American Nations

Practice vocabulary flashcards reviewing key historical figures, legal amendments and civil rights terms, and Native American leaders and nations across United States history.

Elizabeth Blackwell

The first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Emma Willard

A pioneer in women's education who founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first school for women's higher education.

Jeanette Rankin

The first woman elected to the United States Congress (U.S. House of Representatives).

Katherine McCormick

A suffragist and biologist who funded the research and development of the first oral contraceptive pill.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A leading figure in the early women's rights movement who organized the Seneca Falls Convention and drafted the Declaration of Sentiments.

Margaret Sanger

A birth control activist and nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. and founded the American Birth Control League.

Kamala Harris

The first female, first African American, and first South Asian American Vice President of the United States.

Malcolm X

An influential African American civil rights leader and minister who advocated for Black empowerment, self-defense, and Black nationalism.

Emmett Till

A 14-year-old African American youth whose brutal lynching in Mississippi in 1955 galvanized the civil rights movement.

W. E. B. DuBois

A prominent civil rights activist, sociologist, and co-founder of the NAACP who advocated for immediate civil equality and higher education for African Americans.

Sojourner Truth

An abolitionist and women's rights activist who escaped enslavement and delivered the famous speech 'Ain't I a Woman?'.

Rosa Parks

A civil rights activist whose refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Lucretia Mott

A Quaker abolitionist and women's rights leader who helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.

Sandra Day O'Connor

The first female associate justice appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Booker T. Washington

An influential African American educator, author, and founder of the Tuskegee Institute who emphasized vocational training and economic self-reliance.

Frederick Douglass

An escaped slave, eminent abolitionist orator, author, and statesman who published the abolitionist newspaper The North Star.

Susan B. Anthony

A pivotal leader in the women's suffrage movement who co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to campaign for women's voting rights.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Baptist minister and seminal civil rights leader who led nonviolent resistance against racial segregation and delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech.

Betty Friedan

A feminist author and activist whose 1963 book 'The Feminine Mystique' catalyzed the second-wave feminist movement, and co-founder of NOW.

racism

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

discrimination

The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, sex, or disability.

15th Amendment

A constitutional amendment prohibiting federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

prejudice

A preconceived opinion or judgment not based on reason or actual experience.

Twenty-Fourth Amendment

A constitutional amendment that prohibited the use of poll taxes in federal elections.

13th Amendment

A constitutional amendment that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for a crime.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Landmark federal legislation that prohibited discriminatory voting practices, such as literacy tests, previously used to disenfranchise racial minorities.

Civil Rights Act of 1968

Federal legislation, also known as the Fair Housing Act, that prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

A landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, establishing that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

de jure segregation

Racial segregation that is enforced and mandated by law.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

A landmark civil rights law that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public facilities and employment.

Emancipation Proclamation

An executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declaring free all enslaved persons within Confederate-controlled territories.

de facto segregation

Racial segregation that occurs through social customs, practice, and residential patterns rather than by legal enforcement.

Plessy v Ferguson

An 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the 'separate but equal' doctrine.

14th Amendment

A constitutional amendment that granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteed equal protection of the laws and due process.

Iroquois

Characterized as one of the world's oldest participatory democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy (also called Haudenosaunee) was composed of five (later six) Iroquois nations across upper New York state that during the 17th and 18th centuries played a strategic role in the struggle between the French and British for control of North America.

Red Cloud

The principal chief of the Oglala Teton Dakota (Sioux) who successfully resisted the U.S. government's development of the Bozeman Trail.

Apache

A Native American group who, guided for generations by leaders such as Chochise and Geronimo, resisted white colonization of their homeland in the Southwest by both Spaniards and North American settlers.

Tecumseh

The Shawnee chief, orator, military leader, and advocate of intertribal Indian alliance who directed Indian resistance to white rule in the Ohio River valley, and joined British forces in the War of 1812 for the capture of Detroit and the invasion of Ohio.

Hopi

A Native American group whose origin traditions tell that their ancestors climbed upward through underground chambers called kivas and lived in many places before reaching their present settlements in the Fourth World.

Mandan

A Native American group that in the 19th century lived in dome-shaped earth lodges clustered in stockaded villages, where each village generally had three chiefs: one for war, one for peace, and one as the day-to-day village leader.

Natchez

A Native American people who inhabited the east bank of the lower Mississippi River and had a caste system, hereditary aristocracy, and lineage of rulership, whose king and high priest, believed to be a descendant of the sun, was called the Great Sun.

Black Hawk

A 65-year-old Sauk warrior who in 1832 led some 1,000 Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo men, women, and children, including about 500 warriors, across the Mississippi River to reclaim land in Illinois that tribal spokesmen had surrendered to the U.S. in 1804.

Cherokee

A Native American tribe whose name is derived from a Creek word meaning 'people of different speech,' which constituted one of the largest politically integrated tribes at the time of European colonization of the Americas.