History 146 OER Textbook: Natives to Reconstruction

A comprehensive vocabulary set covering the major historical terms from the History 146 OER Textbook, spanning from early Native American cultures through the end of the Reconstruction era.

Columbian Exchange

The global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas that bridged ten thousand years of geographic separation.

Bering Strait

The land bridge that connected Asia and North America between twelve and twenty thousand years ago, allowing Native ancestors to cross into the Americas.

Three Sisters

The primary crops of corn, beans, and squash that provided the nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations in the Eastern Woodlands.

Matrilineal

A social system where family and clan identity proceed along the female line, through mothers and daughters, common in many Native American cultures.

Khipu

Detailed demographic, status, and tax information recorded by Inca recorders in the form of knotted strings.

Kiva

A small dugout room in Puebloan residential structures that played an important role in ceremonies and served as a center for life and culture.

Monks Mound

A large earthen hill in Cahokia that rose ten stories and was larger at its base than the pyramids of Egypt.

Potlatches

Elaborate feasts in the Pacific Northwest that celebrated births and weddings and determined social status based on the host's ability to give away wealth.

Animistic

A religious outlook common to many Native American religions believing in close bonds between people, animals, and the natural environment.

Astrolabe

A technological breakthrough perfected by Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century used to calculate latitude for precise navigation.

Caravel

A rugged ship with a deep draft designed by the Portuguese for lengthy voyages on the open ocean and carrying large amounts of cargo.

Virgin Soil Epidemics

Plagues that decimated Native communities because the infected populations lacked even minor resistance to the new diseases, leading to unprecedented death rates.

Encomienda

An exploitative feudal arrangement where the Spanish crown granted a person land and a specified number of Native laborers tied to the estate.

Chinampas

Large artificial islands constructed by the Aztecs by dredging mud and sediment from the bottom of Lake Texcoco to form new landscapes for the city of Tenochtitlán.

Sistema de Castas

An elaborate racial hierarchy in New Spain that organized individuals into various racial groups based on their supposed purity of blood.

Mestizos

A term used in Spanish colonial society to describe individuals of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage.

Mission System

Combined military and religious settlements in Spanish Florida and the Southwest designed to offer protection to indigenous groups in exchange for conversion to Catholicism.

Black Legend

The narrative of extreme Spanish inhumanity and cruelty toward Native Americans, often used by European rivals to justify their own colonization efforts.

Northwest Passage

A mythical, fabled waterway passing through the North American continent to provide a direct route to Asia.

Middle Ground

A cross-cultural space, particularly in the Great Lakes region, that allowed for Native and European interaction, negotiation, and accommodation.

Patroon System

A Dutch system that granted large estates to wealthy landlords who paid passage for tenants to work their land in New Netherland.

Treaty of Tordesillas

The $1494$ agreement mediated by the pope that divided the New World between Portugal (east of the meridian) and Spain (west of the meridian).

Quilombos

Free settlements in colonial Brazil created by escaped African and Native slaves.

English Mercantilism

A state-assisted manufacturing and trading system designed to create and maintain markets, stimulate economic expansion, and increase national wealth.

Joint-stock Companies

The initial instruments of English colonization and ancestors of modern corporations that allowed investors to manage the vast capital needed for New World ventures.

Privateering

State-sponsored piracy where Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors to plunder Spanish ships and towns in the Americas for profit.

Headright Policy

A $1618$ policy in Virginia stating that any person who migrated to the colony would automatically receive $50$ acres of land, plus $50$ more for each immigrant whose passage they paid.

House of Burgesses

The limited representative body of white landowners first established in Virginia in $1619$.

Puritans

Followers of theologian Jean Calvin who believed the Church of England did not distance itself far enough from Catholicism and sought to purify it of its practices.

Jeremiad

A sermon lamenting the fallen state of New England due to its straying from its early virtuous, godly path.

Middle Passage

The terrifying oceanic trip lasting from one to six months that transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic into slavery.

Decree of Sanctuary

A $1693$ decree by the Spanish king granting freedom to slaves fleeing English colonies if they converted to Catholicism and swore loyalty to Spain.

Walking Purchase

A $1737$ land deal where Delaware leaders sold Pennsylvania the land a man could walk in a day and a half, resulting in a fraudulent measurement that seized $1,200$ square miles.

Consumer Revolution

A process in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where rising incomes and falling prices allowed colonists to purchase luxury items that became markers of respectability.

Commodity Money

Standardized forms of currency used in the colonies when metallic coins were scarce, such as tobacco in Virginia or wampum in the Northeast.

Navigation Acts

Taxes and regulations issued by Parliament to ensure that the profits of colonial trade ended up in Great Britain.

Stono Rebellion

A September $1739$ slave uprising in South Carolina where about eighty slaves set out for Spanish Florida under a banner of 'Liberty!'

Seven Years' War

A global conflict between $1754$ and $1763$, also known as the French and Indian War, fought primarily between Britain and France over North American boundaries.

Royal Proclamation of 1763

A British decree marking the Appalachian Mountains as the boundary between Indian country and the British colonies, forbidding Anglo-American settlement to the west.

Republicanism

A political ideology stressing the corrupting nature of power and the need for virtuous citizens to put the 'public good' over self-interest.

Stamp Act

A $1765$ direct tax imposed by Parliament requiring many documents in the colonies to be printed on specifically stamped paper.

Virtual Representation

The British argument that colonists were represented in Parliament even though they did not elect members, because Parliament represented the interests of the whole empire.

Sons of Liberty

Groups formed in most colonies in $1766$ to organize and direct popular resistance against the Stamp Act and other British policies.

Townshend Acts

Customs duties passed in $1767$ on common items like lead, glass, paint, and tea, intended to extract revenue and pay the salaries of royal officials.

Coercive Acts

Four acts passed in $1774$ to punish Boston for the Tea Party; they included shutting down the harbor and putting the Massachusetts government under British control.

Continental Association

A radical document from the First Continental Congress that established a system of committees to police nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements.

Common Sense

An influential $46$-page pamphlet by Thomas Paine that argued for independence by denouncing monarchy and challenging the logic of the British Empire.

Articles of Confederation

The first national constitution ratified in $1781$ that created a weak central government with no power to levy taxes or regulate commerce.

Shays' Rebellion

A $1786$–$1787$ uprising of debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts that highlighted the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.

Virginia Plan

A proposal at the Constitutional Convention for a strong federal government with three branches and a two-house legislature with representation based on population.

Great Compromise

The agreement to have a House of Representatives based on population and a Senate where each state had one (later two) votes, plus the '$3/5$ths Rule' for slaves.

Electoral College

A system created to choose the President indirectly, acting as a buffer between the common people and the executive office.

Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, added in $1791$ as a political compromise to protect individual liberties.

Dirty Compromise

An agreement at the Constitutional Convention where New Englanders protected the foreign slave trade for $20$ years in exchange for South Carolina and Georgia's support on commercial legislation.

Whiskey Rebellion

A $1794$ armed protest by western Pennsylvania farmers against a federal excise tax on whiskey, which was suppressed by a federal militia led by George Washington.

Jay's Treaty

A $1794$ treaty with Britain that required the abandonment of British military positions in the Northwest Territory but failed to end the impressment of American sailors.

XYZ Affair

A $1797$ diplomatic incident where French officials insulted American envoys by hinting that negotiations could only begin after the Americans offered a bribe.

Alien and Sedition Acts

Controversial $1798$ laws intended to prevent French subversion but used to deport foreign nationals and prosecute critics of the Federalist government.

Disestablishment

The gradual process of ending state-sponsored, tax-supported official churches in the United States, concluding in Massachusetts in $1833$.

Haitian Revolution

The successful slave revolt against French rule ($1791$–$1804$) that inspired free and enslaved Black Americans while terrifying white Americans.

Polygenesis

A theory supported by Thomas Jefferson and some scientists claiming that different human races had multiple, separate creations rather than a common ancestry.

Republican Motherhood

The belief that women were essential to the republic in their role as nurturers of the principles of liberty, responsible for educating children as virtuous citizens.

Embargo Act of 1807

A policy of 'peaceable coercion' that closed American ports to foreign trade to avoid war with Britain and France, but ultimately hurt the U.S. economy.

Market Revolution

A series of economic and social changes between the Revolution and the Civil War characterized by steam power, improved transportation, and the shift toward producing goods for sale.

Waltham-Lowell System

An industrial approach that centralized the textile manufacturing process under one roof, using water power and local farm girls for labor.

Separate Spheres

An ideology setting the public realm of economic production and politics as a male domain, and the domestic realm of consumers and family life as a female domain.

Coverture

The custom that legally counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband, leaving women with no rights to their own money or property.

Know-Nothing Party

A nativist political party of the $1850$s (formally the American Party) built on opposition to Catholic immigrants.

Second Great Awakening

A succession of religious revivals in the early nineteenth century that emphasized spiritual egalitarianism and human action in achieving salvation.

Spiritual Egalitarianism

The belief that all souls are equal in salvation and all people can be saved, which dovetailed with the democratizing spirit of the era.

Benevolent Empire

A powerful force of voluntary associations and social reform societies led by evangelical Christians to address social problems like intemperance and slavery.

Immediatism

The abolitionist demand for the emancipation of slaves without delay, radicalizing the movement in the $1830$s.

Cult of Domesticity

Expectations that women be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic, serving as the guardians of moral virtue in the home.

Missouri Compromise

The $1820$ agreement that admitted Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and forbade slavery north of the $36^\circ30'$ line in the Louisiana Purchase.

Nullification

The legal doctrine argued by John C. Calhoun that states were sovereign and could declare federal statutes unconstitutional and void within their borders.

Manifest Destiny

The belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand democratic and agricultural improvement across the North American continent.

Telegraph

A communication revolutionary technology funded by Congress in $1843$ that redefined the limits of human relative speed of information sharing.

Popular Sovereignty

The policy allowing the residents of a territory to decide through a vote whether to permit or prohibit slavery.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

A harsh law that empowered the federal government to deputize citizens in arresting runaways and denied alleged fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Dred Scott decision

The $1857$ Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories.

Anaconda Plan

The Union strategy to suppress the rebellion by strangling the Confederacy through a naval blockade of ports and the seizure of inland waterways.

Contraband

Term used by General Benjamin Butler for runaway slaves who escaped to Union lines, reasoning they were 'contraband of war' and could be seized.

Emancipation Proclamation

President Lincoln's $1863$ decree that freed slaves in areas under Confederate control and authorized the enlistment of Black soldiers.

Sharecropping

A system of farming where families rented small plots of land from a landowner in exchange for a portion of their crop, often leading to cycles of debt.

Black Codes

Laws passed by southern governments during Reconstruction to regulate Black behavior and impose social and economic control similar to slavery.

Fourteenth Amendment

Ratified in $1868$, it granted birthright citizenship and guaranteed 'equal protection of the laws' to all citizens.

Fifteenth Amendment

A constitutional amendment that prohibited discrimination in voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Redeemers

New Departure Democrats who focused on business and local rule, eventually gaining political control to end Reconstruction in the South.

Compromise of 1877

An agreement that conceded the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction.