Unit one Reconstruion/westward expansion

reservation

Federal land set aside for Native Americans

Homestead Act

Passed in 1862, it gave 160 acres of public land to any settler who would farm the land for five years.

Frontier

Parts of the west that occupied mainly by Native American than the settlers

Assilimate/assimlation

to absorb into a culture the procssic of blending in to socity

Dawes Act

1887 law that distributed reservation land to individual Native American owners

Grange

organization formed in 1867 to meet the social needs of farm families

Populist Party

political party formed in the 1890's that wanted a policy that would raise crop prices

nomad

Characterized by moving from place to place

boomtown

A town that has a sudden burst of economic or population growth

Great Plains

the area from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains

Transcontinental Railroad

railroad that spanned the U.S. continent

Time zones

24 hour zones that 1,000 miles apart from the other, each one is an hour before or after the one next to it, helps to differentiate between the differnt times from one point on the Earth to another point.

Standard Time

the time zones devised by railroad companies

Long Drive

journey that takes cattle by foot to a railway

Sodbuster

a name given to Great Plains farmers

vaquero

Spanish or Mexican cowhand

Reconstruction

the period after the Civil War in the United States when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union

Freedman's Bureau

A federal agency set up to help former slaves after the Civil War

Radical Republicans

congressmen who advocated full citizenship rights for African Americans along with a harsh Reconstruction policy toward the South

Scalawags

white southerners who joined the republican party

Carpetbaggers

northern whites who moved to the south and served as republican leaders during reconstruction

Lynching/Lyinch

to kill by without due to processes of law

Black Codes/Jim Crow Laws

Laws enacted in southern states designed to separate black and white people

Sharecropping

A system under which landowners gave poor farmers seeds, tools and land to cultivate in exchange part of their harvest

KKK (Ku Klux Klan)

A secret society created by white southerners in 1866 that used terror and violence to keep African Americans from obtaining their civil rights.

literacy test

method to keeping uneducated people from voting by requiring them to read and write

poll tax

method of keeping poor people from voting where they had to pay in order to vote

Grandfather Clause

allowed people to vote if their father or grandfather had voted before Reconstruction(1867)

13th Amendment (1865)

abolished slavery

14th Amendment (1868)

Grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the US"; it forbids any state to deny any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws." Most important law ever passed besides original Constitution and Bill of Rights. It has been the vehicle for the expansion of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights among other movements. It also allowed for the "incorporation doctrine" which means the application of the national Bill of Rights to the states.

15th Amendment (1870)

U.S. cannot prevent a person from voting because of race, color, or creed