US History: Reconstruction, Industrialization, Western Expansion, and New Technologies

Vocabulary flashcards reviewing major topics in late 19th and early 20th century U.S. history including Reconstruction, industrial labor and corporations, western expansion and Native American policy, and technological advances.

New South

A vision for the post-Civil War Southern economy focused on building industry, cotton textile mills, coal mining, and modernizing the regional economy beyond agriculture.

Reconstruction

The historical era following the Civil War during which the federal government worked to rebuild Southern society, readmit Confederate states, and protect the rights of newly freed African Americans.

Sharecropping

An agricultural system widespread in the post-Civil War South where tenant farmers cultivated land owned by someone else in exchange for a share of the crop produced.

Labor Movement

An organized effort by workers and labor unions to fight for workplace rights, higher wages, shorter working hours, and safer working conditions during industrialization.

Corporation

A business organization recognized as a legal entity owned by stockholders who purchase shares, allowing the company to raise large amounts of capital for industrial growth.

Transcontinental Railroad

A continuous rail line completed across the United States that linked the eastern rail network to the Pacific coast, transforming trade, western settlement, and the national economy.

Homestead Act

An 1862 federal law that offered 160 acres of public land in the West to settlers who agreed to live on and farm the land for five years.

Reservation System

Federal lands designated and set aside for Native American tribes to live on, intended by the government to relocate tribes and open remaining lands to white settlement.

Dawes Act

An 1887 law designed to assimilate Native Americans into American culture by breaking up reservation lands into individual property allotments.

Thomas Edison

An American inventor whose work produced major innovations including the incandescent light bulb, phonograph, and centralized power plant technology.

Wright Brothers

Orville and Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneers who achieved the world's first successful powered, controlled human airplane flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Assembly Line

A manufacturing procedure utilized and refined by Henry Ford in automobile factories where a product moves along a conveyor belt past stationary workers performing specialized tasks.