Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age History Flashcards

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key historical terms, laws, entities, and events from Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age lecture notes.

13th Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1865 that legally abolished slavery throughout the United States.

Freedman's Bureau

Federal agency established in 1865 to educate, aid, and negotiate labor contracts for formerly enslaved people in the South.

Second Industrial Revolution

A late-19th-century surge in American industry driven by advances in chemistry, energy, materials, and communications.

Bonanza farms

Vast corporate Western farms that utilized expensive machinery and seasonal labor crews to achieve economies of scale.

Homestead Act

1862 federal law offering settlers 160 acres (a quarter of a square mile) of public land to encourage westward settlement.

Promontory Summit, Utah

The location where the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 with the Golden Spike ceremony.

Comstock Lode

A massive silver discovery in Nevada in 1859 that generated huge wealth and spurred the development of nearby Carson City.

Radical Republicans

Congressional faction that favored strict terms for Southern readmission and passed the Military Reconstruction Act after Lincoln's death.

Black codes

Laws established by all-white Southern state legislatures in 1865 and 1866 to severely restrict the civil rights and mobility of freedmen.

Scalawags

A derogatory term applied to Southern White individuals who supported the Republican Party during Reconstruction.

Carpetbaggers

A derogatory term for Northern Republicans who moved to the South during the Reconstruction period.

Compromise of 1877

Political deal in which Democrats agreed to the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the complete removal of federal troops from the South.

Bessemer converter

An industrial machine that forced oxygen into molten iron to raise temperatures and remove impurities, enabling mass production of strong steel.

Horizontal integration

A business strategy involving the merger or acquisition of competing firms within the same industry, as seen with Standard Oil.

Vertical integration

A business strategy in which a company controls every step of the production process from raw materials to final distribution, as practiced by Carnegie Steel.

Holding company

A corporate enterprise, such as J. Pierpont Morgan and Company, created to own controlling stock in other companies.

Knights of Labor

A broad national union organized in 1869 open to both skilled and unskilled workers, including women, that collapsed after the Haymarket Riot.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

An alliance of craft unions of skilled male workers formed in 1886 under Samuel Gompers, pursuing firm-specific wage, hour, and safety improvements.

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

The first nationwide labor stoppage in U.S. history, which interrupted commerce until President Rutherford B. Hayes dispatched federal army troops.

Ludlow Massacre

An early 1900s violent attack in Southern Colorado by private corporate forces on striking miners' camps at Rockefeller-owned mines, leaving 21 to 25 dead.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

A radical, revolutionary labor organization—also known as the Wobblies—that admitted all workers, including Chinese immigrants, and utilized direct action.

Morrill Act

Civil War-era legislation funding state-level agricultural and mechanical colleges to build a skilled workforce in engineering and land management.

Plessy v. Ferguson

1896 Supreme Court ruling that declared racial segregation legal under the constitutional doctrine of 'separate but equal'.

Wilmington Insurrection

An 1898 armed white supremacist coup in North Carolina that ousted a elected biracial local Republican government.

Atlanta Compromise

An 1895 speech by Booker T. Washington urging Southern Black Americans to focus on vocational skills and economic self-sufficiency rather than immediate social equality.

Mississippi Plan

An 1890 state policy using poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and residency limits to disenfranchise African American voters.

Dawes Severalty Act

An 1887 federal law intended to dissolve tribal communal holdings and force Indigenous people onto individual land allotments.

Chinese Exclusion Act

An 1882 federal law prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States.

Social Darwinism

A philosophy promoted by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner applying evolutionary theory ('survival of the fittest') to human society and business.

Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act

An 1883 law establishing competitive examinations for federal job hiring to reform the political patronage system.

Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)

The first federal regulatory agency, created in 1887 under Grover Cleveland to regulate corporate interstate railroad operations.