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Missouri Compromise

An 1820 agreement that maintained the balance of power between slave and free states by admitting Maine as free, Missouri as slave, and establishing the 36°30′ boundary.

Abolition

The organized movement to eliminate the institution of slavery through political action, persuasion, or direct resistance.

Moral suasion

A reform strategy that attempts to end injustice, such as slavery, by appealing directly to people's conscience and Christian ethics.

Slave narrative

A first-person literary account documenting the experiences of bondage and escape to reveal the harsh realities of enslavement.

Transcendentalism

A philosophical and literary movement emphasizing intuition, the sanctity of nature, and individual spiritual self-reliance over established dogma.

Self-Reliance

An influential essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson urging individuals to avoid social conformity and place absolute trust in their own inner voice.

Free verse

A style of poetry composed without a regular rhyme scheme, set meter, or fixed rhythm.

Civil Disobedience

An essay by Henry David Thoreau asserting the individual's moral duty to refuse cooperation with and peacefully resist unjust laws.

Manifest Destiny

The 19th-century doctrine that the United States was divinely destined to expand across the North American continent.

Mexican-American War

The 1846–1848 armed conflict between the U.S. and Mexico that resulted in the U.S. acquisition of extensive southwestern territories.

Lost Cause

A revisionist historical myth that romanticized the Confederacy and falsely claimed the Civil War was fought over heroic states' rights rather than slavery.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

An 1854 law repealing the Missouri Compromise boundary and allowing settlers to determine the legality of slavery in territories via popular sovereignty.

Dred Scott Decision

An 1857 Supreme Court ruling stating Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress lacked constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

Slave Power Conspiracy

The antebellum northern suspicion that a wealthy oligarchy of southern slaveholders held undue and disproportionate control over the federal government.

Rain Follows the Plough

A debunked 19th-century climatological belief asserting that agricultural cultivation and settlement would permanently increase precipitation in arid regions.

Reconstruction

The post–Civil War period (1865–1877) focused on reintegrating southern states into the Union and establishing rights for formerly enslaved citizens.

13th Amendment

The constitutional amendment that formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the United States, except as punishment for a crime.

14th Amendment

The constitutional amendment granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and establishing equal protection and due process under law.

15th Amendment

The constitutional amendment prohibiting the denial of voting rights based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Vanishing Indian Myth

The erroneous ideology that Indigenous peoples and their traditions were inevitably fading away and doomed to vanish before modern civilization.

Reservations

Federally designated tracts of land under tribal jurisdiction where Indigenous communities were historically concentrated and segregated.

Allotments

The policy dividing communally owned tribal lands into individually titled plots under the Dawes Act to dismantle communal sovereignty and enforce assimilation.

Carlisle Boarding School

A flagship federal boarding institution created to systematically eradicate Indigenous language and culture through compulsory assimilation.

Frontier Thesis

Frederick Jackson Turner's argument that westward frontier expansion was the primary force shaping American democracy, individualism, and national character.

Gilded Age

The late 19th-century era marked by industrial expansion, political corruption, conspicuous consumption, and widening socioeconomic inequality.

Progressive Era

An era of widespread socio-political reform from the 1890s through the 1920s aiming to correct problems generated by rapid industrialization and urbanization.

Social Darwinism

A sociological theory applying biological natural selection concepts to human societies to justify wealth gaps, racial hierarchies, and imperial expansion.

Gospel of Wealth

An essay and philosophy by Andrew Carnegie proposing that the affluent have a moral responsibility to use surplus fortunes for social philanthropic good.

Chinese Exclusion Act

An 1882 federal statute that suspended immigration of Chinese laborers, representing the first major U.S. law restricting entry based on race and nationality.

Johnson-Reed Act

The 1924 immigration law establishing strict national-origins quotas that favored northern and western Europeans while banning most Asian immigrants.

Eugenics

A pseudoscientific movement advocating the improvement of the genetic composition of the human population through selective breeding and forced sterilization.