Chapter 17: The New South and the New West (1865-1900)

Atlanta Compromise (1895)

Speech by Booker T. Washington that called for the Black community to strive for economic prosperity before demanding political and social equality

Exodusters

African Americans who migrated west from the South in search of a haven from racism and poverty after the collapse of Radical Republican rule

Comstock Lode

A mine in eastern Nevada acquired by Canadian fur trapper Henry Comstock that between 1860 and 1880 yielded almost $1 billion worth of gold and silver

Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

Colonel Chivington's unprovoked slaughter of the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Colorado, initially reported as a justified battle but soon exposed for the despicable massacre it was

Great Sioux War

Conflict between Sioux and Cheyenne Indians and federal troops over land in the Dakotas in the mid-1870s

Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

Federal legislation that divided ancestral Native American lands among the heads of each Indian family in an attempt to "Americanize" Indians by forcing them to become farmers working individual plots of land

American Tobacco Company

Business founded in 1890 by North Carolina's James Buchanan Duke, who combined the major tobacco manufacturers of the time, controlling 90 percent of the country's booming cigarette production

crop-lien system

Credit system used by sharecroppers and share tenants who pledged a portion ("share") of their future crop to local merchants or land owners in exchange for farming supplies, food, and clothes

Mississippi Plan (1890)

series of state constitutional amendments that sought to disenfranchise Black voters and was quickly adopted by nine other southern states

separate but equal

Underlying principal behind segregation that was legitimized by the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Wilmington Insurrection (1898)

Led by Alfred Waddell in Wilmington, North Carolina, White supremacists rampaged through the Black community, overthrew the local government, and forced over 2000 African Americans into exhile

Indian wars

Bloody conflicts between U.S. soldiers and Native Americans that raged in the West from the early 1860s to the late 1870s, sparked by American settlers moving into ancestral Indian lands

Ghost Dance movement

A spiritual and political movement amongst Native Americans whose followers performed a ceremonial "ghost dance" intended to connect the living with the dead and make the Native Americans bulletproof in battles intended to restore their homelands