Chapter 15 Vocabulary

Guild

A business association associated with a particular trade or craft; fluids evolved in the twelfth century and came to play a leading role in the economic life of medieval cities.

Inquisition

A court established by the Catholic Church in 1232 to discover and try heretics; also called the Holy Office.

Interdict

A decree by the pope forbade priests to give the sacraments of the church to the people.

Black Death

A form of bubonic plague, spread by fleas carried by rats.

Scholasticism

A medieval philosophical and theological system that tried to reconcile faith and reason.

Masterpiece

A piece created by a journeyman who aspires to be a master craftsperson; it allowed the members of a guild to judge whether the journeyman was qualified to become a master and join the guild.

Great Schism

A split in the Catholic Church that lasted from 1378 to 1418, during which time there were rival popes in Rome and in the French city of Avignon; France and its allies supported the pope in Avignon, while France's enemy England and its allies supported the pope in Rome

Taille

An annual direct tax, usually on land or property that provided a regular source of income for the French monarchy.

Money Economy

An economic system based on money rather than barter.

Commercial Capitalism

An economic system in which people invest in trade or goods to make profits.

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who was the 44th president of the United States, from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book 'The Feminine Mystique' is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century.

Relic

Bones or other objects connected with saints; considered worthy of worship by the faithful.

Sacrament

Christain rites.

Colin Powell

Colin Luther Powell is an American politician, diplomat and retired four-star general who served as the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. Powell was the first African-American Secretary of State.

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat, political scientist, civil servant, and professor who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

César Chavez

César Estrada Chávez was an American labor leader, community organizer, businessman, and Latino American civil rights activist.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms. Magazine.

Anti-Semitism

Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews.

Serf

In medieval Europe, a peasant legally bound to the land had to provide labor services, pay rents, and be subject to the lord's control.

Manor

In medieval Europe, an agricultural estate run by a lord and worked by peasants.

New Monarchies

In the fifteenth century, governments in which power had been centralized under a king or queen, France, England, and Spain.

James Meredith

James Howard Meredith is an American civil rights movement figure, writer, political adviser, and Air Force veteran.

Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science.

L. Douglas Wilder

Lawrence Douglas Wilder is an American lawyer and politician who served as the 66th Governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1994. He was the first African-American to serve as governor of a U.S. state since the Reconstruction era, and the first elected African-American governor.

Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright is an American politician and diplomat who served as the first female United States Secretary of State in U.S. history from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Along with her family, Albright immigrated to the United States in 1948 from Czechoslovakia.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement. He is best known for his time spent as a vocal spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

a proposed and failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited any government discrimination on the basis of sex.

Nation of Islam

a religious group, popularly known as the Black Muslims, founded by Elijah Muhammad to promote black separatism and the Islamic religion.

Black Power

a slogan used by Stokely Carmichael in the 1960s that encouraged African-American pride and political and social leadership.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

an organization formed in 1957 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders to work for civil rights through nonviolent means.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

an organization formed in 1960 to coordinate sit-ins and other protests and to give young blacks a larger role in the civil rights movement.

National Organization for Women (NOW)

an organization founded in 1966 to pursue feminist goals, such as better childcare facilities, improved educational opportunities, and an end to job discrimination.

Fannie Lou Hamer

(1917-1977) was a civil rights activist whose passionate depiction of her own suffering in a racist society helped focus attention on the plight of African-Americans throughout the South.

Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Stewart Schlafly was an American attorney, conservative activist and author. She held traditional conservative social and political views, opposed feminism, gay rights and abortion, and successfully campaigned against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was a Chicano boxer, poet, political organizer, and activist. Gonzales was one of many leaders for the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Sonia Sotomayor

Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic and Latina member of the Court.

Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

Stonewall Riots

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

Pay Equity

The basing of an employee's salary on the requirements of his or her job rather than on the traditional pay scales that have frequently provided women with smaller incomes than men.

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's first African-American justice.

Heresy

The denial of basic church doctrines.

Vernacular

The language of everyday speech in a particular region.

Lay Investiture

The practice by which secular rulers both chose nominees to church offices and gave them the symbols of their office.

Theology

The study of religion and God.

Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka

a 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" education for black and white students was unconstitutional.

Freedom Summer

a 1964 project to register African-American voters in Mississippi.

La Raza Unida

a Latino political organization founded in 1970 by José Angel Gutiérrez.

Sit-In

a form of demonstration used by African Americans to protest discrimination, in which the protesters sit down in a segregated business and refuse to leave until they are served.

American Indian Movement (AIM)

a frequently militant organization that was formed in 1968 to work for Native American rights.

Kerner Commission

a group that was appointed by President Johnson to study the causes of urban violence and that recommended the elimination of de facto segregation in American society.

United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC)

a labor union formed in 1966 to seek higher wages and better working conditions for Mexican-American farm workers in California.

Civil Rights Act of 1968

a law that banned discrimination in housing.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

a law that banned discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or religion in public places and most workplaces.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

a law that made it easier for African Americans to register to vote by eliminating discriminatory literacy tests and authorizing federal examiners to enroll voters denied at the local level.

Black Panther

a militant African-American political organization formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to fight police brutality and to provide services in the ghetto.

Affirmative Action

a policy that seeks to correct the effects of past discrimination by favoring the groups who were previously disadvantaged.

Freedom Riders

one of the civil rights activists who rode buses through the South in the early 1960s to challenge segregation.

De Jure Segregation

racial separation established by law.

De Facto Segregation

racial separation established by practice and custom, not by law.

Feminism

the belief that women should have economic, political, and social equality with men.