Give Me Liberty!: An American History, AP Edition, Eric Foner, Third Edition
Metacom
A Wampanoag leader, called King Philip by colonists, who was the mastermind behind a 1675 uprising against settlers known as King Philip's War.
Title IX
A ban on gender discrimination in higher education.
Coxey's Army
A band of several hundred unemployed men led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey demanding economic relief.
Roanoke colony
A base set up off the North Carolina coast in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh.
Force Act
A bill authorizing President Jackson to use the army and navy to collect customs duties.
Lemuel Haynes
A black member of the Massachusetts militia and later a celebrated minister. He urged that Americans ''extend'' their conception of freedom to include blacks.
Silent Spring
A book by Rachel Carson that exposed the environmental costs of economic growth.
''Scottsboro boys''
A case in which nine young black men were arrested for the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931. Despite the weakness of the evidence against the Scottsboro boys and the fact that one of the two accusers recanted, Alabama authorities three times put them on trial and three times won convictions. Landmark Supreme Court decisions overturned the first two verdicts and established legal principles that greatly expanded the definition of civil liberties that defendants have a constitutional right to effective legal representation, and that states cannot systematically exclude blacks from juries. But the Court allowed the third set of convictions to stand, which led to prison sentences for five of the defendants.
Gibbons v. Ogden
A case in which the Supreme Court struck down a monopoly the New York legislature had granted for steamboat navigation.
Cahokia
A city near present-day St. Louis that was a fortified community created by ''mound builders,'' which had a population between 10,000 and 30,000 in the year 1200.
Stagflation
A combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation present during the 1970s.
Denmark Vesey's conspiracy
A conspiracy that reflect the combination of American and African influences of the time; Denmark Vesey, a slave carpenter in South Carolina, took to rebuking blacks who stepped off the city's sidewalks to allow whites to pass.
Jay's Treaty
A controversial 1794 agreement that failed to secure British concessions on impressment or the rights of American shipping.
Father Junipero Serra
A controversial figure who founded the first California mission in San Diego in 1769.
Glorious Revolution
A coup engineered by a small group of aristocrats that led to William of Orange taking the British throne in place of James II
Seditious libel
A crime that included defaming government officials in published works.
Salem witch trials
A crisis of trials and executions in Salem, Massachusetts, that came about from anxiety over witchcraft in 1692.
Maize
A crop that formed the basis of agriculture in the Western Hemisphere.
Bradwell v. Illinois
A decision rebuffing the claim that the written legal code and Constitution gave women equal rights.
Slaughterhouse Cases
A decision that rejected the claim by butchers that their right to equality before the law had been violated.
Patterson v. McLean Credit Union
A decision wherein the Supreme Court barred a black employee who suffered racial harassment while working from suing for damages under the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Ethnic nationalism
A definition of a nation as a community of descent based on a shared ethnic heritage, language, and culture.
Telegraph
A device that made possible instantaneous communication invented by Samuel Morse in 1844.
Slave religion
A distinctive version of Christianity adopted by slaves in the face of hardship. A blend of African traditions and Christian belief, slave religion was practiced in secret nighttime meetings on plantations and in ''praise meetings.''
''wall of separation''
A division freeing politics and the exercise of the intellect from religious control.
Preemptive war
A doctrine that states the United States retains the right to use its military power against countries that might pose a threat in the future.
''virtual representation''
A doctrine which stated that the House of Commons represented all residents of the British empire, whether or not they could vote for members.
Lecompton Constitution
A document drafted by a pro-southern convention but never submitted to vote that attempted to admit Kansas as a slave state.
Exposition and Protest
A document in which the South Carolina legislature justified nullification.
Report on Manufactures
A document that called for the imposition of a tariff and government subsidies to encourage the development of factories that could manufacture products currently purchased from abroad.
Muller v. Oregon
A famous brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demonstrate that because they had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions.
Roosevelt and conservation
A federal policy to conserve natural resources. Under Roosevelt's leadership, millions of acres were set aside as preserves and national parks were created.
Benedict Arnold
A former commander under George Washington that defected and almost succeeded in turning over to the British the important fort at West Point on the Hudson River.
Walking Purchase
A fraudulent transaction in 1737 whereby Pennsylvania Governor James Logan acquired a large tract of land by hiring runners to mark land; the Lenni Lanape Indians had agreed to cede land that a man could walk in thirty-six hours.
Balanced government
A government whose structure reflects the division of society between the wealthy and ordinary men.
Neoconservatives
A group of intellectuals who charged that the 1960s had produced a decline in moral standards and respect for authority.
Loyal Nine
A group of merchants and craftsmen who had taken the lead in opposing the Stamp Act.
Immigration Restriction League
A group that called for the reduction of immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States.
Transcendentalists
A group who insisted on the primacy of individual judgment over existing social traditions and institutions.
Cyrus McCormick reaper
A horse-drawn machine that greatly increased the amount of wheat a farmer could harvest.
Missouri controversy
A incident stemming from the suggestion by New York congressman James Tallmadge that the introduction of further slaves be prohibited and that children of those already in Missouri be freed at age twenty-five.
Gullah
A language that mixed various African roots that was mostly unintelligible to whites.
''information revolution''
A large expansion of the public sphere and an explosion in printing. The application of steam power to newspaper printing led to a great increase in output and the rise of the mass-circulation ''penny press'' priced at one cent per issue.
English Toleration Act
A law of 1690 that allowed all Protestants to worship freely.
''The Significance of the Frontier in American History''
A lecture given by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 arguing that the western frontier had forged the distinctive qualities of American culture: individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility.
Yellow fever
A malady that struck many workers on the Panama Canal project.
Matthew Lyon
A member of Congress from Vermont who was jailed under the Sedition Act for criticizing the Adams administration in his newspaper.
''moral suasion''
A method of reformers attempting to convert people to their cause by highlighting the moral implications of the opposing viewpoint.
Literacy tests
A method used to exclude uneducated blacks from voting.
Juvenile delinquency
A mid-1950s panic about "juvenile delinquency'' occurred as a result of works such as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
Kansas Exodus
A migration by some 40,000-60,000 blacks to Kansas to escape the oppressive environment of the New South.
Crispus Attucks
A mixed Indian-African white colonist who died in the Boston Massacre and was hailed as the first martyr of the American Revolution.
''welfare capitalism''
A more socially conscious kind of business leadership.
''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?''
A motto adopted by abolitionists to highlight the reality that blacks in bondage were no different than the whites in power over them.
Red Power movement
A movement which led to many Indian tribes winner greater control over education and economic development on their reservations.
Rock-and-roll music
A musical style derided as alarming, overly sexualized, and provocative.
National Security Council
A national security body immune from democratic oversight.
Family Assistance Plan
A ''negative income tax'' that would replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by having the federal government guarantee a minimum income for all Americans.
Sea Island experiment
A ''rehearsal for Reconstruction'' in an attempt to make self-reliant, productive citizens of former slaves on an island off the coast of South Carolina.
Battle of Fallen Timbers
A 1794 battle in which 3,000 American troops under Anthony Wayne defeated Little Turtle's forces.
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez
A 5-4 Court majority ruling that the Constitution did not require equality of school funding.
Lawrence v. Texas
A 6-3 majority declared unconstitutional a Texas law making homosexual acts a crime.
Zheng He
A Chinese Admiral who led seven large naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean.
Neolin
A Delaware religious prophet whose teachings contributed to Pontiac's Rebellion.
''reannexation'' of Texas and ''reoccupation'' of Oregon"
A Democratic party platform that called for addition of both Texas and Oregon to the Union to appease differing points of views on the issues.
Dorothea Dix
A Massachusetts schoolteacher who was the leading advocate of more humane treatment of the insane.
Polygamy
A Mormon practice which allows one man to have more than one wife.
Pope
A Pueblo Indian who became the main organizer of an uprising that aimed to drive the Spanish from their colony and restore the Indians' traditional autonomy.
Half-Way Covenant
A Puritan compromise allowing for the baptism and a subordinate church membership for grandchildren of those who emigrated during the Great Migration.
Moral liberty
A Puritan concept meaning ''a liberty to that only which is good.''
League of United Latin American Citizens
A Southwestern group that challenged restrictive housing, employment discrimination, and the segregation of Latino students.
Encomienda system
A Spanish system under which the first settlers had been granted authority over conquered Indian lands with the right to extract forced labor from the native inhabitants.
Ex parte Milligan
A Supreme Court case that declared it unconstitutional to bring accused persons before military tribunals where civil courts were operating.
Worcester v. Georgia
A Supreme Court decision holding that Indian nations were a distinct people with the right to maintain a separate political identity.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
A Supreme Court ruling awarding citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants born on American soil.
Alfred T. Mahan
A naval officer who argued that no nation could prosper without a large fleet of ships engaged in international trade, protected by a powerful navy operating from overseas bases.
American standard of living
A new concept that came about from the maturation of the consumer economy; the idea that mass consumption came to occupy a central place in American society and its future.
The Slave Power
A northern term for the South's proslavery political leadership.
Common Sense
A pamphlet that appeared in January 1776 that attacked the Constitution of England and the principles of hereditary rule and monarchical government.
Coal miner's strike of 1902
A paralyzing strike that was ended when President Roosevelt threatened a federal takeover of the mines.
''open immigration''
A partially accurate term referring to the restriction on citizenship from abroad to free white persons.
Camp David peace treaty
A peace agreement between Egypt and Israel facilitated by Jimmy Carter.
Secular communitarian
A person who plans or lives in a cooperative community
''Cotton is King''
A phrase referring to the social, economic, and cultural importance of cotton the South.
''salutary neglect''
A policy adopted by British governments that left the colonies largely to govern themselves.
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
A popular captivity narrative written by Mary Rowlandson.
''Wilkes and Liberty''
A popular rallying cry in both the colonies and Britain in response to the expulsion of John Wilkes from his seat in Parliament.
Virginia Company
A private business organization whose shareholders included merchants, aristocrats, and members of Parliament.
Gradual emancipation
A process established in Northern colonies that left up to them the boundaries of liberty for blacks.
''scientific management''
A program that sought to streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs and work practices.
Judith Sargent Murray
A prominent writer of plays, novels, and poetry, Judith Sargent Murray of Massachusetts was one of the first women to demand equal educational opportunities for women.
Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed amendment to eliminate all legal distinctions ''on account of sex.''
Three-fifths clause
A provision that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted in determining each state's representation in the House of Representatives and its electoral votes for president.
The Feminine Mystique
A publication by Betty Friedan that focused attention on the reality facing suburban women.
Regan Revolution
A reference to how Reagan reshaped the nation's agenda and political language more effectively than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Temperance movement
A reform movement advocating the moderation in consumption of liquor.
Birth-control movement
A reform movement espousing the idea that right to control of one's body included the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing women. Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger were the leaders of this movement.
The Dorr War
A reform movement in Rhode Island sparked by the continued exclusion of any white man from voting.
Ghost Dance
A religious revitalization campaign reminiscent of the pan-Indian movements led by earlier prophets.
Pontiac's Rebellion
A revolt against British rule in 1763 by Indians of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes.
Charles River Bridge case
A ruling that the Massachusetts legislature did not infringe the charter of an existing company that had constructed a bridge over the Charles River when it empowered a second company to build a competing bridge.
The Genet affair
A series of American attacks on British vessels while under the French flag organized by Edmond Genet, a French envoy.
Las Siete Partidas
A series of Spanish laws granting slaves certain rights relating to marriage, the holding of property, and access to freedom.
''filibustering'' expeditions"
A series of attempts by William Walker to establish himself as the leader of a Latin American country.
Suffolk Resolves
A series of resolutions passed by a convention of delegates in Massachusetts that urged Americans to refuse obedience to new laws, withhold taxes, and prepare for war.
Caravel
A ship capable of long-distance travel.
''swing around the circle''
A speaking tour of the North taken by Andrew Johnson to urge voters to elect members of Congress committed to his own Reconstruction program.
Standard gauge
A standard distance separating the two tracks adopting in 1886 that allowed for the first time trains of one company to travel on another company's track.
Signing statements
A statement by the president along with his signature on a bill soon to be law. When signing the 2005 Defense Appropriations Act, President Bush signed the bill but reaffirmed his right as commander-in-chief to set rules for the military by himself.
Wampum
A string of beads used by Indians in religious rituals and as currency.
Uprising of 1622
A surprise attack on Virginia's settlers that was led by Opechancanough.
Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash
A system in which New England's early factory owners relied on the cotton supplied by southern slaveowners.
Headright system
A system in which any colonist who paid for his own or another's passage from London was rewarded with fifty acres of land.
Federal Reserve System
A system of twelve regional banks overseen by a central board empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influence interest rates so as to promote economic growth.
''task'' system"
A system whereby individual slaves were assigned daily jobs, and the completion of which allowed them time for leisure or farming of their own.
Checks and balances
A systematic balance to prevent any one branch of the national government from dominating the other two.
''waving the bloody shirt''
A tactic of Republicans whereby they identified their opponents with secession and treason.
Panama Canal Zone
A ten-mile wide strip of land on which was built a canal; its construction drastically reduced the time it took for commercial and naval vessels to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
The Beats
A term coined by Jack Kerouac for a small group of poets and writers who railed against mainstream culture.
Redemptioners
A term for indentured families.
Cotton Kingdom
A term referring to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas that rose in the early nineteenth century as their economies focused on cotton textiles to meet a rising demand.
''infant industries''
A term referring to the nascent manufacturing sector and the perceived need to protect it from international competition.
''cousinocracy''
A term referring to the tight-knit and intermarried nature of the Virginia upper class.
''self-made man''
A term that those who achieved success in America did so not as a result of hereditary privilege or government favoritism as in Europe, but through their own intelligence and hard work.
''ethnic cleansing''
A terrible new term meaning the forcible expulsion from an area of a particular ethnic group.
Mercantilist system
A theory that government should regulate economic activity as to promote national power.
The Perot candidacy
A third candidate in the 1992 election, the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, also entered the fray. He attacked George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as lacking the economic know-how to deal with the recession and the ever-increasing national debt. That millions of Americans considered Perot a credible candidate; at one point, polls showed him leading both Clinton and Bush; testified to widespread dissatisfaction with the major parties. Perot's support faded as election day approached, but he still received 19 percent of the popular vote, the best result for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Treaty of Paris
A treaty that won recognition of American independence, gained control of the entire region between Canada and Florida east of the Mississippi River, and the right of Americans to fish in Atlantic waters off of Canada.
Stockbridge Indians
A tribe that allied with the colonists during the War of Independence who suffered heavy losses fighting the British.
One-house legislature
A unicameral representational body.
Anti-Imperialist League
A union of writers and social reformers who believed American energies should be directed at home, businessmen fearful of the cost of maintaining overseas outposts, and racists who did not wish to bring non-white populations into the United States.
Civic nationalism
A vision of a national as a community open to all those devoted to its political institutions and social values.
''great upheaval'' of 1886
A wave of strikes and labor protests that touched every part of the nation in 1886.
''silent sabotage''
A widespread hostility to slavery wherein slaves did poor work, broke tools, abused animals, and in other ways disrupted the plantation routine.
''citizens of color''
A widespread term referring to free black citizens in the newly independent America.
Woman suffrage
A woman's right to vote, an issue raised for the first time at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
The Key of Liberty
A writing by William Manning that declared the most important division of society as that between the ''few and the ''many.''
Liberty Party
Abolitionist political party that nominated James G. Birney for president in 1840 and 1844; merged with the Free Soil Party in 1848.
Totalitarianism
According to the theory of totalitarianism, there was no room for individual rights or alternative values in a country and therefore could never change from within.
Act Concerning Religion
Adopted in Maryland in 1649; institutionalized the principle of toleration that had prevailed from the colony's beginning.
Culture of corruption
After a series of scandals in 2005, Democrats charged that the nation's capital had been overtaken by corrupt practices
Black soldiers and sailors
After the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union army became an agent of emancipation.
National banking system
After the war broke out, both sides were found unprepared as they lacked a national banking system.
Helsinki Accords
Agreements made in 1975 between the United States and Soviet Union that, over time, inspired movements for greater freedom within the communist countries of eastern Europe.
Oslo Accords
Agreements that seemed to set out a road to Mideast peace between Israel and Palestine, though neither side proved willing to fully implement them.
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
Agreements which froze each country's arsenal of intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Alliance founded in 1949 by ten western European nations, the United States, and Canada to deter Soviet expansion in Europe.
Popular sovereignty
Allowed settlers in a disputed territory to decide the slavery issue for themselves; program most closely associated with Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
''standard consumer package''
Along with a home and television set, the car became part of what sociologists called the standard consumer package of the 1950s.
Civil Rights Bill of 1866
Along with the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteed the rights of citizenship to former slaves.
Platt Amendment
Amendment to Cuban constitution that reserved the United States' right to intervene in Cuban affairs and forced newly independent Cuba to host American naval bases on the island.
The Nixon pardon
Among his first acts as president, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, shielding him from prosecution for obstruction of justice.
''hearts and minds''
Among other things, the Cold War was an ideological struggle, a battle, in a popular phrase of the 1950s, for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world.
Civil Rights Cases
An 1883 Court decision invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Quebec Act
An act that extended the southern boundary of Quebec to the Ohio River and granted legal toleration to the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.
Roosevelt Corollary
An addendum to the Monroe Doctrine that held that the United States had the right to exercise an international police power in the Western Hemisphere.
The Freedman's Bureau
An agency established by Congress in March 1865 to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts.
Enclosure movement
An agricultural process that introduced more modern farming practices, such as crop rotation and the fencing of ''commons.''
Covenant Chain
An alliance formed by Sir Edmund Andros, in which the imperial ambitions of the English and Indians reinforced one another in New York.
Iroquois
An alliance of five peoples living in present-day New York and Pennsylvania - the Mohawk, Oneido, Cayuga, Seneca, and Onondaga - which formed a Great League of Peace.
Backcountry
An area stretching from central Pennsylvania southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and into upland North and South Carolina.
Pequot War
An armed conflict that led to the destruction of one of New England's most powerful Indian groups.
''King Cotton diplomacy''
An attempt by the South to encourage British intervention by banning cotton exports.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
An autobiography of an freed slave that gives insight into slave life and challenges many period stereotypes towards blacks.
''missile gap''
An belief that the Soviets had achieved technological and military superiority over the United States.
Plantation
An early word for a colony, a settlement planted from abroad among an alien population in Ireland or the New World. Later, a large agricultural enterprise that used unfree labor to produce a crop for the world market.
Inflation
An economic condition in which prices rise continuously.
Patrons of Husbandry
An educational and social organization for farmers founded in 1867
Harriet Tubman
An escaped slave who escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 and spent the next ten years making trips back and forth to Maryland to lead her relatives and other slaves to freedom.
The American Crisis
An essay by Thomas Paine read by George Washington to his troops shortly before crossing the Delaware River.
Welfare reform
An example of a Republican policy embraced by Bill Clinton to neutralize Republican claims about Democrats.
Hurricane Katrina
An historically large storm that hit the city of New Orleans in August, 2005. The natural disaster's damage was amplified by the ensuing governmental ineptitude surrounding the rescue and recovery efforts.
''Christian liberty''
An idea common in Europe that freedom would come from abandoning the life of sin to embrace the teachings of Christ.
''effective freedom''
An idea put forth by John Dewey that freedom was a positive, not negative concept -- the ''power to do specific things.''
English liberty
An idea that certain ''rights of Englishmen'' applied to all within the kingdom.
The proslavery argument
An ideology of the justification for slavery that covered a broad range of sources, including the Bible and economic theory.
Sinking of the Lusitania
An incident in 1915 wherein a British liner was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland.
The caning of Charles Sumner
An incident in which Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was assaulted on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston S. Brooks over Sumner's accusation that a distant cousin of Brooks's had taken ''the harlot slavery'' as his mistress.
Eaton affair
An incident in which Peggy Eaton, the wife of Andrew Jackson's secretary of war, was ostracized because she was the daughter of a Washington tavern keeper, and thus allegedly a woman of ''easy virtue.''
My Lai massacre
An incident in which a company of American troops killed some 350 South Vietnamese civilians.
Lord Dunmore's proclamation
An offer by the British governor and military commander in Virginia for freedom to any slave who escaped to his lines and bore arms for the king.
Olive Branch Petition
An offer to George III reaffirming Americans' loyalty to the crown and hoping for a ''permanent reconciliation.''
American Protective League
An organization that helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on their neighbors and carrying out ''slacker raids'' in which thousands of men were stopped on the streets of major cities and required to produce draft registration cards.
Yamasee uprising
An uprising in Carolina by Indians sparked by fears over trade debts owed to colonists.
Stono Rebellion
An uprising in South Carolina by slaves that led to a severe tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on imported slaves.
War on Poverty
Announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 State of the Union address; under the Economic Opportunity Bill signed later that year, Head Start, VISTA, and the Jobs Corps were created, and programs were created for students, farmers, and businesses in efforts to eliminate poverty.
Nativism
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent in the 1830s through the 1850s; the largest group was New York's Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854.
Social Darwinism
Application of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to society; used the concept of the "survival of the fittest" to justify class distinctions and to explain poverty.
North American Free Trade Agreement
Approved in 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico allowed goods to travel across their borders free of tariffs; critics argued that American workers would lose their jobs to cheaper Mexican labor.
Freedom petitions
Arguments for liberty presented to New England's courts and legislatures in the early 1770s by enslaved African-Americans.
Mexican immigration
As Mexicans arrived in the United States, most became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility.
Agricultural expansion and decline
As the country expanded and returned to normal economic practices after the Civil War, Southern cotton had trouble regaining its dominance in the world marketplace, and Western farmers suffered economic distresses of their own.
Conformity
As the historian Henry Steele Commager argued in a 1947 magazine article, the anticommunist crusade promoted a new definition of loyalty, conformity.
Bataan ''death march''
At Bataan, in the Philippines, the Japanese forced 78,000 American and Filipino troops to lay down their arms; the largest surrender in American military history. Thousands perished on the ensuing death march to a prisoner-of-war camp, and thousands more died of disease and starvation after they arrived.
The Popular Front
At the height of the Popular Front a period during the mid-1930s when the Communist Party sought to ally itself with socialists and New Dealers in movements for social change, urging reform of the capitalist system rather than revolution, Communists gained an unprecedented respectability.
Embargo Act
Attempt to exert economic pressure by prohibiting all exports from the United States, instead of waging war in reaction to continued British impressment of American sailors; smugglers easily circumvented the embargo, and it was repealed two years later.
U.S.S. Maine
Battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, resulting in 266 deaths; the American public, assuming that the Spanish had mined the ship, clamored for war, and the Spanish-American War was declared two months later.
King Philip's War
Beginning in 1675, an uprising against white colonists by Indians. A multi-year conflict, the end result was broadened freedoms for white New Englanders and the disposession of the region's Indians.
Minimum wage laws
Beginning in March 1937, the Court suddenly revealed a new willingness to support economic regulation by both the federal government and the states. It upheld a minimum wage law of the state of Washington similar to the New York measure it had declared unconstitutional a year earlier.
Santa Fe trail
Beginning in the 1820s, a major trade route from St. Louis, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory.
Panic of 1837
Beginning of major economic depression lasting about six years; touched off by a British financial crisis and made worse by falling cotton prices, credit and currency problems, and speculation in land, canals, and railroads.
Freedom Rides
Bus journeys challenging racial segregation in the South in 1961.
Bank holiday
By March 1933, banking had been suspended in a majority of the states, that is, people could not gain access to money in their bank accounts. Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, temporarily halting all bank operations.
''jobless'' recovery"
By the end of 2001, the United States resumed economic growth, but failed to generate new jobs.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
Case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the California university system's use of racial quotas in admissions but allowed the use of race as one factor in admissions decisions.
Cuban missile crisis
Caused when the United States discovered Soviet offensive missile sites in Cuba in October 1962; the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was the Cold War's closest brush with nuclear war.
Metis
Children of marriages between Indian women and French traders or officials.
''high crimes and misdemeanors''
Circumstances under which the president can by impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.
''reverse discrimination''
Claims that, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, minorities were granted special advantages over whites.
Boston Massacre
Clash between British soldiers and a Boston mob, March 5, 1770, in which five colonists were killed.
The Federalist
Collection of eighty-five essays that appeared in the New York press in 1787-1788 in support of the Constitution; written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay and published under the pseudonym "Publius."
Loyalists
Colonists who remained loyal to Great Britain during the War of Independence.
Vertical integration
Company's avoidance of middlemen by producing its own supplies and providing for distribution of its product.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing the president to take all necessary measures to repel armed attack in Vietnam.
Redeemers
Conservative white Democrats, many of them planters or businessmen, who reclaimed control of the South following the end of Reconstruction.
Dominion of New England
Consolidation into a single colony of the New England colonies, and later New York and New Jersey, by royal governor Edmund Andros in 1686; dominion reverted to individual colonial governments three years later.
Committee on Public Information
Created in 1917 by the Wilson administration to explain to Americans and the world that ''the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.''
Northwest Ordinance of 1787
Created the Northwest Territory (area north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania), established conditions for self-government and statehood, included a Bill of Rights, and permanently prohibited slavery.
Social Security Act
Created the Social Security system with provisions for a retirement pension, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and public assistance (welfare).
Rural Electrification Agency
Created to bring electric power to homes that lacked it; 80 percent of farms were still without electricity in 1934; in part to enable more Americans to purchase household appliances.
Federal Trade Commission
Created to enforce existing antitrust laws that prohibited business combinations in restraint of trade.
Lochner v. New York
Decision by Supreme Court overturning a New York law establishing a limit on the number of hours per week bakers could be compelled to work; "Lochnerism" became a way of describing the liberty of contract jurisprudence, which opposed all governmental intervention in the economy.
Dixiecrats
Deep South delegates who walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest of the party's support for civil rights legislation and later formed the States' Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president.
Virtue
Defined in the eighteenth century as both a personal moral quality but also the willingness to subordinate self-interest to the pursuit of the public good.
Carpetbaggers and scalawags
Derisive term for northern emigrants who participated in the Republican governments of the Reconstruction South; Southern white Republicans, some former Unionists, who supported Reconstruction governments.
Land Ordinances of 1784 and 1785
Directed surveying of the Northwest Territory into townships of thirty-six sections (square miles) each, the sale of the sixteenth section of which was to be used to finance public education.
Declaration of Independence
Document adopted on July 4, 1776, that made the break with Britain official; drafted by a committee of the Second Continental Congress, including principal writer Thomas Jefferson.
The Fair Deal
Domestic reform proposals of the Truman administration; included civil rights legislation, national health insurance, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but only extensions of some New Deal programs were enacted.
Townsend plan
Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, won wide support for a plan by which the government would make a monthly payment of $200 to older Americans, with the requirement that they spend it immediately.
Albany Plan of Union
Drafted by Benjamin Franklin in 1754; envisioned the creation of a Grand Council composed of delegates from each colony, with the power to levy taxes and deal with Indian relations and common defense.
''tough on crime'' movement"
During the 1960s, the nation's prison population had declined. But in the 1970s, with urban crime rates rising, politicians of both parties sought to convey the image of being tough on crime.''
Housing discrimination
During the postwar suburban boom, federal agencies continued to insure mortgages that barred resale of houses to non-whites, thereby financing housing segregation.
Fordism
Early twentieth-century term describing the economic system pioneered by Ford Motor Company based on high wages and mass consumption.
Hart-Celler Act
Eliminated the national origins quota system for immigration established by laws in 1921 and 1924; led to radical change in the origins of immigrants to the United States, with Asians and Latin Americans outnumbering Europeans.
English Bill of Rights
Enacted in 1689 by Parliament; listed parliamentary powers such as control over taxation as well as rights of individuals, including trial by jury.
Slave code
Enacted in 1705 by the House of Burgesses, this legislation created the provision of white supremacy over slaves and blacks.
First fugitive slave law
Enacted in 1793, a law providing for federal and state judges and local officials to facilitate the return of escaped slaves.
Selective Service Act
Enacted in 1917; required 24 million men to register with the draft.
Puritans
English religious group that sought to purify the Church of England; founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop in 1630.
Runaways
Escaped slaves fleeing from recapture by their owners.
Runaways
Escaped slaves seeking freedom from their owners.
Lords of Trade
Established in 1675 by England to oversee colonial affairs.
Civil Service Act of 1883
Established the Civil Service Commission and marked the end of the spoils system.
Circulating libraries
Establishments that made possible wider dissemination of knowledge, as books were still expensive. The first, the Library Company of Philadelphia, was established by Benjamin Franklin in 1731.
''the American way of life''
Even as unemployment remained high in Britain throughout the 1920s, and inflation and war reparations payments crippled the German economy, Hollywood films spread images of "the American way of life" across the globe.
The Hundred Days
Extraordinarily productive first three months of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in which a special session of Congress enacted fifteen of his New Deal proposals.
Bonanza farming
Farms that covered thousands of acres and employed large numbers of agricultural wage workers.
Red Scare
Fear among many Americans after World War I of Communists in particular and noncitizens in general, a reaction to the Russian Revolution, mail bombs, strikes, and riots.
Separation of powers
Feature of the U.S. Constitution, sometimes called "checks and balances," in which power is divided between executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the national government so that no one can dominate the other two and endanger citizens' liberties.
Great Awakening
Fervent religious revival movement in the 1720s through the 1740s that was spread throughout the colonies by ministers like New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and English revivalist George Whitefield.
''100 percent Americanism''
Few features of urban life seemed more alien to rural and small-town native-born Protestants than their immigrant populations and cultures. The wartime obsession with "100 percent Americanism" continued into the 1920s, a decade of citizenship education programs in public schools, legally sanctioned visits to immigrants' homes to investigate their house- hold arrangements, and vigorous efforts by employers to instill appreciation for "American values."
Panic of 1819
Financial collapse brought on by sharply falling cotton prices, declining demand for American exports, and reckless western land speculation.
Marbury v. Madison
First U.S. Supreme Court decision to declare a federal law "the Judiciary Act of 1801"unconstitutional.
Sputnik
First artificial satellite to orbit the earth; launched October 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union.
Monitor v. Merrimac
First engagement between ironclad ships; fought at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862.
Pure Food and Drug Act
First law to regulate manufacturing of food and medicines; prohibited dangerous additives and inaccurate labeling.
Transcontinental railroad
First line across the continent from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, established in 1869 with the linkage of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory, Utah.
Bill of Rights
First ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791 to guarantee individual rights against infringement by the federal government.
Garveyites
Followers of Marcus Garvey for whom freedom meant national self-determination.
Great Recession
Following the housing bubble the ensuing mortgage crisis, banks suddenly found themselves with billions of dollars of worthless investments on their books. In 2008, the situation became a full-fledged crisis, as banks stopped making loans, business dried up, and the stock market collapsed.
''housing bubble''
For years, the Federal Reserve Bank kept interest rates at unprecedented low levels, first to help the economy recover from the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000 and then to enable more Americans to borrow money to purchase homes. The result was a new bubble, as housing prices rose rapidly.
School segregation
For years, the NAACP, under the leadership of attorney Thurgood Marshall, had pressed legal challenges to the "separate but equal" doctrine, and in the 1950s, attitudes began to shift.
Free Soil Party
Formed in 1848 to oppose slavery in the territory acquired in the Mexican War; nominated Martin Van Buren for president in 1848. By 1854 most of the party's members had joined the Republican Party.
House Un-American Activities Committee
Formed in 1938 to investigate subversives in the government and holders of radical ideas more generally; best-known investigations were of Hollywood notables and of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of espionage and Communist Party membership. Abolished in 1975.
American Anti-Slavery Society
Founded in 1833 to organize efforts devoted to abolition.
Knights of Labor
Founded in 1869, the first national union lasted, under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, only into the 1890s; supplanted by the American Federation of Labor.
Standard Oil Company
Founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller in Cleveland, Ohio, it soon grew into the nation's first industry-dominating trust; the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) was enacted in part to combat abuses by Standard Oil.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Founded in 1910, this civil rights organization brought lawsuits against discriminatory practices and published The Crisis, a journal edited by African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois.
Society of American Indians
Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice.
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
Founded in 1960 to coordinate civil rights sit-ins and other forms of grassroots protest.
Alien and Sedition Acts
Four measures passed during the undeclared war with France that limited the freedoms of speech and press and restricted the liberty of noncitizens.
Four Freedoms
Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Huguenots
French Protestant colonists in America.
XYZ Affair
French foreign minister Tallyrand's three anonymous agents demanded payments to stop French plundering of American ships in 1797; refusal to pay the bribe was followed by two years of undeclared sea war with France (1798-1800).
Acadians
French residents of Nova Scotia expelled by the British.
Zimmerman Telegram
From the German foreign secretary to the German minister in Mexico, February 1917, instructing him to offer to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona for Mexico if it would fight the United States to divert attention from Germany in the event that the United States joined the war.
Nixon and China
Full diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China were not established until 1979, but Nixon's visit sparked a dramatic increase in trade between the two countries.
Camp meetings
Gatherings especially prominent on the frontier with fiery revivalist preachers promoting the doctrine of human free will.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Gave federal government authority in cases involving runaway slaves; aroused considerable opposition in the North.
Freedom of expression
Generally not considered one of the ancient rights of Englishmen; there was no legal protection of free speech in the 17th century.
The Bush Doctrine
George W. Bush's foreign policy principle wherein the United States would launch a war on terrorism.
''axis of evil''
George W. Bush's term for Iraq, Iran, and North Korea based on accusations that they harbored terrorists and were developing weapons of mass destruction.
Internal improvements
Government-sponsored projects such as roads and canals.
''block grants''
Grants given to states to spend as they see fit, rather than for specific purposes.
Dust Bowl
Great Plains counties where millions of tons of topsoil were blown away from parched farmland in the 1930s; massive migration of farm families followed.
Radical Republicans
Group within the Republican Party in the 1850s and 1860s that advocated strong resistance to the expansion of slavery, opposition to compromise with the South in the secession crisis of 1860-1861, emancipation and arming of black soldiers during the Civil War, and equal civil and political rights for blacks during Reconstruction.
Committees of Safety
Groups authorized by Congress to oversee its mandates and to take action against ''enemies of American liberty,'' including businessmen who tried to profit from the sudden scarcity of goods.
Slave coffles
Groups chained to one another on forced marches in the Deep South.
Regulators
Groups of backcountry Carolina settlers who protested colonial policies.
Committees of Correspondence
Groups that communicated with those in other colonies to encourage opposition to the Sugar and Currency acts
Fourteenth Amendment
Guaranteed rights of citizenship to former slaves, in words similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Teapot Dome scandal
Harding administration scandal in which Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall profited from secret leasing to private oil companies of government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel popularized the abolitionist position.
Holocaust
Hitler embarked on the final solution, the mass extermination of undesirable peoples, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews. By 1945, 6 million Jewish men, women, and children had died in Nazi death camps.
Bay of Pigs
Hoping to inspire a revolt against Fidel Castro, the CIA sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland on April 17, 1961, but the mission was a spectacular failure.
Black Legend
Idea that the Spanish New World empire was more oppressive toward the Indians than other European empires; was used as a justification for English imperial expansion.
Free blacks
In 1776, fewer than 10,000 free blacks resided in the United States. By 1810, this number was nearly 200,000. Free black men who met taxpaying or property qualifications enjoyed the right to vote under new state constitutions.
Railroad time zones
In 1883, the major rail companies divided the national into four time zones still in use today.
Brownsville affair
In 1906, when a small group of black soldiers shot off their guns in Brownsville, Texas, killing one resident, and none of their fellows would name them, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three black companies' 156 men in all, including six winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Sedition Act
In 1918, the Sedition Act made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that intended to cast contempt, scorn, or disrepute on the form of government, or that advocated interference with the war effort
Hays code
In 1922, the film industry adopted the Hays code, a sporadically enforced set of guidelines that prohibited movies from depicting nudity, long kisses, and adultery, and barred scripts that portrayed clergymen in a negative light or criminals sympathetically.
Korematsu v. United States
In 1944, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American citizen who had been arrested for refusing to present himself for internment.
Loyalty review system
In 1947, less than two weeks after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president established a loyalty review system in which government employees were required to demonstrate their patriotism without being allowed to confront accusers or, in some cases, knowing the charges against them.
Soviet atomic bomb
In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly of the weapon.
Massive retaliation
In 1954, John Foster Dulles announced an updated version of the doctrine of containment. Massive retaliation, as it was called, declared that any Soviet attack on an American ally would be countered by a nuclear assault on the Soviet Union itself.
Capitalism and Freedom
In 1962, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, which identified the free market as the necessary foundation for individual liberty.
Americans with Disabilities Act
In 1990, newly organized disabled Americans won passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This far-reaching measure prohibited discrimination in hiring and promotion against persons with disabilities and required that entrances to public buildings be redesigned so as to ensure access for the disabled.
Clinton impeachment
In 1998, it became known that Clinton had carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. After a report was published, a vote was taken in December 1998 by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.
''double-V''
In February 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier coined the phrase that came to symbolize black attitudes during the war, the double-V. Victory over Germany and Japan, it insisted, must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home.
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, it considered the lawsuit of Yasir Hamdi, an American citizen who had moved to Saudi Arabia and been captured in Afghanistan. Hamdi was imprisoned in a military jail in South Carolina without charge or the right to see a lawyer. The administration allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia on condition that he relinquish his American citizenship.
To Secure These Rights
In October 1947, a Commission on Civil Rights appointed by the president issued To Secure These Rights, one of the most devastating indictments ever published of racial inequality in America.
''social contract''
In leading industries, labor and management hammered out what has been called a new social contract. Unions signed long-term agreements that left decisions regarding capital investment, plant location, and output in management's hands, and they agreed to try to prevent unauthorized "wildcat" strikes.
Rise of the stock market
In the 1920s, as the steadily rising price of stocks made front-page news, the market attracted more investors. Many assumed that stock values would rise forever. By 1928, an estimated 1.5 million Americans owned stock, still a small minority of the country's 28 million families, but far more than in the past.
Bargain of 1877
In the aftermath of a close presidential election, an Electoral Commission declared Rutherford B. Hayes president contingent a variety of compromises and agreements upon his taking office.
Child labor
In the early twentieth century, more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages.
Bonus marchers
In the spring of 1932, 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans descended on Washington to demand early payment of a bonus due in 1945, only to be driven away by federal soldiers led by the army's chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur.
''American system of manufactures''
Industrial mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
Interstate strike, crushed by federal troops, which resulted in extensive property damage and many deaths.
Sugar Act
Introduced in 1764 by Prime Minister George Grenville, reducing the tax on molasses imported into North America from the French West Indies, but also establishing a new machinery to end the widespread smuggling by colonial merchants.
Cotton gin
Invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, the machine separated cotton seed from cotton fiber, speeding cotton processing and making profitable the cultivation of the more hardy, but difficult to clean, short-staple cotton; led directly to the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of slavery in the South.
John Deere steel plow
Invented in 1837, it made possible the rapid subduing of the western prairies.
Isolationism
Isolationism is the 1930s version of Americans' long-standing desire to avoid foreign entanglements, dominated Congress. Beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents' ships and the sale of arms to countries at war.
D-Day
June 6, 1944, when an Allied amphibious assault landed on the Normandy coast and established a foothold in Europe, leading to the liberation of France from German occupation.
''clear and present danger''
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that the First Amendment did not prevent Congress from prohibiting speech that presented a "clear and present danger" of inspiring illegal actions. Free speech, he observed, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."
Great Migration
Large-scale migration of southern blacks during and after World War I to the North, where jobs had become available during the labor shortage of the war years.
Share Our Wealth movement
Launched in 1934, its slogan was 'Every Man a King'; the group called for the confiscation of most of the wealth of the richest Americans in order to finance an immediate grant of $5,000 and a guaranteed job and annual income for all citizens.
War in Afghanistan
Launched in response to the September 11th attacks, this war sought to capture Osama bin Laden and remove the Taliban as leaders of the country.
Dawes Act
Law passed in 1887 meant to encourage adoption of white norms among Indians; broke up tribal holdings into small farms for Indian families, with the remainder sold to white purchasers.
War Powers Act
Law passed in 1973, reflecting growing opposition to American involvement in Vietnam War; required congressional approval before president sent troops abroad.
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854
Law sponsored by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas to allow settlers in newly organized territories north of the Missouri border to decide the slavery issue for themselves; fury over the resulting repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 led to violence in Kansas and to the formation of the Republican Party.
Workmen's compensation laws
Laws enacted to benefit workers, male or female, injured on the job.
Elimination of black voting
Laws or provision enacted by southern states eliminated the black vote by means other than race, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.
Black Codes
Laws passed in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Miami Confederacy
Led by Little Turtle, a group of Indians who partook in open warfare with Americans in the Ohio Valley during the 1790s.
Intelligence quotient
Lewis Terman introduced the term IQ (intelligence quotient) in 1916, claiming that this single number could measure an individual's mental capacity.
''pet banks''
Local banks that received deposits while the charter of the Bank of the United States was about to expire. The choice of these banks was influence by political and personal connections.
Levittown
Low-cost, mass-produced developments of suburban tract housing built by William Levitt after World War II on Long Island and elsewhere.
Shays's Rebellion
Massachusetts farmer Daniel Shays and 1,200 compatriots, seeking debt relief through issuance of paper currency and lower taxes, attempted to prevent courts from seizing property from indebted farmers.
Yalta conference
Meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at a Crimean resort to discuss the postwar world on February 4-11, 1945; Joseph Stalin claimed large areas in eastern Europe for Soviet domination.
Hartford Convention
Meeting of New England Federalists on December 15, 1814, to protest the War of 1812; proposed seven constitutional amendments (limiting embargoes and changing requirements for officeholding, declaration of war, and admission of new states), but the war ended before Congress could respond.
Crop-lien system
Merchants extended credit to tenants based on their future crops, but high interest rates and the uncertainties of farming often led to inescapable debts.
''gentlemen of property and standing''
Merchants with close commercial ties to the South.
Santa Anna
Mexico's ruler during the Texas Revolt.
Gulf War
Military action in 1991 in which an international coalition led by the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait, which it had occupied the previous year.
Economic Bill of Rights
Mindful that public-opinion polls showed a large majority of Americans favoring a guarantee of employment for those who could not find work, the president in 1944 called for an Economic Bill of Rights. The original Bill of Rights restricted the power of government in the name of liberty. FDR proposed to expand its power in order to secure full employment, an adequate income, medical care, education, and a decent home for all Americans.
Erie Canal
Most important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation's largest port.
Nat Turner's Rebellion
Most important slave uprising in nineteenth-century America, led by a slave preacher who, with his followers, killed about sixty white persons in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
Know-Nothing Party
Nativist, anti-Catholic third party organized in 1854 in reaction to large-scale German and Irish immigration; the party's only presidential candidate was Millard Fillmore in 1856.
Agricultural Adjustment Act
New Deal legislation that established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to improve agricultural prices by limiting market sup- plies; declared unconstitutional in United States v. Butler (1936).
Contract with America
Newt Gingrich's platform which promised to curtail the scope of government, cut back on taxes and economic and environmental regulations, overhaul the welfare system, and end affirmative action.
Détente
Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of peaceful coexistence, in which detente (cooperation) would replace the hostility of the Cold War.
Office of War Information
Office of War Information (OWI), created in 1942 to mobilize public opinion, illustrates how the political divisions generated by the New Deal affected efforts to promote the Four Freedoms. The liberal Democrats who dominated the OWI's writing staff sought to make the conflict a people's war for freedom.
March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, 250,000 black and white Americans converged on the nation's capital for the March on Washington, often considered the high point of the nonviolent civil rights movement.
Boston Tea Party
On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty, dressed as Indians, dumped hundreds of chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest the Tea Act of 1773, under which the British exported to the colonies millions of pounds of cheap, but still taxed, tea, thereby undercutting the price of smuggled tea and forcing payment of the tea duty.
Black families
Once freed, blacks and their families were strengthened and become central to the postemancipation black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery.
Battle of Antietam
One of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, fought to a standoff on September 17, 1862, in western Maryland.
Writs of assistance
One of the colonies main complaints against Britain, the writs allowed unlimited search warrants without cause to look for evidence of smuggling.
Public Works Administration
One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the Public Works Administration (PWA), with an appropriation of $3.3 billion. Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it built roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.
Underground Railroad
Operating in the decades before the Civil War, the "railroad" was a clandestine system of routes and safehouses through which slaves were led to freedom in the North.
Anti-Federalists
Opponents of the ratification of the Constitution.
''captains of industry'' v. ''robber barons''
Opposing viewpoints that industrial leaders were either beneficial for the economy or wielded power without any accountability in an unregulated market.
American Civil Liberties Union
Organization founded during World War I to protest the suppression of freedom of expression in wartime; played a major role in court cases that achieved judicial recognition of Americans' civil liberties.
Sons of Liberty
Organizations formed by Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other radicals in response to the Stamp Act.
Gabriel's Rebellion
Organized by a Richmond blacksmith, a plan to march on the state capital and demand for the abolition of slavery.
American Colonization Society
Organized in 1816 to encourage colonization of free blacks to Africa; West African nation of Liberia founded in 1822 to serve as a homeland for them.
Southern Unionist
Organized peace movements that actively promoted disaffection
Liberalism
Originally, political philosophy that emphasized the protection of liberty by limiting the power of government to interfere with the natural rights of citizens; in the twentieth century, belief in an activist government promoting greater social and economic equality.
Civil Rights Act
Outlawed discrimination in public accommodations and employment.
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation like hotels and theaters.
Greenbacks
Paper money declared to be legal tender printed by the government.
Works Progress Administration
Part of the Second New Deal, it provided jobs for millions of the unemployed on construction and arts projects.
Navigation Acts
Passed by the English Parliament to control colonial trade and bolster the mercantile system, 1650-1775; enforcement of the acts led to growing resentment by colonists.
Virginia and Kentucky resolutions
Passed by the Virginia and the Kentucky legislatures; written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, the resolutions advanced the state-compact theory of the Constitution. Virginia's resolution called on the federal courts to protect free speech. Jefferson's draft for Kentucky stated that a state could nullify federal law, but this was deleted.
Defense of Marriage Act
Passed in 1996, barred gay couples from spousal benefits provided by federal law.
National Defense Education Act
Passed in reaction to America's perceived inferiority in the space race; encouraged education in science and modern languages through student loans, university research grants, and aid to public schools.
Voting Rights Act
Passed in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, Selma to Montgomery March, it authorized federal protection of the right to vote and permitted federal enforcement of minority voting rights in individual counties, mostly in the South.
McCarran-Walter Act
Passed over President Harry S. Truman's veto, the law required registration of American Communist Party members, denied them passports, and allowed them to be detained as suspected subversives.
Taft-Hartley Act
Passed over President Harry Truman's veto, the law contained a number of provisions to weaken labor unions, including the banning of closed shops.
Lend-Lease Act
Permitted the United States to lend or lease arms and other supplies to the Allies, signifying increasing likelihood of American involvement in World War II.
Creoles
Persons born in the New World of European ancestry.
Peninsulares
Persons of European birth living in the colonies.
Manifest destiny
Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage American settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.
Maternalist reform
Policies such as mothers' pensions designed to improve the living standards of poor mothers and children.
Republicanism
Political theory in eighteenth-century England and America that celebrated active participation in public life by economically independent citizens as central to freedom.
''plain folk''
Poorer Southern whites who did not own plantations.
Rerum Novarum
Pope Leo XIII's powerful statement of 1894 that criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to form unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society.
Reaganomics
Popular name for President Ronald Reagan's philosophy of "supply side" economics, which combined tax cuts with an unregulated marketplace.
The People's Party
Populists; spoke for all ''producing classes'' and embarked on a remarkable effort of community organization and education.
Factories
Portuguese fortified trading posts on the western coast of Africa.
Black Power
Post-1966 rallying cry of a more militant civil rights movement.
Lynching
Practice, particularly widespread in the South between 1890 and 1940, in which persons (usually black) accused of a crime were murdered by mobs before standing trial. Lynchings often took place before large crowds, with law enforcement authorities not intervening.
Social Gospel
Preached by liberal Protestant clergymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems generated by industrialization.
''balloon frame'' houses"
Prefabricated houses which facilitated further western expansion in the mid nineteenth century.
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, freeing the slaves in areas under Confederate control as of January 1, 1863, the date of the final proclamation, which also authorized the enrollment of black soldiers into the Union army.
Court-packing plan
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failed 1937 attempt to increase the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices from nine to fifteen in order to save his Second New Deal programs from constitutional challenges.
Truman doctrine
President Harry S. Truman's program announced in 1947 of aid to European countries, particularly Greece and Turkey, threatened by communism.
Monroe Doctrine
President James Monroe's declaration to Congress on December 2, 1823, that the American continents would be thenceforth closed to European colonization, and that the United States would not interfere in European affairs.
Louisiana Purchase
President Thomas Jefferson's 1803 purchase from France of the important port of New Orleans and 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains; it more than doubled the territory of the United States at a cost of only $15 million.
Fourteen Points
President Woodrow Wilson's 1918 plan for peace after World War I; at the Versailles peace conference, however, he failed to incorporate all of the points into the treaty.
''separate but equal''
Principle underlying legal racial segregation, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Rosie the Riveter
Private advertising celebrated the achievements of Rosie the Riveter, the female industrial laborer depicted as muscular and self-reliant in Norman Rockwell's famous magazine cover.
Good Neighbor Policy
Proclaimed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1933, it sought improved diplomatic relations between the United States and its Latin American neighbors.
American System
Program of internal improvements and protective tariffs promoted by Speaker of the House Henry Clay in his presidential campaign of 1824; his proposals formed the core of Whig ideology in the 1830s and 1840s.
Fifteenth Amendment
Prohibited states from denying citizens the right to vote because of race.
Executive Order 9066
Promulgated in February 1942, this ordered the expulsion of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast.
Wilmot Proviso
Proposal to prohibit slavery in any land acquired in the Mexican War, but southern senators, led by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, defeated the measure in 1846 and 1847.
Bank of the United States
Proposed by the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the bank opened in 1791 and operated until 1811 to issue a uniform currency, make business loans, and collect tax monies. The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 but President Andrew Jackson vetoed the recharter bill in 1832.
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Proposed to stimulate freer trade among the participants, creating an enormous market for American goods and investment.
Captivity narratives
Publications written by colonists who had been captured by Indians.
Women in the Nineteenth Century
Published in 1845, Margaret Fuller's work that sought to apply to women the transcendalist idea that freedom meant a quest for personal development.
Pilgrims
Puritan Separatists who broke completely with the Church of England and sailed to the New World aboard the Mayflower, founding Plymouth Colony on Cape Cod in 1620.
Industrial Workers of the World
Radical union organized in Chicago in 1905 and nicknamed the Wobblies; its opposition to World War I led to its destruction by the federal government under the Espionage Act.
Interstate Commerce Commission
Reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Wabash Railroad v. Illinois (1886), Congress established the ICC to curb abuses in the railroad industry by regulating rates.
Ellis Island and Angel Island
Reception center in New York Harbor through which most European immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954.
''suitable education''
Recommended for women, by Benjamin Rush; the ability to teach their sons in the principles of liberty and government.
The ''peculiar institution''
Referring to slavery's continued existence in the South after Northern abolition.
Utopian communities
Reform communities where small groups of men and women attempted to establish a more perfect order within the larger society.
Kerner Report
Released in 1968, the Kerner Report blamed urban rioting on segregation and poverty and offered a powerful indictment of white racism.â
Society of Friends (Quakers)
Religious group in England and America whose members believed all persons possessed the inner light or spirit of God; they were early proponents of abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.
American Enlightenment
Revolution in thought in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason and science over the authority of traditional religion.
Gag rule
Rule adopted by House of Representatives in 1836 prohibiting consideration of abolitionist petitions; opposition, led by former president John Quincy Adams, succeeded in having it repealed in 1844.
War Industries Board
Run by financier Bernard Baruch, the board planned production and allocation of war materiel, supervised purchasing, and fixed prices, 1917-1919.
Iran-Contra affair
Scandal of the second Reagan administration involving sales of arms to Iran in partial exchange for release of hostages in Lebanon and use of the arms money to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, which had been expressly forbidden by Congress.
''end of ideology''
Scholars celebrated the end of ideology and the triumph of a democratic, capitalist consensus in which all Americans except the maladjusted and fanatics shared the same liberal values of individualism, respect for private property, and belief in equal opportunity.
Manhattan Project
Secret American program during World War II to develop an atomic bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer led the team of physicists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Nye committee and Neutrality Acts
Senate hearings in 1934-1935 headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota revealed that international bankers and arms exporters had pressed the Wilson administration to enter that war and had profited handsomely from it. / Beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents' ships and the sale of arms to countries at war.
Indentured servant
Settler who signed on for a temporary period of servitude to a master in exchange for passage to the New World; Virginia and Pennsylvania were largely peopled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by English and German indentured servants.
Patroons
Shareholders who agreed to transport tenants for agricultural labor.
Indian Removal Act
Signed by President Andrew Jackson, the law permitted the negotiation of treaties to obtain the Indians' lands in exchange for their relocation to what would become Oklahoma.
Mayflower Compact
Signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, the document committed the group to majority-rule government.
Treaty of Greenville
Signed in 1795 whereby twelve Indian tribes ceded most of Ohio and Indiana to the federal government.
Harpers Ferry
Site of abolitionist John Brown's failed raid on the federal arsenal, October 16-17, 1859; Brown became a martyr to his cause after his capture and execution.
Artisans
Skilled craftsmen.
Self-discipline
Some reformers believed that self-fulfillment came through the practice of self-control.
''fire-eaters''
Southern nationalists who hoped to split the Democratic party and the country and form an independent Southern Confederacy.
Women in the Confederacy
Southern women were often forced to manage business affairs, discipline slaves, but also stepped out of their traditional ''sphere'' to run commercial establishments and work in arms factories.
Presidios
Spanish military outposts in Texas.
Mestizos
Spanish word for person of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
Montgomery bus boycott
Sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger, a successful year-long boycott protesting segregation on city buses; led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Yick Wo v. Hopkins
Supreme Court decision in 1886 overturning San Francisco law that, as enforced, discriminated against Chinese-owned laundries; established principle that equal protection of the law embodied in Fourteenth Amendment applied to all Americans, not just former slaves.
Tet offensive
Surprise attack by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the Vietnamese New Year of 1968; turned American public opinion strongly against the war in Vietnam.
Bracero program
System agreed to by Mexican and American governments in 1942 under which tens of thousands of Mexicans entered the United States to work temporarily in agricultural jobs in the Southwest; lasted until 1964 and inhibited labor organization among farm workers since braceros could be deported at any time.
Sit-down strike
Tactic adopted by labor unions in the mid- and late 1930s, whereby striking workers refused to leave factories, making production impossible; proved highly effective in the organizing drive of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Common school
Tax-supported state schools open to all children.
Army-McCarthy hearings
Televised U.S. Senate hearings in 1954 on Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges of disloyalty in the army; his tactics contributed to his censure by the Senate.
Hollywood Ten
Ten ''unfriendly witnesses'' who refused to answer questions at hearings questioning communist influence in Hollywood. They were charged with contempt of Congress and served jail terms of six months to a year.
Great Society
Term coined by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1965 State of the Union address, in which he proposed legislation to address problems of voting rights, poverty, diseases, education, immigration, and the environment.
Tejanos
Texan non-Indian population of Spanish origin.
Reconquista
The ''reconquest'' of Spain from the Moors by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
Boumediene v. Bush
The 5-4 decision in Boumediene v. Bush affirmed the detainees' right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
First modern war
The American Civil War; the first time armies confronted each other with weapons created by the industrial revolution.
''Checkers speech''
The Checkers speech, named after the family dog, rescued Nixon's political career. It illustrated how television was beginning to transform politics by allowing candidates to bring a carefully crafted image directly into Americans' living rooms.
Anglicanism
The Church of England.
Espionage Act
The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited not only spying and interfering with the draft but also false statements that might impede military success.
Foraker Act
The Foraker Act of 1900 declared Puerto Rico an "insular territory", different from previous territories in the West. Its 1 million inhabitants were defined as citizens of Puerto Rico, not the United States, and denied a future path to statehood.
GI Bill of Rights
The GI Bill of Rights provided money for education and other benefits to military personnel returning from World War II.
The Man Nobody Knows
The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 best-seller by advertising executive Bruce Barton, portrayed Jesus Christ as "the greatest advertiser of his day, . . . a virile go-getting he-man of business," who "picked twelve men from the bottom ranks and forged a great organization."
National Recovery Administration
The National Recovery Administration (NRA), created to work with groups of business leaders to establish industry codes that set standards for output, prices, and working conditions.
Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement devoted four-fifths of its text to criticism of institutions ranging from political parties to corporations, unions, and the military-industrial complex. But what made the document the guiding spirit of a new radicalism was the remainder, which offered a new vision of social change.
''public works revolution''
The Roosevelt administration spent far more money on building roads, dams, airports, bridges, and housing than any other activity in the 1930s.
Second Bank of the United States
The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 but President Andrew Jackson vetoed the recharter bill in 1832.
Sharon Statement
The Sharon Statement summarized beliefs that had circulated among conservatives during the past decade; the free market underpinned personal freedom,â government must be strictly limited, and international communism, the gravest threat to liberty, must be destroyed.
Fong Yue Ting
The Supreme Court's decision authorizing the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of law.
Iranian coup
The U.S.- sponsored coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 created resentments that helped lead to Iran's Islamic Revolution twenty-five years later.
Containment
The United States commitment to preventing any further expansion of Soviet power.
Politics of memory
The abandonment of the dream for racial equality as the Civil War become more remembered as a quarrel between white American in which blacks had no significant role.
''middle ground''
The area between European empires and Indian sovereignty that contained intermixed villages of settlers and tribes.
''hard money'' v. ''soft money''
The argument over the use of ''hard money,'' such as gold and silver, against ''soft money,'' or paper currency issued by the government.
''deference''
The assumption among ordinary people that wealth, education, and social prominence carried a right to public office.
''American exceptionalism''
The belief that the United States has a special mission to serve as a refuge from tyranny, a symbol of freedom, and a model for the rest of the world.
Tenochtitlan
The capital city of the Aztec empire, in present-day Mexico.
Sugar
The chief crop produced by slaves in the Western Hemisphere during the eighteenth century.
Military-industrial complex
The conjunction of an immense military establishment with a permanent arms industry'' with and influence felt in ''every office'' in the land.
Factory system
The consolidation of an entire manufacturing process under a single factory roof.
The Bank War
The debate during Andrew Jackson's presidency over the rechartering of the Bank of the United States.
Iron law of supply and demand
The economic theory that determined wages and prices for goods and services.
Abolition
The emancipation of slaves and the removal of slavery as a social institution.
Tobacco colony
The expansion of tobacco cultivation in Virginia.
Sonia Sotomayor
The first Hispanic and third woman justice in the Supreme Court's history, confirmed in August 2009.
House of Burgesses
The first elected assembly in colonial America.
Mattachine Society
The first gay rights organization that worked to persuade the public that apart from their sexual orientation, gays were average Americans who ought not to be persecuted.
John Winthrop
The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Liberty of contract
The idea that contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the workplace.
Free trade
The idea that economic life should be directed by the ''invisible hand'' of the free market rather than by government intervention.
''perfectionism''
The idea that social ills once considered incurable could in fact by eliminated.
Republican motherhood
The ideology that emerged as a result of independence where women played an indispensible role by training future citizens.
''illegal alien''
The law of 1924 established, in effect, for the first time a new category, the "illegal alien." With it came a new enforcement mechanism, the Border Patrol, charged with policing the land boundaries of the United States and empowered to arrest and deport persons who entered the country in violation of the new nationality quotas or other restrictions.
General John Sullivan
The leader of an expedition in 1779 against hostile Iroquois, with the aim of ''the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.''
Emilio Aguinaldo
The leader of the Philippine War against American occupation.
John Smith
The leader of the early Virginia colony.
Army of the Potomac
The main army of the Union.
Balkan crisis
The most complex foreign policy crisis of the Clinton years arose from the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic state in southeastern Europe. Within a few years, the country's six provinces dissolved into five new states. Ethnic conflict plagued several of these new nations.
Southern paternalism
The outlook that both slave and master needed to care for one another.
Impressment
The practice of kidnapping sailors.
Contraband of war
The practice of treating escaped blacks as property of military value subject to confiscation.
The Texas revolt
The revolution of Texas against Mexico led by Stephen Austin that resulted in Texas's independence in 1836.
Dower rights
The right of a married woman to one-third of her husband's property in the event that he died before she did.
Suffrage
The right to vote.
Valley Forge
The site where Washington's army camped during the frigid winter of 1777-1778.
Army of Northern Virginia
The smaller main army of the Confederacy.
Misery index
The sum of the unemployment and inflation rates.
Atlantic slave trade
The systematic importation of African slaves from their native continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, largely fuelled by rising demand for sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco.
The ''new Negro''
The term "New Negro," associated in politics with pan-Africanism and the militancy of the Garvey movement, in art meant the rejection of established stereotypes and a search for black values to put in their place. This quest led the writers of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance to the roots of the black experience, Africa, the rural South's folk traditions, and the life of the urban ghetto.
Multiculturalism
The term for a new awareness of the diversity of American society, past and present, and for vocal demands that jobs, education, and politics reflect that diversity.
''spoils system''
The term meaning the filling of federal government jobs with persons loyal to the party of the president originated in Andrew Jackson's first term.
Columbian Exchange
The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with Columbus's voyages.
Second American Revolution
The transformation of American government and society brought about by the Civil War.
''free coinage'' of silver"
The unrestricted minting of silvery money called for by William Jennings Bryan.
Middle Passage
The voyage of slaves across the Atlantic.
Zoot suit riots
The zoot suit riots of 1943, in which club-wielding sailors and policemen attacked Mexican-American youths wearing flamboyant clothing on the streets of Los Angeles, illustrated the limits of wartime tolerance.
NSC-68
This 1950 manifesto described the Cold War as an epic struggle between the idea of freedom and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin. At stake in the world conflict, it insisted, was nothing less than âthe survival of the free world. One of the most important policy statements of the early Cold War, NSC-68 helped to spur a dramatic increase in American military spending.
Smith Act
This legislation made it a federal crime to ''teach, advocate, or encourage'' the overthrow of the government.
Executive Order 8802
This order banned discrimination in defense jobs and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to monitor compliance.
''strict constructionists''
Those who believed the federal government could only exercise powers specifically listed in the Constitution.
Enforcement Acts
Three acts outlawing terrorist societies and allowing the president to use the army against them.
Kyoto protocol
To great controversy, the Bush administration announced that it would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to combat global warming.
Turnpikes
Toll roads constructed by localities, states, and private companies.
Bretton Woods conference
Town in New Hampshire and site of international agreement in 1944 by which the American dollar replaced the British pound as the most important international currency, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were created to promote rebuilding after World War II and to ensure that countries did not devalue their currencies.
International commerce
Trade between two nations.
Scopes trial
Trial of John Scopes, Tennessee teacher accused of violating state law prohibiting teaching of the theory of evolution; it became a nationally celebrated confrontation between religious fundamentalism and civil liberties.
Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa
Two Shawnee brothers who called for attacks on American frontier settlements.
Sharecropping
Type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers, often former slaves, farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop.
McCulloch v. Maryland
U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice John Marshall, holding that Maryland could not tax the Second Bank of the United States, supported the authority of the federal government versus the states.
Dred Scott decision
U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, on the grounds that such a prohibition would violate the Fifth Amendment rights of slaveholders, and that no black person could be a citizen of the United States.
Plessy v. Ferguson
U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites.
Baker v. Carr
U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the principle of one man, one vote, that is, that legislative districts must be equal in population.
Brown v. Board of Education
U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down racial segregation in public education and declared separate but equal as unconstitutional.
Marshall Plan
U.S. program for the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe through massive aid to former enemy nations as well as allies; proposed by General George C. Marshall in 1947.
Indian New Deal
Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the administration launched an Indian New Deal. Collier ended the policy of forced assimilation and allowed Indians unprecedented cultural autonomy. He replaced boarding schools meant to eradicate the tribal heritage of Indian children with schools on reservations, and dramatically increased spending on Indian health.
''Militant Liberty''
Under the code name Militant Liberty, national security agencies encouraged Hollywood to produce anticommunist movies.
War Advertising Council
Under the watchful eye of the War Advertising Council, private companies joined in the campaign to promote wartime patriotism, while positioning themselves and their brand names for the postwar world.
Public education
Universal public education was viewed as an avenue to restore equality and to equip the less fortunate for advance in the social scale.
Bacon's Rebellion
Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia governor William Berkeley's administration because of governmental corruption and because Berkeley had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids and did not allow them to occupy Indian lands.
Pueblo Revolt
Uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish colonists out of modern-day New Mexico.
McNary-Haugan farm bill
Vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927 and 1928, the bill to aid farmers would have artificially raised agricultural prices by selling surpluses overseas for low prices and selling the reduced supply in the United States for higher prices.
Freedom of the press
Viewed as dangerous by both American and European governments.
''Bleeding Kansas''
Violence between pro- and antislavery settlers in the Kansas Territory, 1856.
Whiskey Rebellion
Violent protest by western Pennsylvania farmers against the federal excise tax on whiskey, 1794.
Cult of domesticity
Virtue and modesty; emphasized as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.
Squatters
Western migrants who set up farms on unoccupied land without a clear legal title.
Iran hostage crisis
When Carter in November 1979 allowed the deposed shah of Iran to seek medical treatment in the United States, Khomeini's followers invaded the American embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-three hostages. They did not regain their freedom until January 1981, on the day Carter's term as president ended. Events in Iran made Carter seem helpless and inept and led to a rapid fall in his popularity.
United States in Russia
Wilson's policies toward the Soviet Union revealed the contradictions within the liberal internationalist vision. On the one hand, in keeping with the principles of the Fourteen Points and its goal of a worldwide economic open door, Wilson hoped to foster trade with the new government. On the other, fear of communism as a source of international instability and a threat to private property inspired military intervention in Russia
The ''flapper''
With her bobbed hair, short skirts, public smoking and drinking, and unapologetic use of birth-control methods such as the diaphragm, the young, single "flapper" epitomized the change in standards of sexual behavior, at least in large cities.
Women and war work
Women took advantage of the wartime labor shortage to move into jobs in factories and into certain largely male professions, particularly nursing.
Daughters of Liberty
Women who spun and wove at home so as not to purchase British goods.
Mill girls
Women who worked at textile mills who were thus given new freedoms and independence not seen before.
''New Feminism''
Women's emancipation movement in the social, economic, cultural, and sexual spheres.
''liberal internationalism''
Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy that rested on the conviction that economic and political progress go hand in hand.
''moral imperialism''
Woodrow Wilson's idea that Americans were ''meant to carry liberty and justice'' throughout the world.''
Free labor
Working for wages or owning a farm or shop.
Women at work
Working women in 1960 earned, on average, only 60 percent of the income of men. Despite the increasing numbers of wage-earning women, the suburban family's breadwinner was assumed to be male, while the wife remained at home.
''patriotic assimilation''
World War II created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children. Millions of Americans moved out of urban ethnic neighborhoods and isolated rural enclaves into the army and industrial plants where they came into contact with people of very different backgrounds.
Muckrakers
Writers who exposed corruption and abuses in politics, business, meatpacking, child labor, and more, primarily in the first decade of the twentieth century; their popular books and magazine articles spurred public interest in reform.
Democracy in America
Written by Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 1830s, a classic account of America society in the midst of its political transformation.
Letters from an American Farmer
Written by Hector St. John de Cre?vecoeur, this French work illustrated the process of exclusion of non-white citizens in the American community.
Thoughts on Government
Written by John Adams in 1776; insisted that the new state constitutions should create ''balanced governments.''
Two Treatises of Government
Written by John Locke around 1680, but became largely influential in the next century. He wrote on the principles of government, the social contract between man and government, and the natural rights of man.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Written by Mary Wollstonecraft; asserts the ''rights of humanity'' should not be ''confined to the male line.''
Notes on the State of Virginia
Written by Thomas Jefferson and published in 1785; a comparison of the races that claimed blacks lacked, partly due to natural incapacity and partly because the bitter experience of slavery had rendered them disloyal to the nation.
Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom
Written by Thomas Jefferson, this bill eliminated religious requirements for voting and officeholding and government financial support for churches.
A Discourse Concerning Western Planting
Written in 1584 by Richard Hakluyt, this work lists twenty-three reasons why Queen Elizabeth I should support the establishment of colonies.
''annuity'' system"
Yearly grants of federal money to Indian tribes that institutionalized continuing government influence in tribal affairs and gave outsiders considerable control over Indian life.
''new world order''
he sudden shift from a bipolar world to one of unquestioned American predominance promised to redefine the country's global role. President George H. W. Bush spoke of the coming of a "new world order."