ALL APUSH TERMS

Agricultural Adjustment Administration

A New Deal program designed to raise agricultural prices by paying farmers not to farm. It was based on the assumption that higher prices would increase farmers' purchasing power and thereby help alleviate the Great Depression.

Fundamentalism

A Protestant Christian movement emphasizing the literal truth of the Bible and opposing religious modernism, which sought to reconcile religion and science. It was especially strong in the Baptist Church and the Church of Christ, first organized in 1906.

Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois

A Supreme Court decision that prohibited states from regulating the railroads because the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. As a result, reformers turned their attention to the federal government, which now held sole power to regulate the railroad industry.

Schenck v. United States

A Supreme Court decision that upheld the Espionage and Sedition Acts, reasoning that freedom of speech could be curtailed when it posed a "clear and present danger" to the nation.

McCarthyism

A brand of vitriolic, fear-mongering anticommunism associated with the career of Senator Joseph _____________. In the early 1950s, Senator _____________ used his position in Congress to baselessly accuse high-ranking government officials and other Americans of conspiracy with communism. The term named after him refers to the dangerous forces of unfairness and fear wrought by anticommunist paranoia.

Roosevelt Corollary

A brazen policy of "preventive intervention" advocated by ___________ _______________ in his Annual Message to Congress in 1904. Adding ballast to the Monroe Doctrine, his corollary stipulated that the United States would retain a right to intervene in the domestic affairs of Latin American nations in order to restore military and financial order.

American Plan

A business-oriented approach to worker relations popular among firms in the 1920s to defeat unionization. Managers sought to strengthen their communication with workers and to offer benefits like pensions and insurance. They insisted on an "open shop" in contrast to the mandatory union membership through the "closed shop" that many labor activists had demanded in the strike wave after World War I.

Scientific Management

A system of industrial management created and promoted in the early twentieth century by Frederick W. Taylor, emphasizing stopwatch efficiency to improve factory performance. The system gained immense popularity across the United States and Europe.

Gilded Age

A term given to the period 1865-1896 by Mark Twain, indicating both the fabulous wealth and the widespread corruption of the era.

City Beautiful Movement

A turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners, who aimed to promote order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying the nation's new urban spaces with grand boulevards, welcoming parks, and monumental public buildings.

Closed Shop

A union-organizing term that refers to the practice of allowing only unionized employees to work for a particular company. The AFL became known for negotiating closed-shop agreements with employers, in which the employer would agree not to hire nonunion members.

Compromise of 1850

Admitted California as a free state, opened New Mexico and Utah to popular sovereignty, ended the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in Washington, D.C., and introduced a more stringent fugitive slave law. Widely opposed in both the North and South, it did little to settle the escalating dispute over slavery.

Great Rapprochement

After decades of occasionally "twisting the lion's tail," American diplomats began to cultivate close, cordial relations with Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century-a relationship that would intensify further during World War I.

Mining Industry

After surface metals were removed, people sought ways to extract ore from under the ground, leading to the development of heavy mining machinery. This, in turn, led to blank, because only big companies could afford to buy and build the necessary machines.

Half-Way Covenant

Agreement allowing unconverted offspring of church members to baptize their children. It signified a waning of religious zeal among second- and third-generation Puritans.

Root-Takahira Agreement

Agreement by which the United States and Japan agreed to respect each other's territorial possessions in the Pacific and to uphold the Open Door in China. The agreement was credited with easing tensions between the two nations, but it also resulted in a weakened American influence over further Japanese hegemony in China.

Mayflower Compact

Agreement to form a majoritarian government in Plymouth, signed aboard the Mayflower. Created a foundation for self-government in the colony.

Quebec Act

Allowed the French residents of Québec to retain their traditional political and religious institutions, and extended the boundaries of the province southward to the Ohio River. Mistakenly perceived by the colonists to be part of Parliament's response to the Boston Tea Party.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Also known as "Obamacare," the act extended health-care insurance to some 30 million Americans, marking a major step toward achieving the century-old goal of providing universal health-care coverage.

Wagner Act

Also known as the National Labor Relations Act, this law protected the right of labor to organize in unions and bargain collectively with employers and established the National Labor Relations Board to monitor unfair labor practices on the part of employers. Its passage marked the culmination of decades of labor protest.

Wilmot Proviso

Amendment that sought to prohibit slavery from territories acquired from Mexico. Introduced by Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot, the failed amendment ratcheted up tensions between North and South over the issue of slavery.

Containment Doctrine

America's strategy against the Soviet Union based on ideas of George Kennan. The doctrine declared that the Soviet Union and communism were inherently expansionist and had to be stopped from spreading through both military and political pressure. _________________ guided American foreign policy throughout most of the Cold War.

Contras

Anti-Sandinista fighters in the Nicaraguan civil war. The ___________ were secretly supplied with American military aid, paid for with money the United States clandestinely made selling arms to Iran.

The Liberator

Antislavery newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison, who called for the immediate emancipation of all slaves.

Free Soil Party

Antislavery party in the 1848 and 1852 elections that opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, arguing that the presence of slavery would limit opportunities for free laborers.

Liberty Party

Antislavery party that ran candidates in the 1840 and 1844 elections before merging with the Free Soil party. Supporters of the Liberty party sought the eventual abolition of slavery, but in the short term hoped to halt the expansion of slavery into the territories and abolish the domestic slave trade.

The Impending Crisis of the South

Antislavery tract, written by white southerner Hinton R. Helper, arguing that nonslaveholding whites actually suffered most in a slave economy.

Al Qaeda

Arabic for "The Base," an international alliance of anti-Western Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist organizations founded in the late 1980s by veterans of the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union. The group was headed by Osama bin Laden and has taken responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks, especially after the late 1990s. Al Qaeda organized the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States from its headquarters in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Since the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the launch of the "global war on terror," the group has been weakened but still poses significant threats around the world.

International Style

Archetypal, post-World War II modernist architectural style, best known for its "curtainwall" designs of steel-and-glass corporate high-rises.

Stamp Act Congress

Assembly of delegates from nine colonies who met in New York City to draft a petition for the repeal of the Stamp Act. Helped ease sectional suspicions and promote intercolonial unity.

V-J (Victory in Japan) Day

August 15, 1945, heralded the surrender of Japan and the final end to World War II.

Tuscarora War

Began with an Indian attack on New Bern, North Carolina. After the Tuscaroras were defeated, remaining Indian survivors migrated northward, eventually joining the Iroquois Confederacy as its sixth nation.

Insular Cases

Beginning in 1901, a badly divided Supreme Court decreed in these cases that the Constitution did not follow the flag. In other words, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos would not necessarily enjoy all American rights.

Arminianism

Belief that salvation is offered to all humans but is conditional on acceptance of God's grace. Different from Calvinism, which emphasizes predestination and unconditional election.

Manifest Destiny

Belief that the United States was destined by God to spread its "empire of liberty" across North America. Served as a justification for mid-nineteenth-century expansionism.

Antinomianism

Belief that the elect need not obey the law of either God or man; most notably espoused in the colonies by Anne Hutchinson.

Social Darwinist

Believers in the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that people gained wealth by "survival of the fittest." Therefore, the wealthy had simply won a natural competition and owed nothing to the poor, and indeed service to the poor would interfere with this organic process. Some ___________ ___________ also applied this theory to whole nations and races, explaining that powerful peoples were naturally endowed with gifts that allowed them to gain superiority over others. This theory provided one of the popular justifications for U.S. imperial ventures like the Spanish-American War.

The Feminine Mystique

Best-selling book by feminist thinker Betty Friedan. This work challenged women to move beyond the drudgery of suburban housewifery and helped launch what would become second-wave feminism.

Battle of Shiloh

Bloody Civil War battle on the Tennessee-Mississippi border that left more than twenty-three thousand soldiers dead, wounded, or missing, and ended in a marginal Union victory.

Civil Law

Body of written law enacted through legislative statutes or constitutional provisions. In countries where civil law prevails, judges must apply the statutes precisely as written.

Bank of the United States

Chartered by Congress as part of Alexander Hamilton's financial program, the bank printed paper money and served as a depository for Treasury funds. It drew opposition from Jeffersonian Republicans, who argued that the bank was unconstitutional.

Battle of Gettysburg

Civil War battle in Pennsylvania that ended in Union victory, spelling doom for the Confederacy, which never again managed to invade the North. Site of General George Pickett's daring but doomed charge on the Northern lines.

Second Battle of Bull Run

Civil War battle that ended in a decisive victory for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who was emboldened to push further into the North.

Ex Parte Milligan

Civil War-era case in which the Supreme Court ruled that military tribunals could not be used to try civilians if civil courts were open.

Bleeding Kansas

Civil war in Kansas over the issue of slavery in the territory, fought intermittently until 1861, when it merged with the wider national Civil War.

Boston Massacre

Clash between unruly Bostonian protestors and locally stationed British redcoats, who fired on the jeering crowd, killing or wounding eleven citizens.

Proprietary Colonies

Colonies-Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware-under the control of local proprietors, who appointed colonial governors.

Olive Branch Petition

Conciliatory measure adopted by the Continental Congress, professing American loyalty and seeking an end to the hostilities. King George rejected the petition and proclaimed the colonies in rebellion.

Merrimack

Confederate ironclad whose successes against wooden ships signaled an end to wooden warships. It fought a historic though inconsequential battle against the Union ironclad, Monitor, in 1862.

Chesapeake Affair

Conflict between Britain and the United States that precipitated the 1807 embargo. The conflict developed when a British ship, in search of deserters, fired on the American Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia.

Interstate Commerce Act

Congressional legislation that established the Interstate Commerce Commission, compelled railroads to publish standard rates, and prohibited rebates and pools. Railroads quickly became adept at using the act to achieve their own ends, but it gave the government an important means to regulate big business.

Thirteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment prohibiting all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude. Former Confederate states were required to ratify the amendment prior to gaining reentry into the Union.

Fourteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment that extended civil rights to freedmen and prohibited states from taking away such rights without due process.

Guantanamo Detention Camp

Controversial prison facility constructed after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Located on territory occupied by the U.S. military, but not technically part of the United States, the facility serves as an extra-legal holding area for suspected terrorists.

First Continental Congress

Convention of delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies that convened in Philadelphia to craft a response to the Intolerable Acts. Delegates established The Association, which called for a complete boycott of British goods.

Northwest Ordinance

Created a policy for administering the Northwest Territories. It included a path to statehood and forbade the expansion of slavery into the territories.

Freedmen's Bureau

Created to aid newly emancipated slaves by providing food, clothing, medical care, education, and legal support. Its achievements were uneven and depended largely on the quality of local administrators.

Insurrectos

Cuban insurgents who sought freedom from colonial Spanish rule. Their destructive tactics threatened American economic interests in Cuban plantations and railroads.

Battle of Saratoga

Decisive colonial victory in upstate New York, which helped secure French support for the Revolutionary cause.

Battle of Fredericksburg

Decisive victory in Virginia for Confederate Robert E. Lee, who successfully repelled a Union attack on his lines.

Declaration of the Rights of Man

Declaration of rights adopted during the French Revolution. Modeled after the American Declaration of Independence.

Emancipation Proclamation

Declared all slaves in rebelling states to be free but did not affect slavery in nonrebelling Border States. The proclamation closed the door on possible compromise with the South and encouraged thousands of Southern slaves to flee to Union lines.

Black Power

Doctrine of militancy and separatism that rose in prominence after 1965. _______ _______ activists rejected Martin Luther King's pacifism and desire for integration. Rather, they promoted pride in African heritage and an often militant position in defense of their rights.

Calvinism

Dominant theological credo of the New England Puritans based on the teachings of John Calvin. Calvinists believed in predestination-that only "the elect" were destined for salvation.

Fundamental Orders

Drafted by settlers in the Connecticut River valley, this document was the first "modern constitution" establishing a democratically controlled government. Key features of the document were borrowed for Connecticut's colonial charter and later, its state constitution.

Mercantilism

Economic theory that closely linked a nation's political and military power to its bullion reserves. Mercantilists generally favored protectionism and colonial acquisition as means to increase exports.

Orders in Council

Edicts issued by the British crown closing French-owned European ports to foreign shipping. The French responded by ordering the seizure of all vessels entering British ports, thereby cutting off American merchants from trade with both parties.

Royal African Company

English joint-stock company that enjoyed a state-granted monopoly on the colonial slave trade from 1672 until 1698. The supply of slaves to the North American colonies rose sharply once the company lost its monopoly privileges.

Virginia Company

English joint-stock company that received a charter from King James I that allowed it to found the Virginia colony.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Established by non-separating Puritans, it soon grew to be the largest and most influential of the New England colonies.

War Production Board

Established in 1942 by executive order to direct all _____ _______________, including procuring and allocating raw materials, to maximize the nation's war machine. The _______ had sweeping powers over the U.S. economy and was abolished in November 1945 soon after Japan's defeat.

Regulator Movement

Eventually violent uprising of backcountry settlers in North Carolina against unfair taxation and the control of colonial affairs by the seaboard elite.

Triangular Trade

Exchange of rum, slaves, and molasses between the North American colonies, Africa, and the West Indies. A small but immensely profitable subset of the Atlantic trade.

Society of the Cincinnati

Exclusive, hereditary organization of former officers in the Continental Army. Many resented the pretentiousness of the order, viewing it as a vestige of pre-Revolutionary traditions.

Black Legend

False notion that Spanish conquerors did little but butcher the Indians and steal their gold in the name of Christ.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Federal legislation that prohibited most further Chinese immigration to the United States. This was the first major legal restriction on immigration in U.S. history.

Panic of 1857

Financial crash brought on by gold-fueled inflation, overspeculation, and excess grain production. Raised calls in the North for higher tariffs and for free homesteads on western public lands.

Korean War

First "hot war" of the Cold War. It began when the Soviet-backed North Koreans invaded South Korea and U.N. forces, dominated by the United States, launched a counteroffensive. The war ended in stalemate in 1953.

Articles of Confederation

First American constitution that established the United States as a loose confederation of states under a weak national Congress, which was not granted the power to regulate commerce or collect taxes. The Articles were replaced by a more efficient Constitution in 1789.

Kristallnacht

German for "night of broken glass," it refers to the murderous pogrom that destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues and sent thousands to concentration camps on the night of November 9, 1938. Thousands more attempted to find refuge in the United States but were ultimately turned away due to restrictive immigration laws.

Zimmermann Note

German foreign secretary Arthur ___________________ had secretly proposed a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. When the note was intercepted and published in March 1917, it caused an uproar that made some Americans more willing to enter the war.

U-Boats

German submarines, named for the German Unterseeboot, or "undersea boat," proved deadly for Allied ships in the war zone. ___-_____ attacks played an important role in drawing the United States into the First World War.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe's widely read novel that dramatized the horrors of slavery. It heightened northern support for abolition and escalated the sectional conflict.

Battle of Quebec

Historic British victory over French forces on the outskirts of Québec. The surrender of Québec marked the beginning of the end of French rule in North America.

Republican Motherhood

Ideal of family organization and female behavior after the American Revolution that stressed the role of women in guiding family members toward republican virtue.

Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Idealistic American volunteers who served in the Spanish Civil War, defending Spanish republican forces from the fascist General Francisco Franco's nationalist coup. Some three thousand Americans served alongside volunteers from other countries.

Fair Labor Standards Act

Important New Deal labor legislation that regulated minimum wages and maximum hours for workers involved in interstate commerce. The law also outlawed labor by children under sixteen. The exclusion of agricultural, service, and domestic workers meant that many blacks, Mexican Americans, and women—who were concentrated in these sectors— did not benefit from the act's protection.

Modernism

In response to the demanding conditions of modern life, this artistic and cultural movement revolted against comfortable Victorian standards and accepted chance, change, contingency, uncertainty, and fragmentation. Originating among avant-garde artists and intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century, ___________________ blossomed into a full-fledged cultural movement in art, music, literature, and architecture.

Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

Incendiary abolitionist tract advocating the violent overthrow of slavery. Published by David Walker, a southern-born free black.

Morrill Tariff Act

Increased duties back up to 1846 levels to raise revenue for the Civil War.

California Gold Rush

Inflow of thousands of miners to northern California after news reports of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January of 1848 had spread around the world by the end of that year. The onslaught of migrants prompted Californians to organize a government and apply for statehood in 1849.

United Nations

International body formed in 1945 to bring nations into dialogue in hopes of preventing further world wars. Much like the former League of Nations in ambition, the ______ was more realistic in recognizing the authority of the Big Five powers in keeping peace in the world. Thus, it guaranteed veto power to all permanent members of its Security Council-Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Ancient Order of Hibernians

Irish semisecret society that served as a benevolent organization for downtrodden Irish immigrants in the United States.

Standard Oil Company

John D. Rockefeller's company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age. By 1877 ___________ ___________ controlled 95 percent of the oil refineries in the United States. It was also one of the first multinational corporations and at times distributed more than half of its kerosene production outside the United States. By the turn of the century it had become a target for trust-busting reformers, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to break up into several dozen smaller companies.

Battle of Buena Vista

Key American victory against Mexican forces in the Mexican War. Elevated General Zachary Taylor to national prominence and helped secure his success in the 1848 presidential election.

Battle of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson

Key victory for Union general Ulysses S. Grant, it secured the North's hold on Kentucky and paved the way for Grant's attacks deeper into Tennessee.

National Recovery Administration

Known by its critics as the "National Run Around," the ______ was an early New Deal program designed to assist industry, labor, and the unemployed through centralized planning mechanisms that monitored workers' earnings and working hours to distribute work and established codes for "fair competition" to ensure that similar procedures were followed by all firms in any particular industrial sector.

Sandinistas

Leftwing anti-American revolutionaries in Nicaragua who launched a civil war in 1979.

Primogeniture

Legal principle that the oldest son inherits all family property or land. Landowners' younger sons, forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere, pioneered early exploration and settlement of the Americas.

Transcendentalism

Literary and intellectual movement that emphasized individualism and self-reliance, predicated upon a belief that each person possesses an "inner light" that can point the way to truth and direct contact with God.

Committees of Correspondence

Local committees established across Massachusetts, and later in each of the thirteen colonies, to maintain colonial opposition to British policies through the exchange of letters and pamphlets.

Tariff of 1857

Lowered duties on imports in response to a high Treasury surplus and pressure from southern farmers.

Iran Contra Affair

Major political scandal of Ronald Reagan's second term that was revealed in 1986. An illicit arrangement of selling "arms for hostages" with Iran and using money to support the contras in Nicaragua, the scandal deeply damaged Reagan's credibility.

Marshall Plan

Massive transfer of aid money to help rebuild postwar Western Europe, intended to bolster capitalist and democratic governments and prevent domestic communist groups from riding poverty and misery to power. The plan was first announced by Secretary of State George _______________ at Harvard's commencement in June 1947.

Settlement Houses

Mostly run by middle-class native-born women, __________ __________ in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States. Many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed lifelong passions for social activism in the __________ __________. Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent.

West Virginia

Mountainous region that broke away from Virginia in 1861 to form its own state after Virginia seceded from the Union. Most of the residents of ___________ ___________ were independent farmers and miners who did not own slaves and thus opposed the Confederate cause.

Erie Canal

New York State canal that linked Lake Erie to the Hudson River. It dramatically lowered shipping costs, fueling an economic boom in upstate New York and increasing the profitability of farming in the Old Northwest.

Zenger Trial

New York libel case against John Peter Zenger. Established the principle that truthful statements about public officials could not be prosecuted as libel.

Silent Majority

Nixon administration's term to describe generally content, law-abiding, middle-class Americans who supported both the Vietnam War and America's institutions. As a political tool, the concept attempted to make a subtle distinction between believers in "traditional" values and the vocal minority of civil rights agitators, student protesters, counterculturalists, and other seeming disruptors of the social fabric.

Southern Strategy

Nixon reelection campaign strategy designed to appeal to conservative whites in the historically Democratic South. The president stressed law and order issues and remained noncommittal on civil rights. This strategy typified the regional split between the two parties as white southerners became increasingly attracted to the Republican party in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

The Association

Nonimportation agreement crafted during the First Continental Congress calling for the complete boycott of British goods.

Democratic Leadership Council

Nonprofit organization of centrist Democrats founded in the mid-1980s. The group attempted to push the Democratic party toward pro-growth, strong defense, and anti-crime policies. Among its most influential early members was Bill Clinton, whom it held up as an example of "third way" politics.

Congress of Racial Equality

Nonviolent civil rights organization founded in 1942 and committed to the "Double V"-victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. After World War II, CORE would become a major force in the civil rights movement.

Copperheads

Northern Democrats who obstructed the war effort by attacking Abraham Lincoln, the draft, and, after 1863, emancipation.

Oneida Community

One of the more radical utopian communities established in the nineteenth century, it advocated "free love," birth control, and eugenics. Utopian communities reflected the reformist spirit of the age.

Tennessee Valley Authority

One of the most revolutionary of the New Deal public works projects, the ______ brought cheap electric power, full employment, low-cost housing, and environmental improvements to Americans in the Tennessee Valley.

Antifederalists

Opponents of the 1787 Constitution, they cast the document as antidemocratic, objected to the subordination of the states to the central government, and feared encroachment on individuals' liberties in the absence of a bill of rights.

Executive Order 9981

Order issued by President Truman to desegregate the armed forces. The president's action resulted from a combination of pressure from civil rights advocates, election-year political calculations, and the new geopolitical context of the Cold War.

Act of Toleration

Passed in Maryland, it guaranteed toleration to all Christians but decreed the death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Ensured that Maryland would continue to attract a high proportion of Catholic migrants throughout the colonial period.

Civil Rights Bill

Passed over Andrew Johnson's veto, the bill aimed to counteract the Black Codes by conferring citizenship on African Americans and making it a crime to deprive blacks of their rights to sue, testify in court, or hold property.

Workingmen's Compensation Act

Passed under Woodrow Wilson, this law granted assistance to federal civil-service employees during periods of disability. It was a precursor to labor-friendly legislation passed during the New Deal.

Racketeers

People who obtain money illegally by fraud, bootlegging, gambling, or threats of violence. ________________ invaded the ranks of labor during the 1920s, a decade when gambling and gangsterism were prevalent in American life.

Cult of Domesticity

Pervasive nineteenth-century cultural creed that venerated the domestic role of women. It gave married women greater authority to shape home life but limited opportunities outside the domestic sphere.

Writ of Habeas Corpus

Petition requiring law enforcement officers to present detained individuals before the court to examine the legality of the arrest. Protects individuals from arbitrary state action. Suspended by Lincoln during the Civil War.

New Freedom

Platform of reforms advocated by Woodrow Wilson in his first presidential campaign, including stronger antitrust legislation to protect small business enterprises from monopolies, banking reform, and tariff reductions. Wilson's strategy involved taking action to increase opportunities for capitalist competition rather than increasing government regulation of large trusts.

Spoils System

Policy of rewarding political supporters with public office, first widely employed at the federal level by Andrew Jackson. The practice was widely abused by unscrupulous office seekers, but it also helped cement party loyalty in the emerging two-party system.

Moral Majority

Political action committee founded by evangelical Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979 to promote traditional Christian values and oppose feminism, abortion, and gay rights. The group was a major linchpin in the resurgent religious right of the 1980s.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Political party organized by civil rights activists to challenge Mississippi's delegation to the Democratic National Convention, who opposed the civil rights planks in the party's platform. Claiming a mandate to represent the true voice of Mississippi, where almost no black citizens could vote, the ________ demanded to be seated at the convention but were denied by party bosses. The effort was both a setback to civil rights activism in the South and a motivation to continue to struggle for black voting rights.

Lewinsky Affair

Political sex scandal that resulted in Bill Clinton's impeachment and trial by Congress. In 1998, Clinton gave sworn testimony in a sexual harassment case that he had never engaged in sexual activity with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. When prosecutors discovered evidence that the president had lied under oath about the affair, to which Clinton admitted, Republicans in Congress began impeachment proceedings. Although Clinton was ultimately not convicted by the Senate, the scandal put a lasting blemish on his presidential legacy.

Republicanism

Political theory of representative government, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, with a strong emphasis on liberty and civic virtue. Influential in eighteenth-century American political thought, it stood as an alternative to monarchical rule.

Bill of Rights

Popular term for the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The amendments secure key rights for individuals and reserve to the states all powers not explicitly delegated or prohibited by the Constitution.

Great Compromise

Popular term for the measure that reconciled the New Jersey and Virginia Plans at the Constitutional Convention, giving states proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate. The compromise broke the stalemate at the convention and paved the way for subsequent compromises over slavery and the Electoral College.

Whiskey Rebellion

Popular uprising of whiskey distillers in southwestern Pennsylvania in opposition to an excise tax on whiskey. In a show of strength and resolve by the new central government, Washington put down the rebellion with militia drawn from several states.

Tammany Hall

Powerful New York political machine that primarily drew support from the city's immigrants, who depended on Tammany Hall patronage, particularly social services.

New Frontier

President Kennedy's nickname for his domestic policy agenda. Buoyed by youthful optimism, the program included proposals for the Peace Corps and efforts to improve education and health care.

Turnpike

Privately funded, toll-based public road constructed in the early nineteenth century to facilitate commerce.

Affirmative Action

Program designed to redress historic racial and gender imbalances in jobs and education. The term grew from an executive order issued by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 mandating that projects paid for with federal funds take concerted action against discrimination based on race in their hiring practices. In the late 1960s, President Nixon's Philadelphia Plan changed the meaning of _____________ _________ to require attention to certain groups, rather than protect individuals against discrimination.

Philadelphia Plan

Program established by Richard Nixon to require construction trade unions to work toward hiring more black apprentices. The plan altered Lyndon Johnson's concept of "affirmative action" to focus on groups rather than individuals.

Fifteenth Amendment

Prohibited states from denying citizens the franchise on account of race. It disappointed feminists, who wanted the amendment to include guarantees for women's suffrage.

Pope's Rebellion

Pueblo Indian rebellion that drove Spanish settlers from New Mexico.

Strategic Defense Initiative

Reagan administration plan announced in 1983 to create a missile defense system over American territory to block a nuclear attack. Derided as "Star Wars" by critics, the plan typified Reagan's commitment to vigorous defense spending even as he sought to limit the size of government in domestic matters.

House of Burgesses

Representative parliamentary assembly created to govern Virginia, establishing a precedent for government in the English colonies.

Taft-Hartley Act

Republican-promoted, antiunion legislation passed over President Truman's vigorous veto that weakened many of labor's New Deal gains by banning the closed shop and other strategies that helped unions organize. It also required union leaders to take a noncommunist oath, which purged the union movement of many of its most committed and active organizers.

Quartering Act

Required colonies to provide food and quarters for British troops. Many colonists resented the act, which they perceived as an encroachment on their rights.

Tenure of Office Act

Required the president to seek approval from the Senate before removing appointees. When Andrew Johnson removed his secretary of war in violation of the act, he was impeached by the House but remained in office when the Senate fell one vote short of removing him.

Battle of San Jacinto

Resulted in the capture of Mexican dictator Santa Anna, who was forced to withdraw his troops from Texas and recognize the Rio Grande as Texas's southwestern border.

Battle of Tippecanoe

Resulted in the defeat of Shawnee chief Tenskwatawa, "the Prophet," at the hands of William Henry Harrison in the Indiana wilderness. After the battle, the Prophet's brother, Tecumseh, forged an alliance with the British against the United States.

Walker Tariff

Revenue-enhancing measure that lowered tariffs from 1842 levels, thereby fueling trade and increasing Treasury receipts.

Boston Tea Party

Rowdy protest against the British East India Company's newly acquired monopoly on the tea trade. Colonists, disguised as Indians, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor, prompting harsh sanctions from the British Parliament.

Model Treaty

Sample treaty drafted by the Continental Congress as a guide for American diplomats. Reflected the Americans' desire to foster commercial partnerships rather than political or military entanglements.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Series of debates between ___________ and ___________ during the U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln gained national prominence and emerged as the leading candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination.

Conquistadores

Sixteenth-century Spaniards who fanned out across the Americas, from Colorado to Argentina, eventually conquering the Aztec and Incan empires.

"Fifty-Four Forty or Fight"

Slogan adopted by mid-nineteenth-century expansionists who advocated the occupation of Oregon Territory, jointly held by Britain and the United States. Though President Polk had pledged to seize all of Oregon, to 54° 40', he settled on the forty-ninth parallel as a compromise with the British.

Fort Sumter

South Carolina location where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in April of 1861, after Union forces attempted to provision the fort.

Redeemers

Southern Democratic politicians who sought to wrest control from Republican regimes in the South after Reconstruction.

Brain Trust

Specialists in law, economics, and welfare, many of them young university professors, who advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped develop the policies of the New Deal.

Foraker Act

Sponsored by Senator ___________ ____ __________, a Republican from Ohio, this accorded Puerto Ricans a limited degree of popular government. The first comprehensive congressional effort to provide for governance of territories acquired after the Spanish-American War, it served as a model for a similar act adopted for the Philippines in 1902.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Standoff between John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 over Soviet plans to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. Although the crisis was ultimately settled in America's favor and represented a foreign-policy triumph for Kennedy, it brought the world's superpowers perilously close to the brink of nuclear confrontation.

New Nationalism

State-interventionist reform program devised by journalist Herbert Croly and advocated by Theodore Roosevelt during his Bull Moose presidential campaign. Roosevelt did not object to continued consolidation of trusts and labor unions. Rather, he sought to create stronger regulatory agencies to ensure that they operated to serve the public interest, not just private gain.

Virginia and Kentucky Resolution

Statements secretly drafted by Jefferson and Madison for the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia. Argued that states were the final arbiters of whether the federal government overstepped its boundaries and could therefore nullify, or refuse to accept, national legislation they deemed unconstitutional.

Levittown

Suburban communities with mass-produced tract houses built in the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas in the 1950s by William _________ and Sons. Typically inhabited by white middle-class people who fled the cities in search of homes to buy for their growing families.

Marbury v. Madison

Supreme Court case that established the principle of "judicial review"-the idea that the Supreme Court had the final authority to determine constitutionality.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

Supreme Court decision that extended federal protection to slavery by ruling that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any territory. Also declared that slaves, as property, were not citizens of the United States.

Tariff

Tax levied on imports. Traditionally, manufacturers support tariffs as protective and revenue-raising measures, while agricultural interests, dependent on world markets, oppose high tariffs.

Goliad

Texas outpost where American volunteers, having laid down their arms and surrendered, were massacred by Mexican forces in 1836. The incident, along with the slaughter at the Alamo, fueled American support for Texan independence.

Industrial Workers of the World

The ______, also known as the "Wobblies," was a radical organization that sought to build "one big union" and advocated industrial sabotage in defense of that goal. At its peak in 1923, it could claim 100,000 members and could gain the support of 300,000. The ______ particularly appealed to migratory workers in agriculture and lumbering and to miners, all of whom suffered from horrific working conditions.

Compromise of 1877

The agreement that finally resolved the 1876 election and officially ended Reconstruction. In exchange for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, winning the presidency, Hayes agreed to withdraw the last of the federal troops from the former Confederate states. This deal effectively completed the southern return to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics.

Hurricane Katrina

The costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States, which killed nearly two thousand Americans. The storm ravaged the Gulf Coast, especially the city of New Orleans, in late August 2005. In New Orleans, high winds and rain caused the city's levees to break, leading to catastrophic flooding, particularly in the city's most impoverished wards. A tardy and feeble response by local and federal authorities exacerbated the damage and led to widespread criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Black Tuesday

The dark, panicky day of October 29, 1929, when over 16,410,000 shares of stock were sold on Wall Street. It was a trigger that helped bring on the Great Depression.

Mechanization of agriculture

The development of engine-driven machines, like the combine, which helped to dramatically increase the productivity of land in the 1870s and 1880s. This process contributed to the end of many family farms.

New Deal

The economic and political policies of Franklin Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s, which aimed to solve the problems of the Great Depression by providing relief for the unemployed and launching efforts to stimulate economic recovery. The ______ ________ built on reforms of the progressive era to expand greatly an American- style welfare state.

Hetch Hetchy Valley

The federal government allowed the city of San Francisco to build a dam here in 1913. This was a blow to preservationists, who wished to protect the Yosemite National Park, where the dam was located.

Sunbelt

The fifteen-state crescent through the American South and Southwest that experienced terrific population and productivity expansion during World War II and particularly in the decades after the war, eclipsing the old industrial Northeast (the "Frostbelt").

Hundred Days

The first _____________ ______ of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, stretching from March 9 to June 16, 1933, when an unprecedented number of reform bills were passed by a Democratic Congress to launch the New Deal.

Battle of Chateau-Thierry

The first significant engagement of American troops in World War I-and, indeed, in any European war. To weary French soldiers, the American doughboys were an image of fresh and gleaming youth.

Hawley-Smoot Tariff

The highest protective tariff in the peacetime history of the United States, passed as a result of good old-fashioned horse trading. To the outside world, it smacked of ugly economic warfare.

Deleveraging

The inverse of "leveraging," whereby businesses increase their financial power by borrowing money (debt) in addition to their own assets (equity). In times of uncertainty or credit tightening, the same businesses seek to improve their debt-to-equity ratios by shedding debt through the sale of assets purchased with borrowed money.

Appeasement

The policy followed by leaders of Britain and France at the 1938 conference in Munich. Their purpose was to avoid war, but they allowed Germany to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

Horizontal Integration

The practice perfected by John D. Rockefeller of dominating a particular phase of the production process in order to monopolize a market, often by forming trusts and alliances with competitors.

Bible Belt

The region of the American South, extending roughly from North Carolina west to Oklahoma and Texas, where Protestant Fundamentalism and belief in literal interpretation of the Bible were traditionally strongest.

Knights of Labor

The second national labor organization, organized in 1869 as a secret society and opened for public membership in 1881. The ___________ were known for their efforts to organize all workers, regardless of skill level, gender, or race. After the mid-1880s their membership declined for a variety of reasons, including the Knights' participation in violent strikes and discord between skilled and unskilled members.

Bolshevik Revolution

The second stage of the Russian Revolution in November 1917 when Vladimir Lenin and his ________________ party seized power and established a communist state. The first stage had occurred the previous February when more moderate revolutionaries overthrew the Russian czar.

V-E (Victory in Europe) Day

The source of frenzied rejoicing, May 8, 1945, marked the official end to the war in Europe, following the unconditional surrender of what remained of the German government.

Reservation system

The system that allotted land with designated boundaries to Native American tribes in the West, beginning in the 1850s and ending with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.

Columbian Exchange

The transfer of goods, crops, and diseases between New and Old World societies after 1492.

Women's Army Corps

The women's branch of the U.S. Army established during World War II to employ women in noncombatant jobs. Women now participated in the armed services in ways that went beyond their traditional roles as nurses.

SPARs (US Coast Guard Women's Reserve)

The women's branch of the U.S. Coast Guard established during World War II to employ women in noncombatant jobs. See WACs.

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service

The women's branch of the U.S. Navy established during World War II to employ women in noncombatant jobs. See WACs.

Agricultural Marketing Act

This act established the Federal Farm Board, a lending bureau for hard-pressed farmers. The act also aimed to help farmers help themselves through new producers' cooperatives. As the depression worsened in 1930, the Board tried to bolster falling prices by buying up surpluses, but it was unable to cope with the flood of farm produce to market.

Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act

This act reversed traditional high-protective-tariff policies by allowing the president to negotiate lower tariffs with trade partners, without Senate approval. Its chief architect was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who believed that tariff barriers choked off foreign trade.

Neutrality Act of 1939

This act stipulated that European democracies might buy American munitions, but only if they could pay in cash and transport them in their own ships, a policy known as "cash-and-carry." It represented an effort to avoid war debts and protect American arms-carriers from torpedo attacks.

Regulars

Trained professional soldiers, as distinct from militia or conscripts. During the French and Indian War, British generals, used to commanding experienced regulars, often showed contempt for ill-trained colonial militiamen.

Middle Passage

Transatlantic voyage slaves endured between Africa and the colonies. Mortality rates were notoriously high.

Brook Farm

Transcendentalist commune founded by a group of intellectuals, who emphasized living plainly while pursuing the life of the mind. The community fell into debt and dissolved when their communal home burned to the ground in 1846.

Assumption

Transfer of debt from one party to another. In order to strengthen the union, the federal government assumed states' Revolutionary War debts in 1790, thereby tying the interests of wealthy lenders with those of the national government.

Coureurs de bois

Translated as "runners of the woods," they were French fur-trappers, also known as "voyageurs" (travelers), who established trading posts throughout North America. The fur trade wreaked havoc on the health and folkways of their Native American trading partners.

Hitler-Stalin Pact

Treaty signed on August 23, 1939, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to fight each other. The fateful agreement paved the way for German aggression against Poland and the Western democracies.

Specie Circular

U.S. Treasury decree requiring that all public lands be purchased with "hard," or metallic, currency. Issued after small state banks flooded the market with unreliable paper currency, fueling land speculation in the West.

Admiralty Courts

Used to try offenders for violating the various Navigation Acts passed by the crown after the French and Indian War. Colonists argued that the courts encroached on their rights as Englishmen since they lacked juries and placed the burden of proof on the accused.

My Lai

Vietnamese village that was the scene of a military assault on March 16, 1968, in which American soldiers under the command of 2nd Lieutenant William Calley murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children. The atrocity produced outrage and reduced support for the war in America and around the world when details of the massacre and an attempted cover-up were revealed in November 1969.

Nat Turner's Rebellion

Virginia slave revolt that resulted in the deaths of sixty whites and raised fears among white southerners of further uprisings.

Opium War

War between Britain and China over trading rights, particularly Britain's desire to continue selling opium to Chinese traders. The resulting trade agreement prompted Americans to seek similar concessions from the Chinese.

King William's War

War fought largely between French trappers, British settlers, and their respective Indian allies. The colonial theater of the larger War of the League of Augsburg in Europe.

Haitian Revolution

War incited by a slave uprising in French-controlled Saint Domingue, resulting in the creation of the first independent black republic in the Americas.

New England Confederation

Weak union of the colonies in Massachusetts and Connecticut led by Puritans for the purposes of defense and organization, an early attempt at self-government during the benign neglect of the English Civil War.

Liberia

West African nation founded in 1822 as a haven for freed blacks, fifteen thousand of whom made their way back across the Atlantic by the 1860s.

Woman's Loyal League

Women's organization formed to help bring about an end to the Civil War and encourage Congress to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery.

William Penn

(1644-1718) Prominent Quaker activist who founded Pennsylvania as a haven for fellow Quakers in 1681. He established friendly relations with neighboring Indian tribes and attracted a wide array of settlers to his colony with promises of economic opportunity and ethnic and religious toleration.

Nathaniel Bacon

(1647-1676) Young Virginia planter who led a rebellion against Governor William Berkeley in 1676 to protest Berkeley's refusal to protect frontier settlers from Indian attacks.

Thorstein Veblen

(1857-1929) An eccentric Norwegian American economist who savagely attacked "predatory wealth" and "conspicuous consumption" in his most important book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

William H. Taft

(1857-1930) The corpulent civil governor of the Philippines under William McKinley. _______ went on to become twenty-seventh president of the United States in 1909.

Australian ballot

A system that allows voters privacy in marking their ballot choices. Developed in Australia in the 1850s, it was introduced to the United States during the progressive era to help counteract boss rule.

Patronage

A system, prevalent during the Gilded Age, in which political parties granted jobs and favors to party regulars who delivered votes on election day. ___________ was both an essential wellspring of support for both parties and a source of conflict within the Republican party.

Army-McCarthy Hearings

Congressional hearings called by Senator Joseph ________________ to accuse members of the army of communist ties. In this widely televised spectacle, _____________ finally went too far for public approval. The hearings exposed the senator's extremism and led to his eventual disgrace.

Pendleton Act

Congressional legislation that established the Civil Service Commission, which granted federal government jobs on the basis of examinations instead of political patronage, thus reining in the spoils system.

Greenbacks

Paper currency issued by the Union Treasury during the Civil War. Inadequately supported by gold, ___________ fluctuated in value throughout the war, reaching a low of 39 cents on the dollar.

Non-Intercourse Act

Passed alongside the repeal of the Embargo Act, it reopened trade with all but the two belligerent nations, Britain and France. The act continued Jefferson's policy of economic coercion, still with little effect.

Declaratory Act

Passed alongside the repeal of the Stamp Act, it reaffirmed Parliament's unqualified sovereignty over the North American colonies.

Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act

Passed amidst worries about the effects that labor strikes would have on war production, this law allowed the federal government to seize and operate plants threatened by labor disputes. It also criminalized strike action against government-run companies.

Compromise Tariff of 1833

Passed as a measure to resolve the Nullification Crisis, it provided that tariffs be lowered gradually, over a period of ten years, to 1816 levels.

Fugitive Slave Law

Passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, it set high penalties for anyone who aided escaped slaves and compelled all law enforcement officers to participate in retrieving runaways. Strengthened the antislavery cause in the North.

Force Bill

Passed by Congress alongside the compromise Tariff of 1833, it authorized the president to use the military to collect federal tariff duties.

Force Acts

Passed by Congress following a wave of Ku Klux Klan violence, the acts banned clan membership, prohibited the use of intimidation to prevent blacks from voting, and gave the U.S. military the authority to enforce the acts.

Congregational Church

Self-governing Puritan congregations without the hierarchical establishment of the Anglican Church.

Aroostook War

Series of clashes between American and Canadian lumberjacks in the disputed territory of northern Maine, resolved when a permanent boundary was agreed upon in 1842.

Pequot War

Series of clashes between English settlers and Pequot Indians in the Connecticut River valley. Ended in the slaughter of the Pequots by the Puritans and their Narragansett Indian allies.

McKinley Tariff

Shepherded through Congress by President __________ ____________, this tariff raised duties on Hawaiian sugar and set off renewed efforts to secure the annexation of Hawaii to the United States.

Treaty of Wanghia

Signed by the United States and China, it assured the United States the same trading concessions granted to other powers, greatly expanding America's trade with the Chinese.

Encomienda

Spanish government's policy to "commend," or give, Indians to certain colonists in return for the promise to Christianize them. Part of a broader Spanish effort to subdue Indian tribes in the West Indies and on the North American mainland.

Amistad

Spanish slave ship dramatically seized off the coast of Cuba by the enslaved Africans aboard. The ship was driven ashore in Long Island and the slaves were put on trial. Former president John Quincy Adams argued their case before the Supreme Court, securing their eventual release.

Johnson Debt Default Act

Steeped in ugly memories of World War I, this spiteful act prevented debt-ridden nations from borrowing further from the United States.

Laird Rams

Two well-armed ironclad warships constructed for the Confederacy by a British firm. Seeking to avoid war with the United States, the British government purchased the two ships for its Royal Navy instead.

Siege of Vicksburg

Two-and-a-half-month siege of a Confederate fort on the Mississippi River in Tennessee. ___________ finally fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July of 1863, giving the Union army control of the Mississippi River and splitting the South in two.

Operation Desert Storm

U.S.-led multicountry military engagement in January and February of 1991 that drove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army out of neighboring Kuwait. In addition to presaging the longer and more protracted Iraq War of the 2000s, the 1991 war helped undo what some called the "Vietnam Syndrome," a feeling of military uncertainty that plagued many Americans.

New York Slave Revolt

Uprising of approximately two dozen enslaved Africans that resulted in the deaths of nine whites and the brutal execution of twenty-one participating blacks.

South Carolina Slave Revolt

Uprising, also known as the Stono Rebellion, of more than fifty South Carolina blacks along the Stono River. They attempted to reach Spanish Florida but were stopped by the South Carolina militia.

New York Draft Riots

Uprising, mostly of working-class Irish Americans, in protest of the draft. Rioters were particularly incensed by the ability of the rich to hire substitutes or purchase exemptions.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Vivid autobiography of the escaped slave and renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Robert de la Salle

(1643-1687) French explorer who led an expedition down the Mississippi River in the 1680s.

Stephen Kearny

(1794-1848) American officer during the Mexican War who led a detachment of troops into New Mexico and captured Santa Fe.

Rock 'n' roll

"Crossover" musical style that rose to dominance in the 1950s, merging black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass and country. Featuring a heavy beat and driving rhythm, ______ ____ _____ music became a defining feature of the 1950s youth culture.

Caleb Cushing

(1800-1879) Massachusetts-born congressman and diplomat who "opened" China to U.S. trade, negotiating the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844.

Virginia Plan

"Large state" proposal for the new constitution, calling for proportional representation in both houses of a bicameral Congress. The plan favored larger states and thus prompted smaller states to come back with their own plan for apportioning representation.

Noche Triste

"Sad night," when the Aztecs attacked Hernan Cortes and his forces in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, killing hundreds. Cortes laid siege to the city the following year, precipitating the fall of the Aztec empire and inaugurating three centuries of Spanish rule.

New Jersey Plan

"Small-state plan" put forth at the Philadelphia convention, proposing equal representation by state, regardless of population, in a unicameral legislature. Small states feared that the more populous states would dominate the agenda under a proportional system.

Jacob Arminius

(1560-1609) Dutch theologian who rejected predestination, preaching that salvation could be attained through the acceptance of God's grace and was open to all, not just the elect.

Tenskwatawa (The Prophet)

("the Prophet") (1775-1836) Shawnee religious leader, also known as "the Prophet," who led a spiritual revival, emphasizing Indian unity and cultural renewal and urging Indians to limit contact with Americans. The Prophet lost his following in 1811 after he and a small army of followers were defeated by William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe.

Isabella of Castile

(1451-1504) Spanish monarch who, along with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, funded Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, which led to his discovery of the West Indies.

Christopher Columbus

(1451-1506) Genoese explorer who stumbled upon the West Indies in 1492 while in search of a new water route to Asia. Columbus made three subsequent voyages across the Atlantic and briefly served as a colonial administrator on the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti.

Ferdinand of Aragon

(1452-1516) Spanish monarch who, along with his wife Isabella of Castile, funded Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, which led to his discovery of the West Indies.

Moctezuma

(1466-1520) Last of the Aztec rulers, who saw his powerful empire crumble under the force of the Spanish invasion led by Hernan Cortes.

Martin Luther

(1483-1546) German friar who touched off the Protestant Reformation when he nailed a list of grievances against the Catholic Church to the door of Wittenberg's cathedral in 1517.

Bartolome de las Casas

(1484-1566) Reform-minded Spanish missionary who worked to abolish the encomienda system and documented the mistreatment of Indians in the Spanish colonies.

Hernan Cortes

(1485-1547) Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztec empire and claimed Mexico for Spain.

Henry VIII

(1491-1547) Tudor monarch who launched the Protestant Reformation in England when he broke away from the Catholic Church in order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

John Calvin

(1509-1564) French Protestant reformer whose religious teachings formed the theological basis for New England Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and members of the Dutch Reformed Church. Calvin argued that humans were inherently weak and wicked, and he believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful God who predestined select individuals for salvation.

Francisco Coronado

(1510-1554) Spanish explorer who ventured from western Mexico through present-day Arizona and up to Kansas in search of fabled golden cities.

Elizabeth I

(1533-1603) Protestant queen of England whose forty-five-year reign from 1558 to 1603 firmly secured the Anglican Church and inaugurated a period of maritime exploration and conquest. Never having married, she was dubbed the "Virgin Queen" by her contemporaries.

James I

(1566-1625) Formerly James VI of Scotland, he became James I of England at the death of Elizabeth I. James I supported overseas colonization, granting a charter to the Virginia Company in 1606 for a settlement in the New World. He also cracked down on both Catholics and Puritan Separatists, prompting the latter to flee to Holland and, later, to North America.

Lord De la Warr

(1577-1618) Colonial governor who imposed harsh military rule over Jamestown after taking over in 1610. A veteran of England's brutal campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr applied harsh "Irish" tactics in his war against the Indians, sending troops to torch Indian villages and seize provisions. The colony of Delaware was named after him.

Captain John Smith

(1580-1631) English adventurer who took control of Jamestown in 1608 and ensured the survival of the colony by directing gold-hungry colonists toward more productive tasks. Smith also established ties with the Powhatan Indians through the chief's daughter, Pocahontas, who had "saved" Smith from a mock execution the previous year.

John Rolfe

(1585-1622) English colonist whose marriage to Pocahontas in 1614 sealed the peace of the First Anglo-Powhatan War.

John Winthrop

(1588-1649) First governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. An able administrator and devout Puritan, Winthrop helped ensure the prosperity of the newly established colony and enforce Puritan orthodoxy, taking a hard line against religious dissenters like Anne Hutchinson.

William Bradford

(1590-1657) Erudite leader of the separatist Pilgrims who left England for Holland and eventually sailed on the Mayflower to establish the first English colony in Massachusetts. His account of the colony's founding, Of Plymouth Plantation, remains a classic of American literature and an indispensable historical source.

Oliver Cromwell

(1599-1658) Puritan general who helped lead parliamentary forces during the English Civil War and ruled England as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.

Lord Baltimore

(1605-1675) Established Maryland as a haven for Catholics. Baltimore unsuccessfully tried to reconstitute the English manorial system in the colonies and gave vast tracts of land to Catholic relatives, a policy that soon created tensions between the seaboard Catholic establishment and backcountry Protestant planters.

William Berkeley

(1606-1677) Royal governor of Virginia, with brief interruptions, from 1641 until his death. Berkeley, a member of Virginia's seaboard elite, drew the ire of backwater settlers for refusing to protect them against Indian attacks. This friction eventually led to Bacon's Rebellion.

Charles II

(1630-1685) Assumed the throne with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Charles sought to establish firm control over the colonies, ending the period of relative independence on the American mainland.

Duke of York

(1633-1701) Catholic English monarch who reigned as James II from 1685 until he was deposed during the Glorious Revolution in 1689. When the English seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, they renamed it in the duke's honor to commemorate his support for the colonial venture.

Sir Edmund Andros

(1637-1714) Much loathed administrator of the Dominion of New England, which was created in 1686 to strengthen imperial control over the New England colonies. Andros established strict control, doing away with town meetings and popular assemblies and taxing colonists without their consent. When word of the Glorious Revolution in England reached the colonists, they promptly dispatched Andros back to England.

Louis XIV

(1638-1715) Long-reigning French monarch who took a keen interest in colonization, sending French explorers throughout North America, establishing outposts in present-day Canada and Louisiana, and launching France to global preeminence. Louis XIV oversaw the construction of the magnificent palace at Versailles, from where he ruled until his death.

Edward Braddock

(1695-1755) Hardheaded and imperious British general, whose detachment of British and colonial soldiers was routed by French and Indian forces at Fort Duquesne.

James Oglethorpe

(1696-1785) Soldier-statesman and leading founder of Georgia. A champion of prison reform, Oglethorpe established Georgia as a haven for debtors seeking to avoid imprisonment. During the War of Jenkins's Ear, Oglethorpe successfully led his colonists in battle, repelling a Spanish attack on British territory.

John Peter Zenger

(1697-1746) New York printer tried for seditious libel against the state's corrupt royal governor. His acquittal set an important precedent for freedom of the press.

Jonathan Edwards

(1703-1758) New England minister whose fiery sermons helped touch off the First Great Awakening. Edwards emphasized human helplessness and depravity and touted that salvation could be attained through God's grace alone.

Benjamin Franklin

(1706-1790) American printer, inventor, statesman, and revolutionary. Franklin first established himself in Philadelphia as a leading newspaper printer, inventor, and author of Poor Richard's Almanac. Franklin later became a leading revolutionary and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. During the Revolutionary War, Franklin served as commissioner to France, securing that nation's support for the American cause.

William Pitt

(1708-1778)British parliamentarian who rose to prominence during the French and Indian War as the brilliant tactician behind Britain's victory over France.

Thomas Hutchinson

(1711-1780) Royal governor of Massachusetts during the run-up to the Revolution, Hutchinson misjudged colonial zeal during the Tea Act controversy and insisted that East India Company ships unload in Boston Harbor, thereby prompting the Boston Tea Party.

George Grenville

(1712-1770) British prime minister who fueled tensions between Britain and her North American colonies through his strict enforcement of Navigation Laws and his support for the Sugar and Stamp Acts.

Father Junipero Sierra

(1713-1784) Franciscan priest who established a chain of missions along the California coast, beginning in San Diego in 1769, with the aim of Christianizing and civilizing native peoples.

George Whitefield

(1714-1770) Itinerant English preacher whose rousing sermons throughout the American colonies drew vast audiences and sparked a wave of religious conversion, the First Great Awakening. Whitefield's emotionalism distinguished him from traditional, "old light," ministers who embraced a more reasoned, stoic approach to religious practice.

Admiral de Grasse

(1722-1788) French admiral whose fleet blocked British reinforcements, allowing Washington and Rochambeau to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.

John Burgoyne

(1722-1792) British general who led an ill-fated invasion of upstate New York, suffering a crushing defeat and surrendered to the American general Horatio Gates at Saratoga.

Samuel Adams

(1722-1803) Boston revolutionary who organized Massachusetts committees of correspondence to help sustain opposition to British policies. A delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, Adams continued to play a key role throughout the Revolutionary and early national periods, later serving as governor of his home state.

Crispus Attucks

(1723-1770) Runaway slave and leader of the Boston protests that resulted in the "Boston Massacre," in which Attucks was first to die.

Comte de Rochambeau

(1725-1807) General in command of French forces during the American Revolution, he fought alongside George Washington at Yorktown.

Lord Sheffield

(1725-1831) Parliamentarian who persuaded Britain to take a hard line in negotiations with the newly independent United States, closing off American trade with the West Indies and continuing to enforce navigation laws. His approach prompted many Americans to call for a stronger central government, culminating in the 1787 Philadelphia convention.

James Wolfe

(1727-1759) Young British commander who skillfully outmaneuvered French forces in the Battle of Québec during the French and Indian War.

William Howe

(1729-1814) British general who, despite victories on the battlefield, failed to deal a crushing blow to Washington's Continental army. By attacking Philadelphia instead of reinforcing General Burgoyne at Saratoga, Howe also inadvertently contributed to that crucial American victory.

Baron von Steuben

(1730-1794) German-born inspector general of the Continental army who helped train the novice colonial militia in the art of warfare.

Lord North

(1732-1792) Tory prime minister and pliant aide to George III from 1770 to 1782. North's ineffective leadership and dogged insistence on colonial subordination contributed to the American Revolution.

George Washington

(1732-1799) Revolutionary War general and first president of the United States. A Virginia-born planter, Washington established himself as a military hero during the French and Indian War. He served as commander in chief of the Continental army during the War of Independence, securing key victories at Saratoga and Yorktown. Unanimously elected president under the new national Constitution in 1788, Washington served two terms, focusing primarily on strengthening the national government, establishing a sound financial system, and maintaining American neutrality amidst the escalating European conflict.

Richard Henry Lee

(1733-1794) Virginia planter and revolutionary who served as a member of the Continental Congress. He first introduced the motion asserting America's independence from Britain, which was later supplanted by Thomas Jefferson's more formal and rhetorically moving declaration. Lee went on to become the first U.S. senator from Virginia under the new constitution.

Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur

(1735-1813) French settler whose essays depicted life in the North American colonies and described what he saw as a new American identity—an amalgam of multiple ethnicities and cultures.

John Adams

(1735-1826) American revolutionary, statesman, and second president of the United States. One of the more radical patriots on the eve of the Revolution, Massachusetts-born Adams helped guide the Continental Congress toward a declaration of independence from Britain. From 1778 to 1788, Adams involved himself with international diplomacy, serving as minister to France, Britain, and the Netherlands. After serving as Washington's vice president, he was elected president in his own right in 1796. Adams's administration suffered from Federalist infighting, international turmoil, and domestic uproar over the Alien and Sedition Acts, all of which contributed to his defeat in the election of 1800.

Patrick Henry

(1736-1799) American revolutionary and champion of states' rights, Henry became a prominent antifederalist during the ratification debate, opposing what he saw as despotic tendencies in the new national constitution.

John Hancock

(1737-1793) Boston smuggler and prominent leader of the colonial resistance, who served as president of the Second Continental Congress. In 1780 Hancock became the first governor of Massachusetts, a post he held with only a brief intermission until his death.

Thomas Paine

(1737-1809) British-born pamphleteer and author of Common Sense, a fiery tract that laid out the case for American independence. Later an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, Paine became increasingly radical in his views, publishing the anti-clerical The Age of Reason in 1794, which cost him the support of his American allies.

Common Sense

(1737-1809) Thomas Paine's pamphlet urging the colonies to declare independence and establish a republican government. The widely read pamphlet helped convince colonists to support the Revolution.

Richard Montgomery

(1738-1775) Irish-born British army veteran who served as a general in the Continental army during the Revolution. He joined Benedict Arnold in a failed attempt to seize Québec in 1775.

Ethan Allen

(1738-1789) Revolutionary War officer who, along with Benedict Arnold, fought British and Indian forces in frontier New York and Vermont.

Lord Charles Cornwallis

(1738-1805) British general during the Revolutionary War who, having failed to crush Greene's forces in South Carolina, retreated to Virginia, where his defeat at Yorktown marked the beginning of the end for Britain's efforts to suppress the colonial rebellion.

John Singleton Copley

(1738-1815) Massachusetts-born artist best known for his portraits of prominent colonial Americans, including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. A Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, Copley spent the rest of his life in London, painting portraits of British aristocrats and depicting scenes from English history.

George III

(1738-1820) British monarch during the run-up to the American Revolution, George III contributed to the imperial crisis with his dogged insistence on asserting Britain's power over her colonial possessions.

Benedict Arnold

(1741-1801) Revolutionary War general turned traitor who valiantly held off a British invasion of upstate New York at Lake Champlain but later switched sides, plotting to sell out the Continental stronghold at West Point to the redcoats. His scheme was discovered and the disgraced general fled to British lines.

Samuel Chase

(1741-1811) Federalist Supreme Court justice who drew the ire of Jeffersonian Republicans for his biting criticism of Republican policies. In 1804, the House of Representatives brought charges of impeachment against him but failed to make the case that his unrestrained partisanship qualified as "high crimes and misdemeanors." Acquitted by the Senate, he served on the Court until his death.

Nathanael Greene

(1742-1786) General in command of the Continental army in the Carolina campaign of 1781. The "Fighting Quaker" successfully cleared most of Georgia and South Carolina of British troops despite losing a string of minor battles.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

(1743-1803) Haitian revolutionary who led a successful slave uprising and helped establish an independent Haiti in 1797. In 1802, L'Ouverture was captured by a French force sent to reestablish control over the island. Shipped back to France and imprisoned for treason, he succumbed to pneumonia in 1803.

Joseph Brant

(1743-1807) Mohawk chief and Anglican convert who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, believing that only a British victory could halt American westward expansion.

Thomas Jefferson

(1743-1826) Author of the Declaration of Independence, ambassador to France, and third president of the United States. As one of the leaders of the Democratic-Republican party, Jefferson advocated a limited role for the national government, particularly in the area of finance. As president, however, Jefferson oversaw significant expansion of the federal state through the purchase of Louisiana Territory and the enactment of the Embargo of 1807.

Meriwether Lewis

(1744-1809) American soldier and explorer who led the famous expedition through Louisiana Territory from 1804 to 1806. After briefly serving as governor of upper Louisiana Territory, Lewis died in an apparent suicide in 1809.

Abigail Adams

(1744-1818) The wife of President John Adams. Abigail had her own opinions about the course of the American Revolution and urged her husband to take the needs and rights of women into consideration in the construction of the new government.

"Mad Anthony" Wayne

(1745-1796) Revolutionary War soldier and commander in chief of the U.S. Army from 1792 to 1796, he secured the Treaty of Greenville after soundly defeating the Miami Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

William Henry Harrison

(1773-1841) Hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe and ninth president of the United States. Harrison, a Whig, won the 1840 election on a "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign, which played up his credentials as a backwoods westerner and Indian fighter. Harrison died of pneumonia just four weeks after his inauguration.

John Jay

(1745-1829) Leading American revolutionary and diplomat who negotiated the Treaty of Paris and, later, the much-criticized Jay Treaty of 1794, which averted war with Britain but failed to address key American grievances. Jay also served as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1789 to 1795, a post he left to become governor of New York.

Robert Livingston

(1746-1813) American statesman who served as minister to France from 1801 to 1804 and negotiated the purchase of Louisiana Territory in 1803.

Daniel Shays

(1747-1825) Revolutionary War veteran who led a group of debtors and impoverished backcountry farmers in a rebellion against the Massachusetts government in 1786, calling for paper money, lighter taxes, and an end to property seizures for debt. Though quickly put down, the rebellion raised the specter of mob rule, precipitating calls for a stronger national government.

James Madison

(1751-1836) Principal author of the Constitution, co-author of The Federalist, and fourth president of the United States. A leading advocate of a strong national government in the 1780s, Madison later joined Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans in advocating a more limited role for the federal state. As president, Madison inherited the conflict over trade with Britain and France, which eventually pushed him to declare war on Britain in 1812.

Little Turtle

(1752-1812) Miami Indian chief whose warriors routed American forces in 1790 and 1791 along the Ohio frontier. In 1794, Little Turtle and his braves were defeated by General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, after which they were forced to cede vast tracts of the Old Northwest under the Treaty of Greenville.

Louis XVI

(1754-1793) King of France from 1774 to 1792; he and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded during the French Revolution.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

(1754-1838) French foreign minister whose attempts to solicit bribes from American envoys in the infamous XYZ Affair prompted widespread calls for war with France.

John Marshall

(1755-1835) Chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835, Marshall strengthened the role of the courts by establishing the principle of judicial review. During his tenure, the Court also expanded the powers of the federal government through a series of decisions that established federal supremacy over the states.

Aaron Burr

(1756-1836) Revolutionary War soldier and vice president under Thomas Jefferson, Burr is perhaps most famous for fatally wounding Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. In 1806, Burr led a failed plot to separate the trans-Mississippi West from the United States. Narrowly acquitted of treason, Burr fled to France, where he tried to convince Napoleon to ally with Britain against the United States.

John Trumbull

(1756-1843) Connecticut-born painter who, like many of his contemporaries, traveled to England to pursue his artistic ambitions. Trumbull was best known for his depictions of key events in the American Revolution, including the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Alexander Hamilton

(1757-1804) Revolutionary War soldier and first Treasury secretary of the United States. A fierce proponent of a strong national government, Hamilton attended the Philadelphia convention and convincingly argued for the Constitution's ratification in The Federalist. As Treasury secretary, he advocated the assumption of state debts to bolster the nation's credit and the establishment of a national bank to print sound currency and boost commerce. Hamilton died from a gunshot wound suffered during a duel with then-Vice President Aaron Burr.

James Wilkinson

(1757-1825) Military governor of Louisiana Territory who conspired with Aaron Burr to separate from the United States and ally with Spanish-controlled areas of the Americas.

Marquis de Lafayette

(1757-1834) French nobleman who served as major general in the colonial army during the American Revolution and aided the newly independent colonies in securing French support.

William Wilberforce

(1759-1833) British politician who championed the abolition of the slave trade, and later slavery itself. An evangelical Christian, Wilberforce delivered rousing speeches on the floor of the House of Commons, galvanizing public support for the abolitionist cause.

Albert Gallatin

(1761-1849) Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1813 under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Gallatin sought to balance the federal budget and reduce the national debt.

Edmond Genet

(1763-1834) Representative of the French Republic who in 1793 tried to recruit Americans to invade Spanish and British territories in blatant disregard of Washington's Neutrality Proclamation.

John Jacob Astor

(1763-1848) German-born fur trader and New York real estate speculator, who amassed an estate of $30 million by the time of his death.

Robert Fulton

(1765-1815) Pennsylvania-born painter and engineer who constructed the first operating steamboat, the Clermont, in 1807.

Eli Whitney

(1765-1825) Great American inventor best known for his cotton gin, which revolutionized the southern economy. Whitney also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts in the production of muskets.

Black Hawk

(1767-1838) Sauk war chief who led the Sauk and Fox resistance against eviction under the Indian Removal Act in Illinois and Wisconsin. Brutally crushed by American forces, he surrendered in 1832 and lived out his days on a reservation in Iowa.

John Quincy Adams

(1767-1848) Son of second president John Adams, John Quincy Adams served as secretary of state under James Monroe before becoming the sixth president of the United States. A strong advocate of national finance and improvement, Adams faced opposition from states' rights advocates in the South and West. His controversial election-the allegedly "corrupt bargain" of 1824-and his lack of political acumen further hampered his presidential agenda.

Samuel Slater

(1768-1835) British-born mechanic and father of the American "factory system," establishing textile mills throughout New England.

Napoleon Bonaparte

(1769-1821) French emperor who waged a series of wars against his neighbors on the European continent from 1800 until his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. In 1803, having failed to put down the Haitian rebellion, Napoleon relinquished France's remaining North American possessions by selling Louisiana Territory to the United States.

Dewitt Clinton

(1769-1828) Governor of New York State and promoter of the Erie Canal, which linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. "Clinton's Big Ditch," as the canal was called, transformed upstate New York into a center of industry and gave rise to the midwestern cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago.

William Clark

(1770-1838) Explorer who joined Meriwether Lewis in leading the expedition of Louisiana Territory from 1804 to 1806. After the expedition, Clark played a key role in shaping America's Indian policy, seeking to strengthen American relations with the Indians through trade.

Sally Hemings

(1773-1835) One of Thomas Jefferson's slaves on his plantation in Monticello. DNA testing confirms that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children.

Henry Clay

(1777-1852) Secretary of state and U.S. senator from Kentucky, Clay was known as the "Great Compromiser," helping to negotiate the Missouri Compromise in 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850. As a National Republican, later Whig, Clay advocated a strong national agenda of internal improvements and protective tariffs, known as the American System.

Roger B. Taney

(1777-1864) Chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, ___________ overturned Marshall's strict emphasis on contract rights, ruling in favor of community interest in the famous Charles River Bridge case in 1837. Maryland-born ___________ also presided over the landmark Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in the territories.

John C. Calhoun

(1782-1850) Vice president under Andrew Jackson, Calhoun became a U.S. senator from South Carolina after a public break with the administration. A fierce supporter of states' rights, Calhoun advocated South Carolina's position during the nullification crisis. In the 1840s and 1850s, he staunchly defended slavery, accusing free-state northerners of conspiring to free the slaves.

Daniel Webster

(1782-1852) Lawyer, congressman, and secretary of state, Webster teamed up with Henry Clay in the Bank War against Andrew Jackson in 1832. Hoping to avoid sectional conflict, Webster opposed the annexation of Texas but later urged the North to support the Compromise of 1850.

Lewis Cass

(1782-1866) War veteran, diplomat, and U.S. senator, Cass ran as the Democratic candidate in the 1848 election and lost to Zachary Taylor. Cass is best known as the father of "popular sovereignty," the notion that the sovereign people of a territory should decide for themselves the issue of slavery.

Zachary Taylor

(1784-1850) Military general and twelfth U.S. president, Taylor emerged as a popular war hero after defeating Santa Anna's forces at Buena Vista in the war with Mexico. As president, Taylor, a Louisiana slave owner, sought to avoid a sectional confrontation over slavery, though he opposed the Compromise of 1850.

John Audubon

(1785-1851) French-born naturalist and author of the beautifully illustrated Birds of America.

Peter Cartwright

(1785-1872) Methodist revivalist who traversed the frontier from Tennessee to Illinois in the first decades of the nineteenth century, preaching against slavery and alcohol and calling on sinners to repent.

Nicholas Biddle

(1786-1844) Banker, financier, and president of the Second Bank of the United States from 1822 until the bank's charter expired in 1836.

Winfield Scott

(1786-1866) Military officer and presidential candidate, Scott first made a name for himself as a hero of the War of 1812. During the war with Mexico, he led the American campaign against Mexico City, overcoming tremendous handicaps to lead his men to victory. He later made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1852 as the Whig candidate.

Sacajawea

(1788-1812) Shoshone guide who led Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their exploration of the American West.

James Fenimore Cooper

(1789-1851) American novelist and a member of New York's Knickerbocker Group, Cooper wrote adventure tales, including The Last of the Mohicans, which won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Tyler

(1790-1862) Tenth president of the United States. A Whig in name only, Tyler opposed central tenets of the Whig platform, including tariffs, internal improvements, and a national bank.

James Buchanan

(1791-1868) Fifteenth president of the United States, ___________, a Pennsylvania-born Democrat, sympathized with the South and opposed any federal interference with its "peculiar institution." As president, he supported Kansas's Lecompton Constitution and opposed the Homestead Act, antagonizing northern Democrats and hopelessly splitting the Democratic party.

Samuel Morse

(1791-1872) Inventor of the telegraph and the telegraphic code that bears his name. He led the effort to connect Washington and Baltimore by telegraph and transmitted the first long-distance message—"What hath God wrought?"—in May 1844.

Thaddeus Stevens

(1792-1868) Pennsylvania congressman who led the radical Republican faction in the House of Representatives during and after the Civil War, advocating for abolition and, later, the extension of civil rights to freed blacks. He also called for land redistribution to break the power of the planter elite and to provide African Americans with the economic means to sustain their newfound independence.

Charles Grandison Finney

(1792-1875) One of the leading revival preachers during the Second Great Awakening, Finney presided over mass camp meetings throughout New York State, championing temperance and abolition and urging women to play a greater role in religious life.

Stephen Austin

(1793-1836) American who established the first major Anglo settlements in Texas under an agreement with the Mexican government. Though loyal to Mexico, Austin advocated for local Texans' rights, particularly the right to bring slaves into the region. Briefly imprisoned by Santa Anna for inciting rebellion, Austin returned to Texas in 1836 to serve as secretary of state of the newly independent republic until his death later that year.

Sam Houston

(1793-1863) President of the republic of Texas and U.S. senator, Houston led Texas to independence in 1836 as commander in chief of the Texas army. As president of the republic, Houston unsuccessfully sought annexation into the United States. Once Texas officially joined the Union in 1845, Houston was elected to the U.S. Senate, later returning to serve as governor of Texas until 1861, when he was removed from office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.

Lucretia Mott

(1793-1880) Prominent Quaker and abolitionist, Mott became a champion for women's rights after she and her fellow female delegates were not seated at the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848.

Matthew Perry

(1794-1858) American naval officer sent by Millard Fillmore to negotiate a trade deal with Japan. Backed by an impressive naval fleet, Perry showered Japanese negotiators with lavish gifts. Combining military bravado with diplomatic finesse, he negotiated the landmark Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854, which ended Japan's two centuries of isolation.

Santa Anna

(1794-1876) Mexican general, president, and dictator who opposed Texas's independence and later led the Mexican army in the war against the United States.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

(1794-1877) A railroad magnate who made millions in steamboating before beginning a business consolidating railroads and eliminating competition in the industry.

James K. Polk

(1795-1849) Eleventh president of the United States. A North Carolina Democrat, largely unknown on the national stage, Polk campaigned on a platform of American expansion, advocating the annexation of Texas and the "reoccupation" of Oregon. As president, Polk provoked war with Mexico, which added vast tracts of land to the United States but led to a bitter sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories.

David Walker

(1796-1830) Black abolitionist and author of the incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which advocated a bloody end to white supremacy.

Horace Mann

(1796-1859) Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and a champion of public education who advocated more and better schoolhouses, longer terms, better pay for teachers, and an expanded curriculum.

Sojourner Truth

(1799-1883) Black abolitionist, preacher, and women's rights activist, who worked tirelessly on behalf of slaves and freed blacks.

Dred Scott

(1800-1858) Black slave who sued his master for freedom, triggering the landmark Supreme Court decision that extended federal protection for slavery in the territories. Backed by abolitionists, he based his case on the five years he spent with his master in free-soil Illinois and Wisconsin.

John Brown

(1800-1859) Radical abolitionist who launched an attack on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to lead slaves in a violent uprising against their owners. ___________, who first took up arms against slavery during the Kansas civil war, was captured shortly after he launched his ill-conceived raid on the armory and was sentenced to hang.

Nicholas Trist

(1800-1874) American diplomat who negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican War and through which the United States acquired a vast amount of territory from Mexico.

Millard Fillmore

(1800-1874) New York congressman and vice president under Taylor, Fillmore took over the presidency after Taylor's death in 1850. A practical politician, he threw his support behind the Compromise of 1850, ensuring its passage. He was passed over for the Whig nomination in 1852 when the party chose to select the legendary war hero Winfield Scott.

Benjamin Wade

(1800-1878) A founder of the Republican party and senator from Ohio from 1851 to 1869. A passionate abolitionist, he pressured President Lincoln throughout the Civil War to pursue harsher policies toward the South. He co-sponsored the ___________-Davis Bill in 1864, which required 50 percent of the registered voters of a Southern state to take a loyalty oath as a precondition for restoration to the Union, rather than the 10 percent proposed by Lincoln. As president pro tem of the Senate in 1868, he was next in line for the presidency should Andrew Johnson be impeached, and the prospect that someone of such radical views might become president may have contributed to the failure of the effort to impeach Johnson.

William Seward

(1801-1872) U.S. senator and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. An avid opponent of slavery, ___________ was a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in both 1856 and 1860. Later, as one of Lincoln's closest advisers, he helped handle the difficult tasks of keeping European nations out of the Civil War. He is best known, however, for negotiating the purchase of Alaska, dubbed "___________'s Folly" by expansion-weary opponents of the deal.

Robert Owen

(1801-1877) Scottish-born textile manufacturer and founder of New Harmony, a short-lived communal society of about a thousand people in Indiana.

Brigham Young

(1801-1877) Second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Young led his Mormon followers to Salt Lake City, Utah, after Joseph Smith's death. Under Young's discipline and guidance, the Utah settlement prospered, and the church expanded to include over 100,000 members by Young's death in 1877.

Dorothea Dix

(1802-1887) New England teacher-author and champion of mental health reform, Dix assembled damning reports on insane asylums and petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to improve conditions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882) Boston-born scholar and leading American transcendentalist whose essays, most notably "Self-Reliance," stressed individualism, self-improvement, optimism, and freedom.

Theodore Dwight Weld

(1803-1895) Fervent abolitionist and author of American Slavery as It Is, an antislavery tract that dramatized the horrors of slave life.

Franklin Pierce

(1804-1869) Pro-southern Democrat from New Hampshire who became the fourteenth president of the United States on a platform of territorial expansion. As president, he tried to provoke war with Spain and seize Cuba, a plan he quickly abandoned once it was made public. Pierce emphatically supported the Compromise of 1850, vigorously enforced the Fugitive Slave Law, and threw his support behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

John Deere

(1804-1886) Inventor of the steel plow, which revolutionized farming in the Midwest, where fragile wooden plows had failed to break through the thick soil.

Neal S. Dow

(1804-1897) Nineteenth-century temperance activist, dubbed the "Father of Prohibition" for his sponsorship of the Maine Law of 1851 that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the state.

Joseph Smith

(1805-1844) Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), the young Smith gained a following after an angel directed him to a set of golden plates that, when deciphered, became the Book of Mormon. Smith's communal, authoritarian church and his advocacy of plural marriage antagonized his neighbors in Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois, where he was murdered by a mob in 1844.

William Lloyd Garrison

(1805-1879) Ardent abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper that advocated the immediate emancipation of slaves. In 1833, Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, which became the largest abolitionist organization in the North, counting more than 250,000 members by 1838.

Robert E. Lee

(1807-1870) Confederate general in command of the Confederate army during the Civil War. A bold tactician, ___________ kept his army on the offensive throughout most of the war, skillfully outmaneuvering Union armies in key battles. ___________'s fortunes reversed after his defeat at Gettysburg, though he continued to battle Union forces throughout Virginia until his surrender at Appomattox. After the war, ___________ was indicted for treason but never charged, and he actively worked to bring about a peaceful reunion of North and South.

Charles Francis Adams

(1807-1886) Whig politician and foreign minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. ___________ intervened in 1863 to prevent a British firm from selling Laird rams to the Confederacy.

Napoleon III

(1808-1873) Nephew of Napoleon I and president of the Second Republic of France, ___________ declared himself emperor of the French in 1852. Hoping to capitalize on America's preoccupation with the Civil War, he sent a French army to occupy Mexico in 1863, installing Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. Under threat from a newly unified United States, he withdrew his support for his puppet in 1867.

Andrew Johnson

(1808-1875) Seventeenth president of the United States, North Carolina-born ___________ assumed the presidency after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. Much to the disgust of radical Republicans in Congress, ___________, a Democrat, took a conciliatory approach to the South during Reconstruction, granting sweeping pardons to former Confederates and supporting Southern Black Codes against freedmen. In 1868, ___________ was impeached by the House of Representatives for breaching the Tenure of Office Act. Acquitted by the Senate, he remained in office to serve out his term.

Jefferson Davis

(1808-1889) U.S. senator from Mississippi and president of the Confederate States of America. A West Point graduate, ___________ staunchly defended slavery and Southern rights throughout his career, but he initially opposed secession in 1860. As president of the Confederacy, ___________ faced the formidable task of overcoming Southern localism in directing his war effort. After the war, ___________ was briefly imprisoned but was pardoned by Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809-1849) American poet and author of Gothic horror short stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," which reflected a distinctly morbid sensibility for Jacksonian America.

William T. Johnson

(1809-1851) Free New Orleans black, known as the "barber of Natchez," who eventually owned fifteen slaves.

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882) A British naturalist whose 1859 book On the Origin of Species outlined a theory of evolution based on natural selection, whereby the strongest individuals of a particular species survived and reproduced while weaker individuals died out. This theory had an enormous impact not just on science but on religion and society too, as people wrestled with the challenge evolutionary theory posed to biblical notions of divine creation and applied the ideas of natural selection to human society.

Cyrus McCormick

(1809-1885) Inventor of the McCormick mower-reaper, a horse-drawn contraption that fueled the development of large-scale agriculture in the trans-Allegheny West.

Horace Greeley

(1811-1872) A New York newspaper editor, ___________ ran for president in 1872 under the mantles of the Liberal Republican and Democratic parties.

Charles Sumner

(1811-1874) Massachusetts senator and abolitionist, ___________ opposed the extension of slavery, speaking out passionately on the civil war in Kansas. ___________ is best known for the caning he received at the hands of Preston Brooks on the Senate floor in 1856. After his recovery, he returned to the Senate and led the radical Republican coalition against Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction.

Isaac Singer

(1811-1875) American inventor and manufacturer who made his fortune by improving on Elias Howe's sewing machine. Singer's machine fueled the ready-made clothing industry in New England.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896) Connecticut-born abolitionist and author of the best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that awakened millions of northerners to the cruelty of slavery.

Martin Delany

(1812-1885) Black abolitionist and advocate of relocating freed blacks to Africa, even visiting West Africa's Niger Valley in search of a suitable location in 1859.

Stephen A. Douglas

(1813-1861) U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, ___________ played a key role in passing the Compromise of 1850, though he inadvertently reignited sectional tensions in 1854 by proposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1858, ___________ famously sparred with Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-___________ debates, defeating Lincoln in the Senate race that year but losing to the Illinois Republican in the presidential election of 1860.

Henry Ward Beecher

(1813-1887) Preacher, reformer, and abolitionist, ___________ was the son of famed evangelist Lyman ___________ and brother of author Harriet ___________ Stowe. In the 1850s, he helped raise money to support the New England Emigrant Aid Company in its efforts to keep slavery out of Kansas Territory. After the Civil War, ___________ emerged as perhaps the best-known Protestant minister, in part because of his ability to adapt Christianity to fit the times, emphasizing the compatibility of religion, science, and modernity.

John C. Fremont

(1813-1890) Explorer who helped overthrow the Mexican government in California after the outbreak of war with Mexico. He later ran for president as the Republican nominee in 1856 but lost the election to Democratic candidate James Buchanan.

David Wilmot

(1814-1868) Pennsylvania congressman best known for his "Wilmot Proviso," a failed amendment that would have prohibited slavery from any of the territories acquired from Mexico. He later went on to help organize the Free Soil and Republican parties, supporting Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Edwin Stanton

(1814-1869) Secretary of war under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, ___________ advocated for stronger measures against the South during Reconstruction, particularly after widespread violence against African Americans erupted in the region. In 1868, Johnson removed ___________ in violation of the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, giving pretense for radical Republicans in the House to impeach him.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(1815-1902) Abolitionist and woman suffragist, Stanton organized the first Woman's Rights Convention near her home in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. After the Civil War, Stanton urged Congress to include women in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, despite urgings from Frederick Douglass to let freedmen have their hour. In 1869, she, along with Susan B. Anthony, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to lobby for a constitutional amendment granting women the vote.

Henry David Thoreau

(1817-1862) American transcendentalist and author of Walden: Or Life in the Woods. A committed idealist and abolitionist, he advocated civil disobedience, spending a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that supported slavery.

Lucy Stone

(1818-1893) Abolitionist and women's rights activist who kept her maiden name after marriage and inspired other women—"Lucy Stoners"—to follow her example. Though she campaigned to include women in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, she did not join Stanton and Anthony in denouncing the amendments when it became clear the changes would not be made. In 1869 she founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which lobbied for suffrage primarily at the state level.

Frederick Douglass

(1818-1895) Prominent back abolitionist, whose autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, detailed his experience in bondage and his daring escape to the North. More practical than many of his fellow abolitionists, Douglass looked to politics to put an end to slavery. After the Civil War, he continued to write and speak on behalf of blacks, calling on the federal government to help ensure economic independence for newly freed slaves.

Preston Brooks

(1819-1857) Fiery South Carolina congressman who senselessly caned Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. His violent temper flared in response to Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech, in which the Massachusetts senator threw bitter insults at the southern slaveocracy, singling out ___________'s South Carolina colleague, Senator Andrew Butler.

Elias Howe

(1819-1867) Massachusetts-born inventor of the sewing machine. Unable to convince American manufacturers to adopt his invention, he briefly moved to England before returning to the United States to find his sewing machine popularized by Isaac Singer. Howe won a patent infringement suit against Singer in 1854 and continued to produce sewing machines until his death.

Walt Whitman

(1819-1892) Brooklyn-born poet and author of Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems, written largely in free verse, that exuberantly celebrated America's democratic spirit.

Cyrus Field

(1819-1892) Promoter of the first transatlantic cable that linked Ireland and Newfoundland in 1854. After the first cable went dead, Field lobbied for a heavier cable, which was finally laid in 1866.

Clement Vallandigham

(1820-1871) Democratic congressman from Ohio who led the Copperhead faction of the party in opposition to the Civil War. Convicted by a military tribunal for his treasonous outbursts, ___________ was banished to the South, though he later made his way to Canada and made an unsuccessful bid for the Ohio governorship.

William Tecumseh Sherman

(1820-1891) Union general who led the destructive march through Georgia in 1864. A pioneer practitioner of "total war," he advocated bringing war to the civilian population to undercut morale and destroy supplies destined for Confederate troops.

Susan B. Anthony

(1820-1906) Reformer and woman suffragist, Anthony, with long-time friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, advocated for temperance and women's rights in New York State, established the abolitionist Women's Loyal League during the Civil War, and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 to lobby for a constitutional amendment giving women the vote.

John C. Breckinridge

(1821-1875) Vice president under James Buchanan, ___________ ran as the candidate of the southern wing of the Democratic party in 1860 and lost the election to Abraham Lincoln. A Kentucky slave owner, ___________ acknowledged the South's right to secede but worked tirelessly to hammer out a compromise in the weeks before Lincoln's inauguration. Once the Civil War began, he served as a Confederate general, briefly serving as Jefferson Davis's secretary of war in 1865.

Elizabeth Blackwell

(1821-1910) America's first female physician, ___________ helped organize the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War to aid the Union war effort by training nurses, collecting medical supplies, and equipping hospitals.

Clara Barton

(1821-1912) Massachusetts-born teacher and philanthropist who served as a nurse with the Union army during the Civil War. After the war, she became involved with the newly formed International Red Cross, serving as the first president of the American branch from 1882 to 1904.

Ulysses S. Grant

(1822-1885) Ohio-born Union general and eighteenth president of the United States. During the war, ___________ won Lincoln's confidence for his boldness and his ability to stomach the steep casualties that victory required. First assigned to the West, ___________ attained Union victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg, seizing control of the Mississippi River and splitting the South in two. After taking command of the Union army, he fought ___________ in a series of bloody battles in Virginia, culminating in ___________'s surrender at Appomattox. As president, he took a hard line against the South, but economic turmoil and waning support for Reconstruction undermined his efforts.

Rutherford Hayes

(1822-1893) The former Republican governor of Ohio who became president after the contested 1876 election. By 1880 he had lost the support of his party and was not renominated for the office.

Frederick Law Olmsted

(1822-1903) Journalist and leading American landscape architect. His landmark designs include New York's Central Park, Boston's "Emerald Necklace," and the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

William Walker

(1824-1860) Tennessee-born adventurer who made several forays into Central America in the 1850s. After an unsuccessful ploy to take over Baja California in 1853, Walker ventured into Nicaragua, installing himself as president in 1856. His dream of establishing a planter aristocracy in Nicaragua faltered when neighboring Central American nations allied against him. Walker met his fate before a Honduran firing squad in 1860.

Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson

(1824-1863) Daring Confederate general and brilliant tactician, who routinely took men on long marches to outflank Union lines. He led his troops to victory at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) and protected Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from Northern invasion in the first year of the Civil War. Joining Lee at Richmond, he helped halt the Union's Peninsula Campaign in 1862. ___________ was killed by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May of 1863.

George Pickett

(1825-1875) Confederate general who led the bold but ill-fated charge against Union forces at Gettysburg.

Stephen Foster

(1826-1864) Popular American folk composer, Foster, a Pennsylvania-born white, popularized minstrel songs, which fused African rhythms with nostalgic melodies.

George McClellan

(1826-1885) Union general in command of the Army of the Potomac from 1861 to 1862, ___________ led the failed Peninsula Campaign in 1861 and later fought Lee to a virtual stalemate at Antietam. He boosted the morale and confidence of his troops but tested Lincoln's patience by routinely hesitating to send men into battle. In 1864, ___________ ran against Lincoln as the Democratic nominee, campaigning against emancipation and the harsh treatment of the South while repudiating the antiwar stance of the Copperheads.

Chester Arthur

(1829-1886) Elected as vice president in 1880, ___________ became president after Garfield's assassination. He was primarily known for his efforts at civil service reform, which culminated in the Pendleton Act.

Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886) Massachusetts-born poet who, despite spending her life as a recluse, created a vivid inner world through her poetry, exploring themes of nature, love, death, and immortality. Refusing to publish during her lifetime, she left behind nearly two thousand poems, which were published after her death.

James G. Blaine

(1830-1893) American statesman who served in the House thirteen years (1863-1876) and then a little over four years in the Senate (1876-1881). He served as Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875. As secretary of state under James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, _________ advocated a "Big Sister" policy of U.S. domination in Latin America.

Oliver Howard

(1830-1909) Union general put in charge of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction. ___________ later founded and served as president of Howard University, an institution aimed at educating African American students.

James Garfield

(1831-1881) Elected to the presidency in 1880, ___________ served as president for only a few months before being assassinated by Charles Guiteau, who claimed to have killed him because he was denied a job through patronage when ___________ was elected. The assassination fueled efforts to reform the spoils system.

"Waving the Bloody Shirt"

(1831-1881) The use of Civil War imagery by political candidates and parties to draw votes to their side of the ticket.

Maximilian

(1832-1867) Archduke of Austria who in 1864 was installed by Napoleon III as emperor of Mexico. The well-intentioned but hapless ___________ saw his government collapse in 1867 when the French withdrew their support under pressure from the United States.

Horatio Alger

(1832-1899) The writer of dozens of novels for children, __________ popularized the notion of "rags to riches," that by hard work and a bit of a luck, even a poor boy could pull himself up into the middle class.

Sally Tompkins

(1833-1916) Southern woman who established an infirmary for wounded Confederate soldiers in Richmond, Virginia. When Confederate hospitals were brought under military control, Jefferson Davis commissioned ___________ as an officer with the rank of captain, making her the first female military officer in American history.

Mark Twain

(1835-1910) A satirist and writer, __________ is best known for his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His work critiqued American politics and society, especially the racial and economic injustice that he saw in the South and West. __________ traveled abroad extensively, and his work was read and loved around the world.

Richard Olney

(1835-1917) The pugnacious successor to James G. Blaine as secretary of state, serving from 1895 to 1897, __________ stirred up conflict with Great Britain during the Venezuelan crisis of 1895-1896. He also insisted on the protection of American lives and property and on reparations for losses incurred during violent disturbances in Cuba, China, and Turkey.

Andrew Carnegie

(1835-1919) A tycoon who came to dominate the burgeoning steel industry. His company, later named United States Steel, was the biggest corporation in U.S. history in 1901. After he retired, he donated most of his fortune to public libraries, universities, arts organizations, and other charitable causes.

Jay Gould

(1836-1892) A railroad magnate who was involved in the Black Friday scandal in 1869 and later gained control of many of the nation's largest railroads, including the Union Pacific. He became revered and hated for his ability to manipulate railroad stocks for his personal profit and for his ardent resistance to organized labor.

Winslow Homer

(1836-1910) Boston-born artist who excelled in portraying New England's pastoral farms and swelling seas in the native realist style.

Grover Cleveland

(1837-1908) President from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897; ___________'s first term was dominated by the issues of military pensions and tariff reforms. He lost the election of 1888, but he ran again and won in 1892. During his second term, he faced one of the most serious economic depressions in the nation's history but failed to enact policies to ease the crisis.

J.P. Morgan

(1837-1913) A banker who became a national symbol of the power of the banks during the Gilded Age, he helped all the big businesses of the era consolidate their holdings and ultimately bought Carnegie's steel empire for more than $400 million in 1900. He also helped to bail the U.S. government out of a currency crunch in 1895 when he organized a loan to the government of $65 million in gold. In 1902 his Northern Securities Company became one of the first targets of Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting crusades, but Roosevelt's 1907 decision to allow a steel merger under ___________'s watch showed the limits of Roosevelt's efforts.

George Dewey

(1837-1917) Commander of the American Asiatic Squadron who boldly captured Manila Bay and the Philippines at the launch of the Spanish-American War. His actions ultimately led to fierce debates about the propriety of American imperialism.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones

(1837-1930) A prominent labor activist and community organizer, dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America" in 1902 by a West Virginia district attorney. ___________ was born in Ireland and worked as a dressmaker and schoolteacher before turning to labor organizing in the 1870s, first for the Knights of Labor and later for the United Mine Workers. By the turn of the century, she had adopted the matronly public persona of "Mother Jones." In 1903 she organized a "Children's Crusade" of youthful mill and mine workers who marched from Pennsylvania to New York to publicize the issue of child labor.

John Wilkes Booth

(1838-1865) Maryland-born actor and Confederate sympathizer who assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. ___________ died of a gunshot wound a week later after refusing to surrender to federal troops, though it is unclear if the fatal bullet came from one of the soldiers or his own revolver.

John Hay

(1838-1905) Named U.S. ambassador to England in 1897 when William McKinley became president. _____ later served as McKinley's secretary of state. He was author of the Open Door note, which called for free economic competition in China.

John Muir

(1838-1914) This noted naturalist split with conservationists like Gifford Pinchot by trying to protect natural "temples" like the Hetch Hetchy Valley from development. In 1892 he founded the Sierra Club, which is now one of the most influential conservation organizations in the United States. His writings and philosophy shaped the formation of the modern environmental movement.

Liliuokalani

(1838-1917) The last reigning queen of Hawaii, whose defense of native Hawaiian self-rule led to a revolt by white settlers and her dethronement.

"Butcher" Weyler

(1838-1930) _____________ ___________ ___________ was a Spanish general who arrived in Cuba in 1896 to put down the insurrection. He became notorious for herding many civilians into barbed-wire reconcentration camps.

Frances E. Willard

(1839-1898) This pious leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union wished to eliminate the sale of alcohol and thereby "make the world more homelike." Her ecumenical "do everything" reform sensibility encouraged some women to take the leap toward more radical causes like woman suffrage while allowing more conservative women to stick comfortably with temperance work.

Thomas B. Reed

(1839-1902) The Republican congressman from Maine who became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1889 and then led the Billion-Dollar Congress like a "czar," making sure that his agenda dictated the business of the legislature.

John D. Rockefeller

(1839-1937) The founder of the Standard Oil Company, he developed the technique of horizontal integration and compelled other oil companies to join the Standard Oil "trust." He became the richest person in the world and the United States' first billionaire. He later became known for his philanthropic support of universities and medical research.

Alfred Thayer Mahan

(1840-1914) American naval officer and author whose book of 1890, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, impressed a generation of imperialists around the world with its argument that control of the sea was the key to world dominance.

Henry James

(1843-1916) Expatriate novelist and brother of philosopher William __________. A master of "psychological realism," he experimented in novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove with point of view and interior monologue.

Henry Demarest Lloyd

(1847-1903) A muckraking journalist and reform leader whose book Wealth Against Commonweath (1894) excoriated the sins of the Standard Oil Company. _______ became one of the leading intellectuals behind the progressive movement, influencing such figures as Clarence Darrow, Florence Kelley, and John Dewey.

Joseph Pulitzer

(1847-1911) A publisher whose newspapers, including the New York World, became a symbol of the sensationalist journalism of the late nineteenth century.

Josiah Strong

(1847-1916) Protestant clergyman and author of Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885). He touted the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization and helped summon Americans to spread their religion abroad.

Alexander Graham Bell

(1847-1922) The inventor of the telephone, patented in 1876.

Thomas Alva Edison

(1847-1931) The inventor of, among other things, the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the mimeograph, the moving picture, and a machine capable of taking X-rays. Ultimately he held more than one thousand patents for his inventions.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

(1848-1907) Irish-born sculptor who immigrated to America and produced some of the nation's finest beaux arts sculptures, including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common.

Jacob Riis

(1849-1914) Danish-born police reporter and pioneering photographer who exposed the ills of tenement living in his 1890 book illustrated with powerful photographs, How the Other Half Lives. His work led to the establishment of "model tenements" in New York City.

Henry Cabot Lodge

(1850-1924) A prominent Republican senator from Massachusetts, ________ was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a persistent thorn in President Wilson's internationalist side when he crusaded against the League of Nations.

Samuel Gompers

(1850-1924) The president of the American Federation of Labor nearly every year from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924. ___________ was no foe of capitalism but wanted employers to offer workers a fair deal by paying high wages and providing job security.

Dupuy de Lome

(1851-1904) The Spanish minister to the United States who found himself at the center of a scandal when his private letter maligning President McKinley was made public in 1898.

New Immigrants

(1854-1951) Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them. These __________ __________________ congregated in ethnic urban neighborhoods, where they worried many native-born Americans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of whom introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate.

Robert M. La Follete

(1855-1925) Hailing from Wisconsin, _______________ was one of the most militant of the progressive Republican leaders. He served in the Senate and in the Wisconsin governor's seat and was a perennial contender for the presidency, keeping the spirit of progressivism alive into the 1920s.

Eugene V. Debs

(1855-1926) A tireless socialist leader who organized the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike in 1894. ______ was later convicted under the World War I's Espionage Act in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. A frequent presidential candidate on the Socialist party ticket, in 1920 he won more than 900,000 votes campaigning for president from his prison cell.

Frederick Taylor

(1856-1915) A prominent inventor and engineer who developed "scientific management," a system of shop-floor organization that stressed efficient, highly supervised labor management and production methods. His methods revolutionized manufacturing across the industrialized world.

Booker T. Washington

(1856-1915) As head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, __________ advocated for vocational education for African Americans so that they could gain economic security. Believing that southern whites were not yet ready for social equality, he instead concentrated on gaining economic power for blacks without directly challenging the southern racial order.

Tom Watson

(1856-1922) A Populist leader who initially advocated interracial political mobilization but later became a symbol of the party's shift to white supremacy.

Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939) An Austrian physician who led the way in developing the field of psychoanalysis. One of the most influential minds of the twentieth century, _________ was known for his argument that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of nervous and emotional ills.

Louis D. Brandeis

(1856-1941) A progressive-minded confidant of Woodrow Wilson, ____________ was the litigator behind Muller v. Oregon. In 1916, Wilson made him the first Jewish American to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ida Tarbell

(1857-1944) The most eminent woman in the muckraking movement and one of the most respected business historians of her generation. In 1904 she earned a national reputation for publishing a scathing history of the Standard Oil Company, the "Mother of Trusts." Two years later she joined Ray Stannard Baker, William Allen White, and other muckrakers in purchasing The American Magazine, which became a journalistic podium in their campaign for honest government and an end to business abuses.

Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt

(1858-1919) Rough Rider __________ __________________ was a cowboy-hero of the Cuban campaign who rode his popularity into the governorship of New York State and then into the vice president's office. He became president when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He won reelection as a Republican in 1904 and then lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912, when he tried for another term as the Progressive party candidate.

Florence Kelley

(1859-1932) A tireless crusader for women's and labor rights, Kelley was Illinois's first chief factory inspector and a leader of the National Consumers League, an organization dedicated to improving working conditions for women and children. Kelley also went on to help found the NAACP.

Carrie Chapman Catt

(1859-1947) A leader of the revived women's suffrage movement, __________ served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920. She was also active internationally, helping women in other countries gain suffrage and advocating for international peace.

John Dewey

(1859-1952) A leader of the pragmatist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, __________ applied its philosophy to education and social reform, advocating "learning by doing" as well as the application of knowledge to solving real-life problems. He became an outspoken promoter of social and political reforms that broadened American democracy.

William Jennings Bryan

(1860-1925) A Democratic congressman from Nebraska who was an outspoken "free-silver" advocate. His "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic convention in 1896 won him the party's nomination. The Populists also backed him in a "fusion" ticket with the Democrats. ___________'s eloquent advocacy for free silver and farmers' interests earned him millions of devoted followers, but never quite enough to win the presidency, for which he ran three times (1896, 1900, 1908). Later in life, as secretary of state he led the resistance to American entry into World War I. An ardent Fundamentalist, in 1925 he gained fame from some quarters—and great disdain from others—for joining the prosecution of high school biology teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution.

Jane Addams

(1860-1935) __________ founded Hull House, America's first settlement house, to help immigrants assimilate through education, counseling, and municipal reform efforts. She also advocated pacifism throughout her life, including during World War I, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Frederick Jackson Turner

(1861-1932) Author of the famous "frontier thesis" which argued that the taming of the West had shaped the nation's character. The experience of molding wilderness into civilization encouraged Americans' characteristic embrace of individualism and democracy. He entirely ignored the role of Native Americans in the West.

Albert B. Fall

(1861-1944) A scheming conservationist who served as secretary of the interior under Warren G. Harding. ______ was one of the key players in the notorious Teapot Dome scandal.

Henry Ford

(1863-1947) The "Father of the Traffic Jam," _______ developed the Model T ________ and pioneered its assembly-line production. As founder of the ________ Motor Company, he became one of the wealthiest men in the world.

William Randolph Hearst

(1863-1951) A newspaper magnate who started by inheriting his father's San Francisco Examiner and ultimately owned newspapers and magazines published in cities across the United States. He was largely responsible for the spread of sensationalist journalism. The __________ Corporation still owns dozens of newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets in the United States and around the world.

Warren G. Harding

(1865-1923) Twenty-ninth president of the United States, from 1921 to his death in office in 1923. He began his career as a newspaper publisher before getting elected to the Ohio senate, where he served from 1899 to 1903. He then served as lieutenant governor of Ohio (1903-1905) and as a U.S. senator (1915-1921) before winning the presidency. His time in office was beset with scandals, many of them the result of the disloyalty of scheming friends.

Gifford Pinchot

(1865-1946) A friend of Theodore Roosevelt, __________ was the head of the federal Division of Forestry and a noted conservationist who wanted to protect, but also use, the nation's natural resources, such as forests and rivers. In 1922 he won election to the Pennsylvania governor's mansion on the Republican ticket.

Hiram W. Johnson

(1866-1945) Elected Republican governor of California in 1910, ______________ oversaw numerous progressive reforms, including the passage of woman suffrage at the state level. In 1917 he entered the Senate, where he proved an isolationist in foreign affairs. He is famous for declaring that "the first casualty when war comes is truth."

Francis E. Townsend

(1867-1960) A retired physician who had lost his savings in the Great Depression and promoted a plan, popular with senior citizens, to pay every person over sixty years old $200 a month, provided that the money was spent within the month. One estimate had the scheme costing one-half of the national income.

W.E.B. Du Bois

(1868-1963) A Harvard-educated leader in the fight for racial equality, _____ __________ believed that liberal arts education would provide the "talented tenth" of African Americans with the ability to lift their race into full participation in society. From New York, where he was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he relentlessly brought attention to racism in America and demanded legal and cultural change. During his long life he published many important books of history, sociology, and poetry and provided intellectual leadership to those advocating civil rights. One of his deepest convictions was that American blacks needed to connect their freedom struggle with African independence, and he died as a resident of the new nation of Ghana.

William D. (Big Bill) Haywood

(1869-1928) As a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Western Federation of Miners, and the Socialist Party of America, ______________ was one of the most feared American labor radicals. During World War I, he became a special target of anti-leftist legislation.

Herbert Croly

(1869-1930) Political thinker and journalist whose book The Promise of American Life (1910) influenced the New Nationalist reform platform of Theodore Roosevelt.

Emilio Aguinaldo

(1869-1964) Well-educated Filipino leader who first fought against Spain and later led the Philippine insurgency against U.S. colonial rule.

Cordell Hull

(1871-1955) Secretary of state under President Franklin Roosevelt and chief architect of the low-tariff reciprocal trade policy of the New Dealers. Foreign trade increased appreciably under all the trade pacts that he negotiated. One of the chief architects behind the United Nations, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for "co-initiating the United Nations."

Calvin Coolidge

(1872-1933) Vice president "Silent Cal" _______________ became thirtieth president of the United States when Warren G. Harding died in office. A friend of business over labor, he served during the boom years from 1923 to 1929.

A. Mitchell Palmer

(1872-1936) A zealous prosecutor and anti-red, __________ served as attorney general during the post-World War I "red scare," when thousands of foreign nationals were deported because of suspected subversive activities.

Alfred E. Smith

(1873-1944) Colorful New York governor who was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1928. His Catholicism and "wet" stance on prohibition made him a controversial figure, even in the traditionally loyal Democratic South. Although _________ lost the electoral vote to a Hoover landslide, his appeal to urban voters foreshadowed the northern urban and southern coalition that would gain Franklin Roosevelt the White House in 1932.

John W. Davis

(1873-1955) The unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1924. The wealthy, Wall Street-connected _________ was no less conservative than his opponent, Calvin Coolidge.

Herbert Hoover

(1874-1964) A Quaker-humanitarian tapped to head the Food Administration during World War I. During the 1920s, he became the secretary of commerce, promoting economic modernization and responsible leadership by business to hold off further expansion of government power. Elected to the presidency in 1928 as a Republican, he soon faced the crisis of the Great Depression, which he tried to combat with the same voluntary efforts and restrained government action that had been his hallmark over the previous decade. He lost the election of 1932 to Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who advocated a more activist role for the federal government.

Mary McLeod Bethune

(1875-1955) The highest-ranking African American in the Roosevelt administration, ____________ headed the Office of Minority Affairs and was a leader of the unofficial "Black Cabinet," which sought to apply New Deal benefits to blacks as well as whites.

George Creel

(1876-1953) The young, outspoken, and tactless journalist who was tapped to head the Committee on Public Information, also known as the _______ Committee, during World War I.

Francisco (Pancho) Villa

(1877-1923) A combination of bandit and Robin Hood, _______ emerged as a chief rival to Mexican president Carranza and tried to provoke the United States into war by going on a killing spree north of the border in New Mexico. President Wilson dispatched General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing in an attempt to capture _______, but the expedition ended in defeat for American forces.

Robert Wagner

(1877-1953) A Democratic senator from New York from 1927 to 1949, __________ was responsible for the passage of some of the most important legislation enacted through the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was popularly known as the __________ Act in honor of the senator. He also played a major role in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the ____________-Steagall Housing Act of 1937.

Joseph Stalin

(1878-1953) Soviet dictator from Lenin's death in 1922 until his own death in 1953. He led the Soviet Union through World War II and shaped Soviet policies in the early years of the Cold War. _________ secured protective "satellite states" in Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference and pushed Soviet scientists to develop atomic weapons, escalating an arms race with the United States.

Albert Einstein

(1879-1955) German-born scientist who immigrated to the United States in 1933 to escape the Nazis. He helped to persuade FDR to push ahead with preparations for developing the atomic bomb, but he later ruefully declared that "annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities."

Margaret Sanger

(1879-1966) A nurse and prominent birth-control activist who founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1916, she established the first birth-control clinic in the United States and endured the first of many arrests for illegally distributing information about contraception.

George C. Marshall

(1880-1959) Former World War II general who became secretary of state under President Harry Truman. He was the originator of the concept of the ____________ Plan to provide aid to reconstruct Western Europe in 1947.

Douglas MacArthur

(1880-1964) The flamboyant, vain, and brilliant American commander in the Philippines and mastermind of the "leapfrogging" strategy for bypassing strongly defended Japanese islands during World War II. _______________ would go on to command American troops in the Korean War until he was relieved of his duties by President Harry S. Truman for insubordination in 1951.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

(1882-1945) The thirty-second president of the United States, ____________ _______________ was the only American president to be elected to four terms of office. He first won the presidency against Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression and was credited with having developed a program, called the New Deal, that shepherded the nation out of crisis. When World War II broke out in Europe, he steered the United States into the war, which in the end proved more effective than the New Deal in helping the nation recover from difficult economic times. His gallant struggle against polio and his enormous talents as a politician made him a beloved leader for a dozen difficult years in the nation's history.

Frances Perkins

(1882-1965) The first woman cabinet member and secretary of labor under Roosevelt, ___________ helped draw labor into the New Deal coalition.

Horace Kallen

(1882-1974) Along with Randolph Bourne, early-twentieth-century commentators who wrote against the grain of "one-hundred-percent" Americanism, celebrating ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism. Their essays left behind an important legacy for later writers on pluralism and civil rights.

Benito Mussolini

(1883-1945) Fascist leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943. _____________ launched Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis powers and became a close ally of Adolf Hitler.

Eleanor Roosevelt

(1884-1962) The wife of Franklin Roosevelt, ___________ ______________ was the most active First Lady the United States had ever seen and was known for her devotion to the impoverished and oppressed.

Harry S. Truman

(1884-1972) Vice president under Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, __________ assumed the office of the presidency in April of that year, when Roosevelt died from a brain hemorrhage while vacationing in Warm Springs, Georgia. __________ won another term in his own right in a historically close election in 1948 against Republican Thomas Dewey. As president, he chose to use nuclear weapons against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chester W. Nimitz

(1885-1966) U.S. Navy admiral who was commander in chief of the Pacific naval forces for the United States and its allies during World War II. He strategized the important victories in the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea.

Alice Paul

(1885-1977) A leading suffragist, feminist, and antiwar activist. The Quaker-raised ______ worked with the Women's Social and Political Union in Great Britain and the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the United States before cofounding the National Woman's party (NWP) in 1916. The NWP combined militant feminist protest action with controversial opposition to America's involvement in World War I, and in 1923 it launched the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Randolph Bourne

(1886-1918) Along with Horace Kallen, early-twentieth-century commentators who wrote against the grain of "one-hundred-percent" Americanism, celebrating ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism. Their essays left behind an important legacy for later writers on pluralism and civil rights.

Jiang Jieshi

(1887-1975) Leader of the Chinese Nationalists, also known as Chiang Kai-shek. He was defeated by Mao Zedong's communist revolutionaries in 1949 and was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan, where, with the support of the United States, he became president of the Republic of China.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

(1888-1927) Along with Nicola Sacco, Italian anarchists convicted in 1921 of the murder of a paymaster and a security guard at a Massachusetts shoe factory. Despite a worldwide public outcry, they were electrocuted in 1927.

John Foster Dulles

(1888-1959) American politician principally known for serving as Eisenhower's secretary of state. An ardent cold warrior, he drafted the "policy of boldness" designed to confront Soviet aggression with the threat of "massive retaliation" via thermonuclear weapons, and he supported American intervention in Vietnam.

T.S. Elliot

(1888-1965) Harvard-educated poet who became one of the twentieth century's most influential practitioners of "high modernism." His poetic masterpieces included The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.

Adolf Hitler

(1889-1945) Nazi dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, ________ was the mastermind behind the Holocaust. His rapacious quest for power provoked World War II.

Harry Hopkins

(1890-1946) A former New York social worker, ___________ came to be one of the major architects of the New Deal, heading up the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Works Progress Administration and serving as a personal confidant to President Roosevelt.

Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower

(1890-1969) Supreme commander of U.S. forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower the war hero later became the thirty-fourth president of the United States. During his two terms, from 1952 to 1960, _____________ presided over the economically prosperous 1950s. He was praised for his dignity and decency, though criticized for not being more assertive on civil rights.

Ho Chi Minh

(1890-1969) Vietnamese revolutionary nationalist leader. Beginning in 1941, ____ organized Vietnamese opposition to foreign occupation, first against the Japanese and then, after World War II, against the French. His Viet Minh forces were victorious against French colonialists in 1954, after which ____ became the leader of North Vietnam. He led the war to unify the country in the face of increased military opposition from the United States.

Nicola Sacco

(1891-1927) Along with Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists convicted in 1921 of the murder of a paymaster and a security guard at a Massachusetts shoe factory. Despite a worldwide public outcry, they were electrocuted in 1927.

Earl Warren

(1891-1974) Liberal California politician appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, serving until 1969. __________ was principally known for moving the Court to the left in defense of civil and individual rights in such cases as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

Father Charles Coughlin

(1891-1979) A Catholic priest from Michigan who goaded 40 million radio listeners with his weekly anti-New Deal harangues. He was a well-known opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies.

Wendell L. Wilkie

(1892-1944) Known as the "rich man's Roosevelt," __________ was a novice politician and Republican businessman who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential campaign. Although __________ won more votes than any previous GOP candidate, Roosevelt still beat him by a landslide.

Reinhold Niebuhr

(1892-1971) A liberal Protestant theologian whose teachings and writings aimed to relate Christian faith to the realities of modern politics. A socialist and pacifist as a young man, he came out of World War II committed to the doctrine of the "just war" and the necessity of resisting dark forces of evil like Hitler and Stalin, while remaining outspoken in defense of progressive social causes.

Francisco Franco

(1892-1975) Spanish general who became head of state after his fascistic troops prevailed over the republican Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. He remained head of the Spanish state until his death in 1975.

Huey P. (Kingfish) Long

(1893-1935) Louisiana governor, later U.S. senator, whose anti-New Deal "Share Our Wealth" program promised to make "Every Man a King." _______ was gunned down in 1935.

Nikita Khrushchev

(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964. _________________ was a Communist party official who emerged from the power struggle after Stalin's death in 1953 to lead the USSR. As Soviet premier, he notably renounced Stalin's brutality in 1956, the same year that he crushed a pro-Western uprising in Hungary. In 1958, he issued an ultimatum for Western evacuation of Berlin, from which he backed down a year later. Khrushchev defended Soviet-style economic planning in the kitchen debate with American vice president Richard Nixon in 1959, and he attempted to send missiles to Cuba in 1962 but backed down when confronted by President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940) Minnesota-born and Princeton-educated novelist who captured the glamour and spiritual emptiness of the 1920s jazz age in novels such as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.

William Faulkner

(1897-1962) Mississippi novelist who explored the South's collective memory of racism and conservatism in his fictional chronicle of "Yoknapatawpha" County. His many modernist novels inspired a twentieth-century southern literary renaissance.

Al Capone

(1899-1947) A notorious Chicago bootlegger and gangster during prohibition, ____________ evaded conviction for murder but served most of an eleven-year sentence for tax evasion.

Ernest Hemingway

(1899-1961) Novelist and author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Former newspaper correspondent and wartime ambulance driver, he became an international celebrity for his searing war novels, clipped prose, and personal exploits.

John T. Scopes

(1900-1970) Tennessee high-school biology teacher who was prosecuted in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution. Former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution. The talented Clarence Darrow served as defense attorney.

Ngo dinh Diem

(1901-1963) First president of South Vietnam, where he took power following the Geneva Accords in 1954. _______ was propped up by the United States until he was overthrown and assassinated by a coup in 1963.

Langston Hughes

(1902-1967) African American poet and leading literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance. His modernist poems incorporated colloquial black speech and gave poetic expression to the twentieth-century African American condition.

Charles A. Lindbergh

(1902-1974) An American aviator who made history as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. An instant international hero, _________________ reputation was later tarnished by anti-Semitic views he voiced during World War II.

Benjamin Spock

(1903-1998) Pediatrician and author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which instructed parents on modern child-rearing, replacing traditional means of passing along such knowledge.

George F. Kennan

(1904-2005) American diplomat who authored the "containment doctrine" in 1947, arguing that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and had to be stopped, via political and military force, from spreading throughout the world.

Leonid Brezhnev

(1906-1982) General secretary of the Communist party and premier of the Soviet Union from 1964, when he ousted Khrushchev, to his death in 1982. _______________ engaged in détente with American presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and in both series of SALT negotiations. He also led the Soviet Union during its initial foray into Afghanistan in 1979.

Rachel Carson

(1907-1964) American conservationist whose 1962 book Silent Spring galvanized the modern environmental movement that gained significant traction in the 1970s.

Warren E. Burger

(1907-1995) Chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1969 to 1986. __________ was responsible for bringing the Court somewhat back to the right after the Earl Warren years. He presided over major cases involving abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, and school desegregation.

Joseph McCarthy

(1908-1957) Senator from Wisconsin who rose to infamy by accusing the State Department of employing communists. ______________ conducted high-profile red-baiting hearings that damaged countless careers before he finally overreached in 1954 when he went after the U.S. Army. Following the Army-_____________ hearings, he was censured by the Senate and died of alcoholism shortly thereafter.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

(1908-1973) Thirty-sixth president of the United States, 1963-1969. A Texas Democrat who rose to tremendous power in the Senate during the New Deal, _____________ was tapped to be John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960. Chosen largely to help solidify support for the Democratic ticket in the anti-Catholic South, he assumed the presidency after Kennedy's assassination in 1963. As president, he was responsible for liberal programs such as the Great Society, War on Poverty, and civil rights legislation, as well as the escalation of the Vietnam War. After a series of challenges from within his party, he chose not to run for reelection in 1968.

Ronald Reagan

(1911-2004) Fortieth president of the United States, 1981-1989. A former actor and California governor, he was elected in 1980 with a pronounced conservative mandate to fix the American economy by scaling back taxes and the role of government in business. __________ was a staunch Cold Warrior whose massive defense spending added stress to the Soviet Union's military budget and may ultimately have contributed to the end of the Cold War.

Jackson Pollock

(1912-1956) New York-based painter who became the father of abstract expressionism with his spontaneous "action paintings."

Milton Friedman

(1912-2006) A Nobel Prize-winning economist who helped to spearhead the public revival of pro-free-market thought in the later twentieth century. His neoclassical critique of Keynesian economics made him one of the most influential practitioners in his field. His popular writings on markets, democracy, and the dangers of big government, meanwhile, made him an intellectual giant of American conservatism.

Richard Nixon

(1913-1994) Thirty-seventh president of the United States, 1969-1974. _________ rose to national prominence as a "communist hunter" and member of HUAC in the 1950s. He was vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961 and defended American capitalism in the 1959 kitchen debate with Khrushchev. _________ ran unsuccessfully for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960 but was elected to the presidency in 1968 and 1972. He resigned the presidency amid the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Rosa Parks

(1913-2005) NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, who inaugurated that city's famous bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. _______ remained a living symbol of the spirit of the civil rights movement and the cause of racial equality throughout her long life.

Gerald "Jerry" Ford

(1913-2006) Thirty-eighth president of the United States, 1974-1977. A long-serving congressman from Michigan, ______ was appointed vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in the fall of 1973. He succeeded to the presidency upon Nixon's resignation in August 1974 and focused his brief administration on containing inflation and reviving public faith in the presidency. _______ was defeated narrowly by Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Ralph Ellison

(1914-1994) Oklahoma-born and Tuskegee-educated novelist best known for writing Invisible Man, one of the great novels of the twentieth-century African American experience.

Arthur Miller

(1915-2005) New York-born playwright who dramatized the pitfalls of postwar American materialism in Death of a Salesman and Cold War hysteria in The Crucible, among other plays.

Eugene McCarthy

(1916-2005) Liberal antiwar senator from Minnesota who rallied a large youth movement behind his presidential campaign in 1968. Challenging sitting President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, ____________ captured 41 percent of the vote and helped ensure that Johnson would quit the race.

Robert McNamara

(1916-2009) Businessman turned secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. _______________ was the author of the "flexible response" doctrine, which created a variety of military options and avoided a stark choice between nuclear warfare and none at all. As defense secretary, he was the chief architect of the Vietnam War.

John F. Kennedy

(1917-1963) Thirty-fifth president of the United States, 1961-1963. A navy hero from World War II and son of a prominent Boston businessman, _____________ won election to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952. In 1960, he narrowly defeated incumbent vice president Richard Nixon in 1960 to become the youngest person ever elected president. As president, he launched New Frontier programs and urged legislation to improve civil rights. He assumed blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion and was credited for impressively handling the Cuban missile crisis. ____________ was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

(1918-1970) President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970. __________ was known for his pan-Arab nationalism and opposition to colonialism, specifically in his decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956. Although his reputation was tarnished somewhat by his country's military failure against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, he remained a popular leader in Egypt and throughout the Arab world.

Nelson Mandela

(1918-2013) Anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. After spending twenty-seven years in prison in South Africa, Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, dramatically signaling the end of racial apartheid in the country.

George C. Wallace

(1919-1998) Southern populist and segregationist. As governor of Alabama, he famously defended his state's policies of racial segregation. He ran for president several times as a Democrat but achieved his greatest influence when he ran as a third-party candidate in 1968, winning five states.

Betty Friedan

(1921-2006) Feminist author of The Feminine Mystique in 1960. ____________ book sparked a new consciousness among suburban women and helped launch the second-wave feminist movement.

Jack Kerouac

(1922-1969) Frenetic novelist and progenitor of the bohemian Beat Generation (a term he coined). He gained celebrity after publishing the group's unofficial bible, On the Road.

George McGovern

(1922-2012) Liberal senator from North Dakota who lost a landslide election to Richard Nixon in 1972. He eventually lost his Senate seat in the conservative revolution that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980.

Henry A. Kissinger

(1923-) National security adviser and secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was responsible for negotiating an end to the Yom Kippur War as well as for the Treaty of Paris that led to a cease-fire in Vietnam in 1973.

Robert Dole

(1923-) Republican senator from Kansas who ran unsuccessfully against Bill Clinton in 1996. Dole had previously been the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1976 and served as Senate minority leader during the 1980s and 1990s.

Phyllis Schlafly

(1924-) A grassroots conservative and antifeminist leader in postwar American politics. ______________ wrote a best-selling campaign book for the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign and, a decade later, led the successful mobilization against the Equal Rights Amendment through her organization STOP ERA.

George H.W. Bush

(1924-) Forty-first president of the United States, 1989-1993. A former congressman, diplomat, businessman, Republican party chairman, and director the CIA, H.W. Bush served for eight years as Reagan's vice president before being elected president in 1988. As president, he oversaw the end of the Cold War and the revitalization of the American military in the Persian Gulf War. He faced a severe economic recession late in his term that damaged his popularity, and he lost his bid for reelection in 1992.

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr.

(1924-) Thirty-ninth president of the United States, 1977-1981. A peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, he defeated Gerald Ford in 1976. As president, he arranged the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978 but saw his foreign-policy legacy tarnished by the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis in 1979. Domestically, he tried to rally the American spirit in the face of economic decline but was unable to stop the rapid increase in inflation. After leaving the presidency, he achieved widespread respect as an elder statesman and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Malcolm X

(1925-1965) Black militant, radical minister, and spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964. Having eschewed his family name "Little," ____________ preached a doctrine of no compromise with white society. He was assassinated in New York City in 1965.

Robert F. Kennedy

(1925-1968) Younger brother of John F. Kennedy who entered public life as U.S. attorney general during the Kennedy administration. Later elected senator from New York, he became an antiwar, pro-civil rights presidential candidate in 1968, launching a popular challenge to incumbent President Johnson. Amid that campaign, he was assassinated in California on June 6, 1968.

Margaret Thatcher

(1925-2013) Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. As an ideological partner to President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher enacted economic liberalization reforms and attempted to check the powers of labor unions in Britain. She led a successful British military operation in the Falkland Islands War in 1982.

Fidel Castro

(1926-) Cuban revolutionary who overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1958 and assumed control of the island country. ____________ connections with the Soviet Union led to a cessation of diplomatic relations with the United States and such international affairs as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. A controversial figure, __________ oversaw his country through the end of the Cold War, when financial and military support from the Soviet Union dissipated, and through nearly a half-century of a trade embargo with the United States. He remained the head of Cuba's government until his retirement in February 2008.

Allen Ginsberg

(1926-1997) New Jersey-born poet who served as spokesman of the Beat Generation. The 1956 publication of his Howl and Other Poems sparked a San Francisco literary renaissance and a local obscenity trial that brought nationwide publicity to the bohemian Beat movement.

Andy Warhol

(1928-1987) Pioneering "pop" artist known for his iconic portraits of Cold War America's material objects, including soup cans and soda bottles.

Martin Luther King Jr.

(1929-1968) Civil rights leader and Baptist preacher who rose to prominence with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. _______ was an outspoken advocate for black rights throughout the 1960s, most famously during the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike.

H. Ross Perot

(1930-) Texas billionaire businessman who ran populist campaigns for the presidency in 1992 and 1996. In 1992, he garnered 19 percent of the popular vote, probably throwing the election to Bill Clinton. Perot's campaigns represented anti-establishment sentiment and desires for "common sense" governance.

Sandra Day O' Connor

(1930-) The first female justice on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Stanford Law School, she served as an attorney, jurist, and politician in Arizona before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. On the bench, she was known as a moderate, frequently casting crucial swing votes in important cases. She retired in 2005.

Mikhail Gorbachev

(1931-) Last leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev assumed control in 1985 and ushered in a period of reforms known as glasnost and perestroika. On four occasions, he met U.S. president Ronald Reagan to negotiate arms reduction treaties and other measures to thaw the Cold War. In 1991, after surviving a failed military coup against him, he dissolved the Soviet Union and disbanded the Communist party.

Boris Yeltsin

(1931-2007) First president of Russia, who took over as the former Soviet republic became independent in 1991. Yeltsin led the country through the breakdown of the communist economy and introduced important market reforms.

James Meredith

(1933-) In 1962 he became the first black American to attend the University of Mississippi after being blocked several times by segregationist politicians. An icon of the civil rights movement, ______________ receded from public view following his brave steps toward educational integration.

Jerry Falwell

(1933-2007) Christian evangelical reverend and radical right-wing traditionalist. In 1979, Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a political action committee dedicated to moral values and in opposition to feminism and gay rights.

Manuel Noriega

(1935-) Panamanian general and dictator from 1983 to 1989. Noriega was ousted from power after the U.S. invasion in late 1989, convicted in the United States of drug trafficking, and imprisoned in Miami, Florida.

Elvis Presley

(1935-1977) Memphis-born singer whose youth, voice, and sex appeal helped popularize rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950s. Commonly known by only his first name, _______ was an icon of popular culture, in both music and film.

John McCain

(1936-) Republican senator from Arizona who lost the 2008 presidential election to Democrat Barack Obama. A former navy fighter pilot who spent five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, McCain was known as a maverick senator, frequently departing from his own party to co-sponsor moderate legislation with Democratic allies. Among his most notable legislative achievements were changes in campaign finance and efforts to reform immigration laws.

Saddam Hussein

(1937-2006) Iraqi dictator who led the Ba'ath party in a coup in 1968 and ruled Iraq until the U.S. invasion. He inaugurated hostilities with neighboring Iran in 1980, leading to the protracted and bloody Iran-Iraq War. Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, prompting a broad-based military operation led by the United States to liberate the country. After that war, Hussein retained power under strict sanctions and no-fly demilitarized zones throughout the 1990s, but he stymied international atomic weapons inspectors. After his fall in 2003, he went into hiding but was ultimately captured, tried, and executed by the Iraqi government.

Nancy Pelosi

(1940-) Democratic congresswoman from California who became, in 2007, the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. Pelosi proved an effective party leader in securing House passage of the stimulus package, a "cap-and-trade" climate change bill, financial regulation, and the Affordable Care Act, all during Barack Obama's first term as president. Her tenure as Speaker came to an end as a result of sweeping Republican victories in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Richard Cheney

(1941-) A former White House staffer, congressman, and secretary of defense during the first Persian Gulf War, Cheney joined the Bush ticket in 2000 to add experience and a link to the first Bush presidency. As vice president, he was more active in policy and politics than his predecessors, playing decisive roles especially in matters of foreign policy.

Robin Morgan

(1941-) A founder of second-wave feminism and proponent of radical feminist thought and politics. ____________ was active in civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s prior to founding many radical feminist activist groups, health networks, and foundations.

Joseph R. Biden

(1942-) United States senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009 and vice president of the United States since 2009. As a long-time senator and former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden brought Washington experience and foreign-policy expertise to the Obama campaign and subsequent presidency.

Newt Gingrich

(1943-) Republican congressman from Georgia who served as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999. As the author of the "Contract with America," Gingrich led the Republican "revolution" of 1994.

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton

(1946-) Forty-second president of the United States, 1993-2001. A former Arkansas governor and founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton promoted centrist politics and distanced his policies from traditional Democratic programs. He signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996 to fulfill a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." Clinton was the first Democrat to be reelected since Franklin Roosevelt and the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson.

George W. Bush

(1946-) Forty-third president of the United States, 2001-2009. The son of former president George H. W. Bush and former governor of Texas, he emerged victorious from the contested election of 2000, where he lost the popular vote. As president, he pursued changes in Social Security, immigration, and education laws and appointed two conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Launching and leading the "war on terror" in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush was the architect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

(1947-) Democratic senator from New York who, in 2008, became the first highly competitive female candidate for president. A lawyer and political activist, Clinton was First Lady from 1993 to 2001 and then became the first former First Lady to serve in elected office when she was elected to the Senate. She tried unsuccessfully to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 and then served as secretary of state in the Barack Obama administration from 2009 to 2013.

Clarence Thomas

(1948-) The second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, Thomas is a conservative justice who adheres to constitutional interpretation based on the doctrine of originalism. Appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1991 to replace Thurgood Marshall, Thomas was the subject of controversial nomination proceedings when he was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague.

Barack Obama

(1962-) Forty-fourth president of the United States and first African American elected to that office. A lawyer and community organizer in Chicago, Obama served in the Illinois state senate before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. As president, Obama tackled the effects of the financial crisis while pursuing passage of ambitious reforms in health care and financial regulation.

Sarah Palin

(1964-) Republican vice-presidential candidate with John McCain in the 2008 election. Palin served on the city council and as mayor of her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, from 1996 to 2002, and then in 2006 was elected governor of the state. Relatively unknown nationally, Palin's social conservatism made her popular among the evangelical members of the Republican party who had been distrustful of McCain.

Monica Lewinsky

(1973-) White House intern with whom President Bill Clinton had an extramarital affair in the late 1990s. Lewinsky was the center of a protracted scandal during the second Clinton term that led to the president's impeachment.

Malinche

(Dona Marina) (ca. 1501-1550) Indian slave who served as an interpreter for Hernan Cortes on his conquet of the Aztecs. Malinche later married one of Cortes's soldiers, who took her with him back to Spain.

Lyceums

(From the Greek name for the ancient Athenian school where Aristotle taught.) Public lecture hall that hosted speakers on topics ranging from science to moral philosophy. Part of a broader flourishing of higher education in the mid-nineteenth century.

Giovanni Caboto

(John Cabot) (ca. 1450-ca. 1498) Italian explorer sent by England's King Henry VII to explore the northeastern coast of North America in 1497 and 1498.

Metacom

(King Philip) (ca. 1638-1676) Wampanoag chief who led a brutal campaign against Puritan settlements in New England between 1675 and 1676. Though he himself was eventually captured and killed and his wife and son sold into slavery, his assault halted New England's westward expansion for several decades.

Francisco Pizarro

(ca. 1475-1541) Spanish conquistador who crushed the Incas in 1532 and founded the city of Lima, Peru.

Powhatan

(ca. 1540s-1618) Chief of the Powhatan Indians and father of Pocahontas. As a show of force, Powhatan staged the kidnapping and mock execution of Captain John Smith in 1607. He later led the Powhatan Indians in the first Anglo-Powhatan War, negotiating a tenuous peace in 1614.

Sir Francis Drake

(ca. 1542-1595) English sea captain who completed his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580, plundering Spanish ships and settlements along the way.

Sir Walter Raleigh

(ca. 1552-1618) English courtier and adventurer who sponsored the failed settlements of North Carolina's Roanoke Island in 1585 and 1587. Once a favorite of Elizabeth I, Raleigh fell out of favor with the Virgin Queen after secretly marrying one of her maids of honor. He continued his colonial pursuits until 1618, when he was executed for treason.

Henry Hudson

(ca. 1565-1611) English explorer who ventured into New York Bay and up the Hudson River for the Dutch in 1609 in search of a Northwest Passage across the continent.

Samuel de Champlain

(ca. 1567-1635) French soldier and explorer, dubbed the "Father of New France" for establishing the city of Québec and fighting alongside the Huron Indians to repel the Iroquois.

Massasoit

(ca. 1590-1661) Wampanoag chieftain who signed a peace treaty with Plymouth Bay settlers in 1621 and helped them celebrate the first Thanksgiving.

Anne Hutchinson

(ca. 1591-1643) Antinomian religious dissenter brought to trial for heresy in Massachusetts Bay after arguing that she need not follow God's laws or man's and claiming direct revelation from God. Banished from the Puritan colony, Hutchinson moved to Rhode Island and later New York, where she and her family were killed by Indians.

Pocahontas

(ca. 1595-1617) Daughter of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas "saved" Captain John Smith in a dramatic mock execution and served as a mediator between Indians and the colonists. In 1614, she married John Rolfe and sailed with him to England, where she was greeted as a princess and where she passed away shortly before her planned return to the colonies.

Roger Williams

(ca. 1603-1683) Salem minister who advocated a complete break from the Church of England and criticized the Massachusetts Bay Colony for unlawfully taking land from the Indians. Banished for his heresies, he established a small community in present-day Rhode Island, later acquiring a charter for the colony from England.

Peter Stuyvesant

(ca. 1610-1672) Director-general of Dutch New Netherland from 1645 until the colony fell to the British in 1664.

Pontiac

(ca. 1720-1769) Ottawa chief who led an uprising against the British in the wake of the French and Indian War. Though initially routing British forces at Detroit, Pontiac and his men succumbed after British troops distributed smallpox-infected blankets among the Indians.

Lord Dunmore

(ca. 1730-1809) Royal governor of Virginia who, in 1775, promised freedom to runaway slaves who joined the British army.

Phillis Wheatley

(ca. 1753-1784) African American poet who overcame the barriers of slavery to publish two collections of her poems. As a young girl, Wheatley lived in Boston; she was later taken to England, where she found a publisher willing to distribute her work.

Denmark Vesey

(ca. 1767-1822) Free black who orchestrated an aborted slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey's plan was uncovered before he could put it in motion, and he and thirty-four accomplices were put to death.

Tecumseh

(ca. 1768-1813) Accomplished Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh sought to establish a confederacy of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. He opposed individual tribes selling land to the United States, arguing that the land belonged to all the native peoples. After 1811, Tecumseh allied with the British, fighting fiercely against the United States until his death in 1813.

Harriet Tubman

(ca. 1820-1913) Famed conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman helped rescue more than three hundred slaves from bondage. Born into slavery, she fled to the North in 1849 but returned to the South nineteen times to guide slaves to freedom. After the Civil War, she worked to give freedpeople access to education in North Carolina.il

Hiram Revels

(ca. 1827-1901) First African American U.S. senator, elected in 1870 to the Mississippi seat previously occupied by Jefferson Davis. Born to free black parents in North Carolina, ___________ worked as a minister throughout the South before entering politics. After serving for just one year, he returned to Mississippi to head a college for African American males.

Hiawatha

(dates unknown) Along with Deganawidah, legendary founder of the Iroquois Confederacy that united the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes in the late sixteenth century.

Old Lights

Orthodox clergymen who rejected the emotionalism of the Great Awakening in favor of a more rational spirituality.

Haymarket Square

A May Day rally that turned violent when someone threw a bomb into the middle of the meeting, killing several dozen people. Eight anarchists were arrested for conspiracy contributing to the disorder, although evidence linking them to the bombing was thin. Four were executed, one committed suicide, and three were pardoned in 1893.

Congress of Industrial Organizations

A New Deal-era labor organization that broke away from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in order to organize unskilled industrial workers regardless of their particular economic sector or craft. The _______ gave a great boost to labor organizing in the midst of the Great Depression and during World War II. In 1955, the _______ merged with the AFL.

Plessy v. Ferguson

A Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, saying that as long as blacks were provided with "separate but equal" facilities, these laws did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision provided legal justification for the Jim Crow system until the 1950s.

War Refugee Board

A U.S. agency formed to help rescue Jews from German-occupied territories and to provide relief to inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The agency performed noble work, but it did not begin operations until very late in the war, after millions had already been murdered.

Federal Trade Commission Act

A banner accomplishment of Woodrow Wilson's administration, this law empowered a standing, presidentially appointed commission to investigate illegal business practices in interstate commerce like unlawful competition, false advertising, and mislabeling of goods.

Battle of Wounded Knee

A battle between the U.S. Army and the Dakota Sioux, in which two hundred Native Americans and twenty-nine U.S. soldiers died. Tensions erupted violently over two major issues: the Sioux practice of the "Ghost Dance" and the dispute over whether Sioux reservation land would be broken up because of the Dawes Act.

United Negro Improvement Association

A black nationalist organization founded in 1914 by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey in order to promote resettlement of African Americans to their "African homeland" and to stimulate a vigorous separate black economy within the United States.

Students for a Democratic Society

A campusbased political organization founded in 1961 by Tom Hayden that became an iconic representation of the New Left. Originally geared toward the intellectual promise of "participatory democracy," ______ emerged at the forefront of the civil rights, antipoverty, and antiwar movements during the 1960s.

Fordney-McCumber Tariff Law

A comprehensive bill passed to protect domestic production from foreign competitors. As a direct result, many European nations were spurred to increase their own trade barriers.

Credit Mobilier Scandal

A construction company was formed by owners of the Union Pacific Railroad for the purpose of receiving government contracts to build the railroad at highly inflated prices-and profits. In 1872 a scandal erupted when journalists discovered that the ___________ ___________ Company had bribed congressmen and even the vice president to allow the ruse to continue.

"Lost Generation"

A creative circle of expatriate American artists and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, who found shelter and inspiration in post-World War I Europe.

Harlem Renaissance

A creative outpouring among African American writers, jazz musicians, and social thinkers, centered around __________ in the 1920s, that celebrated black culture and advocated for a "New Negro" in American social, political, and intellectual life.

Office of Price Administration

A critically important wartime agency charged with regulating the consumer economy by rationing scarce supplies, such as automobiles, tires, fuel, nylon, and sugar, and by curbing inflation by setting ceilings on the price of goods. Rents were controlled as well in parts of the country overwhelmed by war workers. The ______ was extended after World War II ended to continue the fight against inflation.

Good Neighbor Policy

A departure from the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the ________ ______________ Policy stressed nonintervention in Latin America. It was begun by Herbert Hoover but associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Abu Ghraib Prison

A detention facility near Baghdad, Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, the prison was the site of infamous torturing and execution of political dissidents. In 2004, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the prison became the focal point of a prisoner-abuse and torture scandal after photographs surfaced of American soldiers mistreating, torturing, and degrading Iraqi war prisoners and suspected terrorists. The scandal was one of several dark spots on the public image of the Iraq War and led to increased criticism of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Pragmatism

A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems. The _______________ thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge. Among the most well-known purveyors of _______________ were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James.

Anti-Imperialist League

A diverse group formed to protest American colonial oversight in the Philippines. It included university presidents, industrialists, clergymen, and labor leaders. Strongest in the Northeast, the _______________ __________ was the largest lobbying organization on a U.S. foreign-policy issue until the end of the nineteenth century. It declined in strength after the United States signed the Treaty of Paris (which approved the annexation of the Philippines), and especially after hostilities broke out between Filipino nationalists and American forces.

Big Sister Policy

A foreign policy of Secretary of State James G. Blaine aimed at rallying Latin American nations behind American leadership and opening Latin American markets to Yankee traders. The policy bore fruit in 1889, when Blaine presided over the First International Conference of American States.

McNary-Haugen Bill

A farm-relief bill that was championed throughout the 1920s and aimed to keep agricultural prices high by authorizing the government to buy up surpluses and sell them abroad. Congress twice passed the bill, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it in 1927 and 1928.

Volstead Act

A federal act enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages.

Peace Corps

A federal agency created by President Kennedy in 1961 to promote voluntary service by Americans in foreign countries. The ________ _________ provides labor power to help developing countries improve their infrastructure, health care, educational systems, and other aspects of their societies. Part of Kennedy's New Frontier vision, the organization represented an effort by postwar liberals to promote American values and influence through productive exchanges across the world.

Homestead Act

A federal law that gave settlers 160 acres of land for about $30 if they lived on it for five years and improved it by, for instance, building a house on it. The act helped make land accessible to hundreds of thousands of westward-moving settlers, but many people also found disappointment when their land was infertile or they saw speculators grabbing up the best land.

Social Security Act

A flagship accomplishment of the New Deal, this law provided for unemployment and old-age insurance financed by a payroll tax on employers and employees. It has long remained a pillar of the "New Deal Order."

Reconstruction Finance Corporation

A government lending agency established under the Hoover administration in order to assist insurance companies, banks, agricultural organizations, railroads, and local governments. It was a precursor to later agencies that grew out of the New Deal and symbolized a recognition by the Republicans that some federal action was required to address the Great Depression.

Committee on Public Information

A government office during World War I known popularly as the Creel Committee for its chairman George Creel, it was dedicated to winning everyday Americans' support for the war effort. It regularly distributed prowar propaganda and sent out an army of "four-minute men" to rally crowds and deliver "patriotic pep."

Civilian Conservation Corps

A government program created by Congress to hire young unemployed men to improve the rural, out-of-doors environment with such work as planting trees, fighting fires, draining swamps, and maintaining national parks. The _______ proved to be an important foundation for the post-World War II environmental movement.

Operation Wetback

A government program to round up and deport as many as 1 million illegal Mexican migrant workers in the United States. The program was promoted in part by the Mexican government and reflected burgeoning concerns about non-European immigration to America.

Environmental Protection Agency

A governmental organization signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970 designed to regulate pollution, emissions, and other factors that negatively influence the natural environment. The creation of the _____ marked a newfound commitment by the federal government to actively combat environmental risks and was a significant triumph for the environmentalist movement.

Trust

A mechanism by which one company grants control over its operations, through ownership of its stock, to another company. The Standard Oil Company became known for this practice in the 1870s as it eliminated its competition by taking control of smaller oil companies.

Tea Party

A grassroots conservative political movement mobilized in opposition to Barack Obama's fiscal, economic, and health care policies. Named after the Boston Tea Party of the Revolutionary Era, Tea Party protestors first demonstrated in early 2009, and they grew steadily in visibility and power as a pressuring force within the Republican Party through the 2010 midterm elections and beyond.

Muller v. Oregon

A landmark Supreme Court case in which crusading attorney (and future Supreme Court justice) Louis D. Brandeis persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the constitutionality of limiting the hours of women workers. Coming on the heels of Lochner v. New York, it established a different standard for male and female workers.

Adkins v. Children's Hospital

A landmark Supreme Court decision reversing the ruling in Muller v. Oregon, which had declared women to be deserving of special protection in the workplace.

Glass-Stegall Banking Reform Act

A law creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insured individual bank deposits and ended a century- long tradition of unstable banking that had reached a crisis in the Great Depression.

Pure Food and Drug Act

A law passed by Congress to inspect and regulate the labeling of all foods and pharmaceuticals intended for human consumption. This legislation, and additional provisions passed in 1911 to strengthen it, aimed particularly at the patent medicine industry. The more comprehensive Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 largely replaced this legislation.

Meat Inspection Act

A law passed by Congress to subject meat shipped over state lines to federal inspection. The publication of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle earlier that year so disgusted American consumers with its description of conditions in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants that it mobilized public support for government action.

Espionage Act

A law prohibiting interference with the draft and other acts of national "disloyalty." Together with the Sedition Act of 1918, which added penalties for abusing the government in writing, it created a climate that was unfriendly to civil liberties.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

A law that forbade trusts or combinations in business, this was landmark legislation because it was one of the first congressional attempts to regulate big business for the public good. At first the law was mostly used to restrain trade unions, as the courts tended to side with companies in legal cases. In 1914 the act was revised so it could more effectively be used against monopolistic corporations.

Southern Renaissance

A literary outpouring among mid-twentieth-century southern writers, begun by William Faulkner and marked by a new critical appreciation of the region's burdens of history, racism, and conservatism.

D-Day

A massive military operation led by American forces in Normandy beginning on June 6, 1944. The pivotal battle led to the liberation of France and brought on the final phases of World War II in Europe.

American Federation of Labor

A national federation of trade unions that included only skilled workers, founded in 1886. Led by Samuel Gompers for nearly four decades, the AFL sought to negotiate with employers for a better kind of capitalism that rewarded workers fairly with better wages, hours, and conditions. The AFL's membership was almost entirely white and male until the middle of the twentieth century.

Tuskegee Institute

A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. It focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence. Washington justified segregated, vocational training as a necessary first step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too "accommodationist."

Battle of the Little Bighorn

A particularly violent example of the warfare between whites and Native Americans in the late nineteenth century. In two days, the combined forces of 2,500 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians defeated and killed more than 250 U.S. soldiers, including Colonel George Custer. The battle came as the U.S. government tried to compel Native Americans to remain on the reservations and Native Americans tried to defend territory from white gold-seekers.

Red Scare

A period of intense anticommunism . The "Palmer raids" of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer resulted in about six thousand deportations of people suspected of "subversive" activities.

Battle of Midway

A pivotal naval battle fought near the island of Midway on June 3-6, 1942. The victory halted Japanese advances in the Pacific.

Teller Amendment

A proviso to President William McKinley's war plans that proclaimed to the world that when the United States had overthrown Spanish misrule, it would give Cuba its freedom. The amendment testified to the ostensibly "anti-imperialist" designs of the initial war plans.

Recall

A progressive ballot procedure allowing voters to remove elected officials from office.

Initiative

A progressive reform measure allowing voters to petition to have a law placed on the general ballot. Like the referendum and recall, it brought democracy directly "to the people" and helped foster a shift toward interest group politics and away from old political "machines."

Referendum

A progressive reform procedure allowing voters to place a bill on the ballot for final approval, even after being passed by the legislature.

Regionalism

A recurring artistic movement that, in the context of the late nineteenth century, aspired to capture the peculiarities, or "local color," of America's various regions in the face of modernization and national standardization.

Social Gospel

A reform movement led by Protestant ministers who used religious doctrine to demand better housing and living conditions for the urban poor. Popular at the turn of the twentieth century, it was closely linked to the settlement-house movement, which brought middle-class, Anglo-American service volunteers into contact with immigrants and working people.

Grandfather Clause

A regulation established in many southern states in the 1890s that exempted from voting requirements (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) anyone who could prove that his ancestors ("___________") had been able to vote in 1860. Since slaves could not vote before the Civil War, these clauses guaranteed the right to vote to many whites while denying it to blacks.

Yellow Journalism

A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards.

Kellogg-Briand Pact

A sentimental triumph of the 1920s peace movement, this 1928 pact linked sixty-two nations in the supposed "outlawry of war."

Whitewater

A series of scandals during the Clinton administration that stemmed from a failed real estate investment from which the Clintons were alleged to have illicitly profited. The accusations prompted the appointment of a special federal prosecutor, though no indictments.

Open Door note

A set of diplomatic letters in which Secretary of State John Hay urged the great powers to respect Chinese rights and free and open competition within their spheres of influence. The notes established the "Open Door policy," which sought to ensure access to the Chinese market for the United States, despite the fact that it did not have a formal sphere of influence in China.

Lochner v. New York

A setback for labor reformers, this Supreme Court decision invalidated a state law establishing a ten-hour day for bakers. It held that the "right to free contract" was implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

London Economic Conference

A sixty-six nation economic conference organized to stabilize international currency rates. Franklin Roosevelt's decision to revoke American participation contributed to a deepening world economic crisis.

Beat Generation

A small coterie of mid-twentieth century bohemian writers and personalities, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, who bemoaned bourgeois conformity and advocated freeform experimentation in life and literature.

Miranda Warning

A statement of an arrested person's constitutional rights, which police officers must read during an arrest. The warning came out of the Supreme Court's decision in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 that accused people have the right to remain silent, consult an attorney, and enjoy other protections. The Court declared that law enforcement officers must make sure suspects understand their constitutional rights, thus creating a safeguard against forced confessions and self-implication.

Homestead Strike

A strike at a Carnegie steel plant in ___________, Pennsylvania, that ended in an armed battle between the strikers, three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives hired by Carnegie, and federal troops, which killed ten people and wounded more than sixty. The strike was part of a nationwide wave of labor unrest in the summer of 1892 that helped the Populists gain some support from industrial workers.

Pullman Strike

A strike by railroad workers upset by drastic wage cuts. The strike was led by socialist Eugene Debs but not supported by the American Federation of Labor. Eventually Cleveland intervened, and federal troops forced an end to the strike. The strike highlighted both divisions within labor and the government's new willingness to use armed force to combat work stoppages.

Proposition 13

A successful California state ballot initiative that capped the state's real estate tax at 1 percent of assessed value. The proposition radically reduced average property tax levels, decreasing revenue for the state government and signaling the political power of the "tax revolt," increasingly aligned with conservative politics.

Tweed Ring

A symbol of Gilded Age corruption, "Boss" Tweed and his deputies ran the New York City Democratic party in the 1860s and swindled $200 million from the city through bribery, graft, and vote-buying. Boss Tweed was eventually jailed for his crimes and died behind bars.

Fordism

A system of assembly-line manufacturing and mass production named after __________ _______, founder of the ________ Motor Company and developer of the Model T car.

Teapot Dome Scandal

A tawdry affair involving the illegal lease of priceless naval oil reserves in ___________ ________, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. The scandal, which implicated President Harding's secretary of the interior, was one of several that gave his administration a reputation for corruption.

Fourth Party System

A term to describe national politics from 1896 to 1932, when Republicans had a tight grip on the White House and issues such as industrial regulation and labor concerns became paramount, replacing older concerns such as civil -service reform and monetary policy.

Hay-Pauncefote Treaty

A treaty signed between the United States and Great Britain giving Americans a free hand to build a canal in Central America. The treaty nullified the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which prohibited Britain or the United States from acquiring territory in Central America.

Freedom Summer

A voter registration drive in Mississippi spearheaded by a coalition of civil rights groups. The campaign drew the activism of thousands of black and white civil rights workers, many of whom were students from the North, and was marred by the abduction and murder of three such workers at the hands of white racists.

Jacob S. Coxey

A wealthy Ohio Populist, he led a 500-strong "army" to Washington, D.C., in 1894 to demand a public works program to create jobs for the unemployed in the midst of a devastating four-year depression.

League of Nations

A world organization of national governments proposed by President Woodrow Wilson and established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It worked to facilitate peaceful international cooperation. Despite emotional appeals by Wilson, isolationists' objections to the League created the major obstacle to American signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Panic of 1873

A worldwide depression that began in the United States when one of the nation's largest banks abruptly declared bankruptcy, leading to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. The crisis intensified debtors' calls for inflationary measures such as the printing of more paper money and the unlimited coinage of silver. Conflicts over monetary policy greatly influenced politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

American Anti-Slavery Society

Abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison, who advocated the immediate abolition of slavery. By 1838, the organization had more than 250,000 members across 1,350 chapters.

Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln's oft-quoted speech, delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg battlefield. In the address, Lincoln framed the war as a means to uphold the values of liberty.

Gadsden Purchase

Acquired additional land from Mexico for $10 million to facilitate the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad.

Louisiana Purchase

Acquisition of Louisiana Territory from France. The purchase more than doubled the territory of the United States, opening vast tracts for settlement.

Impressment

Act of forcibly drafting an individual into military service, employed by the British navy against American seamen in times of war against France, 1793-1815. Impressment was a continual source of conflict between Britain and the United States in the early national period.

Alien Laws

Acts passed by a Federalist Congress raising the residency requirement for citizenship to fourteen years and granting the president the power to deport dangerous foreigners in times of peace.

Dominion of New England

Administrative union created by royal authority, incorporating all of New England, New York, and East and West Jersey. Placed under the rule of Sir Edmund Andros, who curbed popular assemblies, taxed residents without their consent, and strictly enforced Navigation Laws. Its collapse after the Glorious Revolution in England demonstrated colonial opposition to strict royal control.

Nine-Power Treaty

Agreement coming out of the Washington "Disarmament" Conference of 1921-1922 that pledged Britain, France, Italy, Japan, the United States, China, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium to abide by the Open Door policy in China. The Five-Power Naval Treaty on ship ratios and the Four-Power Treaty to preserve the status quo in the Pacific also came out of the conference.

Convention of 1800

Agreement to formally dissolve the United States' treaty with France, originally signed during the Revolutionary War. The difficulties posed by America's peacetime alliance with France contributed to Americans' long-standing opposition to entangling alliances with foreign powers.

Three-Sister Farming

Agricultural system employed by North American Indians as early as 1000 C.E.; maize, beans, and squash were grown together to maximize yields.

Macon's Bill no. 2

Aimed at resuming peaceful trade with Britain and France, the act stipulated that if either Britain or France repealed its trade restrictions, the United States would reinstate the embargo against the nonrepealing nation. When Napoleon offered to lift his restrictions on British ports, the United States was forced to declare an embargo on Britain, thereby pushing the two nations closer toward war.

Corrupt Bargain

Alleged deal between presidential candidates John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay to throw the election, to be decided by the House of Representatives, in Adams's favor. Though never proven, the accusation became the rallying cry for supporters of Andrew Jackson, who had actually garnered a plurality of the popular vote in 1824.

Blue Laws

Also known as sumptuary laws, they are designed to restrict personal behavior in accord with a strict code of morality. Blue laws were passed across the colonies, particularly in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania.

Immigration Act of 1924

Also known as the "National Origins Act," this law established quotas for immigration to the United States. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe was sharply curtailed, while immigrants from Asia were shut out altogether.

Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

Also known as the Dodd-Frank Act, after its Democratic sponsors, Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd and Massachusetts representative Barney Frank. In an effort to avoid another financial crisis like the Great Recession, the act updated many federal regulations affecting the financial and banking systems and created some new agencies, such as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

Hudson River School

American artistic movement that produced romantic renditions of local landscapes.

Maine

American battleship dispatched to keep a "friendly" watch over Cuba in early 1898. It mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, with a loss of 260 sailors. Later evidence confirmed that the explosion was accidental, resulting from combustion in one of the ship's internal coal bunkers. But many Americans, eager for war, insisted that it was the fault of a Spanish submarine mine.

Loyalists

American colonists who opposed the Revolution and maintained their loyalty to the King; sometimes referred to as "Tories."

Creole

American ship captured by a group of rebelling Virginia slaves. The slaves successfully sought asylum in the Bahamas, raising fears among southern planters that the British West Indies would become a safe haven for runaway slaves.

World's Columbian Exposition

Americans saw this world's fair, held in Chicago, as their opportunity to claim a place among the world's most "civilized" societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe. The fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a mini-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time. For many, this was the high point of the City Beautiful movement.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Among the earliest initiatives of the Obama administration to combat the Great Recession. It was based on the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes that called for increased government spending to offset decreased private spending in times of economic downturn. The act was controversial from the outset, passing with no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate, and helping to foster the "Tea Party" movement to curb government deficits, even while critics on the left argued that the act's $787 billion appropriation was not enough to turn the economy around.

Pearl Harbor

An American naval base in Hawaii where Japanese warplanes destroyed numerous ships and caused three thousand casualties on December 7, 1941—a day that, in President Roosevelt's words, was to "live in infamy." The attack brought the United States into World War II.

Federal Reserve Act

An act establishing twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks and a Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the president, to regulate banking and create stability on a national scale in the volatile banking sector. The law carried the nation through the financial crises of the First World War of 1914-1918.

Dawes Severalty Act

An act that broke up Indian reservations and distributed land to individual households. Leftover land was sold for money to fund U.S. government efforts to "civilize" Native Americans.

Gold Standard Act

An act that guaranteed that paper currency would be redeemed freely in ______, putting an end to the already dying "free-silver" campaign.

ABC-1 Agreement

An agreement between Britain and the United States developed at a conference in Washington, D.C., between January 29 and March 27, 1941, that should the United States enter World War II, the two nations and their allies would coordinate their military planning, making a priority of protecting the British Commonwealth. That would mean "getting Germany first" in the Atlantic and the European theater and fighting more defensively on other military fronts.

Sharecropping

An agricultural system that emerged after the Civil War in which black and white farmers rented land and residences from a plantation owner in exchange for giving him a certain "share" of each year's crop. ___________ was the dominant form of southern agriculture after the Civil War, and landowners manipulated this system to keep tenants in perpetual debt and unable to leave their plantations.

Equal Rights Amendment

An amendment that declared full constitutional equality for women. Although it passed both houses of Congress in 1972, a concerted grassroots campaign by antifeminists led by Phyllis Schlafly persuaded enough state legislatures to vote against ratification. The amendment failed to become part of the Constitution.

Dawes Plan

An arrangement negotiated in 1924 to reschedule German reparations payments. It stabilized the German currency and opened the way for further American private loans to Germany.

Tampico Incident

An arrest of American sailors by the Mexican government that spurred Woodrow Wilson to dispatch the American navy to seize the port of Veracruz in April 1914. Although war was avoided, tensions grew between the United States and Mexico.

Keynesianism

An economic theory based on the thoughts of British economist John Maynard ___________, holding that central banks should adjust interest rates and governments should use deficit spending and tax policies to increase purchasing power and hence prosperity.

No Child Left Behind Act

An education bill created and signed by the George W. Bush administration. Designed to increase accountability standards for primary and secondary schools, the law authorized several federal programs to monitor those standards and increased choices for parents in selecting schools for their children. The program was highly controversial, in large part because it linked results on standardized tests to federal funding for schools and school districts.

Abstract Expressionism

An experimental style of mid-twentieth-century modern art exemplified by Jackson Pollock's spontaneous "action paintings," created by flinging paint on canvases stretched across the studio floor.

Ku Klux Klan

An extremist, paramilitary, right-wing secret society founded in the mid-nineteenth century and revived during the 1920s. It was antiforeign, antiblack, anti-Jewish, antipacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, anti-evolutionist, and antibootlegger, but pro-Anglo-Saxon and pro-Protestant. Its members, cloaked in sheets to conceal their identities, terrorized freedmen and sympathetic whites throughout the South after the Civil War. By the 1890s, ___________-style violence and Democratic legislation succeeded in virtually disenfranchising all southern blacks.

Quarantine Speech

An important speech delivered by Franklin Roosevelt in which he called for "positive endeavors" to "_______________" land-hungry dictators, presumably through economic embargoes. The speech flew in the face of isolationist politicians.

World Trade Organization

An international body to promote and supervise liberal trade among nations. The successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, it marked a key world trade policy achievement of the Clinton administration.

Naturalism

An offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement purported to apply detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme or sordid social environments.

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women. __________ argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilities in the home and family made them indispensable in the public decision-making process. During World War I, __________ supported the war effort and lauded women's role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).

Boxer Rebellion

An uprising in China directed against foreign influence. It was suppressed by an international force of some eighteen thousand soldiers, including several thousand Americans. The ________ _______________ paved the way for the revolution of 1911, which led to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912.

Leisler's Rebellion

Armed conflict between aspiring merchants led by Jacob Leisler and the ruling elite of New York. One of many uprisings that erupted across the colonies when wealthy colonists attempted to re-create European social structures in the New World.

English Civil War

Armed conflict between royalists and parliamentarians, resulting in the victory of pro-Parliament forces and the execution of Charles I.

Paxton Boys

Armed march on Philadelphia by Scotts-Irish frontiersmen in protest against the Quaker establishment's lenient policies toward Native Americans.

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

Arms limitation agreement settled by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev after several attempts. The treaty banned all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe and marked a significant thaw in the Cold War.

Lend-Lease Bill

Based on the motto "Send guns, not sons," this law abandoned former pretenses of neutrality by allowing Americans to sell unlimited supplies of arms to any nation defending itself against the Axis powers. Patriotically numbered 1776, the bill was praised as a device for keeping the nation out of World War II.

Bank War

Battle between President Andrew Jackson and congressional supporters of the Bank of the United States over the bank's renewal. Jackson vetoed the bank bill, arguing that the bank favored moneyed interests at the expense of western farmers.

Pontiac's Uprising

Bloody campaign waged by Ottawa chief Pontiac to drive the British out of Ohio Country. It was brutally crushed by British troops, who resorted to distributing blankets infected with smallpox as a means to put down the rebellion.

Iroquois Confederacy

Bound together five tribes-the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas-in the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York State.

Nonimportation agreements

Boycotts against British goods adopted in response to the Stamp Act and, later, the Townshend and Intolerable Acts. The agreements were the most effective form of protest against British policies in the colonies.

Muckrakers

Bright young reporters at the turn of the twentieth century who won this unfavorable moniker from Theodore Roosevelt, but boosted the circulations of their magazines by writing exposés of widespread corruption in American society. Their subjects included business manipulation of government, white slavers, child labor, and the illegal deeds of the trusts, and helped spur the passage of reform legislation.

West Africa Squadron

British Royal Navy force formed to enforce the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It intercepted hundreds of slave ships and freed thousands of Africans.

Lusitania

British passenger liner that sank after it was torpedoed by Germany on May 7, 1915. It ended the lives of 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, and pushed the United States closer to war.

Alabama

British-built and manned Confederate warship that raided Union shipping during the Civil War. One of many built by the British for the Confederacy, despite Union protests.

Bay of Pigs invasion

CIA plot in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban exiles to invade and supporting them with American airpower. The mission failed and became a public relations disaster early in John F. Kennedy's presidency.

Department of Homeland Security

Cabinet-level agency created in 2003 to unify and coordinate public safety and antiterrorism operations within the federal government.

Responsorial

Call and response style of preaching that melded Christian and African traditions. Practiced by African slaves in the South.

Shakers

Called "Shakers" for their lively dance worship, they emphasized simple, communal living and were all expected to practice celibacy. First transplanted to America from England by Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers counted six thousand members by 1840, though by the 1940s the movement had largely died out.

Predestination

Calvinist doctrine that God has foreordained some people to be saved and some to be damned. Though their fate was irreversible, Calvinists, particularly those who believed they were destined for salvation, sought to lead sanctified lives in order to demonstrate to others that they were in fact members of the "elect."

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

Cartel comprising Middle Eastern states and Venezuela first organized in 1960. ________ aimed to control access to and prices of oil, wresting power from Western oil companies and investors. In the process, it gradually strengthened the hand of non-Western powers on the world stage.

Manhattan Project

Code name for the American commission established in 1942 to develop the atomic bomb. The first experimental bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the desert of New Mexico. Atomic bombs were then dropped on two cities in Japan in hopes of bringing the war to an end: Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

The Federalist

Collection of essays written by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton and published during the ratification debate in New York to lay out the federalists' arguments in favor of the new Constitution. Since their publication, these influential essays have served as an important source for constitutional interpretation.

Land-Grant colleges

Colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887. These grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of today's public universities derive from them.

Royal Colonies

Colonies where governors were appointed directly by the king. Though often competent administrators, the governors frequently ran into trouble with colonial legislatures, which resented the imposition of control from across the Atlantic.

Patriots

Colonists who supported the American Revolution; they were also known as "Whigs."

9/11

Common shorthand for the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, in which nineteen militant Islamist men hijacked and crashed four commercial aircraft. Two planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing them to collapse. One plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the fourth, overtaken by passengers, crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the worst case of domestic terrorism in American history.

New Harmony

Communal society of around one thousand members, established in New Harmony, Indiana, by Robert Owen. The community attracted a hodgepodge of individuals, from scholars to crooks, and fell apart due to infighting and confusion after just two years.

Holding Companies

Companies that own part or all of other companies' stock in order to extend monopoly control. Often, a holding company does not produce goods or services of its own but only exists to control other companies. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 sought to clamp down on these companies when they obstructed competition.

Seventh of March speech

Daniel Webster's impassioned address urging the North to support the Compromise of 1850. Webster argued that topography and climate would keep slavery from becoming entrenched in Mexican Cession territory and urged northerners to make all reasonable concessions to prevent disunion.

Battle of Fallen Timbers

Decisive battle between the Miami Confederacy and the U.S. Army. British forces refused to shelter the routed Indians, forcing the latter to attain a peace settlement with the United States.

Freeport Doctrine

Declared that since slavery could not exist without laws to protect it, territorial legislatures, not the Supreme Court, would have the final say on the slavery question. First argued by Stephen Douglas in 1858 in response to Abraham Lincoln.

Proclamation of 1763

Decree issued by Parliament in the wake of Pontiac's uprising, prohibiting settlement beyond the Appalachians. Contributed to rising resentment of British rule in the American colonies.

Edict of Nantes

Decree issued by the French crown granting limited toleration to French Protestants. Ended religious wars in France and inaugurated a period of French preeminence in Europe and across the Atlantic. Its repeal in 1685 prompted a fresh migration of Protestant Huguenots to North America.

Yamasee Indians

Defeated by the South Carolinians in the war of 1715-1716. The Yamasee defeat devastated the last of the coastal Indian tribes in the southern colonies.

War Hawks

Democratic-Republican congressmen who pressed James Madison to declare war on Britain. Largely drawn from the South and West, the war hawks resented British constraints on American trade and accused the British of supporting Indian attacks against American settlements on the frontier.

Baby Boom

Demographic explosion from births to returning soldiers and others who had put off starting families during the war. This large generation of new Americans forced the expansion of many institutions such as schools and universities.

Scalawags

Derogatory term for pro-Union Southerners whom Southern Democrats accused of plundering the resources of the South in collusion with Republican governments after the Civil War.

Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act

Designed to appeal to new women voters, this act provided federally financed instruction in maternal and infant health care and expanded the role of government in family welfare.

3/5ths Compromise

Determined that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning taxes and representation. The compromise granted disproportionate political power to southern slave states.

XYZ Affair

Diplomatic conflict between France and the United States when American envoys to France were asked to pay a hefty bribe for the privilege of meeting with the French foreign minister. Many in the United States called for war against France, while American sailors and privateers waged an undeclared war against French merchants in the Caribbean.

Caroline

Diplomatic row between the United States and Britain. Developed after British troops set fire to an American steamer carrying supplies across the Niagara River to Canadian insurgents, during Canada's short-lived insurrection.

Trent Affair

Diplomatic row that threatened to bring the British into the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, after a Union warship stopped a British steamer and arrested two Confederate diplomats on board.

Sugar Act

Duty on imported sugar from the West Indies. It was the first tax levied on the colonists by the crown and was lowered substantially in response to widespread protests.

Romanticism

Early-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that, in reaction to the hyper-rational Enlightenment, emphasized imagination over reason, nature over civilization, intuition over calculation, and the self over society.

Panic of 1837

Economic crisis triggered by bank failures, elevated grain prices, and Andrew Jackson's efforts to curb overspeculation on western lands and transportation improvements. In response, President Martin Van Buren proposed the "Divorce Bill," which pulled treasury funds out of the banking system altogether, contracting the credit supply.

Supply-Side Economics

Economic theory that underlay Ronald Reagan's tax and spending cuts. Contrary to Keynesianism, supply-side theory declared that government policy should aim to increase the supply of goods and services, rather than the demand for them. It held that lower taxes and decreased regulation would increase productivity by providing increased incentives to work, thus increasing productivity and the tax base.

Voter Education Project

Effort by SNCC and other civil rights groups to register the South's historically disenfranchised black population. The project typified a common strategy of the civil rights movement, which sought to counter racial discrimination by empowering people at grassroots levels to exercise their civic rights through voting.

Market Revolution

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transformation from a disaggregated, subsistence economy to a national commercial and industrial network.

Radical Whigs

Eighteenth-century British political commentators who agitated against political corruption and emphasized the threat to liberty posed by arbitrary power. Their writings shaped American political thought and made colonists especially alert to encroachments on their rights.

Deism

Eighteenth-century religious doctrine that emphasized reasoned moral behavior and the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Most Deists rejected biblical inerrancy and the divinity of Christ, but they did believe that a Supreme Being created the universe.

Revolution of 1800

Electoral victory of Democratic Republicans over the Federalists, who lost their congressional majority and the presidency. The peaceful transfer of power between rival parties solidified faith in America's political system.

Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney's invention that sped up the process of harvesting cotton. The gin made cotton cultivation more profitable, revitalizing the southern economy and increasing the importance of slavery in the South.

Headright System

Employed in the tobacco colonies to encourage the importation of indentured servants, the system allowed an individual to acquire fifty acres of land if he paid for a laborer's passage to the colony.

Sedition Act

Enacted by the Federalist Congress in an effort to clamp down on Jeffersonian opposition, the law made anyone convicted of defaming government officials or interfering with government policies liable to imprisonment and a heavy fine. The act drew heavy criticism from Republicans, who let the act expire in 1801.

Embargo Act

Enacted in response to British and French mistreatment of American merchants, the act banned the export of all goods from the United States to any foreign port. The embargo placed great strains on the American economy while only marginally affecting its European targets, and was therefore repealed in 1809.

Valley Forge

Encampment where George Washington's poorly equipped army spent a wretched, freezing winter. Hundreds of men died and more than a thousand deserted. The plight of the starving, shivering soldiers reflected the main weakness of the American army-a lack of stable supplies and munitions.

Treaty of Kanagawa

Ended Japan's two-hundred-year period of economic isolation, establishing an American consulate in Japan and securing American coaling rights in Japanese ports.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Ended the war with Mexico. Mexico agreed to cede territory reaching northwest from Texas to Oregon in exchange for $18.25 million in cash and assumed debts.

Puritans

English Protestant reformers who sought to purify the Church of England of Catholic rituals and creeds. Some of the most devout Puritans believed that only "visible saints" should be admitted to church membership.

Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War

Established by Congress during the Civil War to oversee military affairs. Largely under the control of radical Republicans, the committee agitated for a more vigorous war effort and actively pressed Lincoln on the issue of emancipation.

National War Labor Board

Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to act as an arbitration tribunal and mediate disputes between labor and management that might have led to work stoppages and thereby undermined the war effort. The ________ was also charged with adjusting wages with an eye to controlling inflation.

Townshend Acts

External, or indirect, levies on glass, white lead, paper, paint, and tea, the proceeds of which were used to pay colonial governors, who had previously been paid directly by colonial assemblies. Sparked another round of protests in the colonies.

Crittenden Amendments

Failed constitutional amendments that would have given federal protection for slavery in all territories south of 36°30' where slavery was supported by popular sovereignty. Proposed in an attempt to appease the South.

Operation Dixie

Failed effort by the CIO after World War II to unionize southern workers, especially in textile factories.

Harpers Ferry

Federal arsenal in Virginia seized by abolitionist John Brown in 1859. Though Brown was later captured and executed, his raid alarmed southerners, who believed that northerners shared in Brown's extremism.

Midnight judges

Federal justices appointed by John Adams during the last days of his presidency. Their positions were revoked when the newly elected Republican Congress repealed the Judiciary Act.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Federal law that banned racial discrimination in public facilities and strengthened the federal government's power to fight segregation in schools. Title VII of the act prohibited employers from discriminating based on race in their hiring practices, and empowered the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to regulate fair employment.

Federal Highway Act of 1956

Federal legislation signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower to construct thousands of miles of modern highways in the name of national defense. Officially called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, this bill dramatically increased the move to the suburbs, as white middle-class people could more easily commute to urban jobs.

Lexington and Concord

First battles of the Revolutionary War, fought outside of Boston. The colonial militia successfully defended their stores of munitions, forcing the British to retreat to Boston.

Barbados Slave Code

First formal statute governing the treatment of slaves, which provided for harsh punishments against offending slaves but lacked penalties for the mistreatment of slaves by masters. Similar statutes were adopted by southern plantation societies on the North American mainland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Anti-Masonic Party

First founded in New York, it gained considerable influence in New England and the mid-Atlantic during the 1832 election, campaigning against the politically influential Masonic order, a secret society. Anti-Masons opposed Andrew Jackson, a Mason, and drew much of their support from evangelical Protestants.

Battle of Bull Run (Manassas Junction)

First major battle of the Civil War and a victory for the South, it dispelled Northern illusions of swift victory.

Canadian Shield

First part of the North American landmass to emerge above sea level

Jamestown

First permanent English settlement in North America founded by the Virginia Company.

Border States

Five slave states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia—that did not secede during the Civil War. To keep the states in the Union, Abraham Lincoln insisted that the war was not about abolishing slavery but rather protecting the Union.

Platt Amendment

Following its military occupation, the United States successfully pressured the Cuban government to write this amendment into its constitution. It limited Cuba's treaty-making abilities, controlled its debt, and stipulated that the United States could intervene militarily to restore order when it saw fit.

Trail of Tears

Forced march of fifteen thousand Cherokee Indians from their Georgia and Alabama homes to Indian Territory. Some four thousand Cherokees died on the arduous journey.

Policy of Boldness

Foreign-policy objective of Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles, who believed in changing the containment strategy to one that more directly engaged the Soviet Union and attempted to roll back communist influence around the world. This policy led to a buildup of America's nuclear arsenal to threaten "massive retaliation" against communist enemies, launching the Cold War's arms race.

Declaration of Independence

Formal pronouncement of independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson and approved by Congress. The declaration allowed Americans to appeal for foreign aid and served as an inspiration for later revolutionary movements worldwide.

Constitutional Union Party

Formed by moderate Whigs and Know-Nothings in an effort to elect a compromise candidate and avert a sectional crisis.

Union Party

Formed by moderate Whigs and Know-Nothings in an effort to elect a compromise candidate and avert a sectional crisis.

William McKinley

Former Republican congressman from Ohio who won the presidency in 1896 and again in 1900. He was pro-business, conservative, and unwilling to trouble the waters by voicing unpopular opinions.

Marcus Alonzo Hanna

Former businessman who raised money and devised strategy for McKinley's winning bid for the White House in 1896.

Berlin Wall

Fortified and guarded barrier between East and West Berlin erected on orders from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 to stop the flow of people to the West. Until its destruction in 1989, the wall was a vivid symbol of the divide between the communist and capitalist worlds.

Alamo

Fortress in Texas where two hundred American volunteers were slain by Santa Anna in 1836. "Remember the Alamo" became a battle cry in support of Texan independence.

Battle of Acoma

Fought between Spaniards under Don Juan de Onate and the Pueblo Indians in present-day New Mexico. Spaniards brutally crushed the Pueblo peoples and established the territory as New Mexico in 1609.

Battle of Bunker Hill

Fought on the outskirts of Boston, on Breed's Hill, the battle ended in the colonial militia's retreat, though at a heavy cost to the British.

American Temperance Society

Founded in Boston in 1826 as part of a growing effort of nineteenth-century reformers to limit alcohol consumption.

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, the __________ went on to embrace a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women.

Tripolitan War

Four-year conflict between the American navy and the North African nation of Tripoli over piracy in the Mediterranean. Jefferson, a staunch noninterventionist, reluctantly deployed American forces, eventually securing a peace treaty with Tripoli.

Court-Packing Plan

Franklin Roosevelt's politically motivated and ill-fated scheme to add a new justice to the Supreme Court for every member over seventy who would not retire. His objective was to overcome the Court's objections to New Deal reforms.

North American Free Trade Agreement

Free-trade zone encompassing Mexico, Canada, and the United States. A symbol of the increased reality of a globalized marketplace, the treaty passed despite opposition from protectionists and labor leaders.

European Economic Community

Free-trade zone in Western Europe created by Treaty of Rome in 1957. Often referred to as the "Common Market," this collection of countries originally included France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The body eventually expanded to become the European Union, which by 2005 included twenty-seven member states.

Huguenots

French Protestant dissenters, the Huguenots were granted limited toleration under the Edict of Nantes. After King Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in 1685, many Huguenots fled elsewhere, including to British North America.

Acadians

French residents of Nova Scotia, many of whom were uprooted by the British in 1755 and scattered as far south as Louisiana, where their descendants became known as "Cajuns."

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

From 1993 to 2010, the policy affecting homosexuals in the military. It emerged as a compromise between the standing prohibition against homosexuals in the armed forces and President Clinton's push to allow all citizens to serve regardless of sexual orientation. Military authorities were forbidden to ask about a service member's orientation, and gay service personnel could be discharged if they publicly revealed their homosexuality. At President Obama's urging, Congress repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in 2010, permitting gays to serve openly in uniform.

Potsdam Conference

From July 17 to August 2, 1945, President Harry S Truman met with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British leaders Winston Churchill and later Clement Attlee (when the Labour party defeated Churchill's Conservative party) near Berlin to deliver an ultimatum to Japan: surrender or be destroyed.

Detente

From the French for "reduced tension," the period of Cold War thawing when the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated reduced armament treaties under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. As a policy prescription, ___________ marked a departure from the policies of proportional response, mutually assured destruction, and containment that had defined the earlier years of the Cold War.

Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls

Gathering of feminist activists in Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her "Declaration of Sentiments," stating that "all men and women are created equal."

Meuse-Argonne offensive

General John J. ("Black Jack") Pershing led American troops in this effort to cut the German railroad lines supplying the western front. One of the few major battles that Americans participated in during the entire war, it was still under way when the war ended.

Battle of Trenton

George Washington surprised and captured a garrison of sleeping German Hessians, raising the morale of his crestfallen army and setting the stage for his victory at Princeton a week later.

Farewell Address

George Washington's address at the end of his presidency, warning against "permanent alliances" with other nations. Washington did not oppose all alliances, but believed that the young, fledgling nation should forge alliances only on a temporary basis, in extraordinary circumstances.

Battle of Yorktown

George Washington, with the aid of the French Army, besieged Cornwallis at Yorktown, while the French naval fleet prevented British reinforcements from coming ashore. Cornwallis surrendered, dealing a heavy blow to the British war effort and paving the way for an eventual peace.

Hessians

German troops hired from their princes by George III to aid in putting down the colonial insurrection. This hardened the resolve of American colonists, who resented the use of paid foreign fighters.

Central Powers

Germany and Austria-Hungary, later joined by Turkey and Bulgaria, made up this alliance against the Allies in World War I.

U.S. Sanitary Commission

Government agency founded with the help of Elizabeth Blackwell that trained nurses, collected medical supplies, and equipped hospitals in an effort to help the Union army. The commission helped professionalize nursing and gave many women the confidence and organizational skills to propel the women's movement in the postwar years.

Confederate States of America

Government established after seven southern states seceded from the Union. Later joined by four more states from the upper South.

Allies

Great Britain, Russia, and France, later joined by Italy, Japan, and the United States, formed this alliance against the Central Powers in World War I.

Dust Bowl

Grim nickname for the Great Plains region devastated by drought and dust storms during the 1930s. The disaster led to the migration into California of thousands of displaced "Okies" and "Arkies."

Hoovervilles

Grim shantytowns where impoverished victims of the Great Depression slept under newspapers and in makeshift tents. Their visibility (and sarcastic name) tarnished the reputation of the Hoover administration.

War Industries Board

Headed by Bernard Baruch, this federal agency coordinated industrial production during World War I, setting production quotas, allocating raw materials, and pushing companies to increase efficiency and eliminate waste. Under the economic mobilization of the _____ ________________ _________, industrial production in the United States increased 20 percent during the war.

Pacific Railroad Act

Helped fund the construction of the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad with the use of land grants and government bonds.

Incas

Highly advanced South American civilization that occupied present-day Peru until it was conquered by Spanish forces under Francisco Pizarro in 1532. The Incas developed sophisticated agricultural techniques, such as terrace farming, in order to sustain large, complex societies in the unforgiving Andes Mountains.

Nuremberg War Crimes Trial

Highly publicized proceedings against former Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity in postwar Germany. The trials led to several executions and long prison sentences.

Ecological Imperialism

Historians' term for the spoliation of western natural resources through excessive hunting, logging, mining, and grazing.

Underground Railroad

Informal network of volunteers that helped runaway slaves escape from the South and reach free-soil Canada. Seeking to halt the flow of runaway slaves to the North, southern planters and congressmen pushed for a stronger fugitive slave law.

Conversion

Intense religious experience that confirmed an individual's place among the "elect," or the "visible saints." Calvinists who experienced conversion were then expected to lead sanctified lives to demonstrate their salvation.

Albany Congress

Intercolonial congress summoned by the British government to foster greater colonial unity and assure Iroquois support in the escalating war against the French.

Suez crisis

International crisis launched when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the ______ Canal, which had been owned mostly by French and British stockholders. The crisis led to a British and French attack on Egypt, which failed without aid from the United States. The ______ _________ marked an important turning point in the post-colonial Middle East and highlighted the rising importance of oil in world affairs.

Earth Day

International day of celebration and awareness of global environmental issues launched by conservationists on April 22, 1970.

Kyoto Treaty

International treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was negotiated and opened for signatories in 1997 and took effect in 2005. Although it was signed by 169 (of 192) countries, the Bush administration rejected the plan as too costly in 2001.

10 Percent Reconstruction Plan

Introduced by President Lincoln, it proposed that a state be readmitted to the Union once 10 percent of its voters had pledged loyalty to the United States and promised to honor emancipation.

House of Un-American Activities Committee

Investigatory body established in 1938 to root out "subversion." Sought to expose communist influence in American government and society, in particular through the trial of Alger Hiss.

Neutrality Proclamation

Issued by George Washington, it proclaimed America's formal neutrality in the escalating conflict between England and France, a statement that enraged pro-French Jeffersonians.

GI Bill

Known officially as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act and more informally as the ____ Bill of Rights, this law helped returning World War II soldiers reintegrate into civilian life by securing loans to buy homes and farms and set up small businesses. It also made tuition and stipends available for them to attend college, as well as job training programs. The act was intended to cushion the blow of 15 million returning servicemen on the employment market and to nurture the postwar economy.

Roe v. Wade

Landmark Supreme Court decision that forbade states from barring abortion by citing a woman's constitutional right to privacy. Seen as a victory for feminism and civil liberties by some, the decision provoked a strong counterreaction by opponents to abortion, galvanizing the pro-life movement.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

Landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and abolished racial segregation in public schools. The Court reasoned that "separate" was inherently "unequal," rejecting the foundation of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. This decision was the first major step toward the legal end of racial discrimination and a major accomplishment for the civil rights movement.

Battle of Antietam

Landmark battle in the Civil War that essentially ended in a draw but demonstrated the prowess of the Union army, forestalling foreign intervention and giving Lincoln the "victory" he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Americans with Disabilities Act

Landmark law signed by President George H. W. Bush that prohibited discrimination against people with physical or mental handicaps. It represented a legislative triumph for champions of equal protections to all.

Second Anglo-Powhatan War

Last-ditch effort by the Indians to dislodge Virginia settlements. The resulting peace treaty formally separated white and Indian areas of settlement.

Jones Act

Law according territorial status to the Philippines and promising independence as soon as a "stable government" could be established. The United States did not grant the Philippines independence until July 4, 1946.

Clayton Anti-Trust Act

Law extending the anti-trust protections of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and exempting labor unions and agricultural organizations from antimonopoly constraints. The act conferred long-overdue benefits on labor.

War Powers Act

Law passed by Congress limiting the president's ability to wage war without congressional approval. The act required the president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing troops to a foreign conflict. An important consequence of the Vietnam War, this piece of legislation sought to reduce the president's unilateral authority in military matters.

Elkins Act

Law passed by Congress to impose penalties on railroads that offered rebates and customers who accepted them. The law strengthened the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The Hepburn Act of 1906 added free passes to the list of railroad no-no's.

Black Codes

Laws passed throughout the South to restrict the rights of emancipated blacks, particularly with respect to negotiating labor contracts. Increased Northerners' criticisms of President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policies.

Common Law

Laws that originate from court rulings and customs, as opposed to legislative statutes. The United States Constitution grew out of the Anglo-American common law tradition and thus provided only a general organizational framework for the new federal government.

Irreconcilables

Led by Senators William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, this was a hard-core group of militant isolationists who opposed the Wilsonian dream of international cooperation in the League of Nations after World War I. Their efforts played an important part in preventing American participation in the international organization.

Charter

Legal document granted by a government to some group or agency to implement a stated purpose, and spelling out the attending rights and obligations. British colonial charters guaranteed inhabitants all the rights of Englishmen, which helped solidify colonists' ties to Britain during the early years of settlement.

Limited Liability

Legal principle that facilitates capital investment by offering protection for individual investors, who, in cases of legal claims or bankruptcy, cannot be held responsible for more than the value of their individual shares.

French and Indian War

Nine-year war between the British and the French in North America. It resulted in the expulsion of the French from the North American mainland and helped spark the Seven Years' War in Europe.

Employment Act of 1946

Legislation declaring that the government's economic policy should aim to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power, as well as to keep inflation low. This general commitment was much shorter on specific targets and rules than its liberal creators had wished. The act created the Council of Economic Advisers to provide the president with data and recommendations to make economic policy.

USA Patriot Act

Legislation passed shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that granted broad surveillance and detention authority to the government.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Legislation pushed through Congress by President Johnson that prohibited ballot-denying tactics, such as literacy tests and intimidation. The __________ _________ ______ was a successor to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and sought to make racial disenfranchisement explicitly illegal.

Welfare Reform Bill

Legislation that made deep cuts in welfare grants and required able-bodied welfare recipients to find employment. Part of Bill Clinton's campaign platform in 1992, the reforms were widely seen by liberals as an abandonment of key New Deal/Great Society provisions to care for the impoverished.

March on Washington

Massive civil rights demonstration in August 1963 in support of Kennedy backed legislation to secure legal protections for American blacks. One of the most visually impressive manifestations of the civil rights movement, the march was the occasion of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Glasnost

Meaning "openness," a cornerstone along with perestroika of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's reform movement in the USSR in the 1980s. These policies resulted in greater market liberalization, access to the West, and ultimately the end of communist rule.

Perestroika

Meaning "restructuring," a cornerstone along with glasnost of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's reform movement in the USSR in the 1980s. These policies resulted in greater market liberalization, access to the West, and ultimately the end of communist rule.

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Measure enacted by the Virginia legislature prohibiting state support for religious institutions and recognizing freedom of worship. Served as a model for the religion clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Spot Resolution

Measures introduced by Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, questioning President James K. Polk's justification for war with Mexico. Lincoln requested that Polk clarify precisely where Mexican forces had attacked American troops.

McCormick Reaper

Mechanized the harvest of grains, such as wheat, allowing farmers to cultivate larger plots. The introduction of the reaper in the 1830s fueled the establishment of large-scale commercial agriculture in the Midwest.

Yalta Conference

Meeting of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in February 1945 at an old tsarist resort on the Black Sea, where the Big Three leaders laid the foundations for the postwar division of power in Europe, including a divided Germany and territorial concessions to the Soviet Union.

Bretton Woods Conference

Meeting of Western allies to establish a postwar international economic order to avoid crises like the one that spawned World War II. Led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, designed to regulate currency levels and provide aid to underdeveloped countries.

Atlantic Charter

Meeting on a warship off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill signed this covenant outlining the future path toward disarmament, peace, and a permanent system of general security. Its spirit would animate the founding of the United Nations and raise awareness of the human rights of individuals after World War II.

Liberal Protestants

Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth. Many __________ __________ became active in the "social gospel" and other reform movements of the era.

Judiciary Act of 1789

Organized the federal legal system, establishing the Supreme Court, federal district and circuit courts, and the office of the attorney general.

Realism

Mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, in all its unvarnished detail. Adherents eschewed the idealism and nostalgia of the earlier romantic sensibility.

Indentured Servants

Migrants who, in exchange for transatlantic passage, bound themselves to a colonial employer for a term of service, typically between four and seven years. Their migration addressed the chronic labor shortage in the colonies and facilitated settlement.

Great English Migration

Migration of seventy thousand refugees from England to the North American colonies, primarily New England and the Caribbean. The twenty thousand migrants who came to Massachusetts largely shared a common sense of purpose-to establish a model Christian settlement in the New World.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Military alliance of Western European powers and the United States and Canada established in 1949 to defend against the common threat from the Soviet Union, marking a giant stride forward for European unity and American internationalism.

Six Day War

Military conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. The war ended with an Israeli victory and territorial expansion into the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. The 1967 war was a humiliation for several Arab states, and the territorial disputes it created formed the basis for continued conflict in the region.

Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Military engagement in French colonial Vietnam in which French forces were defeated by Viet Minh nationalists loyal to Ho Chi Minh. With this loss, the French ended their colonial involvement in Indochina, paving the way for America's entry.

Vietnamization

Military strategy launched by Richard Nixon in 1969. The plan reduced the number of American combat troops in Vietnam and left more of the fighting to the South Vietnamese, who were supplied with American armor, tanks, and weaponry.

New Lights

Ministers who took part in the revivalist, emotive religious tradition pioneered by George Whitefield during the Great Awakening.

Cahokia

Mississippian settlement near present-day East St. Louis, home to as many as twenty-five thousand Native Americans.

Protestant Reformation

Movement to reform the Catholic Church launched in Germany by Martin Luther. Reformers questioned the authority of the Pope, sought to eliminate the selling of indulgences, and encouraged the translation of the Bible from Latin, which few at the time could read. The reformation was launched in England in the 1530s when King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church.

Contract with America

Multipoint program offered by Republican candidates and sitting politicians in the 1994 midterm election. The platform proposed smaller government, congressional ethics reform, term limits, greater emphasis on personal responsibility, and a general repudiation of the Democratic party. This articulation of dissent was a significant blow to the Clinton administration and led to the Republican party's takeover of both houses of Congress for the first time in half a century.

Dollar Diplomacy

Name applied by President Taft's critics to the policy of supporting U.S. investments and political interests abroad. First applied to the financing of railways in China after 1909, the policy then spread to Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua. President Woodrow Wilson disavowed the practice, but his administration undertook comparable acts of intervention in support of U.S. business interests, especially in Latin America.

Occupy Wall Street

Name of the original protest that launched the populist, anti-Wall Street "Occupy" movement in late 2010 and early 2011. Youthful radicals pitched tents and occupied Zuccotti Park in New York's financial district beginning in September 2010 to protest inequality and corporate political power. This demonstration inspired similar occupations in many other cities.

Malaise Speech

National address by Jimmy Carter in July 1979 in which he chided American materialism and urged a communal spirit in the face of economic hardships. Although Carter intended the speech to improve both public morale and his standing as a leader, it had the opposite effect and was widely perceived as a political disaster for the embattled president.

Checkers Speech

Nationally televised address by vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon during which he defended himself against allegations of corruption. Using the new mass medium of television shortly before the 1952 election, the vice-presidential candidate saved his place on the ticket by saying the only campaign gift he had received was a cocker spaniel named _____________.

Aztecs

Native American empire that controlled present-day Mexico until 1521, when they were conquered by Spanish Hernan Cortes. The Aztecs maintained control over their vast empire through a system of trade and tribute. They came to be known for their advances in mathematics and writing and their use of human sacrifices in religious ceremonies.

Code Talkers

Native American men who served in the military by transmitting radio messages in their native languages, which were undecipherable by German and Japanese spies.

Know-Nothing Party

Nativist political party, also known as the American party, that emerged in response to an influx of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics.

Rome-Berlin Axis

Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, and Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini, allied themselves together under this nefarious treaty. The pact was signed after both countries had intervened on behalf of the fascist leader Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Jay's Treaty

Negotiated by Chief Justice John Jay in an effort to avoid war with Britain, the treaty included a British promise to evacuate outposts on U.S. soil and pay damages for seized American vessels, in exchange for which Jay bound the United States to repay pre-Revolutionary war debts and to abide by Britain's restrictive trading policies toward France.

National Banking System

Network of member banks that could issue currency against purchased government bonds. Created during the Civil War to establish a stable national currency and stimulate the sale of war bonds.

King George's War

North American theater of Europe's War of Austrian Succession that once again pitted British colonists against their French counterparts in the North. The peace settlement did not involve any territorial realignment, leading to conflict between New England settlers and the British government.

Conscience Whigs

Northern Whigs who opposed slavery on moral grounds. Conscience Whigs sought to prevent the annexation of Texas as a slave state, fearing that the new slave territory would only serve to buttress the southern "slave power."

Tariff of Abominations

Noteworthy for its unprecedentedly high duties on imports. Southerners vehemently opposed the tariff, arguing that it hurt southern farmers, who did not enjoy the protection of tariffs but were forced to pay higher prices for manufactures.

Popular Sovereignty

Notion advanced before the Civil War that the sovereign people of a given territory should decide whether to allow slavery. Seemingly a compromise, it was largely opposed by northern abolitionists, who feared it would promote the spread of slavery to the territories.

Black Monday

October 19, 1987. Date of the largest single-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average until September 2001. The downturn indicated instability in the booming business culture of the 1980s but did not lead to a serious economic recession.

Populists

Officially known as the People's party, they represented Westerners and Southerners who believed that U.S. economic policy inappropriately favored Eastern businessmen instead of the nation's farmers. Their proposals included nationalization of the railroads, a graduated income tax, and, most significantly, the unlimited coinage of silver.

Bonus Army

Officially known as the ________ Expeditionary Force (BEF), this rag-tag group of twenty thousand veterans marched on Washington to demand immediate payment of bonuses earned during World War I. General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the veterans with tear gas and bayonets.

Jeremiad

Often-fiery sermons lamenting the waning piety of parishioners first delivered in New England in the mid-seventeenth century; named after the doom-saying Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.

Mason-Dixon Line

Originally drawn by surveyors to resolve the boundaries between Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in the 1760s, it came to symbolize the North-South divide over slavery.

Indian Removal Act

Ordered the removal of Indian tribes still residing east of the Mississippi to newly established Indian Territory west of Arkansas and Missouri. Tribes resisting eviction were forcibly removed by American forces, often after prolonged legal or military battles.

New England Emigrant Aid Company

Organization created to facilitate the migration of free laborers to Kansas in order to prevent the establishment of slavery in the territory.

Black Panther Party

Organization of armed black militants formed in Oakland, California, in 1966 to protect black rights. The Panthers represented a growing dissatisfaction with the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement and signaled a new direction to that movement after the legislative victories of 1964 and 1965.

Rough Riders

Organized by Theodore Roosevelt, this was a colorful, motley regiment of Cuban war volunteers consisting of western cowboys, ex-convicts, and effete Ivy Leaguers. Roosevelt emphasized his experience with the regiment in subsequent campaigns for governor of New York and vice president under William McKinley.

Freedom Riders

Organized mixed-race groups who rode interstate buses deep into the South to draw attention to and protest racial segregation, beginning in 1961. This effort to challenge racism, which involved the participation of many northern young people as well as southern activists, proved a political and public relations success for the civil rights movement.

Wade-Davis Bill

Passed by congressional Republicans in response to Abraham Lincoln's "10 percent" Reconstruction plan, it required that 50 percent of a state's voters pledge allegiance to the Union, and set stronger safeguards for emancipation. Reflected divisions between Congress and the president, and between radical and moderate Republicans, over the treatment of the defeated South.

Criminal Syndicalism Laws

Passed by many states during the red scare, these nefarious laws outlawed the mere advocacy of violence to secure social change. Stump speakers for the International Workers of the World, or IWW, were special targets.

Judiciary Act of 1801

Passed by the departing Federalist Congress, it created sixteen new federal judgeships, ensuring a Federalist hold on the judiciary.

Reconstruction Act

Passed by the newly elected Republican Congress, it divided the South into five military districts, disenfranchised former Confederates, and required that Southern states both ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and write state constitutions guaranteeing freedmen the franchise before gaining readmission to the Union.

Son's of Liberty

Patriotic groups that played a central role in agitating against the Stamp Act and enforcing non-importation agreements. (See also Daughters of Liberty)

Daughters of Liberty

Patriotic groups that played a central role in agitating against the Stamp Act and enforcing nonimportation agreements. (See also Sons of Liberty)

Funding at par

Payment of debts, such as government bonds, at face value. In 1790, Alexander Hamilton proposed that the federal government pay its Revolutionary war debts in full in order to bolster the nation's credit.

Treaty of Paris

Peace treaty signed by Britain and the United States ending the Revolutionary War. The British formally recognized American independence and ceded territory east of the Mississippi while the Americans, in turn, promised to restore Loyalist property and repay debts to British creditors.

Carpetbaggers

Pejorative used by Southern whites to describe Northern businessmen and politicians who came to the South after the Civil War to work on Reconstruction projects or invest in Southern infrastructure.

Mestizos

People of mixed Indian and European heritage, notably in Mexico

Burned-Over District

Popular name for western New York, a region particularly swept up in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening.

Seward's Folly

Popular term for Secretary of State ___________'s purchase of Alaska from Russia. The derisive term reflected the anti-expansionist sentiments of most Americans immediately after the Civil War.

Pet Banks

Popular term for pro-Jackson state banks that received the bulk of federal deposits when Andrew Jackson moved to dismantle the Bank of the United States in 1833.

Great Society

President Lyndon Johnson's term for his domestic policy agenda. Billed as a successor to the New Deal, the ________ ____________ aimed to extend the postwar prosperity to all people in American society by promoting civil rights and fighting poverty. ________ ____________ programs included the War on Poverty, which expanded the Social Security system by creating Medicare and Medicaid to provide health care for the aged and the poor. Johnson also signed laws protecting consumers and empowering community organizations to combat poverty at grassroots levels.

Fair Deal

President Truman's extensive social program introduced in his 1949 message to Congress. Republicans and southern Democrats kept much of his vision from being enacted, except for raising the minimum wage, providing for more public housing, and extending old-age insurance to many more beneficiaries under the Social Security Act.

Nixon Doctrine

President __________'s plan for "peace with honor" in Vietnam. The doctrine stated that the United States would honor its existing defense commitments but, in the future, countries would have to fight their own wars.

Bracero Program

Program established by agreement with the Mexican government to recruit temporary Mexican agricultural workers to the United States to make up for wartime labor shortages in the Far West. The program persisted until 1964, by which time it had sponsored 4.5 million border crossings.

Apollo

Program of manned space flights run by America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The project's highest achievement was the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Gag Resolution

Prohibited debate or action on antislavery appeals. Driven through the House by proslavery southerners, the Gag Resolution passed every year for eight years and was eventually overturned with the help of John Quincy Adams.

Maine Law of 1851

Prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. A dozen other states followed Maine's lead, though most statutes proved ineffective and were repealed within a decade.

Federalists

Proponents of the 1787 Constitution, they favored a strong national government, arguing that the checks and balances in the new Constitution would safeguard the people's liberties.

Lecompton Constitution

Proposed Kansas constitution, whose ratification was unfairly rigged so as to guarantee slavery in the territory. Initially ratified by proslavery forces, it was later voted down when Congress required that the entire constitution be put up for a vote.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Proposed that the issue of slavery be decided by popular sovereignty in the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, thus revoking the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Introduced by Stephen Douglas in an effort to bring Nebraska into the Union and pave the way for a northern transcontinental railroad.

Tariff of 1842

Protective measure passed by Congressional Whigs, raising tariffs to pre-compromise tariff of 1833 rates.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Protest by black Alabamians against segregated seating on city buses, sparked by Rosa Parks's defiant refusal to move to the back of the bus. The _____ ____________ lasted from December 1, 1955, until December 26, 1956, and became one of the foundational moments of the civil rights movement. It led to the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., and ultimately to a Supreme Court decision opposing segregated busing.

Land Ordinance of 1785

Provided for the sale of land in the Old Northwest and earmarked the proceeds toward repaying the national debt.

Union League

Reconstruction-era African American organization that worked to educate Southern blacks about civic life, built black schools and churches, and represented African American interests before government and employers. It also campaigned on behalf of Republican candidates and recruited local militias to protect blacks from white intimidation.

"Smoking Gun" Tape

Recording made in the Oval Office in June 1972 that proved conclusively that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in and endeavored to cover it up. Led to a complete breakdown in congressional support for Nixon after the Supreme Court ordered he hand the tape to investigators.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Refers to weapons-nuclear, biological, and chemical-that can kill large numbers of people and do great damage to the built and natural environment. The term was used to refer to nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had developed WOMD provided the rationale for the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003. These weapons were never found after the invasion.

American Colonization Society

Reflecting the focus of early abolitionists on transporting freed blacks back to Africa, the organization established Liberia, a West African settlement intended as a haven for emancipated slaves.

Black belt

Region of the Deep South with the highest concentration of slaves. The "Black Belt" emerged in the nineteenth century as cotton production became more profitable and slavery expanded south and west.

Glorious Revolution

Relatively peaceful overthrow of the unpopular Catholic monarch, James II, who was replaced with Dutch-born William III and Mary II, daughter of James II. William and Mary accepted increased parliamentary oversight and new limits on monarchical authority.

Mormons

Religious followers of Joseph Smith, who founded a communal, oligarchic religious order in the 1830s, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormons, facing deep hostility from their non-Mormon neighbors, eventually migrated west and established a flourishing settlement in the Utah desert.

Quakers

Religious group known for their tolerance, emphasis on peace, and idealistic Indian policy, who settled heavily in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Second Great Awakening

Religious revival characterized by emotional mass "camp meetings" and widespread conversion. Brought about a democratization of religion as a multiplicity of denominations vied for members.

Great Awakening

Religious revival that swept the colonies. Participating ministers, most notably Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, placed an emphasis on direct, emotive spirituality. A Second Great Awakening arose in the nineteenth century.

Second Continental Congress

Representative body of delegates from all thirteen colonies. Drafted the Declaration of Independence and managed the colonial war effort.

Kent State University

Scene of massacre of four college students by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970, in Ohio. In response to Nixon's announcement that he had expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia, college campuses across the country exploded in violence. On May 14 and 15, students at historically black Jackson State College in Mississippi were protesting the war as well as the _____ ________ shooting when highway patrolmen fired into a student dormitory, killing two students.

Queen Anne's War

Second in a series of conflicts between the European powers for control of North America, fought between the English and French colonists in the North, and the English and Spanish in Florida. Under the peace treaty, the French ceded Acadia (Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay to Britain.

Ostend Manifesto

Secret Franklin Pierce administration proposal to purchase or, that failing, to wrest militarily Cuba from Spain. Once leaked, it was quickly abandoned due to vehement opposition from the North.

Pentagon Papers

Secret U.S. government report detailing early planning and policy decisions regarding the Vietnam War under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Leaked to the New York Times in 1971, it revealed instances of governmental secrecy, lies, and incompetence in the prosecution of the war.

Molly Maguires

Secret organization of Irish miners that campaigned, at times violently, against poor working conditions in the Pennsylvania mines.

First Anglo-Powhatan War

Series of clashes between the Powhatan Confederacy and English settlers in Virginia. English colonists torched and pillaged Indian villages, applying tactics used in England's campaigns against the Irish.

Black Hawk War

Series of clashes in Illinois and Wisconsin between American forces and Indian chief Black Hawk of the Sauk and Fox tribes, who unsuccessfully tried to reclaim territory lost under the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

Hungarian uprising

Series of demonstrations in Hungary against the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev violently suppressed this pro-Western uprising, highlighting the limitations of America's power in Eastern Europe.

Navigation Laws

Series of laws passed, beginning in 1651, to regulate colonial shipping; the acts provided that only English ships would be allowed to trade in English and colonial ports, and that all goods destined for the colonies would first pass through England.

Intolerable Acts

Series of punitive measures passed in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, closing the Port of Boston, revoking a number of rights in the Massachusetts colonial charter, and expanding the Quartering Act to allow for the lodging of soldiers in private homes. In response, colonists convened the First Continental Congress and called for a complete boycott of British goods.

Watergate

Series of scandals that resulted in President Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974 amid calls for his impeachment. The episode sprang from a failed burglary attempt at Democratic party headquarters in Washington's Watergate Hotel during the 1972 election.

Salem Witch Trials

Series of witchcraft trials launched after a group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women of the town. Twenty individuals were put to death before the trials were put to an end by the governor of Massachusetts.

Slave Codes

Set of laws beginning in 1662 defining racial slavery. They established the hereditary nature of slavery and limited the rights and education of slaves.

Spanish Armada

Spanish fleet defeated in the English Channel in 1588. The defeat of the Armada marked the beginning of the decline of the Spanish Empire.

California Bear Flag Republic

Short-lived California republic, established by local American settlers who revolted against Mexico. Once news of the war with Mexico reached the Americans, they abandoned the Republic in favor of joining the United States.

Pony Express

Short-lived, speedy mail service between Missouri and California that relied on lightweight riders galloping between closely placed outposts.

Joint-stock Company

Short-term partnership between multiple investors to fund a commercial enterprise; such arrangements were used to fund England's early colonial ventures.

Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937

Shortsighted acts passed to prevent American participation in a European war. Among other restrictions, they prevented Americans from selling munitions to foreign belligerents.

Nullification Crisis

Showdown between President Andrew Jackson and the South Carolina legislature, which declared the 1832 tariff null and void in the state and threatened secession if the federal government tried to collect duties. It was resolved by a compromise negotiated by Henry Clay in 1833.

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty

Signed by Great Britain and the United States, it provided that the two nations would jointly protect the neutrality of Central America and that neither power would seek to fortify or exclusively control any future isthmian waterway. Later revoked by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901, which gave the United States control of the Panama Canal.

Executive Order No. 9066

Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, it authorized the secretary of war to designate military zones from which certain categories of people could be excluded. Fueled by historic anti-Japanese sentiment as well as panic following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the order led to the forced removal of some 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry (70,000 of them U.S. citizens) from the Western Military Zone (the coastal sections of Washington, Oregon, and California). Most but not all of those removed were interned in relocation camps in the interior West. The order was rescinded in December 1944, and legislation passed in 1988 offered an official government apology and modest financial compensation to surviving citizen internees.

Treaty of Tordesillas

Signed by Spain and Portugal, dividing the territories of the New World. Spain received the bulk of territory in the Americas, compensating Portugal with titles to lands in Africa and Asia.

Pinckney's Treaty

Signed with Spain, which, fearing an Anglo-American alliance, granted Americans free navigation of the Mississippi and the disputed territory of Florida.

Roanoke Island

Sir Walter Raleigh's failed colonial settlement off the coast of North Carolina.

Appomattox Courthouse

Site where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865 after almost a year of brutal fighting throughout Virginia in the "Wilderness Campaign."

Separatists

Small group of Puritans who sought to break away entirely from the Church of England; after initially settling in Holland, a number of English Separatists made their way to Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Caravel

Small regular vessel with a high deck and three triangular sails. Caravels could sail more closely into the wind, allowing European sailors to explore the western shores of Africa, previously made inaccessible due to prevailing winds on the homeward journey.

Clipper Ships

Small, swift vessels that gave American shippers an advantage in the carrying trade. Clipper ships were made largely obsolete by the advent of sturdier, roomier iron steamers on the eve of the Civil War.

War of Jenkins's Ear

Small-scale clash between Britain and Spain in the Caribbean and in the buffer colony, Georgia. It merged with the much larger War of Austrian Succession in 1742.

Sputnik

Soviet satellite first launched into earth orbit on October 4, 1957. This scientific achievement marked the first time human beings had put a man-made object into orbit and pushed the USSR noticeably ahead of the United States in the space race. A month later, the Soviet Union sent a larger satellite, __________ II, into space, prompting the United States to redouble its space exploration efforts and raising American fears of Soviet superiority.

SALT II

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty agreement between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and American president Jimmy Carter. Despite an accord to limit weapons between the two leaders, the agreement was ultimately scuttled in the U.S. Senate following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Jim Crow

System of racial segregation in the American South from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century. Based on the concept of "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites, the ___________ ___________ system sought to prevent racial mixing in public, including restaurants, movie theaters, and public transportation. An informal system, it was generally perpetuated by custom, violence, and intimidation.

Excise tax

Tax on goods produced domestically. Excise taxes, particularly the 1791 tax on whiskey, were a highly controversial component of Alexander Hamilton's financial program.

Molasses Act

Tax on imported molasses passed by Parliament in an effort to squelch the North American trade with the French West Indies. It proved largely ineffective due to widespread smuggling.

Corps of Discovery

Team of adventurers, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sent by Thomas Jefferson to explore Louisiana Territory and find a water route to the Pacific. Louis and Clark brought back detailed accounts of the West's flora, fauna, and native populations, and their voyage demonstrated the viability of overland travel to the West.

Kitchen Debate

Televised exchange in 1959 between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and American vice president Richard Nixon. Meeting at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, the two leaders sparred over the relative merits of capitalist consumer culture versus Soviet state planning. Nixon won applause for his staunch defense of American capitalism, helping lead him to the Republican nomination for president in 1960.

Reign of Terror

Ten-month period of brutal repression when some forty thousand individuals were executed as enemies of the French Revolution. While many Jeffersonians maintained their faith in the French Republic, Federalists withdrew their already lukewarm support once the Reign of Terror commenced.

New Right

Term for a loose network of conservative political activists and organizations that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. More populist in tone than previous generations of conservatives, the _____ ________ emphasized hot-button cultural issues like abortion, busing, and prayer in school. They also espoused a nationalist foreign policy outlook that rejected détente and international treaties.

Boll Weevils

Term for conservative southern Democrats who voted increasingly for Republican issues during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Military-Industrial Complex

Term popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address, referring to the political and economic ties between arms manufacturers, elected officials, and the U.S. armed forces that created self-sustaining pressure for high military spending during the Cold War. Eisenhower also warned that this powerful combination left unchecked could "endanger our liberties or democratic process," favoring defense concerns over more peaceful goals that balanced security and liberty.

Transportation Revolution

Term referring to a series of nineteenth-century transportation innovations—turnpikes, steamboats, canals, and railroads—that linked local and regional markets, creating a national economy.

Stagflation

Term referring to the simultaneous occurrence of low employment growth and high inflation in the national economy. The phenomenon characterized the economic troubles of the 1970s and posed both an intellectual challenge to economists and a policymaking challenge to government officials.

Old Northwest

Territories acquired by the federal government from the states, encompassing land northwest of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi River, and south of the Great Lakes. The well-organized management and sale of the land in the territories under the land ordinances of 1785 and 1787 established a precedent for handling future land acquisitions.

Iranian Hostage Crisis

The 444 days, from November 1979 to January 1981, in which American embassy workers were held captive by Iranian revolutionaries. The Iranian revolution began in January 1979 when young Muslim fundamentalists overthrew the oppressive regime of the American-backed shah, forcing him into exile. Deeming the United States "the Great Satan," these revolutionaries triggered an energy crisis by cutting off Iranian oil. The hostage crisis began when revolutionaries stormed the American embassy, demanding that the United States return the shah to Iran for trial. The episode was marked by botched diplomacy and a failed rescue attempt by the Carter administration. After permanently damaging relations between the two countries, the crisis ended with the hostages' release the day Ronald Reagan became president, January 20, 1981.

Cold War

The forty-five-year-long diplomatic tension between the United States and the Soviet Union that divided much of the world into polarized camps, capitalist against communist. Most of the international conflicts during that period, particularly in the developing world, can be traced to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Civil Rights of 1875

The last piece of federal civil rights legislation until the 1950s, the law promised blacks equal access to public accommodations and banned racism in jury selection, but it provided no means of enforcement and was therefore ineffective. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared most of the act unconstitutional.

Vertical Integration

The practice perfected by Andrew Carnegie of controlling every step of the industrial production process in order to increase efficiency and limit competition.

Great Migration

The movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West in two major waves. The first, from World War I until the onset of the Great Depression, brought more than 1.5 million migrants to northern cities. From 1940 to 1970, another 5 million left the South, pushed off the land by the mechanization of cotton farming and lured north and west by hopes for greater economic opportunity and more equitable political participation. After 1970, increasing numbers of African Americans trekked back to the South in what was called the New _______ ______________, as new jobs became more plentiful in the South than in the older industrial cities of the North and racial relations improved in the South.

American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)

The name given to the U.S. Army force deployed to Europe in World War I commanded by General John J. Pershing and composed mostly of conscripts. Because the United States entered the war so late, by the time the _____ was raised, trained, and deployed, the war was in its last year (1918). Units of the ______ fought at Cantigny in May and at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood in June; its major engagements were at Saint Mihiel (September 12-15) and the Meuse-Argonne (September 26-November 11.

Interlocking Directorates

The practice of having executives or directors from one company serve on the board of directors of another company. J. P. Morgan introduced this practice to eliminate banking competition in the 1890s.

Eighteenth Amendment

This constitutional amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, ushering in the era known as prohibition.

Nineteenth Amendment

This constitutional amendment, finally passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote over seventy years after the first organized calls for woman's suffrage in Seneca Falls, New York.

National Labor Union

This first national labor organization in U.S. history gained 600,000 members from many parts of the work force, although it limited the participation of Chinese, women, and blacks. The organization devoted much of its energy to fighting for an eight-hour workday before it dissolved in 1872.

Norris-La Guardia Anti-Injunction Act

This law banned "yellow-dog," or antiunion, work contracts and forbade federal courts from issuing injunctions to quash strikes and boycotts. It was an early piece of labor-friendly federal legislation.

Adamson Act

This law established an eight-hour day for all employees on trains involved in interstate commerce, with extra pay for overtime. The first federal law regulating the hours of workers in private companies, it was upheld by the Supreme Court in Wilson v. New (1917).

Underwood Tariff

This tariff provided for a substantial reduction of rates and enacted an unprecedented, graduated federal income tax. By 1917, revenue from the income tax surpassed receipts from the tariff, a gap that has since been vastly widened.

Fair Employment Practices Commission

Threatened with a massive "Negro March on Washington" to demand equal opportunities in war jobs and in the military, Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in all defense plants operating under contract with the federal government. The _______ was intended to monitor compliance with the executive order.

Disestablished

To separate an official state church from its connection with the government. Following the Revolution, all states disestablished the Anglican Church, though some New England states maintained established Congregational Churches well into the nineteenth century.

Oklahoma City Bombing

Truck-bomb explosion that killed 168 people in a federal office building on April 19, 1995. The attack was perpetrated by right-wing and antigovernment militant Timothy McVeigh, who was later executed by the U.S. government for the crime.

Treaty of Greenville

Under the terms of the treaty, the Miami Confederacy agreed to cede territory in the Old Northwest to the United States in exchange for cash payment, hunting rights, and formal recognition of their sovereign status

Dominion of Canada

Unified Canadian government created by Britain to bolster Canadians against potential attacks or overtures from the United States.

Peninsula Campaign

Union general George B. McClellan's failed effort to seize Richmond, the Confederate capital. Had McClellan taken Richmond and toppled the Confederacy, slavery would have most likely survived in the South for some time.

Sherman's March

Union general William Tecumseh ___________'s destructive march through Georgia. An early instance of "total war," purposely targeting infrastructure and civilian property to diminish morale and undercut the Confederate war effort.

Monitor

Union ironclad whose successes against wooden ships signaled an end to wooden warships. It fought a historic though inconsequential battle against the Confederate ironclad, Merrimack, in 1862.

Salutary Neglect

Unofficial policy of relaxed royal control over colonial trade and only weak enforcement of Navigation Laws. Lasted from the Glorious Revolution to the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.

Stonewall Rebellion

Uprising in support of equal rights for gay people sparked by an assault by offduty police officers at a gay bar in New York. The rebellion led to a rise in activism and militancy within the gay community and furthered the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.

Bacon's Rebellion

Uprising of Virginia backcountry farmers and indentured servants led by planter Nathaniel Bacon; initially a response to Governor William Berkeley's refusal to protect backcountry settlers from Indian attacks, the rebellion eventually grew into a broader conflict between impoverished settlers and the planter elite.

Shay's Rebellion

Uprising of Virginia backcountry farmers and indentured servants led by planter Nathaniel Bacon; initially a response to Governor William Berkeley's refusal to protect backcountry settlers from Indian attacks, the rebellion eventually grew into a broader conflict between impoverished settlers and the planter elite.

Payne-Aldrich Bill

While intended to lower tariff rates, this bill was eventually revised beyond all recognition, retaining high rates on most imports. President Taft angered the progressive wing of his party when he declared it "the best bill that the Republican party ever passed."

Poor Richard's Almanack

Widely read annual pamphlet edited by Benjamin Franklin. Best known for its proverbs and aphorisms emphasizing thrift, industry, morality, and common sense.

Stamp Tax

Widely unpopular tax on an array of paper goods, repealed in 1766 after mass protests erupted across the colonies. Colonists developed the principle of "no taxation without representation" that questioned Parliament's authority over the colonies and laid the foundation for future revolutionary claims.

Civic Virtue

Willingness on the part of citizens to sacrifice personal self-interest for the public good. Deemed a necessary component of a successful republic.

Camp Followers

Women and children who followed the Continental Army during the American Revolution, providing vital services such as cooking and sewing in return for rations.

Fourteen Points

Woodrow Wilson's proposal to ensure peace after World War I, calling for an end to secret treaties, widespread arms reduction, national self-determination, and a new league of nations.

Treaty of Versailles

World War I concluded with this vengeful document, which secured peace but imposed sharp terms on Germany and created a territorial mandate system to manage former colonies of the world powers. To Woodrow Wilson's chagrin, it incorporated very few of his original Fourteen Points, although it did include the League of Nations that Wilson had long sought. Isolationists in the United States, deeply opposed to the League, led the opposition to the treaty, which was never ratified by the Senate.

Berlin Airlift

Year-long mission of flying food and supplies to blockaded West Berliners, whom the Soviet Union cut off from access to the West in the first major crisis of the Cold War.

Factory Girls

Young women employed in the growing factories of the early nineteenth century, they labored long hours in difficult conditions, living in socially new conditions away from farms and families.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Youth organization founded by southern black students in 1960 to promote civil rights. Drawing on its members' youthful energies, _________ in its early years coordinated demonstrations, sit-ins, and voter registration drives.

National Security Council Memorandum Number 68

____________ ____________ ____________ recommendation to quadruple defense spending and rapidly expand peacetime armed forces to address Cold War tensions. It reflected a new militarization of American foreign policy, but the huge costs of rearmament were not expected to interfere with what seemed like the limitless possibilities of postwar prosperity.