Periods 1 & 2 (1491-1754)
This 16th-century exchange of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds decimated Native populations.
Columbian Exchange
This British proclamation forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Proclamation of 1763
This 19th-century belief held that the US was divinely ordained to expand across the entire North American continent.
Manifest Destiny
These investigative journalists, like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, exposed social ills and corporate corruption.
Muckrakers
This landmark 1954 Supreme Court case overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal".
Brown v. Board of Education
This Spanish labor system effectively enslaved Native Americans to extract minerals and farm land.
Encomienda
Written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, these 85 essays were designed to convince New York to ratify the new Constitution.
Federalist Papers
This 1857 Supreme Court case ruled that Black people were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in territories.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
This 1930s series of programs by FDR aimed to provide "Relief, Recovery, and Reform" during the Great Depression.
New Deal
Led by Thurgood Marshall, this organization spent decades using a strategic legal approach to chip away at "separate but equal".
NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
This 1680 uprising in present-day New Mexico saw Indigenous people successfully (if temporarily) expel Spanish colonizers.
Pueblo Revolt
This 1754 plan, proposed by Ben Franklin, was the first formal attempt to unify the colonies for defense but was rejected.
Albany Plan of Union
This Reconstruction Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal protection of the law.
14th Amendment
This mass movement of people involved millions of African Americans moving from the rural South to the urban North starting in WWI.
Great Migration
Championed by MLK and influenced by Gandhi, this strategy involves breaking unjust laws openly and refusal to retaliate.
Non-Violence Civil Disobedience (Militant Nonviolence)
Unlike other colonizing countries, this European power focused on fur trading and maintained relatively better relations with Natives.
France
Under the Articles of Confederation, this 1787 ordinance established the process for admitting new states and banned slavery in the territory.
Northwest Ordinance
This 1887 Act attempted to assimilate Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands into individual plots.
Dawes Act
This 1941 program allowed the US to send war supplies to the Allies while officially remaining neutral.
Lend-Lease Act
Integrated groups of activists known as these rode interstate buses into the Deep South in 1961 to challenge illegal terminal segregation.
Freedom Riders
This 1676 Virginia rebellion led by disgruntled frontiersmen shifted the labor source from indentured servants to enslaved Africans.
Bacon's Rebellion
This 1794 uprising in Pennsylvania over a federal excise tax proved that the new Constitution had the power to enforce its laws.
Whiskey Rebellion
This late-1800s philosophy used "survival of the fittest" to justify the massive wealth gap and "robber baron" and laissez-faire business practices.
Social Darwinism
In this 1944 Supreme Court case, the Court upheld the constitutionality of Japanese internment, ruling that the "military urgency" of the situation outweighed the individual rights of a specific ethnic group.
Korematsu v. United States
Following the "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, Alabama; this 1965 Act banned literacy tests and provided federal oversight of elections.
Voting Rights Act of 1865