Colonial America
This colony was founded by Puritans seeking to build a “city upon a hill.”
What is Massachusetts Bay Colony?
This pamphlet by Thomas Paine argued for independence.
What is Common Sense?
This invention by Eli Whitney led to the expansion of slavery.
What is the cotton gin?
This Reconstruction agency provided food, schools, and legal aid to formerly enslaved people.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
This 1887 law was the first federal attempt to regulate railroads.
What is the Interstate Commerce Act?
This was the first representative assembly in the English colonies.
What is the House of Burgesses?
America’s first national government was created under this weak framework.
What are the Articles of Confederation?
This doctrine warned Europe against colonization in the Western Hemisphere.
What is the Monroe Doctrine?
This group of Republicans in Congress pushed for harsher Reconstruction and stronger civil rights protections.
What are the Radical Republicans?
This 1894 strike disrupted rail traffic nationwide.
What is the Pullman Strike?
This 1676 uprising exposed tensions between frontier settlers and Virginia’s elite planter class.
What is Bacon's Rebellion?
This 1787 compromise created a bicameral Congress.
What is the Great Compromise?
This 1820 compromise admitted two new states--one free and one slave state.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
This system of postwar Southern agriculture trapped many freedpeople and poor whites in cycles of debt.
What is sharecropping?
This book by Jacob Riis exposed urban poverty and tenement conditions.
What is How the Other Half Lives?
This economic system held that colonies existed to benefit the mother country.
What is mercantilism?
Anti-Federalists most consistently feared the absence of this explicit protection in the Constitution, later added in 1791.
What is the Bill of Rights
This 1832 crisis centered on South Carolina’s attempt to reject a federal tariff.
What is the Nullification Crisis?
This Reconstruction statute, passed over Andrew Johnson’s veto in 1866, affirmed birthright citizenship and guaranteed equal legal protection for formerly enslaved people before many of its principles were later embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment.
What is the Civil Rights Act of 1866?
This 1883 law replaced patronage with merit-based exams for many federal jobs after the assassination of James A. Garfield.
What is the Pendleton Civil Service Act?
This colonial document, drafted in 1649, established a framework for self-government in Maryland and is often cited as an early example of representative government guaranteeing religious freedom.
What is the Maryland Toleration Act?
This 1786 rebellion convinced many leaders the Articles of Confederation were too weak.
What is Shays' Rebellion?
This 1819 Supreme Court case strengthened implied powers through the constitutionality of the national bank.
What is McCulloch v. Maryland?
This 1876 Supreme Court decision overturned federal convictions of white terrorists involved in the Colfax Massacre by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment restricted only state actions, not those of individuals.
What is United States v. Cruikshank?
This 1892 platform of the People’s Party called for direct election of senators, a graduated income tax, and public control of railroads.
What is the Omaha Platform?