America
Big Stick Policy
“speak softly and carry a big
stick...”
American foreign policy
Teddy Roosevelt’s
Berlin Conference (1884-85)
Multinational meeting held to formalize the so-called “Scramble for Africa” among various
European empires scrabbling for territory in the African interior
Haymarket affair (1886)
A bombing – perhaps the first major terrorist bombing in US history – that took place after a
labor union rally in Chicago and which resulted in the deaths of several policemen.
Black Ships
Language used by Japanese onlookers to describe Commodore Matthew Perry’s fleet after its
initial visit to Tokyo harbor in 1853
Flying Shuttle (1733)
Invented by John Kay in 1733, this device drastically sped up the process of weaving thread into
cloth by automating work normally done by hand.
American Colonization Society
encouraging freed people of color to emigrate to West Africa
frailty of “abolitionist” movement
Henry Stanley
British explorer who became famous for his expeditions into Central Africa during the late 1800s
“Scramble for Africa,”
Hull House
Created by Jane Addams in the late 1880s (date not important), Hull House was a settlement in
metropolitan Chicago that was run entirely by women and designed to facilitate social reform by providing housing and community for working class people.
First Sino-Japanese War
Conflict ignited between Japan and China in 1894 (date is not super important in this instance)
by instability on the Korean peninsula.
Westernization
James Watt
Inventor, or rather perfecter, of the steam engine, which employed water superheated by coal as a
power source
Indian Removal Act
President Andrew Jackson
Significant as an embodiment of the way in
which “frontier” rhetoric enabled the removal of non-European people.
Junta
The name for the political committees that formed in Central and South America/New Spain
during the early nineteenth century to serve as stewards of royal power
Molly-houses
Circumspect spaces, usually disguised as inns or taverns, that began to appear around London
(especially the West End) in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, in which gay or bisexual men
had the opportunity to practice intimacy with other men in (relative) safety.
First Opium War
War between China and a variety of European powers, but mostly Britain, that kicked off when
Chinese administrators objected to the illegal opium trade being facilitated by European
smugglers.
Thirteen Factories
Name for the twelve-acre parcel of land outside [this is important] Canton’s walls in which the entirety of Western trade with China was conducted
The Liberator
Abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 (although the date isn’t
essential) that ran for more than thirty years and advocated for total, immediate abolition.
Meiji Restoration (1868)
Moment in which the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown by a new regime that was
committed to adopting Western tools and institutions in order to elevate Japan’s standing on the
world stage without abandoning Japanese culture.
Columbian Exposition
it presented a thoroughly Eurocentric, imperialistic view of the world and world history,
including a racialized history of human “progress.”
World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893
The “Great Game”
Long nineteenth-century struggle between the British and Russian empires for control of Central
Asia (i.e. the space separating southern Russia from British India).
Luddites
British textiles workers who militated against automation and industrialization during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
“Frontier thesis”
Promulgated by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, this theory argued that the experience of
pushing westward across the American frontier
Miguel Hidalgo
Mexican priest, academic, and revolutionary who has become known as the “Father of Mexico”
for his role in leading the region’s first great, although tragic, revolution against Spanish
imperialism.
Cholera
Disease, spread predominantly by contaminated water, that swept across Britain and other
industrialized, urbanizing parts of Europe and North America recurrently through the nineteenth
century.
Unequal treaties
Chinese (later also a Japanese) term for a series of treaties with Western powers that were
universally detrimental to the East Asian signatories because they were negotiated in the face of
European guns.
Manchester
center of the new textile industry. Because it
was largely unplanned, Manchester was plagued by filth, disease, and overcrowding even as it
made the industrial capitalists who owned its factories enormously wealthy.