Legalities & Liberty
This 1865 amendment legally ended chattel slavery in the United States.
What is the 13th Amendment?
The informal name for the system of laws that enforced racial segregation across the South.
What are Jim Crow Laws?
Completed in 1869, this linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by rail for the first time.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This traveling extravaganza popularized the romanticized, violent image of the "Wild West" for Easterners.
What is Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show?
The federal agency tasked with providing food, schools, and legal aid to refugees of the Civil War.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
It granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States and guaranteed "equal protection under the laws."
What is the 14th Amendment?
This 1896 Supreme Court case established the "separate but equal" doctrine.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This 1862 act promised 160 acres of "free" land to any citizen willing to farm it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
The 1882 law that banned a specific immigrant group based on the fear they were "undermining" white labor.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Immediate post-war Southern laws designed to replicate slavery by restricting Black movement and labor.
What are Black Codes?
The amendment prohibited states from discriminating against voters base don race, color, or previous servitude.
What is the 15th Amendment?
A labor system where farmers worked land they didn't own in exchange for a portion of the harvest.
What is Sharecropping?
A broad term for diverse tribes like the Sioux and Cheyenne whose lives were centered around Buffalo.
What are the Plains Indians?
A group of artists whose massive landscape paintings emphasized the majestic, "untouched" nature of the West.
What is the Rocky Mountain School?
A derogatory term for Northerners who moved South during Reconstruction to seek economic or political gain.
What are Carpetbaggers?
This President narrowly avoided conviction after being impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act.
Who is Andrew Johnson?
This journalist and activist led a lifelong crusade against the lynching of Black Americans.
Who is Ida B. Wells-Barnett?
The 1864 slaughter of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho by Colorado militia, marking a turning point in the Indian Wars.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
This 1887 act aimed to "civilize" Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands into individual family plots.
What is the Dawes Act?
The founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training and "accommodation" to segregation.
Who is Booker T. Washington?
[DAILY DOUBLE] Also known as the Enforcement Acts, these 1870-1871 laws sought to protect Black voters from terror groups.
What are the Ku Klux Klan Acts?
A credit system where farmers stayed in debt by using their future harvests as collateral for supplies.
What is the Crop-lien system?
[DAILY DOUBLE] An 1850s policy shift that sought to pressure tribes into smaller, defined territories rather than one "Indian Territory."
What is Concentration Policy?
The historian who famously argued in 1893 that the "frontier" was closed and had been the defining force of American identity.
Who is Frederick Jackson Turner?
The term for "the history of history"—how historians' interpretations of events like Reconstruction change over time.
What is Historiography?