Reconstruction & Freedom
Lincoln's lenient Reconstruction plan that required only 10% of a Confederate state's voters from 1860 to take a loyalty oath.
What is the 10% Plan?
The strategy of acquiring control over every stage of production, from raw materials to final transportation.
What is Vertical Integration?
1862 federal law offering 160 acres of free public land to settlers who agreed to live on and improve it for 5 years.
What is the Homestead Act?
1896 Supreme Court ruling that established the legal doctrine of "separate but equal."
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
Overcrowded, poorly ventilated, low-cost apartment buildings that housed thousands of working-class families in growing industrial cities.
What are Tenements?
Federal agency established in 1865 to assist newly freed African Americans with food, medical aid, labor contracts, and education.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
The practice of buying out or merging with competing firms within the exact same stage of production or industry.
What is Horizontal Integration?
1887 law aimed at assimilating Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands into individual family allotments.
What is the Dawes act?
Southern laws passed immediately after the Civil War to restrict freed Black people's freedom and compel them to work in a labor economy.
What are Black Codes?
Immigrants arriving after 1880, predominantly from Southern and Eastern Europe, who faced heightened nativism and cultural prejudice.
Who are New Immigrants?
Constitutional amendment passed in 1865 that formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the entire United States.
What is the 13th Amendment?
The industrial trend of breaking down manufacturing into specific, highly repetitive tasks performed by specialized workers.
What is Specialization (or Rationalization)?
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 argument that the presence of an open frontier shaped American democracy, self-reliance, and character.
What is the Turner Thesis (Frontier Thesis)?
Third-party political movement formed mainly by distressed farmers seeking free silver, tariff reduction, and government regulation of railroads.
What are The Populists (People's Party)?
Print publications from companies like Sears & Roebuck that allowed rural Americans to purchase mass-produced consumer goods.
What are Mail-Order Catalogs?
Constitutional amendment granting citizenship, equal protection under the law, and due process to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S.
What is the 14th Amendment?
Economic concept where per-unit production costs decrease significantly as the overall volume of production increases.
What are Economies of Scale?
1890 massacre by the U.S. Army against Lakota Sioux followers of the Ghost Dance movement in South Dakota.
What is Wounded Knee?
Racial segregation established by custom, social norms, and economic factors rather than explicit legal statutes.
What is De Facto Segregation?
The nationwide labor stoppage in 1877 sparked by wage cuts that paralyzed rail transport and required federal troops to suppress.
What is the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
Period led by Radical Republicans in Congress who divided the South into 5 military districts and forced states to ratify civil rights amendments to rejoin the Union.
What is Congressional (Radical) Reconstruction?
Legal protection that restricts an investor's financial loss to only the amount they invested in a company's stock.
What is Limited Liability?
Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick's counter-argument emphasizing western history as a continuous story of conquest, racial interaction, and government support.
What is the Limerick Thesis?
Southern political coalition of conservative white Democrats who sought to overthrow Republican rule and re-establish white supremacy.
Who are the Redeemers?
The widespread belief that hard work, individual ambition, and moral discipline guaranteed financial upward mobility.
What is the Success Ethic (or American Dream)?