Period 6.1-6.7 Flashcards
(35 cards)
Transcontinental Railroad
Railroad spanning from the East to West coast that was built jointly by the Union Pacific (started in the East) and the Central Pacific. This promoted settlement on the Great Plains and linked the West to the East.
Homestead Act
Encouraged farming on the Great Plains by offering 160 acres of land free to any family that settled on it for a period of 5 years
National Grange Movement
Organized by Oliver Kelley as a social and educational organization for farmers and their families, later becoming active in economics and politics by lobbying and establishing cooperatives.
Dry Farming
Technique used on the Great Plains to make the most of the little moisture availible in the soil.
Turner’s Frontier Thesis
Influential essay written by Jackson Turner that presented the settling of the frontier as an evolutionary process of civilization. First came hunters, then farmers, then towns and cities.
Assimilation
The destruction of Native culture in favor of replacing it with a White one, in which reformers set up boarding schools to segregate Native children and teach them Farming and Industrial skills.
Dawes Severalty Act
Designed to break up tribal organizations, it divided tribal lands into plots based on family size and granted US citizenship to those who stayed on the land for 25 years and “adopted the habits of civilized life”
Little Big Horn
Ambush of U.S. troops serving under General George Custer by Sioux forces.
Ghost Dance
Spiritual movement that White settlers interpreted as a call for war, the US army was sent to prevent the Natives from the practice
Yosemite
State Park (later national) in California’s Yosemite Valley
Yellowstone
First national Park, located in Yellowstone.
Sharecropping
People who paid for the use of farmland with a share of the crop, this system kept many poor whites and recent freedmen in poverty
Tuskegee Institute
Place in Alabama where African American scientist George Washington Carver promoted growing crops such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans. This shifted Southern Agriculture to a more diversified base.
Plessy v. Ferguson
Case in which the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana Jim Crow law, spurring a wave of segregation laws in the South.
Jim Crow laws
Segregationist laws requiring “separate but equal” accommodations for Black and White citizens.
Literacy tests
Tests that required citizens to pass in order to vote, disproportionately affecting Black voters.
Poll taxes
Fees that had to be paid in order to vote, disproportionately affecting Black voters.
Grandfather clauses
Laws that gave a man the right to vote if his grandfather had voted in elections before Reconstruction, allowing poor, uneducated whites to circumnavigate Literacy tests and Poll taxes while disenfranchising freedmen.
Lynch mobs
Mobs that would murder Black Americans, terrorizing or threatening them with the intent of preventing freedmen from voting or exercising other civil rights.
Bessemer Process
Process developed by both Henry Bessemer in England and William Kelly in the US that created steel out of iron. The Great Lakes region had abundant coal reserves and access to iron ore, making it the center of steel production.
Electric light
Invention by Thomas Edison’s laboratory that revolutionized people’s lives, especially in cities. Edison became a mythic figure.
Consumer economy
Shift in America towards shopping and consumerism made possible by urbanization and advances in transportation and storage
US Steel
Corporation sold by Carnegie to Morgan and was the first billion-dollar company. It became the largest enterprise in the world and controlled more than three fifths of the nation’s steel.
Standard Oil
Trust company founded by John D. Rockefeller that controlled 90 percent of the oil refinery business and became a monopoly.
