Vocabulary

Unit 7: Westward Expansion & Indian Wars

Terms

American Indian Wars: a series of armed conflicts between U.S. soldiers and Native American tribes.

Ghost Dance Movement: attempted to rehabilitate traditional Native American culture.

Homestead Act: 1862 law that provided settlers with western land if they lived on and improved it.

Transcontinental Railroad: railroad completed in 1869 that connected the eastern and western United States.

Reservation: land designated by the U.S. government for Native American tribes.

Dawes Act: 1887 law that divided tribal lands into individual plots in an effort to assimilate Native Americans into American society.

Indian Removal: U.S. policies that forced Native American peoples from their ancestral lands to make way for American settlement.

People & Places

Oregon Trail: route used by hundreds of thousands of Americans traveling West in the mid-19th Century.

Sitting Bull: leader of the Sioux tribe.

Crazy Horse: Lakota leader who resisted U.S. expansion and fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

George Armstrong Custer: U.S. Army officer whose forces were defeated at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Little Bighorn: site of an 1876 battle in which Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated Custer and the 7th Cavalry.

Wounded Knee: site in South Dakota where U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of Lakota people in 1890.

Promontory Summit: Utah location where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads were joined in 1869, completing the first transcontinental railroad.

Concepts

Assimilation: the process through which individuals or groups from different cultural heritage adopt the beliefs, customs, and ways of life of another culture.

Culture: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or social group.

Heritage: the inherited resources and attributes of a group or society from past generations.

Integrate: to form, coordinate, or blend into a unified group.

Manifest Destiny: the 19th-century belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent.

Displacement: the forced movement of people from their traditional or ancestral lands.

Unit 8: The Gilded Age & Progressive Era

Terms

Gilded Age: time of rapid economic growth, particularly in the Northern and Western United States.

Bessemer Process: a cheap and efficient process for making steel, developed in the 19th century.

Progressivism: group of reform movements that focused on urban problems, including workplace problems, poor sanitation, and government corruption.

Industrial Revolution: the time of transformation from an agricultural to industrial society.

Nineteenth Amendment: allows for women to vote in the United States.

Tenement housing: small, rundown apartments in major cities at the turn of the 20th century.

Square Deal: President Theodore Roosevelt's three-part domestic program; conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection.

Sherman Antitrust Act: law making monopolies illegal in the United States.

People & Places

Woodrow Wilson: twenty-eighth president of the United States; served two terms.

Susan B. Anthony: leading figure of the Women's Suffrage Movement.

Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt: twenty-sixth president of the United States; served two terms.

William Howard Taft: twenty-seventh president of the United States; served one term.

W.E.B. DuBois: founder of the NAACP.

Jacob Riis: famous journalist who chronicled the poor living conditions of tenement housing.

Ellis Island: the primary immigration station in the United States between 1892-1920.

Concepts

Suffrage: the right to vote.

Monopoly: exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market.

Immigrate: to move to a non-native country or region to live.

Laissez-faire: belief that the government should stay out of business regulation.

Social Darwinism: states that a system of unrestrained competition will ensure the survival of the fittest.

Unit 9: World War I & 1920s

Terms

Schlieffen Plan: German military plan that addressed how to handle a war on two fighting fronts.

Zimmerman Note: a memorandum sent by Germany to Mexico encouraging an attack on the United States.

Allied Powers: comprised of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

Central Powers: comprised of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Harlem Renaissance: era in which African American literature, art, and music flourished.

Roaring Twenties: an era in which many Americans defied Prohibition and challenged traditional standards.

Speakeasies: illegal, underground bars of the Prohibition era.

Prohibition: era of American history in which the manufacturing, distribution, sale, and consumption of alcohol was illegal.

Treaty of Versailles: peace treaty officially ending World War I.

People & Places

Franz Ferdinand: Archduke of Austria-Hungary.

Kaiser Wilhelm II: Emperor of Germany during World War I.

Woodrow Wilson: twenty-eighth President of the United States.

Gavrilo Princip: Serbian assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Somme: location of the bloodiest battle of World War I.

Paris: capital of France and location of World War I peace conference.

Concepts

Sit-down strike: protest in which a group of people refuse to leave a designated area.

Trench warfare: a type of strategy of attrition in which sides assault one another from long-term, fixed positions.

Casualty: refers to a soldier who is killed, wounded, missing, or deserted in a battle.

Counterculture: refers to a group of people do and believe in things outside of what society considers normal or typical.

Bootlegging: the illegal manufacturing, distribution, and sale of an illegal product.