Do you recognise the terms below?   Use them in your answers to impress the examiner!!!

 Click on the yellow pointers to reveal explanations for any terms you don't know about.

•   Northers
  • Freezing cold winds on the Plains
•   Manifest Destiny
  • America’s obvious mission to occupy the Plains
•   Providence
  • God’s will
•   Frontier
  • The border between ‘civilisation’ and the ‘untamed’ Plains
•   Civilised Tribes
  • The five tribes of the south-east (Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) – so-called they had adopted Christianity, laws, literacy and slavery
•   wašíču
  • The Sioux word for white Americans; it means ‘he who takes the fat’
•   thiyospaye
  • The Sioux word for camp circle – ie the community meeting
•   Oceti Sakowin
  • The Sioux term meaning ‘Seven Council Fires’ – ie the Sioux Nation
•   Akicita
  • The Sioux warrior societies such as the Kit-Fox and the Strong-Heart
•   Counting coup
  • When a warrior touching his enemy with a coup stick
•   Wakantanka
  • The Great Spirit
•   wakampi
  • Spirits who, if offended, might cause misfortune or death and needed appeasing
•   Wicasa wakan
  • A Sioux holy man, often wrongly called a ‘medicine man’, or VERY incorrectly a ‘shaman’.
•   parflèches
  • Buffalo skin bags into which they packed their belongings
•   Wetu – Bloketu – Ptanyetu - Waniyetu
  • Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – the key season was Blaketu, the season of the buffalo hunt
•   Tatanka
  • Sioux word for the (male) buffalo
•   tipi
  • Indigenous tent
•   polygamy
  • Having more than one wife
•   exposure
  • When an older Indigenous person asked to be left behind to die
•   Caulk a wagon
  • Seal the joints in a wagon with tar, so it will float across a river
•   Ague
  • Malaria
•   Camp fever
  • Typhus – a bacterial fever spread by lice and fleas
•   Forty-niners
  • The gold prospectors who flooded into California in 1849
•   Vigilante
  • Groups of citizens who take the law into their own hands
•   Indenture
  • A legal document binding a child to serve an apprenticeship
•   genocide
  • The attempt to wipe out an ethnic group
•   Danites
  • A Mormon paramilitary group
•   Gentiles
  • Actually, people who are not Jews … but used by the Mormon to label people who were not Mormons
•   scrip
  • When cash is scare, local economies sometimes use paper bills, guaranteed by (eg) the employer
•   adobe
  • Mud/ clay
•   Sod house
  • A house made out of turves.
•   dugout
  • A house which is a cave of hollow dug out of a bank side.
•   theocracy
  • Rule by the religious leaders
•   Quorum
  • The minimum number of attendees needed to make a meeting valid
•   Crazy Quilt
  • A loop-hole in the law stated that, if a rancher owned any land in a valley, he had the right to graze his cattle over all of it
•   Cattle fever
  • A disease of cattle, transmitted by a tick, to which the cattle ranchers’ longhorn cattle were immune, but which killed the homesteaders’ domestic cows.
•   Renegade
  • Actually, any outlaw – but particularly applied to Indigenous warriors off the reservation
•   exodusters
  • Free former enslaved Black Americans who went west to claim a plot under the Homestead Act
•   lynching
  • Hanging without a trial, usually of Black Americans by vigilante groups/ KKK etc.
•   sectionalism
  • ‘Sectionalism’ is putting your region before any other.
•   tariff
  • A customs duty, levied on an import, designed to raise its price so that home-made products can compete against it.
•   nullification
  • Preventing an law or an order taking place’; specifically, South Caroline refusing to collect the Tariff of Abominations (1828)
•   Dough faces
  • Presidents who came from the north, but did as the southern Democrats told them
•   segregation
  • Keeping apart; specifically, preventing Black Americans being able to mix with white Americans in the South.
•   intersectionality
  • Where a number of issues overlap (e.g. a plantation-owner beating an enslaved women is an issue of slavery, but also of racism, and of gender).
•   36°30’
  • The line of latitude of the 1820 Missouri Compromise – no slavery north of 36°30’.
•   secession
  • Where one of the US states declares it is leaving the Union.
•   Anaconda Plan
  • The Union plan to ‘strangle’ the South economically, by blockading the Southern ports, and capturing the Mississippi Valley.
•   Impressment
  • The act of seizing people or goods for public/army service; specifically, the Confederate Law of 1863 to buy supplies at half price.
•   cartridge
  • A small wrap of gunpowder used in a muzzle-loading musket
•   Gilded Age
  • A period of American history, 1870s-90s, known for its economic growth, wealth, materialism and corruption.
•   greenbacks
  • The US’s first national paper currency, created by the 1863 National Banking Act.
•   ‘the draft’
  • Conscription – calling up men to serve in the Army.
•   habeas corpus
  • A Latin phrase which means, literally: ‘you have a body’ – the law which protects you from arrest without being charged.
•   Copperhead
  • A poisonous snake – in the Civil War, someone who lived in the North but supported the Confederates.
•   Impeach
  • To put a leading politician on trial for some misconduct
•   Carpetbaggers
  • Northerners moving south in search of work (because they carried their possessions in a cheap bag made from carpet).
•   Scallawags
  • Southerners who supported the Union
•   Reconstruction
  • The period, 1865-77, when the federal government tried to rebuild Southern politics and society.
•   Redeemer Democrats
  • White Southern Democratic politicians who wanted to take back political control of the South from federal/military rule.
•   Miscegenation
  • Entering into a mixed race marriage.
•   sharecropping
  • Where a landowner lets a farm for a share of the crop.
•   Southern Belle
  • The Southern ideal of womanhood, emphasizing genteel motherhood, family honour, and subservience to her husband.
•   United Daughters of the Confederacy
  • A Southern women’s organisation dedicated to promoting the ‘Lost Cause’ theory of the Civil War.
•   Jim Crow Laws
  • A suite of laws that enforced racial segregation and white political and social supremacy in the American South.
•   Free Blacks
  • Black Americans who lived in the South before the American Civil War, but who had obtained their freedom.
•   Cash crop
  • A crop (eg cotton) farmed to sell for profit, not to use for subsistence.
•   Contrabands
  • enslaved people who had run away from, or been abandoned by, their owners, and had sought refuge with the Union army.
•   USCTs
  • United States Colored Troops.
•   Dunningite
  • The school of historians that portrayed Reconstruction as a dreadful atrocity of brutality and corruption perpetrated upon the South by the North.
•   Vagrant
  • Beggar.