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- Northers
- Freezing cold winds on the Plains
- Manifest Destiny
- America’s obvious mission to occupy the Plains
- Providence
- 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
- 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
- tipi
- 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
- 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
- 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
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