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25 Cards in this Set
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Joint-stock Company
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A financial arrangement established by the British around 1550 that subsequently facilitated the colonization of North America. These agreements allowed merchants to band together as stockholders, raising large amounts of money while sharing the risks and profits in proportion to their part of the total investment
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Judicial review
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The claim by the judiciary that it has the legitimate authority to judge the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and the state legislatures. This power is implicit in the federal Constitution and was first practiced by the Supreme Court with respect to congressional legislation in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. The Court's review of legislation became particularly significant between 1874 and 1937
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Keynesian economics
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Originally developed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, this theory stresses that aggregate (or total) demand for goods and services is the primary determinant of the level of overall economic activity
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Lab theory of value
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The belief that the price of a product should reflect the work that went into making it and should be paid mosly to the person who produced it. This idea was popularized by the National Trades' Union and other labor organizations in the mid-nineteenth century
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Laissez-faire
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In French, litterally "let do" or "leave alone", the term refers to the principle that the less government does, the better, in particular as related to interference with the economy. this was the dominant philosophy of American government in the late nineteenth century and the guiding light of conservative politics in the twentieth
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Liberal consensus
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Refers to widespread agreement in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s that government power could be used to stimulate the economy to bring about extensive affluence; protect the rights of disadvantaged minorities' and promote social welfare in general. the liberal consensus supported an optimistic belief in a prosperous, harmonious future that also assumed U.S. world activism to contain communism
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Lien (Crop lien)
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A legal device enabling a creditor to take possession of the property of a borrower, including the right to have it sold in payment of the debt. Furnishing merchants took such liens on cotton crops as collateral for subblies advanced to sharecroppers during the growing season. This system trapped farmers in a cycle of debt and made them vulnerable to exploitation by the furnishing merchant
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Literacy test
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The requirement that an ability to read be demonstrated as a qualification for the right to vote. It was a device easily used by registrars to prevent blacks from voting, whether they could read or not, and was widely adopted across the South beginning with Mississippi in 1890
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Machine tools
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Cutting, boring, and drilling machines used to produce standardized metal parts that will then be assembled into products like sewing machines. The developement of these was spread by American inventors in the early nineteenth century facilitated the rapid spread of the Industrial Revolution
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Manifest Destiny
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Term coined by John L. O'Sullivan in 1845 describing the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and supplant the Native Americans. Adding geographic and secular dimensions to the Second Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny implied that the spread of American republican institutions and Protestant churches across the continent was part of God's plan for the world. With the completion of the westward movement in the late nineteenth century, the focus of "manifest destiny" expanded and began to encompass American overseas expansion
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Manorial, manorial system
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The quasi-feudal system of landholding in the Hudson River Valley in which wealthy landlords leased out thousands of acres to tenant farmers. In return, the tenants owed their landlords rent, a quarter of the value of all improvements, and a number of days of personal service
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Manumission
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A word from Latin meaning literally "to release from the hand." The legal act whereby owners relinquished their property rights in slaves. In 1782 the Virginia Assembly passed an act allowing this and within a decade planters had freed 10,000 slaves. Worried that a large free black population would threaten the institution of slavery, the assembly repealed the law in 1792
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Margin buying
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The purchase of stocks or securities with a small down payment while financing the rest with a broker loan. When stock prices started to fall in 1929, brokers requested repayment of such loans; the funds were often not forthcoming, contributing to the crash of the stock market in October of the year
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Market revolution
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The dramatic increase between 1820 and 1850 in the exchange of goods and services in market transactions. The Market Revolution resulted from the combined impact of the increased output of farms and factories, the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants, and the development of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads
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Mass production
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A system of factory production that, throught the use of sophisticated machinery, turns out vast quantities of identical goods at a low cost. In the nineteenth century the textile industy was a pioneer of mass production, which eventually became the standard mode for making consumer goods such as ciggarettes, cars, and many electronic items-such as telephones, radios, televisions, and computers
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Matrilineal
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A system of family organization in which social identity and property descend through the female line. Children are usually raised by their mother's brother (their uncle), not their biological father
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Mechanics
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A term used in the nineteenth century to refer to skilled craftsmen and inventors who built and improved machinery and developed machine tools for industry. They developed a professional identity and established institutes to spread their skills and knowledge
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Mercantilism
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A set of policies that regulated colonial commerce and manufacturing for the enrichment of the mother country. These policies insured that the American colonies produced agricultural goods and raw materials, which would then be carried to Britain, where they would be re-exported or made into finished goods
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Mestizo
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A person of mixed blood, the offspring of intermarriage or sexual liaison between white Europeans and native people, usually a white man and an indian woman. In sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, nearly 90 percent of the Spanish settlers were men who took Indian women as wives or mistresses; the result was a substantial mixed-race population
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Middle Passage
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The brutal sea voyage from Africa to the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during which nearly a million enslaved Africans lost their lives
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Military-industrial complex
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A term first used by President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961, it refers to the interlinkage of the military and the defense industry that emerged with the arms buildup of World War II and the Cold War and continues to this day. Eisenhower particularly warned against the "unwarranted influence" that the military-industrial complex might exert on public policy
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Minutemen
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In the imperial crisis of the 1770s, colonists reorganized their voluntry militia units so that they were ready to mobilize on short notice. Militiamen formed the core of the armed citizenry army that met the British at Lexington and Concord in 1775
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Modernist movement
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A literary and artistic style and movement in the early twentieth century the broke sharply with past traditions and was marked by skepticism and stylistic experimentation.
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Muckrakers
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Journalists in the early twentieth century whose stock-in-trade was exposure of the corruption of big business and government. Theodore Roosevelt gave them the name as a term of reproach. The term comes from a character in Pilgrim's Progress, a religious allegory by john Bunyan
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National debt
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The financial obligations of the U.S. government for money borrowed from its citizens and foreign investors. Alexander Hamilton thought that the national debt, owed to wealthy Americans, would insure their support for the new national government. For similar reasons, in recent decades the U.S. government encouraged individuals and institutions in crucial foreign nations, such as Saudi Arabia and Japan, to invest billions of dollars in the American national debt
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