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21 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Suffrage, suffragists
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The right to vote. In the early national period suffrage was limited by property restrictions. Gradually state constitutions gave the vote to all white men over the age of twenty-one. Over the course of American history, this has expanded as barriers of race, gender, and age have fallen. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women activists on behalf of the vote were known as this
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Tariff
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A tax on imports, which has two purposes: raising revenue for the government and protecting domestic products from foreign competition. A hot political issue throughout much of American history, in the late nineteenth century the tariff became particularly controversial as protection-minded Republicans and pro-free-trade Democrats made the tariff the centerpiece of their political campaigns
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Task system
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A system of slave labor used primarily in the rice fields of South Carolina. Unlike the gang-labor system in which an overseer supervised the workers, this allowed slaves to work at their own pace but required them to complete an assigned daily task. Once the task was finished, slaves could cultivate their own small plots
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Temperance movement
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A long-running series of reform organizations that have encouraged individuals and governments to limit the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Leading groups include the American Temperance Society of the 1830s, the Washington Association of the 1840s, the Women's Christian Temperance Union of the late nineteenth century, and Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-twentieth century
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Third world
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This term came into usage in the post-World War II era to describe developing or ex-colonial nations that were not aligned with either the First World, meaning the Western capitalist countries, or the Second World, referring to the socialist states of Eastern Europe. It is currently used in reference to developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East
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Total war
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A form of warfare, characteristic of nineteenth and twentieth century conflicts, that mobilized all of a society's resources-economic, political, cultural-in support of the military effort. Armies grew dramatically in size and now were composed of civilian conscripts rather than professional soldiers. Moreover, the civilians and industries that supported the war effort increasingly became the object of enemy attack; examples include sherman's march through georgia in the Civil war and the massive American firebombing of Dresden, Humburg, and Tokyo during World War II
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Totalitarianism, Totalitarian
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Centralized regimes that systematically repress dissent and exercise dictatorial control over public and private life, usually through the use of force and propaganda. A twentieth-century phenomenon, it is represented by both the Fascist regime of Germany's Adolph Hitler and the Communist rule of the USSR's Joseph Stalin
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Town Meeting
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The system of local government in New England. The meeting included all male heads of house
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Trade slaves
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Those unfree West Africans who were sold from one African kingdom to another and not considered members of the society that had enslaved them. For centuries Arab merchants had carried these to the Mediterranean region: around 1440, Portugues ship captains joined in this trade by buying slaves from African princes and warlords
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Transcendentalism
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A nineteenth-century intellectual movement that postulated the importance of an ideal world of mystical knowledge and harmony beyond the world of the senses. As articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, it called for a critical examination of society and emphasized individuality, self-reliance, and nonconformity
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Trusts
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A term originally applied to a specific form of business organization enabling participating firms to assign the operation of their properties to a board of trustees, but by the early twentieth century, the term applied more generally to corporate mergers and business combinations that exerted monopoly power over an industry. It was in the latter sense that progressives referred to firms like United States Steel and Standard Oil as trusts
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Urban renewal
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Process by which city planners, politicians, and real estate developers leveled urban tenements and replaced them with modern construction projects in the 1950s and 1960s. High-rise housing projects, however, destroyed community bonds and led to an increase in crime
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Vice-admiralty courts
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Legal tribunals presided over by a judge and without jury (as in common law courts). The Sugar Act of 1764 required that offenders be tried by these rather than in common law tribunals, thereby provoking protests from merchant-smugglers accustomed to acquittal by sympathetic local juries
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Virtual representation
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Claim made by British politicians that the interests of the American colonists were "represented" in Parliament by merchants who traded with the colonies and by absentee landlords (mostly West Indian sugar planters) who held property there
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Volutarism
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The view that citizens should act among themselves to improve their lives, rather than rely on the efforts of the state. Especially favored by Samuel Gompers, voluntarism was a key idea within the labor movement, but one it gradually abandoned in the course of the twentieth century
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War of attrition
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A military strategy of small-scale attacks used, usually by the weaker side, to sap the resources and the morale of the adversary. Examples include the southern resistance of the Patriot forces commanded by General N. Greene during the American War of Independence and the tactics of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War
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Welfare capitalism
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A system of labor relations that stresses management's responsibility for employees' well-being. Originating in the 1920s, welfare capitalsim offered such benefits as stock plands, health care, and old-age pensions and was designed to maintain a stable workforce and undercut the growth of trade unions
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Welfare state
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A nation that provides for the basic needs of its citizens, including such provisions as old-age pensions, unemployment
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Yellow journalism
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Term that refers to newspapers that specialize in sesnsationalistic reporting. The name came from the ink used in Hearst's New Your Journal to print the first comic strip to apear in color in 1895 and is generally associated with the inflammatory reporting leading up to the Spanish-American War of 1898
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Yellow-dog contract
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An agreement by a worker, as a condition of employment, not to join a union. Employers in the late nineteenth century used this along with the blacklist and violent strikebreaking to fight unionization of the workforce
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Yeoman
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In medieval England, a farmer below the level of gentry but above the peasantry. A freeholder, he owned his own land, which released him from economic obligations to a landlord. In America, Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation based on democracy and a thriving agrarian society, built on the labor and prosperity of the yeomen
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