Book Five
Terms
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- New American Practical Navigator
- explains the principles of navigation and the most practical methods of applying them, and extensive revision by Nathaniel Bowditch of The Practical Navigator
- Lucy Stone
- helped organize the women's rights movement in the U.S.
- James Marshall
- discovered gold in California while building a sawmill for John Sutter
- Dred Scott decision
- Supreme Court case in which black slaves were declared "simply" property, having absolutely no rights; the Court also declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because Taney and the other justices in the majority said Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories.
- border ruffians
- group of pro-slavery advocates who lived on the Missouri-Kansas border and would make sure they voted for slavery in the new Kansas territory
- Elias Howe
- American inventor, constructed a practical sewing machine
- Brigham Young
- led the Mormons from Illionois to what is now Utah, second president of the LDS Church
- Missouri Senator David Atchison
- led pro-slavery forces in Kansas territory in the mid-1850s
- Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna
- military dictator of Mexico after Mexico gained its independence from Spain
- Sengbe Pieh/Joseph Cinque
- led the Armistad Rebellion
- Preston Brooks
- proslavery representative from South Carolina who beat antislavery senator Charles Sumner unconscious in 1856
- Stephen Watts Kearny
- colonel in the U.S. Army, who captured New Mexico
- Moby-Dick
- a whaling adventure that ranks as one of the greatest novels in American literature, by Herman Melville
- Samuel Gridley Howe
- gains notoriety for his work among deaf people, and especially for successfully teaching Laura Bridgman, a deaf, blind, and mute student, how to read
- baleen
- the long, thin, plastic-like strips in baleen whale's mouths, also called whalebone
- bight
- the middle part of of a slack rope, a curve or loop; a curve or bend in the shore of a sea or river
- Samuel F.B. Morse
- famous American inventor and painter, invented the first successful electric telegraph in the United States, also invented the Morse Code
- Levi Strauss
- American clothing manufacturer
- spermaceti
- a liquid wax that makes fine candles
- Sam Houston
- played a leading part in Texas's fight for independence from Mexico
- John Calhoun
- major American political figure before the American Civil War, vice president from 1825-1832
- Jim Bowie
- American frontiersman
- Cassius Marcellus Clay
- American politician and abolitionist
- rationalism
- a philosophical system that stresses reason, logic, science, and mathematics
- Davy Crockett
- one of the most famous frontiersmen in United States history
- Charles Goodyear
- American inventor, developed vulcanization, a method of making rubber strong and resistant to heat and cold
- Leaves of Grass
- collection of poems by Walt Whitman, considered one of the world's major literary works
- Natty Bumppo
- the main character in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales
- Frederick Douglass
- leading spokesman of African Americans in the 1800s, born a slave, noted reformer, author, and orator
- widow's walk
- the balcony on top of New England whaling town homes where wives would look out to sea in hopes of finding their husband's boats returning
- Walt Whitman
- American poet
- Charles Babbage
- develops first automatic digital calculator
- Dorothea Dix
- led the drive to build state hospitals for the mentally ill in the U.S.
- Joseph Smith
- founder and first president of the Mormon Church, officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
- Herman Melville
- ranks among America's major authors
- meet his Waterloo
- a decisive or disastrous defeat in reverse-Waterloo, Belgium, scene of Napoleon's defeat in 1815
- Kansas-Nebraska Act
- split the Louisiana Purchase territories outside Missouri and north of latitude 36degrees 30' into two territories, "Kansas" and "Nebraska"; also made slavery an issue to be decided by each future state within that area
- Sarah Pierce
- founded the Litchfield Female Academy (1792)
- John Sutter
- pioneer trader on whose land gold was discovered in California
- Henry Clay
- leading American statesman for nearly 50 years, repeatedly helped settle bitter disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
- one of Washington Irving's best-known works, tells about Ichabod Crane, a poor schoolmaster, and his encounter with a headless horseman
- William H. McGuffey
- American educator and clergyman, published illustrated reading books from 1836 to 1857
- vaquero
- Spanish-speaking "cowboy"
- Unitarianism
- a rationalistic religious system that grew out of a Christian base but now completely rejects Christianity; it emphasizes good behavior (i.e. morality) rahter than salvation by faith
- Charles Wilson Peale
- patriarch of a family of famous American artists
- Federal style of architecture
- red-brick home with white-columned entrance
- Leatherstocking Tales
- five novels by James Fenimore Cooper about Natty Bumppo, a frontiersman
- Horace Mann
- played a leading role in establishing state-supervised, state-funded, mandatory-attendance school systems in the United States
- John Brown
- anti-slavery agitator who led a band of murderers against pro-slavery settlers (May 1856)
- Seneca Falls Declaration
- a declaration written at the first women's rights convention that stated "all men and women are created equal"; it also listed many items that the signers believed were injustices perpetrated by "man" towards women
- Stephen Austin
- leader of a band of Missouri emigrants to Texas (1821)
- Acadians
- natives or inhabitants of Acadia, a French colony of 17th and 18th century consisting principally of what is now Nova Scotia
- Roger Taney
- Chief Justice of the Supreme Court folling John Marshall, helped decide and explain the Dred Scott case
- Henry David Thoreau
- American writer remembered for his attacks on the social institutions he considered immoral and for his faith in the religious significance of nature
- John Singleton Copley
- generally considered the greatest portrait painter in colonial America
- Stephen A. Douglas
- Popular and skillful American orator and political leader just before the American Civil War
- Andre Ampere
- founder of the science of electromagnetism (on which virually all modern electrical appliances rely
- popular sovereignty
- a doctrine in political theory that sovereignty is vested in the people as a whole rather than a particular individual or group (as a ruling dynasty) and as a result that government is created by and subject to the will of the people
- Commodore Matthew Perry
- famous United States naval officer, best known for opening Japan to Western trade and diplomacy
- Underground Railroad
- informal system that helped slaves escape to the Northern States and Canada during the mid-1800s
- Tapping Reeve Law School
- first law school in America, founded in 1784, in Litchfield, Connecticut
- Julia Ward Howe
- American writer, lecturer, and reformer, wrote the words of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and introduced the idea of Mother's Day
- Walt Whitman
- American poet
- Gilbert Stuart
- American artist, became famous for his unfinished portrait of George Washington, probably the best-known portrait in America
- Amistad
- the ship on which a revolt took place in 1839 by black slaves against Spaniards who had bought them
- John Deere
- American inventor and manufacturer, invented the first steel plow that efficiently turned the American prairie sod
- Henry Clay
- leading American statesman for nearly 50 years, repeatedly helped settle bitter disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states
- Lawrence, Kansas
- scene of massive carnage by pro-slavery forces (May 1856)
- Noah Webster
- wrote the first American dictionary published in 1828
- civil disobedience
- the deliberate and public refusal to obey a law
- Sarah and Angelina Grimke
- antislavery crusaders and women's rights advocates (Angelina was the first woman ever permitted to address a legislative body in the United States
- romanticism
- a philosophical system that emphasizes emotion and individual achievement
- Washington Irving
- one of the first American authors to win recognition in Europe as well as the United States
- Cyrus McCormick
- invented a reaping machine that revolutionized grain harvesting the United States
- Elizabeth Blackwell
- first woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree
- transcendentalism
- a religious philosophy, closely related to romanticism, that identifies beauty and wonder with a person's perception of "god" in the thing he is looking at
- blubber
- the thick fat that surrounds a whale
- Mount Holyoke College
- one of the first, and certainly one of the most famous, women's colleges in America
- Free Soilers
- anti-slavery agitators; there was a "Free Soil Party" from 1848 to 1854 (it was absorbed by the Republican Party when that party was formed); "The Free-Soilers' historic slogan calling for 'free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men' attracted small farmers, debtors, village merchants, and household and mill workers, who resented the prospect of black-labour competition-whether slave or free-in the territories
- Amelia Bloomer
- a leader in the temperance and women's suffrage movements, remembered especially for her failed attempt to revolutionize women's clothing through the use of modified trousers under slightly shorter skirts
- Nantucket sleigh ride
- the "ride" men in a whaling boat get sometimes when they harpoon a whale and it takes off; the whale can drag them at incredible speeds with great potential danger
- Sutter's Mill; Comstock Lode
- the richest gold discovery in America; it is at Virginia City, Nevada
- Nathaniel Bowditch
- American mathematician and atronomer
- antebellum
- ante="before", bellum="war": before the war
- Rip Van Winkle
- one of Washington Irving's best-known works, in which the title character falls asleep for 20 years and awakens to find everything different
- section (of land)
- one square mile or 640 acres
- James Fenimore Cooper
- American novelist and social critic
- John James Audobon
- one of the first to study and paint the birds of North America
- Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
- gives the United States all the Mexican territory from the western border of Texas to the Pacific Ocean and as far north as Wyoming
- Nakahama Manjiro
- Japanese naval officer, translated Bowditch's Navigator into Japanese, was the first native of Japan to navigate a ship out of sight of land on scientific principles
- Zebulon Montgomery Pike
- explorer who discovered the tall mountain in Colorado that now is called Pike's Peak
- Civil Disobedience (the essay)
- declared that people should refuse to obey any law they believe is unjust
- Walden (the book)
- tells how Thoreau built a cabin in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lived there alone
- Sojourner Truth
- a.k.a. Isabella Baumfree, one of the best-known American abolitionists of her day, first black woman orator to speak out against slavery
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- "America's poet", he wrote some of the most famous poems about colonial and pre-colonial America, including "Hiawatha" and "Paul Revere"
- Susan B. Anthony
- reformer and one of the first leaders of the campaign for women's rights
- Jedediah Smith
- American trader and explorer, traveled widely and provided many other pioneers with valuable information about the American West
- George Catlin
- American artist known for his paintings and drawings of American Indians
- Josiah Gregg
- Santa Fe trader, wrote Commerce of the Prairies which introduced people to life in the southwest
- hacienda
- ranch plantation
- Dred Scott
- slave whose situation was deliberately used in hopes of providing a legal means of freeing slaves
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- leader of the transcendentalist movement, the "Sage of Concord" who seemed to gather the first truly American writers around him
- Compromise of 1850
- admits California as a state; designates New Mexico and Utah as territories; promises once more that the fugitive slave law that was part of the Constitution (Art. IV, Sec. 2) will be enforced; outlaws slave sales in the District of columbia
- passive resistance
- resistance (as to a government or an occupying power) that does not resort to violence or active measures of opposition but depends mainly on techniques and acts of non-cooperation
- Charles Sumner
- famous statesman and antislavery leader
- ambergris
- a base for perfumes
- Edgar Allen Poe
- American poet, short-story teller, and literary critic
- Jim Bridger
- hunter, trapper, fur trader, guide, one of the greatest American frontiersmen
- Book of Mormon
- regarded as scripture by members of the LDS Church
- Samuel Morse
- famous American inventor and painter, invented first successful electric telegraph in the United States, also invented the Morse code
- presidio
- fort