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The Scalp Act" refers to a specific, often violent, form of historical legislation that offered financial incentives, or bounties, for the scalps of enemies, primarily Native Americans. While scalping itself was a practice with roots in Native American warfare, European colonists and governments introduced and encouraged scalp bounties as a method of warfare and, in some cases, extermination. These laws could be enacted at various levels, from local governments to colonial authorities
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The 3/5 Compromise, was an agreement at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to count three out of every five enslaved individuals when determining a state's population for purposes of both congressional representation and taxation. This compromise gave Southern states more political power in the House of Representatives than they would have had if enslaved people were not counted, while also incorporating them into the tax base
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The Fugitive Slave Acts were federal laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 that enforced the constitutional provision for the return of escaped slaves to their owners, allowing for their capture and removal from free states into slave states. The 1793 Act was relatively weak, but the more stringent 1850 Act mandated federal intervention, criminalized aiding escaped slaves, and denied them the right to a jury trial or to testify on their own behalf. The Acts intensified sectional tensions,
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The slave trade to the United States effectively ended in 1808 with a federal law banning the importation of enslaved people, although the practice of slavery itself continued until 1865. The nationwide abolition of slavery was then solidified with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in December 1865 after the Civil War
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The Battle of Tippecanoe was fought on November 7, 1811, in Battle Ground, Indiana, between American forces led by then Governor William Henry Harrison
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The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a U.S. law that temporarily resolved the national debate over the expansion of slavery by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to maintain balance in the Senate, and by prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36°30′ parallel. averting immediate national division over slavery, but it was later repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
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The Trail of Tears refers to the forced displacement and death of Native American tribes, particularly the Cherokee, from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to territory in present-day Oklahoma during the 1830s and 1840s.Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations, a journey of over a thousand miles that led to widespread suffering, disease, starvation, and the deaths of thousands of people.
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The Indian Removal Act, signed into law on May 28, 1830, by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the President to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes to exchange their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River for unsettled territories west of the river, primarily in what is now Oklahoma. While the act ostensibly offered voluntary removal with incentives, it led to the forced displacement of thousands, including the tragic "Trail of Tears".
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Nat Turner's Rebellion was a revolt led by Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, in August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. The rebellion killed about 55 white people before being suppressed within a few days, but Turner remained at large for two months. The uprising intensified widespread fear of future revolts, leading to increased repression and harsh new laws restricting the rights of Black people in Virginia and North Carolina, despite the event's ultimate failure.
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The Emancipation Proclamation was an Executive Order issued by President Abraham Lincoln declaring that all enslaved people in the rebellious Confederate states were to be free. It was a crucial turning point in the American Civil War, as it shifted the war's focus to include the abolition of slavery, permitted Black men to serve in the Union Army, and deterred foreign support for the Confederacy. While the Proclamation did not immediately end slavery nationwide
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during the Pequot War, when a force from Connecticut Colony under Captain John Mason and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies set fire to the Pequot Fort near the Mystic River. They circled the fort and shot anyone who tried to escape it.
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On this day, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its ruling in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford,stating that enslaved people were not citizens and could not sue in federal court, and that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in the territories.
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The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on December 6, 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, except as punishment for a crime. It also granted Congress the power to enforce this prohibition through "appropriate legislation".This landmark amendment concluded the legal institution of slavery in America and paved the way for subsequent civil rights legislation
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The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and officially ratified on July 9, 1868. This key post-Civil War amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and established the "equal protection" and "due process" clauses, ensuring that states could not deny any person life, liberty, or property without due process or deny equal protection under the law.
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The 15th Amendment was passed by Congress on February 26, 1869, and ratified on February 3, 1870. This amendment granted African American men the right to vote, prohibiting states and the U.S. government from denying the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude
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It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory.
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The U.S. Supreme Court changes history on May 18, 1896! The Court's “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson on that date upheld state-imposed Jim Crow laws. It became the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States for the next fifty years.
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The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, involved nearly three hundred Lakota people killed by soldiers of the United States Army.