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The Massacre at Mystic, also known as the Pequot Massacre or Battle of Mystic Fort, was an attack on May 26, 1637, during the Pequot War where English colonists and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies burned a fortified Pequot village, killing hundreds of men, women, and children. The event took place in what is now Groton, Connecticut, atop a ridge overlooking the Mystic RiveR -
historical phenomenon of colonial governments in North America (like the British colonies and later the U.S.) issuing laws and proclamations to pay "bounties" for the scalps of Native Americans. These "scalp acts" promoted the violent and racist practice of scalping as a form of trophy-taking and genocide, encouraging widespread violence and the mass murder of Indigenous men, women, and children for financial reward -
The Three-Fifths Compromise was an agreement at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to count three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining a state's total population for purposes of congressional representation and taxation. -
The Battle of Tippecanoe was fought on November 7, 1811, between the American forces led by William Henry Harrison and the Native American warriors of Tecumseh's confederacy, commanded by his brother, Tenskwatawa (The Prophet). -
The Missouri Compromise was a 1820 agreement that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, maintaining a fragile balance of power between free and slave states in the U.S. Senate. -
The Indian Removal Act was a 1830 United States law signed by President Andrew Jackson that authorized the president to negotiate treaties for the forced removal of Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands in the west. -
The Trail of Tears refers to the forced displacement of approximately 60,000 Native Americans, primarily the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes, from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern United States to designated "Indian Territory" (now Oklahoma) in the 1830s. -
In the early hours of August 22, 1831, an enslaved man named Nat Turner led more than fifty followers in a bloody revolt in Southampton, Virginia, killing nearly 60 White people, mostly women and children. The local authorities stopped the uprising by dawn the next day. -
The Fugitive Slave Act refers to two federal laws passed in 1793 and 1850 that required the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, empowering slave catchers and providing penalties for anyone who interfered. -
The Dred Scott Decision of 1857 was a landmark, highly controversial Supreme Court ruling that declared people of African descent could not be U.S. citizens, therefore barring them from suing in federal court. The decision also ruled that Congress lacked the authority to prohibit slavery in U.S. territories, effectively declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and upholding slavery. -
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved people in Confederate-held territory were free. -
The legal international slave trade into the U.S. ended in 1808, but slavery persisted internally and was only abolished nationwide with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. -
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime, on December 6, 1865. -
The 14th Amendment is a critical component of the U.S. Constitution that granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved people, and guaranteed them equal protection and due process under the law. -
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits denying citizens the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". -
The battle was a momentary victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The death of Custer and his troops became a rallying point for the United States to increase their efforts to force native peoples onto reservation lands. -
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. More than 250 people of the Lakota were killed and 51 wounded (4 men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later). Some estimates placed the number of dead as high as 300. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers also were killed and 39 were wounded (six of the wounded later died). -
Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine, allowing states to mandate segregation in public facilities as long as those facilities were equal for both races.