-
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 -
The Scalp Act" refers to historical legislation or proclamations in British colonies and early American states that offered financial rewards, or scalp bounties, for the scalps of Indigenous people, particularly from the late 17th through the 19th centuries -
The Three-Fifths Compromise was a pivotal agreement at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that determined three-fifths of an enslaved person's population would be counted for direct taxation and political representation in the House of Representatives -
The Fugitive Slave Act refers to two U.S. federal laws, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the more stringent Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which aimed to enforce the capture and return of enslaved people who escaped to free states -
The Battle of Tippecanoe was fought on November 7, 1811, between the U.S. forces led by William Henry Harrison and Native American warriors under Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) and his brother Tecumseh -
The Missouri Compromise was a 1820 agreement that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the balance of power in the U.S. Senate between slave and free states. It also prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30' parallel, though this ban was later repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision. -
The Trail of Tears refers to the forced displacement of Native American tribes, primarily the Cherokee, from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in the 1830s. Authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 -
The Indian Removal Act, signed into law by U.S. President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorized the President to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes to exchange their lands east of the Mississippi River for lands west of the Mississippi
-
The Nat Turner Rebellion was a slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, from August 21 to August 23, 1831. The revolt, the deadliest in U.S. history, killed approximately 60 white people before being suppressed by state militias and local mobs. In the aftermath, Turner was captured and hanged, while the rebellion led to even stricter laws against enslaved and free Black people and increased fear of further uprisings across the South -
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 the rebellious Confederate states were to be free as of that date -
The 13th Amendment is a pivotal amendment to the U.S. Constitution that formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, with the exception of slavery as punishment for a duly convicted crime. Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865 -
Slavery ended in the United States with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865, following the Civil War. The process began with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in rebelling states, and was further advanced by Union victories and measures such as the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807 -
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the U.S., including formerly enslaved people, and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens -
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibits states from denying a citizen the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude -
The 15th Amendment is a part of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits the denial or abridgment of a citizen's right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". Ratified on February 3, 1870, it was the last of the Reconstruction Amendments and specifically granted the right to vote to African American men.
-
It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory. -
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. Some estimates placed the number of dead as high as 300 -
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal". The case challenged a Louisiana law requiring segregated railway cars, with Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race, arrested for sitting in a "whites only" car