ILTS Social Science: History (315) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Neolithic Revolution

The shift from foraging to settled agriculture and animal domestication beginning about 10,000 BCE, which supported larger populations, food surplus, occupational specialization, and early states.

Code of Hammurabi

A Babylonian legal compilation inscribed on a stele around 1754 BCE, prescribing penalties that varied by social class and covering contracts, property, family, and injury.

Columbian Exchange

The post-1492 transfer between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia of crops, animals, people, and pathogens; Old World diseases killed a large share of Indigenous Americans.

Silk Roads

Overland and oasis caravan routes linking China, Central Asia, India, and the Mediterranean, along which goods traveled together with religions, technologies, and epidemic disease.

Treaty of Westphalia

The 1648 settlement ending the Thirty Years' War, commonly cited for establishing territorial sovereignty and non-interference as governing principles among European states.

Meiji Restoration

The 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, followed by rapid state-led industrialization, military reform, and political centralization in the emperor's name.

Berlin Conference

An 1884–85 meeting of European powers that set rules for claiming African territory, accelerating the scramble for colonies without any African representation.

Industrial Revolution

Beginning in Britain around 1760, the application of coal, steam power, and mechanized textile production to manufacturing, reorganizing work, cities, and class relations.

Bandung Conference

A 1955 meeting of Asian and African states in Indonesia that endorsed anti-colonialism, national sovereignty, and non-alignment in the Cold War.

Three-Fifths Compromise

A 1787 constitutional provision counting three of every five enslaved people for apportionment and taxation, increasing slaveholding states' representation without granting anyone rights.

Marbury v. Madison

The 1803 Supreme Court decision holding that courts may void legislation conflicting with the Constitution, establishing the power of judicial review in U.S. law.

Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln's January 1, 1863 order declaring enslaved people in rebelling Confederate states free; it excluded border slave states and depended on Union military victory.

Fourteenth Amendment

Ratified in 1868, it granted citizenship by birth, guaranteed due process and equal protection, and became the constitutional basis for later civil rights rulings.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The 1896 decision upholding Louisiana's segregated railway cars under a separate-but-equal doctrine, which legitimized Jim Crow segregation until it was repudiated in 1954.

New Deal

Federal programs from 1933 to 1939 responding to the Great Depression, including bank deposit insurance, Social Security, labor organizing rights, and public works employment.

Brown v. Board of Education

The 1954 unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning the separate-but-equal standard in education.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Federal law suspending literacy tests and other devices and providing federal supervision of elections in jurisdictions with histories of excluding Black voters.

GI Bill of 1944

Legislation funding education, home loans, and unemployment benefits for returning World War II veterans, expanding college enrollment and the postwar middle class.

Northwest Ordinance

The 1787 law organizing the territory north of the Ohio River, including Illinois; it set conditions for statehood and prohibited slavery in the territory.

Illinois statehood, 1818

Illinois entered the Union on December 3, 1818 as the 21st state, under a constitution that barred slavery but allowed indenture of laborers from slave states.

Black Hawk War

An 1832 conflict in northern Illinois and Wisconsin between U.S. forces and Sauk and Fox bands resisting removal; Abraham Lincoln served as a militia captain.

Lincoln-Douglas debates

Seven 1858 debates during the Illinois Senate race; Douglas won reelection, but his Freeport Doctrine alienated southern Democrats and raised Lincoln's national profile.

Haymarket affair

An 1886 Chicago labor rally and bombing that led to the conviction of eight anarchists and became a symbol in international labor and May Day commemorations.

Pullman Strike

An 1894 walkout by workers at Chicago's Pullman Palace Car Company, organized in part by Eugene Debs and ended by federal injunction and troops.

Hull House

A Chicago settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, offering social services and shaping American social work and urban reform.

Sourcing

Identifying a document's author, date, place, audience, and purpose before using it, so its claims can be weighed rather than simply accepted.

Corroboration

Comparing independent sources about the same event; agreement strengthens a claim, while disagreement points to differing perspectives, interests, or material conditions.

Contextualization

Situating a source in the political, economic, and cultural conditions of its own time rather than judging it by present-day assumptions and categories.

Presentism

The error of interpreting past people and events through contemporary values and categories, which distorts evidence and obscures the actors' own reasoning.

Primary source

An artifact, document, or record produced during the period under study, such as letters, census returns, photographs, or statutes; usefulness depends on the research question.

Historiography

The study of how historians have interpreted a subject over time, including changing methods and schools such as empiricist, Annales, social, and cultural history.

Periodization

The interpretive choice of dividing the past into eras; different turning points, such as 1453, 1492, or 1648, answer different historical questions.