Praxis Middle School Social Studies flashcards

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

OPVL source analysis

A method for evaluating primary sources by examining Origin (author, date, context), Purpose (why it was made), Value (what it reveals), and Limitations (what it omits or distorts).

Chronological reasoning

The skill of placing events in correct sequence and explaining how earlier developments cause, enable, or constrain later ones, rather than treating events as isolated facts.

Corroboration

Confirming a historical claim by comparing multiple independent sources; agreement across sources with different authors or purposes strengthens confidence in the claim.

Contextualization

Interpreting an event or source within the political, economic, and social conditions of its own era, avoiding judgments based on present-day values.

Continuity and change

A historical thinking skill that identifies what stayed the same and what shifted across a period, recognizing that most eras contain both persistence and transformation.

Bias in sources

A source's slant or partiality does not make it useless; biased sources can still provide reliable factual details when checked against other independent evidence.

Economic systems

Traditional economies rely on custom, command economies on state direction, market economies on prices and exchange, and mixed economies combine state and market elements.

Five themes of geography

Location (absolute or relative), place (physical and human characteristics), human-environment interaction, movement of people and goods, and region (areas sharing unifying traits).

Declaration of Independence

The 1776 document asserting natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and arguing that government derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

Articles of Confederation

The first U.S. constitution (1781-1789) created a weak central government lacking power to tax or regulate interstate commerce, leading to its replacement by the Constitution.

Great Compromise

The 1787 constitutional agreement creating a bicameral Congress: the House apportioned by population and the Senate giving each state equal representation.

Three-Fifths Compromise

A 1787 agreement counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House and for direct taxation of states.

Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution (1791), protecting freedoms such as speech, press, assembly, religion, and protection against unreasonable searches and self-incrimination.

Reconstruction amendments

The Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) guaranteed citizenship and equal protection, and the Fifteenth (1870) protected voting rights regardless of race.

Progressive Era reforms

Late 19th- and early 20th-century reforms including muckraking journalism, antitrust enforcement, the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) for women's suffrage, and initiative, referendum, and recall.

New Deal

President Franklin Roosevelt's 1933-1939 programs providing relief, recovery, and reform, including Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Containment policy

Cold War strategy to limit Soviet expansion through the Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), and military engagement such as the Korean War.

Civil War causes

The conflict stemmed from disputes over slavery's expansion, states' rights, and sectional economic differences; fighting began with the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Neolithic Revolution

The transition around 10,000 BCE from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture and animal domestication, producing food surpluses, permanent villages, and early cities.

River valley civilizations

Early complex societies along the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow Rivers, where irrigation supported cities, writing systems, and centralized political authority.

Classical Athens

A Greek city-state (5th century BCE) that developed direct democracy, in which eligible male citizens voted on laws and policies in the assembly.

Roman Republic

Rome's government (509-27 BCE) with elected consuls, a Senate, and assemblies; its legal codes influenced later Western legal systems.

Silk Roads

Overland trade networks linking China, Central Asia, India, and the Mediterranean from roughly the 2nd century BCE to the 15th century CE, spreading goods, Buddhism, and Islam.

Islamic Golden Age

A period (8th-13th centuries) of advances in algebra, medicine, and optics by scholars such as al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina, who preserved and extended Greek learning.

Renaissance humanism

A 14th-17th century intellectual movement emphasizing classical Greek and Roman texts, human potential, and secular subjects, aided by the printing press around 1450.

Protestant Reformation

The 16th-century movement begun by Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517), which challenged indulgences and papal authority and split Western Christianity.

Columbian Exchange

The transfer of crops, animals, people, and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492, reshaping diets, populations, and economies on both sides.

Industrial Revolution

The mechanization of production beginning in Britain around 1760, driven by textile machinery and steam power, which accelerated urbanization and spread to Europe and North America.

Separation of powers

The division of government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, each with distinct functions, to prevent concentration of power in any one body.

Checks and balances

Constitutional mechanisms letting each branch limit the others, such as the presidential veto, congressional override by two-thirds, Senate confirmation, and judicial review.

Federalism

A system dividing power between national and state governments; the Supremacy Clause (Article VI) makes federal law supreme within its constitutional sphere.

Due process

Constitutional protections under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments requiring fair procedures (procedural) and fair laws (substantive) before government deprives a person of life, liberty, or property.