United States History: Civil War

(1861–5) Sometimes called ‘the War Between the States’ or ‘the Second American Revolution’...

The first battle of Bull Run (or first battle of Manassas) was the first major engagement of the Civil War...

Site of one of the decisive battles of the American Civil War: a Confederate defeat by Union forces 1-3 July 1863...

Fortification, built 1829–60, on a shoal at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston, S.C., and named for Gen. Thomas Sumter; scene of the opening engagement of the Civil War...

Speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 19, 1863, at the dedication of the national cemetery on the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, Pa. It is one of the most famous and most quoted of modern speeches...

Argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856–57. It involved the then bitterly contested issue of the status of slavery in the federal territories...

US Supreme Court decision of 1857 which denied ‘blacks’ (African Americans) US citizenship and made slavery legal in all US territories...

The Union Conscription Act of Mar. 3, 1863, provided that all able-bodied males between the ages of 20 and 45 were liable to military service...

In U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites...

The largest civil engineering project in western history to that date, the railroad was over 4,800 km/3,000 mi long and crossed deserts, canyons, and mountains, requiring the development of new construction techniques...

Bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska...

Armed conflict between the United States and Great Britain, 1812–15. It followed a period of great stress between the two nations as a result of the treatment of neutral countries by both France and England during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars...

The first Ku Klux Klan was an organization that thrived in the South during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War...

1865–77, in U.S. history, the period of readjustment following the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, the defeated South was a ruined land...

Term used by Americans generally in reference to a native of New England and by non-Americans, especially the British, in reference to an American of any section...

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, African-Americans have taken their place in the upper echelons of US society...

1808–89, American statesman, President of the Southern Confederacy...

...he was educated at Fisk University (1885–8), where he was shocked by the racial segregation he experienced in the South...

US millionaire industrialist and philanthropist. He was the founder of Standard Oil in 1870, from which were descended four of the world's largest oil companies - Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil...

1820–91, Union general in the American Civil War, b. Lancaster, Ohio. Sherman is said by many to be the greatest of the Civil War generals...

As a religious mystic, she travelled throughout New England and the Midwest on speaking tours and was one of the first African-American women to speak publicly for the abolitionist movement...

US abolitionist. Born a slave in Maryland, she escaped to Philadelphia (where slavery was outlawed) in 1849. She helped set up the Underground Railroad...