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History Terms

Terms: Who or what they refer to, when this was important, and why it is significant to our understanding of US history
Black Codes: Taking advantage of Johnson’s policies, the southern states aimed to penalize “vagrant” blacks, defined as those who did not work in the fields for whites, and to deny blacks the right to vote, serve on juries, or in some cases even own land. People arrested under the Black Codes faced imprisonment or forced labor. When? Post Civil War, 1865-1867. Shows the conditions of blacks even after being freed after the war, at the time, and what they had to go through to get where they are at the present.
*1870s
*Laws restricting black rights
*no guns
* couldn’t quit jobs w/ out “good cause”
*failure to obey led to imprisonment
Radical Reconstruction: This refers to the reconstruction of the South which is radical in terms of its provisions. This was quite different from the reconstruction that Lincoln had started and Johnson had continued. It involved terms such as full citizenship to blacks, civil rights amendments (13, 14 and 15) and Freedman’s Bureau. This was significant b/c it showed how US congress radically enforced rights of blacks in their times of need. 1868
Freedman’s Bureau: On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau’s chief focus was to provide food, medical care, help with resettlement, administer justice, manage abandoned and confiscated property, regulate labor, and establish schools. This is important to our understanding of US history because it showed US’s efforts to improve the lives for former slaves after the Civil War.
Sharecropping: During the reconstruction, sharecropping worked in collaboration with convict lease to re-employ former slaves in similar jobs to those prior to their emancipation. To avoid the worse situation of becoming convict laborers, farmers were forced to enter into extremely...