B's Flashcards
Vasco Nunez de Balboa
A Spanish conquistador who crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean
Bank of the United States
The national bank that began in 1823
-operated under the direction of Nicholas Biddle
the bank became a lame-duck agency when President Andrew Jackson vetoed a 1932 bill to recharter it
Barbary War
An spontaneous/irregular war that dragged on from 1801-1805 with no decisive settlement - except the gaining of U.S. free access to the Mediterranean
Battle of Long Island
The 1776 defeat of General George Washington and his undertrained, underequipped, and badly outnumbered American army by British General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe
Battle of New Orleans
An 1815 battle in which General Andrew Jackson decisively defeated the powerful British forces with an army of frontiersman, blacks, creoles, and pirates
Battle of Washington Heights
A 1776 battle on Manhattan in which General George Washington was forced to retreat across New Jersey pursued by the aggressive British General Lord Cornwallis, a subordinate of General Howe
W.W. Belknap
President Grant’s Secretary of War, who accepted bribes from corrupt agents involved in his department’s administration of Indian Affairs
Bill of Rights
Ratified in 1791, the first ten amendments to the Constitution
Black Friday Scandal
A scheme by two unscrupulous businessmen, Jim Fiske and Jay Gould, to corner the gold market; they persuaded President Grant’s brother-in-law to convince the president that stopping government gold sales would be good for farmers; Grant naively complied, and many businessmen were ruined as the price of gold was bid up furiously on “Black Friday”
Bleeding Kansas
The name given by the press to a series of violent incidents in Kansas resulting from a virulently proslavery territorial government that was elected by widespread voting fraud and the response by Kansans of denouncing the proslavery government as illegitimate and forming their own free-soil government in an election that the proslavery faction boycotted
Daniel Boone
A frontiersman who explored parts of the western trans-Appalachian frontier
Booster colleges
The higher education products of religious sectarianism as well as local pride that sprang up in new communities as the population moved west
Boston Massacre
An incident, so named - even though the British soldiers involved had acted more or less in self-defense - and widely publicized by Samuel Adams, in which five Bostonians were killed as a result of friction between British soldiers and Boston citizens caused by the Townshend Acts
Boston Port Act
One of the Coercive Acts, which resulted in the closing of the port of Boston to all trade until local citizens would agree to pay for the lost tea (they would not).
Brer Rabbit tales
Oral literature that was an underground system of ridicule by slaves toward masters