Famous Americans Flashcards
Clara Barton
nurse who founded the American Red Cross
John Wilkes Booth
an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865.
John Brown
a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States.[
William Clark
an American explorer, soldier, Indian agent, and territorial governor.
Dorothea Dix
an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses.
Frederick Douglass
an African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
a American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century
William Lloyd Garrison
a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War.
Sam Houston
a American politician and soldier, best known for his role in bringing Texas into the United States as a constituent state.
Anne Hutchinson
a Puritan spiritual adviser, mother of 15, and important participant in the Antinomian Controversy that shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.
Meriwether Lewis
an American explorer, soldier, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, with William Clark.
Cyrus McCormick
an Inventor and founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of International Harvester Company in 1902.
Thomas Paine
an English and American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.
Chief Pontiac
an Ottawa war chief who became noted for his role in Pontiac’s War (1763–1766), an American Indian struggle against British military occupation of the Great Lakes region and named for him.
Sacajawea
a Lemhi Shoshone woman, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition, acting as an interpreter and guide, in their exploration of the Western United States. She traveled thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean between 1804 and 1806.
Dred Scott
an enslaved African American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the “Dred Scott Decision.”
Daniel Shays
an American soldier, revolutionary, and farmer famous for being one of the leaders of Shays’ Rebellion, a populist uprising against oppressive debt collection and tax policies in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787.
John Smith
New England, was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania and his friend Mózes Székely. He was considered to have played an important part in the establishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements in the United States.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South
Tecumseh
a Native American leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy (known as Tecumseh’s Confederacy) which opposed the United States during Tecumseh’s War and became an ally of Britain in the War of 1812.
Henry David Thoreau
an American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.[2] He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Sojourner Truth
an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826.
Harriet Tubman
an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made about thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends,[1] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women’s suffrage.
Nat Turner
an African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 60 white deaths
Eli Whitney
an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.[1] Whitney’s invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States.
Roger Williams
an English Protestant theologian who was an early proponent of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
Brigham Young
an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1847 until his death in 1877.
