| A | B |
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| Reconstruction | a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the eleven former Confederate States of America into the United States |
| amnesty | an official pardon for people who have been convicted of political offenses |
| radical | complete political or social change; representing or supporting an extreme or progressive section of a political party |
| Black codes | restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force |
| override | use one's authority to reject or cancel |
| veto | a constitutional right to reject a decision or proposal made by a law-making body |
| Fourteenth Amendment | grants citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people |
| Fifteenth Amendment | granted African American men the right to vote |
| Reconstruction Acts | four statutes passed during the Reconstruction Era by the 40th United States Congress addressing the requirement for Southern States to be readmitted to the Union |
| Civil Rights Act of 1866 | the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law |
| Tenure of Office Act | intended to restrict the power of the president to remove certain office-holders without the approval of the U.S. Senate |
| suspend | officially prohibit (someone) from holding their usual post or carrying out their usual role for a particular length of time |
| convention | a large meeting or conference |
| impeach | charge (the holder of a public office) with misconduct |
| convict | declare (someone) to be guilty of a criminal offense by the verdict of a jury or the decision of a judge in a court of law |
| acquit | free (someone) from a criminal charge by a verdict of not guilty |
| sharecropping | a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land |
| lien | a right to keep possession of property belonging to another person until a debt owed by that person is discharged |
| scalawag | a white Southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction, often for personal profit |
| moderate | not radical or excessively right- or left-wing |
| integrated | desegregated, especially racially |
| scandal | an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage |
| Ku Klux Klan | a violent post-Civil War secret society founded in Tennessee in 1866 to upend the Black political and social power that was being established during Reconstruction |
| New South | coined in 1874 by Atlanta, Georgia newspaper editor Henry W. Grady, who wanted to promote economic growth and investment in the region |
| redeemer | the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power after the Civil War, they supported Bourbon ideas |
| Bourbon | steadfast refusal to accept or learn from the defeat of the Civil War and adapt to new realities |
| literacy test | a test that checks if someone can read and write. It used to be required in some states before someone could register to vote |
| poll tax | a fee levied as a condition of voting |
| grandfather clause | exempted individuals from meeting the new suffrage requirements if they or their ancestors had been eligible to vote prior to a certain date |
| segregation | the separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races |
| lynching | extrajudicial unaliving by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate people |
| corruption | dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery |
| carpetbagger | a person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction |
