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| Sutter’s Mill | a water-powered sawmill owned by pioneer John Sutter in Coloma, California, where the accidental discovery of gold sparked the California Gold Rush. |
| Gadsden Purchase 1853 | is the 1853–1854 agreement in which the United States paid Mexico $10 million for roughly 29,640 square miles of land in what is now southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico |
| Compromise of 1850 | was a package of five separate bills passed by the U.S. Congress in September 1850 to ease a fierce political crisis over slavery and territorial expansion following the Mexican-American War. 1 California statehood, 2. Mexican cessian organized into territories, 3. Texas given 10 million for debts Texas boundry settled, 4. Watshington D.C. buying and selling of slaves illegal, but slavery legal, 5. Fugitive Slave Act. |
| Fugitive Slave Act | was one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a slave power conspiracy. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner, and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate |
| Commodore Perry | best known for leading the 1852–1854 expedition that forced Japan to end its two-century policy of national isolation |
| Onstead Manifesto | was a controversial, secret document written in 1854 by three U.S. diplomats. It stated that the United States was justified in using military force to seize Cuba from Spain if Spain refused to sell the island for $120 million |
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin | is an 1852 anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe that painted a grim, emotional picture of life under slavery |
| The Know Nothing Party | American Party) was a 19th-century U.S. political party that arose in the 1850s as a nativist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic movement. |
| Kansas–Nebraska Act | of 1854 was a U.S. federal law that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and allowed white settlers to decide whether to allow slavery through popular sovereignty |
| Bleeding Kansas | was a series of violent civil confrontations in the Kansas Territory over whether the region would enter the Union as a free state or a slave state |
| Beecher’s Bibles | refers to the breech-loading Sharps rifles supplied to anti-slavery settlers during the "Bleeding Kansas" territorial conflicts (1854–1860). They were named after abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher, who helped raise funds to arm Free-State fighters and famously remarked that the rifle was a greater moral argument against slavery than the Bible |
| Lee Compton Constitution | second of four proposed state constitutions for Kansas. Drafted in 1857 by pro-slavery advocates meeting at Constitution Hall in Lecompton, Kansas, it sought to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. |
| Crimes Against Kansas speech | was a famous, fiery anti-slavery speech delivered in the United States Senate on May 19–20, 1856, by Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner |
| Dred Scott v. Sandford | the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that Black people, whether enslaved or free, were not U.S. citizens and could not sue in federal court |
| Panic of 1857 | a severe financial crisis and economic depression in the United States that began on August 24, 1857, and lasted into 1859 |
| Lincoln–Douglas Debates | were a series of seven political debates held in 1858 between Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln and Democratic incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas during the Illinois campaign for the U.S. Senate |
| Fort Sumter | is a historic, man-made sea fort located at the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, best known as the site where the American Civil War began. |
| Conscription | is the compulsory enlistment of people by law into national service, most commonly into the military. It is also widely known as "the draft" |
| 1st Bull Run | was the first major land battle of the American Civil War, fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia |
| George McClellan | was an American Union Army major general, civil engineer, railroad executive, and politician. |
