The term Carpetbagger was used derisively by many Southerners during the Reconstruction period to refer to those Northerners who begun moving south to take advantage of opportunities there, and to push through a political Republican agenda. Scalawags was the name given to white Republicans who already lived in the South. Sharecropping was a way for freedman to work on the land and be paid for it. It was a system where landowners granted a percentage of their land to tenants in return for a percentage of the crops produced. In practice in the Reconstruction Era South, it was a means to effectively enslave poor whites and blacks into perpetual debt. The other two terms, to our knowledge, are totally made up. 

As the name implies, the Northwest Passage was a passage through the northwest of North America sought for centuries as a new, quicker route to the Asian nations.  It was not an objective of the Lewis and Clark Expedition who ventured farther south.

The application of the Fugitive Slave Law caused a great deal of anger and resentment in the North. Many Northerners bulked at the violation of human rights and felt that Southerners coming into the North to capture fugitive slaves was a dangerous precedent. It encouraged many Northerners to join the anti-slavery movement and to pass personal liberty laws designed to limit the legality of the Fugitive Slave Law. The South responded that the North was plainly violating the Compromise of 1850, and tensions grew significantly worse, as each side became further entrenched in regional ideologies of personal and property rights.

The Seneca Falls Convention was convened in 1848 in Seneca, New York. The meeting was organized primarily by several influential female Quakers. The intention was to provide a series of meetings and lectures in which speakers could argue for the advancement of women’s rights in the United States. Many historians refer to the Seneca Falls Convention as the birth place of the female suffrage movement; others contend that it was simply a noteworthy example of a trend that had already received some support and would continue to gain momentum for the next century. Numerous prominent members of the female suffrage movement were in attendance, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The Convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, which reads very much like the Declaration of Independence, but is inclusive of women. 

The Presidency of John Quincy Adams was a crucial administration for the solidification of Northern and Southern economic and ideological differences. Adams favored Northern merchants and bankers over Southern plantation owners, enacting policies to that effect. The so-called Tariff of Abominations was designed to favor Northern industry over European industry, but it had the opposite effect in the South where it led to economic stagnation and poverty for some. Adams lost a great deal of credibility in the South and helped encourage ideological notions of a separate Southern and Northern identity. 

The above quote was spoken by trade unionist Samuel Gompers, in a speech to an assembly of some twenty thousand workers in 1893. In the early 1890s there was a severe economic recession and tensions between the wealthy and the working classes were growing. Samuel Gompers worked with this feeling—creating the American Federation of Labor and working tirelessly to improve the conditions of the working class. 

"Bushwhacker" was a general term used during the Civil War to refer to any guerrilla groups that were not directly tied to the command structure of either army. While at first used for both sides, the term in particular began to be used to refer to the pro-Confederate guerillas in Missouri's Ozarks. These "bushwhackers" would commit many atrocities in the latter parts of the War, but also produced a number of outlaws that would gain fame in the late-nineteenth century, including Frank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger.

The phrase "separate but equal" was first used in an 1890 Louisiana law (as "equal but separate"), but found greater currency after the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896. The Plessy case held that Jim Crow laws, which codified racial segregation, were valid under the Constitution as long as the different institutions were "equal" for both races. The Plessy case dealt specifically with railroad seating, but was applied broadly. The "seperate but equal" idea was regularly espoused, but almost never actually put into practice, as the "colored" schools, services, and seating on transportation was usually inferior by a great amount.

The Know-Nothing Party, also called the American Party, was an offshoot of a Nativist, anti-immigration, anti-Catholicism movement in the 1850s. The party claimed that it would purify American politics by removing the influence of Catholicism from government and strictly limiting the number of people who could immigrate to the United States. The ideology of the party reflected a broad fear among Americans at the time, many of whom believed that the arrival of Irish and German Catholics was undermining the ability of the working class to find work. 

Horace Mann served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Senate before his appointment as the Massachusetts secretary of education. Mann went on to the U.S. House of Representatives, promoting an agenda of public education and "normal schools" to train teachers. Much of the North reformed its schools along the lines dictated by Horace Mann, and free public schools spread throughout the region. The South, however, made little progress in public education, partly owing to its low population density and a general indifference toward progressive reforms. Mann developed six main principles regarding public education and its troubles: (1) Citizens cannot maintain both ignorance and freedom; (2) This education should be paid for, controlled, and maintained by the public; (3) This education should be provided in schools that embrace children from varying backgrounds; (4) This education must be nonsectarian; (5) This education must be taught using tenets of a free society; and (6) This education must be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.