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.

Nativism, a movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, was founded on anti-immigrant feeling. Many Americans felt that the arrival of the poor and disenfranchised from other countries would spell trouble for the working classes forcing them to compete and thus lowering the wages that they could expect to receive. Most Nativists did not expect immigration to fully cease, but desired to ensure that those granted immigration would be useful to the future prosperity of America. One product of this was the implementation of a literacy test to test whether arriving immigrants could read and write. 

 The Union Army saw a succession of commanders through the first three years of the war.  Most of them were easily defeated by Robert E. Lee and the Conderate forces.  Abraham Lincoln did not find a suitable general until Grant, who was made General of the Army in 1864.

The quote appears in a text issued by National Woman Suffrage Association, in the late Nineteenth Century. It has been variously attributed to both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, although most historians maintain that Susan B. Anthony is the most likely candidate. Susan B. Anthony was an extremely prominent figure in the fight for Universal Suffrage, in particular female suffrage. She began campaigning before the Civil War and was famously arrested in 1872 for voting in the Presidential Election. Susan B. Anthony would die, aged 86, in 1906 - fourteen years before the passage of Nineteenth Amendment which forever guaranteed women in the United States equal voting rights as men. 

In the United States, during the Reconstruction Era, the South passed a series of Jim Crow laws, which were designed to resist the integration of freed slaves into the political and social process. Included amongst these was the Grandfather Clause and the Literary requirements, which imposed restrictions on who could vote and who could not. Both were designed to prevent blacks from voting. The poll tax was similarly designed to prevent African-Americans from voting. It required a small payment to be made in order to vote, which had the effect of disenfranchising African-Americans, Native Americans, and poor whites. Poll taxes were not deemed unconstitutional until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. 

Dorothea Dix was a very famous female American activist who campaigned heavily for the humane and conscientious treatment of individuals with mental disabilities. She lobbied state and national institutions throughout the antebellum era and successfully created the first ever American insane asylums. 

The Rough Riders is the name given to a volunteer cavalry organization that was organized by Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Leonard Wood during the Spanish-American War and the conflict for Cuban independence. They were one of several volunteer organizations that President McKinley set up to help remedy the deficiency of manpower available to the United States military—in the years following the Civil War there was a chronic shortage of men willing to serve in the armed forces. The group was mostly organized in the south and southwest, consisting of men and college-aged boys from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The Rough Riders were one of the few volunteer organizations to see action in the conflict, fighting in numerous battles, including the battle of San Juan Hill. 

Roger Williams was a puritan clergyman who came early to Massachusetts Bay Colony, in February of 1631. Almost instantly, Williams' radical egalitarian theology and politics aroused the ire of Boston's leading citizens. He became a complete separatist, advocating for the cutting off of the "true church" from the Church of England. Massachusetts Bay's leaders exiled Williams from Boston, and initially went north to the small Salem colony, but also had to leave there. Eventually, Williams went south to the are now known as Rhode Island, and established a colony truly based on religious freedom, and offered asylum there to any people fleeing religious persecution.