African American - Black people who once lived in Africa and were brought to America to be slaves. Most African Americans are American citizens.
Agriculture - The science and business of cultivating the soil, producing crops and raising livestock.
Biology - The science of living organisms and life processes, including the study of structure, functioning, growth, origin, evolution and distribution of living organisms.
Boll - The rounded seed pod or capsule of certain plants, such as flax or cotton.
Boll Weevil - A small gray long-snouted beetle of Mexico and the southern United States having destructive larvae that hatch in and damage cotton bolls.
Botany - The biological study of plants and plant life.
Bushwhackers - Bands of guerrilla fighters that sympathized with the southern states during and after the Civil War. They often attacked Northerners and stole slaves to trade for money in the South.
Chemistry - The science of the composition, structure, properties and reactions of matter.
Choice - The power, right or liberty to make a selection or choose an option or alternative.
Civil War - A war between factions or regions of one country. Specifically the North versus the South in the United States from 1861 to 1865 partially over the issue of slavery.
Conservation - The act or process of protecting from loss or depletion with controlled usage and systematic preservation.
Crop Rotation - Planting different crops to restore vitality and nutrients to soil instead of depleting it with the same crops season after season.
Ecology - The science of the relationships between organisms and their environments.
Emancipation - To free or release from control, oppression, bondage or restraint, to liberate.
Emancipation Proclamation - Issued by President Abraham Lincoln, effective January 1, 1863, this law freed all slaves in territory still at war with the Union.
Equality - Having the same value as another.
Freedom - The condition of being free of restraints and oppression. At liberty to make choices without specific restrictions.
Grafting - To unite a shoot or a bud with a growing plant by insertion or by placing in close contact.
Homestead Act - This 1862 law passed by Congress promised ownership of a 160-acre tract of public land to a head of a family after he had cleared and improved the land and lived on it for five years.
Jim Crow Laws - Any of a number of discriminating practices favoring or promoting the suppression of black people.
Legume - A pod, such as that of a pea or bean, which splits into two halves with the seeds attached to the lower edge of one of the halves.
Normal School - A school that trains teachers, chiefly for the elementary grades. So called because the first school named was intended as a model.
Sharecropping - Tenant farming that many slaves chose when they were emancipated. The tenant gave a portion of his crop instead of rent to the landlord.
Slave - One bound in servitude to a person or household as an instrument of labor.