Pre-Columbian era
• Name for the period of History in the New
World before Christopher Columbus became
the first European to arrive (except for the
Vikings’ limited exploration) in 1492
Mercantilism
• Economic system that promoted the
establishment of colonies around the
world for the enrichment of European
powers during the fifteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries
• Under this system, colonies exported
raw materials to the powerful European
“motherland” and then purchased the
finished products produced from these
raw materials
• System explains why nations were so
eager to find, populate, and maintain
Christopher
Columbus
•Italian-born explorer
who sailed on behalf of
Spain
•First European (except
for the Vikings) to land
in the Americas (the
New World
•Popular name for the
Americas in the
century or so after
Christopher Columbus
became the first
European to “discover”
Conquistadors
• Name for Spanish explorers who flocked to the
New World in the sixteenth century
• They were seeking gold and other treasures,
and they treated the Native Americans brutally
• They were often accompanied by the Catholic
missionaries
Industrial Revolution
• Term for the conversion of society from an
agrarian one (centered on farming and other
agricultural pursuits) to an industrial one
(centered on manufacturing and other
mechanized pursuits).
• Took place in the mid eighteenth century
• Took place in America in the nineteenth century
• Initially focused in the American northeast
Jamestown
• First successful colony in Virginia
• Founded in 1607
• More than two-thirds of the original settlers died
during the “starving time” of the first winter
• Site of John Rolf’s first experiment plating
tobacco for export to Britain
• Served as the capital of Virginia for many years
Joint-stock company
• A company funded by selling stock to
investors to fund exploration and
colonization in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Virginia was founded by a joint stock
company that earned great dividends for
its stockholders from the sale of tobacco
exported to Britain from Virginia
John Smith
• First governor of the Jamestown colony
Powhatan
The name of the group of Native
American peoples that lived in
eastern Virginia at the time of the
first English settlements.
Tobacco
The English colonists
discovered that they could sell
this crop in Europe for a great
profit
John Rolfe grew it and sold it
back to England, this saved
the Jamestown colony.
Headright system
The name of the system, in
which each new person who
came to the colony received
50 acres of land and another
50 acres for each family
member who came.
Cash Crop
A crop grown for sale rather
than the farmers personal use
Indentured Servant
• A person who could not afford passage to
the American colonies from Britain and
promised his or her servitude (usually for a
period of seven years) to someone who
was then willing to pay his or her passage
across the Atlantic Ocean.
• Became less popular as slavery became
more widespread.
House of Burgesses
• Legislature of colonial Virginia
• First legislature body in colonial America
slavery
• Practice of buying and selling people from Africa and of African
descent as household servants and/or farm workers
• First practiced in the New World in Virginia in 1619
• Slaves were imported from Africa, where they were brought or
kidnapped and transported to the Americas by a sea voyage
known as the Middle Passage
• In the American colonies it was more prevalent in the South
than in the North
• Created political problems, beginning with the drafting of the
Constitution and lasting through the Civil War
• Ended by the 13th Amendment (one of the Civil War
Amendments)
The Ring Shout
This dance paid tribute to the
ancestors and gods of the
slaves.
Triangular Trade
• In this process merchants carried rum and other
goods from New England to Africa. In Africa
merchants traded merchandise for enslaved
people. They transported these people to the
West Indies and sold them for Sugar and
molasses. These goods were then shipped to
New England to be distilled into rum.
Middle Passage
• Middle leg of the journey from Europe
to Africa to America, then back to
Europe in which slaves, spices, furs,
gold, and other goods were
transported
• Name by which the brutal experience
of crossing the Indian and Atlantic
Oceans after being sold or kidnapped
into slavery in Africa was known
• Almost 15 percent of slaves did not
Pilgrims
• Religious dissidents who left England for
freedom in the American colonies.
• Settled first in Plymouth, Massachusetts
• Came over on the Mayflower, from which their
agreement on how to govern the Colony, the
Mayflower Compact, took its name.
• Pioneered the concept of the separation of the
church and state.
• Separate from the puritans, who maintained
membership in the Church of England Pilgrims
had abandoned.
Mayflower
Compact
• The first “constitution” in
North America
• Signed by 41 Pilgrim men
who came to Plymouth on
the Mayflower in 1620
• Established the rule of law
and the separation of
church and state
Separation of Church and State
• Notion that government and religion should
function separately
• Established in the Constitution by the First
Amendment (in the Bill of Rights)
• Pioneered by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower
Compact and first entered into American law by
Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of
Religious Freedom
Plymouth
• Massachusetts settlement founded by the
Pilgrims in 1621
• Governed by the Mayflower Compact
New Netherland
Colony founded by the Dutch in
1621
New Amsterdam
Capital of the Dutch colony New
Netherland
Puritans
• Religious dissidents who left England to
establish a purer branch of the Church of
England
• Settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony around
the area we now know as Boston in 1630
• Led by John Winthrop, who envisioned the
Puritan society as an example to the world, a
“City Upon a Hill”
• Separate from the Pilgrims, who abandoned
the Church of England
Pequot War
The name of the 1st major conflict
between the New England
colonists and Native Americans
that arose in Connecticut in 1637.
Roger Williams
the preacher that Puritan leaders
banished for his beliefs that
government officials should not
punish those with different
religious views and that settlers
should buy, not take, land from
the Native Americans.
He would later form a colony in
what is now Rhode Island.
John Winthorp
the first governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
(New England)
Anne Hutchinson
Woman that was banished for her
beliefs that people did not need
church leaders to interpret the bible,
and that people could gain
enlightenment on their own through
the holy spirit.
Metacom
The Wampanoag chief (nicknamed
King Phillip) that led a war against
the English which would cost the
colonists 1/10th of their fighting age
men.
He was eventually killed by the
Puritans and his head was put on
display for 20 years in Plymouth.
Bacon’s Rebellion
• 1675 uprising in Virginia
• Led by Nathaniel Bacon, who was
unhappy about the colonial government’s
unwillingness to help settlers on the
western frontier protect themselves
against Native Americans
• He turned his sites to the colonial
government, deposing the governor and
burning down Jamestown
• Bacon died in 1676, allowing the previous
governor, William Berkeley, to regain
control of Virginia.
King Philip’s War
• Led by King Phillip, a Native American tribal
leader whose Indian name was Metacom
• Fought when King Phillip’s Wampanoag tribe
joined with two other tribes and attacked
settlements on the western frontier of New
England in 1675 and 1676
• Ended when King Phillip was killed in 1676
Sir Edmond Andros
The man appointed by King James
II to govern over the Dominion of
New England in 1686.
He severely punished smugglers
and refused to allow the colonists to
form assemblies
Salem Witch Trials
• Famous 1662 episode in the Puritan town of Salem,
Massachusetts, in which 175 people were arrested and
22 were executed for allegedly practicing witchcraft
• Most of the testimony came from a group of teenage
girls
• Invoked by some as an analogy during the
McCarthyism (playwright Arthur Miller wrote The
Crucible about this analogy)
First Great Awakening
• Religious revival in the 1740’s that spread
a more evangelical brand of Protestantism
across the colonies, including the
popularization of Baptist and Methodist
denominations
• George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards
were the most famous preachers of the
time
This man was a religious leader
during the Great Awakening of
the 1730’s and 1740’s.
Jonathan
Edwards
• The phrase, "gold, God, and
glory" best describes the
motivations of which of the
following groups during the Age
of Discovery?
a) Pilgrims
b) Puritans
c) conquistadors
d) Native Americans
• The first successful colony in
the New World was
a) Roanoke
b) Richmond
c) Raleigh
d) Jamestown
• The first slaves introduced to
the American colonies arrived in
which state in 1619?
a) Georgia
b) Kentucky
c) Virginia
d) South Carolina
• In contrast to early settlers in
Virginia and many other parts of
North America who came seeking
financial gain, the earliest settlers of
Massachusetts came from Britain
seeking
a) profitable trade
b) religious purity
c) land to farm
d) cleaner air
• The colony founded on
principles of social equality and
religious tolerance was
a) New York
b) Plymouth
c) Massachusetts Bay
d) Pennsylvania
• Which colony was established
by dissenters fleeing
persecution from the Puritans?
a) Rhode Island
b) Pennsylvania
c) Maryland
d) Connecticut
• What was the economy of the
Southern Colonies based upon?
a) lumbering
b) cash crops
c) fur trading
d) shipbuilding
• The New England economy was
heavily dependent on
a) slave labor
b) the production of many staple crops
c) fishing, shipbuilding, and commerce
d) all of the above
• In which colony did the Quakers
settle?
a) Pennsylvania
b) Virginia
c) North Carolina
d) Maryland
• Which colony was established
as a place for Catholics but
welcomed all faiths?
a) Georgia
b) New Hampshire
c) Connecticut
d) Maryland
• Which colonies were part of the
middle colonies?
a) New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut
b) New York, New Jersey, Virginia
c) Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania
d) Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware
• Which region of the colonies
maintained allegiance to the
Church of England and had
closer social ties with England?
a) Middle colonies
b) Colonies in the foothills of the
Appalachians
c) Southern colonies
d) New England colonies
• What term describes people
who agreed to a limited term of
work in exchange for passage
to North America as well as
food and shelter?
a) indentured servants
b) slavery
c) headright system
d) separatists
• What cargo was carried on what
is known as the middle passage
of triangular trade?
a) enslaved people
b) rum
c) lumber
d) tobacco
• What was the House of
Burgesses?
a) the Virginia colonial assembly
b) the U.S. House of Representatives
c) a Virginia family's home
d) the hereditary line of England's
kings
• Which city did NOT grow as a
seaport or commercial center
during the colonial period?
a) Raleigh
b) Baltimore
c) Philadelphia
d) New York City
• The Great Awakening caused some
colonists to
a) pay more attention to scientific method.
b) abandon their Puritan and Anglican
congregations.
c) shift their loyalty from England to
America.
d) seek spirituality through the use of
reason.
• Which country did not have
large-immigration to new areas
in the New World and
developed friendly relations
with the native people?
a) France
b) Portugal
c) Spain
d) England