US History to 1877 Lecture Notes

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the entirety of the US History to 1877 lecture notes, detailing indigenous societies, early European exploration, colonial settlement, legal frameworks, and socioeconomic systems.

Periodization

The historical practice of breaking the past into distinct, categorized periods of time (e.g., the Colonial Period from 1492 to 1763 and the American Revolution from 1763 to 1783).

Clovis Points

Archaeological projectile points providing evidence that human populations migrated from Asia to the Americas at least 12,000 to 13,000 years ago across walkable coastal areas exposed by lowered sea levels during the Ice Age.

Three Sisters

The primary agricultural crops—corn, beans, and squash—cultivated together by Native American societies, with farming typically managed by women.

Fire Ecology

The deliberate use of fire by Native American populations to clear underbrush, maintain plains, reduce dense forests, and create open environments that facilitated hunting game and maintaining food sources.

Vaccum Domicilium (Vacuum Domicilium)

An English Common Law concept asserting that 'unused' or wild-looking land was open to the public; used by Europeans to dispossess Native Americans whose mixed-crop farming did not resemble separated European agricultural plots.

Two-Spirits

Individuals in Native American cultures who were recognized beyond the binary male/female genders, possessed recognized access to the spiritual realm, and held balanced societal power and influence.

Mercantilism

An economic doctrine holding that global wealth is a fixed sum where one nation's gain is another's loss; nations sought power by maintaining a favorable balance of trade (exporting more than importing) to acquire hard currency.

Astrolabe

A navigational technology utilized by Portuguese mariners to determine latitude by measuring when the sun reached its highest point in the sky.

Prince Henry the Navigator

The Portuguese leader who spearheaded Portuguese maritime expansion southward along the coast of Africa and the colonization of Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands during the early 1400s.

Letter to Luis de Saint Angel (Santángel)

Christopher Columbus's report detailing his observations of the Americas, written to an influential royal finance official as a sales pitch to secure continued funding by framing the land as prime for settlement and its native inhabitants as generous, welcoming, and easy to control.

Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

A 1494 agreement grounded in an earlier 1493 papal decree dividing the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, awarding Brazil to Portugal and the remainder of the Americas to Spain.

Potosí

A major Spanish silver mining center that yielded 45,000 tons of silver between 1556 and 1783, eventually triggering severe inflation across the Spanish Empire.

Cortés Expedition (1519–1521)

The military conquest of the 200,000-person Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés and 600 soldiers, accomplished through smallpox epidemics, indigenous alliances, and European military technology.

Fort Caroline

A French Protestant colony established in Florida in 1564 to serve as a base for piracy against Spanish shipping, completely wiped out by a Spanish expedition in 1565.

St. Augustine

A defensive military outpost established by the Spanish in Florida in 1565 following the destruction of French Fort Caroline.

Council of the Indies

The central governing body established in Spain in 1524 to oversee and exercise direct administrative control over the Spanish American empire.

Viceroy

A Spanish-born crown official appointed to govern an administrative region in the Americas, such as New Spain or New Castile, under tight metropolitan control.

Pedro Hazar

A colonial Spanish American figure recorded as a 'Mulatto' in 1779 who was reclassified as 'Spanish' by 1793 after acquiring wealth, illustrating that racial categorizations in the casta system were socially constructed and linked to economic status.

Columbian Exchange

The widespread transatlantic transfer of plants, animals, cultures, human populations, and communicable diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres following 1492.

Black Legend

An English propaganda campaign portraying Spanish colonization as uniquely cruel, tyrannical, and destructive toward Native Americans, used by the English to justify their own imperial ambitions under the guise of being benevolent liberators.

Enclosure Movement

The privatization and fencing-off of common agricultural lands in England for commercial sheep farming and wool production, which evicted rural tenant farmers, concentrated land, and caused widespread urban poverty.

Lost Colony of Roanoke

England's second settlement attempt on Roanoke Island under Governor John White in 1587, which had vanished without a trace by the time White returned in 1590 following delays caused by the 1588 Spanish Armada.

Jamestown

The first permanent English settlement in North America, founded on the James River in 1607 by 104 men sent by the Virginia Company, which suffered catastrophic mortality during the 'starving winter' of 1609–1610.

Headright System

A Virginia land distribution reform introduced in 1618 by Sir Edwin Sandys awarding 100 acres to colonists arriving before 1616 and 50 acres per dependent to newly arriving settlers who funded immigration.

House of Burgesses

An elected legislative body created in Virginia in 1619, representing an early form of colonial self-government voted on primarily by male landowners.

Indentured Servitude

A labor system in which impoverished European laborers contracted 4 to 7 years of unfree service in America in exchange for transatlantic passage, maintenance, and eventual 'freedom dues.'

Task System

An early labor arrangement in Virginia that assigned enslaved laborers specific sets of daily tasks, permitting them to perform extra work for pay, earn money, and potentially purchase their freedom.

Powhatan Confederacy Uprising of 1622

A surprise assault by the Powhatan Confederacy against expanding Virginia settlements that killed 350 English colonists, triggering an investigation that caused King James to revoke the Virginia Company charter and make Virginia a royal colony in 1624.

John Casor (Casore)

An African laborer in seventeenth-century Virginia who contended he had completed his term of indenture, but was declared by court ruling to be held as property for life by Anthony Johnson.

Fornication

A legal and religious infraction in colonial Virginia defined as sex outside of marriage, punished severely with public whipping, court fines, or church-mandated penance in a white sheet.

Navigation Act of 1660

An English mercantilist statute specifying that colonial commodities could only be exported directly to England or other English colonies.

Partus Sequitur Ventrem (Virginia Law of 1662)

A 1662 Virginia colonial statute stipulating that the legal status of newborn children—whether free or enslaved—strictly followed the condition of the mother.

Royal African Company

An English joint-stock monopoly chartered in 1672 that dramatically increased the regular supply and transatlantic importation of enslaved Africans into the English American colonies.

Bacon's Rebellion (1676)

An armed uprising led by Nathaniel Bacon uniting frontier European indentured servants and enslaved Africans against Governor William Berkeley, culminating in the burning of Jamestown.

Virginia Slave Codes (1680–1705)

A series of discriminatory statutes passed after Bacon's Rebellion that banned interracial marriage (1691), barred Africans from possessing weapons (1680), and made it illegal to whip Christian white servants naked (1705) to fracture cross-racial working-class solidarity.

Act of Supremacy (1534)

An English statute declaring King Henry VIII the supreme head of the Church of England (Anglican Church), formalizing the break with the Roman Catholic Church.

Mayflower Compact

A 1620 political agreement signed by the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower establishing a system of self-government for Plymouth Colony in the absence of an official royal charter.

City upon a Hill

Governor John Winthrop's phrase characterizing the Massachusetts Bay Colony as an exemplary, godly Puritan commonwealth intended to serve as a model to reform England.

Just Price

A Puritan economic precept dictating that merchants and community members must sell goods and services at a fair, morally reasonable rate rather than exploiting market shortages for exorbitant profit.

Half-Way Covenant (1662)

A Massachusetts Puritan measure granting partial church membership and baptism rights to the children of baptized adults who had not yet experienced a personal conversion experience, devised to address declining church membership among second- and third-generation colonists.

Barbados

An English Caribbean sugar colony established in 1625 whose sugar exports by 1660 were worth more than all other English colonial exports combined, absorbing one-third of English migrants between 1640 and 1660 and serving as the mother colony for South Carolina.

Yamassee War (1715)

A military conflict in South Carolina that began after English traders seized Yamassee women and children into slavery to satisfy commercial debts, which ended in Yamassee defeat after the Cherokee allied with the English.

Walking Purchase (1737)

A fraudulent land transaction in Pennsylvania in which colonial authorities used an alleged unratified treaty to claim an area of land bounded by what a man could walk in 36 hours, securing three times the tract originally agreed upon by Native leaders.

Coureurs de Bois

Independent French colonial woodsmen and fur traders who lived among Native American tribes in New France to collect and transport furs between 1608 and 1662.

Frenchification

An assimilationist policy in New France promising that indigenous individuals who embraced French cultural traditions, language, and Roman Catholicism could attain full French citizenship and relocate to France.

St. Domingue

A French West Indian colony established in 1659 centered on intensive, brutal sugar cultivation, where enslaved Africans made up $90\%$ of the total colonial population.

Company of the Indies (1717)

A chartered commercial enterprise that directed the administration and development of colonial Louisiana starting in 1717, relying on the importation of European convicts and enslaved Africans to cultivate tobacco.

Natchez War (1729–1730)

An armed conflict sparked by French tobacco expansion onto Natchez tribal lands in Louisiana, culminating in the French allying with the Choctaw, destroying the Natchez, and publicly burning allied Africans to instill fear and prevent coalitions between enslaved laborers and Native Americans.