APUSH Unit 2 vocab

Virginia Company

Definition: A joint-stock company chartered by King James I in 1606 to establish an English colony in North America and generate profits for investors.

Significance: The Virginia Company demonstrates that the earliest permanent English colonization was largely an economic venture. The search for profitable commodities shaped the settlement of Virginia and ultimately encouraged the development of tobacco agriculture

Jamestown

Definition: The English settlement established in Virginia in 1607 by the Virginia Company. It became the first permanent English colony in what would become the United States.

Significance: Jamestown nearly collapsed from disease, starvation, poor planning, and conflict with Indigenous peoples. Its eventual survival established the foundation for England’s expanding presence along the Atlantic coast.

Powhatan Confederacy

Definition: A powerful alliance of more than thirty Algonquian-speaking communities in the Chesapeake region led by Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan.

Significance: Jamestown was established within an already populated and politically organized Indigenous world. The Powhatan initially possessed far greater regional power than the English, demonstrating that European control of North America was neither immediate nor inevitable.

John Smith

Definition: An early Jamestown leader who imposed stricter discipline on the struggling colony and developed diplomatic and trading relationships with surrounding Indigenous communities.

Significance: Smith’s experiences illustrate how dependent early English colonists were upon Native trade and diplomacy. English survival initially depended more upon accommodation than military dominance.

Starving Time

Definition: The catastrophic winter of 1609–1610 during which famine, disease, warfare, and the breakdown of supplies devastated Jamestown.

Significance: The Starving Time reveals how fragile early English settlement remained. Jamestown survived only barely, reminding us that permanent English colonization was not guaranteed in 1607.

John Rolfe/ Tobacco

Definition: John Rolfe was a Virginia colonist who successfully cultivated a variety of tobacco that became highly profitable in European markets beginning in the 1610s.

Significance: Tobacco transformed Virginia. It made the colony economically viable, encouraged immigration, increased the demand for land, and created an enormous demand for labor.

Headright Policy

Definition: A Virginia policy begun in 1618 that awarded fifty acres of land to settlers who migrated to Virginia and additional acreage to individuals who paid for the passage of other immigrants.

Significance: The headright system encouraged migration and expansion while helping wealthy colonists accumulate large estates. It also strengthened the connection among land ownership, labor, and political power.

Indentured Servitude

Definition: A labor system in which migrants agreed to work for an employer for a specified number of years, usually in exchange for passage to North America.

Significance: Indentured servants supplied much of the labor needed for the seventeenth-century Chesapeake tobacco economy. Their experiences also contributed to tensions between wealthy landowners and poorer colonists.

House of Burgesses

Definition: A representative assembly established by the Virginia Company in 1619 and composed initially of white male landowners.

Significance: The House of Burgesses established an early tradition of representative government in English North America. Colonial assemblies eventually became important defenders of local political authority.

Anglo-Powhatan Wars

Definition: A series of conflicts between English settlers in Virginia and the peoples of the Powhatan Confederacy during the seventeenth century.

Significance: These wars grew largely from English demands for land and control of trade. Over time, warfare, disease, and continued English migration weakened Powhatan power and allowed the colony to expand westward.

Opechancanough

Definition: Powhatan leader who succeeded Wahunsenacawh and organized major attacks against expanding English settlements, including the 1622 assault that killed hundreds of colonists.

Significance: Opechancanough’s resistance demonstrates that Indigenous peoples actively attempted to stop English territorial expansion. His campaigns also accelerated English efforts to seize Native lands.

New France

Definition: France’s North American colonial empire, centered along the St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and eventually the Mississippi River.

Significance: New France developed differently from English colonies because French colonization depended heavily upon commerce—especially the fur trade—and military and diplomatic alliances with Indigenous peoples.

Fur Trade

Definition: The exchange of European manufactured goods for animal pelts supplied largely by Indigenous hunters and trading networks.

Significance: The fur trade encouraged French and Dutch colonists to maintain extensive relationships with Native peoples. It also intensified competition among Indigenous nations for access to European trade.

Middle Ground

Definition: A cross-cultural world, particularly around the Great Lakes, in which Native peoples and Europeans negotiated relationships because neither side possessed enough power to completely dominate the other.

Significance: The middle ground challenges the idea that colonial history consisted simply of Europeans conquering Native peoples. Cooperation, diplomacy, intermarriage, trade, and cultural adaptation were also central to colonial relationships.

New Netherland

Definition: The Dutch colony established in the Hudson River region during the seventeenth century, with New Amsterdam as its major settlement.

Significance: New Netherland developed primarily as a commercial colony based upon trade. Its ethnically and religiously diverse population also influenced the later development of New York after England seized the colony in 1664.

Wampum

Definition: Shell beads created by Indigenous peoples of the Northeast and used for ceremonial, diplomatic, and political purposes. Europeans increasingly used them as a medium of exchange.

Significance: Wampum illustrates how Europeans entered existing Native economic and diplomatic systems rather than simply replacing them. Its changing use also demonstrates cultural adaptation within the Atlantic world.

Haudenosaunee / Six Nations

Definition: A powerful Indigenous political confederation originally composed of five Iroquoian nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—with the Tuscarora later joining as the sixth nation.

Significance: The Haudenosaunee remained one of the strongest political and military powers in eastern North America. Their ability to negotiate with competing European empires demonstrates the continuing importance of Indigenous diplomacy.

Covenant Chain

Definition: A series of diplomatic and trading agreements connecting the Haudenosaunee with English colonies, especially New York.

Significance: The Covenant Chain helped both the British and Haudenosaunee pursue their own political and commercial goals. It demonstrates that alliances between Europeans and Indigenous nations were negotiated partnerships rather than simple submission.

Puritans

Definition: English Protestants who believed the Church of England retained too many Catholic practices and sought further religious reform.

Significance: Large numbers of Puritans migrated to New England during the seventeenth century and attempted to construct communities organized around their religious ideals. Their settlements helped create distinctive political, social, and cultural traditions in New England.

Maryland

Definition: A Chesapeake colony founded by the Calvert family beginning in the 1630s and originally intended partly as a refuge for English Catholics.

Significance: Maryland demonstrates the mixture of economic and religious motives behind English colonization. Its history also reveals how difficult genuine religious toleration could be in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world.

Proprietary Colonies

Definition: Colonies granted by the English monarch to individuals or groups known as proprietors who possessed broad authority to govern and develop the territory.

Significance: Proprietary colonies such as Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania demonstrate the variety of political arrangements England used to encourage colonization.

William Penn/ Pennsylvania

Definition: William Penn was a Quaker who received a large land grant from Charles II in 1681 and established Pennsylvania.

Significance: Pennsylvania attracted immigrants with inexpensive land, representative government, religious toleration, and freedom of conscience. Its diverse population became characteristic of the Mid-Atlantic colonies.

Quakers / Society of Friends

Definition: A Protestant religious movement emphasizing the equality of souls, direct spiritual experience, pacifism, and freedom of conscience.

Significance: Quaker beliefs shaped Pennsylvania’s early commitment to religious toleration and relatively peaceful relations with Indigenous peoples. Quakers also became some of the earliest organized critics of slavery in British America.

Restoration Colonies

Definition: Colonies established or reorganized after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, including Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Significance: The Restoration marked a new period of English imperial expansion and reflected growing efforts by the monarchy to organize, populate, and profit from North America.

Navigation Acts

Definition: English laws intended to regulate colonial trade and direct the economic benefits of the empire toward England.

Significance: The Navigation Acts illustrate England’s increasingly mercantilist approach to its colonies. Although enforcement before 1763 was often inconsistent, these laws established Parliament’s claim to regulate colonial commerce.

Dominion of New England

Definition: An administrative union created by James II in 1686 that combined several northern colonies under centralized royal authority.

Significance: Many colonists resented the Dominion because it weakened their local governments and political autonomy. Resistance to it demonstrated the importance colonists had already begun to attach to self-government.

Glorious Revolution

Definition: The overthrow of the Catholic English king James II in 1688 and the accession of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary.

Significance: The Glorious Revolution reinforced Protestant political identity throughout the British Empire and encouraged uprisings against unpopular colonial governments. It also strengthened ideas about limits on royal authority.

Middle Passage

Definition: The forced Atlantic voyage that transported enslaved Africans from the coast of Africa to the Americas as part of the Atlantic slave trade.

Significance: Millions of Africans endured the Middle Passage, and enormous numbers died during capture, transport, or shortly after arrival. The forced migration of Africans became fundamental to the development of colonial economies and societies.

Racial Slavery

Definition: A system in which enslavement became increasingly permanent, hereditary, and associated specifically with African ancestry.

Significance: English colonial slavery was not simply a labor system. During the seventeenth century, colonial governments increasingly created laws that connected African ancestry with permanent legal enslavement, helping construct a new racial hierarchy.

Barbados Slave Code

Definition: A comprehensive 1661 law that treated enslaved Africans as property and provided slaveholders with extensive legal authority over them.

Significance: The Barbados Slave Code became an important model for slave laws elsewhere in the English Atlantic world and helped institutionalize racialized chattel slavery.

Virginia Slave Law of 1662

Definition: A Virginia law declaring that a child’s legal status followed the status of the mother, meaning children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved.

Significance: The law made slavery hereditary and gave slaveholders a direct economic interest in the children of enslaved women. It was an important step in constructing a permanent racial slave system.

Creole Culture

Definition: New cultural traditions that developed through the interaction and blending of African, European, Indigenous, and American practices.

Significance: Enslaved Africans did not merely lose their cultures after forced migration. They preserved, adapted, and combined languages, foods, music, religion, and family traditions, helping create distinctive African American cultures.

Carolina Rice Economy

Definition: A plantation economy that developed in South Carolina and relied heavily upon enslaved African labor and African agricultural knowledge.

Significance: Rice generated enormous wealth for Carolina planters and contributed to the rapid growth of slavery. The development of rice cultivation also demonstrates the essential knowledge and skills enslaved Africans brought to colonial economies

Stono Rebellion

Definition: A 1739 uprising in South Carolina in which a group of enslaved people attempted to reach Spanish Florida, where they hoped to gain freedom.

Significance: Stono demonstrates that enslaved people actively resisted bondage. The revolt frightened white colonists and contributed to increasingly restrictive slave laws.

Pequot War

Definition: A 1636–1637 conflict in New England involving English colonists and their Native allies against the Pequot people.

Significance: The destruction of Pequot communities opened additional land for English settlement and demonstrated how colonists sometimes used alliances with Native nations to defeat other Indigenous peoples.

King Philip’s War/ Metacom

Definition: A devastating 1675–1676 conflict between New England colonists and an Indigenous alliance led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip.

Significance: King Philip’s War grew from expanding English settlements and the erosion of Native sovereignty. The English victory weakened organized Indigenous power in southern New England and opened additional territory to colonial settlement.

Bacon’s Rebellion

Definition: A 1676 uprising in Virginia led by Nathaniel Bacon involving frontier settlers, servants, enslaved people, and others opposed to Governor William Berkeley’s government and policies toward nearby Native peoples.

Significance: The rebellion exposed tensions among wealthy planters, poorer colonists, Indigenous peoples, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans. Its aftermath contributed to changes in Virginia society and coincided with planters’ growing reliance on racial slavery.

Pueblo Revolt / Popé

Definition: A major 1680 uprising led by the Pueblo religious leader Popé against Spanish colonial rule in present-day New Mexico.

Significance: Pueblo forces drove the Spanish from New Mexico for approximately twelve years. The revolt stands as one of the most successful examples of Indigenous resistance to European colonization in North American history.

Consumer Revolution

Definition: The dramatic growth in the availability and purchase of manufactured goods in the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Significance: Consumer goods connected colonists more closely to the British Atlantic economy and allowed ordinary colonists to participate increasingly in British material culture. Consumption would later become politically important when colonists protested British taxation.

Print Culture

Definition: The expanding production and circulation of newspapers, pamphlets, books, broadsides, and other printed material.

Significance: Print allowed ideas and information to circulate more widely among colonists. It helped create shared debates about politics, religion, authority, and eventually resistance to British rule.

Colonial Assemblies

Definition: Elected representative bodies that developed throughout the British colonies and exercised authority over taxation, local laws, spending, and other colonial matters.

Significance: Colonial participation in government was much broader among white men than political participation was in most of Europe. Colonists therefore developed strong expectations regarding representative government and local political autonomy.

Great Awakening

Definition: A series of Protestant religious revivals that spread through British North America primarily during the 1730s and 1740s.

Significance: The Great Awakening emphasized emotional conversion and a personal relationship with God. Revivalism connected colonists across regional boundaries and encouraged some people to question established religious authority.

Jonathan Edwards

Definition: A New England minister and theologian whose preaching helped launch the early stages of the Great Awakening.

Significance: Edwards sought to restore intense personal religious commitment among colonists whom he believed had become spiritually complacent.

George Whitefield

Definition: A traveling British evangelist and the most famous itinerant preacher of the Great Awakening.

Significance: Whitefield preached to enormous crowds throughout the colonies and helped transform scattered revivals into an intercolonial religious experience. His popularity demonstrated the growing ability of ideas and movements to spread throughout British America.

New Lights and Old Lights

Definition: Terms describing supporters and opponents of the religious revivals associated with the Great Awakening.

Significance: Their conflict illustrates how the Great Awakening challenged established religious institutions and encouraged debate over authority, tradition, and individual belief.

Albany Congress

Definition: A 1754 meeting of colonial representatives and Haudenosaunee delegates called partly to coordinate relations with Indigenous nations and colonial defense during growing tensions with France.

Significance: Benjamin Franklin proposed a plan for greater colonial political cooperation at Albany. Although his plan was rejected, the meeting demonstrated both the importance of Indigenous alliances and the growing need for intercolonial coordination.

Seven Years’ War / French and Indian War

Definition: A global war between Britain and France and their respective allies beginning in North America in 1754 and formally ending in 1763.

Significance: The conflict involved Europeans, colonists, and numerous Indigenous nations and became one of the first truly global wars. British victory dramatically changed the balance of power in North America.

George Washington

Definition: A young Virginia officer whose confrontation with French forces in the Ohio Valley in 1754 helped trigger the wider Seven Years’ War.

Significance: Washington’s early military career illustrates how disputes over western land and imperial boundaries could escalate into a much larger Atlantic and global conflict.

 Indigenous Alliances

Definition: Diplomatic and military partnerships created by Native nations with the French, British, Spanish, or other Indigenous peoples.

Significance: European empires could not simply dictate events in the North American interior. Indigenous nations frequently determined the balance of power by deciding whether, when, and with whom they would ally.

Treaty of Paris (1763)

Definition: The treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War and transferred most French claims in mainland North America to Britain.

Significance: Britain emerged with an enormous North American empire but also significant debts and new responsibilities. The victory of 1763 therefore created many of the problems that would eventually strain relations between Britain and its American colonies.