APUSH Chapter 4: American Life in the Seventeenth Century Flashcards

Comprehensive question-and-answer flashcards covering key topics, dates, entities, and concepts from APUSH Chapter 4: American Life in the Seventeenth Century (1607–1692).

What three major diseases made the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region particularly unhealthy?

Malaria, dysentery, and typhoid.

What demographic conditions in the early Chesapeake created a shortage of women and fragile families?

Most immigrants were young men who suffered high mortality rates from disease.

Why did Chesapeake tobacco planters continually push for new land farther inland?

Tobacco cultivation rapidly exhausted the soil.

What was the headright system?

A land-grant system that offered land incentives to wealthy planters who paid for an immigrant's passage to America.

What were indentured servants in the colonial Chesapeake?

Young English workers bound to several years of labor in exchange for passage to America.

What primary grievances led Nathaniel Bacon to lead Bacon's Rebellion in 1676?

Landless former indentured servants resented Governor William Berkeley for withholding frontier protection against Native groups and concentrating land and political power among wealthy planters.

What actions did Nathaniel Bacon's rebels take in Virginia in 1676?

They attacked Native groups, drove Governor William Berkeley from Jamestown, and burned the city.

In what year was the Royal African Company chartered, expanding the transatlantic slave trade?

1672

What was the middle passage?

The deadly transatlantic voyage carrying enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas.

How did colonial slave codes alter the legal status of enslaved Africans in the late seventeenth century?

They made slavery permanent and hereditary, tied legal status to race, and defined enslaved people and their children as property.

What was the social hierarchy of Southern colonial society from top to bottom?

Wealthy planters, small farmers, landless whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans.

Why did few large towns or cities develop in the colonial South?

Plantations were widely scattered and relied on rivers for direct transportation.

How did environmental conditions in New England lead to a longer life expectancy compared to the Chesapeake?

New England's colder climate and cleaner water reduced the spread of deadly diseases.

How did migration patterns in New England differ from those in the Chesapeake?

New England settlers usually migrated as complete families rather than single male indentured servants.

Why were New England Puritans strongly dedicated to establishing local public education?

They wanted to ensure that children learned to read Scripture.

In what year was Harvard College founded, and what was its original main purpose?

Founded in 1636, primarily to train Christian ministers.

What was a jeremiad?

A type of sermon warning that society was falling away from its original religious mission and moral standards.

What did the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 grant to Puritan churchgoers?

Partial church membership for the children of baptized but unconverted members.

How many people were executed during the Salem witch trials of 1692?

Twenty people.

Why did New England's geography prevent the growth of large plantation agriculture?

The region had thin, rocky glaciated soil and a cold climate.

What economic activities sustained New England's regional economy?

Small farming, fishing, shipbuilding, lumbering, and commerce.

What was Leisler's Rebellion (1689–1691)?

A New York uprising caused by class conflict and resentment between middle-class colonists and wealthy elites.