US History Module A Midpoint Quiz Vocabulary Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, locations, concepts, and historical events from pre-contact Indigenous America through 1776.

U.S. History

A narrow historical approach centered on the United States as a nation-state, generally starting at 1776 (or 1607/1619) and organized around federal government, presidents, wars, and political milestones.

American History

A broad, bottom-up historical approach encompassing the entire history of North, Central, and South America and all its inhabitant peoples, weighing pre-Columbian history equally with post-1776 events.

Ute

Colorado's longest continuous Indigenous residents, historically organized into autonomous bands across the mountains and western slope who practiced seasonal rounds and acquired horses in the 1600s–1700s.

Sinawaf (Senawahv)

The creator/trickster figure in the Ute creation story who placed transformed sticks into a bag to create and distribute different peoples across the earth.

Mount Blue Sky

The renamed Colorado 14er (formerly Mount Evans) changed in September 2023 to honor the Arapaho ('Blue Sky People') and a Cheyenne renewal-of-life ceremony.

1922 Colorado River Compact

An agreement dividing Colorado River water among seven states that completely excluded tribal nations, who were not recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924.

Maya

A Mesoamerican civilization in the Yucatan Peninsula and Central America (250–900 CE) known for hieroglyphic writing, astronomical accuracy, pyramid-temples, and city-states.

Long Count calendar

An extremely accurate calendar system developed by the Maya civilization to track long spans of time.

Inca

The largest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas by 1492, centered in the Andes Mountains and known for massive road systems, terrace farming, and mortarless stonework.

quipu

A knotted-cord record-keeping system used by the Inca civilization in place of a written script.

Aztec (Mexica)

A central Mexican empire (c. 1428–1521) centered at Tenochtitlan that maintained a tribute-based system over subject city-states and utilized floating garden agriculture.

Tenochtitlan

The capital city of the Aztec Empire, built on an island in Lake Texcoco with a population exceeding 200,000 residents, causeways, aqueducts, and chinampas.

chinampas

Sophisticated floating garden agricultural beds created by the Aztec to grow crops on Lake Texcoco.

Cahokia

The largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico (c. 1050–1350 CE), located in the Mississippi River Valley near modern-day St. Louis.

Monks Mound

A massive earthen mound located at Cahokia that has a larger base area than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Puebloans (Ancestral Puebloans)

An Indigenous culture of the American Southwest known for multi-story adobe and cliff-dwelling architecture, dry-land and irrigation farming, and extensive trade networks.

Mesa Verde

An Ancestral Puebloan site in southwestern Colorado famous for its multi-story cliff dwellings built into canyon walls.

Chaco Canyon

A major Southwestern trade, road network, and cultural center for the Ancestral Puebloan civilization.

Three Sisters

The staple crops of corn (maize), beans, and squash grown together using companion planting, forming a sustainable polyculture and nutritionally complete diet.

The Danger of a Single Story

A concept presented by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describing how repeating only one narrative about a group flattens complex realities into incomplete stereotypes.

Dinetah

The sacred homeland of the Diné (Navajo), bounded by four sacred mountains into which First Man, First Woman, and the Holy People emerged.

Grammar of Animacy

A concept described by Robin Wall Kimmerer highlighting how Indigenous languages like Potawatomi use animate grammatical forms for nature to reflect kinship and responsibility.

Haudenosaunee Confederacy

A alliance of five (later six) Indigenous nations in the Northeast governed by the Great Law of Peace, consensus decision-making, and Clan Mothers.

potlatch

A ceremonial feast practiced by Northwest Coast chiefdoms where wealth was redistributed to publicly validate a leader's political authority.

encomienda system

A Spanish colonial labor system granting Spanish settlers control over Indigenous labor and land in exchange for efforts to convert them to Catholicism.

White Lion

An English privateer ship that arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia in August 1619 carrying approximately 20 seized enslaved Africans.

House of Burgesses

The first elected legislative assembly in England's American colonies, established in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

Middle Passage

The brutal trans-Atlantic voyage transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas as the second leg of the Transatlantic Trade.

1619 Project

An initiative launched by The New York Times in 2019 that reframes American history around the arrival of the first enslaved Africans as central to national development.

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

An academic legal framework originating in the 1970s–80s stating that racism is systemic and embedded within legal codes, institutions, and social structures.

partus sequitur ventrem

A legal doctrine dictating that children inherited the legal status of their mother, establishing hereditary status for children born to enslaved women.

Fancy Trade

A market within domestic U.S. slave trading in which light-skinned enslaved women and girls were sold at premium prices explicitly for sexual exploitation.

intersectionality

A framework coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw analyzing how overlapping identities (such as race and gender) combine to form compounded systems of discrimination.

King Philip's War

A 1675–1678 war between Wampanoag leader Metacom and New England colonists that ended organized Indigenous power in southern New England.

Bacon's Rebellion

A 1676 uprising of Virginia frontier settlers, indentured servants, and enslaved people against the colonial elite, driving Virginia toward race-based chattel slavery.

Proclamation Line of 1763

A British boundary line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains prohibiting Anglo-American colonial settlement west of the crest.

Common Sense

A 1776 pamphlet written by Thomas Paine arguing in plain language for American colonies to declare complete independence from monarchical rule.

mercantilism

An economic theory driving British trade policy that viewed colonies primarily as sources of raw materials and markets to enrich the mother country.