Unit 1 History chapter 1-4 vocabulary

Maize

The primary grain crop in Mesoamerica yielding small kernels often ground into cornmeal. Easy to grow in a broad range of condition, it enabled a global population explosion after being brought to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Mexica

Otherwise known as “Aztecs”, a Mesoamerican people of northern Mexico who founded the vast Aztec Empire in the fourteenth century, later conquered by the Spanish under Hernan Cortes in 1521.

Aztec Empire

Mesoamerican people who were conquered by the Spanish under Hernando Cortes, 1519-1528.

Burial mounds

A funeral tradition, practiced in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys by the Adena-Hopewell cultures, of erecting massive mounds of earth over graves, often in the designs of serpents and other animals.

Cahokia

The largest chiefdom and city of the Mississippian Indian culture located in present-day Illinois, and the site of a sophisticated farming settlement that supported up to 15,000 inhabitants.

Eastern Woodlands peoples

Various Native American peoples, particularly the Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean regional groups, who once dominated the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Louisiana.

Roman Catholicism

The Christian faith and religious practices of the Roman Catholic Church, which exerted great political, economic, and social influence on much of Western Europe and, through the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, on the Americas.

Protestant Reformation

Sixteenth-century religious movement initiated by Martin Luther, a German monk whose public criticism of corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, and whose teaching that Christians can communicate directly with God, gained a wide following.

Conquistadores

Spanish term for “conquerors”, applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Encomienda

A land-grant system under which Spanish Army officers (conquistadores) were awarded large parcels of land taken from Native Americans.

Columbian Exchange

The transfer of biological and social elements, such as plants, animals, people, diseases, and cultural practices, among Europe, the Americas, and Africa in the wake of Christopher Colmbus’s voyages to the “New World”.

Infectious diseases

Also called contagious diseases, illnesses that can pass from one person to another by way of invasive biological organisms able to reproduce in the bodily tissues of their hosts. Europeans unwittingly brought many such diseases to the Americas, devastating the Native American peoples.

New Mexico

A U.S. territory and later a state in the American Southwest, originally established by the Spanish, who settled there in the sixteenth century, founded Catholic missions, and exploited the region’s indigenous peoples.

Spanish Armada

A massive Spanish fleet of 130 warships that was defeated at Plymouth in 1588 by the English navy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Puritans

English religious dissenters who sought to “purify” the Church of England of its Catholic practices.

Joint-stock companies

Businesses owned by investors, who purchase shares of companies’ stocks and share all the profit and losses.

Powhatan Confederacy

An alliance of several powerful Algonquian tribes under the leadership of Chief Powhatan, organized into thirty chiefdoms along much of the Atlantic coast in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Tobacco

A cash crop grown in the Caribbean as well as the Virginia and Maryland colonies, made increasingly profitable by the rapidly growing popularity of smoking in Europe after the voyages of Columbus.

Indentured servants

Settlers who consented to work for a defined period of labor (often four to seven years) in exchange for having their passage to the New World paid by their “master”.

Headright

A land-grant policy that promised fifty acres to any colonist who could afford passage to Virginia, as well as fifty more for any accompanying servants. The policy was eventually expanded to include any colonists-and was also adopted in other colonies.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)

Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia governor William Berkeley’s administration, which, Bacon charged, had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids.

Mayflower Compact (1620)

A formal agreement signed by the Separatist colonists aboard the Mayflower in 1620 to abide by laws made by leaders of their own choosing.

Anne Hutchinson

The articulate, strong-willed, and intelligent wife of a prominent Boston merchant, who espoused her belief in direct divine revelation.

King Philip’s War (1675-1678)

A bloody, three-year war in New England, resulting from the escalation of tensions between Indians and English settlers; the defeat of the Indians led to broadened freedoms for the settlers and their dispossessing the region’s Indians of most of their land.

Iroquois League

An alliance of the Iroquois tribes, originally formed sometime between 1450 and 1600, that used their combined strength to pressure Europeans to work with them in the four trade and to wage war across what is today eastern North America.

Middle Passage

The hellish and often deadly middle leg of the transatlantic “Triangular Trade” in which European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, then transported enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean, and finally conveyed American agricultural products back to Europe; from the late 16th to early 19th centuries, some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown millions more dying en route.

Death rate

Proportion of deaths per 1,000 of the total population; also called morality rate.

Birth rate

Proportion of births per 1,000 of the total population.

Women’s work

The traditional term referring to routine tasks in the house, garden, and fields performed by women. The sphere of women’s occupations expanded in the colonies to include medicine, shop keeping, upholstering, and the operation of inns and taverns.

Staple crops

A profitable market crop, such as cotton, tobacco, or rice that predominates in a given region.

Triangular trade

A network of trade in which exports from one region were sold to another region, which sent its exports to a third region, which exported its goods back to the first country or colony.

Race-based slavery

Institution that uses racial characteristics and myths to justify enslaving a people.

Slave codes

Ordinances passed by a colony or state to regulate the behavior of slaves, often including brutal punishments for infractions.

Stono Rebellion (1739)

A slave uprising in South Carolina that was brutally quashed, leading to executions as well as a severe tightening of the slave code.

Enlightenment

A revolution in thought begun in Europe in the seventeenth century that emphasized reason and science over the authority and myths of traditional religion.

Deists

Enlightenment thought applied to religion, emphasizing reason, morality, and natural law rather than scriptural authority or an ever-present God intervening in human life.

Great Awakening

Fervent religious revival that swept the thirteen colonies from the 1720s through the 1740s.

Mercantilism

Policy of Great Britain and other imperial powers of regulating the economies of colonies to benefit the mother country.

Navigation Acts (1650-1775)

Restrictions passed by the British Parliament to control colonial trade and bolster the mercantile system.

Glorious Revolution (1688)

Successful coup, instigated by a of English aristocrats, overthrew King James II and instated William of Orange and Mary, his English wife, to the British throne.

Natural rights

An individual’s basic rights that should not be violated by any government or community.

Salutary neglect

Informal British policy during the first half of the 18th century that allowed the American colonies considerable freedom to pursue their economic and political interests in exchange for colonial obedience.

French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) (1756-1763)

The last - and the most important - of four colonial wars fought between England and France for control of North America east of the Mississippi River.

Albany Plan of Union (1754)

A failed proposal by the seven northern colonies in anticipation of the French and Indian War, urging the unification of the colonies under one Crown appointed president.

Treaty of Paris (1763)

Settlement between Great Britain and France that ended the French and Indian War.

Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763)

An Indian attack on British forts and settlements after France ceded to the British its territory east of the Mississippi River, as part of the Treaty of Paris, without consulting France’s Indian allies.

Royal Proclamation of 1763

Proclamation drawing a boundary along the Appalachian Mountains from Canada to Georgia in order to minimize occurrences of settlers Indian violence; colonists were forbidden to go west of the line.

Stamp Act (1765)

Act of Parliament requiring that all printed materials ( e.g., newspapers, bonds, and even playing cards) in the American colonies use paper with an official tax stamp in order to pay for British military protection of the colonies.

Virtual representation

The idea that the American colonies, although they had no actual “representative” in Parliament, were “virtually” represented by all members of Parliament.

Son of Liberty

First organized by Samuel Adams in the 1770s, groups of colonists dedicated to militant resistance against British control of the colonies.

Daughters of Liberty

Colonial women who protested the British government’s tax policies by boycotting British products, such as clothing, and wove their own fabric, or “homespun”.

Townshend Acts (1767)

Parliamentary measures to extract more revenue from the colonies; the Revenue Act of 1767, which taxed tea, paper, and other colonial imports, was one of the most notorious of these policies.

Loyalists

Colonists who remained loyal to Great Britain before and during the Revolutionary War.

Patriots

Colonists who rebelled against British authority before and during the Revolutionary War.

Boston Massacre (1770)

Violent confrontation between British soldiers and a Boston mob on March 5, 1770, in which five colonists were killed.

Committee of Correspondence

Group organized by Samuel Adams in retaliation for the Gaspee incident to address American grievances, assert American rights, and form a network of rebellion.

Boston Tea Party (1773)

Demonstration against the Tea Act of 1773 in which the Sons of Liberty, dressed as Indians, dumped hundreds of chests of British-owned tea into Boston Harbor.

Coercive Acts (1774)

Four parliamentary measures that required the colonies to pay for the Boston Tea Party’s damages, imposed a military government, disallowed colonial trials of British soldiers, and forced the quartering of troops in private homes.

Common Sense (1776)

Popular pamphlet written by Thomas Paine attacking British principles of hereditary rule and monarchical government, and advocating a declaration of American independence.

Declaration of Independence (1776)

Formal statement, principally drafted by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, that officially announced the thirteen colonies’ break with Great Britain.