Commerce, Culture, and Identity (1720–1763)

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering eighteenth-century transatlantic trade, the Enlightenment, Pietism, the Great Awakening, and colonial conflicts.

Enlightenment

A European cultural movement that emphasized the power of human reason to understand and shape the world.

Pietism

An evangelical Christian movement originating in Germany around 1700 that stressed an individual's personal relationship with God and pious behavior.

Great Wagon Road

A mid-eighteenth-century road network that carried migrating families down the Shenandoah Valley as far as the Carolina backcountry.

Print Revolution

The dramatic surge in printed materials—including newspapers, pamphlets, books, and handbills—following the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act in Britain, essential to spreading Enlightenment and Pietist ideas.

John Locke

English philosopher whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) argued that human character could be changed through education and experience, and whose Two Treatises of Government (1690) posited that political authority derives from social compacts to preserve natural rights.

Pennsylvania Hospital

A Philadelphia structure built in 1753 using public funds and private donations that embodied Enlightenment principles of social improvement, reason, and orderly facade symmetry.

Benjamin Franklin

A Philadelphia printer, inventor, and exemplar of the American Enlightenment who authored Poor Richard's Almanack, founded the American Philosophical Society, and conducted pioneering electrical experiments.

Deism

A way of thinking influenced by Enlightenment science, holding that a Supreme Being created the world and allowed it to operate by natural laws without direct intervention in human lives.

Poor Richard's Almanack

An annual publication (1732–1757) by Benjamin Franklin that popularized the practical, rational outlook of the Enlightenment to thousands of colonial readers.

American Philosophical Society

An organization founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin to promote useful knowledge.

George Whitefield

An English minister and follower of John Wesley who transformed local religious revivals into the Great Awakening by preaching fervently from memory across British North America starting in 1739.

New Lights

Evangelical converts during the Great Awakening who embraced emotional religious revivals and challenged conservative church authority.

Old Lights

Conservative ministers who condemned revivalist emotionalism, claims of miracles, and uneducated itinerant preaching during the Great Awakening.

The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry

A 1740 pamphlet by Gilbert Tennent asserting that a minister's authority should derive from personal conversion experience rather than formal theological training.

Baptists

Radical Protestants whose central ritual was adult baptism by immersion, who welcomed enslaved persons, rejected social distinctions, and opposed government-imposed religious taxes.

Ohio Company of Virginia

A partnership formed in 1748 by prominent colonial planters and London merchants that received a 200,000-acre grant from the crown to establish settlements on the upper Ohio River.

Tanaghrisson

An adopted Seneca half-king recognized by Britain as an Iroquois leader at Logstown, who killed a French officer after George Washington's detachment engaged French forces in the Ohio Valley.