American Yawp - US History Textbook

Flashcards providing key vocabulary terms and definitions from 'The American Yawp' textbook, covering early American history, European colonization, and the origins of the American Revolution.

The American Yawp

A massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook covering the period to 1877, edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright.

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A license that permits commercial and non-commercial use of 'The American Yawp' as long as attribution is given.

History

An ongoing conversation about the past, involving asking historical questions, weighing evidence from primary sources, grappling with rival interpretations, and arguing for conclusions.

Primary Sources

Material produced in the era under study, used by historians to weigh evidence and form conclusions.

Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp"

A phrase used as an organizing principle for 'The American Yawp' textbook, representing the collective and diverse voices of Americans throughout history.

Native Americans (Pre-Columbian Americas)

Millions of diverse people who lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years, speaking hundreds of languages, creating distinct cultures, building settled communities, and maintaining trade networks before European arrival.

Columbian Exchange

The global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes that followed the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, bridging ten thousand years of geographic separation and revolutionizing world history.

Bering Strait Land Bridge

A land bridge that connected Asia and North America between twelve and twenty thousand years ago, allowing Native ancestors (mobile hunter-gatherers) to cross into the Americas.

Agriculture in the Americas

A development occurring between nine thousand and five thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in both hemispheres, leading to settled populations and civilizations relying on crops like maize (corn) and the 'Three Sisters' (corn, beans, squash).

Matrilineal Kinship

A system common in many Native American cultures where family and clan identity proceeded along the female line, through mothers and daughters.

Native American Property Rights

Differed from European notions; generally involved personal ownership of actively used items and the right to use land, but not permanent possession.

Cahokia

One of the largest Mississippian settlements, located near modern-day St. Louis, which peaked at a population of ten thousand to thirty thousand people around one thousand years ago.

Mississippian Chiefdoms

A hierarchical, clan-based system that politically organized Cahokia, giving leaders both secular and sacred authority.

Native American Slavery (Mississippian)

Not based on holding people as property permanently; slaves were often war captives who lacked kinship networks and could become integrated into the community through adoption or marriage.

Lenapes (Delawares)

Native American society in the Eastern Woodlands, known for their skills as farmers and fishers, living in dispersed, kin-based communities bound by oral histories and consensus-based political organization.

Puebloan Peoples

Culture groups centered in the current-day Greater Southwest, known for constructing defensible cliff dwellings and massive residential structures like those in Chaco Canyon.

Potlatches

Elaborate feasts organized by the densely populated peoples of the Pacific Northwest, celebrating births and weddings and determining social status by demonstrating wealth and power through gift-giving.

Norse Colonies

Limited settlements established by Scandinavian seafarers in Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (around the year 1000 by Leif Erikson), which ultimately failed due to cultural/geographic isolation, limited resources, and Native resistance.

Crusades (European Expansion)

Linked Europe with the wealth, power, and knowledge of Asia, fueling long-term European expansion by creating a demand for new commodities in European markets.

Astrolabe and Caravel

Technological breakthroughs perfected by Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century; the astrolabe allowed for precise latitude calculation, and the caravel was a rugged ship suited for long ocean voyages and carrying large amounts of cargo.

Prince Henry the Navigator

Portuguese royal who heavily invested in research and technology for exploration from his estate on the Sagres Peninsula during the fifteenth century.

Reconquista

Centuries of intermittent warfare in Iberia concluded by the Spanish crown in 1492, expelling Muslim Moors and Iberian Jews, just as Christopher Columbus sailed west.

Atlantic Plantations

First established by the Portuguese on Atlantic islands for sugar production, relying on enslaved African laborers obtained through trade with African kingdoms.

Christopher Columbus

An Italian-born sailor who, under Spanish patronage in 1492, underestimated the earth's size and stumbled upon the Americas, initially interacting with the indigenous Arawaks or Taíno people.

Arawaks (Taíno)

Indigenous people of the Caribbean islands encountered by Columbus, who were subsequently decimated by Spanish violence, exploitation (encomienda system), and European diseases.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Traveled to the New World in 1502 and later wrote a scathing account of Spanish abuses ('The Destruction of the Indies'), describing European barbarities.

Encomienda

An exploitative feudal legal system in which Spain granted a person not only land but also a specified number of native laborers, who were often brutalized.

Repartimiento

A milder legal system that replaced the encomienda in 1542, but nevertheless replicated many of its abuses and continued the exploitation of Native populations.

Maya Civilization

A complex and long-lasting civilization in Central America with a written language, advanced mathematics, and accurate calendars, which collapsed before European arrival likely due to droughts and unsustainable agricultural practices.

Aztec Empire

The largest Native civilization in the Western Hemisphere when Spaniards arrived, centered around the awe-inspiring city of Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico.

Tenochtitlán

The capital city of the Aztec Empire, founded in 1325, built on artificial islands in Lake Texcoco, rivaling the world's largest cities in size and grandeur before its fall to Hernán Cortés.

Hernán Cortés

An ambitious Spaniard who organized an invasion of Mexico in 1519, allied with Native groups chafed by Aztec rule, and, aided by disease, conquered the Aztec Empire.

Inca Empire

A vast mountain empire managed by the Quechuas along the Andes Mountains in South America, stretching from present-day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina, which fell to Francisco Pizarro in 1533, weakened by disease and internal strife.

Sistema de Castas

An elaborate racial hierarchy in Spanish New World society, regularized in the mid-1600s, organizing individuals into groups based on their supposed 'purity of blood,' with Peninsulares at the top.

Mestizos

A term used in Spanish colonial society to describe those of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage, typically occupying a middling social position.

Virgen de Guadalupe

A national icon for a new mestizo society in Mexico, stemming from reports in 1531 of the Virgin Mary appearing as a dark-skinned Nahuatl-speaking Indian to Juan Diego.

St. Augustine, Florida

Founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565, it remains the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day United States.

Columbian Exchange (Impact)

A cross-hemispheric exchange of violence, culture, trade, and peoples, resulting in native populations being decimated by European diseases and new crops revolutionizing Old World agriculture and diets.

Apalachee District (Florida)

A territory claimed by one of the most powerful tribes in Florida at the time of contact, extending from the modern Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico, into which the Spanish mission system extended in the 1630s.

Juan de Oñate

Led four hundred settlers, soldiers, and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico in 1598, establishing brutal beginnings for the Spanish Southwest, including the slaughter of Pueblo people at Acoma.

Santa Fe (New Mexico)

The first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, established in 1610, which remained a Spanish outpost with a relatively small colonial population.

Franciscan Missionaries

Religious order members who served as Spain's advance guard in North America, establishing dozens of missions along the Rio Grande and in California by the early seventeenth century.

Black Legend

A propaganda concept drawing on religious differences and political rivalries, used by English writers to accuse Spain of inhuman cruelties in the New World, justifying non-Spanish European colonization.

Huguenots

French Protestants who sought to emigrate after France criminalized Protestantism in 1685, but were forbidden in New France.

Northwest Passage

A fabled mythical waterway passing through the North American continent to Asia, sought by early French explorers.

New France

French colonial possessions centered on the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, developed through investment from private trading companies, with a preference for trade over permanent settlement fostering cooperation with Native Americans.

Jesuit Missionaries (French)

Adopted different conversion strategies than Spanish Franciscans, often living with or alongside Indian groups, fostering more cooperative relationships with Native Americans.

Métis(sage)

A French word for the offspring of Indian women and French men, common in New France due to traders marrying Indian women.

Middle Ground (French Colonization)

A kind of cross-cultural space in the Great Lakes region that allowed for Native and European interaction, negotiation, and accommodation, fostered by the French preference for trade.

New Netherland

A Dutch colony established in modern-day New York by Henry Hudson in 1609, which became an essential part of the Dutch New World empire and focused on trade with Native peoples.

Dutch West India Company

Chartered in 1621 by the Netherlands, it established colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, including New Netherland, with the island of Manhattan as a launching pad.

Hugo Grotius

A legal philosopher who believed Native peoples possessed the same natural rights as Europeans, influencing Dutch guidelines for New Netherland to purchase land from Indians.

Wampum

Shell beads fashioned by Algonquian Indians, valued as a ceremonial and diplomatic commodity among the Iroquois, which became a currency in Dutch trading networks in New Netherland.

Patroon System

Implemented by the Dutch West India Company to encourage colonization in New Netherland, granting large estates to wealthy landlords who paid passage for tenants to work their land.

Slavery in New Amsterdam

An essential part of Dutch capitalist triumphs, with the colony importing eleven company-owned slaves in 1626 to build New Amsterdam; by 1660, it had the largest urban slave population on the continent.

Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

Intervention by the Pope dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal, with land east of the meridian given to Portugal and west of it reserved for Spanish conquest.

Brazil (Portuguese Colony)

Became the focus of Portuguese attention by 1530, where sugar and the slave trade powered the early colonial economy, leading to more Africans enslaved here than any other Atlantic World colony.

Quilombos

Free settlements created by escaped slaves in Brazil, drawing from both African and Native slaves, which endured despite frequent attacks.

English Mercantilism

A state-assisted manufacturing and trading system under Elizabeth I, which created and maintained markets, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.

Richard Hakluyt the Younger

An advocate for English colonization who, in his 1584 'Discourse on Western Planting,' amassed religious, moral, and economic benefits of colonization, attacking Spanish cruelty and promoting Protestantism.

Joint-stock Companies

Ancestors of modern corporations and initial instruments of English colonization, allowing for shared profits and managed risks to attract vast capital for ventures like the Virginia Company.

Privateering

A form of state-sponsored piracy, where Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors like John Hawkins and Francis Drake to plunder Spanish ships and towns in the Americas, earning substantial profit.

Spanish Armada (1588)

King Philip II of Spain's large invasion fleet intended to destroy the British navy and depose Elizabeth, but annihilated by a storm (the 'divine wind'), opening the seas to English expansion.

Roanoke Island

A failed English settlement on North Carolina's coast, reestablished in 1587, whose colonists mysteriously disappeared, with the word 'Croatan' carved into a tree or post.

Virginia Company

Established in 1606, it was a joint-stock company hoping to find gold and silver and other valuable trading commodities in the New World, leading to the founding of Jamestown.

Jamestown

The first permanent English colony in the present-day United States, settled in 1607 on a peninsula in the James River, initially plagued by disease, starvation, and unprepared colonists.

Powhatan Confederacy

A group of nearly ten thousand Algonquian-speaking Indians in the Chesapeake, led by Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh), who initially welcomed the English and traded goods.

Starving Time

A desperate winter of 1609-1610 in Jamestown where colonists faced severe food shortages and resorted to eating leather and even corpses for survival.

John Rolfe

A Jamestown colonist who married Pocahontas and cultivated Virginia's first tobacco crop in 1616, saving the colony from ruin and initiating the tobacco boom.

Tobacco (Virginia)

A 'noxious weed' that fetched a high price in Europe, transforming Virginia's economy and incentivizing further colonization, leading to mass immigration and the headright policy.

Headright Policy (1618)

A system in Virginia where any person who migrated to the colony received fifty acres of land, and an additional fifty acres for every immigrant whose passage they paid.

House of Burgesses (1619)

A limited representative body composed of white landowners, established by the Virginia Company, which first met in Jamestown.

First Africans in Virginia (1619)

Twenty Africans sold to Virginia colonists by a Dutch slave ship, marking the birth of southern slavery in English North America.

Opechancanough

Powhatan's brother and successor, who launched a surprise attack in 1622 killing over 350 colonists, leading to retaliatory massacres and a decisive shift of power to the English colonizers.

English Superiority (Colonization)

A sense of physical, spiritual, and technological superiority felt by English colonists over Native peoples in North America, which, coupled with violence, led to an sense of entitlement to indigenous lands.

Pocahontas

Daughter of Chief Powhatan, who, according to John Smith, intervened to save his life, and later married colonist John Rolfe, dying in England.

Northern Puritanism

A religious movement in England that sought to 'purify' the Church of England of Catholic practices, leading to the Great Migration of about twenty thousand people to New England between 1630 and 1640.

City on a Hill

John Winthrop's vision for the godly community Puritans would form in America, intending it to be an example for reformers back home in England.

New England Colony Characteristics

Colonists generally arrived in family groups, replicating their home environments with small landholders, leading to a society less stratified than other British colonies due to impracticality of large-scale plantation agriculture.

Great Migration (Puritan)

The period between 1630 and 1640 when about twenty thousand Puritans traveled to New England to form a godly community in America.

Pequot War (1636-1637)

A violent conflict in New England where English Puritans and their Native allies attacked the Pequot community, resulting in hundreds of deaths and the enslavement of many Indians.

Salutary Neglect

The unofficial British policy of lenient or lax enforcement of parliamentary laws, which allowed the American colonies to develop greater autonomy and local political institutions.