history 7a

virgin land

the West was viewed as an untouched, agrarian utopia meant for yeoman farmers to inhabit

beaver

beaver pelts became extremely popular in Europe so Indigenous communities traded beavers for firearms and the population began to decline rapidly

domesticated animals

the people of the Great Plains domesticated dogs for hunting assistance but horses were reintroduced to Western Hemisphere after their extinction during the Pleistocene era when Spanish colonists introduced them to New Mexico shortly after 1600

ownership vs. sovereignty

colonists believed they had complete private ownership of whatever land they claimed, but the Indigenous people took care of the land as a community and had sovereignty over the land was challenged

land as a commodity

wealthy colonists saw land through a capitalist lens as something to be bought and sold, but the Indigenous people saw land as something to be shared and used as a community

freehold property

under English law, the monarch owned all the land, but the colonists decided to implement a system in which land could be freely bought and sold

subsistence farming

early Americans raised crops and livestock purely to sustain their households rather than for profit, and traded with their neighbors instead of using cash

empire of goods

a system of commercial exchange that linked a widely dispersed population through the things they bought, consumed, displayed, and coveted

colonial cities

Boston, Massachusetts and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are port cities where goods were exchanged and they served as the center of politics in the colonies

George Whitefield

Anglican priest who preached outdoors throughout the colonies in a very theatrical manner to tens of thousands of people

Haudenosaunee

an Iroquois League consisting of five native groups located south of Lake Ontario: Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and governed by a council of chiefs appointed by clan matrons in each of the five nations

Santa Fe

a new capital of New Mexico built largely by Native American laborers for the Spanish-speaking population in 1610

Puritans

strict Calvinist Protestants who claimed the English Reformation did not fully purge itself from Catholic heresy

Pequot War

a conflict with the Pequot people and Puritans from 1636-1637 which resulted in many Pequots being killed, sold into slavery, or being delivered as captives to other Native American tribes

Pueblo Revolt

a revolt in 1680 when about seventeen thousand Pueblos from more than twenty-five independent villages across the Rio Grande Valley rose up in an armed rebellion against Spanish rule and restored Pueblo autonomy in the Southwest for 12 years

Bacon’s Rebellion

in 1675 Nathaniel Bacon led land-hungry English settlers on a series of attacks “against all Indians in general,” which Governor William Berkeley renounced as he declared Bacon a rebel to which he responded with more raids against the Native Americans

King Philip’s War

a massive uprising involving many indigenous groups in which over twenty five New England towns were attacked due to a conflict between the colonists and the Wampanoag chief Metacom, also known as King Philip

Middle Passage

the Atlantic crossing enslaved Africans had to endure from Africa to the Americas

chattel slavery in the Americas

a system that treats individuals as personal property that can be bought and sold based on race

transition to slavery in the Chesapeake

in the 1660s, Chesapeake landowners began to turn from indentured servitude and toward race-based chattel slavery

African diaspora

a community of Africans in British North America who are connected by a remembered or envisioned relationship to their distant homeland

crusades

a series of wars against non-believes to wrest control of Jerusalem from Muslims between 1095 and 1291

Reconquista

armies from Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, and Portugal waged a prolonged holy war from the eighth century onward to “reconquer” the Iberian peninsula from Muslims

Limpieza de Sangre

a doctrine in Spain that required individuals to prove they have no Jewish or Muslim ancestry to hold public office, enter universities, and join religious and military organizations

Sao Tome and Principe

two islands claimed by Portugal in the Gulf of Guinea in 1471 where a large group of Jewish children who were taken from there parents were to be raised as Christians and enslaved Africans began to work on sugar plantations

Adelantados

advance men sent by King Enrique III of Castile to organize and fund raids on the Canary Islands in 1402

Tainos

Arawak-speaking indigenous peoples who lived on the Canary Islands and fulfilled few of Columbus and the visitors’ expectations of what people from Asia or the East Indies were like

The Great Dying

the collapse of 95% of Indigenous populations from the 16th and 17th centuries after the arrival of Europeans

Columbian Exchange

the widespread, complex process through which new flows of people, information, goods, flora, fauna, and microbes was transported between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo

a wealthy man from Bondou, between the Senegal and Gambian Rivers, who was enslaved in 1731 and made to work as a cattle herder in Annapolis, but was freed after a letter he wrote to his father in Arabic was discovered

Beringia

a vast, unglaciated region that included the land bridge as well as hundreds of miles of land on both sides, from Siberia to the Yukon

North Atlantic Warming Period

period in which farming spread throughout North America

medieval American cities

complex Indigenous cities that flourished during the European medieval period

Chaco Canyon

a city in the Four Corners area of northwestern New Mexico where a population of several thousand lived in elaborate stone housing blocks

Cahokia

a metropolitan center near present-day East St. Louis, Illinois that connected to much of the continent’s interior through a vast water transportation network

Chunkey

a Cahokian version of an older hoop-and-pole game that involved throwing a stone disk across a clay playing field, which became a prominent feature of Mississippian culture

Covenant Chain

a pattern of councils and treaties between New York and the Iroquois League following the events of 1676-1677

Great Lakes Region—Pays d’en Haut

the region where French Catholic established their own missions for spreading the faith in the northern part of the continent

balance-of-power diplomacy

European empires and Indigenous nations competed for regional dominance in North America to prevent any single power from becoming too strong

Townshend Duties

a bill that introduced import taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea that merchants and Whigs in New England objected to as they knew it was an attempt to raise revenue, not to regulate trade, and critics were galled by the law’s stipulation that some of the revenue would be used to fund the salaries of the colonies’ governors and judges, so that those officials would be more independent of the elected assemblies and less susceptible to popular protests, and colonial Whigs saw a conspiracy that would deprive them of their liberties

Nonimportation Agreements/Nonconsumption Agreements

the Sons of Liberty in Boston advocated for boycotts of British imports as the best way to resist the empire’s tax policies, and even though they caught on only selectively among leading colonial merchants, they had cost Great Britain hundreds of thousands of pounds by 1770, and the Townshend Duties yielded little in the way of revenue so in April of that year Parliament repealed all of the taxes except for the one on tea but Britain was still locked in a political battle with the colonies

East India Company

a financially troubled and mismanaged private corporation that sold Chinese tea to British customers that Prime Minister Frederick Lord North assumed the colonists would purchase instead of Dutch tea, but the Sons of Liberty saw an insistence on Parliament’s right to tax the unrepresented colonies and a sneaky plot to conceal the tax and make colonists pay for British military presence

liberty

the watchword of the resistance that the rebellious colonists insisted were at stake in the dispute over taxation, rather than shillings

Phillis Wheatley

African-American author and literary prodigy who became the first African American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry whose work shattered racist assumptions of the era regarding the capabilities of Black individuals

Earl of Dartmouth

served as Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1772-1775 who initially favored peaceful conciliation with the American colonies, but shifted toward supporting military suppression after the outbreak of fighting, who Phillis Wheatley dedicated her famous poem to expressing hope that he would bring freedom and a milder policy toward the colonies

French and Indian War

war that left a trail of resentment and debt between the British and Americans and made colonists less dependent on British protection, which led to more troops being stationed in North America and the transfer of some costs of governing the empire to the American colonists

Treaty of Paris (1763)

officially ended the French and Indian War which confirmed Great Britain as the dominant colonial power, removed France’s power, removed the ability of Indigenous nations to play European powers against one another, and caused massive wartime debt which led to new taxes on the American colonies

Neolin’s Pan-Indianism

Tecumseh claimed that indigenous groups had a common identity and constituted a single political body, as he hoped to avoid questioning which tribal leaders were authorized to negotiate deals with the United States, and he said that all red men claimed an equal right to the land, and arguments for unity among Indigenous groups went back at least half a century

Pontiac’s War

many colonists appreciated that British troops suppressed it and conquered land on the western frontier, but a standing peacetime army of ten thousand British soldiers still remained in North America in 1765

Proclamation Line of 1763

British decree issued by King George III that drew a boundary line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, forbidding colonists from settling on lands to the west, so settlers were forced to move back east, wealthy land investors had their land claims nullified, and many colonists saw the restriction as an overreach of authority that led to the American Revolution

Stamp Act Controversy

Britain imposed a direct tax completely unrelated to the regulation of international commerce, as colonists had to pay a tax on all printed matter and every legal document, and everything was required to bear a special stamp verifying that the tax had been paid, and colonists focused less on the financial burden and more on what they perceived to be an assault on their traditional political rights as British subjects

Committees of Correspondence

committees that maintained correspondence and communication with other colonies that played an important practical role in the events leading up to the war and provided a model for connecting a dispersed population that had no history of regular contact

Regulators

backcountry settlers in South Carolina who policed the frontier and administered extralegal punishments to individuals accused of crimes and spoke the same political language as Whig merchants protesting the Stamp Act, demanding increased representation in colonial government

Loyalists

colonists who continued to see themselves as subjects of the British Crown and viewed the rebellion as illegitimate or undesirable, and was the prominent political stance among white colonists in Canada, Florida, Bermuda, and the British Caribbean, with some opponents of the rebellion in other colonies moving to those parts of the empire

Declarations of Dependence

a 1776 document signed by New York residents pledging their loyalty to the British Crown in direct rejection of the Declaration of Independence, highlighting the deep internal political and social divisions among colonists during the American Revolution

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation

Lord Dunmore threatened to free people who were enslaved to contain anti-imperial protests in Virginia, even though he was a slaveholder himself, leading to enslaved people in Boston offering military services to the British in exchange for freedom and many African Americans fleeing plantations in Norfolk towards British lines

Wartime Slave Rebellion

ten thousand enslaved people from Virginia fled to the British side between 1779 to 1781, but a majority died of smallpox or the various fevers that swept through the British camps

Freedom Suits

enslaved Blacks in Massachusetts took their enslavers to court, relying on liberty-minded juries to affirm the individual emancipation and after 1773 Black New Englanders petitioned legislatures for general emancipation, arguing against the legitimacy of slavery

Variolation/Inoculation

was introduced when Onesimus explained to Cotton Mather how West Africans scraped smallpox matter into the skin, and promoted by Mather and Zabdiel Boylston but was met with resistance, was made mandatory of all Continental soldiers by George Washington and protected tens of thousands of men, but some states restricted or banned the practice

humoral medicine

the belief that the body held four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, and they must always be in equilibrium, so illness happens when there is too much of one humor or it is corrupted

Common Sense

pamphlet by Thomas Paine that used colorful and provocative language to persuade American readers to abandon hopes of reconciliation and embrace their future as citizens of a democratic republic while ridiculing the monarchy, and became the best selling pamphlet in colonial America

Declaration of Independence

statement by the Continental Congress, personal pledge of commitment on the part of the delegates, public indictment of King George III, and a strategic attempt to persuade the world that the revolt against British authority was serious and legitimate

State Constitutions

established the legal frameworks that would secure individual rights and determine who had access to wealth and power in the postcolonial era, and provide the bases for constitutional thinking at the national level, and promised to protect colonists against the abuses of power they had experienced under the English Constitution because they could be easily circulated, consulted, cited, and they started from scratch

Articles of Confederation

outlined a structure for a weak central government of a collection of friendly states joined together for common defense, did not include any executive or judicial branches of government, gave each state delegation one vote in Congress, and states were assessed based on the size of their free populations

Senate

an aristocratic upper house where members would sit for long terms and would not have to stand for direct election by the people, and comes from the New Jersey Plan

Gouverneur Morris

spoke the most at the Constitutional Convention, pared the resolutions and compromises produced on the convention floor into the finished product’s compact and straightforward articles, and wrote the Preamble

3/5 Clause

credited states for 60 percent of their slave populations and provided a political bonus to slaveholders that would artificially amplify their voice in Congress and presidential elections

Age of Revolution

inspired by the Enlightenment and marked a shift from absolutist monarchies to representative governments, constitutional states, and independent nation-states in America, France, and Haiti

French Revolution

political crisis that overturned centuries of absolute monarchy and established a period of representative government that mirrored the American Revolution, but Federalists were quick to draw from the French experience negative lessons about the dangers of democracy, while Republicans remained faithful to France’s revolutionary cause

Saint Domingue

France’s spectacularly lucrative sugar-producing colony on the western half of the island of Hispaniola, where the second anti-colonial revolt in the Americas took place, and sparked fears of race war and slave conspiracies involving bloodshed in North America, while also signaling that the institution of slavery might be destined to crumble elsewhere

Toussaint Louverture

a well-educated, freed man who emerged as the leader of a resistance force that would ultimately secure the abolition of slavery in 1794 and create the independent nation of Haiti in 1804

First US Party System

Hamilton led the Federalists who favored a strong national government and imagined a central economy operating out of thriving cities, earning the nation international respect and securing financial confidence in its new government, while Jefferson and Madison led the Republicans who valued an agrarian society of independent landowners and sought to protect those interests against the demands of urban merchants and financiers and called for a restrained national government with modest expenditures and little need for revenue

Naturalization Act of 1790

the first federal statute in the United States to establish a uniform rule for granting citizenship through naturalization, shifted the power from individual states to a unified federal baseline, and laid the foundational racial boundary for American citizenship and property rights

Alien and Sedition Acts

targeted immigrants by extending the waiting period for obtaining citizenship from five to fourteen years and authorizing the president to detain or expel foreigners during times of war by executive order, and criminalized dissent even though it seemed to violate the First Amendment

Decolonization

the American Revolutionary War marked the first major successful decolonization movement of a European overseas colony, but maintained and expanded a domestic system of chattel slavery and displaced Indigenous populations

Norfolk Anti-Inoculation Riot

poorer residents and anti-inoculationists feared that private doctors were spreading smallpox into the community through private quarantine houses, pitting Loyalist-leaning physicians and elites against Patriot-aligned anti-inoculationists, and eventually led to Virginia’s first inoculation regulations passed in 1770

Gradual Abolition

the dominant form of legal emancipation in all Northern states where significant numbers of men and women were enslaved, with laws being passed allowing eventual freedom to the future offspring of enslaved people

Free Black Communities

consisted of enslaved French-speaking people from St. Domingue and runaways who took shelter among abolitionists against fugitive slave laws, and developed a series of seven Black churches

Louisiana Purchase

doubled the size of the United States and offered the further benefit of dispersing the population and making it less likely for the new nation to be dominated by a strong central government

Urban Frontier

cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Lexington, and New Orleans, which were in place before farms were cultivated and many of their states were admitted to the union, as cities created the possibility of a rural hinterland and the rural hinterland in turn sustained the growth of cities

Washington, D.C.

began as a small, tight-knit group where Congressmen and other public officials typically stayed in all-male boardinghouses, where they socialized together and often voted along similar lines, Supreme Court justices shared temporary lodgings while the Court was in session, and women were pushed to the sidelines of the public sphere of the new capital

Methodism

an English Protestant movement founded in the eighteenth century that was small in the United States at the time of the Revolution, but grew quickly in the 1790s, spread by circuit riders, who embarked on evangelical missions through rural America

American Bible Society

its founders sought to save the United States by increasing popular access to the printed translation of the Old and New Testaments and distributed the Bibles through a network of branches throughout the country when print runs of more than two thousand copies of a book were rare

Civilization Program

a program designed to convert native inhabitants to European ways of living, and was intended to absorb indigenous people into the new nation as equal citizens, but also assumed that if Native Americans began using land differently, they might free territory for white settlement

Tenskwatawa

a Shawnee man who received a revelation that inspired him to change his life and preach a message of spiritual renewal, and he called for a return to tribal traditions and a rejection of whiskey, imported goods, European foods, intermarriage with whites, and private property, and he attracted thousands of followers among the native groups of the Northwest Territory to his village named Prophetstown

Tecumseh

Tenskwatawa’s older brother who sought to end the practice of ceding land to the United States, and his message had become a military rallying cry for Native Americans in different parts of the trans-Appalachian West

Battle of Tippecanoe

Harrison attacked Prophetstown when Tecumseh was away on a diplomatic mission, but the Prophet could not resist the impulse to engage US forces even though Tecumseh had instructed him to keep the peace during his absence, and Harrison proceeded to burn the abandoned native settlement to the ground, discrediting the Prophet and destroying his base of operations

Redsticks

dissidents who were inspired by Tecumseh’s call for resisting US authority and clashed with the forces of the Creek national council and attacked symbols of the new order along with whites, leading to settlers demanding the dismemberment and extermination of the Creek Nation, and Andrew Jackson rose to prominence by leading an army of white settlers, Cherokee, and Creeks against them in the Creek War

New Madrid

the epicenter of devastating earthquakes in 1812, causing homes to sink, islands to disappear, and the Mississippi River to reverse its course, but also grabbed the attention of indigenous peoples as it supported the revivalist message that the Great Spirit was incensed by assimilation and land cessions, and Tecumseh’s war against the United States appeared to have divine sanction

Treaty of Ghent

the Americans and the British abandoned the demands that had brought them into conflict in the first place, the British dropped their insistence on a buffer zone under Native American sovereignty between Canada and the United States, the Americans agreed to recognize all Native American rights and territorial claims from before the war, and it marked the end of British interference in US-Native American relations

Hartford Convention

a secret Federalist meeting in December 1814 where delegates considered a call for New England to secede from the union, but instead they passed resolutions to scrap the three-fifths rule, limit presidents to a single term, bar the election of consecutive presidents from a single state, and require a two-thirds majority in Congress in order to declare war, which they figured would break the Virginia monopoly on the executive branch, reduce the power of the Republicans, and prevent the South and West from dragging the country into another disastrous expansionist war, but the platform was not publicized until January

Indian Removal Act

authorized Andrew Jackson to negotiate and oversee the transfer of native groups remaining east of the Mississippi, as he pronounced the earlier federal policy of trying to convert indigenous peoples to the arts of civilization a failure, and he advised the southern Native Americans who had already acculturated to emigrate for their own good, since the federal government had no authority to stop Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama from seizing their land or expelling them

Five Civilized Tribes

the Choctaw, Chickasaws, Creek peoples, Cherokee, and Seminoles who clung tenaciously to their land and forced the government to demonstrate how far it would go in order to clear land for white settlement, and most nearly resembled their white neighbors as they were more settled, agricultural, and developed more sophisticated forms of centralized political authority compared to northern Native Americans

Cherokee Syllabary

an 85-character syllabary devised in 1821 by Sequoya that allowed most of the Cherokee Nation to read within about a decade, eroding on of the most culturally significant differences between whites and native people in Georgia

Leatherstocking Tales

five historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, which developed the character of Natty Bumppo, a white frontiersman raised among Native Americans who has no trace of native descent but has been made stronger and nobler by his relationships with native people

Metamora

1829 drama that became one of the most widely performed theatrical performances in nineteenth-century America, but New York spectators in who applauded Metamora’s curse upon white people were far enough removed, both from the seventeenth century and from the frontier clashes that were erupting in their own time, to see Native Americans as something other than an immediate threat, while the opening-night audience in Augusta, Georgia, hissed when Metamora chided whites for their treatment of his culture, and the play was boycotted

Edwin Forrest

the first person born in the United States to earn an international reputation in the field of acting who appeared as the lead character in the premiere performance of a play called Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags

“Eulogy on King Phillip”

1836 speech by William Apess, who famously compared Metacomet to George Washington, while indicting white Christian colonists and Indian Removal for broken treaties, land theft, deceit, and violence, presenting Philip as a martyred patriot

Pushmataha

a Choctaw warrior and diplomat who pointed out to Tecumseh that the Choctaw and Chickasaw had lived peacefully with the United States and had benefitted from their contacts and exchanges with white Americans