Dcush Vocab

Mound Builders

In North American abt. 3,500 years ago, one native culture centered their community in the lower Mississippi River Valley around a series of semicircular mounds and est. extensive trade networks throughout the continent.

Tenochtitlan

The capital city of the Aztec Empire. The city was built on marshy island on the western side of lake Tetzcoco, which is the site of present-day Mexico City.

Aztec

Mesoamerican people who were conquered by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés, 1519–1528.

Great League of Peace

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 fur trade and to wage war across what is today eastern North America.

Coverture

That a married women did not have a separate legal existence from her husband.

Caravel

A fifteenth-century European ship capable of long-distance travel.

Conquistadores

This applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern America and the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Columbian Exchange

The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with Columbus's voyages in 1492.

Criollos/Creoles

Persons born in the New World of European ancestry.

Hacienda

Large-scale farm in the Spanish New World empire worked by Indian laborers.

Mestizos

Spanish word for persons of mixed Native American and European ancestry.

Ninety-Five These

The list of moral grievances against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther, a German priest, in 1517.

Bartolome de Las Casas

A Catholic missionary who renounced the Spanish practice of coercively converting Indians and advocated their better treatment. In 1552, he wrote A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, which described the Spanish Empire's cruel treatment of the Indians.

Repartimiento System

Spanish labor system under which Indians were legally free and able to earn wages but were also required to perform a fixed amount of labor yearly. Replaced the encomienda system.

Black Legend

Idea that the Spanish New World empire was more oppressive toward the Indians than other European empires; was used as a justification for English imperial expansion.

Pueblo Revolt

Uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish colonists out of modern-day New Mexico.

Indentured Servants

Settlers who signed on for a temporary period of servitude to a master in exchange for passage to the New World; Virginia and Pennsylvania were largely peopled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by English and German indentured servants.

Patroons

Shareholders who agreed to transport tenants.

Metis

Children of marriages between Indian women and French traders and officials.

Borderland

A place between or near recognized borders where no group of people has complete political control or cultural dominance.

Virginia Company

A joint-stock enterprise that King James I chartered in 1606. The company was to spread Christianity in the New World as well as find ways to make a profit in it.

Anglican Church

The established state church of England, formed by Henry VIII after the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

Roanoke Colony

English expedition of 117 settlers, including Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. The colony disappeared from Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks sometime between 1587 and 1590.

Enclosure Movement

legal process that divided large farm fields in England that were previously collectively owned by groups of peasants into smaller, individually owned plots. The enclosure movement took place over several centuries, and resulted in eviction for many peasants.

John Smith

A swashbuckling soldier of fortune with rare powers of leadership and self-promotion who was appointed to the resident council to manage Jamestown.

Powhatan

A group of Eastern Woodland Indians who occupied the coastal plain of Virginia.

Pocahontas

A NA women belonging to the Powhatan tribe. Association with the colonial settlement in Jamestown. She saved John Smith and showed that NA ppl can unify with the Europeans.

Headright System

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 headright policy was eventually expanded to include any colonists—and was also adopted in other colonies.

House of Burgess

The first elected assembly in colonial America, established in 1619 in Virginia. Only wealthy landowners could vote in its elections.

Uprising of 1622

Unsuccessful uprising of Virginia Native Americans that wiped out one-quarter of the settler population, but ultimately led to the settlers' gaining supremacy.

Cecilius Calvert

Est. the proprietary colony of Maryland as haven for English Catholics.

Dower Rights

In colonial America, the right of a widowed woman to inherit one-third of her deceased husband's property.

Puritans

English religious group that sought to purify the Church of England; founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop in 1630.

John Winthrop

Puritan leader and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who resolved to use the colony as a refuge for persecuted Puritans and as an instrument of building a "wilderness Zion" in America.

John Calvin

Leading French protester reformer, important figure in 2nd generation of protestant reformation. Influential institutes of Christian religion.

Pilgrims

Puritan separatists who broke completely with the Church of England and sailed to the New World aboard the Mayflower, founding Plymouth Colony on Cape Cod in 1620.

Mayflower Compact

Document signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth; the document committed the group to majority-rule government.

Great Migration

Large-scale migration of southern blacks during and after World War I to the North, where jobs had become available during the labor shortage of the war years.

Dissenters

Protestants who belonged to denominations outside of the established Anglican Church.

Captivity Narratives

Accounts written by colonists after their time in Indian captivity, often stressing the captive's religious convictions.

Pequot War

An armed conflict in 1637 that led to the destruction of one of New England's most powerful Indian groups.

Half-way Coenant

A 1662 religious compromise that allowed baptism and partial church membership to colonial New Englanders whose parents were not among the Puritan elect.

Magna Carta

King had given rights to all "free man" in England, the king subject to rule of law, security of person and property. Also states that the King and gov weren't above the law.

English Liberty

The idea that English people were entitled to certain liberties, including trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the right to face one's accuser in court. These rights meant that even the English king was subject to the rule of law.

Levelers

A member of a group of radical dissenters in the English Civil war, who called for the abolition of the monarchy, social and agrarian reforms, and religious freedom.

Diggers

A person/group who believes in the common ownership of land.

Quakers

Rejected elaborate religious ceremonies, didn't have official clergy, and believed in spiritual equality for men and women.

Act Concerning Religion

1649 law that granted free exercise of religion to all Christian denominations in colonial Maryland.

Metacom

The chief of the Wampanoags, whom the colonists called King Philip. He resented English efforts to convert Indians to Christianity and waged a war against the English colonists, and was consequently killed.

King Phillip's War

A multiyear conflict that began in 1675 with an Indian uprising against white colonists. Its end result was broadened freedoms for white New Englanders and the dispossession of the region's Indians.

Mercantilism

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

(first) Navigation Acts

Law passed by the English Parliament to control colonial trade and bolster the mercantile system, 1650–1775; enforcement of the act led to growing resentment by colonists.

Royal African Company

Important tools in the opening of the African continent to slave trade and later imperial colonizing ambitions.

Covenant Chain

Alliance formed in the 1670s between the English and the Iroquois nations.

Charter of Liberties & Privileges

Laid out the political organization of the colony, set up the procedures for election to the assembly, created 12 countries, and guaranteed certain individual rights for the colonists.

Yamasee Uprising

Revolt of Yamasee and Creek Indians, aggravated by rising debts and slave traders' raids, against Carolina settlers. Resulted in the expulsion of many Indians to Florida.

Fundamental Constitution of Carolina

Protect proprietary interests and to avoid the creation of a democracy.

Society of Friends (Quakers)

Religious group in England and America whose members believed all persons possessed the "inner light" or spirit of God; they were early proponents of abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.

Plantation

An early word for a colony, a settlement "planted" from abroad among an alien population in Ireland or the New World. Later, a large agricultural enterprise that used unfree labor to produce a crop for the world market.

Virginia House of Burgess 1667 Decree

That religious conversion did not constitute a release from slavery, and thus Christians could own Christians.

Bacon's Rebellion

Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia governor William Berkeley's administration because of governmental corruption and because Berkeley had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids and did not allow them to occupy Indian lands.

Virginia House of Burgess 1705 Slave Code

Regulate the interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia.

Glorious Revolution

A coup in 1688 engineered by a small group of aristocrats that led to William of Orange taking the British throne in place of James II.

English Bill of Rights

A series of laws enacted in 1689 that inscribed the rights of Englishmen into law and enumerated parliamentary powers such as taxation.

Lords of Trade

An English regulatory board established to oversee colonial affairs in 1675.

Dominion of New England

Consolidation into a single colony of the New England colonies—and later New York and New Jersey—by royal governor Edmund Andros in 1686; dominion reverted to individual colonial governments three years later.

English Toleration Act

A 1690 act of Parliament that allowed all English Protestants to worship freely.

Salem Witch Trials

A crisis of trials and executions in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 that resulted from anxiety over witchcraft.

Redemptioners

Indentured families or persons who received passage to the New World in exchange for a promise to work off their debt in America.

Walking Purchase

An infamous 1737 purchase of Indian land in which Pennsylvanian colonists tricked the Lenni Lanape Indians. The Lanape agreed to cede land equivalent to the distance a man could walk in thirty-six hours, but the colonists marked out an area using a team of runners.

Backcountry

In colonial America, the area stretching from central Pennsylvania southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and into upland North and South Carolina.

Staple Crop

Important cash crops; for example, cotton or tobacco.

Anglicization

Colonists view themselves as British citizen therefore they try and imitate the homeland back in the colonies.

Atlantic Slave Trade

The systematic importation of African slaves from their native continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, largely fueled by rising demand for sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco.

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 sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown millions more dying en route.

Yeoman Farmers

Small landowners (the majority of white families in the Old South) who farmed their own land and usually did not own slaves.

"task" system

Assigned daily jobs, once finish they have leisure time or growing their own crops

Stono Rebellion

A slave uprising in 1739 in South Carolina that led to a severe tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on imported slaves.

Republicanism

Political theory in eighteenth-century England and America that celebrated active participation in public life by economically independent citizens as central to freedom.

Liberalism

Originally, political philosophy that emphasized the protection of liberty by limiting the power of government to interfere with the natural rights of citizens; in the twentieth century, belief in an activist government promoting greater social and economic equality.

Country Party

Thought of freedom closely associate w/ a group of critics of est. political order

Deference

The assumption among ordinary people that wealth, education, and social prominence cared right to public office.

Salutary Neglect

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

Public Sphere

Political organization and debate independence of the government, where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems.

Trial of Zenger

Most famous colonial court case involving freedom of the press

Englightenment

Revolution in thought in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason and science over the authority of traditional religion.

Arminianism

Taught reason alone could form the basis or religion or deism; a belief that god had withdrew from the world after creating it leaving it to function according to "natural" scientific laws without a divine intervention.

Deism

Enlightenment thought applied to religion; emphasized reason, morality, and natural law.

Isaac Newton

Discovered and demonstrated natural laws that govern the universe.

Great Awakening

Fervent religious revival movement in the 1720s through the 1740s that was spread throughout the colonies by ministers like New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and English revivalist George Whitefield.

Old Light

Traditionalist churches

New Light

Revivalist groups (Baptists, Methodist, Presbyterians)

Father Junipero Serra

Missionary who began and directed the California mission system in the 1770s and 1780s. Serra presided over the conversion of many Indians to Christianity, but also engaged them in forced labor.

Middle Ground

A borderland between European empires and Indian sovereignty where various native peoples and Europeans lived side by side in relative harmony.

Ohio Company

Get land from Virginia grant and could sell the land to settlers.

Seven Years' War/French and Indian War

Also know as the French and Indian War, the last—and most important—of four colonial wars fought between England and France for control of North America east of the Mississippi River.

William Pitt

Led a ministry and also help the British government turn the war around.

Peace of Paris

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 in 1763, without consulting France's Indian allies.

Pontiac's Rebellion

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 in 1763, without consulting France's Indian allies.

Neolin

A Native American religious prophet who, by preaching pan-Indian unity and rejection of European technology and commerce, helped inspire Pontiac's Rebellion.