APUSH (AP United States History) Unit 3

APUSH (AP United States History) Unit 3 - By the People

Age of Enlightenment

Major intellectual movement occurring in Europe beginning in the 1600s that led many to look more to scientific advances and the role of human reason in understanding the world than religion.

Articles of Capitulation

The agreement signed by American, British, and French military commanders on October 19, 1781, providing for the surrender of the British forces at Yorktown.

Articles of Confederation

A written document setting up the loose confederation of states that made up the first national government of the United States from 1781 to 1788.

Camp followers

Women who traveled with the Continental Army during the American Revolution providing support to the troops.

Cease-fire

A suspension of active hostilities.

Commander-in-chief

One who holds the supreme command of an armed force.

Committee of Secret Correspondence

A committee formed by the Second Continental Congress in November 1775 to garner international support for the colonies in their war with Britain.

Committee of Five

A committee of five delegates—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman—appointed by the Second Continental Congress to draft the Declaration of Independence.

Constitution

The basic beliefs and laws of a nation, state, or social group that establish the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights to the people in it.

Continental Army

A regular fighting force organized by the Second Continental Congress and raised from all of the colonies.

Currency Act of 1764

Prohibited the colonies from issuing their own paper money as legal tender for public or private debts to Britain.

Daughters of Liberty

Organized as a women's response to the Sons of Liberty, the Daughters opposed British measures, avoided British taxed tea, spun their own yarn, and wove their own cloth to avoid purchasing British goods.

Debt

Something owed to another (e.g., money); a thing or amount due.

Declaratory Act of 1764

Repealed the Stamp Act of 1765 but said that Parliament could legislate for the colonies in 'all cases Whatsoever.'

Deist

A person who advocates natural religion, emphasizing morality.

Delegate

A person acting for another, such as a representative to a convention or conference.

First Continental Congress

Meeting of delegates from most of the colonies held in Philadelphia in 1774 in response to British efforts to tax the colonies.

First Great Awakening

A significant religious revival in colonial America initiated by the preaching of Solomon Stoddard and Jonathan Edwards in the 1720s and 1730s and expanded by the touring English evangelical minister George Whitefield.

French and Indian War

Known in Europe as the Seven Years' War and in French Canada as the War of Conquest, this war fought in North America between 1754 and 1763 ended in French defeat.

Green Mountain Boys

A militia that formed in Vermont in 1770 and fought in the Revolutionary War, led by Patriot Ethan Allen.

Guerilla

A person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage.

Interest

A charge for borrowed money that is generally a percentage of the amount borrowed.

Iroquois Confederacy

A confederacy formed for largely defensive purposes by the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca and later the Tuscarora.

Loyalists

The name given to those in the colonies—perhaps one-fifth to one-third of the total population—who supported the British and opposed American independence.

Militia

A body of citizens organized for military service.

Minute Men

A group of men pledged to take up arms at a minute's notice during and immediately before the American Revolution.

Natural rights

Political philosophy that maintains that individuals have an inherent right, found in nature and preceding any government or written law, to life and liberty.

Olive Branch Petition

A document issued by the Second Continental Congress on July 5, 1775, in which the delegates affirm the colonies' union with Britain and ask the king to negotiate a peace.

Pacifist

Strongly and actively opposed to conflict and especially war.

Patriot

The name given to those in the colonies who supported American independence from Britain.

Philosophes

Deistic or materialistic writers and thinkers of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment.

Powder Alarm

The removal of gunpowder stockpiled in a colonial storehouse by British troops, on the order of Governor Thomas Gage, on September 1, 1774.

Proclamation Line of 1763

A royal proclamation in 1763 designed to protect Native American tribes by setting a boundary at the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains beyond which no western white settlement was to take place.

Redcoat

A British soldier, especially in America, during the Revolutionary War.

Regulator Movement

Organizations formed by farmers in the western regions of North and South Carolina to defend against theft and to protest corrupt practices of British officials.

Republican motherhood

The belief that women should have more rights and a better education so that they might support husbands and raise sons who would actively participate in the political affairs of society.

Republicanism

A complex, changing body of ideas, values, and assumptions that held that self-government by the citizens of a country, or their representatives, provided a more reliable foundation for the good society and individual freedom than rule by kings or any other distant elite.

Salon

A fashionable assemblage of notables (such as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held, by custom, at the home of a prominent person.

Salonnières

Established women, often artists and writers themselves, who hosted gatherings of other Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century Paris.

Salutary neglect

An unofficial British policy in the early to mid-1700s by which officials took a lax approach to enforcement of British laws in the North American colonies.

Scientific Revolution

A movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in which scientific investigation centered on systematic experimentation and the testing of hypotheses and that changed the ways in which people viewed and thought about the world.

Second Continental Congress

An assemblage of delegates from all the colonies that convened in May 1775 that eventually declared independence, adopted the Articles of Confederation, and conducted the Revolutionary War.

Seven Years' War

Known in North America as the French and Indian War, a war fought between Britain against France and Spain from 1754 to 1763 that ended in French defeat.

Somerset Decision

A 1772 ruling by Britain's Lord Chief Justice in the case of James Somerset that set him free and eventually declared slavery illegal in England, though not in British colonies.

Tory

An American upholding the cause of the British Crown against the supporters of colonial independence during the American Revolution; also called a Loyalist.

Treaty of Paris, 1763

The peace agreement that ended the French and Indian War in North America, in which France surrendered its North American lands to Britain and Spain surrendered Florida to Britain.

Valley Forge

Locality on the Schuylkill River in southeastern Pennsylvania which served as the winter headquarters of General George Washington and his army, 1777-1778 during the American Revolution.