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Summer reading ID terms
Christopher Columbus
Italian explorer, who after being denied access to a fleet by Portugal, was given three ships by Spain to use to go and find Asia and all of its wealth. In 1492, he sailed and found the West Indies which he believed to be Asia. He encountered Native Americans who he called Indians. He continued to explore around the Caribbean Sea, discovering new islands to weave the new lands into an empire based in Europe.
Columbian Exchange
The transatlantic flow of goods, people, and diseases that began with Columbus’s voyages in 1492.
Three Sisters
Corn, beans, and squash
Conquistadors
Spanish term for “conquerors",” applies to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Califonia.
Costas
A racial hierarchy which rose from the pure African and Indian at the bottom through multiple gradations of mixture to the pure Spanish at the pinnacle.
Higher costas enjoyed superior status and greater legal privileges at the expense of the lower costas.
Encomienda system
A Spanish system that rewarded to victorious commanders. They also obtained tribute annually paid by conquered Indian villagers. This tribute came in the form of forced labor and annual produce paid to the encomendero.
Mestizos
a person of mixed race, one having Spanish and indigenous descent.
Viceroyalties
Two immense administrative regions of American empire divided by the Crown
Mission system
A group of missions founded in by Franciscan monks in the Spanish colonies that forces Native people to convert to Catholicism and adopt Spanish agriculture and culture.
Pueblo Revolt/Pope Rebellion
An uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish colonists out of modern day New Mexico.
Couriers de bois
Upper-county French fur traders.
Horse
Provided faster transportation. Were faster and nimbler than buffalo.
Bacon’s Rebellion
Unsuccessful in 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia governor William Berkeley’s administration because Berkeley had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids and did not allow them to occupy Indian lands.
Charter colony
A colony, such as Virginia or Massachusetts, created by royal charter under the control of an individual, trading company, etc, and exempt from interference by the Crown.
John Rolfe
Married Pocahontas in 1614. Developed tobacco as a cash crop that could bear the high cost of transportation to the market in England.
Enclosure Movement
The Enclosure Movement was a push to take land that had formerly been owned in common by all members of a village, or at least available to the public for grazing animals and growing food, and change it to privately owned land
Indentured servants
Three-quarters of the immigrants that arrived in America. They were too poor to afford the £6 cost of transatlantic passage. Instead, they mortgaged 4-7 years of their lives to a ship captain or merchant who carried them to Chesapeake for sale to tobacco platers.
They received basic food, clothing and shelter.
Jamestown
The Virginia Company, a cartel of London merchants with a charter from the Crown sent three vessels to Chesapeake. Seeking security from Spanish discovery and attack, the colonists sailed up the James River about 60 miles and established Jamestown beside a swamp on the north bank.
Jamestown was located in a swampy location which proved deadly, for it bred millions of mosquitos, carriers of malaria. Colonists suffered salt poisoning and starved.
Colonists of Jamestown refused to trade the weapons Powhatan coveted. Colonists and Indians engaged in violence.
Maryland colony
In 1632 the Crown set aside the land at the northern head of the Chesapeake Bay as the second colony names after the queen of the new monarch. It was governed as a proprietary colony. It rapidly prospered as a tobacco colony.
Proprietary colony
land grants given by the King to one or a few favored men called proprietors. They in turn were to administer these areas for the Crown but in a manner to be determined by them.
EX: Maryland
Royal Colony
A colony governed directly by the crown through a governor and council appointed by it.
EX: Virginia (became the first royal colony)
Slave codes
Slaves could not leave a plantation without a written pass from the master. Militia squads patrolled the roads to demand passes. After 1691, no Virginia planter could free slaves unless he paid for their transportation. Free blacks lost the right to bear arms, hold office, vote, or employ white servants.
In 1680, Virginia prescribed 30 lashes on the bare back of any black slave who threatened or struck and white person.
Tobacco
A cash crop that could bear the high cost of transportation to the market in England. Consumers would pay premium prices for it. Tobacco thrived in Virginia. As cultivation expanded and the population grew, the planters needed more land which they took from the Indians.
Virginia Company
A cartel of London merchants with a charter from the crown. Established Jamestown
Great Migration (1630)
A larger emigration of orthodox Puritans began under the leadership for John Winthrop. It brought about 14,000 colonists to New England.
Puritans
A more demanding form of Protestantism than the Anglicanism practiced in Chesapeake. They came from all ranks in English society. Insisted that men honored God by working hard in their occupation, which they deemed a “calling” bestowed by God. They also insisted that the monarchs of England had failed sufficiently to reform the Anglican Church. Many left England to come to “New England”
Founded Plymouth
John Winthrop
A lawyer and member of the gentry. He represented the syndicate of wealthy Puritans who had obtained a royal charter as the Massachusetts Bay Company.
Massachusetts Bay colony
Established by Winthrop’s Puritans beginning with a settlement names Boston on the coast of North Plymouth. It was a virtually independent republic, where Puritan men elected their governor, deputy governor, and legislature.
Praying towns
Puritan missions used to free up the rest of the Indian domain for their own settlements. Some natives saw these as their last hope for preventing their group identity on a part of their homeland. Most of the natives stayed away from these towns and resented aggressive expansion of the settler towns.
King Phillip’s War (1675)
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 regions natives.
Barbados
An island in the Caribbean. Made most of the sugar consumed in England and generated more trade and capital than all other English colonies combined.
Became the first English colony with a black and enslaved majority. (17:1 slave to indentured servant ratio)
Carolina colony
White emigrants sought new lands on the southern mainland of North America. In 1670, three ships from Barbados bore 200 colonists where they founded Charles town, which became the capital of the new colony. The abundant lands of Carolina appealed to the crowded discontent of the West Indian white men.
Georgia colony
To increase South Carolina’s security against Spanish Florida, the British had recently established a new colony along the Savannah River.
The new colony was entrusted to a set of London philanthropists and social reformers led by James Oglethorpe.
The trustees sought to prevent Georgia from becoming like South Carolina. The wanted white men to do the labor without slaves. (rejected slave system) In 1751, the trustees gave up, surrendering Georgia to the Crown, which permitted slavery.
Stono Rebellion
A slave uprising in 1739 in South Carolina that led to severe tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on imported slaves.
Consumer Revolution
Cheaper and more diverse goods in greater abundance were available. Demand swelled as colonial consumers sought a wider array of new things. Women played a major role, they obtained a new means for self expression.
Navigation Acts (1650-60s)
Mandated that only English ships could trade with any English colony. The acts also stipulated that the most valuable colonial commodities (tobacco and sugar) could only be shipped to the mother country.
maximize customs revenue collected in England
increase the flow of commerce enriching English merchants.
stimulate English shipbuilding
augment the number of English sailors, swelling the reserve for the navy.
William Penn
Was granted 45,00 square miles on the west side of the Delaware River. Named the colony Pennsylvania. He was a Quaker and was committed to religious toleration. He welcomes non-Quakers as well as Quakers to Pennsylvania, promising equal rights and opportunities to all.
Quakers
A mystical, radical, and persecuted form of Protestantism. They carried the Puritan critiques of a church hierarchy and ritual to their ultimate conclusion. They relied on a mystical experience in search of an “Inner Light” to understand the Bible.
To emphasize their equality in the eyes of God, they wore plain clothes, refused to take oaths of allegiance or for testimony, rejected the payment of church tithes, used plain, familiar language with all people. Women were equal to men and refused to bear arms.
Pennsylvania colony
A proprietary colony granted to William Penn from the King in order to pay off a large debt. Quickly prospered as a farm colony as it possessed fertile soil and easily tilled landscape of low, rolling hills. Because Penn treated the Indians with respect, they enjoyed prolonged peace with the local Indians.
Middle colonies
The cluster of colonies including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The ethnic and denominational diversity of the region anticipated the American future, but the fractious contentions of those groups frustrated English visions of an empire responsive to command especially during war.
George Whitefield
A young Anglican minister who developed an innovative career as an itinerant evangelican, touring England and Wales.
First Great Awakening
Fervent religious revival movement in the 1720-40s that was spread throughout the colonies by ministers like New England Congregationalist John Edwards and English revivalist George Whitefield.
Era of Salutary Neglect
Informal British policy during the first half of the 18th century that allowed the American colonies considerable freedom to pursue their economic and political interests in exchange for colonial obediance.
French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War (1754-63)
The last and most important of four colonial wars fought between England and France for control of North America east of the Mississippi River.
Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763)
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 (1763) without consulting France’s Indian allies.
Treaty of Paris (1763)
Ended the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War between Great Britain and France, as well as their respective allies.
Proclamation of 1763
Royal directive issued after the French and Indian War prohibiting settlements, surveys, and land grants west of the Appalachian Mountains; caused considerable resentment among colonists hoping to move west.
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