APUSH ALL KEY TERMS

tribute

The practice of collecting goods from conquered peoples.

matriarchy

A gendered power structure in which social identity and property descend through the female line.

animism

Spiritual beliefs that center on the natural world, where homage is paid to spirits and spiritual forces in nature.

patriarchy

A gendered power structure in which social identity and property descend through the male line.

primogeniture

The practice of passing family land to the eldest son.

peasants

The traditional term for farmworkers in Europe, some of whom owned land while others leased small plots.

republic

A state without a monarch or prince, governed by representatives of the people.

civic humanism

The belief that individuals owe a service to their community and its government.

Renaissance

A cultural transformation in the arts and learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century.

guilds

Organizations of skilled workers in medieval and early modern Europe that regulated trade.

Christianity

A religion that holds the belief that Jesus Christ was divine and spread from Europe to the Americas.

heresy

A religious doctrine inconsistent with the teachings of a church.

Islam

A religion that considers Muhammad to be God's last prophet.

Crusades

A series of wars undertaken by Christian armies to reverse the Muslim advance in Europe.

predestination

The belief that God chooses certain people for salvation before they are born.

Protestant Reformation

The reform movement initiated by Martin Luther's critiques of the Catholic Church in 1517.

Counter-Reformation

A reaction in the Catholic Church that sought change from within in response to the Reformation.

trans-Saharan trade

The primary trade route for West Africans before European contact, led by the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires.

reconquista

The campaign by Spanish Catholics to drive North African Muslims from the European mainland.

Chattel Slavery

A system of bondage in which a slave has the legal status of property, allowing them to be bought and sold.

Neo-Europes

Colonies where colonists aimed to replicate the economies and social structures from their homelands.

Encomienda

A grant of Indian labor in Spanish America that allowed prominent men to extract tribute from Indians in exchange for protection and Christian instruction.

Columbian Exchange

The massive global exchange of living things between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that began after the voyages of Columbus.

Outwork

A manufacturing system used in the English woolen industry where merchants bought wool and hired landless peasants to spin and weave it into cloth.

Mercantilism

A political economy system based on government regulation, controlling colonial commerce for Britain's enrichment.

House of Burgesses

The governing body in colonial Virginia made up of representatives elected by the colony's inhabitants.

Royal Colony

A colony chartered by the crown, with a governor appointed by the crown.

Freeholds

Land owned in its entirety without feudal dues or landlord obligations, allowing owners the right to improve, transfer, or sell their property.

Headright System

A land distribution system that granted land to those who paid for the passage of new arrivals, enabling large planters to amass land.

Indentured Servitude

Workers contracted to serve for a specified period in exchange for passage, room and board, and eventual freedom.

Pilgrims

The first Protestant group to settle in America, founding Plymouth in 1620 to separate from the Church of England.

Puritans

Dissenters from the Church of England who sought genuine Reformation, emphasizing an individual’s relationship with God.

Joint-Stock Corporation

A financial organization where investors pooled capital to fund colonization and received shares in return.

Predestination

The belief that God chooses certain people for salvation before they are born, a key tenet of Puritan theology.

Toleration

The allowance of different religious practices, exemplified by the Toleration Act (1649) in Maryland.

Covenant of Works

The Christian idea that God's elect must perform good works in their earthly lives to earn salvation.

Covenant of Grace

The belief that salvation is granted as a gift of grace and cannot be earned by good works.

Town Meeting

A local governance system in New England where male heads of households met to make decisions on taxes, markets, and community regulations.

proprietorship

A colony created through a grant of land from the English monarch to an individual or group, who then set up a form of government largely independent from royal control.

Quakers

Epithet for members of the Society of Friends. Their belief that God spoke directly to each individual through an "inner light" and that neither ministers nor the Bible was essential to discovering God's Word put them in confict with both the Church of England and orthodox Puritans.

Navigation Acts

English laws passed, beginning in the 1650s and 1660s, requiring that certain English colonial goods be shipped through English ports on English ships manned primarily by English sailors in order to beneft English merchants, shippers, and seamen.

Dominion of New England

A royal province created by King James II in 1686 that would have absorbed Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New York, and New Jersey into a single, vast colony and eliminated their assemblies and other chartered rights. James's plan was canceled by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which removed him from the throne.

Glorious Revolution

A quick and nearly bloodless coup in 1688 in which James II of England was overthrown by William of Orange. Whig politicians forced the new King William and Queen Mary to accept the Declaration of Rights, creating a constitutional monarchy that enhanced the powers of the House of Commons at the expense of the crown.

constitutional monarchy

A monarchy limited in its rule by a constitution.

Second Hundred Years' War

An era of warfare beginning with the War of the League of Augsburg in 1689 and lasting until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In that time, England fought in seven major wars; the longest era of peace lasted only twenty-six years.

tribalization

The adaptation of stateless peoples to the demands imposed on them by neighboring states.

Covenant Chain

The alliance of the Iroquois, first with the colony of New York, then with the British Empire and its other colonies. The Covenant Chain became a model for relations between the British Empire and other Native American peoples.

South Atlantic System

A new agricultural and commercial order that produced sugar, tobacco, rice, and other tropical and subtropical products for an international market. Its plantation societies were ruled by European planter-merchants and worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Middle Passage

The brutal sea voyage from Africa to the Americas that took the lives of nearly two million enslaved Africans.

Stono Rebellion

Slave uprising in 1739 along the Stono River in South Carolina in which a group of slaves armed themselves, plundered six plantations, and killed more than twenty colonists. Colonists quickly suppressed the rebellion.

gentility

A refined style of living and elaborate manners that came to be highly prized among well-to-do English families after 1600 and strongly influenced leading colonists after 1700.

salutary neglect

A term used to describe British colonial policy during the reigns of George I (r. 1714-1727) and George II (r. 1727-1760). By relaxing their supervision of internal colonial affairs, royal bureaucrats inadvertently assisted the rise of self-government in North America.

patronage

The power of elected officials to grant government jobs and favors to their supporters; also the jobs and favors themselves.

land banks

An institution, established by a colonial legislature, that printed paper money and lent it to farmers, taking a lien on their land to ensure repayment.

Sugar Act of 1764

British law that decreased the duty on French molasses, making it more attractive for shippers to obey the law, and at the same time raised penalties for smuggling. The act enraged New England merchants, who opposed both the tax and the fact that prosecuted merchants would be tried by British-appointed judges in a vice-admiralty court.

vice-admiralty courts

A maritime tribunal presided over by a royally appointed judge, with no jury.

Stamp Act of 1765

British law imposing a tax on all paper used in the colonies. Widespread resistance to the Stamp Act prevented it from taking effect and led to its repeal in 1766.

virtual representation

The claim made by British politicians that the interests of the American colonists were adequately represented in Parliament by merchants who traded with the colonies and by absentee landlords (mostly sugar planters) who owned estates in the West Indies.

Quartering Act of 1765

A British law passed by Parliament at the request of General Thomas Gage, the British military commander in America, that required colonial governments to provide barracks and food for British troops.

Stamp Act Congress

A congress of delegates from nine assemblies that met in New York City in October 1765 to protest the loss of American "rights and liberties," especially the right to trial by jury. The congress challenged the constitutionality of both the Stamp and Sugar Acts by declaring that only the colonists' elected representatives could tax them.

Sons of Liberty

Colonists - primarily middling merchants and artisans - who banded together to protest the Stamp Act and other imperial reforms of the 1760s. The group originated in Boston in 1765 but soon spread to all the colonies.

English Common Law

The centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the lives and property of the British monarch's subjects.

natural rights

The rights to life, liberty, and property

Declaratory Act of 1766

Law issued by Parliament to assert Parliament's unassailable right to legislate for its British colonies "in all cases whatsoever," putting Americans on notice that the simultaneous repeal of the Stamp Act changed nothing in the imperial powers of Britain.

Townsend Act of 1767

British law that established new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters' colors imported into the colonies.

nonimportation movement

Colonists attempted three nonimportation agreements: in 1766, in response to the Stamp Act; in 1768, in response to the Townshend duties; and in 1774, in response to the Coercive Acts. In each case, colonial radicals pressured merchants to stop importing British goods.

committees of correspondence

A communications network established among towns in the colonies, and among colonial assemblies, between 1772 and 1773 to provide for rapid dissemination of news about important political developments.

Tea Act of May 1773

British act that lowered the existing tax on tea and granted exemptions to the East India Company to make their tea cheaper in the colonies and entice boycotting Americans to buy it.

Coercive Acts

Four British acts of 1774 meant to punish Massachusetts for the destruction of three shiploads of tea. Known in America as the Intolerable Acts, they led to open rebellion in the northern colonies.

Continental Congress

September 1774 gathering of colonial delegates in Philadelphia to discuss the crisis precipitated by the Coercive Acts. The Congress produced a declaration of rights and an agreement to impose a limited boycott of trade with Britain.

Continental Association

An association established in 1774 by the First Continental Congress to enforce a boycott of British goods.

Dunmore's War

A 1774 war led by Virginia's royal governor, the Earl of Dunmore, against the Ohio Shawnees, who had a long-standing claim to Kentucky as a hunting ground.

Minutemen

Colonial militiamen who stood ready to mobilize on short notice during the imperial crisis of the 1770s. These volunteers formed the core of the citizens' army that met British troops at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

Second Continental Congress

Legislative body that governed the United States from May 1775 through the war's duration. It established an army, created its own money, and declared independence once all hope for a peaceful reconciliation with Britain was gone.

Declaration of Independence

A document containing philosophical principles and a list of grievances that declared separation from Britain, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.

popular sovereignty

The principle that ultimate power lies in the hands of the electorate.

Battle of Long Island (1776)

First major engagement of the new Continental army, defending against 32,000 British troops outside of New York City.

Battle of Saratoga (1777)

A multistage battle in New York ending with the surrender of British general John Burgoyne. The victory ensured the diplomatic success of American representatives in Paris, who won a military alliance with France.

Valley Forge

A military camp in which George Washington's army of 12,000 soldiers and hundreds of camp followers suffered horribly in the winter of 1777.

Philipsburg Proclamation

A 1779 proclamation that declared that any slave who deserted a rebel master would receive protection, freedom, and land from Great Britain.

Battle of Yorktown (1781)

A battle in which French and American troops and a French fleet trapped the British army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The Franco-American victory broke the resolve of the British government.

currency tax

A hidden tax on the farmers and artisans who accepted Continental bills in payment for supplies and on the thousands of soldiers who took them as pay.

Treaty of Paris of 1783

The treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. In the treaty, Great Britain formally recognized American independence and relinquished its claims to lands south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River.

Pennsylvania constitution of 1776

A constitution that granted all taxpaying men the right to vote and hold office and created a unicameral (one-house) legislature with complete power; there was no governor to exercise a veto. Other provisions mandated a system of elementary education and protected citizens from imprisonment for debt.

mixed government

John Adams's theory from Thoughts on Government (1776), which called for three branches of government, each representing one function: executive, legislative, and judicial.

Articles of Confederation

The written document defining the structure of the government from 1781 to 1788, under which the Union was a confederation of equal states, with no executive and limited powers, existing mainly to foster a common defense.

Northwest Ordinance of 1787

A land act that established a process by which settled territories would become states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It also banned slavery in the Northwest Territory.

Shay's Rebellion

A 1786-1787 uprising led by dissident farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, protesting the taxation policies of the eastern elites who controlled the state's government.

Virginia Plan

A plan drafted by James Madison that was presented at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. It designed a powerful three-branch government, with representation in both houses of the congress tied to population; this plan would have eclipsed the voice of small states in the national government.

New Jersey Plan

Alternative to the Virginia Plan drafted by delegates from small states, retaining the confederation's single-house congress with one vote per state. It shared with the Virginia Plan enhanced congressional powers to raise revenue, control commerce, and make binding requisitions on the states.

Federalists

Supporters of the Constitution of 1787, which created a strong central government.

Antifederalists

Opponents of ratification of the Constitution and of a strong central government, Antifederalists feared that a powerful and distant central government would be out of touch with the needs of citizens. They also complained that it failed to guarantee individual liberties in a bill of rights.

Federalist No. 10

An essay by James Madison in The Federalist (1787-1788) that challenged the view that republican governments only worked in small polities; it argued that a geographically expansive national government would better protect republican liberty.

Judiciary Act of 1789

Established a federal district court in each state and three circuit courts to hear appeals from the districts, with the Supreme Court having the final say

Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, officially ratified by 1791. The amendments safeguarded fundamental personal rights, including freedom of speech and religion, and mandated legal procedures, such as trial by jury.

Report on the Public Credit

Alexander Hamilton's 1790 report recommending that the federal government should assume all state debts and fund the national debt — that is, offer interest on it rather than repaying it — at full value. Hamilton's goal was to make the new country creditworthy, not debt-free.

Bank of the United States

A bank chartered in 1790 and jointly owned by private stockholders and the national government. Alexander Hamilton argued that the bank would provide stability to the specie-starved American economy by making loans to merchants, handling government funds, and issuing bills of credit.

Report on Manufactures

A proposal by treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791 calling for the federal government to urge the expansion of American manufacturing while imposing tariffs on foreign imports.

Proclamation of Neutrality

A proclamation issued by President George Washington in 1793, allowing U.S. citizens to trade with all belligerents in the war between France and Great Britain.

French Revolution

A 1789 revolution in France that was initially welcomed by most Americans because it abolished feudalism and established a constitutional monarchy, but eventually came to seem too radical to many.