Colonial America: The Enlightenment, Great Awakening, and Mercantilism

Vocabulary flashcards generated from lecture notes covering key historical figures, concepts, religious movements, and economic policies in 18th-century colonial America.

Enlightenment

An eighteenth-century movement triggered by the Scientific Revolution of the early sixteenth century that encouraged the use of reason, critical thinking, and science to understand nature and society.

Nicholas Copernippus

The astronomer who discovered that planets rotated around the sun, introducing the heliocentric theory that Earth was not the center of the universe.

Heliocentric theory

The astronomical theory positing that the sun, rather than the Earth, is at the center of the universe.

Isaac Newton

Scientist who put forth the theory of Earth's gravitational pull in 1687, suggesting natural laws governed all things from planetary orbits to politics and society.

Deists

Believers in a rational god of nature who set the universe in motion governed by natural laws but did not intervene in human daily affairs thereafter.

John Locke

Philosopher who posited that natural laws dictated governments should rest on the consent of the governed and respect individual natural rights, authoring Two Treaties He's On Government.

Benjamin Franklin

A declared deist who epitomized the American Enlightenment through his scientific experiments, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette, and inventing items like the Franklin stove and bifocal spectacles.

Puritan Congregationalism

The official state-supported faith in New England during the early eighteenth century.

Itinerants

Traveling evangelists in the 1730s and 1740s, including women and African Americans, who challenged local parish ministers and urged people to be reborn in their convictions.

Great Awakening

A massive religious revival in the early 1730s designed to counteract religious decline that connected all colonies and inspired the masses.

Jonathan Edwards

Prominent Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts who entered Yale at 13 and delivered powerful sermons to restore emotional religion against Enlightenment ideas.

Sarah Eger Osborne

A lay preacher in Rhode Island who organized prayer meetings attended by Black people despite calls for her to stop.

Kingsley Bathsheba Kingsley

A Western Massachusetts preacher who claimed divine revelations from heaven and traveled on horseback preaching to people, whom Jonathan Edwards denounced as a brawling woman.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Famous 1741 sermon by Jonathan Edwards designed to scare listeners into salvation by describing God holding humans over the pit of hell like a spider.

New Light revivalists

A faction within colonial congregations formed during the Great Awakening that supported religious revivals and individual spiritual rebirth.

Old Light traditionalists

A faction within colonial congregations during the Great Awakening that favored traditional church authority and opposed revivalist emotionalism.

Rene Robert Cavalier Squire LaSalle

French explorer who became the first European to travel down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682, claiming the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys for France as Louisiana.

The Alamo

A Catholic mission built in San Antonio in 1718 by the Spanish to convert Native Americans to Christianity and counter the French presence in Louisiana.

Salutary neglect

British official policy during the 17th and 18th centuries of not strictly enforcing laws regulating trade restrictions in the American colonies.

Mercantilism

A political and economic policy where a mother country controls all economic activities of its colonies to increase national power and wealth.

Captive market

A market where consumers in colonies are forced to purchase manufactured goods exclusively produced by the mother country.