Great League of Peace - an alliance of the Haudenosaunee nations, originally formed at least 400 years ago. Each year the council with male representatives chosen by women of the five nations met to coordinate dealings with outsiders

Reconquista - reconquest of Spain from the moors completed by king Ferdinand and queen Isabella in 1492

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

conquistadores - Spanish term for "conquerors," applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by Indigenous peoples in central and southern America as well as the current states of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Tenochtitlán - The capital city of the Aztec empire; the city was built on marshy islands on the western side of Lake Tetzcoco, which is the site of present-day Mexico City.

Aztec - The Mesoamerican empire ruled by the Mexica people that was defeated by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés and his Native allies, 1519 - 1528.

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

creoles - Persons born in the Americas of European ancestry.

hacienda - Large-scale farm in the Spanish empire worked by Native American laborers.

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

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

Bartolomé 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 cruel treatment of the Indians by the Spanish.

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 empire was more oppressive toward Indians than other European empires; used as a justification for English imperial expansion.

Pueblo Revolt - Uprising in 1680 by allied Pueblo led by Popé that temporarily drove Spanish colonists out of New Mexico.

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

John Smith - An English soldier and explorer who became one of the leaders of the jamestown colony and helped to establish relations with the Powhatans. His narratives describe the early history of Jamestown as well as his explorations of what became New England.

Virginia Company - A joint-stock enterprise that King James I chartered in 1606; the company was to spread Christianity in the Americas 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 - Failed English attempt to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks; the colony disappeared sometime between 1587 and 1590.

enclosure movement - A 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.

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

Anglo-Powhatan Wars - Three wars fought between the Powhatans and the Jamestown colonists in 1610-1614,1622-1626, and 1644-1646.

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

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.

Pilgrims - Puritan separatists who broke completely with the Church of England and sailed to the Americas 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 by its male colonists.

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.

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 fought between the Pequot Indians and an alliance of Narragansett, Mohegan, and English. The Pequot loss led to most of them being killed, enslaved, or incorporated into other Native nations.

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

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

English liberty - The idea that English men 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.

Act Concerning Religion (or Maryland Toleration Act) - 1649 law that granted free exercise of religion to all Christian denominations in colonial Maryland.

King Philip's War - A multiyear conflict that began in 1675 between the English and a Native alliance led by Wampanoags Metacom (King Philip) and Weetamoo, Its end result was broadened freedoms for white New Englanders and the dispossession of the Wampanoags and other Indians.

Metacom - Wampanoag leader whom the colonists called King Philip; he led a war against the English colonists, one in which he was killed.

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

Navigation Act - Law passed by the English Parliament to control colonial trade and bolster the mercantile system, 1651-1775; enforcement of the act led to growing resentment by colonists.

Yamasee War - War between South Carolina and Yamasee and Muscogee Indians, aggravated by rising debts and slave traders' raids; although the Yamasee lost, the war resulted in the end of South Carolina's Indian slave trade.

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.

Bacon's Rebellion - Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against British Governor of Virginia William Berkeley's administration.

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 Il.

English Bill of Rights - A series of laws enacted in 1689 that inscribed the rights of English men 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.

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

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 Native American land in which Pennsylvanian colonists tricked the Delaware Indians, who had 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 crops - Important cash crops; for example, cotton or tobacco.

Natchez War - War begun in 1729 by the Natchez Indians against the French who were building plantations on Natchez land. With help from Native allies, the French won the war and drove the Natchez from their homeland.

Atlantic slave trade - The systematic importation of African people from their native continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, fueled largely 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 centuries, 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.

Stono Rebellion - An uprising by enslaved men 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.

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.

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

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

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

Father Junípero 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 sometimes by force.

Seven Years' 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.

Neolin - A Delaware Indian (Lenape) religious prophet who, by preaching Native American unity and rejection of European technology and commerce, helped inspire Pontiac's War.

Pontiac's War - A war inspired by the Delaware prophet Neolin in which allied Native American fighters from the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes successfully attacked 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. It helped lead to the Proclamation of 1763.

Proclamation of 1763 - Royal directive issued after the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's War prohibiting settlement, surveys, and land grants west of the Appalachian Mountains; caused considerable resentment among colonists hoping to move west.

Albany Plan of Union - A failed 1754 proposal by the seven northern British colonies in anticipation of the Seven Years' War, urging the unification of the colonies under one crown-appointed president.