Studying for APUSH


Chapter 1 — Indigenous America

  1. Q: What land bridge did early Native ancestors cross into the Americas? A: Beringia, 12,000–20,000 years ago.

  2. Q: What were the "Three Sisters"? A: Corn, beans, and squash.

  3. Q: What was Cahokia? A: The largest Mississippian city, near modern St. Louis, peaking at 10,000–30,000 people around 1050–1100 CE.

  4. Q: What caused Cahokia's decline? A: Ecological strain (deforestation, drought) combined with internal political conflict, by 1300 CE.

  5. Q: What system did Spain use to extract forced Native labor? A: The encomienda.

  6. Q: Who conquered the Aztec Empire, and how? A: Hernán Cortés (1519–21), using Native allies, smallpox, and a siege of Tenochtitlán.

  7. Q: Who conquered the Inca Empire? A: Francisco Pizarro (1533), exploiting a smallpox-triggered succession war.

  8. Q: Roughly what share of the pre-Columbian population died within ~130 years of contact? A: Up to 90–95%, mostly from disease.

Chapter 2 — Colliding Cultures
9. Q: What was the Black Legend? A: English/Protestant propaganda (using Las Casas's own writings) framing Spanish colonization as uniquely cruel, to justify English colonization as more humane.
10. Q: What was the "middle ground"? A: A negotiated space of cooperation between the French and Native peoples in the Great Lakes region.
11. Q: Who "bought" Manhattan, and from whom? A: Peter Minuit, from the Munsee, in 1626.
12. Q: What 1588 event opened the Atlantic to English colonization? A: Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
13. Q: What happened to the Roanoke colony? A: It vanished (1587–90); only "Croatoan" was found carved at the site.
14. Q: What Native confederacy kept Jamestown alive early on? A: The Powhatan Confederacy, led by Wahunsenacawh.
15. Q: What crop saved Jamestown economically, and who introduced it? A: Tobacco, John Rolfe, 1616.
16. Q: What two things happened in Virginia in 1619? A: The House of Burgesses first met, and the first ~20 Africans were sold to Virginia colonists.
17. Q: What phrase did Winthrop use for Massachusetts Bay's mission? A: "A city upon a hill" (1630).
18. Q: Why was New England more demographically stable than the Chesapeake? A: Family-based immigration, healthier climate, and a 1610s epidemic that had already devastated the regional Native population before settlement.

Chapter 3 — British North America
19. Q: What 1662 Virginia law made slavery self-perpetuating? A: A child's enslaved/free status followed the mother's condition.
20. Q: What was the Glorious Revolution? A: The 1688 overthrow of Catholic King James II, replaced by Protestant William and Mary, with little bloodshed in England.
21. Q: What was the Dominion of New England? A: James II's 1686 forced merger of New England, New York, and New Jersey under Sir Edmund Andros.
22. Q: What did colonists do when they learned of the Glorious Revolution? A: Overthrew the Dominion government and restored their previous provincial governments.
23. Q: What triggered Bacon's Rebellion? A: A dispute over stolen pigs that escalated into war with the Susquehannock, worsened by Berkeley refusing aggressive action against Native peoples.
24. Q: What was the long-term consequence of Bacon's Rebellion? A: Elites shifted toward race-based enslaved labor, fearing a mixed-race underclass uniting against them.
25. Q: What was the Pueblo Revolt (1680)? A: A pan-Pueblo uprising led by Popé that drove the Spanish from New Mexico for 12 years.
26. Q: What was the Yamasee War (1715)? A: A war in which Carolina's former Native allies nearly destroyed the colony; afterward Carolina shifted to importing enslaved Africans.
27. Q: What was the Walking Purchase (1737)? A: A fraudulent Pennsylvania land deal with the Delaware, using trained runners to claim far more land than intended.
28. Q: Who was Anthony Johnson? A: A formerly indentured Black Virginian landowner whose 1655 lawsuit against John Casor set a precedent for lifetime, non-crime-based servitude.

Chapter 4 — Colonial Society
29. Q: What was the Consumer Revolution? A: Rising colonial prosperity and credit that tied colonists economically closer to Britain even as a distinct colonial culture emerged.
30. Q: What happened in the Stono Rebellion (1739)? A: ~20 enslaved South Carolinians, led by Jemmy, seized weapons and marched toward Spanish Florida, killing colonists; crushed within a day.
31. Q: What law followed the Stono Rebellion? A: South Carolina's 1740 Negro Act, tightening slave codes.
32. Q: Who were the two key figures of the First Great Awakening? A: Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
33. Q: What is the New Lights vs. Old Lights split? A: New Lights embraced revivalism; Old Lights favored traditional worship.
34. Q: What ended the Seven Years' War, and what did it decide? A: Treaty of Paris (1763); France ceded Canada and land east of the Mississippi to Britain.
35. Q: What was Pontiac's War (1763)? A: A pan-tribal uprising against British posts in the Great Lakes/Ohio region after Britain ended French-style gift diplomacy.
36. Q: What was the Proclamation of 1763? A: A British law barring colonial settlement west of the Appalachians.
37. Q: What Enlightenment figure exemplifies rational self-improvement in this era? A: Benjamin Franklin.
38. Q: How did the Seven Years' War lead toward the Revolution? A: Britain's war debt pushed it to seek new tax revenue from the colonies.

Chapter 5 — The American Revolution
39. Q: What was the Stamp Act (1765)? A: The first direct internal tax on colonists, sparking "no taxation without representation."
40. Q: What was the Boston Massacre (1770)? A: British soldiers fired on a harassing crowd, killing five colonists.
41. Q: What was the Boston Tea Party (1773) protesting? A: The Tea Act, which preserved Parliament's taxation principle and a British tea monopoly.
42. Q: What were the Intolerable/Coercive Acts (1774)? A: Britain's punitive response to the Tea Party — closing Boston's port, revoking Massachusetts self-government.
43. Q: What did the First Continental Congress (1774) do? A: Coordinated colonial resistance for the first time.
44. Q: What did Patrick Henry argue in March 1775? A: That peaceful appeals had failed and war was already inevitable.
45. Q: What battle started the fighting? A: Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775.
46. Q: What did Paine's Common Sense (Jan. 1776) argue? A: A plain-language attack on monarchy, shifting opinion toward independence.
47. Q: When was the Declaration of Independence adopted? A: July 4, 1776.
48. Q: What was the war's turning point? A: The Battle of Saratoga (1777), which brought France into the war.
49. Q: What battle effectively ended major fighting? A: Yorktown (1781).
50. Q: What treaty ended the war? A: The Treaty of Paris (1783).

Side Readings
51. Q: What is Harriot's "A Briefe and True Report" (R1)? A: A 1588 promotional account of the Roanoke venture, mixing natural history and ethnography to encourage further English investment.
52. Q: Who was Harriot, and for whom did he work? A: Sir Walter Raleigh's scientific adviser on the Roanoke expedition.
53. Q: What is the Anthony Johnson/John Casor case (R4) about? A: A 1655 Virginia ruling that Casor must serve Johnson for life with no crime attached.
54. Q: What is Zinn's argument in "Drawing the Color Line" (R5)? A: Racism in colonial Virginia was manufactured by specific economic/political conditions, not inevitable.
55. Q: How does Zinn's take on Bacon's Rebellion differ from the Yawp's? A: Zinn frames it as elites deliberately engineering racial division; the Yawp emphasizes labor supply and land conflict.
56. Q: What is the central image in Edwards's "Sinners" (R6)? A: A sinner as a spider dangled over hellfire by a thread of God's mercy.
57. Q: What's the source-reliability issue with Patrick Henry's speech (R7)? A: No 1775 transcript survives — the text was reconstructed by William Wirt in 1817 from elderly witnesses.
58. Q: What was Franklin's method in "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection" (R8)? A: One of 13 virtues at a time, tracked on a daily chart, in sequence.
59. Q: What Enlightenment idea underlies the Declaration's preamble (R9)? A: Natural rights and government legitimacy from consent of the governed (Lockean theory).
60. Q: What was cut from Jefferson's draft of the Declaration? A: A passage condemning the slave trade.