Colonization & Contact
This 1494 treaty, brokered by the pope, divided New World claims between Spain and Portugal.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
This system bound mostly poor European laborers to work for a set number of years in exchange for passage to the colonies.
What is indentured servitude?
This 1730s–1740s religious revival emphasized emotional preaching and personal salvation, challenging established church authority.
What is the (First) Great Awakening?
This war, fought from 1754 to 1763, pitted Britain and its colonists against France and its Native allies for control of North America.
What is the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War)?
This 1765 law taxed printed materials in the colonies and helped popularize the rallying cry "no taxation without representation."
What is the Stamp Act?
This Spanish labor system granted colonists the right to demand tribute and labor from Native peoples in exchange for "protection" and conversion.
What is the encomienda system?
This 1676 Virginia uprising, led by a disgruntled planter against the royal governor, exposed class tensions and accelerated the colonial shift toward African slavery.
What is Bacon's Rebellion?
This English preacher's dramatic open-air sermons made him one of the most famous voices of the Great Awakening across the colonies.
Who is George Whitefield?
Issued in 1763, this British order forbade colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains.
What is the Proclamation of 1763?
In this 1770 incident, British soldiers killed five colonists in Boston, an event Patriots like Paul Revere used as propaganda.
What is the Boston Massacre?
This Columbian Exchange crop from the Americas became a calorie-dense staple that fueled major population growth in Europe.
What is the potato (or maize)?
This economic theory held that colonies existed to enrich the mother country by supplying raw materials and buying its finished goods.
What is mercantilism?
This intellectual movement emphasized reason, natural rights, and scientific inquiry over traditional religious and monarchical authority.
What is the Enlightenment?
This British policy of loosely enforcing trade regulations before 1763 gave colonial merchants significant economic freedom and encouraged smuggling.
What is salutary neglect?
This 1773 law gave the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies, provoking a famous protest in Boston Harbor.
What is the Tea Act?
This hierarchical system in Spanish colonial society ranked individuals by racial ancestry, with peninsulares at the top and enslaved and Indigenous people at the bottom.
What is the casta system?
Starting in 1651, these laws required that colonial trade be carried on English ships and routed through English ports.
What are the Navigation Acts?
This Puritan minister delivered the famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" during the Great Awakening.
Who is Jonathan Edwards?
This Odawa war leader organized a pan-tribal uprising in 1763 against British forts in the Great Lakes region, helping prompt the Proclamation Line.
Who is Pontiac (Pontiac's War)?
Colonists called these 1774 laws the "Intolerable Acts" after they closed Boston's port and revoked Massachusetts' colonial charter in response to the Boston Tea Party.
What are the Coercive Acts?
This 1622 uprising, led by Opechancanough, nearly destroyed the Virginia colony and hardened English attitudes toward Native peoples.
What is the Powhatan Uprising of 1622?
Enacted in 1705, this set of Virginia laws legally defined enslaved people as property, stripped them of nearly all rights, and became a model for slave codes across the South.
What is the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705?
This English philosopher's ideas about natural rights — life, liberty, and property — and government by consent of the governed heavily shaped colonial political thought.
Who is John Locke?
Proposed at the Albany Congress in 1754, this plan called for a unified colonial government but was rejected by the individual colonial legislatures.
What is the Albany Plan of Union?
Published anonymously in January 1776, this widely read pamphlet used plain, accessible language to attack monarchy and build the case for American independence.
What is Common Sense (by Thomas Paine)?