Patterns of European Colonization
This European power focused primarily on the fur trade and maintained relatively friendly relations with Native Americans through alliances and intermarriage.
Who were the French?
Chartered in 1629 by non-separatist Puritans, this colony was led by John Winthrop with the mission of building an exemplary "City Upon a Hill."
What was the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
This brutal transatlantic leg of the Triangular Trade network force-shipped millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas under inhumane conditions.
What was the Middle Passage?
This major religious revival swept the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, emphasizing emotional, personal salvation and weakening traditional church hierarchies.
What was the First Great Awakening?
This 1675–1676 conflict in New England, led by Wampanoag leader Metacom, was the last major Native attempt to stop English settlement expansion in the region.
What was King Philip's War?
Unlike Spain and France, this nation sent large numbers of male and female colonists seeking permanent agricultural settlement and establishing strict social separation from Native Americans.
Who were the British / English?
Known as the "breadbasket" of the colonies, this region exported wheat and grain and had the highest level of ethnic and religious diversity among the British colonies.
What were the Middle Colonies?
This 1676 uprising of frontier settlers against Governor Berkeley highlighted class tensions between landless former indentured servants and elites, accelerating the shift toward chattel slavery.
What was Bacon's Rebellion?
These two New England theologians emphasizing divine wrath and human repentance and were the pioneers of the First Great Awakening.
Who was Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield?
Banished from Massachusetts Bay for preaching antinomianism—the idea that faith alone, not obedience to moral law, guarantees salvation.
Who was Anne Hutchinson?
First enacted on a Caribbean island in 1661, this legal framework denied enslaved people basic human rights, classified them entirely as property, and served as the direct model for slave codes established throughout South Carolina and the American South.
What was the Barbados Slave Code?
Established in 1607, this was the first permanent English settlement in North America.
What was Jamestown?
Founded in 1632 as a haven for English Catholics, this colony passed the Act of Toleration in 1649 to protect all Trinitarian Christians.
What was Maryland?
Poor European immigrants who bound themselves to 4 to 10 years of unpaid labor in exchange for passage across the Atlantic to the colonies.
Who were Indentured Servants?
This European intellectual movement emphasized human reason, natural rights, and scientific inquiry, deeply shaping colonial leaders like Benjamin Franklin.
What was the Enlightenment?
Introduced to Virginia by John Rolfe in 1612, this cash crop saved Jamestown economically but caused severe soil depletion and drove aggressive territorial expansion.
What is Tobacco?
Drafted in 1649 to protect Catholics from a growing Protestant majority in the Chesapeake, this landmark legislative act guaranteed freedom of worship to all Trinitarian Christians, though it prescribed the death penalty for anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus.
What was the Maryland Act of Toleration (or Act Concerning Religion)?
This Dutch settlement at the mouth of the Hudson River served as a major fur-trading post before being captured by the British in 1664 and renamed New York.
What was New Amsterdam?
Founded in 1681 as a "Holy Experiment," this colony was built on Quaker principles of religious freedom, nonviolence, and fair negotiations for Native land.
What was Pennsylvania?
Unlike indentured servitude, this legal system defined enslaved human beings as personal property and established that child status inherited directly from the mother.
What is Chattel (Racial) Slavery?
The Calvinist belief that God determined the eternal destiny of every human soul at the beginning of creation.
What is Predestination?
Founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, this colony was created both as a haven for English debtors and as a military buffer against Spanish Florida.
What was Georgia?
Enacted in 1733 to protect British West Indian sugar planters, this heavy parliamentary import tax on foreign sugar and syrup was routinely bypassed by American merchants through widespread bribery and smuggling, laying a blueprint for future anti-tax resistance.
What was the Molasses Act?
The 1588 defeat of this massive naval fleet by England crippled Spanish dominance and paved the way for English expansion in North America.
What was the Spanish Armada?
This land policy granted 50 acres of land to anyone who paid for their own or another's passage to Virginia, vastly increasing the importation of indentured servants.
What was the Headright System?
The unwritten British policy of the late 17th and early 18th centuries that relaxed strict enforcement of parliamentary laws, allowing colonial self-governance to flourish.
What is Salutary Neglect?
The Puritan belief that intense personal dedication to hard work and earthly duties was a visible sign of personal salvation.
What is the Protestant Work Ethic?
The 1692 outbreak of social panic in Massachusetts that led to the trial and execution of 20 individuals accused of practicing witchcraft.
What were the Salem Witch Trials?
Type of British colony granted to individual owners or groups (like Pennsylvania or Maryland) as opposed to being directly ruled by the Crown.
What is a Proprietary Colony?
Written aboard ship in 1620, this document established a self-governing "civil body politic" based on majority rule among male Pilgrims at Plymouth.
What was the Mayflower Compact?
This 1739 South Carolina uprising was the largest slave rebellion in the British mainland colonies during the colonial era, resulting in harsher slave codes.
What was the Stono Rebellion?
These terms were used to distinguish traditional ministers who opposed the emotionalism of the Great Awakening from the revivalist ministers who embraced it.
What were "Old Lights" and "New Lights"?
The primary institution of local self-government in New England, where property-owning male church members gathered directly to elect officials and vote on local laws.
What was the Town Meeting?
Issued in 1598, this royal decree granted limited religious toleration to French Protestants (Huguenots), stabilizing France and enabling its colonial efforts.
What was the Edict of Nantes?
Before the dominance of cotton in the 19th century, these two major cash crops drove the plantation economies of South Carolina and Georgia.
What were Rice and Indigo?
The commercial route carrying New England rum to Africa, enslaved workers to the West Indies, and sugar/molasses back to New England.
What was the Triangular Trade?
This 1735 trial of a New York printer established the legal precedent that truthful statements against government officials do not constitute seditious libel.
What was the John Peter Zenger Trial?
Fiercely independent Protestant ethnic group of Scottish descent who fled Northern Ireland and settled heavily along the violent Appalachian frontier in the 18th century.
Who were the Scots-Irish?
This 1661 legal code denied basic human rights to enslaved workers; its adoption in Carolina established the framework for mainland chattel slavery.
What was the Barbados Slave Code?
Radical Puritans who insisted on completely breaking away from the Church of England, eventually founding Plymouth Colony in 1620.
Who were the Separatists?
First passed by Parliament in 1651, these acts required colonial trade to be carried out exclusively on English ships and routed through English ports.
Navigation Acts/Laws
Introduced in 1662, this policy allowed unconverted children of Puritan full church members to baptize their own children, softening membership rules.
What was the Half-Way Covenant?
This 1636–1638 conflict in Connecticut led to the near-total destruction of a dominant local Native tribe by English colonists and their Narragansett allies.
What was the Pequot War?