Native Peoples and Contact
This exposed land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska is the route most researchers believe early peoples used to reach North America.
What is Beringia?
Historians use "God, ___, and Glory" to summarize European motives for exploration — fill in the blank.
What is Gold?
This Chesapeake cash crop shaped the region's entire labor system, from indentured servants to enslaved Africans.
What is tobacco?
This forced transatlantic voyage brought enslaved Africans to the Americas under brutal conditions.What is the Middle Passage?
What is the Middle Passage?
This 1730s–40s religious revival movement emphasized personal, emotional conversion experiences over traditional church authority.
What is the Great Awakening?
This Mississippian city near modern St. Louis was one of the largest urban centers in pre-Columbian North America.
What is Cahokia?
This colonial power's model relied on small numbers of settlers and close trade alliances — including intermarriage — with Native nations.
What is France (or the Netherlands)?
This New England institution let residents vote directly on community matters.
What is the town meeting?
This 1676 Virginia uprising involved both indentured servants and enslaved people rebelling against Governor Berkeley.
What is Bacon's Rebellion?
This preacher's sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," became the most famous of the Great Awakening.
Who is Jonathan Edwards?
This Spanish system granted colonists the right to demand forced labor and tribute from a specific Native American population.
What is the encomienda system?
This English king created the Dominion of New England in 1686 to bring the New England colonies under tighter royal control.
Who is James II?
This region was known for cereal crop exports and became the most religiously and ethnically diverse group of British colonies.
What are the Middle Colonies?
This 1675–76 New England war was led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom.
What is King Philip's War (Metacom's War)?
This English philosopher's idea of the "social contract" argued that government exists only by the consent of the governed.
Who is John Locke?
This 1680 uprising, led by Popé, drove Spanish colonizers out of present-day New Mexico for over a decade.
What is the Pueblo Revolt?
This colonial printer's 1735 libel trial and acquittal became an early precedent for freedom of the press.
Who is John Peter Zenger?
In this region, enslaved people often made up the majority of the population due to full-scale plantation economies.
What is the Southern Atlantic Coast (or the British West Indies)?
The majority of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic during this period were sent here — not to the mainland colonies.
What is the West Indies?
This term describes the process by which the British colonies grew culturally and politically closer to England, even while developing a distinct identity of their own.
What is Anglicization?
This term describes the catastrophic decline in Native American populations following European contact, driven largely by epidemic disease.
What is demographic collapse?
This economic theory held that colonies exist primarily to benefit the mother country's wealth and trade balance.
What is mercantilism?
This land grant system awarded acreage to Virginia colonists — or those who paid for a servant's passage — as an incentive to settle.
What is the headright system?
This 1715 war saw a former close trading partner turn against Carolina and nearly destroy the colony.
What is the Yamasee War?
This distinct language and culture was developed by enslaved West Africans in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry.
What is Gullah?