European Exploration
This exchange of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds began after Columbus’s voyages.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
This colony was founded by William Penn as a place for Quakers to practice their religion freely.
What is Pennsylvania?
This 1774 meeting of colonial delegates was called to respond to the Intolerable Acts.
What is the First Continental Congress?
This English document established the principle that even the king must obey the law.
What is the Magna Carta?
This type of legislature has two separate houses, like the Senate and the House of Representatives.
What is a bicameral legislature?
He was the English explorer who tried to start a colony at Roanoke Island and helped bring tobacco to England.
Who is Sir Walter Raleigh?
These workers agreed to labor for a set number of years in exchange for passage to the New World.
Who were indentured servants?
This system allowed colonists to make their own laws and govern themselves in the early American colonies.
What is self-government?
This idea from John Locke influenced the Declaration of Independence by stating that people can overthrow an unjust government.
What is the social contract?
This 1787 law established a process for adding new states and banned slavery in certain U.S. territories.
What is the Northwest Ordinance?
Unlike Spain and England, this European nation focused on fur trading rather than colonization in North America.
What is France?
Many Europeans came to America to avoid religious persecution at home.
What is religious freedom?
This pamphlet by Thomas Paine urged colonists to break away from Britain.
What is Common Sense?
This 1620 agreement established self-government based on majority rule among the Pilgrims.
What is the Mayflower Compact?
The Founders created a weak national government under the Articles because they feared this.
What is tyranny like under British rule?
This economic system said that a nation’s power depended on its wealth, leading European countries to control trade and build colonies.
What is mercantilism?
This region’s economy relied on wheat, trade, and manufacturing, earning it the nickname “the breadbasket colonies.”
What are the Middle Colonies?
These Enlightenment ideas—natural rights and the social contract—helped justify independence from Britain.
What are John Locke’s ideas?
This English document guaranteed rights like trial by jury and inspired parts of the Bill of Rights.
What is the English Bill of Rights?
This compromise at the Constitutional Convention created a two-house legislature to balance large and small states.
What is the Great Compromise?
Spain explored to gain wealth, land, and spread this.
What is religion? (or specifically, Christianity)
This 1619 colonial assembly was the first representative government in America.
What is the Virginia House of Burgesses?
This British law forbade colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains after the French and Indian War.
What is the Proclamation of 1763?
These essays were written to explain and support the U.S. Constitution and convince states to ratify it.
What are the Federalist Papers?
Unlike the Articles, the U.S. Constitution gave the federal government this crucial power it previously lacked.
What is the power to tax and enforce laws?