First Attempts
This was the first permanent English settlement in North America.
Answer: What is Jamestown?
This English leader helped impose strict rules on the Jamestown settlers and famously insisted that they needed to work if they wanted to eat.
Answer: Who is John Smith?
What was the main goal of the Virginia Company when it established Jamestown?
Answer: To make a profit for its investors.
This group of English colonists came to America seeking greater religious freedom.
Answer: Who are the Pilgrims?
This term refers to the period when Europeans searched for a water route through North America to Asia.
Answer: What is the Northwest Passage?
This English settlement mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind the famous word “CROATOAN.”
Answer: What is Roanoke?
This colonist helped make tobacco a profitable crop in Virginia.
Answer: Who is John Rolfe?
A person who agreed to work for a set number of years in exchange for transportation to America, food, and shelter was called this.
Answer: What is an indentured servant?
This was the colony established by the Pilgrims in present-day Massachusetts.
Answer: What is Plymouth Colony?
Name one challenge that made life difficult for early colonists.
Answer: What is disease, starvation, harsh weather, lack of supplies, conflict, difficult farming conditions, etc.?
Name the company that established Jamestown and hoped to make money from the colony.
Answer: What is the Virginia Company?
This crop became Jamestown's economic “cash crop” and helped save the colony financially.
Answer: What is tobacco?
English government/King essentially gives permission for people to establish a colony.
A charter
Before establishing their settlement, the Pilgrims created this agreement establishing rules for governing their community.
Answer: What is the Mayflower Compact?
these English colonists wanted to establish communities based on their religious beliefs and reform or purify the Church of England.
Answer: Who are the Puritans?
Name two reasons Jamestown nearly failed during its early years.
Answer: What are disease, starvation, lack of preparation, poor leadership, conflict with Native Americans, and/or an overemphasis on searching for wealth rather than producing food?
John Rolfe married this member of the Powhatan people, helping create a period of peace between the English and Powhatan.
Answer: Who is Pocahontas?
What is a joint stock company?
Investors who pool money to fund the founding of a colony/company
Why did the Pilgrims create the Mayflower Compact before establishing their colony?
Answer: What is to establish an agreement for self-government and rules for their community?
After the colonies became established, how did life for many colonists compare with life for the average person in England?
Answer: Many colonists had more access to food and land, and studies suggest that colonists eventually grew taller and lived longer than the average person in England.
What was the name given to the harsh winter of 1609–1610 when Jamestown settlers faced extreme hunger, disease, and death?
Answer: The Starving Time
What was one major reason the English and Powhatan people sometimes had conflict around Jamestown?
Answer: The English wanted more land and resources for their growing colony, which led to tension and conflict with the Powhatan people.
The first representative legislative assembly in Jamestown.
House of Burgesses
Imagine the Pilgrims had never created the Mayflower Compact. What problem might their new colony have faced, and why?
Answer: Students should explain that without an agreed-upon system of government/rules, disagreements over leadership, laws, responsibilities, and decision-making could have created instability.
Consider Jamestown, Plymouth, and the Native American societies already living in North America. What is one major pattern you can identify about the relationship between European colonization and Native peoples? Support your answer with two examples from the unit.
Answer: Students should identify a defensible pattern supported by evidence—for example, relationships could involve trade/cooperation as well as tension, competition, displacement, and violence. Examples could include Powhatan/Jamestown relations and King Philip's War.