Colonial Foundations (1491-1754)
This crop, introduced by John Rolfe, turned Jamestown into a profitable colony and increased demand for indentured servants and enslaved labor.
What is Tobacco?
This pre-revolutionary edict forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachians, angering settlers eager for western expansion.
What is the Proclamation of 1763?
This Chief Justice’s decisions in cases like McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden strengthened federal power over the states.
Who was John Marshall?
This 1848 third-party platform explicitly opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories on economic—not moral—grounds.
What was the Free Soil Party?
This 1912 presidential candidate ran on a “New Nationalism” platform calling for federal regulation of corporations and a stronger welfare state—more radical than his former party’s stance.
Who was Theodore Roosevelt?
These British trade laws were designed to ensure that the American colonies benefited the mother country under the theory of mercantilism.
What are the Navigation Acts?
This intellectual movement emphasized reason, natural rights, and the social contract, influencing revolutionary leaders like Jefferson.
What is the Enlightenment?
This 1830 federal law, championed by Jackson, resulted in the forced removal of Native peoples and was later declared unconstitutional in Worcester v. Georgia.
What was the Indian Removal Act?
This 1857 Supreme Court decision declared that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories.
What was Dred Scott v. Sandford?
This 1947 policy, announced in a speech to Congress, committed the U.S. to containing communism abroad and marked the beginning of Cold War interventionism.
What was the Truman Doctrine?
This New England colony was founded as a Puritan theocracy, while another was founded by Quakers advocating religious tolerance.
What were Massachusetts Bay and Pennsylvania?
This early governing document lacked the power to tax, raise an army, or regulate interstate commerce.
What were the Articles of Confederation?
This ideology justified U.S. expansion as a divine right, but also exacerbated sectional tensions over slavery in new territories.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This document, issued during wartime, redefined the Union’s moral purpose but freed no slaves in border states or already-Union-controlled areas.
What was the Emancipation Proclamation?
This 1965 immigration law abolished national origins quotas, dramatically reshaping American demographics and enabling mass immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
What was the Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act)?
This 1676 uprising of former indentured servants led elites to increasingly rely on enslaved African labor to prevent alliances between poor whites and Blacks.
What was Bacon’s Rebellion?
This Massachusetts uprising by farmers demanding debt relief revealed the federal government's weakness under the Articles.
What was Shays’ Rebellion?
This 1832–33 crisis is cited by historians like Daniel Walker Howe as the first serious test of federal supremacy vs. state sovereignty, with Jackson paradoxically defending unionism despite his anti-federal leanings.
What was the Nullification Crisis?
This Reconstruction-era constitutional conflict between President Johnson and Radical Republicans culminated in a landmark showdown over separation of powers and executive authority.
What was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson?
This movement of the 1960s and ’70s critiqued the mainstream civil rights strategy of legal reform, emphasizing Black autonomy, self-defense, and cultural pride.
What was the Black Power movement?
This interpretive framework emphasizes transatlantic cultural and economic exchange rather than viewing early America in isolation.
What is the Atlantic World perspective?
This 1787 event, described by historian Gordon Wood as a “coup d’état by nationalist elites,” reveals how fears of democratic excess shaped the framing of the Constitution.
What was the Constitutional Convention?
This 1840s proposal, often cited by historians as an early spark of the slavery conflict, aimed to ban slavery in any territory gained from Mexico.
What was the Wilmot Proviso?
This political compromise also known as the Wormley Agreement ended military Reconstruction and is viewed by many historians as the formal abandonment of Black civil rights in the South.
What was the Compromise of 1877?
This 1971 internal government report, later leaked, exposed years of deception in U.S. Vietnam policy and sparked a constitutional battle over press freedom and executive secrecy.
What were the Pentagon Papers?