Colonial History
Harbors, abundant forests, rocky soil, and a short growing season encouraged fishing, shipbuilding, and trade in this New England region.
What are the New England colonies?
Document that would officially proclaim independence and war to the King from the Colonists.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
The system designed so each branch of government can limit the others to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful.
What are checks and balances?
The 1803 purchase that doubled U.S. territory and gave control of the Mississippi River.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
The process of states leaving the Union that precipitated the Civil War.
What is secession?
Fertile soil and a middle-latitude climate made this colonial region known as the “breadbasket” for its grain production.
What is the Middle Atlantic region?
According to the Declaration of Independence, the government’s fundamental purpose is to do this for its citizens.
What is protect people’s natural rights?
The Constitutional Convention compromise that created a bicameral legislature with representation by population in one house and equal state representation in the other.
What is the Great Compromise (or Connecticut Compromise)?
The idea that the United States was destined to expand westward to the Pacific Ocean.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This state was the first to secede.
What is South Carolina?
The differences between crops grown in the Southern Colonies and crops grown in the Middle colonies.
What are...
Middle - Wheat, Barley, and Rye?
Southern - Rice, Indigo, and Tobacco?
This 1776 pamphlet by Thomas Paine argued directly for American independence from Britain.
What is Common Sense?
These are government practices and institutions (like political parties or the president’s cabinet) that are influential but not written in the Constitution.
What is the unwritten constitution?
This 1849 event caused a rapid population surge in California and accelerated westward migration.
What is the California Gold Rush?
Violent confrontations in the Kansas Territory in the 1850s over whether it would allow slavery were nicknamed this.
What is Bleeding Kansas?
The invention that dramatically increased cotton processing speed and unintentionally increased demand for enslaved labor.
What is the Cotton Gin?
Paine argued that America should not be ruled by this distant island nation because the relationship was harmful and unnatural.
What is Great Britain?
Under federalism, powers are divided between these two levels of government.
What are the national (federal) government and the states?
By gaining full control of this river, western farmers could ship goods to market more easily.
What is the Mississippi River?
This abolitionist led a raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 aiming to start an uprising.
Who is John Brown?
The First Assembly of elected Representatives
What was the Virginia House of Burgesses?
Thomas Jefferson drew heavily on this Enlightenment philosopher’s ideas about natural rights and the social contract.
Who is John Locke?
The 1787 debate between the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan focused mainly on how to determine this in Congress.
What is representation (proportional vs. equal)?
This set of laws in 1850 attempted to ease sectional tensions by admitting California as a free state and strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act.
What is the Compromise of 1850?
One major advantage the North had over the South during the Civil War that helped sustain its armies and economy.
What is greater manufacturing capability (industrial resources)?