Unit 1: The American Revolution
This is the date that the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, was signed.
These are the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which protect individual liberties.
What is the Bill of Rights?
This invention, which cleaned the seeds out of cotton, made cotton more profitable.
What is the cotton gin?
This 19th-century belief held that the United States was destined by God to expand its dominion and democracy across the entire North American continent.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This 1765 act required colonists to pay a tax on all paper documents, including newspapers and playing cards.
What is the Stamp Act?
This system ensures that no single branch of government—Executive, Legislative, or Judicial—becomes too powerful.
What are Checks and Balances?
These laws created a racial hierarchy and prevented enslaved Africans from gathering, reading/writing, having relationships with white people, etc.
What are the slave codes?
This massive land purchase from France in 1803 doubled the size of the United States and opened up territory west of the Mississippi River.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
This 1770 event began as a street brawl between colonists and British soldiers but ended in the deaths of five colonists.
What is the Boston Massacre?
The first three words of the Constitution, which establish the idea of "popular sovereignty" (rule by the people).
What is "We the People"?
This was the network of secret routes and safe houses used by enslaved people to escape to the North or Canada.
What is the Underground Railroad?
To maintain a balance between free and slave states, this 1820 agreement allowed Maine to enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
This slogan was used by colonists to express their anger over being taxed by a British Parliament that did not represent them.
What is "No Taxation Without Representation"?
This compromise reached during the Constitutional Convention decided how enslaved people would be counted for representation.
What is the Three-Fifths Compromise?
She was a famous "conductor" of the Underground Railroad, leading dozens of people to freedom despite a bounty on her head.
Who is Harriet Tubman?
Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery was prohibited in any new territories formed north of this specific line of latitude.
What is the 36°30' parallel (or the Mason-Dixon line)?
To punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party, Britain passed these harsh laws, which colonists called "Intolerable."
What are the Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts?
This branch of government has the power to declare laws unconstitutional through the process of judicial review.
What is the Judicial Branch?
This 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia was the most significant in U.S. history and led to even stricter "slave codes."
What is Nat Turner’s Rebellion?
In what year did the U.S. defeat Mexico in war and gain a huge territory including modern-day California, Arizona, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico/Colorado?
What is 1848?