John
The first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing individual freedoms like speech, religion, and due process.
Bill of Rights
A device used for executions during the French Revolution.
Guillotine
A radical movement (1789–1799) that overthrew the monarchy, challenged inequality, and reshaped French society.
French Revolution
A 1773 protest in which American colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor to oppose taxation without representation.
Boston Tea Party
The force that attracts objects toward one another.
Gravity
Italian scientist who used telescopes to support heliocentrism.
Galileo Galilei
A 1776 document asserting the American colonies’ break from Britain, citing natural rights and government by consent.
Declaration of Independence
A prison in Paris stormed on July 14, 1789; its fall symbolized the start of the French Revolution.
Bastille
English physicist who formulated laws of motion and gravity.
Isaac Newton
The foundational legal document of the United States, ratified in 1787, establishing a federal government and system of checks and balances.
Constitution
British explorer who charted much of the South Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii; his voyages opened the door to colonization.
James Cook
A powerful region for millennia before colonization, home to ancient civilizations and thriving empires; later, a major colony of the British Empire; ruled directly after 1858 and central to global trade.
India
French philosopher and mathematician who emphasized rational thought and famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”
René Descartes
The first independent Black republic, founded in 1804 after a successful slave revolt against French rule.
Haiti
The armed conflict (1775–1783) between Britain and its American colonies that resulted in U.S. independence.
Revolutionary War
A Polish astronomer who proposed the heliocentric model of the solar system.
Nicolaus Copernicus
An intellectual movement in the 17th–18th centuries that emphasized reason, individual rights, and skepticism of traditional authority.
Enlightenment
A 1803 land deal in which the U.S. bought a vast territory from France.
Louisiana Purcahse
A mechanical automaton built in 1739 that mimicked digestion.
Digesting duck
Queen of France and wife of Louis XVI; also executed during the revolution.
Marie Antoinette
French general who rose to power after the revolution.
Napoleon Bonaparte
A global conflict (1756–1763) between major European powers; its outcome reshaped colonial holdings and increased British debt.
Seven Years War
Leader of the Haitian Revolution; a formerly enslaved man who was a brilliant military strategist and statesman.
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture
A settlement used to exile convicts; Britain established such colonies in Australia starting in 1788.
Prison colony
A Lemhi Shoshone woman, kidnapped at 12, forced to marry a French fur trapper at 13; she guided and translated for the Lewis and Clark expedition through the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.
Sacagawea