Context
A Spanish Jesuit priest and historian who became an early advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas, criticizing the brutality of the encomienda system.
Las Casas
This contested territory was the main point of conflict between the French and the British because of its strategic importance and valuable fur trade with groups like the Algonquin and Shawnee.
Ohio River Valley
A religious revival movement in the mid-1700s, often featuring powerful preachers like George Whitefield, that encouraged personal religious experience and challenged established authority.
The Great Awakening
The unofficial British policy of loosely enforcing trade laws like the Navigation Acts in exchange for the economic loyalty of the colonies, ending after the French and Indian War.
Salutary neglect
This group met in Philadelphia in 1775 after the fighting began; it formed the Continental Army, sent the Olive Branch Petition to King George III, and eventually declared independence.
Second Continental Congress
The indigenous people of the Caribbean who were the first to encounter Christopher Columbus and were nearly wiped out by disease and forced labor.
Taino
The North American portion of the Seven Years' War (1754-1763), where Britain and its colonial allies defeated France and gained control of most of French North America.
French and Indian War
Principles outlined in 'Two Treatises on Government', including natural rights (life, liberty, property), consent of the governed, limited government, and the right to revolution.
John Locke's Social Contract
Laws passed by the British Parliament to control colonial trade, ensuring that the colonies served the economic interests of the mother country.
Navigation Acts
This British monarch was the target of the Declaration of Independence and refused the colonists' Olive Branch Petition, declaring them in a state of rebellion.
King George III
The year a Dutch ship brought the first twenty enslaved Africans to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, marking the start of hereditary slavery in English North America.
1619
The boundary established by Britain following their victory that forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, angering colonists.
Appalachian Mountains
The political ideology, popularized by writings like 'Cato's Letters', that stresses citizen virtue, public service, and representation of the common person in government
Republicanism
The economic theory that held that a nation's power was directly tied to its wealth (Exports>Imports) and that colonies should serve the mother country by supplying raw materials and acting as a market.
Mercantilism
The Patriot's victory here and at Princeton a week later was crucial for raising the Continental Army's morale and inspiring re-enlistments.
Battle of Trenton
What areas represented "Spanish America" in the 16th-17th Centuries?
Parts of modern day Florida and from Argentina to Mexico
An uprising led by an Ottawa chief against British forts in the Great Lakes region towards the end of the French and Indian War, prompted by westward English colonial encroachment.
Pontiac's Rebellion
Principles outlined in early 1775 that independence from Britain, creation of a republic, equality, and the idea that monarchy is an illegitimate form of government.
Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense'
A 1770 confrontation where British soldiers fired on a crowd, killing five (including Crispus Attucks), and the 1773 protest where colonists dumped East India Company tea into the harbor.
Boston Massacre & Boston Tea Party
The turning point battle of the war in 1777 because the Patriot victory convinced the French to form a vital alliance in 1778, providing money, troops, and naval power.
Battle of Saratoga
The policy of responding to, and making 'whole', the enduring harm of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism, not only through direct financial compensation, but through transformative programs that uplift communities of color.
Reparations
A failed proposal by Benjamin Franklin to unify the 13 colonies under one government to better defend themselves during the French and Indian War, symbolized by the "Join or Die" snake cartoon.
Albany Plan
The British argument that colonists were already represented in Parliament because all members acted for the good of the entire empire, regardless of where they were elected.
Virtual Representation
The painful and humiliating act of smearing a person with hot pine tar and then rolling them in feathers, used by colonists to punish officials or collaborators enforcing acts like the Stamp Act.
Tarring and feathering
THIS decisive battle, in which a French admiral's fleet defeated the British navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake, completing the naval blockade of desperately needed reinforcements from England, trapping the British and forcing their surrender.
Battle of Yorktown