Unit 2: Period 2: 1607 to 1754

19 terms. Say what each one means, then open the card to check.

• Jamestown

  The first lasting English settlement in North America, founded in Virginia in 1607 by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company hoping for profit.

  Example. Early settlers spent time hunting for gold instead of planting, and many died of disease and hunger in the first winters.

• Tobacco economy

  The Chesapeake way of life built on growing tobacco for export, which needed large amounts of land and labor and spread settlers along the rivers.

  Example. Planters along the James and York rivers loaded tobacco onto ships at their own wharves, so few large towns grew in Virginia.

• Headright system

  A Chesapeake land policy that gave a settler land, usually 50 acres, for each person whose passage to the colony he paid.

  Example. A planter who paid the passage of ten servants could claim about 500 acres, so headrights rewarded bringing in laborers.

• Indentured servitude

  A labor contract in which a person agreed to work for a master for a set number of years, often four to seven, in return for passage and keep.

  Example. A young English laborer might sign on to work five years in Maryland, hoping for land and freedom dues when the term ended.

• Puritans

  English Protestants who wanted to purify the Church of England; many moved to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s to build a godly community.

  Example. Puritan towns built a meetinghouse at the center and expected families to attend sermons and keep strict moral rules.

• House of Burgesses

  Virginia's elected assembly, first meeting in 1619, the earliest representative lawmaking body in the English colonies.

  Example. In 1619 the first assembly met in the church at Jamestown, with members elected from each settlement sitting alongside the governor and his council.

• Quakers and Pennsylvania

  Members of the Society of Friends, who stressed an inner light in every person; William Penn founded Pennsylvania for them in 1681 with broad religious toleration.

  Example. Lutherans, Mennonites and Presbyterians all settled in Pennsylvania because the colony did not force anyone into an official church.

• New France

  France's North American empire, built on the fur trade and alliances with Native peoples, with far fewer settlers than the English colonies.

  Example. Quebec, founded in 1608, was the center of a colony that still had only a few thousand French settlers in the 1660s.

• Pueblo Revolt

  A 1680 uprising in which Pueblo peoples, led by Popé, drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for about twelve years.

  Example. Rebels burned churches and killed friars because Spanish missions had tried to wipe out Pueblo religious practices.

• King Philip's War

  A 1675 to 1676 war between New England colonists and Native peoples led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, called King Philip by the English.

  Example. Native warriors attacked dozens of frontier towns, but the colonists won, and many Native survivors were killed or sold into slavery.

• Bacon's Rebellion

  A 1676 armed uprising in Virginia, led by Nathaniel Bacon, against Governor William Berkeley and his government.

  Example. After Bacon died of illness in late 1676 the uprising collapsed, and Governor Berkeley had more than twenty rebels hanged.

• Mercantilism

  The economic idea that a nation grows strong by exporting more than it imports, using colonies as sources of raw materials and markets for its goods.

  Example. Parliament's Iron Act of 1750 let colonists make raw iron but limited new mills for finished iron goods, so colonists would buy those from English makers.

• Navigation Acts

  A series of English laws, the first passed in 1651, that set rules for how and where the colonies could trade.

  Example. Enforcement varied a great deal, and for long stretches colonial merchants found ways around the rules.

• Salutary neglect

  Britain's loose enforcement of its trade laws in the early 1700s, which let colonial merchants and assemblies run much of their own affairs.

  Example. For decades, officials in London rarely looked closely at the laws colonial assemblies passed, and the assemblies made most local decisions on their own.

• Middle Passage

  The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, in which crowding, disease and cruelty killed many captives.

  Example. Captives were chained below deck for weeks, and many died of dysentery and other illnesses before the ships reached port.

• Stono Rebellion

  A 1739 uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina, the largest in the mainland colonies before the Revolution, which led to harsher slave laws.

  Example. After the revolt was crushed, the colony passed the Negro Act of 1740, which banned enslaved people from gathering or learning to write.

• Great Awakening

  A wave of Protestant revivals in the 1730s and 1740s that stressed emotional conversion and a personal relationship with God.

  Example. Crowds of thousands gathered in fields to hear traveling preachers, and many listeners wept or cried out as they felt themselves converted.

• Enlightenment

  An intellectual movement that stressed reason, science and natural rights, spread in the colonies through books, newspapers and colleges.

  Example. Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity and his library company in Philadelphia reflected the Enlightenment trust in reason.

• Anglicization

  The growing pull of British goods, fashions and ideas on colonial life in the 1700s, which made many colonists feel more British.

  Example. Wealthy colonists bought English teapots and furniture and read London newspapers to keep up with British tastes.