Colonial Era Flashcards
🔹 New England Colonies 🔹
🔹 New England Colonies 🔹
Economy
There were considerable differences between the New England, Middle and Southern regions. Economic activities and trade were dependant of the environment in which the Colonists lived. The geography and climate impacted the trade and economic activities of New England Colonies. In the New England towns along the coast, the colonists made their living fishing, whaling, and shipbuilding. The fish included cod, mackerel, herring, halibut, hake, bass and sturgeon. Whale oil was a valuable resource as it could be used in lamps. Farming was difficult in New England for crops like wheat because of the poor soil but corn, pumpkins, rye, squash and beans were planted. The Northern Colonies of New England concentrated in manufacture and focussed on town life and industries such as ship building and the manufacture and export of rum. See Triangular Trade.
Puritans
New England life seemed to burst with possibilities.
The life expectancy of its citizens became longer than that of Old England, and much longer than the Southern English colonies. Children were born at nearly twice the rate in Maryland and Virginia. It is often said that New England invented grandparents, for it was here that people in great numbers first grew old enough to see their children bear children.
🔹 Middle Colonies 🔹
🔹 Middle Colonies 🔹
Quakers/William Penn
William Penn and other Quakers within the Middle Colonies believed that everyone had to seek God in his or her own way. Penn viewed his new colony as a “Holy Experiment” offering religious tolerance and stronger governments. Other English thinkers in the 1600s shared these ideas but in Pennsylvania, religious tolerance became the law.
Benjamin Franklin
Throughout the early years of the English colonies, most Europeans did not take Americans seriously. Most were seen as the chaff of English society, bound for America because they could not make it in England. Many viewed Americans as irrational religious fanatics or crude pioneers. American art literature, and science were snubbed by most cultured Europeans. Benjamin Franklin would help them take notice.
🔹 Southern Colonies 🔹
🔹 Southern Colonies 🔹
Tobacco
Virginia’s economic future did not lie with gold. There was too little gold to be found there. Looking for new ways to make its investments pay dividends, the Virginia Company of London began encouraging multiple ventures by 1618.
Slave Labor
Before the Civil War, nearly 4 million black slaves toiled in the American South. Modem scholars have assembled a great deal of evidence showing that few slaves accepted their lack of freedom or enjoyed life on the plantation.
Pocahontas/John Smith
Pocahontas daughter of Powhatan; saved John Smith from his captors; her marriage to John Rolfe sealed peace agreement of First Anglo-Powhatan War.
(1580-June 21, 1631) was an English soldier, sailor, and author. He is remembered for his role in establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, and his brief association with the Native American girl Pocahontas during an altercation with the Powhatan Confederacy and her father, Chief Powhatan. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony (based at Jamestown) between 1607 and 1609, and led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay.
🔹 Southwestern Colonies 🔹
🔹 Southwestern Colonies 🔹
Catholic Missions
Catholic mission became the became the central institution in colonial New Mexico until the missionaries’ efforts to suppress native religious customs provoked and Indian uprising called Pope’s Rebellion in 1680. The Pueblo rebels destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed a score of priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers. In a reversal of Cortes’s treatment of Aztec temples, more than a century earlier, the Indians rebuilt a kiva, or ceremonial religious chamber, on the ruins of the Spanish plaza at Santa Fe.
Conquistadors
Sixteenth-century Spaniards who fanned out across the Americas, from Colorado to Argentina, eventually conquering the Aztec and Incan empires. They did this in the service of God, as well as in search of gold and glory. *Vasco Nunez Balboa and Ferdinand Magellan.
