Unit 1

Question 1

Treaty of Tordesillas

Answer 1

A 1494 agreement between Portugal and Spain, declaring that newly discovered lands to the west of an imaginary line in the Atlantic Ocean would belong to Spain and newly discovered lands to the east of the line would belong to Portugal.

Question 2

Mercantilism

Answer 2

An economic policy under which nations sought to increase their wealth and power by obtaining large amounts of gold and silver and by selling more goods than they bought.

Question 3

Columbian Exchange

Answer 3

The exchange of plants, animals, diseases, and technologies between the Americas and the rest of the world following Columbus’s voyages.

Question 4

Joint-stock company

Answer 4

A company made up of a group of shareholders. Each shareholder contributes some money to the company and receives some share of the company’s profits and debts.

Question 5

Indentured servant

Answer 5

Colonists who received free passage to North America in exchange for working without pay for a certain number of years.

Question 6

“Starving Time”

Answer 6

During the winter of 1609-1610, when food shortages, fractured leadership, and a siege by Powhatan Indian warriors killed two of every three colonists at James Fort in Jamestown.

Question 7

House of Burgesses

Answer 7

Elected assembly in colonial Virginia, created in 1618.

Question 8

Maryland Act of Toleration

Answer 8

Ordered by Lord Baltimore after a Protestant was made governor of Maryland at the demand of the colony’s large Protestant population. The act guaranteed religious freedom to all Christians.

Question 9

Puritans

Answer 9

A religious group who wanted to purify the Church of England. They came to America for religious freedom and settled in Massachusetts Bay.

Question 10

Pilgrims

Answer 10

Group of English Protestant dissenters who established Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1620 to seek religious freedom after having lived briefly in the Netherlands.

Question 11

Mayflower Compact

Answer 11

The first agreement for self-government in America. It was signed by the 41 men on the Mayflower and set up a government for the Plymouth colony.

Question 12

John Winthrop

Answer 12

Puritan governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Speaker of “City upon a hill”

Question 13

Salutary neglect

Answer 13

An English policy of not strictly enforcing laws in its colonies

Question 14

Roger Williams

Answer 14

A dissenter who clashed with the Massachusetts Puritans over separation of church and state and was banished in 1636, after which he founded the colony of Rhode Island to the south

Question 15

Bacon’s Rebellion

Answer 15

A brief yet meaningful uprising of western farmers against the government of Virginia culminating in the burning of Jamestown on September 19, 1676.

Question 16

Middle passage

Answer 16

A voyage that brought enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and the West Indies

Question 17

William Penn

Answer 17

A Quaker that founded Pennsylvania to establish a place where his people and others could live in peace and be free from persecution.

Question 18

Enlightenment

Answer 18

A movement in the 18th century that advocated the use of reason in the reappraisal of accepted ideas and social institutions.

Question 19

John Locke

Answer 19

17th century English philosopher who opposed the Divine Right of Kings and who asserted that people have a natural right to life, liberty, and property.

Question 20

Great Awakening

Answer 20

Religious revival in the American colonies of the eighteenth century during which a number of new Protestant churches were established.