CHAPTER 1 - New World Beginnings, 33,000 B.C.–A.D. 1769
Chapter Themes
Theme: The first discoverers of America, the ancestors of the American Indians, were small bands of hunters who crossed a temporary land bridge from Siberia and spread across both North and South America. They evolved a great variety of cultures, which ranged from the sophisticated urban civilizations in Mexico and Central and South America to the largely seminomadic societies of North America.
Theme: Europe’s growing demand for Eastern luxuries prompted exploration in the hopes of reducing the expense of those goods with new trade routes. Exploration occurred incrementally, beginning with the Portuguese moving around the coast of Africa and establishing trading posts. Awareness of the New World and its wealth pushed exploration across the Atlantic. Spanish exploration continued in the same fashion, first in the Caribbean islands then expanding into South and North America.
Theme: Portuguese and Spanish explorers encountered and then conquered much of the Americas and their Indian inhabitants. This “collision of worlds” deeply affected all the Atlantic societies—Europe, the Americas, and Africa—as the effects of disease, conquest, slavery, and intermarriage began to create a truly “new world” in Latin America, including the borderlands of Florida, New Mexico, and California, all of which later became part of the United States.
chapter summary
Millions of years ago, the two American continents became geologically separated from the Eastern Hemisphere land masses where humanity originated. The first people to enter these continents came across a temporary land bridge from Siberia about 35,000 years ago. Spreading across the two continents, they developed a great variety of societies based largely on corn agriculture and hunting. In North America, some ancient Indian peoples like the Pueblos, the Anasazi, and the Mississippian culture developed elaborate settlements. But on the whole, North American Indian societies were less numerous and urbanized than those in Central and South America, though equally diverse in culture and social organization.
The impetus for European exploration came from the desire for new trade routes to the East, the spirit and technological discoveries of the Renaissance, and the power of the new European national monarchies. The European encounters with Africa and America, beginning with the Portuguese and Spanish explorers, convulsed the entire world. Biological change, disease, population loss, conquest, African slavery, cultural change, and economic expansion were just some of the consequences of the commingling of the Old World and the New World.
After they conquered and then intermarried with Indians of the great civilizations of South America and Mexico, the Spanish conquistadores expanded northward into the northern border territories of Florida, New Mexico, and California. There they established small but permanent settlements in competition with the French and English explorers who also were venturing into North America.
Identify and state the historical significance of the following:
Marco Polo
Francisco Pizarro
Montezuma
Christopher Columbus
Hernán Cortés
Francisco Coronado
Giovanni da Verrazano
John Cabot
Isabella of Castile
Hiawatha
Ferdinand Magellan
Vasco da Gama
Renaissance
Mestizos
Treaty of Tordesillas
Great Ice Age
Mound Builders
Spanish Armada
Conquistadores
Aztecs
Pueblo Indians
Iroquois Confederacy
Cartography
Native Americans
Vinland
Spice Islands
Focus Questions
1. What was Native American society like before European contact? What similarities and differences existed?
2. What factors led to Europe’s increased exploration and to the discovery of the New World?
3. What is the Columbian Exchange? What are some of the results of the Columbian Exchange?
4. What was the role of conquistadores and encomienda in establishing a Spanish Empire in the New World?
5. What was the geographic extent of the Spanish Empire in the New World? What nations were challenging Spain’s dominance in the New World and where?
CHAPTER 2 - The Planting of English America, 1500–1733
Chapter Themes
Theme: The English hoped to follow Spain’s example of finding great wealth in the New World, and that influenced the financing and founding of the early southern colonies. The focus on making the southern colonies profitable shaped colonial decisions, including choice of crops and the use of indentured and slave labor. This same focus also helped create economic and cultural ties between the early southern colonies and English settlements in the West Indies.
Theme: The early southern colonies’ encounters with Indians and African slaves established the patterns of race relations that would shape the North American experience—in particular, warfare and reservations for the Indians and lifelong slave codes for African Americans.
Theme: After a late start, a proud, nationalistic England joined the colonial race and successfully established five colonies along the southeastern seacoast of North America. Although varying somewhat in origins and character, all these colonies exhibited plantation agriculture, indentured and slave labor, a tendency toward strong economic and social hierarchies, and a pattern of widely scattered, institutionally weak settlements.
chapter summary
The defeat of the Spanish Armada and the exuberant spirit of Elizabethan nationalism finally drew England into the colonial race. After some early failures, the first permanent English colony was established at Jamestown, Virginia. Initially it faced harsh conditions and Indian hostility, but tobacco cultivation finally brought prosperity and population growth. Its charter also guaranteed colonists the same rights as Englishmen and developed an early form of representative self-government.
The early encounters of English settlers with the Powhatans in Virginia established many of the patterns that characterized later Indian-white relations in North America. Indian societies underwent their own substantial changes as a result of warfare, disease, trade, and the mingling and migration of Indians from the Atlantic coast to inland areas.
Other colonies were established in Maryland and the Carolinas. South Carolina flourished by establishing close ties with the British sugar colonies in the West Indies. It also borrowed the West Indian pattern of harsh slave codes and large plantation agriculture. North Carolina developed somewhat differently, with fewer slaves and more white colonists who owned small farms. Latecomer Georgia served initially as a buffer against the Spanish and a haven for debtors.
Despite some differences, all the southern colonies depended on staple plantation agriculture for their survival and on the institutions of indentured servitude and enslaved Africans for their labor. With widely scattered rural settlements, they had relatively weak religious and social institutions and tended to develop hierarchical economic and social orders.
Identify and state the historical significance of the following:
Pocahontas
Powhatan
Handsome Lake
John Rolfe
Lord Baltimore
Walter Raleigh
Oliver Cromwell
John Smith
John Wesley
Francis Drake
William Penn
Henry VIII
Elizabeth I
Deganawidah and Hiawatha
George II
nation-state
joint-stock company
slavery
House of Burgesses
royal charter
slave codes
yeoman
proprietor
longhouse
squatter
law of primogeniture
indentured servitude
starving time
surplus population
First Anglo-Powhatan War
Second Anglo-Powhatan War
Maryland Act of Toleration
Barbados slave code
Iroquois Confederacy
Ireland
Santa Fe
Quebec
Jamestown
Charles Town
Tuscarora War
Protestant Reformation
Powhatan's Confederacy
Chesapeake
English Civil War
Quakers
Focus Questions
1. What international events and domestic changes prompted England to begin colonization?
2. What was it like for the early settlers of Jamestown?
3. Why were Native Americans unable to repel the English colonization of North America?
4. What crops were important to the English colonies in the south of North America? How did the cultivation of those crops shape those colonies?
5. How did the English sugar plantations of the Caribbean differ from the English colonies in the south of North America?
6. How did slavery develop in North America during colonization?
7. What features were shared by Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia? What distinguished them from one another?
CHAPTER 3 - Settling the Northern Colonies, 1619–1700
Chapter Themes
Theme: Religious and political turmoil in England shaped settlement in New England and the middle colonies. Religious persecution in England pushed the Separatists into Plymouth and Quakers into Pennsylvania. England’s Glorious Revolution also prompted changes in the colonies.
Theme: The Protestant Reformation, in its English Calvinist (Reformed) version, provided the major impetus and leadership for the settlement of New England. The New England colonies developed a fairly homogeneous social order based on religion and semicommunal family and town settlements.
Theme: Principles of American government developed in New England with the beginnings of written constitutions (Mayflower Compact and Massachusetts’s royal charter) and with glimpses of self-rule seen in town hall meetings, the New England Confederation, and colonial opposition to the Dominion of New England.
Theme: The middle colonies of New Netherland (New York), Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware developed with far greater political, ethnic, religious, and social diversity, and they represented a more cosmopolitan middle ground between the tightly knit New England towns and the scattered, hierarchical plantation in the South.
chapter summary
The New England colonies were founded by English Puritans. While most Puritans sought to purify the Church of England from within, and not to break away from it, a small group of Separatists—the Pilgrims—founded the first small, pious Plymouth Colony in New England. More important was the larger group of nonseparating Puritans, led by John Winthrop, who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the great migration of Puritans fleeing persecution in England in the 1630s.
A strong sense of common purpose among the first settlers shaped the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because of the close alignment of religion and politics in the colony, those who challenged religious orthodoxy, among them Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, were considered guilty of sedition and driven out of Massachusetts. The banished Williams founded Rhode Island, by far, the most religiously and politically tolerant of the colonies. Other New England settlements, all originating in Massachusetts Bay, were established in Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire. Although they shared a common way of life, the New England colonies developed with a substantial degree of independence.
The middle colonies took shape quite differently. New York, founded as New Netherland by the Dutch and later conquered by England, was economically and ethnically diverse, socially hierarchical, and politically quarrelsome. Pennsylvania, founded as a Quaker haven by William Penn, also attracted an economically ambitious and politically troublesome population of diverse ethnic groups.
With their economic variety, ethnic diversity, and political factionalism, the middle colonies were the most typically American of England’s thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies.
Identify and state the historical significance of the following:
John Calvin
Anne Hutchinson
Henry Hudson
William Bradford
William Penn
John Winthrop
King Philip (Metacom)
John Cotton
Sir Edmund Andros
William and Mary
Martin Luther
Squanto
Fernando Gorges
the “elect”
franchise
predestination
freemen
“visible saints”
conversion
doctrine of a calling
covenant
antinomianism
sumptuary laws
salutary neglect
passive resistance
“city upon a hill”
Protestant Reformation
Pilgrims
New England Confederation
Calvinism
Massachusetts Bay Company
Dominion of New England
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Navigation Laws
Great Migration
Glorious Revolution
Puritans
Dutch West India Company
Separatists
Quakers (Religious Society of Friends)
Mayflower
Protestant ethic
Mayflower Compact
Fundamental Orders
French Huguenots
Scottish Presbyterians
Church of England
Dutchification
Plymouth Bay
Congregational Church
Pequot War
Dutch “golden age”
New Netherland
New Amsterdam
New Sweden
Penn's Woodland
Focus Questions
1. What religious turmoil in the Old World resulted in the little colony of Plymouth in the New World?
2. Why was the initial and subsequent colonization of the Massachusetts Bay Colony more successful than Plymouth?
3. How did the colony of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony contribute to the origins of American independence and government? What were the contributions to American independence and government from the New England Confederation, the Dominion of New England, and the Glorious Revolution?
4. What role did religious intolerance play in the founding of New England colonies other than Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay and in the founding of some middle colonies?
5. Besides England, what other nations influenced the colonization of the Atlantic coast of North America?
6. How did the colonization of Pennsylvania differ from the New England colonies and other middle colonies?
CHAPTER 4 - American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692
Chapter Themes
Theme: In the Chesapeake region, seventeenth-century colonial society was characterized by disease-shortened lives, weak family life, and a social hierarchy that included hardworking planters at the top and restless poor whites and enslaved Africans at the bottom. Despite the substantial disruption of their traditional culture and the mingling of African peoples, slaves in the Chesapeake developed a culture that mixed African and new-world elements, and developed one of the few slave societies that grew through natural reproduction.
Theme: By contrast, early New England life was characterized by healthy, extended life spans, strong family life, closely knit towns and churches, and a demanding economic and moral environment.
chapter summary
Life was hard in the seventeenth-century southern colonies. Disease drastically shortened life spans in the Chesapeake region, even for the young single men who made up the majority of settlers. Families were few and fragile, with men greatly outnumbering women, who were much in demand and seldom remained single for long.
The tobacco economy first thrived on the labor of white indentured servants, who hoped to work their way up to become landowners and perhaps even become wealthy. But by the late seventeenth century, this hope was increasingly frustrated and the discontents of the poor whites exploded in Bacon’s Rebellion.
With white labor increasingly troublesome, slaves (earlier a small fraction of the workforce) began to be imported from West Africa by the tens of thousands in the 1680s and soon became essential to the colonial economy. Slaves in the Deep South died rapidly of disease and overwork, but those in the Chesapeake tobacco region survived longer. Their numbers eventually increased by natural reproduction and they developed a distinctive African American way of life that combined African elements with features developed in the New World.
By contrast with the South, New England’s clean water and cool air contributed to a healthy way of life, which added ten years to the average English life span. The New England way of life centered on strong families and tightly knit towns and churches, which were relatively democratic and equal by seventeenth-century standards. By the late seventeenth century, however, social and religious tensions developed in these narrow communities, as the Salem witch hysteria dramatically illustrates.