HIS Exam 1 (Ch. 1-3) study guide:

• Columbian Exchange

  • massive transfer of people, animals, plants, microbes, commodities, ideas and information across the Atlantic ocean in the decades following Columbus's voyages.
  • Important event; changes lives completely for both continents
• Old to New (other countries to America during the Columbian exchange)

  • wheat
  • coffee
  • rice
  • cattle
  • horses
  • diseases
  • people: Europeans and Africans
• New to old (America to other countries during the columbian exchange):

  • Gold and silver
  • Corn and tomatoes
  • Tobacco
  • Diseases - syphilis
  • People
  • Sugar
• Agricultural revolution 


  Major shift in subsistence among North Americans, beginning around the 10th century, as many native societies turned to planting corn and legumes for their principal food sources

  • First observation: Central MX 7000 BP
  • Plant agriculture ONLY - no domesticated animals
  • "Three sister" crops: corn, beans, squash
  • Risk: Not all crops might flourish, those groups remained hunters
  • Benefit: agriculture 1st sign of civilization in Europe
• After effect from agricultural revolution

  • Social reorganization - adaptation
  • division of labor
  • hierarchy - social class structures/class system
• Hierarchy - social class structures/class system (order):

  • Chiefs
  • Priests
  • Merchants
  • Warriors
  • Artisans
  • Farmers
  • Laborers
  • Slaves
• Paleo-Indians


  ancient indigineous Americans who cross Beringia and settles throughout present-day North and South America
• Beringia


  region encompassing a land bridge from Asia, connected to North America
• Cahokia/Mississippian Culture


  metropolitan center at the core of the Mississippian civilization
• the crusades


  religiously motivated military expeditions by European Christians in the medical era to seize control of Jerusalem and other lands by non-christians

  • 1099 - first crusade; Christians take control of muslims
  • Major significance - shows Europeans new things
• Aztecs

  • Mesoamericans
  • identified as Mexica not Aztecs
  • Aztec empire is the largest most sophisticated & complicated native civilization
• Headright system


  Gave individuals 50 acres of land if they got themselves to Virginia, no other requirements
• Encomienda system


  explorative labor regime that Spanish conquerors imposed on native populations in the Americas.

  • Encomenderos - middle management, they don't own land or people
  • They write the authorities to who can own land
  • The natives are not slaves they are surfs - they are bound to the land
• • Portugal - West Africa
• Nueva Espana

  • Portugal - West Africa
  • 1st to est. New World Empire
  • Holds est. for almost 400 yrs, it was the largest new world empire
  • Sustained contact
• Method & Style of Nueva Espana

  • violence and brutality is the commonality
  • military tool - Spain comes over big w/armies which overwhelm the Native Americans
  • Church influence
  • Gov't financed & controlled - no private owned land
• Atlantic slave trade: 


  term commonly used by historians to designate long distance commerce in human laborers from laborers from Africa, south of the Sahara, especially between 1500 and 1800
• Cortez and Mexico

  • Aztec empire is the largest most sophisticated & complicated native civilization
  • Tenochittlan
• Mestizo


  offspring of colonial Spanish immigrant men and indigenous women who populated Mx and central America
• Creole


  a person of mixed European and black descent
• Protestant reformation


  religious movement in the sixteenth-century northern Europe that rejected the authority of the pope and ignited a revolution in Christian thought and practice.
• English Reformation


   religious movement in sixteenth-century northern Europe that rejected the authority of the pope and ignited a revolution in the Chrisitan thought and practice.
• Roanoke


  failed English colony in present-day North Carolina, which Walter Raleigh attempted to est. between 1585 and 1590

  • Privately organized by Sir Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert
  • Becomes a lost colony - it was a failure
• Jamestown


  English settlement in Virginia whose colonists successfully cultivated tobacco, secured an alliance with Powhatan, and warred with Opechancanough

  • 1st real english colony
  • Spain concedes monopoly
  • Turning point - the defeat of the spanish armada
• Virginia Company

  • Joint-stock venture
  • Plymouth and London Virginia companies are head to head
  • Privately founded, the gov't doesn't have much to do
  • Unproductive mix of settlers - 2nd sons of wealthy parents (they don't get as much as the 1st sons), criminals and drinks
  • John Smith - was in the 1st group of 100 settlers, he was the only one with military experience
• Plymouth company 


  commercial trading company chartered by the English crown in 1606 to colonize the eastern coast of North America in present-day New England. Its shareholders were merchants of Plymouth, Bristol, and Exeter. Its twin company was the more successful Virginia Company. The Plymouth Company established a colony on the coast of Maine in 1607 but soon abandoned it.
• Massachusetts Bay Company 


  Largest New England colony, whose Puritan leaders touted commitment to piety and communal living

  • Founded in 1629 by a consortium of London Merchants
  • Was authorized to hold its meetings anywhere, this causing the companies Puritan investors to immigrate to New England where the colonists could govern themselves
• Indentured servants


  Labor for Virginia Economy
• Bacon's Rebellion


  1675-1676 uprising by colonists in Virginia, caused by white-indigenous relations and class conflict

  • lead land-hungry English settlers-mostly current or recent indentured servants-on a series of attacks against what he called "foreign Indians." Soon that would switch to all Indians in general - which declared him as a rebel by Gov Berkley
  • Would sucessfully burn JamesTown to the ground and cause Gov Berkley to flee, but Bacon would die from dysentery making things in the order be restored
• Slave codes


  Special laws regulating (allowing) the status and conduct of enslaved people, first instituted in the second half of the seventeenth century.
• Church of England/Anglican Church (Catholic Church)

  • The majority of english follow the church of England/Anglican church. Becomes the only legal Church
  • Small minority of english dissenters (pilgrims) thinks the Anglican church is too Catholic
• Puritans

  Radical Protestants in seventeenth-century England who opposed the Anglican Church
• Pilgrims


  Radical religious dissenters in seventeenth-century England who favored separating themselves from the corrupting influence of the Anglican Church and from English society.
• Treaty of Tordesillas


  signed in 1494, Spain and Portugal confirmed the geographical boundary set a year earlier by the pope. The lines was intended to recognize the colonies that Spain and Portugal had already claimed.
• task system 


  Method of labor management in which enslaved laborers are assigned quotas of work to complete in a certain time, usually by the end of the day.

  • Typically an enslaved adult in colonial South Carolina was required to plant a quarter-acre field in one day.
  • Instituted by rice planters
• gang system


  Method of labor management used on tobacco plantations—for example, enslaved laborers work together in teams under the scrutiny of a foreman or an overseer.

  • tobacco farming required closer supervision
  • this system epitomized not only the demanding nature of tobacco fieldwork but also the high degree of contact between whites and blacks on the plantation
• Communities of inclusion

  Mixed populations - 200,000 people

  • mainly young single men, creates the mixed population that are interracial
• Communities of exclusion


  Not focused on converting others to christianity - "the character of english colonization"
• Mayflower compact


  Agreement signed aboard the Mayflower ship by 41 Pilgrim men, binding them together as a political body and agreeing to build a society on shore based on "just and equal laws"
• House of Burgesses

  • The first representative legislature in the New World made by the Virginia company
  • Land owners were the only ones to participate in politics in England