AP US History key terms

Valuable colonial products, such as sugar and tobacco, that the Navigation Acts required colonists to ship only to England or another English colony.

The Protestant revivals of the 1730s and 1740s, led by preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, that stressed personal conversion and questioned church authority.

The elected assembly of Virginia, founded in 1619 as the first representative body in English America; it later passed the Virginia Resolves against the Stamp Act.

The forced voyage across the Atlantic that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas in crowded ships, on which many captives died.

Salutary neglect was Britain's loose enforcement of colonial trade laws and light control over colonial assemblies until about 1763, when the policy ended after the Seven Years' War.

English Quaker who founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a "holy experiment," a colony where everyone who believed in God could worship freely.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four 1798 Federalist laws that lengthened the wait for citizenship, let the president deport noncitizens, and criminalized false and malicious writing about the government.

Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution in 1787–1788, fearing a distant national government would swallow the states and threaten liberty, and demanded a bill of rights.

The Articles of Confederation were the first United States constitution, in force from 1781 to 1789, which gave a one-house Congress no power to tax or regulate trade.

Assumption was Alexander Hamilton's 1790 plan for the federal government to take over the states' Revolutionary War debts, which Congress passed after a bargain over the national capital.

At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794, General Anthony Wayne defeated the Western Confederacy of Native nations in Ohio, leading to the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

The 1781 siege in Virginia in which American and French armies and a French fleet trapped Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered more than 7,000 men.

Philadelphia printer, scientist, and diplomat who drafted the Albany Plan of Union, testified against the Stamp Act in 1766, and helped secure the French alliance of 1778.

The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, protecting freedoms such as religion, speech, the press and jury trial from the federal government.

The shooting on March 5, 1770, in which British soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street in Boston and killed five colonists, including Crispus Attucks.

Four laws Parliament passed in 1774 to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party by closing Boston Harbor and cutting the colony's self-government; colonists called them the Intolerable Acts.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet of January 1776 that urged immediate independence and attacked George III and monarchy itself, in plain language aimed at ordinary readers.

The principle that a government's legitimate power comes from the approval of the people it rules; colonists used it against Parliament, and the Declaration of Independence states it.

The Constitutional Convention was the 1787 meeting in Philadelphia where delegates from twelve states wrote the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation.

The statement Congress adopted on July 4, 1776, that justified separation from Britain with natural rights, the consent of the governed, and a list of grievances against George III.

Federalism is the division of power between a national government and state governments, the system the Constitution of 1787 set up in place of the Articles' league of states.

Federalists were supporters of the Constitution in the ratification debate of 1787–1788, who argued that only a stronger national government could keep order, pay debts and protect trade.

Funding at par was Alexander Hamilton's 1790 plan to repay the federal Revolutionary War debt at full face value to whoever held it, to build the new government's credit.

British prime minister from 1763 to 1765 whose Sugar Act and Stamp Act began Parliament's effort to raise revenue from the colonies to pay for the army in America.

The Great Compromise was the Constitutional Convention's July 1787 agreement to base House seats on population and give each state two senators, settling the dispute between large and small states.

Jay's Treaty was the 1794 treaty with Britain in which the British promised to leave their Northwest forts by 1796; it avoided war but ignored impressment and split the parties.

John Jay was a New York lawyer and diplomat who helped make the 1783 peace, wrote five Federalist Papers, became the first Chief Justice and negotiated Jay's Treaty in 1794.

English philosopher whose Two Treatises of Government argued that people have natural rights and that government rests on their consent, ideas American colonists used against Britain.

Massachusetts militia companies organized in late 1774 to turn out on a minute's notice; minutemen fought British regulars at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

Rights that people hold simply by being human, which no government grants and none may take away; colonists used the idea to justify independence.

The New Jersey Plan was William Paterson's small-state plan of June 1787 for a one-house Congress with one vote per state and new powers to tax imports and regulate trade.

The colonial principle, central to protests against the Stamp Act and later taxes, that Parliament could not tax the colonists because they elected no members to it.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized the territory north of the Ohio River, set a path to statehood on equal terms, banned slavery there, and encouraged schools.

Congress's July 1775 appeal to George III, drafted by John Dickinson, which pledged loyalty and asked the king to help restore peace; the king refused to receive it.

The 1763 uprising of the Odawa leader Pontiac and allied Native nations, who captured eight British forts and pushed Britain toward the Proclamation of 1763.

King George III's October 1763 order that closed the land west of the Appalachian Mountains to colonial settlement and private land purchases, reserving it for Native nations.

Ratification was the approval of the Constitution by special state conventions in 1787–1790; nine of thirteen states had to agree, and New Hampshire became the ninth on June 21, 1788.

The global war between Britain and France, fought in North America from 1754 to 1763, in which Britain won Canada and most French land east of the Mississippi River.

Shays's Rebellion was an armed uprising of indebted Massachusetts farmers in 1786–1787 that closed courts and exposed how little the national government could do under the Articles.

The Enlightenment idea that government arises from an agreement among people to protect their rights, so its power comes from the governed and not from a king's divine right.

Groups of artisans, laborers, and merchants who organized crowd protests against the Stamp Act in 1765 and later enforced boycotts of British goods.

Parliament's 1765 law that taxed printed paper in the colonies, from newspapers and wills to playing cards, and set off organized colonial resistance before its repeal in 1766.

Parliament's 1764 law that halved the duty on foreign molasses, enforced it for revenue, and sent smuggling cases to vice-admiralty courts without juries.

The Federalist Papers were 85 essays signed Publius, written by Hamilton, Madison and Jay in 1787–1788 to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution.

The Three-Fifths Compromise counted three-fifths of a state's enslaved people toward its population for House seats and direct taxes, giving slaveholding states extra power in Congress and presidential elections.

Parliament's 1767 duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the colonies, whose revenue paid royal governors and judges; all but the tea duty ended in 1770.

Royal courts with no juries, where a Crown-appointed judge tried smuggling and trade-law cases; Parliament sent more cases to them after 1764.

The Virginia Plan was James Madison's proposal, presented by Edmund Randolph on May 29, 1787, for three branches and a two-house Congress with seats in both houses based on population.

The British argument that Parliament spoke for everyone in the empire, so colonists were represented even though they elected no members of the House of Commons.

Washington's Farewell Address, published September 19, 1796, announced he would not seek a third term and warned against political parties, sectional divisions and permanent foreign alliances.

The Whiskey Rebellion was a 1794 uprising of western Pennsylvania farmers against Hamilton's whiskey tax, which President Washington ended by calling up about thirteen thousand militia.

The XYZ Affair was a 1797–1798 scandal in which French agents demanded a bribe from American envoys, provoking an outcry and an undeclared naval war with France.

Henry David Thoreau was the Concord Transcendentalist who wrote Walden (1854) and the essay Resistance to Civil Government (1849), later called Civil Disobedience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the Concord essayist and former minister whose Nature (1836) and Self-Reliance (1841) made him the leading voice of Transcendentalism.

The Tallmadge Amendment of February 1819, offered by New York's James Tallmadge Jr., would have banned bringing more enslaved people into Missouri and freed their children born there at twenty-five.