Topics
- 2.1 Contextualizing Period 2
Turncoat
AP US History Topic 2.1, Contextualizing Period 2, frames the years 1607 to 1754 in North America. At the start, Spain ruled large colonies in Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean, while the English at Jamestown in 1607, the French at Quebec in 1608, and the Dutch on the Hudson River soon afterward held only small footholds among Native nations that still governed the land. Over the next 150 years, those empires competed for furs, land, and trade, English colonies grew into distinct regions, slavery spread, and Native peoples fought, bargained, and traded with each colonial power.
- 2.2 European Colonization
Turncoat
AP US History Topic 2.2, European Colonization, compares how Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England settled North America in the 1600s. Spain controlled Pueblo labor and religion in New Mexico through encomienda, repartimiento, and missions until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. France and the Dutch sent few colonists and depended on Native partners in the fur trade. England sent far more settlers, mostly to farm, and by 1680 its mainland colonies held about 150,000 people, while New France counted fewer than 10,000 in 1681. Every empire claimed land that Native nations already held.
- 2.3 The Regions of British Colonies
The Weed and the Word
AP US History Topic 2.3, The Regions of British Colonies, compares how English America took shape from 1607 to the mid-1700s. The Chesapeake colonies, Virginia and Maryland, grew tobacco with indentured servants and, by 1700, enslaved Africans. Puritans settled New England in families and ran their towns through town meetings, but demanded religious conformity. The middle colonies, led by Pennsylvania under William Penn, grew wheat and welcomed settlers of many faiths. Carolina, founded in 1670 partly by Barbados planters, built rice and indigo plantations on enslaved labor, and Georgia, chartered in 1732, allowed slavery in 1751.
- 2.4 Transatlantic Trade
The Collector
AP US History Topic 2.4, Transatlantic Trade, explains how Britain tried to make its colonies serve the empire and how colonists traded across the Atlantic anyway. Under mercantilism, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651, to route colonial trade through England. Ships, enslaved labor, and markets in the Caribbean and West Africa tied Europe, Africa, and the Americas into an Atlantic economy that included the Middle Passage. Merchants followed rules that helped them and smuggled around rules that cost them, including the 1733 Molasses Act, and weak enforcement until 1763 became known as salutary neglect.
- 2.5 Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans
The Knotted Cord
AP US History Topic 2.5, Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans, covers the wars, alliances, and bargains that shaped colonial North America from 1607 to 1754. In 1675 the Wampanoag leader Metacom fought New England over land and the right to govern his people, and his defeat in 1676 opened southern New England to English settlers. In 1680 the Pueblo Revolt drove Spain out of New Mexico for twelve years. Colonies with few settlers had to bargain with Native nations, while colonies with many settlers could take their land. Native nations also made their own treaties, such as the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.
- 2.6 Slavery in the British Colonies
The Condition of the Mother
AP US History Topic 2.6, Slavery in the British Colonies, shows how colonial law made slavery racial, lifelong, and hereditary. Africans reached Virginia in 1619, but their status stayed unsettled until laws such as the 1662 act that made a child follow the mother's status. As English servants grew scarce and tobacco, rice, and sugar demanded workers, planters replaced servants with enslaved Africans by about 1700. Enslaved people resisted in daily work, courts, letters, and revolt, including the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, which led to the harsher Negro Act of 1740. By the 1750s slavery was legal in every British colony.
- 2.7 Colonial Society and Culture
The Preacher and the Printer
AP US History Topic 2.7, Colonial Society and Culture, explains how religion, ideas, and politics shaped the British colonies between about 1690 and 1754. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, led by preachers such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, split churches into New Lights and Old Lights. The Enlightenment, including John Locke's natural rights, taught colonists to judge governments by reason. In 1735 a jury acquitted the printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel. Colonial assemblies controlled taxes and salaries, and colonists grew more British through Anglicization while questioning authority.
- 2.8 Comparison in Period 2
One Summer
AP US History Topic 2.8, Comparison in Period 2, compares the colonial societies of 1607 to 1754. The Chesapeake grew tobacco with servants and then enslaved Africans, New England Puritans settled in families around town churches, and the middle colonies mixed peoples and faiths. South Carolina, the only British mainland colony with a Black majority around 1750, ran on rice plantations. Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonists also dealt with Native peoples differently, seeking labor, trade, or land. The colonies shared a king, Atlantic trade, and British goods and ideas, yet at Albany in 1754 they would not unite.
Key terms
- Trade alliances
- Topic 2.1
Partnerships in which Native nations and Europeans traded goods and backed each other in war. French and Dutch colonies depended on them for furs.
- Fur trade
- Topic 2.1
The trade of animal pelts, mostly beaver, from Native hunters for European kettles, cloth, knives and guns. In Europe, beaver fur was made into felt hats.
- Intermarriage
- Topic 2.1
Marriage between European traders and Native women, common in New France. It tied traders to Native families and trade networks, and many wives worked as guides and interpreters.
- Beaver Wars
- Topic 2.1
Wars of the 1600s in which the Haudenosaunee fought the French and France's Native allies for control of the fur trade, its routes and captives.
- Mercantilism
- Topic 2.2
The idea that colonies existed to make the home country rich. Colonies sent raw materials like furs home, bought its goods, and traded only as its government allowed.
- Casta
- Topic 2.2
The Spanish colonial system that ranked people into unequal groups, such as Spanish, Native, African and mixed. Status also depended on freedom or slavery and on wealth.
- Encomienda
- Topic 2.2
A Spanish grant that let a colonist demand tribute or labor from a group of Native people. In New Mexico it was paid in corn and cotton blankets.
- Repartimiento
- Topic 2.2
A Spanish labor draft that forced Native people to work for colonists, officials or missions for set periods. The law required pay, but pay often never came.
- Mission
- Topic 2.2
A religious settlement where Catholic priests worked to convert Native people. Missions also controlled Native labor and tried to change how Native people lived and worshipped.
- Cash crop
- Topic 2.2
A crop grown to sell, not to eat. Tobacco was the cash crop that paid for Virginia and Maryland.
- Indentured servant
- Topic 2.2
A worker who agreed to labor for a set term, usually four to seven years, in return for passage to America. Unlike an enslaved person, a servant went free when the term ended.
- Atlantic slave trade
- Topic 2.2
The forced shipment of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to work in the Americas. By 1700, enslaved Africans were replacing servants on Chesapeake tobacco farms.
- Puritans
- Topic 2.2
English Protestants who wanted to purify the Church of England. In New England they built towns where their faith shaped the laws and daily life.
- Joint-stock company
- Topic 2.2
A business in which many investors buy shares, pooling their money and sharing the risk. The Virginia Company paid for Jamestown this way.
- Pueblo Revolt (1680)
- Topic 2.2
A coordinated uprising of Pueblo towns in 1680 against Spanish forced labor and religious suppression. It drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years, until 1692.
- Chesapeake colonies
- Topic 2.3
Virginia and Maryland, the tobacco colonies around the Chesapeake Bay. Ships reached planters' docks by river, so the region had few towns.
- Headright system
- Topic 2.3
Virginia gave fifty acres to whoever paid a migrant's passage. Planters who imported servants piled up land.
- Indentured servitude
- Topic 2.3
Working for a master for a set term, usually four to seven years, in exchange for passage to America. Servants were freed when the term ended.
- House of Burgesses (1619)
- Topic 2.3
Virginia's elected assembly, the first in English America. It made the colony's laws, and the richest planters ran it.
- Maryland Act of Toleration (1649)
- Topic 2.3
Protected every Christian's right to worship, Catholic or Protestant. It still set death as the penalty for denying the Trinity, so it was not full religious freedom.
- Hereditary slavery
- Topic 2.3
Slavery passed from mother to child. Virginia's 1662 law meant bondage could last for generations, unlike a servant's limited term.
- Puritans and the Great Migration
- Topic 2.3
Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England of Catholic rituals. Facing persecution, about 20,000 English people, mostly Puritans, moved to New England in the 1630s.
- Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact (1620)
- Topic 2.3
The Pilgrims broke completely with the Church of England. Before landing at Plymouth, they signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to make and obey their own laws.
- Mixed economy
- Topic 2.3
New England combined small family farms with fishing, timber, shipbuilding and Atlantic trade, because its poor soil could not support large export crops.
- Town meeting and General Court
- Topic 2.3
Town meetings ran local affairs by open vote. The General Court was Massachusetts's elected assembly, which made the colony's laws.
- Freemen
- Topic 2.3
Men admitted to vote in Massachusetts. From 1631 a freeman had to be a male church member, so women and many men could not vote.
- Anne Hutchinson (1637)
- Topic 2.3
A Puritan who said God spoke to her directly and accused ministers of false teaching. Massachusetts banished her for challenging its religious leaders.
- Roger Williams and Rhode Island
- Topic 2.3
Williams argued that government should not control anyone's conscience. His colony, Rhode Island (chartered 1644), let people of any faith worship freely.
- Quakers (Society of Friends)
- Topic 2.3
A radical Protestant group founded in England in the 1650s. Quakers believed in an inner light in every person, let women preach and refused to fight.
- Proprietary colony
- Topic 2.3
A colony the king granted to private owners, like Maryland, Carolina and Pennsylvania. A royal colony, like Virginia after 1624, was run by the Crown.
- The Holy Experiment
- Topic 2.3
William Penn's name for Pennsylvania: a Quaker-run refuge with freedom of worship for all who believed in God and an elected assembly.
- Middle colonies
- Topic 2.3
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Fertile soil grew wheat for export, and migrants from many European nations and churches settled there.
- British West Indies
- Topic 2.3
England's Caribbean colonies, such as Barbados and Jamaica. Their plantations grew sugar for export with the forced labor of enslaved Africans, who were most of the people.
- Task system
- Topic 2.3
Each enslaved worker got a set daily job, such as hoeing a quarter acre. Time left after it could be their own, but they were still enslaved.
- Gullah
- Topic 2.3
The culture and language that enslaved Africans built in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, mixing African and English ways. It survives today.
- North Carolina
- Topic 2.3
Grouped with the Chesapeake: few good harbors meant smaller tobacco farms and fewer large plantations than in South Carolina, though slavery existed there too.
- Georgia (1732)
- Topic 2.3
The last of the thirteen colonies, run by trustees led by James Oglethorpe. It was a buffer against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for the English poor.
- Colonial charter
- Topic 2.4
A royal grant that set up a colony and its government. The Massachusetts charter of 1629 let the colony elect its own governor and assembly.
- Enumerated goods
- Topic 2.4
Colonial products on the Navigation Acts' list, such as sugar and tobacco. Colonists could ship them only to England or other English colonies.
- Atlantic economy
- Topic 2.4
The trade that linked Europe, Africa and the Americas. Ships carried crops, manufactured goods, enslaved Africans and Native captives between them.
- Middle Passage
- Topic 2.4
The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. Traders packed captives below decks for weeks, and many died on the way.
- Royal African Company
- Topic 2.4
An English company chartered in 1672 to trade on the West African coast in gold, ivory and enslaved people. Its monopoly ended in 1698.
- Triangular trade
- Topic 2.4
One common route: rum from New England to West Africa, captives to the West Indies, and molasses back. Most ships sailed simpler back-and-forth routes.
- Metacom's War
- Topic 2.4
Also called King Philip's War (1675–76). Metacom, a Wampanoag leader, and allied Native nations fought the New England colonies over land and power.
- Sovereignty
- Topic 2.4
The right of a people to govern themselves and choose their own allies and trading partners, as Garangula claimed for the Haudenosaunee.
- Dominion of New England
- Topic 2.4
James II's union of the New England colonies, later joined by New York and New Jersey, under one royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros. It had no elected assembly and was meant to tighten royal control and enforce the trade laws.
- Glorious Revolution
- Topic 2.4
In 1688, William of Orange invaded England, King James II fled, and William and Mary took the throne. Boston rose in April 1689 on news of the invasion and overthrew James's Dominion of New England.
- Board of Trade
- Topic 2.4
A royal committee created in 1696 that supervised colonial trade and government from London.
- Vice-admiralty court
- Topic 2.4
A royal court for cases at sea and in trade. A judge appointed by the Crown decided the case, with no local jury.
- Salutary neglect
- Topic 2.4
London's loose enforcement of its trade laws until 1763. The laws stayed on the books, but officials rarely enforced them, so colonists ran much of their own trade. Edmund Burke gave it the name in 1775.
- Molasses Act (1733)
- Topic 2.4
A tax of sixpence a gallon on molasses from foreign, mostly French, islands, meant to protect British Caribbean sugar planters. New Englanders mostly smuggled around it.
- Trade dependence
- Topic 2.4
Growing reliance on imported goods such as guns, cloth and metal tools. Native nations still bargained hard and played rival traders against each other.
- Epidemic disease
- Topic 2.4
Smallpox and other diseases from Europe spread along trade routes and killed huge numbers of Native people. Each epidemic reshaped Native communities.
- Wampanoag
- Topic 2.5
A Native nation of southeastern New England, in what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1675 its leading sachem, or leader, was Metacom.
- Metacom (King Philip)
- Topic 2.5
Leader of the Wampanoag from 1662; the English called him King Philip. His war with the New England colonies in 1675–1676 is called Metacom's War or King Philip's War.
- Pueblo
- Topic 2.5
Spanish for 'town.' The Spanish used it for the many separate farming towns of the Rio Grande valley and the lands to the west, whose peoples spoke several different languages.
- New England Confederation (1643)
- Topic 2.5
A military alliance of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven against Native, Dutch and French enemies. Rhode Island was left out. In 1675 its members fought Metacom together.
- Native sovereignty
- Topic 2.5
A Native nation's right to govern its own people and land. Plymouth challenged Wampanoag sovereignty when its court tried and executed Wampanoag men.
- Metacom's War (King Philip's War)
- Topic 2.5
The 1675–1676 war between the New England colonies, with their Native allies, and Native nations led by Metacom's Wampanoag. Fighting in Maine went on until 1678.
- Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy
- Topic 2.5
An alliance of five Native nations in what is now upstate New York: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. After the Tuscarora joined in the 1720s, the English called them the Six Nations.
- Sir William Berkeley
- Topic 2.5
Royal governor of Virginia, 1641–1652 and 1660–1677. He favored the wealthy planters, and frontier farmers said he failed to protect them from Native raids.
- Bacon's Rebellion (1676)
- Topic 2.5
A frontier war against Native peoples that turned into a rebellion against Virginia's governor, Sir William Berkeley. It exposed the anger of poor and landless farmers at the wealthy planters who ran the colony.
- Spanish accommodation of Pueblo culture
- Topic 2.5
After the Pueblo Revolt, Spain ruled New Mexico less harshly. It never brought back the encomienda and allowed more Pueblo religious practice, though forced labor drafts went on.
- Fur trade alliances
- Topic 2.5
French and Dutch colonies depended on Native partners who supplied furs. In return, Native nations got cloth, metal tools and guns, which they used in their own wars and diplomacy.
- Beaver Wars (1640s–1701)
- Topic 2.5
Wars in which the Haudenosaunee, armed by Dutch and then English traders, fought the Wendat, the French and their allies over furs, hunting grounds and captives. The Great Peace of Montreal ended this cycle of war.
- Walking Purchase (1737)
- Topic 2.5
A disputed deal in which Pennsylvania's proprietors used an old deed and a fast walk on a cleared path to claim far more Lenape land than the Lenape had agreed to sell.
- Covenant Chain
- Topic 2.5
An alliance between the Haudenosaunee and the English colonies, begun with New York in 1677 and renewed at councils in Albany. Through it, the Haudenosaunee claimed to speak for other nations, such as the Lenape.
- Chattel slavery
- Topic 2.6
Slavery in which people are treated as property that can be bought, sold and inherited, and their children are born into it.
- Slave codes
- Topic 2.6
Colonial laws that defined who could be enslaved and controlled enslaved people's lives, such as Virginia's code of 1705 and South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740.
- Cash crops
- Topic 2.6
Crops grown to sell overseas, such as Chesapeake tobacco, Lowcountry rice and indigo, and Caribbean sugar. Growing them took many workers.
- Gang and task systems
- Topic 2.6
Gang system: enslaved people worked in supervised groups all day, common on Chesapeake tobacco farms. Task system: each person had a set job for the day, common on Lowcountry rice plantations.
- Covert resistance
- Topic 2.6
Hidden, everyday resistance, such as working slowly, breaking tools, faking illness or running away for a few days.
- Natural increase
- Topic 2.6
Population growth from births outnumbering deaths. In the 1700s, the enslaved population of the mainland colonies grew this way, unlike the Caribbean's.
- Stono Rebellion (1739)
- Topic 2.6
An armed uprising of enslaved people near the Stono River, South Carolina, in September 1739. The rebels marched toward Spanish Florida before militia crushed them.
- Overt resistance
- Topic 2.6
Open defiance of slavery, such as armed revolt, an openly refused order or a group escape like the march from Stono.
- Negro Act of 1740
- Topic 2.6
South Carolina's slave code passed after Stono. It made slavery hereditary through the mother, limited enslaved people's travel and gatherings, banned their drums and fined anyone who taught them to write.
- Manumission
- Topic 2.6
An enslaver's legal release of a person from slavery. Some enslaved people, like Venture Smith, bought their own freedom, but only when an enslaver agreed.
- First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s)
- Topic 2.7
Protestant revivals that swept the British colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Itinerant (traveling) preachers such as George Whitefield and printed sermons spread a message of personal conversion. Not the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s.
- Established church
- Topic 2.7
A church that the colony's government officially supported, usually with taxes everyone had to pay. Connecticut and Massachusetts supported Congregational churches; Virginia supported the Church of England.
- Protestant evangelicalism
- Topic 2.7
Protestant preaching that called each person to a personal conversion, a "new birth" felt in the heart, and spread it through traveling preachers and print. The Great Awakening carried it through the colonies.
- Enlightenment
- Topic 2.7
Using reason, observation and experiment to explain nature and government, as Franklin did here. Many educated colonists followed it.
- Pluralism
- Topic 2.7
Many ethnic and religious groups living side by side, as in Pennsylvania: English Quakers, German Lutherans and Mennonites, Scots-Irish Presbyterians. Living together did not mean equal rights.
- Transatlantic print culture
- Topic 2.7
Books, newspapers, sermons and pamphlets moving between Britain and the colonies, and from colony to colony, through printers, post riders and merchant ships. It spread both the Great Awakening and Enlightenment ideas.
- Jonathan Edwards
- Topic 2.7
Massachusetts minister and a leader of the Great Awakening. His 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God warned listeners of hell to drive them toward conversion.
- New Lights / Old Lights
- Topic 2.7
New Lights supported the revivals and their emotional preaching; Old Lights opposed them. Their quarrels split Congregational and Presbyterian churches and produced new, separate congregations.
- Religious toleration
- Topic 2.7
Letting people of different faiths worship freely. It varied by colony: Rhode Island and Pennsylvania went furthest, while Massachusetts and Connecticut kept tax-supported churches. Toleration did not mean equal political rights.
- Great Awakening and Enlightenment compared
- Topic 2.7
Difference: revivalists sought truth through faith and a felt conversion; Enlightenment thinkers used reason and observation. Similarity: both encouraged colonists to question authority, and both spread through Atlantic print.
- John Locke and natural rights
- Topic 2.7
English philosopher (1632–1704). People are born with natural rights to life, liberty and property. Government rests on the consent of the governed and may be resisted if it violates those rights.
- Deism
- Topic 2.7
Belief in a creator who made a universe that runs by natural laws, which people can discover through reason. Many deists doubted miracles. Deism is not atheism.
- Seditious libel
- Topic 2.7
Under English law of the time, printing criticism that damaged the government's reputation was a crime, even if the criticism was true.
- Zenger trial (1735)
- Topic 2.7
A New York jury acquitted the printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel after his lawyer argued that he had printed the truth. The law did not change, but the case encouraged a freer press.
- Colonial assembly
- Topic 2.7
The elected lower house of a colony's legislature, modeled on England's House of Commons. It voted on taxes and spending. Only men who owned property could vote for it.
- Power of the purse
- Topic 2.7
An assembly's control over taxes and spending. Governors needed the assembly's votes for money, even for their own salaries, so the assembly could bargain with them.
- Anglicization
- Topic 2.7
The colonies' growing likeness to Britain: British goods and fashions, London books and news, English churches, and governments built on English models. It grew alongside the colonies' ethnic and religious diversity.
- Quakers
- Topic 2.8
Members of the Society of Friends, a Protestant group that rejected war. William Penn, a Quaker, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a refuge open to many faiths.
- Haudenosaunee (Six Nations)
- Topic 2.8
A confederacy of six Native nations in today's upstate New York: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. Britain and France both sought them as allies.
- Religious pluralism
- Topic 2.8
Religious pluralism means many faiths living side by side. Pennsylvania, with no official church, drew Quakers, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews and others.
- Town meetings · House of Burgesses
- Topic 2.8
New England towns governed themselves in meetings of qualified men. Virginia's elected assembly, first held in 1619, was run by wealthy planters.
- Spanish missions
- Topic 2.8
Religious settlements where Catholic friars worked to convert Native people, often using their forced labor to build churches and farm.
- First Great Awakening
- Topic 2.8
A wave of emotional Protestant revivals in the 1730s and 1740s. Preachers like George Whitefield urged personal conversion, and many congregations split.
- Albany Plan of Union (1754)
- Topic 2.8
Franklin's plan for a council of the colonies, led by a president-general appointed by the king, to manage defense, Native relations and taxes for them. No colony adopted it.