Chapter 2: Beginnings Of English America, 1607-1660 Flashcards
(23 cards)
Virginia Company
A private business organization whose shareholders included merchants, aristocrats, and members of Parliament.
Roanoke colony
A base set up off the North Carolina coast in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh.
plantation
An early word for a colony, a settlement planted from abroad among an alien population in Ireland or the New World. Later, a large agricultural enterprise that used unfree labor to produce a crop for the world market.
A Discourse Concerning Western Planting
Written in 1584 by Richard Hakluyt, this work lists twenty-three reasons why Queen Elizabeth I should support the establishment of colonies.
enclosure movement
An agricultural process that introduced more modern farming practices, such as crop rotation and the fencing of ‘‘commons.’’
indentured servant
Settler who signed on for a temporary period of servitude to a master in exchange for passage to the New World; Virginia and Pennsylvania were largely peopled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by English and German indentured servants.
John Smith
The leader of the early Virginia colony.
headright system
A system in which any colonist who paid for his own or another’s passage from London was rewarded with fifty acres of land.
House of Burgesses
The first elected assembly in colonial America.
Uprising of 1622
A surprise attack on Virginia’s settlers that was led by Opechancanough.
tobacco colony
The expansion of tobacco cultivation in Virginia.
dower rights
The right of a married woman to one-third of her husband’s property in the event that he died before she did.
Puritans
English religious group that sought to purify the Church of England; founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop in 1630.
moral liberty
A Puritan concept meaning ‘‘a liberty to that only which is good.’’
John Winthrop
The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Pilgrims
Puritan Separatists who broke completely with the Church of England and sailed to the New World aboard the Mayflower, founding Plymouth Colony on Cape Cod in 1620.
Mayflower Compact
Signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, the document committed the group to majority-rule government.
Great Migration
Large-scale migration of southern blacks during and after World War I to the North, where jobs had become available during the labor shortage of the war years.
captivity narratives
Publications written by colonists who had been captured by Indians.
Pequot War
An armed conflict that led to the destruction of one of New England’s most powerful Indian groups.
Half-Way Covenant
A Puritan compromise allowing for the baptism and a subordinate church membership for grandchildren of those who emigrated during the Great Migration.
English liberty
An idea that certain ‘‘rights of Englishmen’’ applied to all within the kingdom.
Act Concerning Religion
Adopted in Maryland in 1649; institutionalized the principle of toleration that had prevailed from the colony’s beginning.
