APUSH Definitions
Chapter One:
● Great League of Peace: An alliance of the Iroquois tribes, originally formed sometime
between 1450 and 1600, that used their combined strength to pressure Europeans to
work with them in the fur trade and to wage war across what is today eastern North
America.
● caravel: A fifteenth-century European ship capable of long-distance travel.
● reconquista: The “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors was completed by King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.
● conquistadores: Spanish term for “conquerors,” applied to Spanish and Portuguese
soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern
America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
● Columbian Exchange: The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with
Columbus’s voyages in 1492.
● creoles: Persons born in the New World of European ancestry.
● hacienda: Large-scale farm in the Spanish New World empire worked by Indian laborers.
● mestizos: Spanish word for persons of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
● Ninety-Five Theses: The list of moral grievances against the Catholic Church by Martin
Luther, a German priest, in 1517.
● Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Catholic missionary who renounced the Spanish practice of
coercively converting Indians and advocated their better treatment. In 1552, he wrote A
Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, which described the Spanish’s cruel
treatment of the Indians.
● repartimiento system: Spanish labor system under which Indians were legally free and
able to earn wages but were also required to perform a fixed amount of labor yearly.
Replaced the encomienda system.
● Black Legend: the idea that the Spanish New World Empire was more oppressive toward
the Indians than other European empires; was used as a justification for English imperial
expansion.
● Pueblo Revolt: Uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish
colonists out of modern-day New Mexico.
● indentured servants: Settlers 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.
● métis: Children of marriages between Indian women and French traders and officials.
● borderland: A place between or near recognized borders where no group of people has
complete political control or cultural dominance.
Chapter Two:
● Virginia Company: A joint-stock enterprise that King James I chartered in 1606. The
company was to spread Christianity in the New World as well as find ways to make a
profit from it.
,● Anglican Church: The established state church of England, formed by Henry VIII after
the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
● Roanoke colony: English expedition of 117 settlers, including Virginia Dare, the first
English child born in the New World; the colony disappeared from Roanoke Island in the
Outer Banks sometime between 1587 and 1590.
● enclosure movement: A legal process that divided large farm fields in England that were
previously collectively owned by groups of peasants into smaller, individually owned
plots. The enclosure movement took place over several centuries and resulted in
eviction for many peasants.
● John Smith: A swashbuckling soldier of fortune with rare powers of leadership and
self-promotion who was appointed to the resident council to manage Jamestown.
● headright system: A land-grant policy that promised fifty acres to any colonist who could
afford passage to Virginia, as well as fifty more for any accompanying servants. The
headright policy was eventually expanded to include any colonists—and was also
adopted in other colonies.
● House of Burgesses: The first elected assembly in colonial America, established in 1619
in Virginia. Only wealthy landowners could vote in its elections.
● Uprising of 1622: Unsuccessful uprising of Virginia Native Americans that wiped out
one-quarter of the settler population, but ultimately led to the settlers’ gaining supremacy.
● dower rights: In colonial America, the right of a widowed woman to inherit one-third of
her deceased husband’s property.
● Puritans: English religious group that sought to purify the Church of England; founded
the Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop in 1630.
● John Winthrop: Puritan leader and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who
resolved to use the colony as a refuge for persecuted Puritans and as an instrument of
building a “wilderness Zion” in America.
● 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: A document signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower before the
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth; the document committed the group to a majority-rule
government.
● Great Migration (1630s): 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.
● Dissenters: Protestants who belonged to denominations outside of the established
Anglican Church.
● captivity narratives: Accounts written by colonists after their time in Indian captivity, often
stressing the captive’s religious convictions.
● Pequot War: An armed conflict in 1637 that led to the destruction of one of New
England’s most powerful Indian groups.
● Half-Way Covenant: A 1662 religious compromise that allowed baptism and partial
church membership to colonial New Englanders whose parents were not among the
Puritan elect.
, ● English liberty: The idea that English people were entitled to certain liberties, including
trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the right to face one’s accuser in court. These rights
meant that even the English king was subject to the rule of law.
● Act Concerning Religion (or Maryland Toleration Act): 1649 law that granted free
exercise of religion to all Christian denominations in colonial Maryland.
Chapter Three:
● Metacom: The chief of the Wampanoags, whom the colonists called King Philip. He
resented English efforts to convert Indians to Christianity and waged a war against the
English colonists, one in which he was killed.
● King Philip’s War: A multiyear conflict that began in 1675 with an Indian uprising against
white colonists. Its result was broadened freedoms for white New Englanders and the
dispossession of the region’s Indians.
● mercantilism: The policy of Great Britain and other imperial powers of regulating the
economies of colonies to benefit the mother country.
● Navigation Act: Law passed by the English Parliament to control colonial trade and
bolster the mercantile system, 1650–1775; enforcement of the act led to growing
resentment by colonists.
● Covenant Chain: Alliance formed in the 1670s between the English and the Iroquois
nations.
● Yamasee uprising: Revolt of Yamasee and Creek Indians, aggravated by rising debts
and slave traders’ raids, against Carolina settlers. Resulted in the expulsion of many
Indians to Florida.
● Society of Friends (Quakers): Religious groups in England and America whose members
believed all persons possessed the “inner light” or spirit of God; they were early
proponents of the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.
● 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.
● Bacon’s Rebellion: Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against
Virginia governor William Berkeley’s administration because of governmental corruption
and because Berkeley had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids and did not allow
them to occupy Indian lands.
● Glorious Revolution: A coup in 1688 engineered by a small group of aristocrats that led
to William of Orange taking the British throne in place of James II.
● English Bill of Rights: A series of laws enacted in 1689 that inscribed the rights of
Englishmen into law and enumerated parliamentary powers such as taxation.
● Lords of Trade: An English regulatory board established to oversee colonial affairs in
1675.
● Dominion of New England: Consolidation into a single colony of the New England
colonies—and later New York and New Jersey—by royal governor Edmund Andros in
1686; dominion reverted to individual colonial governments three years later.
● English Toleration Act: A 1690 act of Parliament that allowed all English Protestants to
worship freely.
, ● Salem witch trials: A crisis of trials and executions in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 that
resulted from anxiety over witchcraft.
● redemptioners: Indentured families or persons who received passage to the New World
in exchange for a promise to work off their debt in America.
● Walking Purchase: An infamous 1737 purchase of Indian land in which Pennsylvanian
colonists tricked the Lenni Lenape Indians. The Lenape agreed to cede land equivalent
to the distance a man could walk in thirty-six hours, but the colonists marked out an area
using a team of runners.
● backcountry: In colonial America, the area stretched from central Pennsylvania
southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and into upland North and South
Carolina.
● staple crops: Important cash crops; for example, cotton or tobacco.
Chapter Four:
● Atlantic slave trade: The systematic importation of African slaves from their native
continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, largely fueled by rising demand
for sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco.
● Middle Passage: The hellish and often deadly middle leg of the transatlantic “Triangular
Trade” in which European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, then transported
enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean, and finally conveyed American
agricultural products back to Europe; from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth
century, some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown
millions more dying en route.
● yeoman farmers: Small landowners (the majority of white families in the Old South) who
farmed their own land and usually did not own slaves.
● Stono Rebellion: A slave uprising in 1739 in South Carolina that led to a severe
tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on
imported slaves.
● republicanism: Political theory in eighteenth-century England and America that
celebrated active participation in public life by economically independent citizens as
central to freedom.
● liberalism: Originally, political philosophy that emphasized the protection of liberty by
limiting the power of government to interfere with the natural rights of citizens; in the
twentieth century, belief in an activist government promoted greater social and economic
equality.
● salutary neglect: Informal British policy during the first half of the eighteenth century that
allowed the American colonies considerable freedom to pursue their economic and
political interests in exchange for colonial obedience.
● Enlightenment: Revolution in thought in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason
and science over the authority of traditional religion.
● Deism: Enlightenment thought applied to religion; and emphasized reason, morality, and
natural law.
Chapter One:
● Great League of Peace: An alliance of the Iroquois tribes, originally formed sometime
between 1450 and 1600, that used their combined strength to pressure Europeans to
work with them in the fur trade and to wage war across what is today eastern North
America.
● caravel: A fifteenth-century European ship capable of long-distance travel.
● reconquista: The “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors was completed by King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.
● conquistadores: Spanish term for “conquerors,” applied to Spanish and Portuguese
soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern
America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
● Columbian Exchange: The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with
Columbus’s voyages in 1492.
● creoles: Persons born in the New World of European ancestry.
● hacienda: Large-scale farm in the Spanish New World empire worked by Indian laborers.
● mestizos: Spanish word for persons of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
● Ninety-Five Theses: The list of moral grievances against the Catholic Church by Martin
Luther, a German priest, in 1517.
● Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Catholic missionary who renounced the Spanish practice of
coercively converting Indians and advocated their better treatment. In 1552, he wrote A
Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, which described the Spanish’s cruel
treatment of the Indians.
● repartimiento system: Spanish labor system under which Indians were legally free and
able to earn wages but were also required to perform a fixed amount of labor yearly.
Replaced the encomienda system.
● Black Legend: the idea that the Spanish New World Empire was more oppressive toward
the Indians than other European empires; was used as a justification for English imperial
expansion.
● Pueblo Revolt: Uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish
colonists out of modern-day New Mexico.
● indentured servants: Settlers 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.
● métis: Children of marriages between Indian women and French traders and officials.
● borderland: A place between or near recognized borders where no group of people has
complete political control or cultural dominance.
Chapter Two:
● Virginia Company: A joint-stock enterprise that King James I chartered in 1606. The
company was to spread Christianity in the New World as well as find ways to make a
profit from it.
,● Anglican Church: The established state church of England, formed by Henry VIII after
the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
● Roanoke colony: English expedition of 117 settlers, including Virginia Dare, the first
English child born in the New World; the colony disappeared from Roanoke Island in the
Outer Banks sometime between 1587 and 1590.
● enclosure movement: A legal process that divided large farm fields in England that were
previously collectively owned by groups of peasants into smaller, individually owned
plots. The enclosure movement took place over several centuries and resulted in
eviction for many peasants.
● John Smith: A swashbuckling soldier of fortune with rare powers of leadership and
self-promotion who was appointed to the resident council to manage Jamestown.
● headright system: A land-grant policy that promised fifty acres to any colonist who could
afford passage to Virginia, as well as fifty more for any accompanying servants. The
headright policy was eventually expanded to include any colonists—and was also
adopted in other colonies.
● House of Burgesses: The first elected assembly in colonial America, established in 1619
in Virginia. Only wealthy landowners could vote in its elections.
● Uprising of 1622: Unsuccessful uprising of Virginia Native Americans that wiped out
one-quarter of the settler population, but ultimately led to the settlers’ gaining supremacy.
● dower rights: In colonial America, the right of a widowed woman to inherit one-third of
her deceased husband’s property.
● Puritans: English religious group that sought to purify the Church of England; founded
the Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop in 1630.
● John Winthrop: Puritan leader and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who
resolved to use the colony as a refuge for persecuted Puritans and as an instrument of
building a “wilderness Zion” in America.
● 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: A document signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower before the
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth; the document committed the group to a majority-rule
government.
● Great Migration (1630s): 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.
● Dissenters: Protestants who belonged to denominations outside of the established
Anglican Church.
● captivity narratives: Accounts written by colonists after their time in Indian captivity, often
stressing the captive’s religious convictions.
● Pequot War: An armed conflict in 1637 that led to the destruction of one of New
England’s most powerful Indian groups.
● Half-Way Covenant: A 1662 religious compromise that allowed baptism and partial
church membership to colonial New Englanders whose parents were not among the
Puritan elect.
, ● English liberty: The idea that English people were entitled to certain liberties, including
trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the right to face one’s accuser in court. These rights
meant that even the English king was subject to the rule of law.
● Act Concerning Religion (or Maryland Toleration Act): 1649 law that granted free
exercise of religion to all Christian denominations in colonial Maryland.
Chapter Three:
● Metacom: The chief of the Wampanoags, whom the colonists called King Philip. He
resented English efforts to convert Indians to Christianity and waged a war against the
English colonists, one in which he was killed.
● King Philip’s War: A multiyear conflict that began in 1675 with an Indian uprising against
white colonists. Its result was broadened freedoms for white New Englanders and the
dispossession of the region’s Indians.
● mercantilism: The policy of Great Britain and other imperial powers of regulating the
economies of colonies to benefit the mother country.
● Navigation Act: Law passed by the English Parliament to control colonial trade and
bolster the mercantile system, 1650–1775; enforcement of the act led to growing
resentment by colonists.
● Covenant Chain: Alliance formed in the 1670s between the English and the Iroquois
nations.
● Yamasee uprising: Revolt of Yamasee and Creek Indians, aggravated by rising debts
and slave traders’ raids, against Carolina settlers. Resulted in the expulsion of many
Indians to Florida.
● Society of Friends (Quakers): Religious groups in England and America whose members
believed all persons possessed the “inner light” or spirit of God; they were early
proponents of the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.
● 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.
● Bacon’s Rebellion: Unsuccessful 1676 revolt led by planter Nathaniel Bacon against
Virginia governor William Berkeley’s administration because of governmental corruption
and because Berkeley had failed to protect settlers from Indian raids and did not allow
them to occupy Indian lands.
● Glorious Revolution: A coup in 1688 engineered by a small group of aristocrats that led
to William of Orange taking the British throne in place of James II.
● English Bill of Rights: A series of laws enacted in 1689 that inscribed the rights of
Englishmen into law and enumerated parliamentary powers such as taxation.
● Lords of Trade: An English regulatory board established to oversee colonial affairs in
1675.
● Dominion of New England: Consolidation into a single colony of the New England
colonies—and later New York and New Jersey—by royal governor Edmund Andros in
1686; dominion reverted to individual colonial governments three years later.
● English Toleration Act: A 1690 act of Parliament that allowed all English Protestants to
worship freely.
, ● Salem witch trials: A crisis of trials and executions in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 that
resulted from anxiety over witchcraft.
● redemptioners: Indentured families or persons who received passage to the New World
in exchange for a promise to work off their debt in America.
● Walking Purchase: An infamous 1737 purchase of Indian land in which Pennsylvanian
colonists tricked the Lenni Lenape Indians. The Lenape agreed to cede land equivalent
to the distance a man could walk in thirty-six hours, but the colonists marked out an area
using a team of runners.
● backcountry: In colonial America, the area stretched from central Pennsylvania
southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and into upland North and South
Carolina.
● staple crops: Important cash crops; for example, cotton or tobacco.
Chapter Four:
● Atlantic slave trade: The systematic importation of African slaves from their native
continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, largely fueled by rising demand
for sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco.
● Middle Passage: The hellish and often deadly middle leg of the transatlantic “Triangular
Trade” in which European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, then transported
enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean, and finally conveyed American
agricultural products back to Europe; from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth
century, some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown
millions more dying en route.
● yeoman farmers: Small landowners (the majority of white families in the Old South) who
farmed their own land and usually did not own slaves.
● Stono Rebellion: A slave uprising in 1739 in South Carolina that led to a severe
tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on
imported slaves.
● republicanism: Political theory in eighteenth-century England and America that
celebrated active participation in public life by economically independent citizens as
central to freedom.
● liberalism: Originally, political philosophy that emphasized the protection of liberty by
limiting the power of government to interfere with the natural rights of citizens; in the
twentieth century, belief in an activist government promoted greater social and economic
equality.
● salutary neglect: Informal British policy during the first half of the eighteenth century that
allowed the American colonies considerable freedom to pursue their economic and
political interests in exchange for colonial obedience.
● Enlightenment: Revolution in thought in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason
and science over the authority of traditional religion.
● Deism: Enlightenment thought applied to religion; and emphasized reason, morality, and
natural law.
