Chapter 5 Study Guide

1. Land ownership gave colonists political rights as well as prosperity.

2. Generally, only white male landowners or property owners could vote.

3. Because cash was scarce, farm wives bartered, or traded, with their neighbors for goods and services.

4. Although women contributed to the colonial economy, they did not have many rights.

5. Around age 11, many boys left their fathers to become apprentices and learn a trade from an experienced craftsman.

6. An apprentice worked for free, usually for four to seven years then he could work for wages or start his own business.

7. Most children were taught to read so that they could understand the Bible.

8. Most colonists thought schooling was more important for males than it was for females.

9. Teaching enslaved African Americans them to read in many places was illegal.

10. Most books in the colonies were imported from England, but colonists slowly began to publish their own books.

11. In 1732, Benjamin Franklin began to publish Poor Richard’s Almanack.

12. In the 1730s and 1740s, a religious movement called the Great Awakening swept through the colonies.

13. Jonathan Edwards, who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, was one of the best-known preachers of the Great Awakening.

14. During the Great Awakening, religious groups founded colleges such as Princeton and Brown to train ministers

15. George Whitefield drew thousands of people with his sermons and raised funds to start a home for orphans.

16. The Enlightenment emphasized reason and science as the paths to knowledge.

17. The Enlightenment English philosopher John Locke argued that people have natural rights such as life, liberty, and property.

18. John Locke said that people create governments to protect their natural rights and if a government fails in this duty, people have the right to change it.

19. The first step toward guaranteeing these rights of Englishmen came in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta.

20. The Magna Carta guaranteed important rights such as trail by jury to noblemen and freemen.

21. One of the most important English rights was the right to elect representatives to government.

22. Wanting their own representative government the Colonist formed their own elected assemblies, Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

23. Although the colonists governed themselves in some ways, England still had authority over them.

24. The law making body of the English government was called the Parliament.

25. Parliament had no representatives from the colonies.

26. The people of Massachusetts had claimed that without representation England had no right to make laws for them.

27. In 1688 England’s Glorious Revolution overthrew the King giving more rights to the people.

28. In 1689 The English Bill of Rights established that the government was to be based on laws made by Parliament, not on the desires of a ruler.

29. The Peter Zenger trial helped establish freedom of the press in the Colonies.

30. The French were exploring the North American interior while English colonists were settling the eastern coast.

31. By the late 1600s, French explorers had claimed the Ohio River valley, the Mississippi River valley, and the entire Great Lakes region.

32. The fur trade created economic and military alliances between the Europeans and their Native American trading partners.

33. The seeds for the French and Indian War were planted when British fur traders began moving into the Ohio River valley in the 1750s.

34. To keep the British out of the Ohio River valley, the French destroyed the British trading post located there.

35. To protect the region French built forts on land that the Virginia colony claimed to own.

36. Virginia sent a small group of soldiers to tell the French to leave, led by a 21-year-old major named George Washington.

37. On July 3, 1754 The French attacked and defeated Washington’s forces and he was forced to surrender.

38. In order to defeat the French Benjamin Franklin, suggested that the colonies band together in the first formal proposal to unite the colonies called The Albany Plan of Union.

39. The colonies rejected the Albany Plan because they did not want to give up control of their own affairs.

40. Britain realized that to win the war, it could not rely solely on the colonists for funding or for troops and sent General Edward Braddock and two regiments to Virginia.

41. On July 9, on a narrow trail eight miles from Fort Duquesne, fewer than 900 French and Indian troops surprised and defeated the Braddock’s 2100 British forces.

42. American colonists were stunned by Braddock’s defeat and by many other British losses over the next two years.

43. The defeat of the French at The Battle of Quebec was the turning point of the war.

44. In 1763 the French and British signed The Treaty of Paris putting an official end to the French and Indian War.

45. After French forces withdrew, the British took over their forts however hostilities continued with the local Native Americans.

46. Native American groups responded by attacking settlers and destroying almost every British fort west of the Appalachians in what was called Pontiac’s Rebellion.

47. British officers came up with a brutal plan to defeat the Native Americans invited the war leaders in to talk and then gave them smallpox-infected blankets as gifts.

48. Due to the hostilities the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonists to settle west of the Appalachians making the colonist angry.

49. The British government was angry at the colonists, who did not want to pay for their own defense.

50. The first step toward guaranteeing rights of Englishmen came in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta.