wait remember that time a woman pretended to be a man so she could be a priest and actually made it to the papacy and then the only way they figured out she was a woman was when she gave birth in the middle of a parade?
This is a quicky review of things up to the American Revolution I wrote up to study, and any APUSH students can read to study, as we all get ready for the AP test Friday. I know I talked a long time ago about podcasts, but right now, this is the best I can do!
Chapter 5: The Settling of the Western Hemisphere and Colonial America (1450-1650)
So a lot happened in this whole 200 years of settlement, our key players are the British, the French, and the Indians. They’re going to be kind of a big deal… they might all get in some kind of big war later. I don’t know. Anywho.
Off in Canada, the land of mooses and the French, or at least at the time, they hadn’t discovered the wonders of maple syrup yet, but they were doing pretty great at fur trading. And in order to expand this fluffy business, Marquette (like the school), Joliet (like the city), and La Salle (like the street) all went exploring. And that last guy even found this swampy place he named after his king, Louis XIV, Louisiana. The thing you really need to know about the French though, is that they were actually, you know, NICE to the Indians. Unlike the Spanish who went and conquered everything else, when the French went to convert the Indians to Christianity with the help of some Jesuits, they were nice about it.
Now these Indian folk, yeah them with their long names, were converted to Catholicism by both the French and the Spanish, and the British didn’t really bother with them. Except for that John Smith guy. John Smith was the founder of Jamestown through a joint stock company called the London company. Now living in Jamestown sucked, there were poor harvests, food shortages and disease. Until they hooked up with the Indians. Now, contrary to popular Disney-lead belief, John Smith and Pocahontas did not become and thing. Pocahontas and John Rolfe, the tobacco king, was totally a thing though. This marriage kept the peace, tobacco became Virginia’s cash crop, and things seemed pretty fab. Down in Virginia, they used indentured servants to do all their work, up north in Massachusetts, they used the faith in the Lord and very, very few slaves ever. That’s big. See, indentured servants were eventually replaced by slaves after people figured out how economically feasible it was to own another human being, where up north, it just didn’t happen because they weren’t growing massive crops of tobacco to sell, they were praying and other things. These Puritans were purer than thou, and definitely purer than those Catholics, so when the Church of England began to be too much like the Catholic church (which it was basically the same thing, except it had divorce and no pope, just go ask Henry VIII) these Calvinists (which John Calvin was the original crazy-city-on-a-hill dude, Geneva, Switzerland is all him) were predestined (get it, religion jokes! Ok I’ll stop with the parenthesis) to go to the New World just as the persecution they were under with James I got bad. There were these other bros, Separatists, who you might now better as the Pilgrims, who had to flee because they were that religiously zealous. Massachusetts because A City On A Hill, with the design of John Winthrop. A couple people came along and tried to change things, and they were promptly thrown out. Like Roger Williams (total separation of church and state) who founded Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Hooker who founded Hartford, Connecticut, Anne Hutchinson (who said she received special revelations from God) who founded Portsmouth, and John Davenport who founded New Haven.
What should be noted about all of these budding colonies was their elected assemblies, Virginia having the first, the House of Burgesses.
Chapter 6: The British Empire in America: Growth and Conflict (1650-1750)
The life and times of mercantilism, or the economic philosophy that states that economic self-sufficiency was crucial to a country’s overall power, so therefore empires were necessary in order to keep the wealth all under one crown. It’s kind of like deciding you will never ever buy anything from anyone every again, just so you don’t give other people your money. This economic policy fostered the Navigation Acts, better known as the Acts-That-If-They-Were-Just-Enforced-In-The-First-Place-We-Wouldn’t-Have-An-America. This act basically told the colonists that certain products that they made could only go to England, but its not like the listened. Which is why in 1684, the crown revoked the Massachusetts Bay charter, most other new England colonies, and they all got lumped into the Dominion of New England run by Sir Edmund Andros, who no one liked. Down in Virginia, Nathaniel Bacon (not the sciency one) decided that it would be a good idea to revolt after the Navigation Acts made tobacco prices drop.
Angry white people weren’t the only ones in the colonies though. African slaves were forced to go on the horrible Middle Passage to be traded in the Americas through the Triangle Trade System, in the north American colonies, they became the replacements for indentured servants, working on tobacco (NOT COTTON, NOT YET) plantations. And because slavery is bad and the slaves knew it, the Stono Rebellion happened, killing several plantation owners and ending up with slaves being treated more harshly than before.
Back in the homeland, there was a whole English Civil War happening, and eventually, these two bros named William and Mary came along and set up the constitutional monarchy we’ve all heard about with Will and Kate. Will and Mary decided to be firm with those colonies over on the other side of the ocean, and as we should have learned in APUSH, the England/America relationship doesn’t last that much longer after that. A bunch of wars happen after that, most notably the War of Spanish Succession or Queen Anne’s War, where Spain and France almost buddied up and became one Hapsburg mess, which Britain did not like.
And so through all of those war that England was concentrating on back home and uh, continuing the royal line because Queen Anne didn’t have any kids, the Era of Salutary Neglect came around. Colonial assemblies just kind of did their thing, and the colonies snuck around with other trading partners behind England’s back like a bad boyfriend.
And remember all that religious stuff? It comes back in the First Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield preached about hell and brimstone and God and caught people’s attention. All of your Ivy League schools were founded to train more God-fearing preachers, and the whole thing pretty much was a contained, all-American movement that got it in people’s heads that questioning authority, whether it be religious or political, was totally cool.
So the Ohio River Valley. Obviously, everyone wanted the future site of a bunch of roller coasters and like, Ohio, right? Yes. The Native Americans wanted to keep it, because well, it was theirs first and the colonists wanted it because it was downright cool, and the French wanted to build a fort there and on top of all of that, Britain and France were already fighting the Seven Years War back home, so, well, WAR. The French and Indian War, actually. Ended with the Treaty of Paris (This is the first) Britain got everything, and France got booted out of the New World. The main effect of the end of the war though, was the colonists thought they would have been fine without the British assistance, and the British thought they were joking, so they decided to keep this little money-making bunch of colonies safe by stationing more troops there and then saying that the colonists had to pay taxes to provide funds for the protection they were receive. The colonists didn’t like this. They didn’t like the Currency Act, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts, and then finally, Britain really pissed them off with what they deemed the Intolerable Acts but were actually named the Coercive Acts and then with the additional Quebec Act (that didn’t even apply anywhere but Canada) all hell broke loose.
The First Continental Congress, you think it was really cool and angry, right? No, they actually just sent a letter to George about why this taxing thing was irking them.
Chapter 8: The American Revolution and the New Nation (1775-1787)
Georgie wasn’t going to listen, and neither was his buddy Lord North. So there comes Lexington and Concord, the first shots of the Revolutionary War.
Then people decided to get serious and have another Continental Congress, the second one. Here these guys authorized money printing, buying supplies, and foreign relations, and lastly, the creation of the Continental Army commanded by our own Georgie, George Washington. So with this, they sent the Olive Branch Petition, that the king wouldn’t even receive because well, they were already revolting. The next piece of mail he got was the Declaration of Independence, a document that basically plagiarized from this dude named John Locke and talked about all the rights Americans would get. And from there, shit got real.
The Americans didn’t actually win many battles, but they won at Saratoga, and that’s all that mattered. Because that was the battle that got Louis XVI to empty his treasury to make sure that America was independent and that Britain couldn’t have them anymore. From there, everything got better, until finally, at Yorktown, Britain finally surrendered completely. Another Treaty of Paris was signed, and everything seemed pretty good.
Now they had to figure out how to govern this new nation, and they decided on the Articles of Confederation, which provided a bunch of rights to the states but basically nothing to the unicameral federal government. One of the few things this body successfully passed was the Northwest Ordinances which outlined how the territories out west (or what we would call the Midwest) would become states.
Economic distress was a serious issue, because America didn’t have any money, and the money it printed, was worthless. In frustration with this, Daniel Shays took up arms and revolted against the government, which a paid army had to put down. All this showed is that the weak national government, seriously had to go.
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