Definitions of Words Relating to Colonial America :: American History Puritans War Essays

Definitions of Words Relating to Colonial America 1.Iroquois Confederacy— confederation of five indigenous North American peoples, or nations, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca; founded c.1570. 2.Powhatan Confederacy— a group of 30 Native American tribes of the Eastern Woodlands. 3.Raleigh, Sir Walter— 1554-1618, English soldier, explorer, courtier, and man of letters. He conceived and organized the colonizing expeditions to America that ended tragically with the lost colony on Roanoke Island, VA with Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman. 4.Roanoke Island— 12 mi (19 km) long and 3 mi (4.8 km) wide, off the NE coast of North Carolina between Albemarle and Pimlico sounds, site of the earliest English colony in North America. The first colonists, sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh landed in Aug. 1585 but returned to England in 1586. A second group, arriving in 1587, disappeared by the time additional supplies were brought from England in 1591. Artifacts from the lost colony are displayed in Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on the island. 5.Virginia Company— name of two English colonization companies chartered by King James I in 1606. One founded on the Plymouth Colony; the other, latter known as the London Company, founded colonies in the South, notably Jamestown, VA. 6.Jamestown— former village, SE Va., first permanent English settlement in America; est. May 14, 1607, by the London Company on a peninsula (now an island) in the James R.; named for the reigning English king, James I. 7.Royal Colony— In 1691 a new royal charter was granted for the colony of Massachusetts, which incorporated the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket Island, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Under the charter a popular assembly was established to aid the royal governor, and the right to elect representatives to the assembly was based on property qualifications, rather than on church membership. The royal charter ended control of Massachusetts government by Puritan religious leaders. 8.Puritans— ‘Followers' of Puritanism, a movement for reform in the Church of England that had a profound influence on the social, political, ethical, and theological ideas in England and America. In America the early New England settlements were Puritan in origin and theocratic in nature. The spirit of Puritanism long persisted there, and the idea of congregational democratic government was carried into the political life of the state as one source of modern democracy. 9.Plymouth Colony— settled by the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620. The settlers had difficulty surviving early hardships, although a treaty with neighboring tribes assured peace for 50 years.