Colonial History--Now You'll Remember It!

I've composed mnemonic aids to helping AP US History students remember chapters one to five in the textbook, American Pageant.

Background material from The American Pageant, Twelfth Edition, is followed by Spinrad mnemonics in italics.

1. New World Beginnings

Three sister farming: beans growing on the trellis of the cornstalks and squash covering the planting mounds to retain moisture in the soil. The rich diet produced the highest population densities in the North American continent, among them the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples.

Beans, maize, and squash,
Sister farming of three
Sustained the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee

New world exports: gold and silver; corn, potatoes, pineapples, tobacco, vanilla, and chocolate; and maybe syphilis. Old world exports: wheat, sugar, rice, coffee; horse, cows, pigs; African slave labor; and smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.

The new world exported syphilis, silver, and gold.
Europeans sent horse, cows, pigs, and slaves in their ship holds.
America received sugar, rice, coffee, and wheat.
She gave to Europe corn, potatoes, tobacco and a chocolate treat.
But European diseases were also sent.
Indian deaths—ninety percent!

2. The Planting of English America

Virginia Company of London chose a location on the banks of the James River—Jamestown. The Virginia Company was saved from utter collapse by Captain John Smith and new governor, Lord De La Warr.

From Virgin(ia) (queen) then James.
After Smith then War(r).

John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, was the father of the tobacco industry and economic savior of the Virginia colony.

Rolfe loved an Indian,
Perfected a good smoke.
To grow it needed lots of men.
Virginia didn’t go broke.


Maryland—Catholic haven,
Supported Act of Toleration

Carolinas exported rice and imported slaves.
CERIS

Georgia served as a buffer colony against Spanish Florida and French Louisiana.
Georgia is in the way of Flo and Lou.

3. Settling the Northern Colonies

Puritans were English religious reformers who wished to undertake a total purification and de-Catholicization of the Church of England. Separatists vowed to break away entirely from the Church of England. The Pilgrims were a group of Puritans, including some Separatists, who secured rights to settle under the Virginia Company’s jurisdiction. Their ship, the Mayflower, missed its destination, and they settled on the shore of Plymouth Bay, New England. All signed the Mayflower Compact, a step toward self-government.

PILGRIMS

Puritans
Icy first winter killed half
Left England and then Holland for America
Good leadership in William Bradford
Refused to be discouraged
In fur, fish, and lumber found prosperity and a thanksgiving celebration with the Indians
Mayflower Compact
Separatists influenced the group.

Massachusetts Bay Colony started off on a larger scale than any other English settlements. John Winthrop believed, “We shall be a city upon a hill” and a calling from G-d to serve the new colony as its governor. The purpose of the government was to enforce G-d’s laws. Only “visible saints” could vote.

Massachusetts Bay Colony,
Not a true democracy.
Votes only for Puritans,
Not rabble that sins.
Governor Winthrop had inspiring skill:
“We shall be as a city upon a hill.”

Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams challenged the Puritan orthodoxy of Massachusetts Bay. Hutchinson was banished and Williams fled to the Rhode Island area where he built a Baptist church and established complete freedom of religion.

Who Ceri Arf
Williams, Hutchinson, orthodoxy challengers. (He) escaped (to) Rhode Island and religious freedom.

Indian King Philip (aka Metacom) forged an Indian alliance and mounted a series of coordinated assaults on English villages throughout New England, but he was captured and killed. King Philip’s War inflicted lasting defeat on New England’s Indians, and thereafter they posed only sporadic threats to the New England colonists.

King Philip organized in order to fight,
But his head ended up on a pike.
New England’s last serious Indian attack
Set the tribes’ numbers back.

Residues of Charles II’s effort to assert tighter administrative control using English officials aggravated Americans.

Charles’ judges sent
Were viewed by New England with contempt.

William Penn’s colony included an elected assembly, freedom of worship, no restrictions on immigration, and benevolent Indian relations.

Pennsylvania assembly worship, Immigration, Indians
Paw II

4. American Life in the Seventeenth Century

Malaria, dysentery, and typhoid (MDT) cut ten years off the life expectancy of newcomers from England that left for the Chesapeake. Half the people born to early Virginia and Maryland settlements did not survive to celebrate their twentieth birthdays.

Virginia 1600s=MDT minus ten. With luck, ten again.

Both Virginia and Maryland employed the “headright” system to encourage the importation of servant workers. Whoever paid the passage of a laborer (and Britain had a labor surplus) received the right to acquire fifty acres of land. The laborer, an “indentured servant,” voluntarily traded several years of labor for the cost of the transatlantic passage and later clothes, provisions, and maybe a small amount of land. The planters became great land holders. The indentured servants often became low-wage laborers. Bacon’s rebellion showed the tension of the landless former servants against the plantation gentry. African slaves solved the problem for the gentry as the pool of available English laborers shrank in the late 1600s.

Bacon replaced indentured with African slaves.
Brid Africans

Slave life was most severe on rice plantations in the deep south and slaves there didn’t live long. Blacks in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake region had it easier, and by the early 1700s family life and natural increase was possible.

Slave life wasn’t nice
In the deep south growing rice.
Slave health was a great lack,
To import more, slave ships had to go back.
Chesapeake tobacco had more spice
And allowed slaves an easier family life.

Southern society in the seventeenth century was characterized by a few great merchant planters who owned most slaves and land and monopolized political power. Beneath the planters were the small farmers. They tilled modest plots and might own one or two slaves but lived as subsistence farmers. Beneath them were landless whites, most of them former indentured servants. Under them were indentured servants. Black slaves were on the lowest rung of society.

Planters, small farmers, landless whites, indentured servants, black slaves
Pretty Sally Finch loves when I sass brother Sam.

Healthier New England life on average added ten years to an Englishman’s lifespan. A stable family was the center of New England life, and early marriage encouraged a high birthrate.

If on this earth you wanted to stay,
Best to live in Massachusetts Bay.
Strong family units were partly how
People lived almost as long as they do now.

The Puritans’ Congregational Church government led to democracy in political government.

Church democracy to town meeting

By conferring partial membership rights in the once-exclusive Puritan congregations, the Half-Way Covenant weakened the distinction between the “elect” and others, further diluting the spiritual purity of the original settlers’ G-dly community. Strict religious purity was sacrificed somewhat to the cause of wider religious participation.

Partial church membership—
Half –Way covenant
Diluted spiritual purity
Of Puritan Community.
Infused the congregation
With more religious participation.
A group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women. A hysterical ‘witch hunt” ensued, leading to the execution in 1692 of twenty individuals.

Salem hunt executed “witches”—“bewitched girls of adolescence in Massachusetts.
Shew B Gam

5. Colonial society on the Eve of Revolution

The 18th century American population boom shift the balance of power between the colonies and Britain. In 1700 there were twenty Englishmen for each American colonist. By 1775 the ratio had fallen to three to one.

America grew
To many from few.
In 1776 the British were undone
Partly by a ratio that had fallen to three to one (British to American).

Ethnicities of (non-native) Americans in 1790 were predominantly (in order of population, greatest to least) English, African, Scottish, German, and Scotts-Irish.

English, African, Scottish, German, and Scotts-Irish.
Eat all sweet grapes—stuff it!

Scotts-Irish led the armed march of the Paxton Boys on Philadelphia in 1764, protesting the Quakers’ lenient policy toward the Indians. They also led the Regulator movement, a rebellion against eastern dominance of the South Carolina colony.

The Paxton Boys protested Quakers’ lack of fight.
The Regulators rebelled against South Carolina eastern might.

The colonies’ economy in the 18th century could be explored by region. New England specialized in fishing, whaling, shipbuilding, rum, and trading. The middle colonies grew grain, raised cattle, and traded. The south grew tobacco, rice, and indigo, and traded.

In New England you might trade some fish,
Drying cod for a Spaniard’s dish.
Middle colonies made the bread
Or had cattle in the shed.
Southerners made their dough
From rice, tobacco,
And indigo.

Parliament passed the Molasses Act, disallowing crucial North American trade with the French West Indies. American merchants bribed and smuggled their way around the law.

The Molasses Act didn’t stick to the rum American smugglers bought from the French West Indies.

Two “established” or tax-supported churches in 1775—the Anglican (Church of England) and the Congregational (Puritan) —were strongest in different parts of the country. The Anglicans were established in the south and a part of New York. The Congregationalists were formerly established in all the New England colonies except Rhode Island.

The Anglican or England’s church
Held a strong southern perch.
The Congregational—Puritan—
In New England sermonized sinful men.

Clerical intellectualism and more liberal doctrines set the stage for the religious revival during the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening. “Old light clergy were skeptical of the emotionalism and theatrics of the revivalists. “New light” clergy defended the Awakening for its role in revitalizing American religion. The Awakening led to the founding of “new light” centers of higher learning such as Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth and was the first spontaneous mass movement of the American people, unifying them over sectional and denominational boundaries.

Whitefield
Wrath Hellfire ITinerant (preachers) Emotional (in open) FIELD

Peter Zenger’s newspaper assailed the corrupt royal governor. The mere fact of printing, irrespective of the truth, was enough to convict. The jurors defied the judge and declared a verdict of not guilty—a blow for freedom of the press.

Attacking corruption, Zenger’s paper did tell.
The governor put Zenger to trial for seditious libel.
The judge told the jury that whether truth or tale
Just making the statements should send Zenger to jail.
Zenger’s defense—opposing arbitrary power
Won, permitting press freedom to flower.

Compared to Europe, 18th century America offered unusual opportunities for social mobility and a greater level of democracy.

American mobility and democracy
AMAD