NOTE-TAKING GUIDE: Of the People: A History of the United States CHAPTER 4 “Continental Empires: 1660–1720”

COMMON THREADS
  • What forces—political, economic, military, social, and cultural—gave shape to the British Empire? Which of these forces figured in the conscious plan of empire, and which shaped the empire nonetheless?
  • How did imperial politics—in particular the contest between England and France and England’s larger geopolitical objectives—affect the lives of ordinary men and women in the colonies?
  • What is a slave society, and how did Virginia become one?
  • Which European institutions transplanted easily to North America, and which did not?

OUTLINE
Economy of Mercantilism
New Colonies, New Patterns
New Netherland Becomes New York
American Landscape: New Amsterdam/New York
Diversity and Prosperity in Pennsylvania
Indians and Africans in the Political Economy of Carolina
The Barbados Connection
The Transformation of Virginia
Social Change in Virginia
Bacon’s Rebellion and the Abandonment of the Middle Ground
Virginia Becomes a Slave Society
New England Under Assault
Social Prosperity and the Fear of Religious Decline
King Philip’s War
Indians and the Empire
The Empire Strikes
The Dominion of New England
The Glorious Revolution in Britain and America
The Rights of Englishmen
Conflict in the Empire
Massachusetts in Crisis
The Social and Cultural Contexts of Witchcraft
Witchcraft at Salem
The End of Witchcraft
America and the World: Witchcraft in Global Perspective
Empires in Collision
France Attempts an Empire
The Spanish Outpost in Florida
Conquest, Revolt, and Reconquest in New Mexico
Native Americans and the Country Between
Conclusion
WHO?
Nathaniel Bacon
William Berkeley
John Locke
William Penn
Popé / WHAT?
Half-Way Covenant
King Philip’s (Metacom’s) War
Liberalism
Mercantilism
Navigation Acts
Quakers
Redemptioners
The Glorious Revolution
REVIEW QUESTIONS
  1. What was Britain’s plan of empire? What role were the American colonies supposed to play in it?
  2. What effect did political turmoil and the change of leadership in Britain have on the American colonies in the second half of the seventeenth century?
  3. Describe Native American–white relations in the American colonies in the second half of the seventeenth century. What was the Covenant Chain, and how did Edmund Andros’s vision of Native American–whiterelations differ from that of settlers in New England?
  4. Many of the American colonies experienced a period of political instability in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In many cases, ranging from the Salem witch trials to Popé’s Rebellion of 1680, the sources of the instability appear specific and local, yet they may also reveal a pattern. To what extent were these instances of instability local, and to what extent may they reveal larger processes at work in the colonies of European imperial powers?
  5. In this period, a number of colonies became slave societies. What forces propelled these changes? Were different outcomes possible?
  6. What patterns, if any, do you see in Native Americans’ accommodation and resistance to European expansion in North America in this period?

NOTES: TO FOLLOW UP / QUESTIONS TO ASK IN CLASS