Diseases brought by Europeans, such as smallpox, killed far more Native Americans than Spanish weapons did.
Correct Answer
True
True. Native peoples had no immunity to diseases such as smallpox, and epidemics caused far more deaths than warfare did. The Timucua of Florida, for example, fell from a large population to about a thousand people by 1700.
Category: Spanish Colonies
Question 2
Spanish colonial society was patriarchal, giving men authority over the family, society and government.
Correct Answer
True
True. In Spanish colonies, as in Spain, men ruled the household and public life, and women held lower status. The Spanish also placed themselves above Native peoples and Africans in a rigid hierarchy.
Category: Spanish Colonies
Question 3
Juan de Oñate's expedition found rich gold and silver mines in New Mexico.
Correct Answer
False
False. New Mexico produced little gold or silver, which disappointed the Spanish. Spain kept the colony mainly as a frontier outpost and a mission field for converting the Pueblo.
Category: Spanish Colonies
Question 4
After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Spain reestablished control over New Mexico in 1692.
Correct Answer
True
True. The revolt drove the Spanish out for twelve years, but Spain returned and reasserted control in 1692. Some Spanish colonists blamed the uprising on the Devil.
Category: Spanish Colonies
Question 5
By 1640, New France had attracted tens of thousands of French settlers.
Correct Answer
False
False. Fewer than 400 settlers lived in New France in 1640, because the French saw Canada as a harsh, frozen land. The small population depended heavily on alliances with Algonquian peoples.
Category: Dutch and French Colonies
Question 6
New Netherland allowed a degree of religious tolerance, and Jewish immigrants could become residents beginning in the 1650s.
Correct Answer
True
True. The Dutch colony admitted Protestants from several European countries and, from the 1650s, Jewish settlers, whom the Dutch West India Company allowed to stay over Director-General Peter Stuyvesant's objections. New Amsterdam was known for the many languages heard in its streets.
Category: Dutch and French Colonies
Question 7
The Dutch colony of New Netherland was centered on the St. Lawrence River.
Correct Answer
False
False. New Netherland was centered on the Hudson River, with New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island and the fur post of Beverwijck, now Albany, upriver. The St. Lawrence River was the heart of New France.
Category: Dutch and French Colonies
Question 8
By 1619, Virginia had a representative assembly called the House of Burgesses.
Correct Answer
True
True. The House of Burgesses first met in 1619 alongside a governor and council. It was the first elected legislative assembly in English America.
Category: Chesapeake Colonies
Question 9
Jamestown's "starving time" took place during the colony's first summer in 1607.
Correct Answer
False
False. The starving time came in the winter of 1609 to 1610, when hunger, disease and conflict with the Powhatan nearly destroyed the colony. Survivors were about to abandon Jamestown when a supply ship arrived in June 1610.
Category: Chesapeake Colonies
Question 10
Tobacco, long smoked by Native peoples, became the economic foundation of Virginia once colonists began exporting it to England in the 1610s.
Correct Answer
True
True. Exports to England began in 1614, and the crop's heavy labor demands shaped Chesapeake society. Planters relied first on indentured servants and later on enslaved Africans to grow it.
Category: Chesapeake Colonies
Question 11
Indentured servants in the Chesapeake signed contracts to work for life.
Correct Answer
False
False. Indentured servants agreed to work for a set term, usually about five to seven years, in exchange for passage, food and shelter. At the end they received freedom dues, sometimes including land.
Category: Chesapeake Colonies
Question 12
Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe in 1614 helped bring the First Anglo-Powhatan War to an end.
Correct Answer
True
True. Pocahontas, daughter of the Powhatan leader Wahunsonacook, had been captured by the English in 1613. Her marriage to Rolfe helped end the war, and promoters used her conversion as an example of colonial success.
Category: Chesapeake Colonies
Question 13
The Pilgrims who founded Plymouth wanted to reform the Church of England from within rather than separate from it.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Pilgrims were Separatists who wanted a complete break from the Church of England. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, by contrast, hoped to reform the church from within.
Category: Puritan New England
Question 14
John Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city upon a hill" that would serve as a model for others.
Correct Answer
True
True. Winthrop, a leader of the colony from the English gentry, hoped Massachusetts Bay would be a model of reformed Protestantism, a new English Israel. Its founding in 1630 began a large Puritan migration.
Category: Puritan New England
Question 15
The Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in English North America, was published in Virginia.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Bay Psalm Book was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, on the first printing press in English America. Puritans valued literacy so that everyone could read the Bible.
Category: Puritan New England
Question 16
In the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, nineteen people were hanged.
Correct Answer
True
True. The Salem crisis was the most notorious of many witchcraft accusations in Puritan New England, most of which targeted women. Others accused at Salem died in jail, and one man was pressed to death with heavy stones.
Category: Puritan New England
Question 17
Puritan missionary John Eliot translated the Bible into an Iroquoian language for Native converts living in praying towns.
Correct Answer
False
False. Eliot translated the Bible into an Algonquian language, the language of the Native peoples of southern New England, and published it in 1663. He hoped Native preachers would spread the faith in their own communities.
Category: Puritan New England
Question 18
Slavery as practiced in West Africa was based on race, as it later was in the English colonies.
Correct Answer
False
False. In West Africa people were enslaved as war captives, as punishment for crimes or to settle debts, not because of race. That slavery was often temporary and was not usually inherited, unlike chattel slavery in the colonies.
Category: Slavery and Trade
Question 19
Maroon communities were settlements of people who had escaped slavery and resisted recapture.
Correct Answer
True
True. In Jamaica and elsewhere, people who fled slavery formed maroon communities and survived by farming or foraging. Running away was one of the most common forms of resistance to slavery.
Category: Slavery and Trade
Question 20
Native peoples of New England held land as private property enclosed by fences, much as English colonists did.
Correct Answer
False
False. Native peoples held land in common for the use of the group and moved seasonally among resource areas. Colonists favored private property, fences and fields, which closed those areas to Native use.
Category: Slavery and Trade