The pamphlet Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine and published in January 1776, urged colonists to reject monarchy and declare independence.
Missing Word
Paine
Thomas Paine was an English-born writer whose plain, forceful pamphlet sold widely and persuaded many colonists that a republic was better than rule by a hereditary king.
Category: Republican Ideals
Question 2
Under coverture, the legal doctrine that absorbed a wife's legal identity into her husband's, a married woman could not make contracts or own property in her own name.
Missing Word
coverture
Coverture was the legal status of married women, who depended on their husbands legally and economically. The Revolution did not change it, even as women such as Abigail Adams questioned husbands' power.
Category: Revolutionary Society
Question 3
Phillis Wheatley, who was brought from Africa and enslaved in Boston, won fame as a poet and was freed in 1773.
Missing Word
Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley became literate as a child and published widely admired poetry. Some doubted that an African woman could have written it, and her work questioned how Christians could justify slavery.
Category: Revolutionary Society
Question 4
A legislature divided into two houses, such as Congress under the Constitution, is described as bicameral.
Missing Word
bicameral
Bicameral means having two legislative houses, an upper and a lower. The Articles of Confederation had a single house, while the Constitution created a Senate and a House of Representatives.
Category: State Constitutions
Question 5
John Adams drew on the French thinker Montesquieu, who argued that liberty required separating legislative, executive and judicial power.
Missing Word
Montesquieu
Montesquieu was an Enlightenment political philosopher whose idea of separation of powers shaped Adams's advice to the states and later the federal Constitution's system of checks and balances.
Category: State Constitutions
Question 6
The 1783 Treaty of Paris set the western boundary of the United States at the Mississippi River, although Native nations still controlled much of that land.
Missing Word
Mississippi
The Mississippi River became the western border of the new nation under the peace treaty. Native nations living east of it were not consulted or named, and they continued to resist American settlement.
Category: Revolutionary Society
Question 7
Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader who sided with the British during the war, later helped organize a Western Confederacy of Native nations to resist American settlement.
Missing Word
Brant
Joseph Brant was a Mohawk leader who allied with Britain during the Revolution. Afterward he worked to unite Native nations against American expansion into the Northwest, which led to the Northwest Indian War.
Category: Revolutionary Society
Question 8
The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided each township into 36 sections of 640 acres apiece, to be sold at public auction.
Missing Word
36
The 1785 ordinance surveyed western land into square townships six miles on a side, each split into 36 one-square-mile sections, so the Confederation Congress could sell land in orderly units to raise revenue.
Category: Articles of Confederation
Question 9
The Articles of Confederation created a unicameral Congress, meaning a legislature with only one house, in which each state cast a single vote.
Missing Word
unicameral
Unicameral means having a single legislative chamber. Under the Articles, each state delegation had one vote in that one house, whatever the state's population, unlike the two-house Congress the Constitution later created.
Category: Articles of Confederation
Question 10
Farmers in western Massachusetts closed county courts in 1786 to halt foreclosure, the legal seizure of land from debtors who could not repay their loans.
Missing Word
foreclosure
Foreclosure is the seizure of property when a borrower cannot repay a debt. With paper money nearly worthless and hard money scarce, many farmers faced losing their land, which sparked Shays' Rebellion.
Category: Articles of Confederation
Question 11
In January 1787, rebels led by Daniel Shays tried to seize the federal armory at Springfield but were driven off by state militia.
Missing Word
Springfield
Springfield, Massachusetts, held a federal arsenal of weapons. The rebels' failed attack there was the climax of Shays' Rebellion and alarmed leaders who wanted a stronger national government.
Category: Articles of Confederation
Question 12
In 1786, delegates from just five states met at the Annapolis Convention to discuss trade and called for a broader meeting in Philadelphia the next year.
Missing Word
Annapolis
The Annapolis Convention, held in Maryland, drew too few states to solve the problems of interstate commerce, so its delegates endorsed Alexander Hamilton's call for the Philadelphia convention of 1787.
Category: Constitutional Convention
Question 13
Because the Constitutional Convention met in secret, the detailed notes kept by Virginia delegate James Madison are the chief record of its debates.
Missing Word
Madison
James Madison drafted the Virginia Plan and took careful notes on the convention's closed sessions. His notes are the most complete source historians have for how the Constitution was written.
Category: Constitutional Convention
Question 14
The Federalist essays urging New York to ratify the Constitution were published under the shared pen name Publius.
Missing Word
Publius
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote the essays under the name Publius, after a founder of the Roman Republic. Collected as The Federalist Papers, they remain a key explanation of the Constitution.
Category: Ratification Debate
Question 15
The Constitution was to take effect once special ratifying conventions in 9 of the thirteen states approved it.
Missing Word
9
The framers required approval by nine states, not all thirteen, so that a single state could not block the new government as Rhode Island had blocked changes under the Articles of Confederation.
Category: Ratification Debate