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Headrights
A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to settlers, and the Plymouth Company followed suit. The headright system was used in several colonies, including Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Most headrights were for 1 to of land, and were granted to those who were willing to cross the Atlantic and help populate the colonies. Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of an indentured laborer. These land grants consisted of for someone newly moving to the area and for people previously living in the area. By ensuring the landowning masters had legal ownership of all land acquired, the indentured laborers after their indenture period had passed had little opportunity to procure their own land. This kept a large portion of the citi ...
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Slavery In The Colonial United States
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch Republic. Slave-ships of the Atlantic slave trade transported captives for slavery from Africa to the Americas. Indigenous people were also enslaved in the North American colonies, but on a smaller scale, and Indian slavery largely ended in the late eighteenth century. Enslavement of Indigenous people did continue to occur in the Southern states until the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Slavery was also used as a punishment for crimes committed by free people. I ...
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European Colonization Of The Americas
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale European colonization of the Americas took place between about 1492 and 1800. Although the Norse had explored and colonized areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 CE, the later and more well-known wave by the European powers is what formally constitutes as beginning of colonization, involving the continents of North America and South America. During this time, several empires from Europe—primarily Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands and Sweden—began to explore and claim the land, natural resources and human capital of the Americas, resulting in the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and in many cases, genocide of the indigenous peoples, and the establishment of several settler colonial states. Some formerly European settler colonies—including New Mexico, Alaska, the Prairies or northern Grea ...
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Gunter's Chain
Gunter's chain (also known as Gunter’s measurement) is a distance measuring device used for surveying. It was designed and introduced in 1620 by English clergyman and mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581–1626). It enabled plots of land to be accurately surveyed and plotted, for legal and commercial purposes. Gunter developed an actual measuring chain of 100 links. These, the chain and the link, became statutory measures in England and subsequently the British Empire. Description The chain is divided into 100 links, usually marked off into groups of 10 by brass rings or tags which simplify intermediate measurement. Each link is thus long. A quarter chain, or 25 links, measures and thus measures a rod (or pole). Ten chains measure a furlong and 80 chains measure a statute mile. Gunter's chain reconciled two seemingly incompatible systems: the traditional English land measurements, based on the number four, and decimals based on the number 10. Since an acre measured 1 ...
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Homestead Acts
The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River. An extension of the homestead principle in law, the Homestead Acts were an expression of the Free Soil policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave-owners who wanted to buy up large tracts of land and use slave labor, thereby shutting out free white farmers. The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, opened up millions of acres. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the Federal government of the United States could apply. Women and immigrants who had applied for citizenship were eligible. Several additio ...
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Patroon
In the United States, a patroon (; from Dutch ''patroon'' ) was a landholder with manorial rights to large tracts of land in the 17th century Dutch colony of New Netherland on the east coast of North America. Through the Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629, the Dutch West India Company first started to grant this title and land to some of its invested members. These inducements to foster colonization and settlement (also known as the "Rights and Exemptions") are the basis for the patroon system. By the end of the eighteenth century, virtually all of the American states had abolished primogeniture and entail; thus patroons and manors evolved into simply large estates subject to division and leases. The deeded tracts were called patroonships and could span 16 miles in length on one side of a major river, or 8 miles if spanning both sides. In 1640, the charter was revised to cut new plot sizes in half, and to allow any Dutch American in good standing to purchase an estate ...
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Bacon's Rebellion
Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion held by Colony of Virginia, Virginia settlers that took place from 1676 to 1677. It was led by Nathaniel Bacon (Virginia colonist), Nathaniel Bacon against List of colonial governors of Virginia, Colonial Governor William Berkeley (governor), William Berkeley, after Berkeley refused Bacon's request to drive Native Americans out of Virginia. Thousands of Virginians from all Social class in the United States, classes (including those in Indentured servitude in British America, indentured servitude) and Race and ethnicity in the United States, races rose up in arms against Berkeley, chasing him from Jamestown, Virginia, Jamestown and ultimately torching the settlement. The rebellion was first suppressed by a few armed merchant ships from London whose captains sided with Berkeley and the Loyalism, loyalists. Government forces arrived soon after and spent several years defeating pockets of resistance and reforming the colonial government to b ...
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Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are, but many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. While some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions, the Indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies, and empires. Some had varying degrees of knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, metallurgy, sculpture, and gold smithing. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by Indigenous peoples; some countries have ...
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Population Growth
Population growth is the increase in the number of people in a population or dispersed group. Actual global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020. The UN projected population to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. However, some academics outside the UN have increasingly developed human population models that account for additional downward pressures on population growth; in such a scenario population would peak before 2100. World human population has been growing since the end of the Black Death, around the year 1350. A mix of technological advancement that improved agricultural productivity and sanitation and medical advancement that reduced mortality increased population growth. In some geographies, this has slowed through the process called the demographic tra ...
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Colonies
In modern parlance, a colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. Though dominated by the foreign colonizers, colonies remain separate from the administration of the original country of the colonizers, the '' metropolitan state'' (or "mother country"). This administrative colonial separation makes colonies neither incorporated territories nor client states. Some colonies have been organized either as dependent territories that are not sufficiently self-governed, or as self-governed colonies controlled by colonial settlers. The term colony originates from the ancient Roman '' colonia'', a type of Roman settlement. Derived from ''colon-us'' (farmer, cultivator, planter, or settler), it carries with it the sense of 'farm' and 'landed estate'. Furthermore the term was used to refer to the older Greek ''apoikia'' (), which were overseas settlements by ancient Greek city-states. The city that founded such a settlement became known as its ''metropolis'' ("mother-city ...
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Atlantic Slave Trade
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders,Thornton, p. 112. while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade (which was prior to the widespread availability of quini ...
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Planter Class
The planter class, known alternatively in the United States as the Southern aristocracy, was a racial and socioeconomic caste of pan-American society that dominated 17th and 18th century agricultural markets. The Atlantic slave trade permitted planters access to inexpensive African slave labor for the planting and harvesting of crops such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugarcane, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees, and fruits. Planters were considered part of the American gentry. In the Southern United States, planters maintained a distinct culture, which was characterized by its similarity to the manners and customs of the British nobility and gentry. The culture had an emphasis on chivalry, gentility, and hospitality. The culture of the Southern United States, with its landed plantocracy, was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachian Mountains. The northern and western areas were characterized by s ...
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Plantation Complexes In The Southern United States
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment (or complex) that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people. Plantations are an important aspect of the history of the Southern United States, particularly the antebellum era (pre-American Civil War). The mild temperate climate, plentiful rainfall, and fertile soils of the southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of enslaved Africans or African Americans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a white elite. Today, as was also true in the past, there is a wide range of opinion as to what differentiated a plantation from a farm. Typically, th ...
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