American Pageant Chapter 1 Summary

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Recommended: Impact of geography on mid-Atlantic colonies and New England colonies

1. New World Beginnings - About 6 thousand years ago, only one minute in geological time – recorded History of Western world began. People in the Middle East had already begun a Written culture, gradually emerging form the haze of the past. 500 years ago or a few seconds in geological time-Europeans explorers discovered the Americas. This altered everything the Old and New World knew.

a. The Shaping of North America
- Pangaea contained all the worlds’ lands some 225 million years ago.
- Then it broke off to Eurasia, Australia, Americas, Africa, and Antarctica
- The majestic ranges of western North America – the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the cascades, and the Coast Ranges – arose more recently. …show more content…

- Georgia received monetary subsidies from the British gov’t. (a benefit)
- Produced silk and wine.
- Determined, at first, to keep slavery out of Georgia.
- All Christian worshipers except Catholics enjoyed religious toleration.
- Georgia grew with painful slowness and at the end of the colonial era was perhaps the least populous of the colonies
- Plantation economy was thwarted by the unhealthy climate, by early restrictions on black slavery, and Spanish attacks.
m. The Plantation Colonies
- Outposts of empire were all in some degree devoted to exporting commercial agricultural products,
- Profitable staple crops were the rule, notably tobacco and rice.
- Slavery was found in all the plantation colonies, though only after 1750 in reform-minded Georgia.
- 1671 the governor of Virginia thanked God that no free schools or printing presses existed in his colony.
- All the plantations permitted some religious toleration.
- “Soil butchery” by excessive tobacco growing drove settlers westward, and the long, lazy rivers invited penetration of the continent-and continuing confrontation with Native

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