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FrançaisAP US History Unit 2: Period 2, 1607–1754
In a century and a half, the Atlantic seaboard of North America stopped being a Spanish frontier and became a patchwork of English, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies competing for land, labor, and trade. English settlers along the Chesapeake built tobacco plantations worked first by indentured servants and then by enslaved Africans. Puritans planted compact New England towns. Quakers, Anglicans, and Catholics each carved their own colonial worlds. By 1754, on the eve of the French and Indian War, four distinct British regional societies and a transatlantic economy bound to West Africa had taken hold of eastern North America.
The 8 lessons in order
Contextualizing Period 2
The opening lesson. Frames the years from 1607 to 1754 as one connected story of multi-European colonization, regional differentiation, and the entrenchment of slavery, and previews the seven thematic lessons that follow.
European Colonization
Why Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England built such different colonies. Imperial aims, demographic patterns, and the ways each empire managed land, labor, and Indigenous diplomacy.
The Regions of British Colonies
Four regions, four economies, four political cultures. Chesapeake tobacco, New England towns, the diverse Middle colonies, and the plantation societies of the southern Atlantic and the British West Indies.
Transatlantic Trade
The Atlantic economy that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Mercantilism, the Navigation Acts, the triangular trade, and the rise of merchant ports from Boston and Newport to Philadelphia and Charleston.
Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans
Trade alliance, armed conflict, and selective accommodation. Metacom's War in New England, the Pueblo Revolt in the Southwest, and the diplomacy that knit together French, Dutch, English, and Native polities.
Slavery in the British Colonies
How chattel slavery hardened in the southern colonies between roughly 1660 and 1750, the racial codes that enshrined hereditary bondage, and the visible and hidden ways enslaved Africans pushed back against the system.
Colonial Society and Culture
The First Great Awakening, the spread of Enlightenment thought, the gradual Anglicization of colonial life, and the growing gap between imperial leaders in London and colonists who increasingly saw themselves as British and self-governing at the same time.
Comparison in Period 2
The closing lesson. Synthesis essay, full-period DBQ practice, and a graphic comparison of the four British colonial regions on the eve of the French and Indian War.