The term "primogeniture" refers to the practice of awarding all lands, titles, and finances that can be inherited solely to the firstborn son. It was practiced for hundreds of years in Europe and passed as an ideology into the nascent United States. In his important literary work, Democracy in America,Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the abolition of primogeniture would cause land to be spread much more evenly across society, encourage the overthrow of the established order, and spread democracy.

The nickname is "The Lost Colony." To this day, the colony's disappearance remains inexplicable.

Almost all of the colonies were directly linked at a governmental level to a specific church.  The two exceptions to this were Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, which both intentionally separated the church from the governmental structure, and provided religious freedom to anyone who wanted to come to the colony. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine, the Congregational Church, the sucessor to the separatist groups that founded New England, was the official church. In New York, Virginia, both Carolinas, and Georgia, the offical Anglican Church, headed by the British Crown, dominated.  Maryland was set up by Catholics, but still run by Anglicans.

After Columbus' initial voyages in the 1490s, most European powers came to America in an age of exploration. The Spanish were still the leaders in settlement. While their initial efforts did focus on Central and South America, and the conquest and subjugation of the Aztec and Inca Empires, the Spanish also went into North America. The Spanish established a fort and mission at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565.

The Colony of Maryland was first established by George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, through a Royal Charter from Charles I in 1629. Calvert, a Catholic himself, felt a New World colony was the best place to establish a refuge for increasingly beleaguered English Catholics. The colony was not formally settled until 1634, and provided toleration for Catholics. Maryland remained a home for Catholics, but also was beset by unfriendly neighboring Anglicans in Virginia.

The Mississippian culture flourished in the Mississippi Valley from roughly 800 CE to 1500 CE. The Mississippians were best known as mound builders: they developed small cities by building giant pyramids from soil around corn based agriculture. Trade between these cities occurred mostly around watersheds and rivers. None of the Mississippian cultures were nomadic in any way.

The Crucible is based on the Salem Witch Trials.

After its foundation in 1603, Jamestown was plagued with a number of issues, including frequent attacks from Native American groups, disease, and bad harvests. Jamestown was founded as a business venture, which did little to help the colony prosper. In its first few decades, Jamestown witnessed the death of most people who arrived from England and was significantly detached from English culture and other North American colonies.

The Patriots were a vast majority of American colonists in 1775 and 1776, although it was not true that every colonist was a Patriot. The key groups that remained Loyalists were colonial officials, non-English colonists, and slaves, who were promised emancipation by British officials if they fought for the British government.

Free slaves numbered only in the thousands in the Colonial period, but they were an important social factor, being both reminders of the humanity of blacks and as a symbol to those blacks still enslaved. A slave could gain freedom if their mother was white, if their owner freed them or if they were able to buy their freedom (almost impossible). Those who were descendants of indentured servants had been brought over at a time when slavery had not yet been embraced and maintained their freedom, legally, throughout their lives. However, those slaves that escaped from a slave owning territory to one in which slavery was illegal were still considered property of their masters and legally had to be returned.