Facts and Details in U.S. Economic History from Pre-Columbian to 1789 - SAT Subject Test in United States History

The Economienda System dictated that Native Americans were lesser peoples, afforded the same status as other inferior races, and were free to be used as slaves to further the goals of Spanish Empire. The repeal of the system, at this insistence of several Spanish missionaries, helped lead to the massive influx of slaves from Africa to replace the work that had previously been done by Native Americans. One missionary would famously state that his work to free the Native Americans was the biggest mistake he ever made, as their population was ultimately ravaged by Smallpox anyway and the repeal of the Economienda System led directly to the massive use of African slaves in the New World

The headright system was a system of land grants that were used to expand the population of the original thirteen colonies. It functioned differently in different areas of colonial America, but the principle was essentially the same throughout: an established settlement, like Jamestown or Plymouth, would award newly arriving settlers with a fifty acre tract of land to encourage settlement. Further, to encourage families and wealthy land owners to settle in the colonies, an individual would be awarded an additional fifty acres for each individual he brought along with him.

Hernando de Soto from Spain was the first European to explore the Mississippi River in 1542.

The London Company, often called the Virginia Company of London, was established by King James I in 1606 with the expressed purpose of establishing colonies in North America. The London Company provided financial backing for the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments that later led to the creation of Massachusetts and Virginia.

John Rolfe was the first to cultivate a strain of tobacco in Virginia that became a profitable cash crop, allowing the colony to thrive. John Smith played an important early role in the settlement of Virginia, but returned to England before a profitable strain of tobacco was introduced. Miles Standish was an important leader in Plymouth colony, not Virginia. Thomas Jefferson and Eli Whitney were important late 18th and early 19th century figures, long after the early development of Virginia.

The first African slaves in any of the English colonies were brought to Virginia in 1619. They were brought to help with the thriving tobacco cultivation in the colony, and soon became a crucial part of the growing plantation economy. Their arrival in 1619 predates even the existence of the other colonies listed in this question.

Black Tuesday is when the stock market took its final plunge, a precipitating event of the Great Depression. Although there are entire courses on the Great Depression, and stock trading is likely far beyond the scope of your course, a brief overview is helpful. Essentially, many investors and traders were trading stocks “on margin”—that is (basically) using borrowed money to invest. Think of it like this: you borrow $100 dollars in order to invest it. If you get a 10% rate of return, and you lose nothing, you can repay the $100 and you’ve made $10. Think of the flipside, however: what if you borrow $100, invest it poorly, and then lose it all. Now you owe someone $100; it’s almost like borrowing money to gamble (although that would be considerably more risky). When the stock market crashed, the end result was multiplied tenfold by the fact that many people were trading on margin (thus they lost everything, and then were in debt for more money than they could possibly ever repay).