Virginia Standards of Learning Virginia and United States History
Colonization, independence, the Constitution, civil conflict, industrial growth, world wars, and civil rights.
These questions are original. This is not an official Virginia Standards of Learning test, and FreeExam is not affiliated with the Virginia Department of Education.
1.In 1607 an English expedition built a fort on the James River that became the first lasting English settlement in North America. What was that settlement?
2.Who held the charter that sent settlers to build Jamestown?
3.Which crop turned Virginia from a hungry outpost into a colony that could sell something England wanted?
4.What was Virginia's House of Burgesses when it first met in 1619?
5.What began in Virginia in 1619, when a ship carried Africans into the colony?
6.What happened at Jamestown during the Starving Time of 1609-1610?
7.Which leader headed the confederacy of Algonquian towns around the James and York rivers when the English arrived?
8.How did many poor English people pay for the Atlantic crossing to Virginia in the seventeenth century?
9.What was the headright system used in colonial Virginia?
10.What was Bacon's Rebellion of 1676?
11.What labor pattern hardened in Virginia in the decades after Bacon's Rebellion?
12.What did the passengers of the Mayflower agree to in 1620?
13.Why did large numbers of Puritans settle Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s?
14.Why was Roger Williams banished from Massachusetts Bay?
15.What kind of colony did William Penn set out to build along the Delaware?
16.Which description fits colonial New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware?
17.Why did towns such as Richmond, Petersburg, and Fredericksburg grow along Virginia's fall line?
18.What organized society in colonial Virginia and the wider Chesapeake?
19.What traveled the Atlantic routes that textbooks call the triangular trade?
20.Under mercantilism, what role did Britain expect its American colonies to play?
21.What did Britain's Navigation Acts demand of colonial commerce?
22.What bind did Britain face after winning the French and Indian War in 1763?
23.What did the Proclamation of 1763 forbid colonists to do?
24.Why did the Stamp Act of 1765 provoke such a wide colonial protest?
25.What did colonists do at the Boston Tea Party in December 1773?
26.How did Parliament answer the Boston Tea Party?
27.What did the First Continental Congress accomplish when it met in 1774?
28.What started at Lexington and Concord in April 1775?
29.What case did Thomas Paine make in the 1776 pamphlet Common Sense?
30.Who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which Congress adopted on July 4, 1776?
31.Which rights does the Declaration of Independence name as unalienable?
32.What choice did Patrick Henry put before Virginia's revolutionary convention in 1775?
33.What command did George Washington of Virginia take in 1775?
34.Why is the American victory at Saratoga in 1777 treated as a turning point?
35.In the autumn of 1781 a French fleet sealed Chesapeake Bay while armies closed in on a British force at Yorktown. How did that siege end?
36.What did Britain accept in the treaty signed in Paris in 1783?
37.Why did the Articles of Confederation leave Congress too weak for many national problems?
38.What did the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set up for the country north of the Ohio River?
39.What lesson did many leaders draw from Shays' Rebellion?
40.What did the delegates meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 actually produce?
41.How did the Great Compromise settle the argument between large states and small states?
42.What did the Three-Fifths Compromise actually count?
43.What did Federalists argue while the states were deciding whether to ratify the Constitution?
44.What did Anti-Federalists such as Patrick Henry and George Mason insist the Constitution still lacked?
45.Why does George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 still matter?
46.What principle did Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, adopted in 1786, put into law?
47.What does separation of powers mean in the Constitution?
48.Which situation is an example of checks and balances?
49.What is federalism in the American system of government?
50.Which set of freedoms does the First Amendment protect?
51.Which practice did George Washington establish while he was president?
52.What was the heart of Alexander Hamilton's plan for the nation's finances?
53.What warning sits at the center of Washington's Farewell Address?
54.Why do historians treat the election of 1800 as a milestone?
55.What did the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 accomplish?
56.What was the Lewis and Clark expedition sent to do?
57.In 1803 Chief Justice John Marshall used William Marbury's undelivered commission to claim a lasting power for the Supreme Court. What power was that?
58.Which grievances helped push the United States into the War of 1812?
59.What did the Monroe Doctrine tell European powers in 1823?
60.How did the Missouri Compromise of 1820 handle slavery in land from the Louisiana Purchase?
61.How did Eli Whitney's cotton gin affect slavery?
62.What did the Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorize Andrew Jackson's government to do?
63.What was the Trail of Tears?
64.What did South Carolina claim during the nullification crisis of 1832?
65.How did the Second Great Awakening, the revival movement of the early 1800s, spill into public life?
66.What did the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 ask for in its Declaration of Sentiments?
67.How did Frederick Douglass advance the abolitionist cause?
68.What did Harriet Tubman do on the Underground Railroad?
69.In Southampton County in August 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led followers against nearby plantations. How did Virginia respond after the revolt was crushed?
70.What changed, and what did not, when the international slave trade was banned in 1808?
71.What belief did the phrase Manifest Destiny express in the 1840s?
72.What did the United States gain in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war with Mexico?
73.Which set of terms belongs to the Compromise of 1850?
74.What did the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 do to the Missouri Compromise?
75.Dred Scott had been enslaved and had lived on free soil before he sued for his freedom. What did the Court say about his suit in 1857?
76.What did John Brown try to do at Harpers Ferry in 1859, when that town was still in Virginia?
77.What followed Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860?
78.What began when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861?
79.Why does the Battle of Gettysburg, fought in July 1863, matter in the course of the Civil War?
80.What did the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, actually do?
81.Which constitutional change, ratified in December 1865, ended legal slavery in every state?
82.What does the Fourteenth Amendment address?
83.When the Constitution was amended in 1870, which barrier to the vote was forbidden nationwide?
84.By April 1865 the Army of Northern Virginia was cut off near a small courthouse town west of Richmond. What did Lee do there on April 9?
85.What were the Black Codes that several Southern states passed just after the Civil War?
86.What did the bargain that settled the disputed election of 1876 do to Reconstruction?
87.Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a Louisiana railroad car reserved for white passengers. What did the Court say about that law in 1896?
88.What was finished at Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory in May 1869?
89.What did the Homestead Act offer to people willing to settle public land?
90.Why did critics attack industrial trusts such as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil?
91.Where did most of the people called new immigrants come from between about 1880 and 1920?
92.What part did muckrakers play in the Progressive Era?
93.What did the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, protect?
94.What did the United States take from Spain after the war of 1898?
95.How did the United States obtain the route for the Panama Canal?
96.Why did the United States enter the First World War in 1917?
97.What happened to Woodrow Wilson's plan for a League of Nations?
98.What was the Great Migration?
99.What was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s?
100.What combined to bring on the Great Depression after 1929?
101.What was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal intended to do?
102.What did Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, lead the United States to do?
103.How did life on the home front change during the Second World War?
104.What did Executive Order 9066 lead the government to do to Japanese Americans in the Second World War?
105.What was containment, the policy the United States adopted at the start of the Cold War?
106.Parents and students challenged state laws that sent Black children to separate public schools. What did the Court say about those schools in 1954?
107.What did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaw?
108.What was Massive Resistance in Virginia?