Well, their constitutions simply deem them such. According to one commonwealth's web site Massachusetts—the one in which Merriam-Webster is headquartered , the term commonwealth was preferred by a number of political writers in the years leading up to , when the Massachusetts constitution officially designated the state as such; the preference is believed to have existed perhaps because there was "some anti-monarchial sentiment in using the word commonwealth.
That notion might seem strange to those familiar with another use of the word commonwealth. The Commonwealth with a capital C is an association of sovereign states consisting of Britain and a number of countries that were formerly under its rule. Membership in the Commonwealth is voluntary, and not restricted to former colonies; both Mozambique and Rwanda—the two most recent members to join—are members despite having no historical tie to the British Empire.
They are not states, and have only a nonvoting representative in Congress. While residents of these islands have U. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Words Matter What's the difference between a commonwealth and a state? Are Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia all that different from the rest?
More Words At Play. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct. Time Traveler. Love words? As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan.
In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and—starting in the s—rice. These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves.
As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in In , inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. By , on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.
The American Revolutionary War was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation , embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. The Declaration of Independence , issued on July 4, , enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation.
France joined the war on the side of the colonists in , helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. On May 14, , a group of roughly members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River.
Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower. Two months later, the three-masted The 13 British colonies that eventually became the United States in some ways were more different than they were alike.
They were founded for a diverse range of reasons, from the pursuit of fortunes to the desire to create havens from persecution and model societies, and had In the pre-Revolutionary War era, people living in the original Many of the details of the Popham colony have been lost to history, but in its heyday the tiny settlement in Maine was considered a direct rival of Jamestown.
Both colonies got their start in , when the British King James I granted the Virginia Company a charter to establish The upstart settlement dates to the early 17th In September , a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on the southern coast of England.
The Mayflower Compact was a set of rules for self-governance established by the English settlers who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower. When Pilgrims and other settlers set out on the ship for America in , they intended to lay anchor in northern Virginia. But after Some people, many of them seeking religious freedom in the New World, set sail from England on the Mayflower in September That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts.
A scouting party was sent out, and in late December the Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault.
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