AP US History · History & Social Science

AP US History

1491 to today, argued from primary sources, not just memorized dates. Every period is taught through the documents historians actually use, every unit ends with a stimulus-based review, and the essay sections let you write DBQs and LEQs against the real College Board rubrics with a top-score response to compare against.

3H 15M EXAM 55 MCQ 3 SAQ 1 DBQ 1 LEQ 53 LESSONS 108 REVIEW QUESTIONS 10 ESSAY PROMPTS PREREQ: WORLD HISTORY

Course overview

What this course covers, and how the exam weights it.

AP US History follows the nine periods of the College Board course framework. Periods 3 through 8 carry almost all of the exam's weight, and the essays are drawn from them too: the DBQ always comes from Periods 3–8, and the three LEQ choices span Periods 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9. Every unit below ends with a stimulus-based multiple-choice and short-answer review, and the two essay sections at the bottom of the outline hold five DBQ and five LEQ prompts with a writing space that scores against the official rubric.

  • U1Period 1: 1491–16074–6%
  • U2Period 2: 1607–17546–8%
  • U3Period 3: 1754–180010–17%
  • U4Period 4: 1800–184810–17%
  • U5Period 5: 1844–187710–17%
  • U6Period 6: 1865–189810–17%
  • U7Period 7: 1890–194510–17%
  • U8Period 8: 1945–198010–17%
  • U9Period 9: 1980–Present4–6%

All nine units are open, 53 lessons in all. Every lesson pairs a short explanation with worked examples and a problem to try yourself, the same problem types that show up on the exam. Each unit closes with a short video walk-through and a ten-problem practice set with hidden answers.

Free preview: open any 5 lessons, or watch one unit video, without an account. The counter on the left keeps track.

Lesson 1.1 · Period 1 · CED topic 1.2

Native American societies before European contact

Before 1492 hundreds of distinct societies lived in North America, separated mostly by environment. Maize, domesticated in Mesoamerica, spread north into the Southwest and later the Eastern Woodlands; where it grew well it produced surplus, permanent towns, and hierarchy. Where it did not, people lived well on fish, game, and wild plants.

Compare by environment first, then by the social structure it supported.

Key developments
  • Southwest: Pueblo peoples irrigated maize in an arid climate; multi-story adobe towns at Chaco Canyon (c. 900–1150).
  • Great Plains: mobile bison hunting on foot; the Mandan and Pawnee farmed from earth-lodge villages.
  • Mississippian centers (c. 800–1400): maize surpluses supported mound-building chiefdoms; Cahokia was the largest.
  • Northeast: Haudenosaunee and Algonquian women farmed the "three sisters" around longhouse villages; kinship was often matrilineal.
  • Pacific Northwest: salmon and sea mammals supported permanent, populous villages without farming.
Primary evidence

Description of: the archaeological site at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois.

Cahokia covered several square miles and held over one hundred earthen mounds. Monks Mound, raised in stages from basket-carried soil, rises about one hundred feet above a planned plaza. Excavators found maize, copper, and marine shell traded from distant regions. Population peaked near 10,000–20,000 around 1100; the site was largely empty by 1350.

Sourcing (HIPP): This is material evidence, not a document, no one at Cahokia left a written account. Scale and situation can be read from soil and artifacts; point of view cannot, which is why who ruled Cahokia, and why it emptied, remain contested.

Exam tip: the sourcing point comes from explaining how a source's nature shapes what it can prove.

Model analysis

Where farming produced a reliable surplus, Native societies developed real political complexity. Cahokia's mounds and plaza took thousands of organized workdays, possible only where surplus maize frees labor and some authority directs it, and its traded copper and shell put it at the center of a continental exchange network. The Great Basin is the control case: thin food supply, small mobile bands, no hierarchy. Environment shapes subsistence, subsistence shapes settlement, settlement shapes social structure.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the natural environment shaped the development of a specific Native American society in North America before 1492.

Show a model response

In the arid Southwest, rainfall alone could not sustain maize, so Pueblo peoples built irrigation ditches and check dams to capture scarce water. Reliable harvests let them build permanent multi-story adobe towns like those at Chaco Canyon instead of moving seasonally.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific society and condition, then explains the causal link.

Lesson 1.2 · Period 1 · CED topics 1.3–1.4

European exploration and the Columbian Exchange

Europeans did not sail west out of curiosity. Hunger for Asian spices and gold, rivalry among new monarchies, and missionary confidence pushed outward; the caravel and compass made the gamble survivable. Portugal worked around Africa. Castile, fresh from conquering Granada in January 1492, backed Columbus going west.

Key developments
  • Portuguese precedent (1400s): island sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans; Dias rounded Africa in 1488, da Gama reached India in 1498.
  • Columbus's voyages (1492–1504): landfall in the Bahamas, October 1492; he died insisting he had reached Asia.
  • Treaty of Tordesillas (1494): a north-south line split claims, leaving Portugal the African route and, later, Brazil.
  • The Columbian Exchange: westward: wheat, sugar, horses, cattle, pigs; eastward: maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco.
  • Disease and silver (1490s–1600s): smallpox, measles, and influenza killed most Native people in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica within a century; the labor shortage drove Spain toward African slavery, and Potosí silver (1545) financed the empire.
Primary source

Source: Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santángel, 1493 (English translation).

As I know that you will be pleased at the great victory with which Our Lord has crowned my voyage, I write this to you, from which you will learn how in thirty-three days I passed from the Canary Islands to the Indies with the fleet which the most illustrious King and Queen, our Sovereigns, gave to me. And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them all I have taken possession for their Highnesses.

Sourcing (HIPP): Santángel helped arrange the financing, and the letter was reprinted across Europe within months. Purpose is the lever: Columbus needed a second voyage funded, so he makes possession look effortless and the islands full of promise. That makes this strong evidence about Spanish motives and weak evidence about the Taíno.

Exam tip: "the author is biased" earns nothing. Say what the purpose makes the source good evidence for.

Model analysis

From first contact, Spanish expansion fused religious mission with material profit, and that fusion shaped the labor system that followed. Columbus frames the voyage as a victory crowned by God, then reports possession taken by proclamation for the Crown: piety and property claim in one paragraph. The same pairing reappears in the Requerimiento of 1513 and the encomienda, which handed settlers Native labor in exchange for Christian instruction. Profit backed by religious justification produced coerced labor, not merely trade.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Columbian Exchange affected Europe in the period 1492–1607.

Show a model response

The exchange carried maize and potatoes to Europe, where they grew on land poorly suited to wheat and returned more calories per acre. Steadier food supported population growth, which in turn supplied migrants for colonies in the Americas.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific transfer and explains a consequence instead of listing crops.

Lesson 1.3 · Period 1 · CED topics 1.5–1.6

Spanish colonial society: labor, caste, and cultural encounter

Conquest raised a question Spain could not dodge: what may Christians lawfully do to the people they now rule? Spain answered with law before morals. The encomienda handed settlers the labor and tribute of Native villages in return for protecting and Christianizing them; in practice it was lethal forced labor.

Key developments
  • Encomienda (from 1503): grants of Native labor and tribute to settlers in exchange for protection and religious instruction.
  • The Requerimiento (1513): read aloud, often in a language the listeners did not know, demanding submission and declaring any resulting war lawful.
  • New Laws (1542): limited the encomienda and barred Native enslavement; settler revolt in Peru gutted them by 1545.
  • Valladolid debate (1550–51): Bartolomé de las Casas argued Native peoples were rational and free; Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda called them natural inferiors.
  • Casta system and missions: peninsulares and criollos on top, mestizos and mulattoes between, Native peoples and Africans below; missions gathered converts into supervised villages.
  • African slavery and resistance: as Native populations collapsed the Crown licensed a growing slave trade; Native people resisted by flight, lawsuits, and syncretic worship.
Primary source

Description of: Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (written 1542, printed 1552). Summarized, not quoted.

Las Casas, a Dominican friar and former encomendero who became bishop of Chiapas, works province by province through the Caribbean and Central America. He describes populous societies destroyed by massacre, forced labor in mines, and famine, puts the dead in the millions, and argues that Spain's own laws and Christian duty require ending the encomienda.

Sourcing (HIPP): He wrote it for Prince Philip in 1542, as the New Laws were drafted, and printed it in 1552, as they were gutted. That purpose, persuasion at court, explains the piled-up examples and the inflated numbers. Point of view cuts two ways: he had held an encomienda himself, and rival powers later translated him to feed the "Black Legend."

Exam tip: with a reformer, source on purpose; say what he wanted the reader to do.

Model analysis

The fight over Native labor changed the law and the vocabulary far more than the coercion. Las Casas helped produce the New Laws and held his own at Valladolid, yet the encomienda survived in weakened form, the repartimiento replaced it, and forced labor in the silver mines went on. What changed was who was compelled: as Native populations collapsed, the Crown licensed an expanding trade in enslaved Africans, a substitution Las Casas once urged and later repudiated. Continuity in coercion, change in its victims: that is what continuity-and-change reasoning rewards here.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way Spanish colonizers justified their authority over Native peoples in the period 1492–1607.

Show a model response

Spanish officials read the Requerimiento aloud to Native communities, declaring that the pope had granted their lands to Spain and demanding they accept Spanish rule and Christian instruction. If they refused, Spaniards claimed the war that followed was lawful. The document turned conquest into a legal procedure.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific instrument and explains how it justified authority.

Unit 1 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 1 review: 1491–1607

Ten stimulus- and knowledge-based multiple-choice questions and two short-answer questions covering Native societies before contact, European exploration and the Columbian Exchange, and the labor and caste systems of early Spanish America: click an option to see why each answer is right or wrong, then write the SAQs on paper before opening the model.

Multiple choice

  1. Description of: an engraving by Theodor de Bry after a watercolor by John White, published in Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590).

    The engraving shows the Algonquian town of Secota. Houses of bent saplings and mats stand in a row along a path. Three separate plots of maize are drawn at different stages of ripeness, with a smaller patch of tobacco and one of sunflowers beside them. A group sits on the ground at a communal meal, and a fire burns at a ceremony in the open.

    The image would be most useful to a historian studying which of the following?

    Correct. The engraving shows fixed houses along a path next to maize planted in staggered plots, plus tobacco and a communal feast: exactly the package of settled farming, surplus, and village ritual that maize cultivation supported in the Eastern Woodlands.

    Plains peoples before 1492 followed bison on foot and moved camp seasonally; nothing in this image shows herds, portable housing, or hunting. The misconception to avoid is treating one Native image as evidence for Native societies in general.

    Mississippian centers such as Cahokia were defined by huge earthen mounds and planned plazas, and the engraving shows no mound at all. Secota was a coastal Algonquian town of a few hundred people, not a mound-building chiefdom.

    Southwestern irrigation depended on ditches and check dams in an arid climate, and the engraving depicts a well-watered coastal region with no irrigation works. The plots here are rain-fed, which is why they could be planted in sequence.

  2. Which of the following best explains why peoples of the Pacific Northwest built large, permanent villages without adopting agriculture?

    Maize spread north from Mesoamerica into the Southwest and later the Eastern Woodlands; it never became a staple on the Northwest coast. This choice assumes farming is the only route to permanent settlement, which is the misconception the region disproves.

    Correct. Dense, predictable salmon runs plus whales, seals, and shellfish produced storable surplus without planting, so Northwest peoples built plank-house villages, accumulated wealth, and developed ranked societies: surplus, not farming, is what permanence required.

    There is no evidence of a regular maize trade between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific coast, and Cahokia's exchange network ran east and south. Long-distance trade moved prestige goods such as copper and marine shell, not bulk food.

    Wheat and barley are Eurasian grains that arrived in the Americas only with Europeans after 1492. Placing them in a pre-contact Native society is a chronology error worth training yourself to catch.

  3. The northward spread of maize cultivation most directly contributed to which of the following in North America before 1492?

    Maize spread unevenly and never displaced hunting, fishing, and gathering across the continent: the Great Basin, the Plains, and the Northwest coast all stayed outside it. Overstating a change is one of the most common ways to lose a causation question.

    Horses were brought to the Americas by the Spanish; Plains peoples acquired them only after contact, and the mounted bison-hunting culture is a post-1500 development. Reading the horse back into the pre-contact Plains is a standard trap.

    Correct. Where maize produced a dependable surplus (the Southwest, the Mississippi valley, the Northeast) it freed labor from daily food-getting, and that surplus supported permanent towns, public building such as Cahokia's mounds, and ranked leadership.

    Confederacies such as the Haudenosaunee united a handful of nations, not the continent, and hundreds of distinct societies with different languages persisted. Treating Native America as politically unified erases the diversity the CED asks you to explain.

  4. Source: Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santángel, 1493 (English translation).

    They are so ingenuous and free with all they have, that no one would believe it who has not seen it; of anything that they possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it.

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims about early Spanish expansion?

    Columbus insisted to the end of his life that he had reached the Indies, and the letter itself calls the islands he found part of the Indies. The excerpt is about the people he met, not about his geography.

    Correct. Writing to a financier of the voyage, Columbus presents the Taíno as generous and incapable of refusal: a portrait that made them look ready for conversion and easy to command, and that he paired elsewhere in the same letter with taking possession for the Crown.

    The opposite followed: the encomienda began in 1503, and the New Laws restricting it came only in 1542, after decades of campaigning by Bartolomé de las Casas. Do not let a source's warm tone stand in for a policy it never produced.

    Spanish expansion sought tribute, souls, and precious metals through the encomienda and, later, the mission system, not family farming settlements. Reading English colonial patterns back onto 1493 is an anachronism.

  5. Which of the following best describes the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)?

    No such prohibition existed in 1494; papal and royal debate over Native status came later, in the Requerimiento of 1513, the New Laws of 1542, and the Valladolid debate of 1550–51. The treaty settled claims between Christian monarchs, not the rights of Native peoples.

    France, England, and the Netherlands were not parties and later rejected the line outright. Tordesillas was a bilateral Iberian settlement brokered with papal backing, not a coalition against rivals.

    Correct. The line assigned lands west of it to Castile and east of it to Portugal, which left Portugal the African sea route to Asia and, once the line was measured, the Brazilian coast claimed in 1500.

    The Spanish campaign against Tenochtitlan came a generation later, in 1519–21, and ended in conquest rather than treaty. Watch the dates: a 1494 agreement cannot resolve a 1521 event.

  6. Description of: a table historians use to summarize the principal biological transfers of the Columbian Exchange after 1492.

    DirectionSelected transfers
    Eastern Hemisphere → Americaswheat, sugarcane, rice; horses, cattle, pigs, sheep; smallpox, measles, influenza
    Americas → Eastern Hemispheremaize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, cacao, tobacco; silver

    The transfers summarized in the table most directly contributed to which of the following in the period 1492–1607?

    The exchange of disease was drastically one-sided: smallpox, measles, and influenza killed most Native people in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica within a century, while Europe saw no comparable die-off. Assuming the exchange was symmetrical is the misconception this item targets.

    Correct. Epidemic disease destroyed the Native workforce the encomienda depended on, and Spanish colonists answered the shortage by importing enslaved Africans, so a biological transfer produced a labor system.

    American silver did the reverse: Potosí, opened in 1545, financed a far larger European trade with Asia, since silver was what Chinese markets would take. The exchange intensified Eurasian commerce rather than ending it.

    The silver economy expanded during this period rather than collapsing; Potosí's output underwrote the Spanish Crown's wars and debts for decades. Inflation and repeated royal bankruptcies did strain Spain in these same years, but strain is not collapse: silver shipments were still rising at the end of the sixteenth century.

  7. Which of the following best describes the encomienda system in Spanish America?

    Correct. Beginning in 1503 the Crown assigned settlers the labor and tribute of Native villages, framing it as a reciprocal duty to protect and Christianize; in practice it functioned as lethal forced labor and was the target of the New Laws of 1542.

    The Crown did claim a share of mining output, the royal fifth, but that was a tax, not the encomienda. Conflating a revenue claim with a labor grant misses what the system actually distributed: people's work.

    That describes the headright system in the English Chesapeake after 1618, not Spanish America. Mixing the two empires' labor institutions is one of the most frequent Period 1–2 errors.

    Missions did gather converts into supervised villages, but under the authority of friars, and Native communities did not select clergy. Missions were a parallel institution to the encomienda, not a description of it.

  8. The Valladolid debate of 1550–51 most directly concerned which of the following questions?

    Brazil had been settled under the Tordesillas line since 1500 and was not in dispute in 1550. Valladolid was a debate about people, not about boundaries.

    Correct. Bartolomé de las Casas argued that Native peoples were rational and free and that conquest by force was unlawful; Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued they were natural inferiors whose subjugation was justified. The argument decided nothing outright, but it shaped Spanish law and later criticism of empire.

    Spain permitted no Protestant worship anywhere in its empire and did not debate the point; the Inquisition enforced Catholic uniformity. This option imports a later northern-European religious conflict.

    African slavery was not the question at Valladolid: one reason the debate is uncomfortable, since Las Casas himself had once proposed importing enslaved Africans to relieve Native laborers before repudiating the idea.

  9. Description of: an engraving by Theodor de Bry published in a Latin edition of Bartolomé de las Casas's account of the Spanish conquest (Frankfurt, 1598).

    The engraving shows armored Spanish soldiers on a shoreline attacking unarmed Native people, some of whom flee toward the trees while others lie on the ground. War dogs strain at the soldiers' hands. Ships ride at anchor in the background. De Bry, a Protestant engraver working in Germany, never crossed the Atlantic; he based the scene on Las Casas's printed text.

    Which of the following best explains why images like this one circulated widely in northern Europe in the late sixteenth century?

    No crown advertises atrocity. Spanish authorities were embarrassed by Las Casas's account, and it was foreign presses, not Spanish ones, that kept reprinting it with illustrations.

    The source line says plainly that de Bry never crossed the Atlantic and worked from a printed text. Reading an engraving as eyewitness evidence is the exact sourcing mistake the exam rewards you for catching.

    Correct. English, Dutch, and German Protestants, at war or in commercial rivalry with Spain, reprinted Las Casas with graphic engravings to build what historians call the Black Legend, which made Spanish empire look uniquely cruel and their own look like a rescue.

    The New Laws of 1542 restricted the encomienda but were gutted after settler revolt in Peru, and coerced labor continued through the repartimiento and the mines. The abuses were reduced on paper, not eliminated in fact.

  10. Which of the following best describes the casta system of Spanish America?

    Spanish America did preserve some Native local officials, but the casta system was a ranking of people by descent, not an advisory institution. The word names a hierarchy, not a council.

    That describes the New Laws of 1542, which limited the encomienda and barred Native enslavement before settler resistance gutted them by 1545. Laws and social hierarchies are different categories of historical development.

    Missions did teach converts, and a few schools trained Native elites, but that was a small part of the mission program and not what casta means. Do not let a familiar institution stand in for an unfamiliar term.

    Correct. Peninsulares born in Spain ranked above American-born criollos, with mestizos and mulattoes in between and Native peoples and Africans at the bottom: a legal and social order that determined office-holding, taxation, and marriage.

Short answer

  1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE difference between Native American societies of the Southwest and those of the Great Plains in the period before 1492.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way the natural environment contributed to the difference you described in (a).
    3. Briefly explain ONE way European contact changed Native American societies in the Americas in the period 1492–1607.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: a specific, accurate contrast, such as Pueblo irrigated maize farming in permanent multi-story adobe towns versus mobile bison hunting on foot with seasonal camps; or settled versus mobile settlement patterns; or farming versus hunting as the main food source. Do not accept: "they lived in different ways" with no specifics; a description of only one region; or any claim that Plains peoples hunted on horseback before 1492.
    • (b) Accept: an explanation of how, not a restatement; aridity in the Southwest required irrigation ditches and check dams, and the resulting surplus made permanent towns worth building; or the short-grass Plains could not support reliable maize farming, so people followed the herds that could live there. Do not accept: repeating the difference from (a); "the environment was different"; or naming a region with no causal link.
    • (c) Accept: epidemic disease (smallpox, measles, influenza) and population collapse; coerced labor under the encomienda or the mission system; the introduction of horses and other European livestock, whose effects on Plains hunting and warfare came in the generations that followed; new crops; religious conversion and syncretic worship. Explanation of how or why is required. Do not accept: developments outside 1492–1607 (removal, reservations, the Dawes Act); or a general statement that Europeans harmed Native peoples with no mechanism.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a In the Southwest, Pueblo peoples grew maize using irrigation and lived year-round in permanent multi-story adobe towns like the ones at Chaco Canyon. On the Great Plains, most peoples hunted bison on foot and moved their camps with the herds instead of staying in one place.

    b The Southwest is dry enough that rainfall alone could not raise a maize crop, so Pueblo peoples dug ditches and built check dams to capture what little runoff there was. Once irrigation made harvests reliable, there was a surplus worth storing and a reason to build permanently in one spot. The short-grass Plains could not support that kind of farming, so people there depended on animals that moved, which meant they had to move too.

    c Europeans carried smallpox and other diseases that Native peoples had never been exposed to, and epidemics killed most of the population of the Caribbean and Mesoamerica within about a century. That collapse destroyed whole communities and left survivors under heavier Spanish labor demands, because the encomienda still required tribute and work from far fewer people.

  2. Description of: an illustration from Book XII of the Florentine Codex, compiled in Nahuatl and Spanish between about 1575 and 1577 by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua writers and artists.

    The drawing shows Nahua people lying on mats, faces and bodies covered with sores. One figure leans over to tend a patient; elsewhere a person sits beside someone who has stopped moving. The accompanying Nahuatl text describes a sickness that spread through the city during the war with the Spanish, killing many and leaving the survivors too weak to care for one another or to gather food.

    Using the image, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE historical development depicted in the image.
    2. Briefly explain ONE cause of the development you described in (a).
    3. Briefly explain ONE effect of that development on labor systems in Spanish America in the period 1492–1607.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: an epidemic, smallpox is the standard identification, among the Nahua during or just after the Spanish invasion of Mexico; or mass death and social breakdown from disease during the conquest. The description must come from the image and its text. Do not accept: "people were sick" with no historical development named; or a claim that the image shows a battle, a famine caused only by war, or deaths from Spanish weapons.
    • (b) Accept: Eurasian diseases crossed the Atlantic with Europeans and the people and animals they brought; Native peoples had no prior exposure and therefore no acquired immunity; dense urban settlement at Tenochtitlan and the disruption of the siege accelerated spread. The response must explain how or why, not just name smallpox. Do not accept: "the Spanish invaded" with no disease mechanism; or the claim that the Spanish deliberately engineered the epidemic in 1520.
    • (c) Accept: the collapse of the Native workforce undermined the encomienda and later the repartimiento; Spanish colonists and the Crown turned to an expanding trade in enslaved Africans, especially on Caribbean and coastal sugar plantations; coerced draft labor in silver mines fell on a much smaller surviving population. The effect must be tied to labor. Do not accept: effects only on religion, culture, or politics; or the anachronistic claim that the New Laws of 1542 ended forced labor.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The image shows a smallpox epidemic among the Nahua during the Spanish invasion of Mexico. So many people were sick at the same time that the healthy could not care for the dying or bring in food, which is why the text describes whole households collapsing rather than individual deaths.

    b Smallpox came across the Atlantic with Europeans, since it had circulated in Europe, Africa, and Asia for centuries but had never reached the Americas. Native peoples had no acquired immunity to it, so instead of striking mostly children it hit adults of every age at once, and it moved quickly through a crowded city like Tenochtitlan during the siege.

    c The population collapse wrecked the labor supply the encomienda depended on, because grants of Native labor and tribute were worth little once the villages had emptied. As Native numbers fell through the sixteenth century, the Crown licensed a growing trade in enslaved Africans, so the Caribbean and the coastal sugar regions shifted from coerced Native labor toward African slavery.

Lesson 2.1 · Period 2 · CED topic 2.2

European colonization patterns compared, 1607–1754

Four empires claimed parts of North America and wanted different things from it. Spain wanted tribute, souls, and silver; France and the Netherlands wanted furs; England wanted land. What an empire wanted decided who crossed the ocean, how many came, and what happened to the Native nations already there.

That difference does most of the explaining: trade needs partners, farms need acreage.

Key developments
  • Spain (St. Augustine 1565, Santa Fe 1610): missions, coerced Native labor, and a casta society; the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 expelled the Spanish from New Mexico for twelve years.
  • France (Quebec 1608): a fur empire of forts and rivers; Champlain's alliance with the Huron made the Haudenosaunee enemies of New France.
  • The Netherlands (New Netherland, 1624): a company venture for profit; New Amsterdam was an unusually mixed port. England seized it in 1664.
  • England (Jamestown 1607, Plymouth 1620): whole families migrated for land and religion; growth by natural increase made displacement, not alliance, the norm.
  • Scale by 1700: roughly 250,000 colonists in the English mainland colonies, fewer than 20,000 in New France.
Primary source

Description of: Samuel de Champlain, Voyages (Paris, 1613), on the 1609 campaign at the lake that now carries his name. Summarized, not quoted.

Champlain describes joining Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron war parties against the Mohawk, canoeing south for days under their direction, and deciding the fight with a few shots from his firearm. He presents the alliance as both the price and the proof of French access to the fur country.

Sourcing (HIPP): Champlain wrote for the court and the merchants who financed voyages, in a decade when New France was still a doubtful venture. Purpose is the lever: he needs the colony to look profitable and secure, so he plays up his own decisiveness and plays down how completely the French depended on Native guides, canoes, and food.

Exam tip: readers award the sourcing point only when you tie a source's purpose or situation to an argument, not when you label the author.

Model analysis

The economic goal of each empire, more than any national character, explains how it treated Native nations. France staked a fur trade it could not run alone, so Champlain marched where his allies pointed and New France stayed small enough to keep them. England transplanted farming families onto land Native people already used, so English settlement produced war over land early (the Pequot War of 1637, Metacom's War in 1675–76) rather than alliance. Comparison, done well, names the variable that drives the difference.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way French colonization of North America differed from British colonization in the period 1607–1754.

Show a model response

French colonization rested on the fur trade, which needed Native trappers and guides, so the French built alliances and kept settlements small. British colonization rested on farming, which needed land, so settlers came in families and displaced Native nations near the coast.

Why it earns the point: it names each empire's economic basis and explains the relationship that followed.

Lesson 2.2 · Period 2 · CED topic 2.3

The regions of the British colonies

There was never one British America. Four regions grew out of four founding purposes and four climates, and by 1750 a Boston merchant and a South Carolina rice planter shared little but a king and a language. Start with why each region was settled and what could be grown there; family structure, labor system, and politics follow.

Key developments
  • New England (Massachusetts Bay, 1630): Puritan families migrated together; town grants, covenanted congregations, long lives, and a mixed economy of farms, fishing, and trade.
  • Middle colonies (Pennsylvania, 1681): Penn's Quaker "holy experiment" promised religious liberty; wheat exports and German and Scots-Irish migration made it the most diverse region.
  • Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland): tobacco after 1612 built a scattered plantation society worked by indentured servants drawn by the headright system; the House of Burgesses met in 1619.
  • Bacon's Rebellion (1676): frontier planters and former servants burned Jamestown and turned on Governor Berkeley; the fright sped the turn to enslaved labor.
  • The Lower South and West Indies: Barbadian planters helped settle Carolina from 1670; rice and indigo built a slave society, and South Carolina had a Black majority by about 1708.
Primary source

Source: John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity," 1630 (spelling modernized).

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

Sourcing (HIPP): Winthrop was the elected governor of a Puritan company whose charter, unusually, traveled with the settlers. He spoke to migrants who had staked everything on a voyage that could fail, and his purpose was to bind them together: the famous line warns that they are being watched. That is why New England built compact, disciplined towns.

Exam tip: a quotation everyone recognizes is only useful if you explain the situation that produced it.

Model analysis

Religious purpose gave New England a social form the staple colonies never developed. Winthrop asks a whole community to answer together for its conduct, and Massachusetts built institutions to match: town meetings, required schools after the 1647 law, congregations that admitted members by examination. The Chesapeake, settled by young single men chasing tobacco profits, had dispersed plantations, few towns, and a church too thin to discipline anyone. A covenant needs close neighbors, and tobacco pulled people apart.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the development of the New England colonies differed from that of the Chesapeake colonies in the period 1607–1754.

Show a model response

New England was settled largely by Puritan families who came for religious reasons and lived in compact towns, producing a balanced sex ratio and rapid growth from natural increase. The Chesapeake drew young male indentured servants to raise tobacco, so its population stayed unbalanced and dependent on immigration.

Why it earns the point: it contrasts who migrated and why, then explains the demographic result.

Lesson 2.3 · Period 2 · CED topics 2.4–2.5

Transatlantic trade and the growth of slavery

Britain did not govern its colonies for their benefit. Mercantilists assumed a fixed stock of wealth in the world, so colonies existed to supply raw materials, buy English manufactures, and carry both in English ships.

The same Atlantic system moved people: roughly 12.5 million Africans were forced onto slave ships over three centuries, and their labor built the colonial economy from the Chesapeake south.

Key developments
  • Navigation Acts (1651–1696): colonial trade had to move in English or colonial ships, and enumerated goods such as tobacco and sugar had to pass through England.
  • Triangular trade: New England rum and fish to Africa and the West Indies; captives to the Americas; sugar and molasses back to New England distilleries.
  • The Middle Passage: one to three months in crowded holds; roughly one in seven captives died at sea, and fewer than 400,000 landed directly in the mainland colonies.
  • Slavery written into law: Virginia made slave status inherited through the mother in 1662; the 1705 codes defined enslaved people as property.
  • Stono Rebellion (1739): enslaved people south of Charleston marched toward Spanish Florida, which offered freedom; the Negro Act of 1740 answered with limits on movement and assembly.
  • Salutary neglect: loose enforcement before 1763 left smuggling common and assemblies practiced at self-government.
Primary source

Source: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, London, 1789.

The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.

Sourcing (HIPP): Equiano published in London in 1789, during the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade, and sold the book by subscription to abolitionists and members of Parliament. His purpose was to move readers who had never seen a slave ship. A baptismal record lists South Carolina as his birthplace, so the shipboard chapters may draw on others' accounts too: a caution about what the passage proves.

Exam tip: sourcing a reform text means naming the audience it tried to move.

Model analysis

Between roughly 1660 and 1710 the mainland colonies replaced indentured servitude with hereditary racial slavery, and the cause was as much legal as economic. Rising English wages made servitude a worse bargain for planters just as the Royal African Company's 1672 charter, and the opening of the trade in 1698, made captives cheaper. Bacon's Rebellion had already shown Virginia's elite the danger of armed landless Englishmen. The assembly's answer was statute: inherited status in 1662, no freedom by baptism in 1667, the consolidated code of 1705.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE effect of British mercantilist policy on the British North American colonies in the period 1651–1754.

Show a model response

The Navigation Acts required colonial goods such as tobacco to move in English or colonial vessels and pass through England, which protected colonial shipbuilding and gave New England merchants a guaranteed carrying trade. Loose enforcement before 1763 also accustomed colonists to smuggling.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific policy and explains a consequence.

Lesson 2.4 · Period 2 · CED topics 2.6–2.7

Colonial society and culture: Anglicization, Enlightenment, and revival

By 1750 colonists were in one sense more British than their grandparents: they bought British cloth and tea, argued cases under English common law, read British books, and claimed English liberties. Historians call this Anglicization.

Two currents cut across it. The Enlightenment taught that reason could improve government; the Great Awakening taught that personal conversion outranked a settled minister's authority. Both invited colonists to judge authority for themselves.

Key developments
  • Anglicization: rising imports of British manufactures, English legal procedure in the courts, and a press that grew from the Boston News-Letter (1704) to dozens of papers by the 1760s.
  • The Enlightenment: Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) supplied natural rights and government by consent; Franklin supplied the practical version, from the Library Company (1731) to his electrical experiments.
  • The First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s): Edwards's revival at Northampton and Whitefield's tours from 1739 drew huge open-air crowds, split congregations into New Lights and Old Lights, and founded new colleges such as Princeton (1746).
  • The Zenger trial (1735): a New York jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel after his lawyer argued a true criticism of the governor was no crime.
  • Assemblies versus royal governors: legislatures used control of taxes and governors' salaries to behave like small parliaments.
Primary source

Source: Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," sermon preached at Enfield, July 8, 1741.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.

Sourcing (HIPP): Edwards preached as a visitor to a congregation reported untouched by the revival sweeping nearby towns, a year after Whitefield's tour had raised expectations of dramatic conversion. His purpose was not to explain doctrine but to produce a response in that room, which is why the imagery is so physical. Printed soon afterward, it reached readers who never heard him.

Exam tip: with a sermon, ask what the speaker wanted the audience to do. Purpose tied to a specific audience earns the sourcing point.

Model analysis

The Great Awakening changed colonial authority more than colonial theology. Whitefield preached across parish lines to anyone who would gather, and Edwards addressed a congregation not his own: both moves assumed a listener's spiritual condition mattered more than the local minister's standing. Congregations split, New Lights founded their own churches, and ordinary people got practice deciding which authority deserved obedience. That habit sat oddly beside Anglicization: colonists became more British in taste while becoming less deferential in practice.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the First Great Awakening affected British colonial society in the period 1730–1754.

Show a model response

The Awakening weakened deference to established clergy. Itinerants such as George Whitefield crossed parish boundaries to preach outdoors, and listeners judged ministers by whether their preaching produced conversion. Congregations divided into New Light and Old Light factions, and New Lights founded their own churches rather than accept the settled minister.

Why it earns the point: it claims something specific about authority and explains the mechanism.

Unit 2 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 2 review: 1607–1754

Ten multiple-choice questions and two short-answer questions on the four colonization patterns, the regions of British America, the Atlantic trade and the hardening of slavery, and the ideas (Anglicization, the Enlightenment, and the Great Awakening) that reshaped colonial culture.

Multiple choice

  1. Description of: a table of historians' approximate estimates of the European population of three North American colonial ventures.

    Colonial ventureApproximate European population
    British mainland colonies, c. 1700about 250,000
    New France, c. 1700about 15,000
    New Netherland at the English conquest, 1664about 9,000

    Which of the following best explains the difference shown in the table?

    The founding dates are nearly identical (Jamestown 1607, Quebec 1608, New Netherland 1624), so chronology cannot explain a gap this large. When a table compares outcomes, look for a difference in purpose rather than a difference in start date.

    Correct. A fur empire needs posts, rivers, and Native partners, not population, while a settler empire built on farming needs acreage and hands; English families migrated together, married young, and grew rapidly by natural increase, which is why the numbers diverge.

    Mortality was in fact heaviest in the early Chesapeake, and New France's settlers were comparatively healthy. This reverses the demographic record and mistakes a difference in migration for a difference in death rates.

    Neither government banned emigration. France did discourage Huguenot migration to New France, which narrowed the pool, but the deeper reason is that a fur trade run through alliances simply did not need many colonists.

  2. Which of the following best describes French relations with Native peoples in North America in the period 1607–1754?

    The opposite is true: Champlain joined Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron war parties in 1609 precisely to secure access to fur country. Contact was the business model, not a risk to be avoided.

    The encomienda was a Spanish institution, and although French Jesuits did run missions, they did not receive grants of Native labor and tribute. Matching each empire to its own labor institution is worth a few minutes of review.

    Correct. Furs had to be trapped, processed, and carried by people who knew the country, so New France traded, intermarried, and fought alongside its partners, and inherited their enemies, which is why the Haudenosaunee became enemies of New France.

    French settlement stayed small and clustered along the St. Lawrence and the river routes; it was English settler farming that produced early wars over land, such as the Pequot War of 1637 and Metacom's War in 1675–76.

  3. Source: The Mayflower Compact, Cape Cod, November 1620 (spelling modernized).

    We whose names are underwritten… do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws… as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.

    The excerpt is best understood as evidence of which of the following developments in the British colonies?

    No crown issued this. The Mayflower passengers landed outside the territory of their patent and wrote the compact themselves precisely because no charter covered where they were standing.

    The full document opens by naming King James and calling the signers his loyal subjects. Reading 1776 back into 1620 is the classic anachronism this item is testing.

    The compact says nothing about toleration, and the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were notably intolerant of dissent: Roger Williams was banished in 1635. Colonial toleration comes from Rhode Island, Maryland's 1649 act, and Pennsylvania.

    Correct. A group of settlers, with no legal authority over the place they had reached, agreed in writing to form a body politic and obey the laws it made: the covenant habit that also produced town meetings and congregational self-government.

  4. Which of the following was a significant effect of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) in Virginia?

    Correct. Armed former servants burning Jamestown showed the planter elite how dangerous a large class of landless armed Englishmen could be; enslaved Africans, held for life and marked by law, looked to them like a safer labor force, and Virginia's codes hardened through 1705.

    The Burgesses met continuously from 1619 into the Revolution. Rebellions in the colonies produced changes in labor and land policy far more often than the abolition of an assembly.

    Tobacco remained the Chesapeake's staple for another century, which is exactly why the labor question mattered so much. A rebellion over land and Native policy did not change what the soil grew profitably.

    The Navigation Acts were expanded rather than repealed, with a further act in 1696 creating vice-admiralty courts to enforce them. Enforcement loosened informally under salutary neglect, not by repeal.

  5. Which of the following best describes the Middle colonies in the period 1607–1754?

    That is New England, where Massachusetts Bay granted land to towns, admitted church members by examination, and required schools after the 1647 law. The Middle colonies had no single established church to organize towns around.

    Correct. Pennsylvania's promise of religious liberty after 1681 and New York's inherited Dutch pluralism drew Quakers, Germans, Scots-Irish, and others, and the region's wheat made it the breadbasket of the mainland colonies.

    That is the Lower South, settled in part from Barbados after 1670, where rice and indigo built a slave society and South Carolina had a Black majority by about 1708.

    That is the Chesapeake, where tobacco after 1612 and the headright system produced dispersed plantations worked first by indentured servants and then by enslaved people.

  6. Description of: the printed plan of the slave ship Brookes, produced in Britain in 1788 by opponents of the slave trade.

    The broadside shows a ship in cross-section and from above. Rows of human figures, drawn to scale and identical to one another, are laid side by side in the hold with no space between them, on two decks and on shelves built between the decks. Printed figures beside the drawing state how many people the vessel was legally permitted to carry.

    A historian would most likely use this image to support which of the following claims about the Atlantic slave trade?

    The image says nothing about resistance, and the record contradicts the claim: shipboard insurrections, refusals of food, and escape attempts were common enough that crews armed against them. Never let a source's silence become evidence for a claim it does not make.

    Correct. The plan was drawn to show the packing that shipowners treated as ordinary practice, and it supports what the voyage records confirm: one to three months in the hold and roughly one captive in seven dying at sea.

    Of roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto slave ships, fewer than 400,000 landed directly in the mainland colonies; the great majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean. The mainland's enslaved population grew mostly by natural increase.

    British involvement expanded after the Royal African Company's monopoly ended in 1698, and Britain became the largest single carrier in the eighteenth century. Profitability, not withdrawal, is what abolitionists were arguing against in 1788.

  7. The Navigation Acts of 1651–1696 were designed primarily to do which of the following?

    Taxing the colonies for revenue began only after 1763, with the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, and colonists themselves drew that line. Treating seventeenth-century trade regulation as a revenue tax collapses the distinction Period 3 is built on.

    Correct. Mercantilists assumed a fixed stock of world wealth, so the acts required colonial goods to move in English or colonial vessels and enumerated goods such as tobacco and sugar to pass through England: a benefit to English merchants and to colonial shipbuilders.

    The acts did the reverse, reserving commercial policy to Parliament; what assemblies gained came from loose enforcement rather than from the statutes. Salutary neglect was a practice, not a grant of authority.

    Britain did not restrict the slave trade in this period; it enlarged it, and Parliament abolished the trade only in 1807. Do not project later reform onto mercantilist legislation.

  8. Which of the following best explains why the enslaved people who rose at Stono in 1739 marched south?

    Correct. Spanish officials at St. Augustine had publicized offers of freedom to escapees from the British colonies, which is why a march toward Florida made strategic sense and why the colony's response was so severe.

    The Negro Act of 1740 was the answer to Stono, not its cause: it restricted movement, assembly, and literacy after the rising. Reversing cause and effect is the single most common error on causation questions.

    Georgia was chartered in 1732 as a debtors' and buffer colony and initially banned slavery, but it was a British colony that returned escapees, not a refuge. The refuge was Spanish.

    Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, almost seventy years later, and the trade into Charleston was expanding in the 1730s. Check the date before accepting a plausible-sounding cause.

  9. Description of: a mid-eighteenth-century English engraving of the itinerant preacher George Whitefield.

    Whitefield stands on a raised wooden platform in the open air, one arm lifted. Several hundred men and women press close on every side, some kneeling, some with hands raised, some supporting listeners who have collapsed. Trees and rooftops frame the crowd. No church building appears in the scene and no other clergyman stands with him.

    The scene depicted would be most useful as evidence for which of the following?

    The image shows the reverse: a visiting preacher outdoors, with no local minister beside him and no meetinghouse in sight. The Awakening split congregations into New Lights and Old Lights and weakened deference to settled clergy.

    Correct. Whitefield's tours from 1739 crossed parish lines to reach anyone who would gather, and the crowd's visible response is the point: listeners judged preaching by whether it produced conversion, not by the preacher's standing in their town.

    The Enlightenment reached colonists through print, societies, and experiment (Locke's political writing, Franklin's Library Company of 1731) not through mass open-air emotion. Both currents challenged authority, but by opposite routes.

    Crowds this size are evidence of intense participation, not decline; the Awakening produced new congregations and new colleges such as Princeton in 1746. Read what the image actually shows before choosing a trend.

  10. The outcome of the 1735 trial of printer John Peter Zenger is best understood as which of the following?

    No statute followed. A New York jury simply refused to convict, and press freedom was written into law only with the First Amendment in 1791, and even then contested, as the Sedition Act of 1798 showed.

    The verdict embarrassed the governor Zenger's paper had attacked and encouraged other printers. Colonial presses multiplied after 1735 rather than falling under executive control.

    Correct. Zenger's lawyer conceded the printing but argued the criticism was true, and the jury acquitted: establishing in practice, if not yet in law, that truth was a defense and that juries could check prosecutions for seditious libel.

    The case was tried and decided by a local jury in New York, and the Privy Council had no part in it. Its influence spread by example and reputation, not by binding precedent.

Short answer

  1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE difference between the economy of the New England colonies and the economy of the Southern colonies in the period 1607–1754.
    2. Briefly explain ONE cause of the difference you described in (a).
    3. Briefly explain ONE effect of that difference on labor systems in British North America in the same period.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: New England's mixed economy of small family farms, fishing, shipbuilding, and trade versus the Southern colonies' staple export agriculture in tobacco, rice, and indigo; or subsistence-plus-commerce versus single-crop plantation production. Do not accept: "the North was industrial and the South was agricultural," which describes the nineteenth century; or a description of only one region.
    • (b) Accept: climate and soil; rocky ground and short growing seasons in New England versus long seasons, warm climate, and tidewater river access in the Chesapeake and Lower South; or founding purpose, since Puritan families migrated for religious community while Chesapeake and Carolina ventures were organized for export profit. The response must explain how the cause produced the difference. Do not accept: restating (a); or "the South had slaves," which is an effect rather than a cause.
    • (c) Accept: staple agriculture created heavy year-round labor demand, met first by indentured servants and then, after roughly 1660–1710, by hereditary racial slavery written into law (Virginia 1662 and 1705); New England's diversified farms relied mainly on family labor, so the enslaved share of its population stayed small while its merchants still profited from carrying slave-grown goods. Do not accept: naming slavery without tying it to the economic difference; or claiming New England had no connection to slavery.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a New England had a mixed economy of small family farms, fishing, shipbuilding, and trade, and no single export crop. The Southern colonies built their economies around staples grown for export: tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice and indigo in South Carolina.

    b Climate and soil are the main reason. New England's growing season is short and its soil thin and rocky, so a farm could feed a family and produce a small surplus but not a plantation crop. The Chesapeake and Lower South had long warm seasons and rivers that let planters ship heavy crops straight from their own landings, which made large-scale staple farming worth the investment.

    c Staple crops needed constant labor in large gangs, so Chesapeake planters first imported English indentured servants under the headright system and then, as English servants became scarcer and riskier after Bacon's Rebellion, turned to enslaved Africans; Virginia made slave status hereditary in 1662 and consolidated its slave code in 1705. New England's farms could be worked by a family, so slavery stayed a much smaller part of its labor force even though its merchants carried and profited from slave-grown sugar and molasses.

  2. Source: Maryland Assembly, "An Act Concerning Religion," 1649 (spelling modernized).

    No person or persons whatsoever within this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion, nor in the free exercise thereof… nor any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his or her consent.

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE historical situation that led to the passage of the act excerpted.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way the act reflects a broader pattern in the development of the British colonies in the period 1607–1754.
    3. Briefly explain ONE limitation on religious toleration in the British colonies in the same period.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: Maryland was founded in 1632 as a proprietary colony under the Calverts, a Catholic family, as a refuge for English Catholics, but Protestant settlers quickly outnumbered them, so the proprietor needed legal protection for a Catholic minority; or the religious and political conflict of the English Civil War of the 1640s, which threatened Catholic proprietors. Do not accept: a general statement that "people wanted religious freedom" with no Maryland-specific situation.
    • (b) Accept: growing religious pluralism made accommodation practical, as in Rhode Island after 1636 and Pennsylvania after 1681; or proprietors used toleration to recruit settlers to colonies that needed population; or colonial assemblies legislated on matters England had not settled. The response must connect the act to a pattern beyond Maryland. Do not accept: restating the content of the excerpt.
    • (c) Accept: the act itself protected only those "professing to believe in Jesus Christ" and prescribed severe penalties, including death, for denying the Trinity, so Jews and non-Christians were excluded; Protestants repealed the act in 1654 once they controlled the colony; Massachusetts banished dissenters such as Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1638 and executed Quakers between 1659 and 1661; Virginia maintained an established Anglican church supported by taxes. Do not accept: a vague claim that toleration "was not complete" with no example.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Maryland was founded in 1632 by the Calverts, a Catholic proprietary family, as a place where English Catholics could worship safely, but Protestant settlers came in such numbers that Catholics ended up a minority in their own colony. With the English Civil War making Protestant power in England stronger, the assembly passed the act to protect Catholics from exactly the treatment the excerpt forbids.

    b It fits a broader colonial pattern: where a colony had to attract settlers and already contained several churches, toleration became the practical policy. Rhode Island separated church and colony after 1636, and Pennsylvania's promise of religious liberty after 1681 drew Quakers, Germans, and Scots-Irish. Proprietors learned that religious guarantees filled empty land faster than uniformity did.

    c Toleration in this period was narrow. This act covered only people "professing to believe in Jesus Christ," and it set harsh penalties, including death, for denying the Trinity, so it offered nothing to Jews or non-Christians, and Protestants repealed it in 1654 once they controlled Maryland. Massachusetts went further the other way, banishing Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1638 for challenging its orthodoxy.

Lesson 3.1 · Period 3 · CED topic 3.2

The Seven Years' War and its consequences, 1754–1763

Period 3 opens with a war Britain won so completely that victory broke the empire. In 1754 Virginia sent a twenty-two-year-old militia colonel, George Washington, to press a land claim at the forks of the Ohio. He skirmished with a French party, surrendered a stockade called Fort Necessity on July 3, and turned a frontier fight into a global war.

Key developments
  • Albany Congress (1754): assemblies rejected Franklin's Albany Plan of Union, which would have let a council tax them for defense.
  • Braddock to Pitt (1755–1760): early losses gave way to a war bought on credit; Quebec fell in 1759, Montreal in 1760.
  • Treaty of Paris (1763): France gave up Canada and its claims east of the Mississippi; Spain ceded Florida to Britain and received Louisiana from France.
  • Pontiac's War and the Proclamation of 1763: Ohio and Great Lakes nations attacked British posts; London closed settlement west of the Appalachian divide.
  • New imperial policy (1763–1765): the national debt roughly doubled; Grenville ended salutary neglect and turned to colonial revenue.
Primary source

Source: King George III, Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763.

…to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Dominion, for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments… And We do hereby strictly forbid all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved, without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained.

Sourcing (HIPP): Situation does the work. This came months into Pontiac's War, when Britain had neither troops nor money to police an interior it had just won. The purpose was cheap peace: reserve the West for Native nations and license the trade so settlers would not start wars the army must finish, which is why colonists heard a betrayal.

Exam tip: date a document to the crisis it answers. Situation is the easiest sourcing point to earn.

Model analysis

Britain's victory caused the crisis that followed it. The war left a debt to service and an interior to garrison, and it removed the French threat that had made colonists value British protection. Grenville's answer to the first two (troops in America, revenue raised in America) landed on colonies that no longer needed the third. Decisions once left to colonial assemblies were now made in London.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Seven Years' War contributed to conflict between Britain and its colonies in the period 1763–1775.

Show a model response

The war roughly doubled Britain's national debt and left an army in North America, so Parliament raised revenue through the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765. Assemblies had always voted their own taxes, so parliamentary taxation looked like a new claim of power, and resistance followed.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific consequence and explains the causal link.

Lesson 3.2 · Period 3 · CED topic 3.3

Taxation without representation, 1764–1774

Parliament had regulated colonial trade for a century. What it had not done was tax the colonies to raise money. Between 1764 and 1774 it tried repeatedly, and each attempt drew a sharper answer: petitions, boycotts, a congress, an army. Ministers said colonists were virtually represented, since every member spoke for the whole empire; colonists, used to assemblies they elected, called that a fiction.

Key developments
  • Sugar Act (1764): a revenue duty whose violators were tried in vice-admiralty courts without juries; colonists called it taxation, not trade regulation.
  • Stamp Act (1765): a direct tax on printed matter; a congress of nine colonies and a boycott won repeal in 1766, paired with the Declaratory Act.
  • Townshend Acts (1767): duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea; a second boycott left only the tea duty by 1770.
  • Boston Massacre (1770): soldiers fired into a crowd and five died; Revere's engraving made propaganda of it while John Adams defended the soldiers.
  • Tea Act and Tea Party (1773): cheap company tea still carried the duty, so Bostonians destroyed 342 chests.
  • Coercive Acts, First Continental Congress (1774): Boston's port closed, the Massachusetts charter rewritten; twelve colonies answered with the Continental Association.
Primary source

Source: John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, Letter II, 1767.

If you ONCE admit, that Great-Britain may lay duties upon her exportations to us, for the purpose of levying money on us only, she then will have nothing to do, but to lay those duties on the articles which she prohibits us to manufacture — and the tragedy of American liberty is finished.

Sourcing (HIPP): Dickinson was a wealthy lawyer writing as a plain farmer, and the persona is the point of view: it let a cautious argument travel as common sense. He published serially as the Townshend duties took effect, and nearly every colonial paper reprinted him. His purpose was to convince property owners that an external duty levied for revenue was still unconstitutional, and to keep resistance to petitions and boycotts rather than crowds.

Exam tip: a chosen persona is point of view. Say what it was designed to do to the reader.

Model analysis

Colonial constitutional claims escalated as Parliament pressed. In 1765 the Stamp Act Congress accepted Parliament's authority over trade and objected only to internal taxes. Dickinson closed that loophole in 1767 by asking not where a duty was collected but why. By 1774 the First Continental Congress denied Parliament any power to legislate for the colonies without their consent. The grievance held steady; the theory behind it kept growing, which is why 1774 could end in an army and 1765 could not.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way colonists justified resistance to parliamentary taxation in the period 1765–1775.

Show a model response

Colonists argued that only a legislature they actually elected could tax them, and no colonist voted for a member of Parliament. The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 therefore acknowledged Parliament's power to regulate imperial trade while denying it any power to levy taxes for revenue in America.

Why it earns the point: it states the principle and ties it to a specific body that acted on it.

Lesson 3.3 · Period 3 · CED topic 3.4

Philosophical foundations of the American Revolution

Rebellion needs a justification, not just a grievance. Colonists found one in ideas already circulating in British politics: that government exists by consent to protect natural rights, that liberty survives only where power is divided, and that free states rest on civic virtue and die of corruption. For a decade those ideas argued for colonial rights inside the empire; in 1776 Thomas Paine turned them against it.

Key developments
  • Natural rights and consent (Locke, 1689): government is a trust to protect life, liberty, and property, and may be replaced when it breaks that trust.
  • Separation of powers (Montesquieu, 1748): liberty requires legislative, executive, and judicial power in different hands; American constitution-writers took it literally.
  • Republicanism and civic virtue: free states rest on independent citizens who put the public good first, and die of corruption, patronage, and standing armies.
  • Common Sense (January 1776): Paine attacked monarchy and hereditary rule themselves, in plain prose aimed at ordinary readers; it sold well over a hundred thousand copies within months.
  • Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776): a preamble on rights and consent, a long list of the King's abuses as evidence, a conclusion dissolving allegiance.
Primary source

Source: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Philadelphia, January 1776.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one… Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

Sourcing (HIPP): Paine had been in America barely more than a year and published anonymously: nine months after Lexington, while Congress was still petitioning the King. His purpose was to move undecided readers from reform to separation, so he wrote in plain, Bible-inflected prose and aimed at the King rather than at Parliament. That target is the tell: blaming George III, not his ministers, is what made independence thinkable.

Exam tip: with a persuasive pamphlet, audience and purpose pay. Ask who had not yet been convinced.

Model analysis

The Declaration is Locke's argument rebuilt as a legal brief. It opens with a premise (rights are self-evident, and just powers come from consent) then supplies evidence in the form of twenty-seven charges against the King, then draws the conclusion the premise requires. Structure is the argument: the grievances are not complaints but proof the trust was broken. That logic bound its authors in ways they did not intend; enslaved petitioners in Massachusetts were already turning natural rights back on them.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way Enlightenment ideas shaped the arguments colonists made for independence in the 1770s.

Show a model response

Locke held that government is a trust created by consent to protect natural rights and may be dissolved when it breaks that trust. The Declaration used exactly that reasoning: it asserted rights and consent, listed the King's abuses as proof the trust was broken, and concluded that allegiance was at an end.

Why it earns the point: it names the idea and shows the document reasoning with it.

Lesson 3.4 · Period 3 · CED topics 3.5–3.6

The American Revolution and the influence of revolutionary ideals

Britain had the world's best navy and a professional army. The Continentals had short enlistments, little money, and a commander who lost more battles than he won. Washington's answer was to keep the army in existence rather than risk it: Britain had to win the war, while America only had to not lose it. That made the war long, and a long war put the question to Europe.

Key developments
  • Saratoga (October 1777): Burgoyne's surrender convinced France to sign an alliance in February 1778, adding money, troops, and a fleet.
  • Yorktown (1781) and peace (1783): Washington, Rochambeau, and de Grasse trapped Cornwallis; the Treaty of Paris recognized independence to the Mississippi.
  • Loyalists and Native nations: perhaps a fifth of white colonists stayed loyal and tens of thousands left; Britain's Native allies lost land the treaty ignored.
  • Women: boycotts, war work, farms run alone, then "republican motherhood": raising virtuous citizens became a civic duty and a reason to educate daughters.
  • Slavery, North and South: Vermont, then an independent republic, barred adult slavery in 1777; Pennsylvania passed gradual abolition in 1780 and Massachusetts courts ended it by 1783; the South did not.
  • Global echoes: the French Revolution from 1789 and the Haitian Revolution from 1791 borrowed the language of natural rights.
Primary source

Source: Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776 (spelling modernized).

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.

Sourcing (HIPP): This is a private letter to one delegate, not a public appeal, and it reached print only in the next century. Read what it actually asks. Under coverture a wife's legal identity merged into her husband's; Adams asks for legal limits on that power, not for the vote. John's teasing dismissal in reply shows how far the argument could travel in 1776.

Exam tip: do not inflate a document. Readers reward describing what a source claims, not what you wish it claimed.

Model analysis

Revolutionary ideals changed American society most where change cost the propertied least. Northern states with few enslaved people abolished slavery outright or gradually, most states broadened voting for white men, and republican motherhood gave women a public argument for education. Where the same ideals threatened property or household authority they stalled: coverture survived, and the states with the most enslaved people wrote no emancipation laws at all. Real change in law and rhetoric, sharp limits set by interest: that split is the argument to make about extent.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the American Revolution changed the status of a specific group in American society in the period 1775–1800.

Show a model response

For enslaved people in the North, revolutionary rhetoric about liberty helped produce emancipation laws: Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition act in 1780, and Massachusetts courts held slavery inconsistent with its new constitution by 1783. The change was real but regional, no state to the south followed.

Why it earns the point: it names a group, a specific law, and the change it produced.

Lesson 3.5 · Period 3 · CED topic 3.7

The Articles of Confederation, 1781–1789

Americans had just fought a distant government that claimed the power to tax them, so their first national charter withheld it. The Articles, drafted in 1777 and ratified in March 1781, created a single-chamber Congress in which each state cast one vote, with no executive, no national courts, and no revenue except what the states chose to send. The design was deliberate. Its failures were predictable, and its successes are the part students forget.

Key developments
  • Structure (ratified 1781): one state, one vote; nine of thirteen to pass major measures; all thirteen to amend anything.
  • What was missing: no power to tax or regulate commerce; Congress requisitioned money from the states, which routinely paid late or not at all.
  • Land Ordinance (1785): surveyed the Northwest into townships six miles square, thirty-six sections each, one section reserved to support schools.
  • Northwest Ordinance (1787): territories became states on equal terms at 60,000 free inhabitants; it guaranteed civil liberties and barred slavery north of the Ohio.
  • Shays's Rebellion (1786–87): indebted Massachusetts farmers closed courts and marched on the Springfield arsenal; Congress had no force, and merchants funded the militia.
Primary source

Source: Confederation Congress, Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787, Articles 3 and 6.

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged… There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Sourcing (HIPP): Congress passed this in New York while the Convention sat in Philadelphia, and Congress was broke. Land sales were its only real income, so the purpose was commercial as much as moral: settlers and speculators would pay more for territory that promised schools, liberties, and eventual statehood rather than permanent colonial status. Article 6 also carried a clause returning fugitives from labor: a reminder that the ban was a sectional bargain, not an antislavery victory.

Exam tip: for a law, purpose is usually the incentive it creates. Ask who was meant to act differently.

Model analysis

The Confederation failed at revenue and succeeded at expansion, and both outcomes shaped what came next. Unable to tax, Congress could not pay the war debt or answer an armed rising in Massachusetts, which handed nationalists the argument that produced the Annapolis meeting in 1786 and the Convention in 1787. Yet the same Congress wrote the statehood formula the United States used for a century and drew a slavery line at the Ohio River that fixed the sectional geography of 1820 and 1854. Weak government, durable policy.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE success of the national government under the Articles of Confederation in the period 1781–1789.

Show a model response

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set an orderly process for settling the territory north of the Ohio River, promising admission as equal states once a territory held 60,000 free inhabitants and prohibiting slavery there. It gave the new republic a way to expand without creating permanent colonies.

Why it earns the point: it names the law and explains what it accomplished, not just that it existed.

Lesson 3.6 · Period 3 · CED topics 3.8–3.9

The Constitutional Convention, the Constitution, and ratification

Fifty-five delegates met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787 with instructions to revise the Articles. They wrote a different government instead, behind closed windows, and then had to sell it to the states. Two questions consumed the summer: how states of wildly different size would be represented, and how states that held hundreds of thousands of people as property would count them.

Key developments
  • Virginia and New Jersey plans: two houses apportioned by population against one house with an equal vote for each state.
  • Great Compromise (July 1787): a House by population and a Senate of two per state, brokered by the Connecticut delegation.
  • Slavery in the text: three-fifths of enslaved people counted for representation and direct taxes; the slave trade protected until 1808; a fugitive-labor clause.
  • Separation of powers and federalism: veto and override, impeachment, Senate confirmation and treaty consent; authority split between nation and states.
  • Ratification (1787–88): Federalists faced Anti-Federalists who feared a distant government with no bill of rights; New Hampshire was the decisive ninth state in June 1788.
  • Bill of Rights (1791): ten amendments, the price of Virginia and New York and the Anti-Federalists' most lasting victory.
Primary source

Source: James Madison, writing as Publius, The Federalist No. 10, November 1787.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Sourcing (HIPP): This is campaign writing, published anonymously in New York newspapers during a ratification fight the Federalists expected to lose in that state. Its purpose is to answer the standard objection, drawn from Montesquieu, that republics must be small: Madison argues the reverse, that enlarging the sphere makes it harder for any single majority faction to form and act. Use it as evidence of what Federalists thought would persuade, not as a neutral description of how the government would work.

Exam tip: name The Federalist for what it is, advocacy during a contested ratification, and the sourcing point follows.

Model analysis

The Convention's compromises were settlements of power rather than statements of principle, and the ratification debate made that plain. The three-fifths clause gave slaveholding states added weight in the House and the electoral college without recognizing any right in the people counted. Madison's extended republic promised the same protection for propertied minorities that Anti-Federalists demanded for individuals in a bill of rights. Both sides argued about how to restrain majorities; they disagreed about which minorities most needed restraining.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE argument Anti-Federalists made against ratification of the Constitution in the period 1787–1788.

Show a model response

Anti-Federalists argued that the Constitution gave a distant national government taxing power and supremacy over the states without listing any protections for citizens. Because a republic that large could not stay responsive to local majorities, they insisted on written guarantees: a demand met by the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Why it earns the point: it states the objection and explains the reasoning behind it.

Lesson 3.7 · Period 3 · CED topics 3.10–3.12

Shaping a new republic, 1789–1800

The Constitution did not say how a president should behave, so Washington's choices became precedent: a cabinet, a careful distance from Congress, retirement after two terms. It also did not anticipate political parties, and they formed anyway, in the first Congress, over Alexander Hamilton's plan to give the new government European-grade credit.

Key developments
  • Hamilton's program (1790–91): fund the war debt at face value, assume state debts in exchange for a capital on the Potomac, charter a national bank, tax whiskey.
  • Strict vs. loose construction: Jefferson found no power to charter a bank; Hamilton read it into the necessary and proper clause, and Washington signed.
  • Whiskey Rebellion (1794): western Pennsylvania farmers resisted the excise; Washington called out roughly 13,000 militia and the rising dissolved without a battle.
  • Foreign policy (1793–95): the Neutrality Proclamation, Jay's Treaty averting war with Britain, Pinckney's Treaty opening the Mississippi, the Treaty of Greenville after Fallen Timbers.
  • The crisis of 1798: the XYZ Affair and an undeclared naval war; the Alien and Sedition Acts punished criticism, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions claimed states could judge federal law.
  • An American identity: Noah Webster's spellers taught American spelling; Charles Willson Peale painted the republic's leaders into a national gallery.
Primary source

Source: George Washington, Farewell Address, published September 1796.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism… The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

Sourcing (HIPP): This was printed in a Philadelphia newspaper, not delivered as a speech, and Hamilton helped draft it. The situation matters: Republicans had spent two years attacking Jay's Treaty as a surrender to Britain, and Washington was announcing he would not seek a third term. Its purpose is partly farewell and partly defense of his own administration, which is why opposition appears as "faction" rather than as legitimate disagreement.

Exam tip: documents that offer advice are often defending a record. Source on purpose and say what the author wanted readers to do.

Model analysis

Washington warned against party spirit in a document that was itself partisan, and that irony is the lesson of the 1790s. Parties formed because the Constitution finally created a national government with powers worth fighting over: whether to assume state debts, whether to charter a bank, whether to lean toward Britain or France. By 1798 the argument had reached the Constitution itself, with Jefferson and Madison claiming in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that states might judge federal law: a doctrine later generations would carry much further.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way debates over the power of the federal government contributed to the rise of political parties in the 1790s.

Show a model response

Hamilton's proposal for a Bank of the United States split Washington's cabinet: Jefferson argued the Constitution nowhere granted the power, while Hamilton read it into the necessary and proper clause. Supporters of broad federal authority organized as Federalists and opponents as Democratic-Republicans, turning a constitutional dispute into a lasting division.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific dispute and explains how it produced organized parties.

Unit 3 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 3 review: 1754–1800

Ten multiple-choice questions and two short-answer questions running from the Seven Years' War through the imperial crisis, the Revolution and its ideals, the Articles, the Constitution and ratification, and the first party system under Washington and Adams.

Multiple choice

  1. Description of: a woodcut published by Benjamin Franklin in the Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1754.

    A snake lies along a curve, severed into eight labeled segments. Reading from tail to head the labels are S.C., N.C., V., M., P., N.J., N.Y., and N.E.: the southern and middle colonies separately, with the New England colonies combined in the head. Beneath the snake are the words "JOIN, or DIE."

    The woodcut was first published in order to encourage which of the following?

    Printers did revive this image during the Stamp Act crisis and again in the 1770s, which is why it feels like a resistance symbol, but in May 1754 Parliament had levied no revenue tax on the colonies at all.

    Correct. It appeared with news that the French had seized the forks of the Ohio and driven off a Virginia work party, six weeks before the Albany Congress, where Franklin proposed a union with a council empowered to tax for defense. The assemblies rejected that plan, which is the irony worth remembering.

    The Proclamation came nine years later, after Britain had won the war and Pontiac's forces had attacked British posts. Date the stimulus before choosing an answer about its purpose.

    In 1754 Franklin was arguing for colonial union within the British Empire so that it could be defended more effectively. Reading 1776 into a 1754 cartoon is the anachronism this item is built to catch.

  2. Which of the following best explains the British government's purpose in issuing the Proclamation of 1763?

    The Proclamation did the opposite, forbidding purchases and settlements west of the Appalachian divide without royal licence. Colonists who had fought expecting western land read it as a betrayal, which is the reaction the exam usually asks you to explain.

    Correct. It was issued months into Pontiac's War, when Britain had neither the troops nor the money to police a newly won interior; keeping settlers out was the cheapest way to prevent wars the army would then have to finish.

    Veterans received no such grants, and the line applied to everyone. Turning a restriction into a reward reverses the policy's whole logic.

    Britain was not settling scores from 1754. The Proclamation answered a military and fiscal crisis in 1763, and the Albany Plan had been rejected by the colonial assemblies rather than by London.

  3. Source: Parliament of Great Britain, the Declaratory Act, March 1766.

    The said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain… [Parliament] had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws… to bind the colonies and people of America… in all cases whatsoever.

    The passage was most directly a response to which of the following?

    Correct. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the same month it passed this act, and the Declaratory Act was the price of that retreat: Britain surrendered the revenue while asserting an unlimited power to legislate, which guaranteed the dispute would return.

    The Boston Tea Party came in December 1773, seven years later, and Parliament answered it with the Coercive Acts rather than with a declaration of principle. Watch the dates on any "most directly" question.

    The Continental Association was adopted in October 1774. It was in part a consequence of the constitutional claim made here, not its cause.

    The Proclamation line concerned western settlement, not the authority to legislate or tax, and this act says nothing about land. A real grievance that does not match the document's subject is still the wrong answer.

  4. Which of the following best describes the British doctrine of "virtual representation"?

    Colonies employed agents in London, Franklin among them, but those agents lobbied ministers and presented petitions; none sat or voted in Parliament. That gap is exactly what colonists pointed to.

    Correct. Ministers argued that a member spoke for the whole realm and its interests rather than only for the voters of one place, so unrepresented Manchester and unrepresented Boston stood in the same position. Colonists, used to assemblies they elected, called that a fiction.

    That was the colonial claim by 1774, not the British doctrine, and the Declaratory Act of 1766 was written to deny it. Do not swap the two sides of a constitutional dispute.

    No such rule existed, and the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 had no standing in British law. This choice invents a procedure that sounds reasonable but appears in no document.

  5. Source: Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

    The reasoning in the excerpt drew most directly on which of the following ideas?

    Montesquieu genuinely shaped the period, and American constitution-writers took his separation of powers literally between 1776 and 1787, but this passage says nothing about dividing power. A true idea that does not match the excerpt is still wrong.

    Correct. The excerpt states the premise Locke supplied: rights exist prior to government, government is instituted to secure them, and its just powers come from consent. That premise is what turns the list of the King's abuses into proof rather than complaint.

    Colonists did fear corruption and standing armies, and that language fills the grievance section of this same document. It is not, however, the reasoning of the preamble quoted here.

    Mercantilism is the imperial economic theory colonists were resisting, not a source of their argument for independence. Look for the idea a passage uses, not the one it opposes.

  6. Which of the following most directly contributed to the American victory in the Revolutionary War?

    Washington lost more battles than he won, and his strategy was to preserve the army rather than risk it: Britain had to win the war, while the Americans only had to avoid losing it. Endurance, not battlefield dominance, is the right frame.

    The Royal Navy remained the strongest afloat throughout the war. The decisive naval moment came from the French fleet under de Grasse, which sealed the Chesapeake and trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.

    Correct. Burgoyne's surrender in October 1777 persuaded France that the Americans could win, and the alliance of February 1778 supplied loans, troops, and, decisively, a fleet, turning a colonial rebellion into a war Britain had to fight on several oceans.

    Most Native nations that took a side, including four of the six Haudenosaunee nations, allied with Britain, judging it the likelier check on settler expansion. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 then ignored them entirely.

  7. Which of the following best describes the effect of the Revolution on slavery in the period 1775–1800?

    Correct. Vermont barred adult slavery in 1777, Pennsylvania passed gradual abolition in 1780, and Massachusetts courts ended it by 1783, while no state south of Pennsylvania did the same. Revolutionary ideals moved furthest where they cost the propertied least.

    Slavery remained legal throughout the South, and the northern gradual laws freed only children born after a set date, so people remained enslaved in the North well into the nineteenth century. Gradual abolition is not immediate abolition.

    The Constitution protected the trade from federal interference until 1808; Congress then banned it effective January 1 of that year, twenty years after ratification. This date is missed constantly.

    The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery north of the Ohio, fixing a sectional line that shaped the crises of 1820 and 1854. This choice reverses the policy.

  8. Description of: a surveyor's diagram of a township laid out under the Land Ordinance of 1785.

    The diagram shows a square six miles on a side, ruled into a grid of thirty-six sections. Each section is one square mile, 640 acres, and carries a number. Section 16, near the middle of the square, is shaded and labeled as reserved for the support of schools. Identical squares repeat on every side, covering the map without gaps.

    The system shown most directly served which of the following purposes for the Confederation government?

    The survey assumed the land would be sold to settlers, and Native title was extinguished by treaty and by force: Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. A grid drawn for sale is not a guarantee of Native possession.

    Correct. The Articles gave Congress no power to tax, so requisitions on the states went unpaid and land sales became its only dependable income. A rectangular survey made parcels easy to describe, sell, and record, and the school section made them easier to market.

    The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 promised the opposite: admission as states on equal footing once a territory reached 60,000 free inhabitants. That formula is one of the Confederation's lasting achievements.

    The Articles authorized no standing army, and Congress could not raise a force to answer Shays's Rebellion in 1786–87: Massachusetts merchants funded the militia that did. Revenue, not an army, is what the survey was for.

  9. Source: James Madison, writing as Publius, The Federalist No. 51, February 1788.

    If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary… Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.

    The argument in the excerpt was used most directly to defend which feature of the proposed Constitution?

    The three-fifths clause was a bargain over representation and direct taxes between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, and Madison defends it elsewhere on entirely different grounds. Nothing in this passage concerns apportionment.

    Federalists initially resisted a bill of rights, arguing that a government of enumerated powers needed none; the Bill of Rights was the Anti-Federalists' victory, added in 1791. This passage relies on structure, not on listed guarantees.

    Correct. Madison's claim is that paper limits fail, so the design must set each branch's self-interest against the others: the veto and override, impeachment, Senate confirmation and treaty consent all follow from "ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

    The nine-of-thirteen rule belonged to the Articles of Confederation, the document Madison was arguing to replace. Attaching an old rule to a new charter is a chronology trap worth catching.

  10. The dispute over Alexander Hamilton's proposal to charter a national bank contributed most directly to which of the following?

    The Bill of Rights came out of the ratification bargain with Anti-Federalists, not out of the cabinet's fight over the bank. Two constitutional arguments can run at once without one causing the other.

    That rising answered the excise on whiskey, a different piece of Hamilton's program, and it was a tax revolt rather than a constitutional dispute. Precision about which measure produced which reaction is what separates a strong causation answer from a vague one.

    Correct. Jefferson found no power to charter a bank among the enumerated powers; Hamilton read it into the necessary and proper clause, and Washington signed. Broad construction and strict construction then hardened into Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.

    Those acts grew out of the crisis with France in 1797–98, the XYZ Affair and the undeclared naval war, not out of the bank. By then the parties the bank fight helped create already existed.

Short answer

  1. Source: United States Congress, the Sedition Act, July 14, 1798.

    That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish… any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress…, or the President…, with intent to defame… shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE historical situation that led to the passage of the law excerpted.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way the law contributed to the development of political parties in the 1790s.
    3. Briefly explain ONE way opponents of the law responded to it.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: the crisis with France, the XYZ Affair of 1797–98 and the undeclared naval war known as the Quasi-War; Federalist fear that French and Irish immigrants and Republican newspapers were disloyal in wartime; Federalist control of Congress and the presidency under John Adams. Do not accept: the Whiskey Rebellion; the War of 1812; or a general statement that "the government wanted control" with no specific situation.
    • (b) Accept: prosecutions fell almost entirely on Republican editors and politicians, Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was convicted and then re-elected from jail, which convinced Jefferson's followers that Federalists meant to criminalize opposition and pushed them to build a permanent organization; or Federalist use of federal law as a partisan weapon made party identity a matter of constitutional principle rather than personality. An explanation of how or why is required. Do not accept: "it made people angry"; or the claim that the acts created the Federalist Party, which already existed.
    • (c) Accept: the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798–99, drafted secretly by Jefferson and Madison, which argued that states could judge the constitutionality of federal law; Republican printers kept publishing and campaigned on the acts, contributing to Jefferson's victory in 1800; after 1800 Jefferson pardoned those convicted, Congress let the acts expire, and fines were later repaid. Do not accept: the claim that the Supreme Court struck the law down; it never ruled on it, and judicial review was asserted only in 1803.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The act came out of the crisis with France. After French agents demanded bribes from American envoys in the XYZ Affair, the United States fought an undeclared naval war with France, and Federalists in Congress argued that immigrants sympathetic to France and newspapers sympathetic to Jefferson were dangerous in wartime.

    b The law turned a policy disagreement into a fight over whether opposition itself was legal. Federal prosecutors used it almost entirely against Republican printers and politicians, Matthew Lyon of Vermont was convicted and then re-elected from a jail cell, so Jefferson's supporters concluded they needed a permanent organization to win the government back, not just a faction in Congress.

    c Jefferson and Madison wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 and 1799, which argued that the states could judge federal laws and treat unconstitutional ones as void. No other state joined them, but the resolutions gave Republicans a platform for the election of 1800, and once Jefferson won he pardoned those convicted and let the acts lapse.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE weakness of the national government under the Articles of Confederation.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way the Constitution drafted in 1787 addressed the weakness you described in (a).
    3. Briefly explain ONE argument made by opponents of ratification of the Constitution in 1787–1788.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: no power to tax, so Congress depended on requisitions the states often ignored; no power to regulate interstate or foreign commerce; no executive and no national courts; one vote per state, nine of thirteen to pass major measures, and unanimity to amend; no means to suppress an armed rising such as Shays's Rebellion in 1786–87. Do not accept: a supposed weakness that is not in the Articles, or a bare "the government was weak."
    • (b) Accept: a remedy that actually matches the weakness named in (a); Article I gives Congress power to lay and collect taxes and to regulate commerce among the states; Article II creates a single executive who can call out the militia; Article III creates federal courts; the House is apportioned by population and laws pass by majority; amendment requires two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states rather than unanimity. The response must connect the remedy to the stated weakness. Do not accept: a correct feature of the Constitution that does not address (a).
    • (c) Accept: the Constitution contained no bill of rights; a republic spread over so large a territory could not remain responsive to local majorities; the taxing power and the supremacy clause would swallow the states; the presidency and Senate resembled monarchy and aristocracy; federal courts would override state courts; the three-fifths and slave-trade clauses, which some Anti-Federalists attacked as concessions to slaveholding states. Do not accept: arguments actually made by Federalists; or a general complaint that the document was dangerous with no specific objection named.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The biggest weakness was that Congress had no power to tax. It could only requisition money from the states, and the states routinely paid late or not at all, so the national government could not service the war debt or reliably pay the army.

    b Article I of the Constitution gave Congress the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, and excises directly, without going through the states. That is exactly why Hamilton could fund the war debt at face value and assume the states' debts in 1790 and 1791: the new government had revenue of its own, and the whiskey excise and the militia call-up of 1794 showed it would collect even when people resisted.

    c Anti-Federalists argued that the document listed no protections for individuals, so a distant government armed with the taxing power and the supremacy clause could do as it liked. They also insisted, following Montesquieu, that a republic spread over so much territory could not stay responsive to the people. That demand was answered in 1791 with the Bill of Rights.

Lesson 4.1 · Period 4 · CED topic 4.2

The rise of political parties and the era of Jefferson, 1800–1824

The campaign of 1800 was vicious, and then the machinery jammed: Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr tied at 73 electoral votes, and the House needed thirty-six ballots to choose Jefferson in February 1801. Adams skipped the inauguration, but he left. Power passed to the opposition without troops in the streets.

Jefferson called it a revolution. In office he governed by principle and improvisation together, while the Federalist judiciary he inherited only grew stronger.

Key developments
  • Election of 1800 (decided February 1801): the tie exposed a flaw in the rules; the Twelfth Amendment (1804) separated the votes for the two offices.
  • Retrenchment (1801–1802): internal taxes including the whiskey excise repealed, army and navy cut, the Alien and Sedition Acts left to expire.
  • Louisiana Purchase (1803): about $15 million to France doubled the national territory; Lewis and Clark mapped a route west, 1804–1806.
  • Embargo Act (1807): halting exports to coerce Britain and France crushed New England shipping instead; repealed 1809.
  • The Marshall Court: Marbury v. Madison (1803) claimed judicial review; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld implied powers; Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) broadened federal power over interstate commerce.
Primary source

Source: Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801.

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. … every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

Sourcing (HIPP): Jefferson spoke days after a deadlocked House, to an audience including the Federalists he had just displaced, and his purpose was to make a party turnover look ordinary. That makes the address strong evidence about how the transfer of power was legitimized and weak evidence about his intentions: he soon gutted the Federalist program.

Exam tip: tie situation or purpose to what the document can prove. Naming the bias earns nothing.

Model analysis

The "revolution of 1800" changed who governed more than how the government worked, and the conciliatory inaugural matches the record: Jefferson kept Hamilton's funded debt and the national bank, then stretched federal power past his predecessors by buying Louisiana on the treaty power alone and by putting federal agents on the docks under the Embargo. Marshall spent two decades writing loose construction into constitutional law. The change is a peaceful party turnover; the continuity is a strengthening national state.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way Jefferson's actions as president departed from principles Democratic-Republicans had argued for in the 1790s.

Show a model response

In the 1790s Jefferson insisted the federal government held only the powers the Constitution plainly granted. Yet in 1803 he approved the Louisiana Purchase under the treaty power instead of waiting for an amendment: the loose construction he had attacked Hamilton for using.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific action and explains the contradiction.

Lesson 4.2 · Period 4 · CED topics 4.3–4.4

Regional interests and the world stage, 1812–1823

Britain seized American sailors, choked neutral trade with the Orders in Council, and was blamed for Native resistance on the frontier. Madison asked for war in June 1812. It went badly (Canada held, Washington burned in 1814), yet the Treaty of Ghent restored the prewar borders, and Jackson's victory at New Orleans, won weeks after the treaty was signed, let Americans remember a draw as a triumph.

The decade after looked unified, until a depression and a fight over Missouri showed the seams.

Key developments
  • Hartford Convention (December 1814): New England Federalists demanded amendments limiting Southern power; peace arrived first and the party never recovered.
  • The American System (1816 onward): Clay's program: the protective Tariff of 1816, the Second Bank of the United States, and federal roads and canals, which presidents kept vetoing as unconstitutional.
  • Adams-Onís Treaty (1819): Spain ceded Florida and accepted a boundary running to the Pacific.
  • Panic of 1819: tight credit and collapsing cotton prices brought the first nationwide depression, and lasting western hostility to the Bank.
  • Missouri Compromise (1820): Missouri came in slave, Maine free, slavery barred north of 36°30′ in the rest of the Purchase.
Primary source

Source: James Monroe, Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1823.

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. … we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.

Sourcing (HIPP): The situation was Spanish America's new republics, a rumored European plan to restore Spain's empire, and Russian claims on the Pacific. The stated audience is Congress; the real one is European courts. John Quincy Adams drafted a unilateral warning rather than join Britain's proposed joint statement, so the message proves American ambition, not American power: the Royal Navy did the enforcing.

Exam tip: with a policy statement, separate what it claims from what the government could enforce.

Model analysis

The War of 1812 caused both the nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings and the sectional crisis underneath it. Wartime shortages built American factories, so Congress protected them with the Tariff of 1816 and chartered a second national bank, and the same confidence produced Adams-Onís and the Monroe Doctrine. Neither move was sectionally neutral: the tariff raised costs for cotton planters, and every acre added forced Congress to decide whether slavery went with it.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the outcome of the War of 1812 shaped United States policy between 1815 and 1825.

Show a model response

The war cut off British imports and pushed Americans into manufacturing, and those new factories could not survive the cheap British cloth that flooded in after 1815. Congress answered with the Tariff of 1816, passed mainly to protect industry rather than raise revenue.

Why it earns the point: it links a specific wartime effect to a specific policy.

Lesson 4.3 · Period 4 · CED topics 4.5–4.6

The Market Revolution: industrialization and society

Between 1815 and 1848 the cost of moving things collapsed. The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, cut freight charges between Buffalo and New York City by roughly ninety percent; steamboats made upstream traffic cheap; railroads spread through the 1830s. A farm family that had raised food for itself could now sell wheat a thousand miles away and buy factory cloth with the proceeds. That is the Market Revolution: not one invention, but the moment most Americans began producing for a market instead of a household.

Key developments
  • Transport and communication: Fulton's steamboat (1807), the Erie Canal (1825), the first railroads in the 1830s, and Morse's telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore (1844).
  • The factory system: the Boston Manufacturing Company put spinning and weaving under one roof at Waltham in 1814; Lowell's mills recruited young farm women into supervised company boardinghouses.
  • Machines and cotton: interchangeable parts, promoted by Eli Whitney, let unskilled hands assemble goods; his cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable and carried slavery west.
  • Immigration (1830s–1840s): Irish families fleeing the famine after 1845 and German migrants took mill, canal, and railroad work, and met nativist, especially anti-Catholic, hostility.
  • Class and gender: a salaried middle class emerged; the cult of domesticity named the home women's proper sphere just as other women earned cash wages in mills.
Primary source

Description of: The Lowell Offering, a monthly written by women working in the Lowell mills, 1840–1845. Summarized, not quoted.

Contributors describe boardinghouse life, lectures and study groups, savings sent home to the family farm, and the self-improvement they expected mill work to make possible. Hours, wage cuts, and the speed-up of the machinery are largely absent.

Sourcing (HIPP): Operatives wrote it, but it was printed with the corporations' blessing and handed to visitors who came to see whether factories would degrade American workers. That purpose explains the silences: it is strong evidence for how the Lowell system presented itself and weak evidence for conditions inside it; for those, use the ten-hour petitions the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association sent to the legislature in 1845.

Exam tip: name what a source's purpose keeps out, not just what it says.

Model analysis

The Market Revolution pulled production out of the household, and that one change reorganized women's work in opposite directions. Middle-class families now bought goods once made at home, so the household became a place of moral instruction rather than production: the cult of domesticity. For daughters of struggling farms, the mills that wove that cloth offered cash wages and a life away from a father's household. The market defined one group out of paid work and the other into it.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Market Revolution changed the lives of women in the United States between 1800 and 1848.

Show a model response

Textile mills in towns like Lowell hired unmarried women off New England farms and paid them directly in cash. Controlling their own wages, even under strict boardinghouse rules, gave them an independence farm daughters had not had, and some used it to organize for shorter hours.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific group and a specific change, not just "women worked."

Lesson 4.4 · Period 4 · CED topics 4.7–4.8

Expanding democracy and the Age of Jackson, 1824–1840

In 1824 four candidates split the vote. Andrew Jackson led in popular and electoral votes without a majority, the House chose John Quincy Adams, and Adams made Henry Clay his secretary of state. Jackson's men called it a corrupt bargain and campaigned for four straight years. In 1828 they won, and brought a new politics with them: mass rallies, party newspapers, and a president who claimed to speak for the people against Congress and the courts.

Key developments
  • Expanding suffrage (1810s–1830s): states dropped property qualifications for white men; turnout roughly doubled between 1824 and 1828.
  • Jackson in power (1829–1837): rotation in office, called the spoils system by critics; opponents organized as the Whigs behind Clay's American System.
  • Nullification Crisis (1832–1833): South Carolina, angered by the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, declared it void; Jackson won the Force Bill while Clay wrote a compromise tariff.
  • Bank War (1832–1837): Jackson vetoed the recharter, moved federal deposits to state "pet banks," and issued the 1836 Specie Circular; the Panic of 1837 broke over Van Buren.
  • Indian removal: the Indian Removal Act (1830); in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) the Court held Georgia's laws had no force in Cherokee territory, and Georgia ignored it; after the Treaty of New Echota (1835) the army drove the Cherokee west, and thousands died on the Trail of Tears in 1838.
Primary source

Source: Andrew Jackson, veto message on the recharter of the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832.

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

Sourcing (HIPP): Clay and Webster pushed recharter through Congress four years early to trap Jackson in an election year, so the veto is a campaign document as much as a legal one, aimed past Congress at voters. That purpose makes it excellent evidence for Jacksonian rhetoric about privilege and poor evidence about the Bank, which had managed the currency competently.

Exam tip: for a veto or campaign message, source on audience, who was meant to read it, and what that made the author say.

Model analysis

Jacksonian democracy widened participation and narrowed it at once, for different people. The veto claims equal protection for the ordinary farmer and mechanic against chartered privilege, and the vote did reach nearly all white men as states dropped property tests. The same administration ignored Worcester v. Georgia and removed the southeastern nations by force, and in these years states such as Pennsylvania wrote "white" into their suffrage clauses. Democratization and dispossession ran through the same politics.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the expansion of voting rights between 1820 and 1840 was accompanied by a loss of rights for another group.

Show a model response

As states removed property qualifications so that nearly all white men could vote, several took the vote away from free Black men who had held it. Pennsylvania's 1838 constitution limited suffrage to white men, disfranchising a free Black community that had voted there for decades.

Why it earns the point: it gives a specific state, date, and change instead of a general claim about limits.

Lesson 4.5 · Period 4 · CED topics 4.9–4.10

An American culture and the Second Great Awakening

A wave of revivals rolled across the country from the 1790s into the 1840s. Camp meetings drew thousands, Methodists and Baptists grew fastest, and Charles Grandison Finney held revivals so often in western New York that the region was called the burned-over district. His message fit the age: salvation was not decided in advance but open to anyone who chose it, and the saved owed the world reform. Writers and painters were chasing the same independence in another key, looking for a culture that owed nothing to Europe.

Key developments
  • Second Great Awakening: camp meetings, itinerant preachers, and Finney's revivals replaced predestination with the individual's choice, and made converts responsible for perfecting society.
  • Women and the churches: women were the majority of converts and carried revival energy into missionary, temperance, and antislavery societies.
  • New faiths: Joseph Smith organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830; persecution pushed his followers west, and they reached the Great Salt Lake in 1847 under Brigham Young.
  • Utopian communities: the Shakers, Robert Owen's New Harmony (1825), Brook Farm (1841), and Oneida (1848) tried to build the perfected society in miniature.
  • An American voice: Emerson's Nature (1836) and the transcendentalists located truth in individual conscience; Thoreau went to Walden Pond in 1845; the Hudson River School painted the American landscape as sublime.
Primary source

Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. … Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Sourcing (HIPP): Emerson had left the Unitarian ministry because he could not accept inherited doctrine, and he wrote for a literate Northern audience that paid to hear him lecture. His purpose is persuasion, to move readers from deference to conscience, so the essay is strong evidence for what educated New Englanders admired and weak evidence for what most Americans believed. For that, the revivals reached far more people with a similar confidence in the individual.

Exam tip: a literary source becomes usable evidence when you connect it to a development outside the page.

Model analysis

Revivalism and transcendentalism started from opposite premises and arrived at the same place: the individual could judge for himself. Finney told audiences that salvation was a choice, which made sin something communities could organize against; Emerson told readers that conformity was the enemy of truth. Both fed the same decade of voluntary societies and experiments: temperance pledges, antislavery chapters, Brook Farm, Oneida. The causal link runs from a democratized idea of the self to an explosion of organized reform.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Second Great Awakening contributed to reform movements between 1820 and 1848.

Show a model response

Revivalists such as Finney preached that anyone could choose salvation and that the converted should drive sin out of the community. That turned personal conversion into a public duty, and converts poured into voluntary societies for temperance, missions, and antislavery.

Why it earns the point: it explains the causal step from a religious idea to organized reform.

Lesson 4.6 · Period 4 · CED topic 4.11

Reform movements: abolition, temperance, and women's rights

Reformers disagreed less about whether slavery was wrong than about how fast to end it. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, proposed gradual emancipation and resettlement in Liberia; most free Black northerners rejected it as exile. On January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator and demanded immediate emancipation without compensation. Abolitionists stayed a small and often mobbed minority, but they set the terms of the argument for thirty years.

Key developments
  • Gradualism to immediatism: colonization (1816) gave way to Garrison's Liberator (1831) and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), which split in 1840 over women's role and whether to enter politics.
  • Black abolitionists: Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, became the movement's most effective speaker and founded his own paper in 1847; Black churches supplied subscribers, lecturers, and escape networks.
  • Temperance: the American Temperance Society (1826) recast drinking as a moral and household danger, and consumption fell sharply.
  • Asylums and schools: Dorothea Dix reported to the Massachusetts legislature in 1843 on the jailing of the mentally ill; Horace Mann built the common-school movement from 1837.
  • Seneca Falls (July 1848): Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened about three hundred people; the suffrage resolution passed narrowly, after Douglass spoke for it.
Primary source

Source: Declaration of Sentiments, Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, July 1848.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

Sourcing (HIPP): Stanton and Mott had met in 1840 in London, where the World Anti-Slavery Convention refused to seat women delegates, and they wrote for a public that already revered the Declaration of Independence. The imitation is the purpose: borrowing the form forces readers to grant women the natural-rights ground they already grant men. Point of view limits it: the authors are mostly white, middle-class northeastern women, and the document says little about enslaved or wage-earning women.

Exam tip: when a document copies a famous form, say what the borrowing does for the argument.

Model analysis

The women's rights movement grew directly out of abolition. Women organized antislavery fairs, gathered petitions, and lectured, and in doing so ran into limits on their own standing: the London convention of 1840 would not seat them, and the American Anti-Slavery Society split that year partly over whether women could hold office in it. Eight years later the Seneca Falls document took the abolitionists' natural-rights logic and turned it on marriage, property, and the vote. That is causation, not coincidence.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way participation in the abolitionist movement shaped the movement for women's rights between 1830 and 1848.

Show a model response

Women who organized and spoke for abolition were told they could not do so as equals: the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat women delegates. That exclusion pushed Stanton and Mott to call their own convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, where they demanded rights for women in the natural-rights language they had used against slavery.

Why it earns the point: it names the specific experience and explains how it led to the new movement.

Lesson 4.7 · Period 4 · CED topics 4.12–4.13

African Americans and Southern society, 1808–1848

Congress banned the Atlantic slave trade effective January 1, 1808, and slavery grew anyway. The cotton gin and fresh land in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana made enslaved labor more valuable than ever, so a domestic trade carried roughly a million people from the Upper South to the cotton states, most sold away from parents, spouses, or children. Enslaved people built families, churches, and networks in spite of it.

Key developments
  • The domestic slave trade (after 1808): a cotton-driven forced migration from Virginia and Maryland to the Deep South, carried out through sales that broke up families.
  • Culture and resistance: kinship ties across plantations, Christianity blended with African practice, and resistance from broken tools and flight up to Nat Turner's rising in Southampton County, Virginia (1831).
  • Reaction after 1831: Virginia debated emancipation, then joined other states in tightening slave codes, banning teaching enslaved people to read, and restricting Black preaching.
  • Free Black communities: churches such as Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal denomination (1816), schools, and mutual-aid societies built northern institutions under segregation.
  • Southern society and its defense: a small planter elite set policy while most white southerners were yeoman farmers who owned no one; Calhoun called slavery a positive good in 1837 and George Fitzhugh later argued it beat wage labor, while the House gag rule tabled antislavery petitions from 1836 until John Quincy Adams won repeal in 1844.
Primary source

Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845.

Context: Douglass's enslaver had ordered his wife to stop the reading lessons, warning, in terms that included a racial slur, that literacy would ruin him as a slave. Douglass drew the opposite lesson.

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Sourcing (HIPP): Douglass published seven years after escaping, while lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society to audiences who doubted so polished a speaker had ever been enslaved. To convince them he names owners, places, and dates, which also made him traceable, and he sailed for Britain until supporters bought his freedom. It is strong evidence for how slavery was maintained through enforced ignorance, not a survey of average conditions.

Exam tip: with a memoir, ask what the author had to prove to his audience.

Model analysis

Douglass identifies the mechanism from inside: keeping people unable to read was not incidental to slavery but part of how it held. Southern lawmakers agreed. After Nat Turner's rising in 1831 they wrote that logic into statute with literacy bans and limits on Black preaching, and from 1836 the House gag rule kept antislavery petitions off the floor. The change over time is in the argument itself: the necessary evil of the 1790s became, in Calhoun's 1837 phrase, a positive good.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in the period 1800–1848.

Show a model response

Most resistance was daily rather than armed, because reprisals for revolt were severe. Enslaved people worked slowly, broke tools, feigned illness, and ran off for days at a time, which cut the labor an owner could extract and forced bargaining over tasks and time.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific form of resistance and explains its effect.

Unit 4 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 4 review: 1800–1848

Ten exam-style multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions covering Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics, the Market Revolution, the Second Great Awakening and antebellum reform, and the growth of Southern slave society: answer each before opening the explanation, because the rationales are written to teach the miss.

Multiple choice

  1. Source: Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801.

    Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. … every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

    Which of the following best describes Jefferson's purpose in the passage?

    Jefferson made no such offer, and in office he did the opposite: he let the Alien and Sedition Acts expire, repealed the internal taxes, and replaced Federalist officeholders. Reading conciliatory language as a power-sharing plan mistakes tone for policy.

    Correct. The House had needed thirty-six ballots to break the Burr tie, and Jefferson's audience included the party he had just displaced. Saying that different names cover "brethren of the same principle" makes a partisan turnover look routine rather than revolutionary, which is exactly the problem a first peaceful transfer of power has to solve.

    The passage says the reverse: he grants that differences of opinion exist and argues only that they are not differences of principle. Party conflict in fact sharpened, over the judiciary, the Embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812.

    Nothing in the excerpt concerns the courts. This choice borrows from a real 1801–1804 fight, the repeal of the Judiciary Act and the failed impeachment of Justice Chase, but the Marshall Court only grew stronger, from Marbury (1803) to Gibbons (1824).

  2. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 most directly contributed to which of the following developments?

    Judicial review came from Marbury v. Madison, decided the same year but arising from a dispute over undelivered judicial commissions. Two things happening in 1803 is coincidence, not causation: the exam rewards you for telling them apart.

    Federalists opposed the purchase precisely because new western states would dilute New England's weight. The party's collapse came later and for a different reason: the Hartford Convention of 1814 made it look disloyal just as the war ended.

    Correct. Doubling the national territory forced Congress to decide the status of slavery in each new piece of it. Missouri's application produced the crisis of 1819–1820, settled by admitting Missouri as a slave state, Maine as free, and barring slavery north of 36°30′ in the rest of the Purchase: a line the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed in 1854.

    The Missouri Compromise restricted slavery only north of 36°30′, and Missouri itself entered as a slave state. Slavery expanded into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, and the cotton boom carried it steadily westward.

  3. Source: James Monroe, Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1823.

    The American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. … we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims about United States foreign policy in the 1820s?

    Britain proposed a joint declaration and John Quincy Adams refused it, insisting the United States speak alone rather than "come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war." The unilateral form is the point of the document.

    Correct. The message warns all of Europe away from an entire hemisphere at a moment when the United States had a small navy and no means of stopping a Spanish or French expedition. What actually deterred intervention was the Royal Navy and Britain's own interest in open trade, so the excerpt is evidence of ambition and self-definition rather than of power.

    The message restates that policy rather than abandoning it: Monroe pairs the warning with a pledge not to interfere in Europe's existing colonies or internal affairs. It draws a line between two spheres, which is the Washington–Jefferson tradition, not a break from it.

    No annexation is proposed. The United States had already recognized the new republics in 1822, and the argument here is that Europe must stay out: a claim about who may intervene, not a claim to the territory itself.

  4. Which of the following most directly contributed to the passage of the protective Tariff of 1816?

    A protective tariff worked against planters: it raised the price of the manufactured goods they bought while doing nothing for cotton, which sold abroad. That grievance grew until South Carolina tried to nullify the Tariff of 1828.

    Correct. Embargo and war cut off British cloth and iron for nearly a decade, and Americans built mills to fill the gap. When peace came in 1815 British manufacturers dumped goods below cost to recapture the market, and Congress answered with the first tariff passed mainly to protect industry rather than to raise revenue: the opening plank of Clay's American System.

    The chronology is reversed. The Panic of 1819 came three years after the tariff, and its main political legacies were western hostility to the Second Bank and pressure for easier land terms.

    The Hartford Convention was a New England protest against the war itself, meeting in December 1814. Its demands concerned the three-fifths clause, embargoes, and war declarations, and peace arrived before Congress considered them.

  5. Description of: a table comparing the cost and the time required to move one ton of freight between Buffalo and New York City before and after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.

    The table gives two rows. Before the canal, overland wagon haulage cost roughly one hundred dollars a ton and took about three weeks. After the canal opened, the same ton moved by canal boat for roughly ten dollars and arrived in about one week. A note under the table records that tonnage carried on the canal rose in every year of the 1830s.

    Which of the following best explains the change shown in the table?

    The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, four decades later and on the other side of the continent. Reaching for the most famous transportation fact instead of the one that fits the dates is the commonest error on a data stimulus.

    Lowell's mills changed what it cost to make cloth, not what it cost to move a ton of freight. The table measures shipping cost and travel time, so an answer about manufacturing productivity cannot explain it.

    Correct. New York State borrowed to dig the canal, finished it in 1825, and cut the Buffalo-to-New York freight charge by roughly ninety percent. Once a farmer in the Genesee Valley could sell wheat in New York City and buy factory cloth with the proceeds, household production gave way to producing for a market: the Market Revolution in one table.

    Morse's Washington-to-Baltimore line opened in 1844, nineteen years after the canal, and it moved information rather than cargo. Faster price news mattered enormously to merchants, but it could not lower a wagon's haulage cost in 1825.

  6. Source: Andrew Jackson, veto message on the recharter of the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832.

    It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

    Which of the following best describes the argument Jackson makes in the excerpt?

    Correct. Jackson concedes that inequality of talent and wealth is natural and permanent, then argues that the wrong lies in government adding to it: here, by chartering a monopoly whose stock enriched a few. That combination, egalitarian in rhetoric and limited in program, is the core of Jacksonian political language.

    The excerpt says the opposite in plain words: distinctions "will always exist," and equality of wealth "can not be produced by human institutions." Treating Jackson as a redistributionist is the classic overreading of this passage.

    Jackson does make a constitutional argument elsewhere in the veto, claiming the right to judge the Bank unconstitutional even after McCulloch v. Maryland upheld it in 1819. But it is not in these sentences, and a stimulus question asks what this text argues: outside knowledge cannot override the words on the page.

    No federal program of any kind is proposed. Jackson's answer to privilege was to withhold charters and remove deposits, not to spend; he also vetoed federal funding for internal improvements such as the Maysville Road in 1830.

  7. Which of the following best describes the significance of Worcester v. Georgia (1832)?

    The case tested Georgia's laws, not the federal statute, and the Court ruled against Georgia. Assuming that a Jackson-era Court must have sided with removal skips the actual holding, which recognized the Cherokee Nation as a distinct political community.

    Citizenship was not at issue and was not granted. Native Americans born in tribal nations were not made United States citizens by general statute until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

    The opposite happened. Georgia ignored the decision, Jackson declined to enforce it, and the federal government instead pressed the Treaty of New Echota (1835), signed by a minority faction, as the legal basis for removal.

    Correct. Marshall's opinion held that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community in which Georgia's laws could have no force, a real legal victory. Without enforcement it changed nothing on the ground: the army moved the Cherokee west in 1838, and thousands died on the Trail of Tears, a reminder that a court ruling is only as strong as the executive willing to back it.

  8. Description of: a lithograph printed about 1829 showing an outdoor religious meeting in a forest clearing.

    Several hundred people sit on plank benches facing a raised wooden platform where a preacher stands with both arms extended. Rows of canvas tents line the clearing behind the crowd. Near the platform a group of worshippers has risen from the benches; some are weeping, and several are supported by neighbors standing beside them.

    The scene described most directly reflects which of the following developments?

    Puritan worship happened indoors, in a town meetinghouse, under a settled minister whose congregation admitted only "visible saints." A tented camp meeting drawing strangers from a whole district is a different institution from a different century.

    Correct. Camp meetings, itinerant preaching, and emotional conversion were the machinery of the revivals that ran from the 1790s into the 1840s, and they grew Methodist and Baptist membership fastest. Preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney replaced predestination with an individual decision, which also made the converted responsible for reforming the world: the link from revival to temperance, missions, and antislavery societies.

    Transcendentalists were a small circle of writers and lecturers who located truth in individual conscience and nature rather than in crowds; Thoreau's answer to society was Walden Pond, not a camp meeting. Both movements trusted the individual, but they looked nothing alike.

    Anglicization describes eighteenth-century colonists copying English consumer goods, law, and manners. The revival in the image is a nineteenth-century American mass form, and contemporaries treated it as evidence of how unlike England the country had become.

  9. Source: Declaration of Sentiments, Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, July 1848.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal … He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. … He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims?

    A document proves what its authors argued, not what a population believed. Roughly three hundred people attended, the suffrage resolution passed only narrowly after Frederick Douglass spoke for it, and the press mocked the convention afterward.

    The text imitates the Declaration of Independence deliberately, down to "self-evident" and the list of injuries by a single "He." That borrowing is the argument: readers who already accept the form must explain why its logic stops at men.

    Correct. The excerpt takes the Revolution's natural-rights premise and applies it to marriage, property, and the vote, and the grievance about laws made without her voice is the same "no taxation without representation" logic the colonists used. Stanton and Mott arrived at it through abolition, after the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat women delegates.

    Immediate emancipation was the demand of Garrison's Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Many at Seneca Falls were abolitionists, but this document is about the legal and political status of women; the excerpt names laws, property, and wages.

  10. Which of the following best describes an effect of the congressional ban on the international slave trade that took effect in 1808?

    Correct. Closing the Atlantic trade did not reduce demand; the cotton gin and fresh land in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana raised it. Virginia and Maryland planters sold people south, and the forced migration broke up most of the families it touched: a domestic trade that made enslaved people the largest form of property in the South by 1860.

    The enslaved population grew from about one million in 1810 to roughly four million by 1860, almost entirely through natural increase. Ending importation changed where enslaved people were sold, not how many there were.

    Gradual emancipation was a Northern policy adopted after the Revolution, in states such as Pennsylvania and New York. Southern states moved the other way after 1831, tightening slave codes and banning the teaching of reading.

    Cotton made slavery more profitable, not less. This choice repeats the founding generation's expectation that slavery would fade on its own: an expectation the gin and the Deep South land boom destroyed.

Short answer

  1. Source: John C. Calhoun, speech in the United States Senate on the reception of antislavery petitions, February 6, 1837.

    I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races … are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.

    The ellipsis omits Calhoun's assertions about differences between the two groups, summarized rather than reprinted here.

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE historical perspective about slavery expressed in the excerpt.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1800 to 1837 that contributed to the perspective expressed in the excerpt.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific historical effect of that perspective on national politics in the period 1836 to 1848.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: slavery is not a necessary evil to be apologized for but a benefit, or a positive good, for the South; the relationship between the two groups is presented as beneficial rather than wrong; slavery is defended as a permanent and desirable social arrangement. Do not accept: a restatement that Calhoun supported slavery with no reference to the shift away from calling it an evil; a claim that Calhoun urged secession, which this excerpt does not say.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of how it led to the perspective: the cotton boom after the gin and the opening of Deep South land, which made enslaved labor far more valuable; the domestic slave trade after 1808; the rise of immediatist abolition after Garrison's Liberator in 1831 and the American Anti-Slavery Society's petition and pamphlet campaigns; Nat Turner's rising in 1831 and the Virginia emancipation debate that followed. Do not accept: naming a development with no link to why Southerners changed their public defense of slavery; events after 1837.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation of the political consequence: the House gag rule tabling antislavery petitions from 1836 until John Quincy Adams won repeal in 1844; Southern insistence on annexing Texas as slave territory; the sectional split of the House vote on the Wilmot Proviso in 1846; the formation of the Free Soil Party in 1848. Do not accept: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the Civil War, all outside the window; "it caused tension" without a named development.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Calhoun argues that slavery is not an evil the South should apologize for but a good thing: a "positive good." That is a change from the founding generation's line that slavery was a necessary evil that would eventually die out; Calhoun says the arrangement should be defended openly and kept.

    b One development that led to this was the growth of the cotton economy. After the cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable, planters poured into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and after 1808 a domestic slave trade carried about a million people from the Upper South to work that land. Once enslaved people were the South's most valuable property, apologizing for slavery meant apologizing for the region's whole economy, so its defenders needed an argument that it was right rather than merely unavoidable.

    c One effect was the gag rule. Because Southern members insisted that slavery could not even be debated as an evil, the House voted from 1836 on to table every antislavery petition without reading it. That turned an argument about slavery into an argument about the right of petition and free speech, which won the abolitionists Northern allies who had not cared much about slavery before: John Quincy Adams fought the rule for eight years until the House repealed it in 1844.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE way the Market Revolution changed work in the northeastern United States in the period 1815 to 1848.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way a reform movement in the period 1820 to 1848 responded to social change.
    3. Briefly explain ONE way the expansion of voting rights in the 1820s and 1830s changed American politics.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: production moved from household to factory, as at Waltham in 1814 and Lowell; young farm women earned cash wages in textile mills; interchangeable parts let unskilled workers assemble goods once made by artisans; Irish and German immigrants took mill, canal, and railroad work; a salaried middle class of clerks and managers appeared. Do not accept: "there were more factories" with no change in how people worked; developments outside the Northeast or outside the dates.
    • (b) Accept, with the connection made explicit: temperance societies responding to drinking in a wage-earning, cash-paid workforce; Horace Mann's common schools responding to immigration and an urban population; Dorothea Dix's 1843 asylum campaign; Lowell women's ten-hour petitions in 1845; utopian communities such as New Harmony, Brook Farm, or Oneida rejecting competitive market society. Do not accept: naming a reform movement without saying what social change it answered.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: states dropped property qualifications, turnout roughly doubled between 1824 and 1828, and candidates had to campaign directly through rallies, party newspapers, and conventions; presidents such as Jackson claimed to speak for the whole people against Congress and the courts; the second party system of Democrats and Whigs organized mass electorates. Do not accept: "more people could vote" with no political consequence; suffrage expansions for groups other than white men, which did not occur in this period.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Work moved out of the household and into the factory. The Boston Manufacturing Company put spinning and weaving under one roof at Waltham in 1814, and mills at Lowell then hired unmarried women off New England farms and paid them cash wages on a clock-governed schedule, instead of families producing cloth at home for their own use.

    b The temperance movement responded to that change. When men earned cash wages away from the farm, drinking became a household danger in a new way, since a week's pay could disappear before it reached the family. The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, recast drinking as a moral problem that wives and ministers should organize against, and alcohol consumption fell sharply over the next two decades.

    c The expansion of the vote changed how politicians had to win. Once states dropped property qualifications for white men, turnout roughly doubled between 1824 and 1828, so candidates could no longer rely on deference from a small electorate. Jackson's supporters built the first mass party (rallies, party newspapers, and national nominating conventions), and Jackson claimed that as the only officer elected by the whole nation he spoke for the people against Congress and the courts.

Lesson 5.1 · Period 5 · CED topics 5.2–5.3

Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, 1844–1848

Expansion was not new in 1844, but the word for it was. John L. O'Sullivan, a Democratic editor, named the impulse manifest destiny, turning an argument about land into a claim about Providence. The motives underneath were ordinary: cotton acreage, Pacific harbors, farmland cheaper than Ohio's.

James K. Polk won in 1844 promising both Texas and Oregon. He took both within two years, one by treaty and one by war.

Key developments
  • Texas and Oregon (1836–1846): Texans won independence at San Jacinto; annexation stalled nine years over slavery, then passed by joint resolution in 1845, and "Fifty-four forty or fight" settled at the 49th parallel.
  • War with Mexico (1846–1848): after a clash on ground both countries claimed, Polk told Congress that American blood had been shed on American soil; war was declared May 13, 1846.
  • Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848): the Rio Grande border plus California and the Southwest, about half of Mexico's territory, for $15 million.
  • Wilmot Proviso (1846): would have barred slavery from land taken from Mexico; it passed the House, died in the Senate, and split votes by section, not party.
  • Gold Rush (1849): Sutter's Mill gold drew some 80,000 migrants in a year, and California asked to enter free.
Primary source

Source: John L. O'Sullivan, "Annexation," United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1845.

… other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

Sourcing (HIPP): O'Sullivan edited a party magazine and wrote while annexation was still contested. Purpose is the lever: he needs wavering Democrats to stop asking whether Texas enters slave or free, so he recasts a sectional question as a national destiny granted by Providence. Strong evidence for how expansionists sold expansion; none that the country agreed.

Exam tip: readers award the sourcing point only when you tie purpose or situation to an argument; naming the author's party is not sourcing.

Model analysis

Expansion did not relieve the sectional conflict; it caused the next stage of it. O'Sullivan never mentions slavery, and that silence is the point: Providence framing kept the question out of sight, and it could not stay there once there was new land to organize. Within four months of the war's opening Wilmot moved to bar slavery from Mexican territory, and the House divided North against South rather than Democrat against Whig. Causation runs from acquisition to crisis.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way territorial expansion in the period 1844–1848 contributed to sectional conflict.

Show a model response

Victory over Mexico brought the Mexican Cession, which forced Congress to decide whether slavery could expand into the new territory. In 1846 David Wilmot proposed barring it from any land taken from Mexico, and the House vote split North against South instead of by party, showing that section was becoming the stronger loyalty.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific acquisition and a specific political consequence, and explains the link between them.

Lesson 5.2 · Period 5 · CED topics 5.4–5.5

The Compromise of 1850 and the widening sectional conflict

California's gold-rush population forced the question the Wilmot Proviso had left open. In 1849 California asked to enter free, which would break the Senate balance the South relied on to block antislavery legislation. Henry Clay, in his last session, proposed a package of trades.

It failed as one bill. Stephen Douglas then pushed the pieces through separately, each with a different majority, and Millard Fillmore signed them. The settlement lasted four years.

Key developments
  • Free Soil Party (1848): antislavery Democrats, Whigs, and Liberty men ran Martin Van Buren on "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men."
  • Compromise of 1850: California free; popular sovereignty in Utah and New Mexico; $10 million to Texas for its land claims; the slave trade, though not slavery, ended in the District of Columbia; a tougher fugitive slave law.
  • Fugitive Slave Act (1850): federal commissioners decided cases without juries, were paid ten dollars for a certificate of removal and five for a denial, and could compel bystanders into a posse.
  • Northern resistance: personal liberty laws, rescues in Syracuse and Boston, Underground Railroad networks including Harriet Tubman's, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which sold some 300,000 copies in a year.
  • Ostend Manifesto (1854): American ministers in Europe urged buying Cuba and hinted at seizing it; the leak convinced Northerners that a "slave power" steered foreign policy.
Primary source

Source: Fugitive Slave Act, September 18, 1850 (Sections 5 and 6).

[Section 5] … and all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required, as aforesaid, for that purpose … [Section 6] In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence …

Sourcing (HIPP): This is statute, not opinion, so situation gives it meaning: it was the price Southern senators set for admitting California free, drafted by a Congress in which they held an effective veto. Its purpose was to move recapture out of Northern courts and juries into federal hands. Read that way, the law is evidence of Southern anxiety about Northern enforcement rather than of Northern opinion.

Exam tip: with a law, source on the situation that produced it and on what its design reveals about its authors' fears.

Model analysis

The Fugitive Slave Act did more than any abolitionist pamphlet to build antislavery feeling in the North, because it made the North participate. Denying the accused a jury and commanding "all good citizens" to assist meant a Boston merchant with no quarrel with slavery in Mississippi could be ordered into a posse on his own street. States answered with personal liberty laws, crowds answered in Syracuse and Boston, Stowe answered with a novel. A law meant to settle the conflict enlarged the number of Northerners with a stake in it.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Compromise of 1850 contributed to sectional tension in the period 1850–1860.

Show a model response

The Compromise included a stronger Fugitive Slave Act that denied accused fugitives a jury trial and required Northern citizens to help capture them. Because the law forced Northerners to enforce slavery at home, many states answered with personal liberty laws, which deepened Southern conviction that the North would not honor its bargains.

Why it earns the point: it names one provision, not the whole package, and traces a reaction on both sides.

Lesson 5.3 · Period 5 · CED topics 5.6–5.7

The failure of compromise, 1854–1861

Compromise had worked twice because both sections accepted a line on a map, 36°30′ in 1820, a package of trades in 1850. Between 1854 and 1857 Congress and then the Supreme Court destroyed the line and the power to draw one, and built nothing to replace them.

Stephen Douglas began it: he needed Southern votes to organize Nebraska for a railroad, and the price was popular sovereignty where the Missouri Compromise had barred slavery.

Key developments
  • Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854): popular sovereignty in two territories, repealing the Missouri Compromise line.
  • Bleeding Kansas (1855–1856): rival governments at proslavery Lecompton and free-state Topeka, the sack of Lawrence, Brown's killings at Pottawatomie Creek, and Preston Brooks's caning of Senator Charles Sumner.
  • Party realignment (1854–1856): the Whigs broke apart; the new Republican Party organized on one plank, no slavery in the territories, and ran John C. Frémont.
  • Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): Chief Justice Taney's Court held that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to bar slavery from a territory, voiding the Missouri Compromise.
  • Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858): at Freeport, Douglas argued a territory could still exclude slavery by refusing to protect it; the answer kept Illinois and cost him the South.
  • Harpers Ferry and secession (1859–1861): Brown's raid failed and he was hanged; Lincoln then won in 1860 with no Southern support, and seven states seceded by February 1861.
Primary source

Source: Abraham Lincoln, speech accepting the Republican nomination for the United States Senate, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Sourcing (HIPP): Lincoln spoke a year after Dred Scott, to Illinois Republicans tempted to back Douglas because he had broken with the administration over Kansas. Purpose explains the alarm: Lincoln had to show that popular sovereignty was no neutral middle path but a slope toward nationalized slavery. The speech is strong evidence for how Republicans framed the crisis, weak evidence that the drift was a plot.

Exam tip: a campaign speech is evidence about persuasion. Say what the speaker needed the audience to believe, and why then.

Model analysis

What collapsed between 1854 and 1860 was the mechanism, not the goodwill. Both earlier compromises worked by dividing territory geographically, so each section could count on a share of the future. Kansas-Nebraska replaced the line with a vote, turning settlement into a contest that fraud and force could win; Dred Scott then ruled that Congress could not draw such a line at all, making the Republican program unconstitutional. With no constitutional route left, the sections fought through parties, and in 1860 a purely Northern party won.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Dred Scott decision of 1857 contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Show a model response

The Court ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, which made the Republican Party's central plank unconstitutional. Republicans concluded that only winning the presidency could stop slavery's expansion, so the election of 1860 became the decisive test, and the South refused to accept its result.

Why it earns the point: it states the holding accurately and explains a specific political consequence.

Lesson 5.4 · Period 5 · CED topic 5.8

Mobilizing for war: government, economy, and emancipation

Neither side was built for the war it got. The Union had roughly 22 million people to the Confederacy's 9 million and nearly all the country's factories and railroads; the Confederacy had interior lines and many of the army's best officers.

Turning that into armies took a government neither section had wanted in 1860. Both conscripted men, taxed incomes, printed money, and jailed critics; the Union also passed the economic program departed Southern members had blocked.

Key developments
  • Conscription (1862–1863): the Confederacy drafted first, exempting one white man on plantations with twenty or more enslaved people; the Union's 1863 law allowed substitutes and $300 payments and touched off the deadly New York draft riots.
  • Land and schools (1862): the Homestead Act gave 160 acres for five years' residence, the Pacific Railway Act funded a transcontinental line, and the Morrill Act endowed state colleges.
  • Money and taxes (1861–1864): greenbacks under the Legal Tender Act, the first federal income tax, higher tariffs, and a national banking system.
  • Civil liberties: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, first in Maryland in 1861; thousands were held without trial, and Congress authorized the suspension in 1863.
  • Emancipation and Black soldiers: the Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863; about 180,000 Black men served in the Union army, among them the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, on unequal pay until 1864.
  • Women's war work: Dorothea Dix directed army nurses and the US Sanitary Commission ran hospitals; Southern women managed farms, and shortages brought bread riots to Richmond in 1863.
Primary source

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863.

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free … And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places …

Sourcing (HIPP): Lincoln issued this as commander in chief, explicitly as a war measure for suppressing the rebellion, which is why it reaches only the states in rebellion and leaves the loyal border states untouched. Purpose and audience explain the restraint: he needed Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri in the Union, and Britain and France to read the war as a war against slavery. The enlistment sentence changed the war's manpower.

Exam tip: source this on legal form. A war measure can reach only enemy territory, so the document's limits show constitutional caution, not indifference.

Model analysis

The war turned a distant federal government into one that touched ordinary life directly. Before 1861 Washington had never drafted a soldier, taxed an income, issued a national paper currency, or chartered a national banking system; by 1865 it had done all four, and had given away land for farms, railroads, and colleges besides. Emancipation belongs in the same story: war powers used against the South's labor system, then the freed recruited into the army that enforced it. Reconstruction rested on that precedent.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Civil War expanded the power of the federal government.

Show a model response

The Legal Tender Act of 1862 and the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 let the federal government issue greenbacks and charter national banks, replacing a patchwork of state bank notes with a national currency. That gave Washington direct control over the money supply for the first time.

Why it earns the point: it names specific legislation and the new power it created, rather than saying the government "got bigger."

Lesson 5.5 · Period 5 · CED topics 5.8–5.9

Military conflict and the end of the war, 1861–1865

The Union had to conquer a country the size of western Europe; the Confederacy only had to avoid losing until the North quit or Europe intervened. That asymmetry shaped Union strategy: Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan proposed strangling the South by blockade and control of the Mississippi rather than seeking one decisive battle.

The turn came in the second half of 1863, and it was as much diplomatic as military.

Key developments
  • Antietam (September 1862): the bloodiest single day in American history. Stopping Lee in Maryland ended European movement toward mediation and gave Lincoln the victory he needed for the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
  • Vicksburg and Gettysburg (July 1863): Grant took Vicksburg on July 4, opening the Mississippi and splitting the Confederacy; Meade turned back Lee at Gettysburg, and Lee never invaded the North again.
  • Hard war (1864): Grant pressed Lee from the Wilderness to Petersburg; Sheridan burned out the Shenandoah Valley; Sherman took Atlanta and marched to Savannah, destroying railroads, crops, and mills.
  • The election of 1864: Lincoln beat George McClellan, whose party's platform called the war a failure, decisively after Atlanta fell.
  • Appomattox (April 1865): Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9 on terms that let his men go home; John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, and Andrew Johnson became president.
  • Cost: roughly 620,000 soldiers died, about two-thirds of them of disease.
Primary source

Source: Abraham Lincoln, address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation … can long endure. … that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Sourcing (HIPP): Lincoln spoke four months after the battle to a war-weary North that had just endured the draft riots. Purpose is the lever: in under three minutes he recasts an appalling cost as a test of whether self-government can survive, making continued war a duty owed to the dead. Notice the omissions (slavery, secession, the South), which let a speech about union hold Northerners together.

Exam tip: what a source leaves out can earn the sourcing point, but only if you explain how the silence serves the author's purpose.

Model analysis

Antietam mattered less for the ground it won than for the decisions it made possible. The battle was close to a draw, but stopping Lee removed the argument British ministers were weighing that autumn: that the Confederacy had shown it could win and deserved mediation. It also gave Lincoln the appearance of strength he wanted before issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which made intervention on the Confederate side politically impossible in Britain, where opinion opposed slavery. Military events shaped diplomacy, and diplomacy fixed the outcome.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way a specific military development between 1862 and 1865 affected the outcome of the Civil War.

Show a model response

Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September 1864 showed that the Union could take the Confederacy's interior, and it came as Northern voters decided whether to replace Lincoln with McClellan, whose party called the war a failure. It helped secure Lincoln's reelection, so the war was fought to surrender rather than ended by a negotiated peace.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific campaign and date and a political consequence.

Lesson 5.6 · Period 5 · CED topic 5.10

Reconstruction and its failure, 1865–1877

Four million people were free in 1865 and almost none of them owned land. That set the terms of Reconstruction: freedpeople wanted land, schools, legal marriage, reunited families, and the vote; white Southerners wanted a labor force.

Andrew Johnson readmitted states quickly and pardoned generously. When those states sent former Confederates to Congress and passed Black Codes binding freedpeople to year-long contracts, Republicans took control of the process.

Key developments
  • Freedmen's Bureau (1865): food, labor contracts, legalized marriages, and schools; little land, since Johnson returned confiscated acreage to former owners.
  • The Reconstruction Amendments: the Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) made citizenship national and bound states to due process and equal protection; the Fifteenth (1870) barred racial denial of the vote.
  • Congressional Reconstruction (1866–1868): the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto; the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867, requiring new constitutions with Black male suffrage; Johnson impeached and acquitted by one vote.
  • Officeholding and sharecropping: roughly two thousand Black men held office, including Senators Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce; but without land most freedpeople farmed for a share of the crop and fell into crop-lien debt.
  • Violence and retreat (1866–1877): Klan terror, then the Enforcement Acts; depression, narrowing Court rulings, and Northern fatigue ended the effort, and the disputed election of 1876 was settled by withdrawing federal support in 1877.
Primary source

Source: Constitution of the United States, Amendment XIV, Section 1, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868 (the privileges-or-immunities clause omitted).

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. … nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Sourcing (HIPP): The situation is in the grammar. Congress wrote this after Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and after Black Codes showed that ending slavery had not secured basic rights. Its purpose was to put that act beyond a future Congress or Court, and to bind the states directly: the commands run against "any State," not private citizens, a reading the Court later used to narrow the amendment.

Exam tip: with a legal text, source on the problem the drafters were trying to lock shut.

Model analysis

Reconstruction changed the legal status of African Americans permanently while leaving their economic position much as it was, and the gap between those facts explains its collapse. The change was real: slavery abolished, citizenship defined by birth, equal protection and the vote written into the Constitution. So was the continuity: the land stayed with the old planter class, so sharecropping reproduced dependence without ownership, and freedpeople had no economic base from which to defend their rights once federal protection went. The amendments outlived the retreat, and the civil rights movement was built on them.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE specific historical development that limited the effectiveness of Reconstruction in the period 1865–1877.

Show a model response

Because the federal government returned confiscated land to former Confederate owners instead of distributing it, most freedpeople worked white-owned land as sharecroppers and bought supplies on credit. That debt left them dependent on the same families who had enslaved them, so few could risk voting against a landlord's wishes once federal troops left.

Why it earns the point: it identifies a specific policy decision and explains how it limited Reconstruction in practice.

Unit 5 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 5 review: 1844–1877

Ten exam-style multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions on Manifest Destiny and the war with Mexico, the collapse of compromise, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and its retreat: the period's through-line is that every territorial gain forced the country to decide what slavery's future would be.

Multiple choice

  1. Source: John L. O'Sullivan, "Annexation," United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1845.

    … other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it … for the avowed object of thwarting our policy … limiting our greatness and checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

    Which of the following best describes the argument made in the excerpt?

    Slavery is exactly what the passage does not mention, and the silence is the strategy. O'Sullivan needed Democrats who were uneasy about adding a slave state to stop asking that question, so he recast a sectional bargain as a national and providential mission.

    Correct. The argument converts a contested policy choice into an obligation: the continent has been "allotted by Providence," population growth makes taking it natural, and anyone who objects is an intruder. That is why the phrase stuck: it supplied a vocabulary in which expansion needed no further justification.

    No method is endorsed or ruled out. Polk's administration used both, annexing Texas by joint resolution in 1845, settling Oregon by treaty at the 49th parallel in 1846, and taking the Southwest by war in 1846–1848.

    The excerpt calls foreign involvement "hostile interference" undertaken to thwart American policy. Choosing this option reverses the passage's stance toward Britain and France, which had both encouraged an independent Texas.

  2. The territory gained in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) most directly contributed to which of the following?

    California's gold-rush population petitioned to enter free in 1849 and was admitted free in the Compromise of 1850. Its free status is what broke the Senate's sectional balance and forced the compromise in the first place.

    Correct. David Wilmot's proviso to bar slavery from any land taken from Mexico passed the House repeatedly and died in the Senate, and the roll calls split North against South instead of Democrat against Whig. That is the measurable moment when section began to outrank party: the pattern that produced the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republicans in 1854.

    The treaty transferred territory, set the Rio Grande boundary, paid Mexico $15 million, and addressed the property and citizenship of Mexicans who stayed. Slavery in the cession was left for Congress to fight over, which is precisely the trouble.

    The Whigs won the very next election, running Zachary Taylor in 1848. The party broke apart after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, when it could no longer hold Northern and Southern wings together on the territorial question.

  3. Source: Fugitive Slave Act, September 18, 1850 (Sections 5 and 6).

    … and all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required … In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence …

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims about the Compromise of 1850?

    Correct. Commanding "all good citizens" to assist and barring the accused from testifying moved recapture out of Northern courtrooms and onto Northern streets. A merchant with no quarrel with slavery in Mississippi could be ordered into a posse on his own block, which is why states answered with personal liberty laws and crowds answered in Boston and Syracuse.

    The settlement lasted four years. Utah and New Mexico were organized on popular sovereignty rather than a fixed line, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 applied the same principle where the Missouri Compromise had barred slavery, reopening everything.

    The law is evidence of the opposite. It was the price Southern senators set for admitting California free, drafted by a Congress in which they held an effective veto; a Northern-dominated Congress would not have written it.

    Section 6 does the reverse: it bars the accused person's own testimony, and federal commissioners decided cases without juries while being paid ten dollars for a certificate of removal and five for a denial. Misreading a denial of rights as a grant of rights is the trap here.

  4. Which of the following best describes the Northern response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850?

    The movement ran the other way: Northern states strengthened personal liberty laws after 1850, guaranteeing hearings and forbidding state officials and jails from assisting recapture. Southerners cited those laws as proof the North would not keep its bargains.

    The law's design made that impossible, since enforcement happened where the accused was found, in Northern cities. Its national reach is exactly what turned indifferent Northerners into opponents.

    Correct. Massachusetts and other states passed personal liberty laws, crowds freed Jerry Henry in Syracuse in 1851 and fought over Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854, Underground Railroad networks including Harriet Tubman's carried people to Canada, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) sold some 300,000 copies in a year by making the law's human cost vivid.

    The act stayed on the books until Congress repealed it in 1864, during the Civil War. Confusing loud resistance with legislative success misses the point that the law's survival is what kept the grievance alive for a decade.

  5. Source: Abraham Lincoln, speech accepting the Republican nomination for the United States Senate, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858.

    A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved … but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

    Which of the following best describes Lincoln's argument in the excerpt?

    Lincoln says plainly that he does not expect the Union to be dissolved or the house to fall. He predicts the division will end, not the country: a distinction his opponents deliberately blurred by calling the speech a call for war.

    Correct. The claim is about direction, not timing: after Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott, Lincoln argued, the country was drifting toward making slavery lawful everywhere, so Republicans had to stop its extension or watch it become national. Framing it that way also told Illinois Republicans why they could not safely back Douglas.

    Republicans in 1858 opposed slavery's extension into the territories and accepted that the Constitution protected it in the states where it existed. Immediate abolition everywhere was Garrison's position, and Lincoln was regularly attacked for refusing it.

    Popular sovereignty was Douglas's position, and the speech is an attack on it. Lincoln's point is that a supposedly neutral procedure had produced fraud in Kansas and, after Dred Scott, could not lawfully exclude slavery at all.

  6. Which of the following was the most direct political consequence of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)?

    Taney's opinion voided the Missouri Compromise rather than restoring it, holding that Congress had no power to bar slavery from a territory. The line had already been repealed in practice by the Kansas-Nebraska Act three years earlier.

    The decision undercut popular sovereignty too, since a territorial legislature exercises powers delegated by Congress and Congress was said to lack the power to exclude slavery. Douglas's Freeport answer in 1858, that settlers could exclude slavery by refusing to pass a slave code, was an attempt to escape that problem, and it cost him the South.

    Secession followed Lincoln's election in November 1860, not the decision. Seven states left by February 1861, more than three years after the ruling; treating an important cause as an immediate cause is the error here.

    Correct. Republicans had organized on one plank, no slavery in the territories, and the Court ruled that plank unconstitutional. That pushed Republicans toward the conclusion that only capturing the presidency, and eventually the Court, could stop expansion, which made the election of 1860 the decisive test.

  7. Description of: a table comparing the resources of the Union and the Confederacy at the start of the war in 1861.

    The table gives the Union about 22 million people and the Confederacy about 9 million, of whom roughly 3.5 million were enslaved. It shows the Union with roughly two-thirds of the country's railroad mileage, about 22,000 miles to about 9,000, and with the great majority of its manufacturing capacity, shown as roughly nine-tenths of national output.

    Which of the following best explains how Confederate leaders expected to win a war despite the disparities shown in the table?

    Conquest was the Union's problem, not the Confederacy's. The two Confederate invasions of the North, into Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863, were raids meant to win recognition and break Northern will, and both were turned back at Antietam and Gettysburg.

    Correct. The Confederacy needed only to survive: hold interior lines, make the North pay for every mile, and count on British and French dependence on cotton to bring recognition. The strategy was plausible and it failed for reasons the table hints at: the blockade, the loss of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, and a Northern economy that could absorb the cost through 1864.

    The Confederacy relied on enslaved labor to grow food and build fortifications, but it refused to arm enslaved men until a desperate law passed in March 1865, weeks before surrender. The Union did the opposite, enlisting about 180,000 Black soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation.

    Confederate leaders did court the border states, and Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and later West Virginia all stayed with the Union, which is one reason Lincoln exempted them from the Emancipation Proclamation. Even had they gone, the population and manufacturing gap in the table would have narrowed rather than reversed.

  8. Source: Abraham Lincoln, address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863.

    Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. … that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims about the Union war effort?

    Correct. He spoke to a North that had absorbed Gettysburg's casualties and the New York draft riots, and in under three minutes he turned an appalling cost into an obligation owed the dead and to self-government itself. What the speech leaves out is part of the evidence: omitting slavery and the South let a divided North agree on why to keep fighting.

    The address never names slavery, secession, or the South. Lincoln invokes "all men are created equal," which points that way, but the explicit statement that slavery caused the war came in the Second Inaugural of March 1865.

    It was a dedication of a cemetery, and Lincoln was not the day's main speaker. Strategy in 1864 (Grant in Virginia, Sherman toward Atlanta) was set by commanders and announced in orders, not at ceremonies.

    Lincoln's consistent position was that secession was legally void and the rebellion was an insurrection within the United States, which is why the Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a war measure against states in rebellion rather than against a foreign country.

  9. Which of the following best explains why Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866?

    Slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865. The problem the Fourteenth addressed was what happened next: Black Codes in the readmitted states bound freedpeople to year-long labor contracts and restricted their movement, testimony, and property.

    Correct. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act over Johnson's veto and feared a later Congress could repeal it or a court strike it down, so it wrote birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection into the Constitution. The commands run against "any State," which later let the Court narrow the amendment by holding it did not reach private discrimination.

    That is the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870. The Fourteenth only threatened to reduce a state's representation in Congress if it denied the vote to adult male citizens, a penalty that was never actually applied.

    Congress proposed the amendment against Johnson, not with him. He had readmitted states quickly and pardoned generously, those states sent former Confederates to Congress, and Republicans responded by taking control of Reconstruction and requiring ratification as a condition of readmission.

  10. Description of: a wood engraving published in a national illustrated weekly in November 1867.

    A line of Black men waits at a polling place. The first, a workman in shirtsleeves carrying his tools, places a folded ballot in a box while a white election official watches. Behind him stand a man in a soldier's uniform and an older man in a worn but carefully brushed suit. Other voters wait in an orderly line that continues out of the frame.

    The engraving described most directly reflects which of the following developments?

    The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, three years after this image. Congressional Reconstruction came first and by a different route: federal statute imposed on the former Confederate states as a condition of readmission, not a constitutional guarantee applying everywhere.

    Land is the great absence of Reconstruction. The Bureau ran schools, negotiated labor contracts, and legalized marriages, but Johnson returned most confiscated land to former owners, which left freedpeople working as sharecroppers on land they did not own.

    Correct. The Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into military districts and required new state constitutions written by conventions elected with Black male participation. Registration and voting followed immediately, and roughly two thousand Black men held office during Reconstruction, including Senators Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi.

    Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses came a generation later, beginning with Mississippi's constitution of 1890. The image shows the moment those devices were later designed to undo, so reading it as disfranchisement inverts the chronology.

Short answer

  1. Source: Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

    These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war …

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE historical perspective expressed in the excerpt about the cause of the Civil War.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1846 to 1861 that supports the perspective expressed in the excerpt.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1863 to 1877 that resulted from the war Lincoln describes.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: slavery was the cause of the war; the South seceded to protect and extend slavery as an economic and political interest; both sides understood slavery to be at the root of the conflict. Do not accept: "states' rights" or tariffs offered as Lincoln's view, since the excerpt names the slave interest; a summary of the excerpt's tone with no claim about causation.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of how it supports the claim: the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 and the sectional roll calls that followed; the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and Bleeding Kansas; Dred Scott (1857); the founding of the Republican Party on the single plank of no slavery in the territories; the secession declarations of 1860–1861 naming slavery. Do not accept: a development named without connecting it to slavery as a cause; anything outside 1846–1861.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection; the Fifteenth (1870) barring racial denial of the vote; the Freedmen's Bureau; Black officeholding under Congressional Reconstruction; the spread of sharecropping in the absence of land redistribution; Klan violence and the Enforcement Acts; the end of federal support in 1877. Do not accept: developments after 1877, such as Plessy or Mississippi's 1890 constitution.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Lincoln says that slavery was the cause of the war. He calls enslaved people a "peculiar and powerful interest" and argues that the Confederacy went to war to strengthen and extend that interest, so he is rejecting the idea that the war was about anything else.

    b The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 supports his claim. Stephen Douglas organized the territories on popular sovereignty, which repealed the Missouri Compromise line, and proslavery and free-state settlers then fought over Kansas with rival governments, the sack of Lawrence, and John Brown's killings at Pottawatomie Creek. People did not travel to Kansas and shoot each other over tariffs; they did it because whether slavery expanded was the question that mattered, which is what Lincoln means by "all knew."

    c One development that resulted was the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868. After Southern states passed Black Codes that bound freedpeople to year-long contracts, Congress wrote birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection into the Constitution and made ratification a condition of readmission. Winning the war destroyed slavery, but it did not by itself settle what freedom meant, and the amendment was the attempt to fix that answer beyond the reach of a future Congress.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE way the Reconstruction amendments changed the legal status of African Americans.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way African Americans acted to shape Reconstruction in the period 1865 to 1877.
    3. Briefly explain ONE reason federal support for Reconstruction had ended by 1877.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth made citizenship national and by birth and required states to provide due process and equal protection; the Fifteenth barred denial of the vote on account of race. Do not accept: a general statement that African Americans "became free" with no amendment named; claims that the amendments guaranteed land, education, or women's suffrage.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of what the action accomplished: registering and voting under the Military Reconstruction Acts; serving in state conventions, legislatures, and Congress, including Revels and Bruce; founding independent churches and schools; reuniting families and legalizing marriages through the Freedmen's Bureau; negotiating labor terms and refusing gang labor, which pushed planters toward sharecropping. Do not accept: passive phrasing in which freedpeople only receive rights; actions outside 1865–1877.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: organized white violence including the Klan, which raised the cost of federal enforcement; the depression that began in 1873, which pushed Northern attention to the economy; Supreme Court decisions narrowing the Fourteenth Amendment, such as the Slaughterhouse cases and United States v. Cruikshank; Northern political fatigue and the Democratic recapture of the House in 1874; the disputed election of 1876 resolved by withdrawing federal support in 1877. Do not accept: "people stopped caring" with no development named.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, made anyone born in the United States a citizen of the nation and of the state where they lived, and it required every state to give all persons due process and the equal protection of the laws. That overturned Dred Scott, which had held that Black Americans could not be citizens at all.

    b African Americans used the vote the Military Reconstruction Acts gave them. Black men registered in large numbers in 1867, elected delegates to the state constitutional conventions, and then held office: roughly two thousand men served, including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the United States Senate. Those conventions wrote the South's first public school systems and dropped property qualifications for voting, so Black participation changed what Southern state governments actually did.

    c Federal support ended partly because the North's attention moved elsewhere after the Panic of 1873. The depression put unemployment and the currency at the center of politics, Democrats took the House in 1874, and protecting Black voters in the South came to look expensive and endless next to Klan violence that federal troops had to suppress again and again. When the 1876 election was disputed, Republicans settled it by taking the presidency and withdrawing the federal support that had kept Reconstruction governments in place.

Lesson 6.1 · Period 6 · CED topics 6.2–6.3

Westward expansion and its effects on Native Americans, 1865–1898

The West was not settled by lone pioneers. Federal policy did the heavy work: land grants built the transcontinental railroad, joined in Utah in May 1869; the Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres to anyone who farmed it five years; the Army garrisoned the routes.

For the Plains nations the same decades closed every option. Hide hunters shot out the bison, and treaties were rewritten wherever gold or track crossed guaranteed ground.

Key developments
  • Mining and cattle frontiers: the Black Hills gold rush of 1874 put miners on land the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 guaranteed the Lakota.
  • The Plains Wars: Sand Creek (1864), Little Bighorn (June 1876), the Nez Perce surrender (1877), Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890).
  • Dawes Severalty Act (1887): split reservations into 160-acre allotments and sold the "surplus"; Native holdings fell from roughly 138 million acres to 48 million by 1934.
  • Assimilation: boarding schools from Carlisle (1879) on targeted children's language and family ties; the Ghost Dance became the Army's pretext at Wounded Knee.
  • Turner's frontier thesis (1893): the 1890 census reported no frontier line left, and Turner argued the frontier had made American democracy.
Primary source

Source: Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, surrender statement, Montana Territory, October 5, 1877, as recorded by Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood.

I am tired of fighting. … It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. … Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

Sourcing (HIPP): The situation is surrender after an 1,100-mile flight that stopped forty miles short of Canada. Point of view is doubled: the words are Joseph's, but they reached print through an interpreter and a literary Army officer. That makes the text good evidence for how eastern readers were taught to feel about removal, weaker evidence for what Joseph said.

Exam tip: with a translated source, sourcing on transmission (who wrote it down, and for whom) beats naming a bias.

Model analysis

Between 1865 and 1898 the federal government shifted from fighting Native nations to dissolving them, and the second policy took more land. A reservation at least recognized a nation holding land in common; the Dawes Act dropped that premise, treating the tribe as the obstacle and the individual farmer as the goal. Joseph's surrender ends armed resistance in the Northwest, but the larger dispossession came after it, by statute and school rather than cavalry.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way federal government policy contributed to the transformation of the West in the period 1865–1898.

Show a model response

The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservations into individual allotments and sold the leftover land to settlers. Replacing tribal title with individual title that could be taxed or sold cost Native nations most of their remaining land.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific policy and explains the mechanism behind the change.

Lesson 6.2 · Period 6 · CED topic 6.4

The "New South": industry, sharecropping, and Jim Crow

Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, told a New York audience in 1886 that the South had buried the war and was building mills and furnaces with northern capital. Part of that was real: Piedmont textile mills, Birmingham steel, new rail mileage.

Most of the region was not. Cotton still ruled, and most who grew it, Black and white, worked land they did not own on credit they could not clear, while Reconstruction's political gains were taken back by law.

Key developments
  • Grady's New South (1886): mills and furnaces built with northern capital, in a region that stayed the poorest in the country.
  • Sharecropping and the crop lien: merchants advanced seed and food against the next crop at steep interest, so debt renewed itself yearly.
  • Disenfranchisement: Mississippi's 1890 constitution imposed a poll tax and literacy test; Louisiana added a grandfather clause in 1898.
  • Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): states separated rail cars, schools, and public space; the Court upheld "separate but equal" 7–1.
  • Protest and strategy: Ida B. Wells published on lynching in 1892 and lost her Memphis press for it; Washington's Atlanta address (1895) urged trades and patience, and Du Bois soon answered that political rights could not wait.
Primary source

Source: Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. … But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

Sourcing (HIPP): Harlan, a Kentuckian who had held enslaved people before the war, dissented alone from a Court narrowing the Reconstruction amendments. A dissent speaks to a later court, which is why he states a flat rule rather than weighing interests. His opening sentence, conceding white dominance in fact while denying it in law, marks the limit of even the strongest objection on that bench.

Exam tip: a dissent proves the losing argument was available and rejected.

Model analysis

After 1877 Reconstruction's legal gains were not repealed; they were hollowed out. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments stayed in the Constitution while Mississippi used poll taxes and literacy tests that never mention race to cut Black registration to a fraction, and Plessy licensed segregation by calling it equal. The economy worked the same way: new mills, old cotton, the same families held in place by debt; change in form, continuity in power.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way Southern state governments restricted the political rights of African Americans in the period 1877–1900.

Show a model response

Mississippi's 1890 constitution required a poll tax and a literacy test judged by white registrars, who could fail Black applicants at will. Because the rules never mentioned race, they survived challenge under the Fifteenth Amendment while cutting Black registration to a fraction of eligible voters.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific device and explains why it worked legally.

Lesson 6.3 · Period 6 · CED topics 6.5–6.6

Technological innovation and the rise of industrial capitalism

Cheap steel changed everything downstream. The Bessemer process made steel at a fraction of the old cost, and cheap steel meant rails, bridges, and frames tall enough to build cities upward. Electricity, the telephone, and refrigerated cars did the rest: a national market appeared where regional ones had been.

That created a new problem: how to run a firm too large for one owner's eye, and how to justify the fortunes it threw off.

Key developments
  • Steel and power: Bessemer steel from the 1870s; Edison's Pearl Street station lit lower Manhattan in 1882, and Westinghouse's alternating current carried power over distance.
  • Communication and distribution: Bell's telephone (1876), the telegraph, and refrigerated rail cars tied local markets into one national market.
  • Vertical integration: Carnegie bought ore ranges, coke works, ships, and rails so no supplier could take a cut; Carnegie Steel became U.S. Steel in 1901.
  • Horizontal integration: Rockefeller's Standard Oil used railroad rebates to undersell rivals and then absorb them, organizing as a trust in 1882.
  • Finance and ideology: J. P. Morgan reorganized railroads from Wall Street, while Social Darwinism and Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth called the results natural.
Primary source

Source: Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, 1889.

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. … This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: … to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer.

Sourcing (HIPP): Carnegie published in a magazine read by the propertied, in a decade when strikes and farm revolt were turning great fortunes into a political problem. Purpose is the lever: this is a defense as much as a program, conceding that inequality needs justifying and answering with philanthropy rather than wages or taxes. Three years later his own Homestead works broke a union.

Exam tip: naming what an author argues against shows you read purpose, not just content.

Model analysis

These industrialists did not merely outcompete rivals; they redesigned the firm. Carnegie's vertical integration cut costs by owning every stage from ore to rail, and Rockefeller's horizontal integration removed price competition by buying rivals after rebates had crippled them. Both then needed a public argument, and the Gospel of Wealth supplied one: fortunes prove fitness, and the rich hold them in trust. The claim was moral, but its effect was political: it made regulation look like interference with nature.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way business leaders in the late nineteenth century justified the concentration of wealth.

Show a model response

Andrew Carnegie argued in "Wealth" (1889) that competition naturally produced great fortunes and that the rich should administer their surplus as trustees for society, funding libraries and schools. That made inequality look useful rather than unjust, provided the wealthy gave the money away in their own lifetimes.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific argument and explains how it justified the outcome.

Lesson 6.4 · Period 6 · CED topic 6.7

Labor in the Gilded Age, 1877–1894

Industrial work paid in cash and took everything else. Sixty-hour weeks were ordinary, injury was common and uncompensated, and children worked in mills and coal breakers. Real wages rose across the period but fell hard in every depression, and the employer set them alone.

Workers organized anyway. The question that defined the era was whether they had any standing in law when they did.

Key developments
  • Great Railroad Strike (1877): a wage cut on the B&O set off a strike that spread across the rail network; President Hayes sent federal troops, setting a precedent.
  • Knights of Labor: under Terence Powderly they admitted unskilled workers, women, and Black members, and peaked near 700,000 in 1886.
  • Haymarket (1886): a bomb at a Chicago rally killed police; four anarchists were hanged, the public blamed organized labor, and the Knights collapsed.
  • American Federation of Labor (1886): Samuel Gompers organized skilled craftsmen only and bargained over wages and hours instead of remaking the system.
  • Homestead (1892) and Pullman (1894): Frick broke the steelworkers with Pinkertons and militia; a federal injunction ended the Pullman boycott, and In re Debs (1895) upheld it.
Primary source

Description of: the preamble to the constitution of the Knights of Labor (1878). Summarized, not quoted.

The preamble warns that wealth concentrated in corporations will, unchecked, degrade the working population, and calls for organization to secure workers a fair share of what they produce. The demands follow: an eight-hour day, an end to child and convict labor, equal pay for equal work for women, arbitration instead of strikes, and producer cooperatives to replace the wage system.

Sourcing (HIPP): This is a program, not a report, written while the Knights were opening membership to any "producer": a category that took in shopkeepers and shut out bankers. Purpose shapes what it says: strikes appear only as a last resort because the order wanted respectability and mass membership at once. Strong evidence for what organized labor claimed to want, weak evidence for any particular shop floor.

Exam tip: a platform is evidence of aims. Pair it with an event (Haymarket, Homestead) to show what became of them.

Model analysis

Labor's largest obstacle was not public indifference but the law. Between 1877 and 1894 federal power entered strikes on the employer's side every time: troops in 1877, militia at Homestead, and at Pullman an injunction drawn from the Sherman Antitrust Act, a statute written against trusts, which the Supreme Court upheld in In re Debs. The Knights' cooperative vision lost to Gompers's narrow craft unionism partly because limited goals could survive that environment and sweeping ones could not.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the federal government responded to labor conflict in the period 1877–1900.

Show a model response

During the Pullman strike of 1894 the attorney general obtained a federal injunction against the American Railway Union, arguing that the boycott obstructed the mails, and President Cleveland sent troops to enforce it. The Supreme Court upheld the injunction in In re Debs (1895), handing employers a dependable weapon against strikes.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific federal action and explains its effect on labor.

Lesson 6.5 · Period 6 · CED topics 6.8–6.9

Immigration, migration, and the industrial city

Industry needed hands faster than American farms could release them, so the cities took them from everywhere. Roughly twelve million immigrants arrived between 1870 and 1900, and after 1880 more came from Italy, Poland, Greece, and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires than from Britain, Ireland, and Germany.

They landed in cities with no plan for them, and institutions grew up to fill the gap: some charitable, some predatory, most of both.

Key developments
  • The "new immigrants": largely Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox, processed at Ellis Island after 1892 and clustering in neighborhoods that supplied jobs and worship.
  • Tenements: dense, airless walk-ups where a family might share one room; disease and fire were routine and housing law lagged decades behind.
  • Internal migration: rural Americans moved to cities for wages, and about twenty thousand Black Southerners, the Exodusters, left for Kansas in 1879.
  • Machine politics: Tammany Hall traded coal, jobs, and a word with a judge for votes; Boss Tweed's ring looted New York before his conviction in 1873.
  • Reform and the built city: Hull House opened in Chicago in 1889 under Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr; steel frames, elevators, and electric streetcars remade urban space.
Primary source

Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890.

Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

Sourcing (HIPP): Riis was a Danish immigrant turned police reporter who had slept in lodging houses himself, writing for the comfortable readers he needed to alarm. Purpose explains the method: he paired prose with flash photographs of tenement interiors so the middle class could not plead ignorance. It also explains his ethnic generalizations, which make the book better evidence of how reform was argued than of how immigrants saw themselves.

Exam tip: a reformer's audience is usually the group with power to act. Name it.

Model analysis

Machines and settlement houses answered the same failure of city government and drew opposite conclusions from it. Tammany gave an immigrant family immediate help and asked for loyalty at the polls: corrupt, and effective. Hull House offered classes, childcare, and investigation, then turned its findings into pressure for housing and factory law. Riis belongs to the second tradition: he treats poverty as a condition the city built, and therefore one the city can rebuild.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way immigrants responded to conditions in American cities in the period 1865–1898.

Show a model response

Immigrants built ethnic neighborhoods with their own newspapers, churches and synagogues, and mutual aid societies that paid benefits when a worker was injured or died. These institutions supplied the insurance and job connections that neither employers nor city government offered, which made survival in a strange city possible.

Why it earns the point: it identifies a specific response and explains what it accomplished.

Lesson 6.6 · Period 6 · CED topics 6.10–6.12

Responses to immigration and the Gilded Age's rival remedies

Not everyone read the crowded city as a problem of housing; many read it as a problem of people. Nativism ran through the period: Protestant suspicion of Catholic and Jewish newcomers, union fear of wage competition, and on the Pacific coast a campaign against Chinese labor that produced the first federal law excluding a nationality.

Others blamed the system instead of the newcomers, and the 1880s and 1890s produced a crowd of competing remedies.

Key developments
  • Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): barred Chinese laborers for ten years and denied Chinese immigrants naturalization; renewed in 1892, made permanent in 1902.
  • Organized nativism: the American Protective Association (1887) gathered anti-Catholic feeling, and unions pressed restriction on wage grounds.
  • The Social Gospel: ministers such as Washington Gladden argued that Christian duty meant attacking the causes of poverty, not only relieving it.
  • Rival economic remedies: Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) proposed a single tax on land values; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) imagined a cooperative commonwealth.
  • The Populist critique: Farmers' Alliances built cooperatives, then a party; the Omaha Platform (1892) demanded free silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, and direct election of senators.
Primary source

Source: An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese (the Chinese Exclusion Act), May 6, 1882.

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore, Be it enacted … That … until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be … suspended.

Sourcing (HIPP): The whereas clause is doing political work: Congress offers a public-order justification rather than a racial one, partly because the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 had guaranteed free migration and had to be renegotiated first. The situation is years of depression and anti-Chinese agitation in California; the audience is the customs officers and courts who would enforce it.

Exam tip: with a statute, source on the preamble, the reason a legislature gives is itself evidence.

Model analysis

The same economic distress produced opposite politics, and the difference lay in who got blamed. Western workers facing wage cuts organized against Chinese labor and had a federal statute within five years. Farmers facing falling prices and high freight rates organized against banks and railroads and produced the Omaha Platform. Both spoke for producers against a system they thought rigged; only one identified other workers as the rig, and Populism carried that split inside itself, recruiting Black farmers while many of its leaders later turned to exclusion.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way Americans responded to immigration in the period 1865–1898.

Show a model response

Anti-Chinese agitation on the Pacific coast, led by white workers who blamed Chinese laborers for low wages, pushed Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law barred Chinese laborers for ten years and denied Chinese immigrants naturalization, making it the first federal law to exclude a group by nationality.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific response and explains what it did.

Lesson 6.7 · Period 6 · CED topic 6.13

Politics in the Gilded Age and the realignment of 1896

Gilded Age elections were close and loud. Turnout ran near eighty percent, loyalty followed region, religion, and the memory of the war, and no president between 1877 and 1897 won a decisive mandate.

What the parties actually fought over was narrow (patronage, the tariff, the currency) until the depression that began in 1893 forced a larger question into the open: whose interests was the government for?

Key developments
  • Patronage and reform: Garfield's assassination by a disappointed office seeker in 1881 produced the Pendleton Act (1883), which began filling federal jobs by examination.
  • Tariff and currency: Republicans defended high tariffs; debtors wanted silver coinage to raise prices and creditors wanted gold. Cleveland pushed repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, splitting his own party.
  • Early federal regulation: the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) created the first federal regulatory commission and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) banned combinations in restraint of trade. Courts read both narrowly.
  • Populist breakthrough: James Weaver took twenty-two electoral votes in 1892; the Panic of 1893 and Coxey's march on Washington in 1894 deepened the crisis.
  • Election of 1896: Bryan, nominated by Democrats and Populists, ran on free silver; McKinley's heavily funded campaign won 271 electoral votes to 176.
Primary source

Source: William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896.

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. … You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Sourcing (HIPP): Bryan was thirty-six and spoke last in the convention's debate over the silver plank; the speech won him the nomination that night. The situation is three years of depression and farm foreclosure under a Democratic president who had repealed silver purchases. Purpose explains the imagery: he needed delegates, so the case is moral rather than monetary.

Exam tip: for a convention speech the audience is delegates, not voters, and that changes what counts as persuasive.

Model analysis

The election of 1896 broke the Gilded Age stalemate by changing what elections were about. For twenty years the parties had divided over patronage, tariffs, and wartime loyalties while both assumed Washington should leave the economy alone. Bryan turned money policy into a referendum on whose interests government served; McKinley answered with industrial jobs, sound money, and the largest campaign fund yet assembled. Populism died as a party and survived as an agenda: the income tax, direct election of senators, and real railroad regulation all arrived within twenty-five years.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the federal government responded to the growth of large corporations in the period 1877–1900.

Show a model response

Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, creating a commission to require reasonable railroad rates and to ban rebates and pooling. It was the first federal regulatory agency, but it had to sue to enforce its rulings, and the Supreme Court read its powers so narrowly that railroads went on setting rates much as before.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific law and explains both its purpose and its limit.

Unit 6 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 6 review: 1865–1898

Ten exam-style multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions on the West and Native dispossession, the New South and Jim Crow, industrial capitalism and labor, the immigrant city, and the Gilded Age politics that ended in the realignment of 1896.

Multiple choice

  1. Description of: a photograph taken in a Kansas rail town in the early 1870s.

    A squared stack of bison hides several times the height of a man fills most of the frame, piled beside a railroad siding. Three men in work clothes stand at the base of the stack, and a loaded wagon waits behind them. Similar piles are visible along the track in the background.

    The activity shown most directly contributed to which of the following?

    No such policy existed. Army officers and Indian Office officials generally welcomed the slaughter, saying openly that destroying the herds would do what campaigns had not: force the Plains nations to accept reservation life.

    Correct. Plains nations built food, clothing, shelter, and trade around the bison, and commercial hide hunting supplied by the railroads reduced the herds to remnants within about fifteen years. Once the animals were gone, independence was gone with them, and nations that had negotiated from strength in the 1860s were dependent on rations by the 1880s.

    The Fort Laramie Treaty came in 1868, before this scene, and the government broke it: the Black Hills gold rush of 1874 put miners on guaranteed land, which led to Little Bighorn in 1876 and then to the seizure of the hills.

    The causation runs the other way. Clearing the bison opened the southern plains to cattle, and the drives to Abilene and Dodge City grew in these years; they ended later, when barbed wire, railroads reaching Texas, and the hard winters of the mid-1880s made them unnecessary.

  2. Which of the following best describes the effect of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887?

    The act transferred land away from Native nations rather than back to them. Native holdings fell from roughly 138 million acres to about 48 million by 1934, most of the loss coming through allotment and the sale of "surplus" land.

    Correct. Allotment assigned 160 acres to a head of household and opened everything left over to settlers. Replacing collective tribal title with individual title that could be taxed, leased, or sold dissolved the legal basis of the nation itself, which is why the CED treats Dawes as assimilation policy, not land policy.

    That describes the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended allotment and restored a measure of tribal government. Dawes assumed the opposite: that the tribe was the obstacle and the individual farmer the goal.

    Boarding schools expanded in these years. Carlisle opened in 1879 and the model spread, with schools targeting children's languages, clothing, and family ties as part of the same assimilation program the Dawes Act served.

  3. Source: Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

    The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. … But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

    A historian would most likely use the excerpt to support which of the following claims about the 1890s?

    The vote was 7–1, and this excerpt is the dissent: the single justice who refused. Treating a controversial ruling as unanimous also erases the evidence that contemporaries saw the problem, which is what makes a dissent useful to a historian.

    The trend ran the other way. From the Slaughterhouse cases through United States v. Cruikshank and the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Court narrowed the amendment, largely by holding that it reached state action and not private discrimination.

    Correct. Harlan states a flat rule rather than balancing interests, because a dissent is addressed to a later court. That is the value of the document: it shows that "separate but equal" was not the only reading available in 1896 but a choice the majority made, so the outcome cannot be excused as the inevitable thinking of the age.

    No federal civil rights statute passed between 1875 and 1957. Congress in the 1890s went the other direction, abandoning a federal elections bill in 1890 and repealing major enforcement provisions in 1894.

  4. Which of the following best explains how Southern states disfranchised Black voters after 1890 without violating the text of the Fifteenth Amendment?

    Correct. Mississippi's constitution of 1890 required a poll tax and a literacy or "understanding" test judged by local white officials, and Louisiana added a grandfather clause in 1898 exempting men whose grandfathers had voted before 1867. Because the rules were racially neutral on their face, they survived challenge while cutting Black registration to a small fraction of those eligible.

    The Fifteenth Amendment has never been amended. Its language is the reason disfranchisement had to be indirect: the whole design problem these state constitutions solved was how to exclude without saying so.

    Federal troops had been the force protecting Black voting, and their withdrawal in 1877 is what made disfranchisement possible. After 1877 the federal government was absent from Southern elections, not enlisted against Black voters.

    Congress did repeal major enforcement provisions in 1894, which mattered, but the Enforcement Acts were tools for punishing interference: the right itself came from the Fifteenth Amendment and survived the repeal. Disfranchisement worked through state constitutions and registrars, not through the absence of a federal statute.

  5. Source: Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, 1889.

    The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. … This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: … to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds.

    Which of the following best describes the argument Carnegie makes in the excerpt?

    Taxation is precisely the alternative Carnegie is arguing against. His answer to inequality keeps the decision in the hands of the person who made the fortune, which is why he wrote for a magazine read by the propertied in a decade of strikes and farm revolt.

    Wages are not part of the program either. Three years after this essay his partner Henry Clay Frick broke the union at the Homestead works with Pinkertons and state militia, after a wage dispute: a gap between philanthropy and labor policy the exam expects you to notice.

    Correct. Carnegie concedes that inequality has become a political problem, the "ties of brotherhood" need repair, and answers with stewardship: the rich hold surplus in trust and should give it away, as he did through libraries and schools. The claim is moral, but its political effect is to make regulation look unnecessary.

    Carnegie built one of the largest combinations in the country through vertical integration, buying ore ranges, coke works, ships, and rails. Social Darwinist arguments of this kind treated concentration as the natural result of fitness, not as something to be undone.

  6. Federal government action during the Pullman strike of 1894 most directly contributed to which of the following?

    Federal protection for collective bargaining came four decades later, with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. In the 1890s the law treated a strike that interfered with commerce or the mails as a restraint to be enjoined.

    The Knights had already collapsed. Their membership peaked near 700,000 in 1886, and public reaction to the Haymarket bombing that year destroyed them; by 1894 the American Railway Union and Gompers's craft-based AFL were the significant organizations.

    Correct. The attorney general obtained an injunction against the American Railway Union on the ground that the boycott obstructed the mails, Cleveland sent troops to enforce it, and the Supreme Court upheld the injunction in In re Debs (1895). Employers could now stop a strike with a court order instead of a fight, and the Sherman Antitrust Act, written against trusts, became a tool against unions.

    The Adamson Act of 1916 established the eight-hour day for railroad workers, and it came from Wilson's administration under the threat of a national strike. Nothing in 1894 improved hours; the strike ended in defeat and Eugene Debs went to jail.

  7. Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890.

    Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath …

    Which of the following best describes Riis's purpose in the passage?

    The passage assigns responsibility upward, to the half "on top" that did not care. Riis's book does contain ethnic generalizations that a careful reader should flag, but the argument of this passage is about indifference among the comfortable.

    Correct. Riis was a police reporter writing for the middle-class readers who could pressure legislators, and he paired prose with flash photographs of tenement interiors so that ignorance was no longer available as an excuse. Naming that audience is what turns a description of poverty into a reform argument.

    Riis belongs to the reform tradition that competed with the machines. Tammany Hall traded coal, jobs, and favors for votes and was effective at it, but Riis's remedy was housing law and public pressure, the same path Hull House took after 1889.

    Restriction was the nativist answer, pressed by groups such as the American Protective Association and by unions worried about wages. Riis treats poverty as a condition the city built and can therefore rebuild, which points to codes and inspections rather than to the docks.

  8. Source: Preamble to the platform of the People's Party, Omaha, Nebraska, July 4, 1892.

    We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. … The people are demoralized. … The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.

    The excerpt most directly reflects which of the following?

    Social Gospel ministers such as Washington Gladden did attack the causes of poverty, but they worked through churches and moral appeal. This is a party platform, and the document it introduces demands state action: free silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, and direct election of senators.

    The passage blames a system that transfers "the fruits of the toil of millions," not newcomers. Populism did carry that tension (some of its leaders later turned to exclusion, and the Alliances courted Black farmers while segregating them), but the target here is concentrated wealth.

    Correct. The producer argument is the whole of Populism: those who grow and make things create value, and finance, railroads, and monopoly take it. Falling crop prices, freight rates set by a single line, and crop-lien debt gave Alliance farmers concrete reasons to say so by 1892, when James Weaver took twenty-two electoral votes.

    Carnegie's essay defends great fortunes as proof of fitness and asks only that they be given away well. The Omaha preamble calls the same fortunes stolen, which makes the two documents a useful pair when a question asks you to compare responses to industrial capitalism.

  9. Source: William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896.

    Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. … you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

    Which of the following best describes Bryan's argument in the excerpt?

    Bryan says the reverse, and says it as a challenge: cities depend on farms, not farms on cities. The image is chosen to answer eastern delegates who treated the currency question as a matter for bankers.

    Correct. Coining silver would expand the money supply and raise prices, which helps debtors repaying fixed loans with cheaper dollars: the position of farmers facing falling crop prices and mortgage payments. Bryan's audience was convention delegates rather than voters, so the case is made in moral images instead of monetary arithmetic, and it won him the nomination that night.

    The tariff had been the parties' standing quarrel for twenty years, but the depression that began in 1893 pushed money to the center. Cleveland's repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act split the Democrats and set up this convention fight.

    Government ownership of the railroads was in the Populists' Omaha Platform of 1892. The Populists fused behind Bryan in 1896, and one cost of fusion was that their broader program shrank to the single issue of silver.

  10. Which of the following best describes the effect of the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) before 1900?

    Neither statute was invalidated. The Court limited them instead, most importantly in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895), which held that a sugar refining monopoly was manufacturing rather than interstate commerce and so lay outside the Sherman Act.

    Correct. The ICC could hear complaints but had to go to court to enforce its rulings, and it lost almost every case it brought in the 1890s; the Sherman Act's broad language about "restraint of trade" proved more usable against a strike than against a trust, as In re Debs (1895) confirmed. The laws mattered mainly as precedents that Progressives later gave teeth.

    Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, and serious railroad regulation arrived with the Hepburn Act of 1906: both in the Progressive Era. Reading a law's later effect back into the decade it passed is the common error here.

    Rate-setting authority is exactly what the 1887 act withheld and the Hepburn Act of 1906 supplied. The ICC's original power was to require that rates be "reasonable and just" and to sue when it thought they were not.

Short answer

  1. Description of: a political cartoon published in a New York humor weekly in January 1889.

    Enormous figures in formal dress, each labeled with an industry such as steel, coal, oil, sugar, or copper, crowd through a doorway at the back of the United States Senate chamber and stand over the seated senators, who look tiny beside them. A sign above one gallery door reads that the people's entrance is closed.

    Using the image, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE perspective about politics in the late nineteenth century expressed in the image.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1865 to 1892 that contributed to the perspective expressed in the image.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific government action in the period 1887 to 1900 that responded to the concerns expressed in the image.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: large corporations and trusts, not voters, control the Senate; ordinary people are shut out of a government that serves business interests; monopoly power has corrupted representative government. Do not accept: a description of what the cartoon shows with no interpretation ("there are big men in a room"); a claim about a specific senator, since the figures are industries.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of how it produced the perspective: the rise of trusts and holding companies such as Standard Oil after 1882; vertical integration by Carnegie and the concentration of finance under J. P. Morgan; the selection of senators by state legislatures, which made seats purchasable through party machines; railroad rebates and pooling; the use of troops and injunctions on the employer's side in strikes. Do not accept: naming an industrialist with no link to political influence; developments after 1892.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation of what the action did and how far it went: the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and its commission; the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890); federal antitrust prosecutions brought under it in the 1890s. Credit answers that note the limits: narrow court readings, E. C. Knight (1895), the ICC's need to sue. Do not accept: the Pendleton Act (1883), which is before the window; the Seventeenth Amendment, the Clayton Act, or the Hepburn Act, all after 1900.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The cartoon argues that the trusts, not the voters, run the Senate. The monopolies are drawn as giants looming over senators who look small and powerless, and the people's entrance is closed, so the perspective is that industrial wealth had captured the federal government and shut ordinary citizens out.

    b One development behind this view was the growth of the trust. Rockefeller organized Standard Oil as a trust in 1882 after using railroad rebates to undersell rivals and then absorb them, and other industries copied the form. Firms that size could fund campaigns and lobby the state legislatures that chose United States senators, so it became easy to believe, with reason, that a handful of companies could decide what Congress did.

    c Congress responded with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which banned combinations in restraint of trade. In practice it did little to the trusts for over a decade, because in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895) the Supreme Court held that a sugar refining monopoly was manufacturing rather than interstate commerce; federal prosecutors had more success using the act against striking unions. The law answered the concern in the cartoon on paper while leaving the power it depicted largely in place.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE way industrialization changed the work of wage earners in the period 1865 to 1900.
    2. Briefly explain ONE way workers organized in response to those changes.
    3. Briefly explain ONE reason organized labor achieved limited success before 1900.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: machinery and the division of labor replaced skilled craft work with repetitive tasks; sixty-hour weeks and uncompensated injury became ordinary; employers set wages unilaterally and cut them in every depression; women and children worked in mills and coal breakers; work was paced by machinery and the clock rather than by the worker. Do not accept: "factories grew" with no change in the experience of work; conditions described only for a later period.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of the strategy: the Knights of Labor under Powderly admitting unskilled workers, women, and Black members and seeking cooperatives and the eight-hour day; the AFL under Gompers organizing skilled craftsmen to bargain over wages and hours; specific strikes (the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894) described as organized action. Do not accept: naming an organization with no account of what it tried to do.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: federal and state force used on the employer's side, including troops in 1877 and the Pullman injunction upheld in In re Debs; employer weapons such as lockouts, blacklists, Pinkertons, and yellow-dog contracts; the collapse of the Knights after Haymarket in 1886 and public identification of labor with radicalism; divisions of skill, race, ethnicity, and sex among workers; a steady supply of immigrant and migrant labor that made replacement easy. Do not accept: "workers were poor" with no mechanism.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Industrialization broke skilled work into simple repeated tasks set by machinery. A craftsman who had made a whole product became a hand tending one step of it, which meant the employer, not the worker, controlled the pace and could replace almost anyone quickly. Sixty-hour weeks were normal, injuries went uncompensated, and wages were cut hard in every depression.

    b Workers responded by organizing across those divisions. The Knights of Labor under Terence Powderly admitted unskilled workers, women, and Black members as fellow "producers," demanded an eight-hour day and an end to child labor, and reached roughly 700,000 members by 1886. After the Knights collapsed, Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor took the opposite approach, organizing only skilled craftsmen and bargaining narrowly over wages and hours because those goals could actually be won.

    c Labor's biggest obstacle was that the government entered strikes on the employer's side. President Hayes sent federal troops against the railroad strikers in 1877, state militia backed Frick at Homestead in 1892, and in 1894 the attorney general obtained an injunction against the Pullman boycott that the Supreme Court upheld in In re Debs. Once a court order could end a strike and jail its leaders, unions with sweeping goals could not survive, and only the AFL's limited program fit the environment.

Lesson 7.1 · Period 7 · CED topics 7.2–7.3

Imperialism and the Spanish-American War, 1890–1904

The census declared the frontier closed in 1890, and the 1893 depression made foreign markets look like survival rather than ambition. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) supplied the blueprint (a battleship navy, coaling stations, colonies), while missionaries and Social Darwinist talk of "fit" nations supplied the moral cover.

Cuba turned argument into war. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, Hearst's and Pulitzer's papers blamed Spain; Congress declared war in April, attaching the Teller Amendment promising not to annex Cuba.

Key developments
  • Hawaii (1893–1898): planters overthrew Queen Liliuokalani; Congress annexed the islands by joint resolution in July 1898, mid-war.
  • Treaty of Paris (December 1898): Spain gave up Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines for $20 million.
  • Philippine-American War (1899–1902): Emilio Aguinaldo's republic fought the occupation, at a far higher cost in American and Filipino lives than the war with Spain.
  • Open Door Notes (1899, 1900): John Hay asked the powers to keep equal trading access in China rather than exclusive spheres.
  • Roosevelt Corollary (1904): after backing Panama's revolt against Colombia in 1903, Roosevelt claimed "an international police power"; the canal opened in 1914.
Primary source

Source: Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, October 1899.

We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sourcing (HIPP): Written eight months into the Philippine war and aimed at voters, its purpose is to make annexation look like a betrayal of the founding: hence Washington and Lincoln. Point of view is mixed: Carnegie, Twain, and Addams signed on, some opposing empire on principle, some opposing non-white territories.

Exam tip: with a coalition source, name which faction the language targets.

Model analysis

The fight of 1899 was over which expansion counted as American, not whether to expand. Expansionists called the Philippines the next step after a century of continental conquest; the League answers that governing people who cannot vote turns a republic into what it rebelled against. Both argued from the same founding documents; the Insular Cases (1901) split the difference.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE reason the United States pursued an overseas empire in the period 1890–1914.

Show a model response

Producers feared American farms and factories made more than the home market could absorb, a fear sharpened by the 1893 depression. Officials such as John Hay therefore pressed for open markets in Asia: the Open Door Notes asked the powers to keep China open to American trade.

Why it earns the point: it names a motive and ties it to a policy.

Lesson 7.2 · Period 7 · CED topic 7.4

The Progressives: reform from city hall to the White House

Industrial growth had outrun the rules. Cities absorbed millions of newcomers without safe housing or clean water, a few firms controlled whole industries, and state legislatures answered to railroads. Progressives (urban, middle-class, expert-minded) believed investigation plus government power could fix what the market broke.

Publicity came first. Jacob Riis photographed tenements in How the Other Half Lives (1890), Ida Tarbell serialized the history of Standard Oil in McClure's from 1902, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) aimed at meatpacking labor but horrified readers about their food.

Key developments
  • State and city reform (1901–1910): initiative, referendum, and recall spread west; La Follette's Wisconsin used university experts to write railroad and tax law.
  • Roosevelt's Square Deal (1901–1909): the Northern Securities suit (1904), the Hepburn Act (1906) arming the ICC with rate-setting power, the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts, and 230 million acres of conservation land.
  • Election of 1912: Republicans split when Roosevelt ran on the Progressive ticket, giving Wilson the presidency with 42 percent of the popular vote.
  • Wilson's New Freedom (1913–1914): the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission.
  • Amendments and organizations: the 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of senators) in 1913, the 18th in 1919, the 19th in 1920; the NAACP founded 1909.
Primary source

Source: Theodore Roosevelt, "The New Nationalism," Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

Sourcing (HIPP): Roosevelt spoke to Civil War veterans a year after leaving office and two years before challenging Taft. Arguing for a stronger federal government, he frames regulation as fair play rather than radicalism, and measures how far Republican voters will follow.

Exam tip: with a politician out of office, ask what he wants next.

Model analysis

Progressivism was a method before it was a program: investigate, publicize, legislate. Tarbell made Standard Oil a public problem years before the Court dissolved it in 1911, and Sinclair's novel produced two federal food laws within months. Roosevelt's sentence shows the ceiling: rules rewritten, not wealth redistributed, which is why the movement ends in commissions.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE limitation of Progressive reform in the period 1890–1920.

Show a model response

Progressive reform largely excluded African Americans. Southern Progressives treated disfranchisement and segregation as good government, and Wilson allowed federal departments to be segregated after 1913. Those who did act, such as the NAACP's founders in 1909, worked outside the movement.

Why it earns the point: it names a limitation and supports it with examples.

Lesson 7.3 · Period 7 · CED topics 7.5–7.6

World War I: fighting abroad, dissent at home, 1914–1920

Wilson won reelection in 1916 on having kept the country out of the war, but neutrality was thin: American banks and factories supplied the Allies, and German submarines treated that trade as a target. The Lusitania, sunk in May 1915, took 128 American lives.

When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 and the intercepted Zimmermann telegram offered Mexico American territory for an alliance, Wilson asked Congress for war; it declared on April 6, 1917.

Key developments
  • Mobilization (1917–1918): the Selective Service Act registered 24 million men; the War Industries Board coordinated production; the Committee on Public Information sold the war.
  • Dissent criminalized: the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) punished interference with the draft and criticism of the government; Debs went to prison for an antiwar speech.
  • The AEF: two million soldiers reached France under Pershing; their weight in the Meuse-Argonne offensive helped force the armistice of November 11, 1918.
  • The Great Migration: roughly 500,000 African Americans moved north for war jobs; competition over housing and work fed riots.
  • Peace rejected: the Fourteen Points set the 1918 agenda, but the Senate twice refused the Treaty of Versailles and the League.
Primary source

Source: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., opinion of the Court, Schenck v. United States, 1919.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. … The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Sourcing (HIPP): Charles Schenck mailed leaflets urging resistance to the draft; a unanimous Court upheld his Espionage Act conviction. The situation is wartime: Holmes notes that the same words might be protected in peace. His purpose is to hand judges a usable test, which is why the phrase outlived the case.

Exam tip: for a court opinion, the historical situation is usually the hinge.

Model analysis

Total war expanded federal power faster than any Progressive statute. Washington set prices, ran the railroads, and made some speech a crime, and the Court let that stand. The machinery then turned inward: in the Red Scare of 1919–1920 the Palmer Raids arrested thousands of radicals and immigrants, applying wartime logic in peacetime.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way United States participation in World War I affected American society.

Show a model response

The war drew hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South into northern factories short of immigrant labor. The Great Migration built large Black communities in Chicago and Detroit, and competition over housing and jobs contributed to violence such as the 1919 Chicago riot.

Why it earns the point: it names a development and explains a consequence.

Lesson 7.4 · Period 7 · CED topics 7.7–7.9

The 1920s: mass culture and cultural conflict

The decade ran on machines and installment credit. Ford's assembly line cut the time to build a Model T to minutes and the price under $300; advertising and buy-now-pay-later terms did the same for radios and refrigerators. KDKA began broadcasting in 1920, and by 1927 The Jazz Singer had put sound in theaters: Americans were hearing the same voices.

Cultural authority ran the other way: the 1920 census found most Americans in towns and cities, flappers claimed new freedoms, and much of rural Protestant America answered with prohibition, immigration restriction, and a revived Klan, while Harding and Coolidge promised normalcy.

Key developments
  • Prohibition (1920–1933): the 18th Amendment and Volstead Act closed the legal liquor trade; enforcement failed and organized crime grew.
  • National Origins Act (1924): quotas pegged to the 1890 census cut southern and eastern European arrivals and barred most Asian immigrants.
  • Nativism: the second Klan, refounded in 1915 against Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, claimed millions; Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.
  • The Scopes trial (1925): Tennessee prosecuted a teacher for teaching evolution; Bryan and Darrow argued it on national radio, and Scopes was convicted.
  • The Harlem Renaissance: Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay wrote for Black readers; Garvey's UNIA drew a mass following.
Primary source

Source: Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Nation, June 1926.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. … We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. … We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Sourcing (HIPP): Hughes was twenty-four, answering a poet who said he wanted to be a poet, not a Negro poet. The Nation's readers were largely white liberals, so the essay does two jobs: it tells Black artists to stop seeking white approval, and tells white readers they are addressed, not served.

Exam tip: point of view earns credit only when you say how it shapes the claim.

Model analysis

The 1920s did not simply modernize; they produced a fight over who counted as American, and the same technology served both sides. Radio carried jazz out of Harlem and the Scopes trial into farmhouses. Hughes claims artistic independence in a national magazine as Congress writes ancestry into immigration law. Prosperity widened the audience without settling the argument.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way cultural conflict in the 1920s reflected social change.

Show a model response

The 1920 census showed most Americans in towns and cities, and the Scopes trial of 1925 made that shift a public contest. Tennessee's law defended rural Protestant authority over the schools, while reporters who treated Bryan as a relic showed how much cultural power had moved to the cities.

Why it earns the point: it ties a conflict to a social change.

Lesson 7.5 · Period 7 · CED topics 7.10–7.11

The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929–1939

The crash of October 1929 exposed what the boom had hidden: overproduction, installment debt, banks lending against inflated stock, and no insurance behind deposits. Roughly 9,000 banks failed by 1933, and the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 shrank world trade. By 1933 a quarter of the workforce had no job.

Hoover was not idle: the Reconstruction Finance Corporation lent to banks and railroads in 1932. But he resisted direct federal relief, and the army's dispersal of the Bonus Army fixed his image.

Key developments
  • The Hundred Days (1933): a bank holiday and the Emergency Banking Act reopened sound banks; the CCC, AAA, TVA, and NIRA followed; the FDIC insured deposits.
  • The Second New Deal (1935): the WPA hired millions for public works, the Wagner Act protected union organizing, the Social Security Act created pensions and unemployment insurance.
  • Critics: Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth" and Father Coughlin pressed from the left; the Liberty League attacked from the right, and the Court voided the NIRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936.
  • Court-packing (1937): the plan to add justices died in the Senate, though the Court soon began upholding New Deal laws.
  • Limits: Social Security first excluded farm and domestic workers, leaving out most Black workers and many women; AAA payments went to landowners.
Primary source

Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. … This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.

Sourcing (HIPP): Roosevelt spoke at the bottom of the banking panic, to a radio audience as much as the crowd. His purpose is to restore confidence before he has a program, which is why fear itself is named as the problem. Read it as evidence about the mood of 1933, not the New Deal's content.

Exam tip: an inaugural is a promise; say what it tried to produce.

Model analysis

The New Deal changed what Americans expected of government more than it ended the Depression. Unemployment was still near 17 percent in 1939, and 1937's spending cuts brought a fresh recession, yet the FDIC, Social Security, and the Wagner Act outlasted the crisis. Roosevelt offered relief, recovery, and reform together; reform is what stuck.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE limitation of the New Deal in the period 1933–1941.

Show a model response

New Deal benefits were unevenly distributed by race. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the fields employing most Black southerners, so its pensions bypassed them. AAA acreage payments went to landowners, who often evicted the sharecroppers working that land.

Why it earns the point: it names laws and explains who was excluded.

Lesson 7.6 · Period 7 · CED topic 7.12

Isolation, neutrality, and the road to war, 1921–1941

Disillusion followed Versailles. The Senate stayed out of the League, and Washington bought security cheaply: naval limits by treaty in 1922, a pact renouncing war in 1928, marines withdrawn from Latin America rather than sent. When the Nye Committee reported that bankers and arms makers had profited from 1917, Congress wrote neutrality into law.

Then the aggressors moved. Roosevelt's 1937 call to quarantine them drew criticism, and he could help the democracies only within the Neutrality Acts. France's fall in June 1940 changed the arithmetic.

Key developments
  • Treaty diplomacy (1921–1928): the Washington Naval Conference capped capital ships; the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced war without enforcement.
  • Good Neighbor Policy (1933–1934): Roosevelt pledged non-intervention, pulled marines out of Haiti, and gave up the Platt Amendment's claim on Cuba.
  • Neutrality Acts (1935–1937): arms embargoes on all belligerents, then cash-and-carry for non-military goods, written to keep 1917 from repeating.
  • Aid short of war: cash-and-carry for arms in November 1939, destroyers-for-bases in September 1940, Lend-Lease in March 1941, the Atlantic Charter that August.
  • America First: founded in 1940, it argued that hemispheric defense, not intervention in Europe, served American interests; Charles Lindbergh was its best-known speaker.
Primary source

Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress (the "Four Freedoms"), January 6, 1941.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. … The third is freedom from want. … The fourth is freedom from fear.

Sourcing (HIPP): Roosevelt spoke weeks before asking Congress for Lend-Lease, with Britain nearly alone and most Americans opposed to entering the war. He defines the stakes as universal goods rather than alliance or advantage, and the repeated "everywhere in the world" turns aid to Britain into defense of a principle.

Exam tip: when a speech precedes a bill, name the bill, that is the purpose.

Model analysis

Between 1935 and 1941 the country moved from neutrality by statute to undeclared war, and each step was sold as defense: cash-and-carry protected American shipping, destroyers-for-bases bought hemispheric airfields, Lend-Lease made Britain the shield, and the four freedoms supplied the moral frame. Lindbergh and America First answered that the hemisphere was defensible without war, an argument Pearl Harbor ended on December 7, 1941.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way United States foreign policy changed between 1935 and 1941.

Show a model response

In 1935 Congress embargoed arms sales to all belligerents to keep the country out of another European war. By March 1941 Lend-Lease let Roosevelt supply Britain on credit, and American warships escorted convoys into the North Atlantic. Neutrality had become undeclared support for one side.

Why it earns the point: it contrasts an earlier policy with a later one.

Lesson 7.7 · Period 7 · CED topic 7.13

World War II: mobilizing a nation, 1941–1945

War ended the Depression. The War Production Board converted auto plants to aircraft, the Office of Price Administration rationed gasoline and food, war bonds absorbed wages. Six million women entered the workforce, millions of them in war plants, and more than a million African Americans left the South for defense work.

Rights did not follow automatically. A. Philip Randolph's threatened march on Washington produced Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, barring discrimination in defense industries; the Pittsburgh Courier's Double V campaign demanded victory abroad and at home.

Key developments
  • Labor and migration: the bracero program brought Mexican workers to farms from 1942; in the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots servicemen attacked Mexican American youths in Los Angeles, showing the hostility that community met.
  • Japanese American incarceration (1942–1945): about 120,000 people were removed from the West Coast, two-thirds of them citizens; Korematsu (1944) upheld it, and Congress paid redress in 1988.
  • The Grand Alliance: the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed at Tehran in 1943 on a second front.
  • Two theaters: D-Day came June 6, 1944; island-hopping from Guadalcanal to Okinawa brought bombers within range of Japan.
  • The Holocaust: Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews; American quotas stayed low, and the War Refugee Board of 1944 came late but saved tens of thousands.
Primary source

Source: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942.

Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War … to prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.

Sourcing (HIPP): Roosevelt signed this ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, under pressure from West Coast officials and army commanders. Notice what it does not say: no group is named, and it reads as routine wartime delegation. That neutral language is the point of view: it let officials present removal by ancestry as administration.

Exam tip: with a legal document, sourcing often means reading what it omits.

Model analysis

The war widened American freedom and narrowed it at once: Order 8802 opened defense jobs to Black workers in June 1941, and Order 9066 cost Japanese Americans their homes eight months later. Both were presidential orders justified by war needs, a measure of executive power's growth. Justice Frank Murphy's dissent in Korematsu called the exclusion a fall into "the ugly abyss of racism", and it is the dissent the country later affirmed.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Second World War affected civil liberties in the United States.

Show a model response

Executive Order 9066 let military commanders exclude anyone from designated areas, and in 1942 the army removed about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of them citizens, without charges or hearings. The Court upheld it in Korematsu (1944).

Why it earns the point: it names the policy and the liberty lost.

Lesson 7.8 · Period 7 · CED topic 7.14

Yalta, Potsdam, and the atomic age, 1944–1945

The Allies planned the peace while the war ran. At Yalta in February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divided occupied Germany into zones, promised free elections in liberated Europe, and agreed the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific war.

Roosevelt died in April; Germany surrendered in May. By the time Truman met Stalin at Potsdam in July, Poland's government was Soviet-controlled and the Trinity test had succeeded. The Potsdam Declaration demanded Japan's unconditional surrender.

Key developments
  • Bretton Woods (1944): the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, built around the dollar, gave the United States lasting influence over world finance.
  • The United Nations (1945): delegates signed the Charter at San Francisco in June, and the Senate approved it 89 to 2, unlike 1919.
  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki: atomic bombs fell on August 6 and 9, 1945, killing well over 100,000 people, most of them civilians; Japan surrendered in mid-August.
  • The debate: Truman's advisers argued the bomb would prevent an invasion; historians since have asked whether Japan was near surrender and whether the bombs were also aimed at Moscow.
  • Rivalry begins: disputes over Poland, German reparations, and the atomic monopoly hardened into mistrust before the year ended.
Primary source

Source: President Harry S. Truman, statement announcing the bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. … It is an atomic bomb. … The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Sourcing (HIPP): The statement went out as Truman sailed home from Potsdam, before Japan had responded; it addresses Americans, allies, and Tokyo at once. Purpose shapes the description: naming Hiroshima an important Army base presents a city of roughly 300,000 as a military target while pressing the demand for surrender.

Exam tip: when a source names its target, ask what the naming leaves out.

Model analysis

1945 set the terms of the next four decades. The United Nations and Bretton Woods show the United States meant to stay engaged this time, and the Senate vote of 89 to 2 measures how far opinion had moved since 1919. The same year produced the rivalry those institutions could not contain: Soviet control of Poland, a divided Germany, an atomic monopoly no ally could match.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE reason United States–Soviet cooperation broke down in the period 1945–1946.

Show a model response

Yalta promised free elections in liberated Europe, but the Soviet Union installed a government of its own choosing in Poland. American officials read that as a broken agreement, while Stalin treated a friendly Poland as basic security after two German invasions. Each side concluded the other could not be trusted.

Why it earns the point: it names an agreement and explains the competing readings.

Unit 7 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 7 review: 1890–1945

Ten stimulus-heavy multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions covering empire, Progressivism, the world wars, the 1920s, and the New Deal: click an option to see why each choice works or fails, then write the SAQs on the clock before opening the model.

Multiple choice

  1. Source: Platt Amendment, attached to the Army Appropriations Act, March 2, 1901, and written into Cuba's new constitution.

    That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty …

    The provisions in the excerpt best illustrate which of the following developments in United States foreign policy after 1898?

    This is the textbook misconception that the United States stayed isolationist until 1917. A standing right to land troops in another country is the opposite of avoiding entanglement: the Platt Amendment bound Cuba to American supervision until 1934.

    Cubans were never made United States citizens, and the Insular Cases of 1901 held that the Constitution did not follow the flag in full to the new territories. Puerto Ricans received citizenship only in 1917, under a different law.

    Correct. The Teller Amendment of 1898 had promised no annexation, so Washington got the substance without the title: Cuba kept its flag and its government, and the United States kept the right to intervene plus a naval station at Guantánamo Bay.

    The Monroe Doctrine was expanded here, not abandoned. Three years later the Roosevelt Corollary made the claim explicit by asserting an "international police power" in the hemisphere, precisely to keep European powers out.

  2. Which of the following best explains why many business and political leaders supported acquiring overseas territory in the 1890s?

    Correct. Overproduction and the 1893 depression made foreign markets look like survival rather than ambition, which is why the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 asked the powers to keep China open to American trade rather than carve it into exclusive spheres.

    This confuses continental settlement with overseas empire. The 1890 census had just declared the frontier line closed, and almost none of the territory taken in 1898, islands with dense existing populations, was opened to American homesteaders.

    The causation runs the other way. Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) persuaded Congress to build a battleship fleet first; the bases were wanted to coal and service a navy the country was already constructing.

    The Teller Amendment promised the reverse: that the United States would not annex Cuba. Remembering it backward is a common error; the Platt Amendment of 1901 is what supplied the control Teller had renounced.

  3. Description of: a color political cartoon published in the magazine Puck, September 1904.

    An octopus labeled Standard Oil fills the center of the page. Its tentacles are wrapped around the dome of a state capitol and around figures labeled for the steel, copper, and shipping industries, and one tentacle stretches toward the White House. The caption below the drawing is a single word: "Next!"

    The point of view expressed in the cartoon most directly supported which of the following?

    This is the view the cartoon attacks. Carnegie and the Social Darwinists treated great fortunes as proof of fitness; the artist treats a great fortune as a predator strangling the institutions that are supposed to check it.

    Free silver was a currency remedy aimed at farm debt, and it had already been defeated with Bryan in 1896. Nothing in the drawing concerns money supply or crop prices: the target is corporate control of politics.

    Immigration restriction was a live Progressive-era cause, but it is not this cartoon's subject. Reading any reform cartoon as a generic "reform" statement loses the point; the labels tell you which reform is meant.

    Correct. The tentacle reaching for the White House is the argument: private power has captured government and only stronger public power can pry it loose. Ida Tarbell's serial on Standard Oil ran in these same years, and the Court ordered the trust dissolved in 1911.

  4. Source: President Woodrow Wilson, war message to a joint session of Congress, April 2, 1917.

    The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. … We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.

    Which of the following best explains the purpose of the argument Wilson makes in the excerpt?

    The League fight came two years later, in 1919–1920, and Wilson lost it. Sourcing questions reward getting the month right: in April 1917 he is asking for a declaration of war, not for ratification of a peace treaty.

    Correct. American banks and factories had been supplying the Allies since 1915, and submarine attacks on that trade were the immediate cause. Wilson's purpose is to lift the war above that interest, which is exactly why the excerpt denies seeking conquest, dominion, or indemnities.

    Those acts passed in 1917 and 1918, after this speech, and the message says nothing about dissent. Confusing a war message with the wartime measures it made possible collapses cause into effect.

    This reverses the document. Wilson had run for reelection in 1916 on having kept the country out of war, but unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram ended neutrality; Congress declared war four days after this speech.

  5. Description of: a table of annual immigration quotas set by the National Origins Act of 1924, computed as 2 percent of each nationality's foreign-born population recorded in the 1890 census.

    CountryGermanyGreat BritainPolandItalyRussiaGreece
    Annual quota51,22734,0075,9823,8452,248100

    The quotas shown best support which of the following conclusions about the National Origins Act of 1924?

    Correct. Choosing 1890 as the base year was the mechanism. It measured the foreign-born population before the great wave of southern and eastern European arrivals, so the nationalities Congress wanted to exclude had almost no base to take 2 percent of.

    The numbers refute this directly: Germany's quota is more than five hundred times Greece's. A uniform ceiling would have been restriction without ranking, and ranking is the whole design.

    The 1924 Act exempted the Western Hemisphere entirely, largely because southwestern growers wanted Mexican farm labor. Restriction of Latin American immigration by numerical cap came only with the 1965 law.

    Some unions did back restriction, but the act cut immigration sharply rather than ending it, and its ranking by ancestry reflects the era's nativism and race science, not a wage argument that would have applied to all newcomers equally.

  6. Source: Preamble, Social Security Act, approved August 14, 1935.

    An Act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws.

    The act excerpted above most directly reflected which of the following changes in the 1930s?

    That describes Hoover's preference for voluntarism and local relief, which the 1932 election repudiated. The act runs the other direction, and the Supreme Court upheld it in 1937 rather than striking it down.

    No amendment was passed or needed. Congress rested the act on its taxing and spending power for the "general welfare," language the preamble itself borrows from Article I, which is why the constitutional fight was over interpretation, not text.

    Correct. Before 1935 old age and unemployment were private misfortunes handled by families, employers, or states; this act made them permanent federal commitments funded by payroll taxes, and it outlasted the Depression that produced it.

    Read the preamble again: it works by "enabling the several States." Unemployment compensation and aid to dependent children were state-run with federal money and standards, which is also how benefits varied by state and how farm and domestic workers were left out.

  7. Which of the following best explains President Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 proposal to add justices to the Supreme Court?

    Those rulings came in 1937, after the plan was introduced, and they are usually read as the Court's retreat under pressure. Putting them first inverts the sequence that makes the episode interesting.

    Correct. Roosevelt had won forty-six states in 1936 and faced a Court that had already killed two centerpiece programs. The plan died in the Senate, even his own party balked, but the Court began sustaining New Deal laws that spring.

    Congress passed the Second New Deal, including the WPA, the Wagner Act, and Social Security, in 1935. Roosevelt's problem was judicial review, not legislative resistance.

    The Constitution never sets the Court's size; Congress does, by statute, and the number had changed several times in the nineteenth century. That is exactly why Roosevelt could propose this as an ordinary bill, and why critics called it packing rather than amending.

  8. Which of the following best describes the change in United States foreign policy between the Neutrality Acts of 1935–1937 and the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941?

    The United States never joined the League, so it had no collective-security policy to abandon. The Senate's refusal to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919–1920 is the reason the interwar record looks the way it does.

    This reverses the chronology. There was no alliance in the 1930s; the movement over these six years runs from neutrality toward belligerence, ending with American warships escorting convoys in the North Atlantic by autumn 1941.

    American policy toward Japan hardened rather than softened, with scrap-metal and then oil embargoes in 1940–1941 that Tokyo treated as a strangling of its war economy: one of the calculations behind the attack on December 7.

    Correct. The Neutrality Acts embargoed arms to every belligerent so that 1917 could not repeat itself. Cash-and-carry, destroyers-for-bases, and then Lend-Lease made Britain's survival American policy: undeclared war, months before Pearl Harbor.

  9. Which of the following best supports the argument that the Second World War produced contradictory outcomes for civil rights in the United States?

    Correct. Two presidential orders, eight months apart, justified by the same war: one opened defense jobs regardless of race, the other removed about 120,000 people by ancestry, two-thirds of them citizens. That pairing is the contradiction a strong answer names.

    The order came six months before Pearl Harbor, extracted by A. Philip Randolph's threat of a march on Washington. Dating it after the war erases the pressure from Black organizations that produced it.

    The Court upheld the exclusion in 1944. Justice Murphy's dissent called it a fall into racism, and Congress apologized and paid redress in 1988, but the ruling itself stood, which is why the case is cited as a failure of judicial protection.

    The Double V slogan, carried by the Pittsburgh Courier, meant victory abroad and victory over discrimination at home. Cutting the second V out removes the very argument that made the campaign notable.

  10. Which of the following best explains why the Senate approved the United Nations Charter in 1945 by a vote of 89 to 2 after rejecting the Treaty of Versailles and the League in 1919–1920?

    The headquarters went to New York, but location is not control, and the Soviet Union sat on the Security Council with the same veto. This answer mistakes a symbol for a mechanism.

    The Charter gives the Security Council authority to authorize force, and the Council did so in Korea in 1950. The veto, not powerlessness, is what made that authority acceptable in Washington.

    Correct. Senators who had watched the 1930s drew the lesson that staying out had not kept the country safe, and the veto answered the 1919 objection that membership would commit American forces without American consent.

    The two-thirds rule in Article II still applied, and the Charter cleared it easily. The contrast with 1919 is political, not procedural: Wilson faced a Republican Senate he refused to compromise with, while Truman brought senators of both parties to San Francisco.

Short answer

  1. Source: President Theodore Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904.

    Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may … ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States … to the exercise of an international police power.

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE perspective about the role of the United States in the Western Hemisphere expressed in the excerpt.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1898–1904 that led to the perspective expressed in the excerpt.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific effect of United States policy toward Latin America in the period 1904–1934.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: the United States claims a right or duty to intervene in neighboring states that are unstable or fail to pay debts; the United States should act as a police power in the hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine; a paternalistic view that "civilized" nations may supervise weaker neighbors. Do not accept: a restatement of the original Monroe Doctrine as opposition to European colonization without the new claim of American intervention; a general comment that Roosevelt favored a strong navy.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of the link: victory over Spain in 1898 and the acquisition of Puerto Rico and Guam; the Platt Amendment of 1901 making Cuba a protectorate; the 1902–1903 blockade of Venezuela by Britain, Germany, and Italy over unpaid debts, which raised the prospect of European forces collecting in the hemisphere; the 1903 Panamanian revolt and the canal treaty that made an isthmian canal an American strategic interest. Do not accept: developments outside 1898–1904, or the word "imperialism" with no specific event and no explanation.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: the 1905 customs receivership in the Dominican Republic; military occupations of Haiti (1915–1934), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), or Nicaragua (1912–1933); Taft's dollar diplomacy expanding American bank lending and control; growth of anti-American nationalism in Latin America; the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933–1934, in which Roosevelt renounced intervention and gave up the Platt Amendment. Do not accept: post-1945 Cold War interventions, or effects in Asia or the Pacific.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Roosevelt argues that the United States has the right and even the obligation to police the Western Hemisphere. He says that when a neighboring country becomes disorderly or cannot meet its obligations, the Monroe Doctrine forces the United States to step in and exercise "an international police power," which turns a policy of keeping Europe out into a claim to intervene itself.

    b The Venezuelan debt crisis of 1902–1903 led directly to this perspective. Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuelan ports to collect unpaid loans, and Roosevelt realized that if European navies could collect debts by force in the Caribbean, the Monroe Doctrine was meaningless. His answer was to say that the United States would fix the problem first, so that Europe would have no excuse to come.

    c One effect was repeated American military occupation. Using the corollary's logic, the United States sent marines into Haiti in 1915 and kept them there until 1934, running the country's customs and finances. Occupations like this produced lasting resentment toward the United States across Latin America, which is a major reason Franklin Roosevelt announced the Good Neighbor Policy and pledged non-intervention in 1933–1934.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE specific historical development that contributed to United States entry into the Second World War.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific way mobilization for the Second World War changed American society on the home front.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific way the Second World War changed the role of the United States in the world after 1945.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: the fall of France in June 1940; destroyers-for-bases (September 1940); Lend-Lease (March 1941); the Atlantic Charter (August 1941); American embargoes on scrap metal and oil against Japan in 1940–1941; the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and Germany's declaration of war days later. Do not accept: a bare assertion that "Hitler was evil," or interwar developments with no stated connection to American entry.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of how: roughly six million women entered the workforce, millions of them in war industries, and wartime childcare and payroll practices changed with them; more than a million African Americans left the South for defense jobs, and Executive Order 8802 barred discrimination in defense industries; the bracero program brought Mexican farm labor from 1942; rationing, price controls, and war bonds reordered household consumption; about 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed and confined under Executive Order 9066. Do not accept: naming a program without saying what changed for people; effects located entirely overseas.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: the United States held the only atomic weapons in 1945 and roughly half of world manufacturing output; it led the creation of the United Nations and took a permanent Security Council seat, with Senate approval 89 to 2; the Bretton Woods institutions built the postwar financial order around the dollar; occupation duties in Germany, Japan, and Korea left American forces permanently stationed abroad; rivalry with the Soviet Union led to containment from 1947. Do not accept: "the United States became a superpower" with no evidence; developments after 1980.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a The Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 contributed to American entry. It let Roosevelt hand Britain weapons and supplies on credit rather than for cash, which ended any pretense of neutrality and put American shipping in the middle of the Atlantic war months before Pearl Harbor.

    b Mobilization moved millions of people into new work. About six million women entered the workforce, and millions took industrial jobs that had been closed to them, building aircraft and ships, because war plants could not fill their lines while sixteen million men were in uniform. Many were pushed back out after 1945, but the war showed that the old assumption about who could do factory work was a rule, not a fact.

    c After 1945 the United States stopped trying to stay out of European affairs. It led the founding of the United Nations, and this time the Senate approved the Charter 89 to 2, in contrast to its rejection of the League in 1919–1920. That commitment, plus the wartime buildup and the atomic monopoly, made the United States the organizer of the Western alliance and led straight into containment by 1947.

Lesson 8.1 · Period 8 · CED topic 8.2

The Cold War, 1945–1980: containment from Truman to détente

The wartime allies became rivals almost immediately. Stalin wanted friendly governments between the Red Army and Germany; Washington wanted open markets and elected governments in Europe.

George Kennan's Long Telegram (February 1946) argued that Soviet hostility came from the Soviet system itself, not from anything the United States had done, and that the answer was patient, firm pressure wherever the Soviets pushed.

Key developments
  • Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947–48): $400 million for Greece and Turkey, then roughly $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe.
  • Berlin and NATO (1948–49): an eleven-month airlift supplied West Berlin after the Soviets closed the land routes; twelve nations signed the NATO treaty.
  • NSC-68 and Korea (1950–53): a 1950 report urged permanent rearmament; after North Korea invaded, defense spending tripled. The armistice left Korea divided.
  • Eisenhower's New Look (1953–57): "massive retaliation" and CIA covert action cost less than armies; coups followed in Iran and Guatemala. Sputnik (1957) produced NASA and the National Defense Education Act.
  • Crisis, then détente (1962–72): Soviet missiles in Cuba nearly brought war; ten years later Nixon visited Beijing and signed SALT I.
Primary source

Source: Harry S. Truman, address to a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

Sourcing (HIPP): Britain had just told Washington it could no longer prop up the Greek government, and Truman needed money from a Republican Congress elected to cut budgets. That purpose explains the scale of the language: a regional appropriation becomes a permanent choice between two ways of life. Strong evidence for how containment was sold at home, weaker evidence about Greece itself.

Exam tip: the sourcing point comes only from saying how purpose or audience changes what a document can prove.

Model analysis

The Truman Doctrine mattered less for the money it moved than for the category it created. Instead of requesting aid on narrow strategic grounds, Truman made support for free peoples a standing obligation with no geographic limit and no end date. That framing later underwrote NATO, the decision to fight in Korea without a declaration of war, and the commitment to South Vietnam. The continuity from 1947 to 1965 is the doctrine; the instrument changes, from dollars to soldiers.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way containment shaped United States foreign policy, 1947–1965.

Show a model response

Containment committed the United States to resisting communist expansion anywhere, so Truman sent troops to Korea in 1950 after the North invaded. Because the aim was to restore the prewar line, not to destroy the enemy, the war ended in stalemate near the 38th parallel.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific policy and consequence, then explains the link.

Lesson 8.2 · Period 8 · CED topics 8.3–8.4

The Red Scare and the postwar economy, 1945–1960

The Cold War came home fast. Soviet agents had in fact operated inside the wartime government, and that kernel of truth let politicians treat dissent as disloyalty. Meanwhile the economy did what almost no one predicted: instead of sliding back into depression it boomed for a generation, moving millions of Americans out of cities into new suburbs.

Key developments
  • Loyalty boards and spy cases (1947–53): Executive Order 9835 screened federal employees and HUAC's Hollywood hearings produced the blacklist; Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, the Rosenbergs executed in 1953.
  • McCarthy (1950–54): the Wisconsin senator claimed in 1950 to hold a list of communists in the State Department; televised Army hearings exposed his methods, and the Senate censured him in December 1954.
  • GI Bill and the suburbs (1944–56): federal tuition and mortgage guarantees built a mass middle class; Levittown tracts spread after 1947, the baby boom ran to 1964, and the 1956 highway act funded 41,000 interstate miles.
  • Sun Belt and "dynamic conservatism": defense contracts and air conditioning pulled people south and west; Eisenhower expanded Social Security rather than repealing the New Deal.
Primary source

Source: Senator Margaret Chase Smith, "Declaration of Conscience," Congressional Record, June 1, 1950.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.

Sourcing (HIPP): Smith was a first-term Republican and the only woman in the Senate, speaking from her own party's benches four months after McCarthy's Wheeling speech; six Republican colleagues signed with her. Her purpose was to warn her party off a tactic she thought would win elections and damage the country. Sharing McCarthy's party makes the criticism hard to dismiss as partisan.

Exam tip: when an author criticizes his or her own side, say so; readers reward that point-of-view move.

Model analysis

The second Red Scare worked because it began from a narrow fact and was applied without limit. Espionage had occurred, so no accusation looked absurd on its face; but the machinery built to find spies (loyalty boards, subpoenas, blacklists) punished on suspicion and offered no way to prove innocence. McCarthy finally fell in 1954 because television let viewers watch him bully witnesses, not because his evidence was tested.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE cause of suburban growth in the United States, 1945–1960.

Show a model response

The GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration guaranteed low-interest mortgages that made a new house cheaper than renting a city apartment. Builders like the Levitts used assembly-line methods to meet that subsidized demand, so millions of veterans' families bought homes outside the city.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific federal policy and the mechanism behind the outcome.

Lesson 8.3 · Period 8 · CED topics 8.5–8.6

Postwar culture and the early Civil Rights Movement, 1948–1957

Prosperity produced a shared national culture: families in new suburbs watched the same programs on the same nights. Critics pushed back on the sameness, and so, far more consequentially, did Black Americans who had helped defeat racist regimes abroad and come home to segregation.

Key developments
  • Mass culture (1950s): television reached fewer than one home in ten in 1950 and nearly nine in ten by 1960; rock and roll carried Black rhythm and blues to white teenagers.
  • Critics of conformity: Beat writers such as Kerouac and Ginsberg attacked suburban routine and corporate life.
  • Executive Order 9981 (1948): Truman ordered equal treatment in the armed forces; units integrated during the Korean War.
  • Brown v. Board (1954): NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall won a unanimous ruling that segregated schools violate the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning Plessy. Brown II (1955) ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," which licensed delay.
  • Montgomery and Little Rock (1955–57): Emmett Till's murder and Rosa Parks's arrest set off a 381-day bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.; in 1957 King helped found the SCLC and Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock.
Primary source

Source: Chief Justice Earl Warren, opinion of the Court, Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954.

Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. … We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Sourcing (HIPP): Warren worked for unanimity because he expected massive resistance, and the opinion shows it: short, plain, resting on segregation's effect on children rather than on legislators' motives. That purpose, compliance, explains why the remedy was postponed to Brown II.

Exam tip: a court opinion's audience is the country that must obey it. Source on that, not on the word "official."

Model analysis

Brown changed the law well before it changed schools, and that gap drove the movement's next decade. The ruling removed segregation's legal defense, but "all deliberate speed" let districts stall, and a decade later very few Black students in the Deep South attended integrated schools. Activists turned to pressure the courts could not supply: a boycott in Montgomery, a federal escort at Little Rock. The period shows continuity in segregation alongside sharp change in tactics.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE effect of the Brown decision on the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1960.

Show a model response

Brown made segregation legally indefensible, so activists challenged it outside the courtroom. Black residents of Montgomery boycotted the city buses for more than a year after Rosa Parks's arrest, and federal courts struck down bus segregation there in 1956.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific effect and ties it to a named event.

Lesson 8.4 · Period 8 · CED topics 8.7–8.8

America as a world power and the Vietnam War, 1954–1975

Containment was designed for Europe, but the collapse of European empires moved the contest to Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In Vietnam, American policymakers read a nationalist war against French rule as a communist advance, and inherited the fight France lost in 1954.

Key developments
  • Cold War beyond Europe: Eisenhower forced Britain and France to retreat at Suez (1956); Kennedy approved the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961).
  • From advisers to war (1954–65): the Geneva Accords split Vietnam at the 17th parallel; after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson began sustained bombing and sent combat troops in March 1965.
  • Tet (1968): the lunar new year offensive failed militarily but shattered claims the war was nearly won; Johnson left the presidential race in March.
  • The antiwar movement: teach-ins, draft resistance, and nightly television coverage split the Democratic coalition; the 26th Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to eighteen.
  • Vietnamization and after (1969–75): Nixon withdrew troops while widening the air war into Cambodia; the Paris Peace Accords ended American fighting in 1973, the War Powers Act followed, and Saigon fell in 1975.
Primary source

Source: Joint resolution of Congress (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), August 7, 1964.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.

Sourcing (HIPP): Johnson asked for this three days after reported attacks on American destroyers: a second attack later evidence made doubtful. His audience was a Congress three months from an election; his purpose was a free hand without a declaration of war. Notice what the text lacks: a time limit or any cap on force.

Exam tip: with a law, source the vote and the moment. Passage by 416–0 and 88–2 tells you as much as the wording does.

Model analysis

The resolution shows how the Cold War presidency absorbed a power the Constitution gives Congress. Two senators voted no; the rest handed Johnson an open grant on the strength of a briefing they could not check, and within a year he was bombing North Vietnam without asking again. Congress tried to take the power back only after the war it had authorized went wrong, passing the War Powers Act over Nixon's veto in 1973.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the Vietnam War changed the relationship between Congress and the presidency.

Show a model response

Because the war was fought under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution rather than a declaration, Congress passed the War Powers Act over Nixon's veto in 1973, requiring the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing troops and to withdraw them within 60 days without authorization.

Why it earns the point: it names the law and the specific limit it set.

Lesson 8.5 · Period 8 · CED topic 8.9

The Great Society, 1961–1968

Kennedy promised a New Frontier and got little of it through Congress. His assassination in November 1963 and the Democratic landslide of 1964 handed Lyndon Johnson the majorities Kennedy never had, and Johnson, a former Senate leader, knew exactly what to do with them.

Key developments
  • New Frontier (1961–63): Kennedy created the Peace Corps and committed the country to a moon landing, but a conservative coalition blocked his tax, health, and civil rights bills.
  • War on Poverty (1964): the Economic Opportunity Act created the Office of Economic Opportunity, Job Corps, VISTA, and Head Start.
  • Health and schools (1965): Medicare covered the elderly and Medicaid the poor; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act sent federal money to public schools at scale for the first time.
  • Immigration Act of 1965: replaced national-origins quotas with hemispheric caps and preferences for family and skills, reopening large-scale immigration from Asia and Latin America.
  • The Warren Court: Engel v. Vitale (1962) barred official school prayer, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) guaranteed counsel to poor defendants, and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) required warnings before questioning.
Primary source

Source: President Lyndon B. Johnson, commencement address at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.

Sourcing (HIPP): Johnson spoke at a commencement six months before an election and six weeks before signing the Civil Rights Act, to graduates who would staff the programs he was proposing. The purpose is to set an agenda, not to describe conditions, so the speech is strong evidence for liberal ambition in 1964 and no evidence at all about whether the programs worked.

Exam tip: "historical situation" means the specific month, not "the 1960s." Name what had just happened.

Model analysis

The Great Society's record splits along a line that shaped later politics. Where a program served a broad constituency that included the middle class (Medicare, federal aid to schools) it survived every conservative administration that followed. Where it targeted the poor alone and bypassed city halls, as the community action agencies did, it lost its allies and was dismantled. Vietnam then capped the whole effort: Johnson refused to choose between guns and butter, and inflation made the choice for him.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE limitation of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

Show a model response

Escalation in Vietnam drained money and attention from domestic programs. By 1967 Johnson was financing a war and the War on Poverty at once, and rather than raise taxes early he accepted deficits that fed inflation, so antipoverty agencies were funded far below what their designers had planned.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific constraint and explains how it limited the programs.

Lesson 8.6 · Period 8 · CED topic 8.10

The African American Civil Rights Movement, 1960–1968

Brown had made segregation illegal without making it go away. Between 1960 and 1965 a younger generation forced the issue by putting themselves in places the law had failed to open (lunch counters, interstate buses, registration lines), and by choosing confrontations the cameras would carry north.

Key developments
  • Sit-ins and SNCC (1960): four students sat at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter in February; the tactic spread to dozens of cities, and organizers founded SNCC that April.
  • Freedom Rides (1961): CORE volunteers rode interstate buses into the South and were beaten; federal regulators ordered bus terminals desegregated that November.
  • Birmingham and Washington (1963): televised police violence pushed Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill, and 250,000 marched on Washington in August. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" defended disobeying unjust laws.
  • Freedom Summer and Selma (1964–65): volunteers registering Mississippi voters met violence, including three murders; after troopers attacked marchers at Selma, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in August 1965.
  • Black Power and after (1965–68): Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965, had argued for self-defense and Black self-determination; Stokely Carmichael popularized "Black Power" in 1966, and the Fair Housing Act passed days after King's assassination in 1968.
Primary source

Source: Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II, section 201(a), signed July 2, 1964.

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

Sourcing (HIPP): This is statutory language written by lawyers and passed after a filibuster of more than two months, so its purpose is enforceability, not persuasion: every category and every "place of public accommodation" had to be defined to survive a court challenge. Congress grounded Title II in the commerce clause, and the Supreme Court upheld it on that basis in December 1964.

Exam tip: with a law, ask what it leaves out. Title II reached hotels and restaurants, not private clubs or housing.

Model analysis

Between 1963 and 1965 the movement converted local confrontations into federal law, and it worked twice. Birmingham and Selma were chosen partly because officials there could be counted on to respond with force in front of cameras, and the national reaction gave Johnson his votes. The limit showed afterward: segregation written into statute could be repealed, but the poverty and housing discrimination the Kerner Commission described in 1968 had no single sheriff to televise.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE reason the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded Black voting more than earlier federal laws had.

Show a model response

Earlier laws made Black citizens sue county by county, which was slow and dangerous. The Voting Rights Act suspended literacy tests and sent federal examiners to register voters in covered districts, so Black registration in Mississippi rose from under 10 percent to more than half within a few years.

Why it earns the point: it contrasts a specific mechanism with the older approach.

Lesson 8.7 · Period 8 · CED topics 8.11–8.12

New movements and the counterculture, 1962–1975

The civil rights movement supplied a template (organize, litigate, demonstrate, demand federal enforcement), and other groups adopted it. Women, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and gay Americans each built organizations on that model, while a student left questioned the institutions all of them were petitioning.

Key developments
  • The women's movement (1963–72): Betty Friedan's 1963 book argued that educated women were confined by a narrow ideal of domesticity; NOW formed in 1966, and Title IX barred sex discrimination in federally funded education.
  • The ERA fight (1972–82): Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states in 1972; Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign helped stall it three states short.
  • Chicano and Native movements: César Chávez and Dolores Huerta led the United Farm Workers' grape strike and boycott (1965–70); Native activists occupied Alcatraz in 1969, and AIM occupied Wounded Knee in 1973.
  • Stonewall (1969): a police raid on a New York bar met several nights of resistance and launched a national gay rights movement.
  • Students and the counterculture: the SDS Port Huron Statement (1962) called for participatory democracy; campus protest grew all decade, and National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State in 1970.
Primary source

Source: Justice Harry Blackmun, opinion of the Court, Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973.

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

Sourcing (HIPP): The Court divided 7–2, and the sentence is careful about its own footing, naming two possible constitutional homes for a privacy right the Constitution never mentions. Its audience was the state legislatures whose laws it voided, which is why the opinion also set out a trimester framework saying what regulation remained permitted.

Exam tip: a ruling that provokes a movement is evidence about the law, not about public opinion.

Model analysis

These movements share a method and diverge in outcome, which is what a comparison prompt wants. Each borrowed the civil rights sequence (found an organization, take a case or a strike to a national audience, demand federal action), and each won something concrete: Title IX, union contracts for farm workers, tribal self-determination in 1975. But the publicity that won those gains also organized the opposition, and the ERA died in state legislatures after sailing through Congress.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the African American civil rights movement influenced another social movement of the 1960s or 1970s.

Show a model response

The United Farm Workers borrowed its tactics. César Chávez used nonviolent marches and a national consumer boycott of table grapes, pressuring growers from outside California much as bus boycotts had pressured southern businesses, and the union won contracts in 1970.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific group, a borrowed tactic, and the result.

Lesson 8.8 · Period 8 · CED topics 8.13–8.14

The environment and a society in transition, 1962–1980

The 1970s undid three assumptions the postwar boom had made routine: that energy was cheap, that growth was automatic, and that the presidency could be trusted. Environmental politics came first, as evidence piled up that prosperity carried costs no market was counting.

Key developments
  • Environmental awakening (1962–70): Rachel Carson's 1962 book showed how pesticides moved through food chains; a Santa Barbara oil spill and a burning Cuyahoga River in 1969 widened the alarm, and the first Earth Day came in 1970.
  • Federal response (1970–73): Nixon created the EPA and signed the Clean Air Act in 1970; the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts followed.
  • Energy and stagflation (1971–79): Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility in 1971; the OPEC embargo of 1973–74 quadrupled oil prices, and inflation and unemployment then rose together.
  • Watergate (1972–74): a break-in at Democratic headquarters led to a cover-up the White House tapes exposed; facing impeachment, Nixon resigned in August 1974 and Ford pardoned him.
  • Carter and the New Right (1977–80): Carter brokered the Camp David Accords in 1978 but was overwhelmed by inflation, a second oil shock, and the Iran hostage crisis; the Moral Majority (1979) organized evangelicals for Reagan.
Primary source

Source: President Jimmy Carter, televised address to the nation, July 15, 1979.

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. … It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.

Sourcing (HIPP): Carter canceled a planned energy speech, spent ten days at Camp David hearing from citizens and advisers, and delivered this instead. His purpose was to win support for an energy program by giving a material problem a spiritual diagnosis. It polled well at first, then became the "malaise" speech in his opponents' hands.

Exam tip: separate what a source says from how it was received, both are usable evidence.

Model analysis

Two developments explain why the New Deal coalition broke apart. Stagflation discredited the tools liberal economists had used since 1945, because inflation and unemployment were supposed to trade off and instead climbed together. Watergate and the end in Vietnam drained trust in Washington, which polls put at roughly a quarter of Americans by 1980. Carter names that mood in 1979 and is beaten by it in 1980, when Reagan offers the same diagnosis with government as the culprit.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE cause of the rise of conservatism in the United States in the 1970s.

Show a model response

Inflation and the 1973 oil shock cut real incomes while pushing families into higher tax brackets. Conservatives blamed federal spending and regulation for both, and tax revolts such as California's Proposition 13 in 1978 turned that anger into a program Reagan carried into the 1980 election.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific economic cause and traces it to a political outcome.

Unit 8 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 8 review: 1945–1980

Ten multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions on containment, the Red Scare and the postwar boom, civil rights, Vietnam, the Great Society, and the movements and shocks of the 1970s: answer each stem before reading any rationale.

Multiple choice

  1. Source: Secretary of State George C. Marshall, remarks at Harvard University, June 5, 1947.

    It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.

    Which of the following best describes the purpose of the policy Marshall proposed in the excerpt?

    American forces stayed and grew: NATO in 1949 and the Korean rearmament that followed put more troops in Europe, not fewer. The plan was about factories, currencies, and coal production, not base transfers.

    Correct. Marshall's denial that the policy targets a doctrine is diplomatic cover: the reasoning is that hungry, jobless voters in France and Italy would elect communists. Roughly $13 billion rebuilt Europe and bought American goods with the same dollars.

    The alliance was a separate step two years later. Aid came first and was offered even to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which refused it: proof that the immediate condition was economic cooperation, not a military pact.

    This is containment's economic half, not a reversal of it. The Truman administration treated the doctrine and the plan as two parts of one policy: the first supplied military aid to Greece and Turkey, the second supplied capital to Western Europe.

  2. Which of the following best explains the shift in United States–Soviet relations between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the signing of SALT I in 1972?

    Soviet communism lasted until 1991. Reading détente as the end of the Cold War is a common compression of two very different moments almost twenty years apart.

    Nixon's opening to China was leverage, not alliance. Playing Beijing and Moscow against each other is precisely what pushed the Soviets toward arms talks: the point was triangular pressure, not a joint front.

    American combat in Vietnam ran until 1973 and Saigon fell in 1975. Tet in 1968 changed American politics, not the war's end date, and the war was an expression of superpower rivalry rather than its cause.

    Correct. The 1962 crisis produced a direct hotline and a 1963 test-ban treaty; a decade later SALT I capped missile launchers and the ABM Treaty limited defenses. Competition continued in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa throughout.

  3. Description of: an aerial photograph of Levittown, New York, taken about 1950.

    Curving streets run across former potato fields. Several hundred nearly identical single-family houses stand on small lots, each set the same distance back from the road, each with a driveway and a young tree in the front yard. No apartment buildings, factories, or stores appear in the frame.

    The pattern shown in the photograph was most directly a result of which of the following?

    Correct. Federally guaranteed low-interest mortgages made buying cheaper than renting, and the Levitts built on an assembly-line schedule to meet the subsidized demand. The same federal appraisal rules steered loans away from Black buyers, so this landscape was overwhelmingly white by design.

    The dates rule this out: the photograph precedes the highway act by about six years, and these local streets were laid by the builder. Interstates accelerated suburban growth in the later 1950s; they did not start it.

    Urban renewal did demolish city neighborhoods, but displaced residents were rarely able to buy in developments like this one, which used restrictive covenants. Treating suburbanization and urban renewal as one program hides who could move and who could not.

    Rent control affected some cities, but the housing shortage was a shortage of units after fifteen years of depression and war. The decisive change was on the demand side: federal credit that turned renters into buyers.

  4. Which of the following best explains the collapse of Senator Joseph McCarthy's influence in 1954?

    No such ruling came. In this period the Court largely deferred to loyalty programs, which is why the check on McCarthy had to be political rather than judicial.

    The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 and executed in 1953. Real espionage cases were the kernel of truth that made sweeping accusations plausible, which is the point students most often miss about the second Red Scare.

    Correct. The Army-McCarthy hearings put his methods in front of a mass audience, and the Senate censured him 67 to 22 in December 1954. Note what did not happen: his evidence was never tested and found false; he lost the room, not an argument.

    Eisenhower deliberately refused to attack him in public, saying he would not get in the gutter with him. That reluctance is part of why McCarthy operated unchecked for four years.

  5. Source: President Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948.

    It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. … This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes …

    The order excerpted above is best understood in the context of which of the following?

    Brown came six years later, in 1954. The order is one of the developments that built pressure toward Brown, not a consequence of it: watch the direction of causation on any 1940s civil rights item.

    The 1964 act is sixteen years later and reached private employers, not the military. An executive order also differs from a statute in an important way: it needed no Congress, which is exactly why Truman used one against a southern filibuster.

    That competition was beginning, not ending, and it cut the other way: American segregation was a standing propaganda gift to the Soviets, which gave presidents a foreign-policy reason to act on civil rights.

    Correct. Black servicemen returned from a war against Nazi racism to segregated units and southern violence, and organizations publicized it in an election year when Truman needed northern Black votes. The escape clause about the "time required" is why full integration waited for the manpower needs of the Korean War.

  6. Which of the following best explains the significance of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964?

    Correct. Johnson began sustained bombing and sent combat troops in 1965 on this authority alone, and Congress tried to claw the power back only after the war went wrong, passing the War Powers Act over Nixon's veto in 1973.

    Congress has not declared war since 1942. Calling this a declaration erases what made it constitutionally important: an open-ended grant of authority with no time limit, passed 416 to 0 and 88 to 2 on a briefing members could not verify.

    This describes the War Powers Act's reporting and sixty-day rules, passed nine years later. The 1964 resolution imposed no limit of any kind on the President.

    The United States never signed the Geneva Accords, which split Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel and called for elections that were never held. American commitment to Saigon grew out of containment policy, not that agreement.

  7. Which of the following best describes a long-term effect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965?

    Asian exclusion ran the other way and was older: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 quotas. The 1965 law repealed that framework, and Asian immigration rose sharply afterward.

    That is the formula of the National Origins Act of 1924, the system the 1965 law abolished. Confusing the two reverses the entire century's immigration policy.

    Correct. Its sponsors expected European family networks to dominate the new preferences; instead the largest flows came from Asia and Latin America, reshaping American cities and schools over the following half century.

    Legalization for people already present was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which also penalized employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers.

  8. Source: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), appointed by President Johnson, March 1968.

    Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal. … Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

    The conclusion in the excerpt best supports which of the following claims about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

    Those laws worked at what they targeted: segregated public accommodations largely ended, and Black registration in Mississippi went from under ten percent to more than half within a few years. The commission's point is that de jure victory left de facto conditions untouched.

    Correct. A federal commission appointed by the president who signed both laws reported in 1968 that the country was still splitting in two, which is why the movement's next fights were over housing, jobs, and police practice, and why the Fair Housing Act passed that April.

    The report explicitly rejected the conspiracy explanation and pointed instead to discrimination, unemployment, poor housing, and policing. Naming the misdiagnosis it refused is part of what made the report controversial.

    The commission called for more federal action, not less: large investments in housing, jobs, and education. Johnson, facing Vietnam's costs and an election year, largely shelved the recommendations.

  9. Source: Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972, signed June 23, 1972.

    No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

    The statute excerpted above is best understood as an example of which of the following?

    Congress sent the ERA to the states that same year, but it was never ratified: STOP ERA helped stall it three states short by 1982. Title IX is a statute Congress passed, which is precisely why it took effect while the amendment did not.

    This is legislation, not adjudication. The distinction matters: a statute can be amended or its enforcement loosened by a later administration, while a constitutional holding is far harder to undo.

    Athletics became the most visible application, but the text covers any education program or activity: admissions, hiring, and later sexual harassment in schools. Reading the famous consequence back into the text narrows the law.

    Correct. The wording tracks Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which used federal money as leverage against racial discrimination; here the same lever is aimed at sex discrimination, showing how one movement's tools were borrowed by the next.

  10. Which of the following best explains the economic difficulties Americans experienced in the 1970s?

    Correct. The OPEC embargo of 1973–1974 quadrupled oil prices while Japanese and German manufacturers took market share. "Stagflation" mattered because the postwar policy toolkit assumed you could trade a little inflation for lower unemployment, and both climbed together.

    The direction is backward: the 1970s were the most inflationary decade of the century, not deflationary. Leaving gold let the dollar fall, which raised import prices rather than lowering them.

    Johnson financed the war and the Great Society without an early tax increase, so deficit spending in the late 1960s is usually named among the causes of the inflation that followed, not a cut in demand.

    Rates went the other way at the end of the decade: Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve drove them into the high teens after 1979 to break inflation, and the recession that followed pushed unemployment to 10.8 percent in 1982.

Short answer

  1. Source: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961.

    In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE perspective about the postwar United States expressed in the excerpt.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1945–1961 that led to the perspective expressed in the excerpt.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific effect of the development described in the excerpt on the United States in the period 1961–1975.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: a permanent arms industry and military establishment could gain undue influence over government decisions; democratic control of policy is at risk from concentrated defense interests; citizens must stay alert because this combination will not go away. Do not accept: "Eisenhower opposed the military" or "Eisenhower wanted to disarm"; a restatement of the phrase "military-industrial complex" with no perspective attached.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of the link: NSC-68 (1950) and the tripling of defense spending after North Korea invaded; the Korean War itself; the creation of a permanent peacetime establishment through the National Security Act of 1947 (Department of Defense, CIA, NSC); the hydrogen bomb and the arms race; Sputnik (1957) and the resulting missile-gap debate, NASA, and the National Defense Education Act. Do not accept: World War II mobilization alone with no link to the postwar permanence, or developments after 1961.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: escalation in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the costs that undercut Great Society programs; defense contracting driving Sun Belt growth in California, Texas, and the Southeast; the space program and the 1969 moon landing; guns-versus-butter inflation in the late 1960s; the antiwar movement's critique of the war economy; congressional pushback such as the War Powers Act of 1973. Do not accept: effects dated after 1975, or a general statement that "the Cold War continued" with no specific development.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Eisenhower warns that the permanent partnership between the armed forces and the arms industry has become powerful enough to shape government policy for its own benefit. His perspective is that this influence is a structural danger to democracy, not the fault of any one person, and that it will persist, so citizens have to watch it constantly.

    b The Korean War led to this view. After North Korea invaded in 1950, the United States adopted the NSC-68 recommendation of permanent rearmament and roughly tripled defense spending, and it never returned to prewar levels after the 1953 armistice. That turned wartime production into a standing industry with a permanent lobby in Washington, which is exactly the combination Eisenhower describes.

    c One effect was the escalation in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1968 Johnson committed more than half a million troops and enormous spending on the war under the authority of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and because he refused to choose between the war and the Great Society, inflation rose and antipoverty programs were funded far below what their designers had planned.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE specific difference between the goals or tactics of the African American civil rights movement before 1965 and those of Black Power advocates after 1965.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1954–1968 that contributed to that difference.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific way the African American civil rights movement influenced another movement for rights in the period 1960–1975.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: integration into existing institutions versus Black self-determination and separate institutions; nonviolent direct action and interracial coalition versus armed self-defense and Black-led organizations; a legal and legislative focus in the South versus economic and community power in northern cities. Do not accept: "Black Power was violent and the civil rights movement was peaceful" with nothing more; a difference of personalities alone with no goal or tactic named.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of the link: Brown (1954) and "all deliberate speed" producing a decade of delay; violence against nonviolent protesters at Birmingham (1963), Freedom Summer (1964), and Selma (1965); the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts changing little about northern housing, schools, and jobs; the Watts and Detroit disorders and the Kerner Commission's 1968 report; Malcolm X's argument for self-defense and self-determination and his assassination in 1965; the seating fight over the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Do not accept: developments outside 1954–1968, or an event named with no explanation of how it produced the shift.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: the United Farm Workers' use of nonviolent marches and a national consumer boycott (1965–1970); the women's movement's use of federal antidiscrimination law, including Title VII, NOW (1966), and Title IX (1972); the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes (1969) and the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee (1973); the gay rights movement after Stonewall (1969); the disability rights movement's use of Section 504. Do not accept: a group named with no borrowed tactic, strategy, or legal tool identified.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Before 1965 the main goal was integration, pursued through nonviolent direct action and lawsuits aimed at getting federal law changed: sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the marches that produced the Civil Rights Act. After 1965 Black Power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael argued for Black control of Black communities, including separate institutions and armed self-defense, rather than acceptance into white institutions.

    b The limits of the 1964 and 1965 laws contributed to that shift. Those acts ended segregation by law and opened southern voting, but they did nothing about the segregated housing, school funding, unemployment, and policing that shaped Black life in northern cities. When disorders broke out in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967, younger activists concluded that legal equality without economic power was not enough, a judgment the Kerner Commission itself echoed in 1968.

    c The United Farm Workers borrowed the movement's tactics directly. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta used nonviolent marches, a fast, and a national consumer boycott of table grapes from 1965 to 1970, pressuring California growers through shoppers in distant cities much as bus boycotts had pressured southern businesses. The union won its first contracts in 1970.

Lesson 9.1 · Period 9 · CED topic 9.2

Reagan and the conservative resurgence, 1980–1989

Jimmy Carter's last year ran on bad news: inflation near 13 percent, interest rates above 20 percent, and fifty-two Americans held hostage in Tehran. Ronald Reagan had argued for fifteen years that the federal government had outgrown what it could do well. In November 1980 he carried 44 states and Republicans took the Senate, backed by business conservatives, Sunbelt suburbanites, hawks, and newly organized white evangelicals.

Key developments
  • Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981): cut the top income tax rate from 70 to 50 percent on supply-side logic: lower rates free investment. The 1986 Tax Reform Act took it to 28 percent.
  • Volcker, recession, deficits: tight money broke inflation but pushed unemployment to 10.8 percent in late 1982; growth returned in 1983, while tax cuts and a defense buildup nearly tripled the national debt.
  • PATCO strike (August 1981): Reagan fired over 11,000 controllers who struck illegally, steepening labor's decline.
  • Sandra Day O'Connor (1981): first woman on the Supreme Court.
  • The New Right: the Moral Majority (1979) pressed school prayer and opposition to abortion after Roe v. Wade (1973); STOP ERA killed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.
  • A widening gap: deregulation and deindustrialization concentrated income growth at the top.
Primary source

Source: Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

Sourcing (HIPP): Situation: Reagan spoke into double-digit inflation, and the Tehran hostages were freed minutes after he finished. Purpose: an inaugural claims a mandate, and this one names tax cuts before any program. Point of view blocks a lazy reading: he adds that he means not to abolish government but to make it work.

Exam tip: the sourcing point comes from tying purpose or point of view to what the source can prove.

Model analysis

Conservatism in the 1980s changed the terms of argument more than it shrank the government. Change is real: the top rate fell from 70 to 28 percent in five years, and the PATCO firings told employers Washington would not shield unions. Yet Social Security and Medicare kept growing, defense spending soared, and federal outlays rose every year of the decade. The lasting shift was rhetorical and fiscal, after 1981 both parties argued inside a frame of low rates and large deficits.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way conservative ideas shaped federal economic policy in the period 1980–1989.

Show a model response

Conservatives argued that high marginal rates discouraged investment, so Congress passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, cutting the top rate from 70 to 50 percent. Growth was supposed to replace the lost revenue; instead the cuts and a defense buildup produced record peacetime deficits.

Why it earns the point: it names a specific law and date, then explains the reasoning.

Lesson 9.2 · Period 9 · CED topic 9.3

The end of the Cold War, 1981–1991

Reagan's first term hardened the Cold War: bigger defense budgets, the Soviet Union named an evil empire in March 1983, and that same month the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile shield critics nicknamed Star Wars. Then the other side changed. Mikhail Gorbachev took power in March 1985 with an economy that could not carry both the arms race and its own people, and answered with glasnost and perestroika.

Key developments
  • Buildup and SDI: defense spending rose sharply; SDI, announced March 1983, was never deployed but unsettled Soviet planners.
  • Reagan and Gorbachev (1985–1988): summits at Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow; the INF Treaty of December 1987 eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles and allowed on-site inspection.
  • 1989: Gorbachev would not send tanks; Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania broke away and the Berlin Wall opened on November 9. Germany reunified in October 1990.
  • Soviet collapse (1991): a failed August coup sped the breakup; the USSR dissolved and Gorbachev resigned on December 25.
  • Persian Gulf War (1991): after Iraq seized Kuwait in August 1990, a UN-authorized, US-led coalition expelled it between January 17 and February 28, 1991.
Primary source

Source: Ronald Reagan, remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. … General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Sourcing (HIPP): The audience is double: West Berliners in front of him and, by radio across the wall, listeners in the East. Purpose is pressure through publicity, not negotiation: State Department and NSC staff pushed to cut the line while arms talks were live. Point of view: a president who paired a buildup with bargaining, so the speech is half a strategy.

Exam tip: the wall opened 29 months later, for reasons mostly inside the Eastern bloc. A speech is evidence of pressure, not proof of cause.

Model analysis

No single cause ended the Cold War, and strong answers say so with evidence. American pressure mattered: the buildup and SDI raised the price of competing for an economy already shrinking. Gorbachev's choices mattered more directly: he accepted deep arms cuts, then refused force in Eastern Europe in 1989. And the crowds in Warsaw, Leipzig, and Prague supplied the push. Naming one of these as sufficient loses the complexity point; showing how they combined earns it.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE cause of the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe in the period 1985–1991.

Show a model response

Gorbachev abandoned the Soviet commitment to prop up allied regimes and signaled that troops would not put down opposition movements. Once that guarantee was gone, movements like Poland's Solidarity could force real elections, and communist governments fell across the region in 1989 without Soviet intervention.

Why it earns the point: it identifies a specific policy change and traces its effect.

Lesson 9.3 · Period 9 · CED topics 9.4–9.6

A changing economy, immigration, and the twenty-first century

The Cold War ended and the economy kept changing anyway. Cheap computing and the commercial internet after 1993 knit production together across borders while factory employment fell. Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, governed from that center (freer trade abroad, a smaller welfare state at home) before the century turned with a shock.

Key developments
  • Globalization: NAFTA took effect January 1, 1994 and the WTO opened in 1995; containers and digital networks moved production abroad as factory jobs vanished.
  • The Clinton years: 1996 welfare reform replaced AFDC with time-limited block grants; the House impeached Clinton in December 1998, the Senate acquitted him in February 1999.
  • Immigration: the 1965 Hart-Celler Act ended national-origin quotas, shifting later arrivals toward Latin America and Asia; the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized about three million people and penalized employers.
  • September 11, 2001: al-Qaeda attacks killed nearly 3,000; US forces entered Afghanistan that October and Iraq in March 2003; the Patriot Act widened surveillance and the Department of Homeland Security followed in 2002.
  • Crash and response (2008–2009): the housing bubble burst, Lehman Brothers failed, unemployment reached 10 percent, and Congress answered with bank rescues and stimulus.
  • Obama and the ACA: elected in 2008, the first Black president signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010; it expanded coverage and drew immediate court and electoral challenges.
Primary source

Source: George W. Bush, address to a Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001.

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. … Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. … Freedom and fear are at war.

Sourcing (HIPP): Situation: nine days after the attacks, with Congress having already authorized force on September 14. Audience: the chamber, the country, allies, and the Taliban, addressed directly with demands. Purpose: to define the attacks as war rather than crime, a framing that supported military action abroad and broader surveillance at home, and that critics contested from the start.

Exam tip: when a source defines a problem, ask what policy that definition licenses, that is a purpose argument.

Model analysis

The period after 1991 turned on one question: what should the federal government do? The answers moved both ways at once. Washington deregulated finance, converted welfare to time-limited block grants in 1996, and opened trade through NAFTA and the WTO. It also built a large security apparatus after 2001, rescued banks and stimulated the economy in 2008, and subsidized health coverage in 2010. Continuity in the argument, sharp change in where the line got drawn: that is the thread to trace.

Write it

Briefly explain ONE way the September 11, 2001 attacks changed United States government policy.

Show a model response

Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001, expanding federal authority to monitor communications and obtain records with less judicial review, and created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Supporters called the powers necessary; critics said they weakened civil liberties.

Why it earns the point: it names specific measures and explains the change they made.

Unit 9 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Period 9 review: 1980–Present

Ten multiple-choice items and two short-answer questions on the conservative resurgence, the end of the Cold War, and a globalizing economy: the smallest period on the exam by weight, and the one students most often answer from memory of the news rather than from evidence.

Multiple choice

  1. Description of: a line graph of the top marginal federal individual income tax rate, 1975–1990, with a note printed beneath it.

    The line holds flat at 70 percent through 1980, steps down to 50 percent in 1982, runs level through 1986, then drops again to 28 percent by 1988 and stays near that level to 1990. The note beneath the graph reports that the federal debt roughly tripled over the same years.

    The trend shown in the graph most directly reflects which of the following?

    The note under the graph contradicts this. Deficits grew every year of the decade, and the 1986 act was designed to be revenue-neutral by broadening the base, not to close a deficit.

    Tariffs have been a minor share of federal revenue since the income tax was authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Payroll and income taxes, not customs duties, carried the budget in the 1980s.

    The chronology fails: the cuts begin in 1981, eight years before the Berlin Wall opened, and defense spending rose sharply in exactly those years. That combination of lower rates and higher military outlays is why the debt grew.

    Correct. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 took the top rate from 70 to 50 percent and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 took it to 28. Supporters argued growth would replace the revenue; the note about tripling debt is the evidence that, alongside a defense buildup, it did not.

  2. Which of the following best explains the significance of President Reagan's response to the air traffic controllers' strike of August 1981?

    Presidents had intervened against strikers since the nineteenth century: Cleveland sent troops against the Pullman strike in 1894, and Truman seized the steel mills in 1952. What was new in 1981 was mass permanent replacement, not federal involvement.

    The Wagner Act of 1935 was never repealed. Labor's decline came from the enforcement climate, deindustrialization, and employer tactics rather than from the loss of the underlying statute: a distinction worth stating on an exam.

    Correct. The controllers struck illegally, so the firings were legally defensible, and private employers read the signal: the union share of the workforce fell through the 1980s and 1990s as replacement became a standard tactic in bargaining.

    Federal workers still belong to unions today; PATCO itself was decertified, not unions generally. Federal employees have never had the right to strike, which is what made this particular walkout illegal.

  3. Source: President Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981.

    In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

    The argument in the excerpt is best understood as a response to which of the following?

    Correct. Reagan spoke into inflation near 13 percent, interest rates above 20 percent, a second oil shock, and the hostages in Tehran, after a decade in which Vietnam and Watergate had cut trust in Washington to roughly a quarter of Americans.

    The Cold War had nine years to run when Reagan said this, and his first term raised defense spending sharply. Sourcing questions punish vague dating: name the month, not the decade.

    Abortion and school prayer mattered enormously to the coalition that elected him, but this passage is about economic management and self-rule. Attributing every Reagan statement to the New Right's social agenda ignores what the words actually address.

    Leaving gold in 1971 contributed to the inflation of the decade, but it is one technical cause inside the broader crisis the speech names. The excerpt indicts the size and competence of government, not an exchange-rate regime.

  4. Which of the following best explains the growth of the New Right's political influence between 1972 and 1984?

    The reverse happened: the Republican platform had supported the ERA for decades and dropped that support in 1980. The amendment's defeat in 1982, three states short, was a New Right victory, not a party endorsement.

    Correct. Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, founded in 1979, turned churches into precinct organizations and delivered white evangelical voters to Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

    Union membership fell steadily in this period, and the South was the least unionized region. Sun Belt growth built on defense contracts, air conditioning, and non-union manufacturing is the demographic story here.

    Engel v. Vitale (1962) barred official school prayer. Getting the holding backward removes the grievance: it was the ban, not a permission, that religious conservatives organized against for the next twenty years.

  5. Description of: a photograph taken in Berlin on the night of November 9–10, 1989.

    Dozens of people stand on top of the concrete wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Some hold flags; others chip at the wall with hammers. East German border guards watch from below without intervening, and crowds fill the street on both sides.

    The event shown in the photograph was most directly the result of which of the following?

    The INF Treaty eliminated a class of missiles and allowed on-site inspection; it did not touch the border regime in Berlin. It is evidence that superpower relations were thawing, which is context rather than cause.

    Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, nine months after this night, and the coalition fought in early 1991. The Gulf War is a consequence of the post–Cold War order, not a cause of the Wall's opening.

    Correct. The detail that carries the photograph is the guards standing by. Once Moscow made clear it would not repeat 1956 or 1968, East German officials had no backing for force, and the crowds in Leipzig and Berlin did the rest.

    No NATO operation took place. Germany reunified by negotiation in October 1990 with Soviet consent, which is itself a measure of how much had changed since 1985.

  6. A historian arguing that no single cause ended the Cold War would most likely cite which of the following?

    This is a single-cause claim, and it also overstates the mechanism: the Soviet economy was stagnating for structural reasons well before 1981, including low productivity and dependence on oil exports.

    Afghanistan drained money and legitimacy, but Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 and the union survived two more years. Naming it as the cause substitutes one factor for the combination.

    The Wall opened twenty-nine months after that speech, for reasons that ran through Warsaw, Budapest, Leipzig, and Moscow. Treating a speech as proof of cause is the classic post hoc error on this topic.

    Correct. Multiple variables interacting across different levels (superpower pressure, decisions at the top in Moscow, and mass movements from below) is what earns the complexity point on an essay and what this stem is testing.

  7. Which of the following best describes the significance of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 for United States foreign policy?

    American forces had gone into Lebanon in 1958 and again in 1982–1984, and the Carter Doctrine of 1980 had already declared the Persian Gulf a vital interest. The scale in 1991 was new; the commitment was not.

    Correct. A Security Council authorization that Moscow did not veto was itself the news: for forty years superpower rivalry had frozen the Council, and the coalition of some three dozen nations defined how Washington would act in the 1990s.

    The coalition's mandate was to expel Iraq from Kuwait, and it stopped at that. Saddam Hussein stayed in power until the 2003 invasion: conflating the two wars is the most common error on this question.

    NATO survived the enemy it was built against and enlarged eastward later in the decade. The debate after 1991 was over what alliances were for, not whether to abandon them.

  8. Source: President Bill Clinton, State of the Union address, January 23, 1996.

    We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. … The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.

    The excerpt best reflects which of the following developments of the 1990s?

    Correct. A Democratic president conceding the argument's frame is the point: after the 1994 midterms, Clinton signed welfare reform in August 1996, ending a federal entitlement created in the New Deal. The final sentence is his limit: he keeps a floor while giving up the frame.

    Tax cuts remained central to Republican policy throughout, and the 2001 and 2003 cuts followed. Nothing in the excerpt speaks to the other party's priorities.

    The direction is the reverse. Welfare reform converted an entitlement into capped block grants with work requirements and a five-year limit: a rollback of the Great Society's approach, not a revival.

    Both programs continued and grew; Clinton in fact defended them in the budget standoffs that shut the government down in 1995–1996. Treating "big government is over" as literal misreads a political slogan.

  9. Which of the following best explains the decline of manufacturing employment in the United States after 1980?

    The federal minimum wage lost value to inflation across much of this period and sits below most manufacturing wages anyway. Single-variable explanations of deindustrialization rarely survive contact with the output data.

    Americans bought more manufactured goods than ever; a growing share was imported. Consumption shifting toward services is real but does not explain rising domestic output with falling factory employment.

    Correct. Manufacturing output kept rising while employment fell, which is the fact that rules out a simple collapse in demand: fewer workers made more goods, and the work that remained labor-intensive moved to lower-wage countries.

    Defense procurement did fall in the early 1990s, and some regions felt it sharply, but the decline in factory jobs began in the 1970s, spanned every sector, and continued through the defense buildup after 2001.

  10. Description of: a table showing the region of birth of legal permanent residents admitted to the United States, by decade.

    In the 1950s roughly two-thirds of admissions came from Europe and Canada and fewer than one in ten from Asia. In the 1990s roughly half came from Latin America and the Caribbean, about three in ten from Asia, and about one in seven from Europe.

    The change shown in the table was most directly the result of which of the following?

    The 1924 act produced the earlier pattern, not the later one: quotas pegged to the 1890 census favored northern and western Europe and barred most Asian immigration. The table shows that system being undone.

    Correct. Its sponsors expected European families to dominate the new preference categories; instead chain migration and skill preferences drew the largest flows from Asia and Latin America, reshaping American cities over the next half century.

    The 1986 law legalized about three million people already in the country and penalized employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers. It changed status for people already present rather than the regional sources of new admissions.

    The Patriot Act expanded surveillance and record-gathering authority after September 11, 2001. It postdates the change shown and did not rewrite the admissions preference system.

Short answer

  1. Source: President Ronald Reagan, remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987.

    We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together … General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

    Using the excerpt, answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE perspective about the Cold War expressed in the excerpt.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1979–1987 that led to the perspective expressed in the excerpt.
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific historical development in the period 1989–1991 that contributed to the end of the Cold War.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: the division of Europe is the responsibility of the Soviet government and can be ended by a Soviet decision; freedom and security reinforce rather than threaten each other; public pressure and moral confrontation are legitimate instruments of Cold War policy; reform in the Soviet bloc should be tested by a concrete act. Do not accept: "Reagan wanted the wall to come down" with nothing further; a claim that Reagan was announcing the end of the Cold War.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of the link: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the collapse of détente; the Reagan defense buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative announced in March 1983; the 1983 "evil empire" address; the Solidarity movement in Poland and the martial law imposed in 1981; Gorbachev's accession in March 1985 and the glasnost and perestroika reforms; the Geneva and Reykjavik summits of 1985–1986 and the arms talks under way in 1987. Do not accept: developments outside 1979–1987, or a named event with no explanation of how it shaped the argument.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: Gorbachev's refusal to use force to sustain Eastern European governments, and the revolutions of 1989 in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989; German reunification in October 1990; the failed August 1991 coup in Moscow; the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Do not accept: the INF Treaty of 1987 or other pre-1989 events; "communism failed" with no specific development.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a Reagan argues that the Cold War division of Europe is something the Soviet government chose and could end, and that openness would make the Soviet Union stronger rather than more vulnerable, since he says freedom and security go together. By naming Gorbachev and demanding one concrete act, he treats the Wall as the test of whether Soviet reform is real.

    b Gorbachev's reforms after 1985 led to this argument. He came to power with an economy that could not support both the arms race and its own people, and he responded with glasnost and perestroika and agreed to serious arms negotiations. Reagan's speech is written to push a reformer who was already moving, which is why it offers Gorbachev peace and prosperity if he opens the gate rather than simply denouncing him.

    c The revolutions of 1989 contributed most directly. Gorbachev made clear that Soviet troops would not prop up allied regimes, and once that guarantee was gone, movements such as Solidarity in Poland forced real elections and communist governments fell across the region, culminating in the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Without Soviet force behind them, the governments the Cold War had created could not survive.

  2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

    1. Briefly describe ONE specific way the United States economy changed in the period 1980–2010.
    2. Briefly explain ONE specific cause of the change you described in part (a).
    3. Briefly explain ONE specific way the federal government responded to economic change in the period 1993–2010.
    Your response
    Scoring notes
    • (a) Accept: manufacturing employment fell while service and information work grew; income and wealth became more concentrated at the top; the economy became more globally integrated through trade and offshoring; computing and the commercial internet reshaped work after the mid-1990s; finance grew as a share of the economy and of corporate profits. Do not accept: "the economy got worse" or "there were recessions" with no specific structural change named.
    • (b) Accept, with an explanation of how it produced the change in (a): automation and rising output per worker; containerized shipping and digital communication lowering the cost of distant production; trade agreements such as NAFTA (1994) and the WTO (1995); deregulation of finance and transportation; declining union density after the PATCO firings; lower top marginal tax rates after 1981 and 1986. Do not accept: a cause that does not match the change described in (a), or a cause named with no mechanism.
    • (c) Accept, with an explanation: NAFTA's ratification and the creation of the WTO; the 1996 welfare law replacing AFDC with time-limited block grants; financial deregulation in 1999; the bank rescue and stimulus legislation of 2008–2009 and the Federal Reserve's emergency lending; the Affordable Care Act of 2010; Dodd-Frank financial regulation in 2010. Do not accept: responses dated before 1993 or after 2010, or a law named with no explanation of what it did.
    Show a 3/3 response

    a One change was the shift out of manufacturing. Factory employment fell steadily after 1980, especially in the Midwest and the Northeast, while jobs in services, health care, retail, and information work grew. Manufacturing output itself kept rising, so the change was in who worked in factories, not in whether the country made things.

    b A major cause was the falling cost of producing and moving goods abroad. Container shipping and cheap digital communication let firms run supply chains across borders, and agreements such as NAFTA in 1994 and membership in the WTO in 1995 lowered the tariffs that had protected domestic plants. Automation did the rest, since each remaining worker produced far more than in 1980.

    c In 2008 and 2009 the federal government responded to the financial crisis with emergency intervention. Congress approved a large bank rescue after Lehman Brothers failed, and in 2009 it passed a stimulus package of spending and tax cuts while the Federal Reserve lent heavily to keep credit moving. The scale of the response revived the argument, running back to the New Deal, about how far Washington should go to stabilize a private economy.

DBQ 1 · Period 3 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which the American Revolution changed American society in the period 1775–1800.

Directions

Spend the first fifteen minutes reading the seven documents and planning; write for the next forty-five. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much American society changed and in what respects, and that establishes a line of reasoning. Describe a broader historical context: what the colonial social order looked like before 1775, or what followed after 1800. Use the content of at least four documents to support your argument, and bring in at least one specific piece of evidence that is not in the documents. For at least two documents, explain how the author's point of view, purpose, historical situation, or intended audience is relevant to your argument. Finally, show complexity: qualify your claim, weigh one group against another, or explain how the same revolutionary language produced change in one place and none in another.

Document 1

Source: Continental Congress, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

Document 2

Source: attributed to Philip Dawe, "A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina," satirical mezzotint, published by R. Sayer and J. Bennett, London, March 1775: mocking the fifty-one North Carolina women who signed a non-importation agreement in October 1774.

Image: described

About a dozen women are gathered around a table in a plain interior. One bends over a document that pledges the signers to give up British tea and cloth; several others reach in to add their names. A woman at the left empties a tea container onto the floor, a small child sits unattended beneath the table, and a man leans over the group from behind. The artist draws the women unflatteringly.

Document 3

Source: Abigail Adams to John Adams, a delegate to the Continental Congress, private letter, Braintree, Massachusetts, March 31, 1776 (spelling modernized).

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.

Document 4

Source: Table compiled from state constitutions, statutes, and court decisions ending or restricting slavery, 1777–1804.

StateMeasureDate
Vermont (then an independent republic)Constitution barred slavery for adults1777
PennsylvaniaGradual abolition act; children born after March 1 freed at 281780
MassachusettsCourt decisions held slavery incompatible with the 1780 constitution1781–1783
ConnecticutGradual abolition act; children born after March 1 freed in their twenties1784
Rhode IslandGradual abolition act1784
New YorkGradual emancipation act; children born after July 4 freed at 25 or 281799
New JerseyGradual abolition act1804
States south of PennsylvaniaNo emancipation law; Virginia eased private manumission in 1782:

Note under the table: the first federal census, in 1790, counted about 700,000 enslaved people in the United States, roughly nine in ten of them in the states from Delaware southward.

Document 5

Source: Loyalist refugees embarking for Nova Scotia at New York, November 1783. Line engraving of the kind printed in London for the British press in the years just after the evacuation; artist unknown.

Image: described

At a wharf on the edge of the city, families wait beside trunks, chests, and bundles of bedding. Men, women, and children are handed down into longboats that row out to transport ships riding at anchor in the harbour. A British officer with a list directs the loading while redcoats hold the head of the wharf; the rooftops and steeples of New York rise behind. The refugees are drawn as orderly and respectable, several looking back toward the town.

Document 6

Source: Virginia General Assembly, An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and enacted January 16, 1786.

…that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Document 7

Source: Message from the confederated Indian nations in council at the rapids of the Maumee River to the United States commissioners, August 1793, recorded in the proceedings of the failed treaty negotiation.

Money to us is of no value, and to most of us unknown; and as no consideration whatever can induce us to sell the lands on which we get sustenance for our women and children, we hope we may be allowed to point out a mode by which your settlers may be easily removed, and peace thereby obtained… Divide, therefore, this large sum of money which you have offered to us among these people.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: describe the social order the Revolution inherited (tax-supported established churches in most colonies, coverture merging a wife's legal identity into her husband's, property qualifications for voting, and slavery legal in all thirteen colonies), or the imperial crisis of 1763–1775 that forced colonists to defend their liberties in the language of natural rights. Two or three sentences, tied to the question of how much that order changed.
  • Document groupings that support an argument: ideology becoming law (Docs 1 and 6); women's political action against women's legal status (Docs 2 and 3); the sectional split over slavery (Doc 4 read against the promise of Doc 1); and the people the Revolution cost (Docs 5 and 7). Group the documents by what they show, and never walk through them one at a time. The two images reward the same move as the texts: read Doc 2 and Doc 5 for what the artist wanted a British public to think, not just for what is in the frame.
  • Evidence beyond the documents that fits: the Constitution's three-fifths clause, twenty-year protection of the Atlantic slave trade, and fugitive-labor clause (1787); Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution and other states lowering property qualifications for white men; republican motherhood and the new female academies, and Judith Sargent Murray's essay on the equality of the sexes (1790); Massachusetts keeping tax support for Congregational churches until 1833; Fallen Timbers (1794) and the Treaty of Greenville (1795); the state confiscation acts and the commission Parliament appointed in 1783, which heard more than three thousand Loyalist claims for seized property; the roughly 3,000 Black Loyalists evacuated from New York in 1783. Describe the evidence and use it, do not just name it.
  • Sourcing moves worth making: Doc 2 was printed in London to ridicule, so its purpose is itself the evidence; women's collective politics had become visible enough to be worth mocking. Doc 3 is a private letter to one delegate asking for limits on a husband's legal power, not for the vote, which measures how narrow the opening was. Doc 5 is a British print made for British readers while Parliament was deciding what the Loyalists were owed, so it shows the exiles as orderly, respectable people wronged by the new republic: the departure is real, but the dignity is an argument for compensation. Doc 7 is a collective message from a confederacy that had destroyed two American armies in 1790 and 1791 and was negotiating from strength.
  • A complexity path: argue that change came where it cost property holders least and stalled where it threatened property or household authority, and show the same rights language producing gradual abolition in Pennsylvania in 1780 and federal protection for slavery in 1787; or carry the argument past the period, to the women at Seneca Falls borrowing the Declaration's words in 1848 and to the Haitian revolutionaries who took them seriously after 1791.
Show a 7/7 sample response

Context The society that declared independence had been built around inherited hierarchies: most colonies taxed their inhabitants to support an established church, the common law of coverture merged a wife's legal identity into her husband's, property qualifications limited voting, and slavery was legal from Massachusetts to Georgia. The imperial crisis after 1763 forced colonists to defend their liberties in the language of natural rights, and Paine's plain prose in January 1776 carried it far beyond the men who wrote it. Thesis The Revolution changed American society substantially but unevenly. It destroyed monarchy and religious establishment, widened political participation for white men, and began the legal end of slavery in the North, yet it left the household, the southern plantation, and the dispossession of Native nations intact or strengthened. Change came where it cost property holders little and stopped where it would have cost them a great deal.

Doc evidence Authority itself was redefined. Doc 1 grounds government in consent and in inherent rights and makes rebellion legitimate when a government fails: a standard by which any institution could then be judged. Doc 6 shows that standard becoming statute: Virginia's act of 1786 ended tax support for the established church and barred a man's religious opinions from affecting his civil capacities. Outside evidence Other states rewrote their governments in the same spirit: Pennsylvania's constitution of 1776 gave the vote to every taxpaying white man. The limit shows here too: Massachusetts went on taxing its citizens for Congregational ministers until 1833.

Doc evidence For women, practice changed faster than law. Doc 2 shows North Carolina women signing a non-importation agreement: a political act by people with no legal standing to act politically. Sourcing The print was published in London to ridicule them, and the ridicule is the evidence: women's collective politics had become visible enough to be worth mocking. Doc 3 shows where that expansion stopped. Sourcing Abigail Adams wrote privately to a single delegate, and asked not for the vote but for limits on the unlimited power coverture gave husbands; the request was modest, and it was refused. Outside evidence What emerged instead was republican motherhood: the claim that the republic depended on mothers raising virtuous citizens justified female academies such as the Young Ladies' Academy, opened in Philadelphia in 1787, and Judith Sargent Murray argued in 1790 that women's apparent inferiority came from unequal education. Coverture survived untouched.

Doc evidence Slavery shows the pattern most sharply. Doc 4 records a real revolution north of Pennsylvania: Vermont barred adult slavery in 1777, Pennsylvania passed gradual abolition in 1780, Massachusetts courts ended slavery by 1783, and New York followed in 1799, the first emancipation laws in the Atlantic world. But the table's last row carries the argument: no state south of Pennsylvania passed such a law, and about 700,000 people were enslaved in 1790, nine in ten of them in the South. Even there change was gradual by design: a Pennsylvania child born in 1781 served until 1809. Outside evidence The Constitution of 1787 then gave slavery national protection it had never had under the empire: three-fifths representation, a twenty-year guarantee for the Atlantic trade, and a clause requiring the return of people who escaped across state lines.

Doc evidence Two groups experienced the Revolution as loss. Doc 5 shows Loyalist families on a New York wharf in November 1783, handed down into boats for transports bound for Nova Scotia; some sixty thousand Loyalists left, and a colonial elite was removed from American society. Sourcing Made in London while Parliament decided what they were owed, the print draws them as orderly, respectable victims rather than the losing side of a civil war, but the departure is real, and American confiscation laws produced it. Outside evidence Parliament's 1783 claims commission heard over three thousand claims for seized property. Sourcing Doc 7 is a collective message written from strength in 1793, after the confederated nations had destroyed two American armies in 1790 and 1791, and its refusal of money states the issue exactly: the United States claimed by treaty with Britain land that Native nations had never sold. Outside evidence Force settled it: Fallen Timbers in 1794 produced the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and the cession of most of present-day Ohio.

Complexity The pattern is less hypocrisy than arithmetic. The natural-rights language of Doc 1 produced the emancipation laws in Doc 4 and the statute in Doc 6, where the cost fell on a church or on a small number of owners, and produced nothing where it would have required planters to surrender their largest asset or settlers to surrender land. Where change was cheap it was radical; where it was expensive it was postponed and then protected in 1787. The Revolution's largest legacy was therefore one its leaders did not intend: a standard that Loyalists, women, enslaved people, and Native nations could all turn back on it. Adams was refused in 1776, but the women at Seneca Falls rewrote Doc 1 in 1848, and the line Pennsylvania drew in 1780 had already begun to make slavery sectional rather than national.

Measured against 1775, the society of 1800 was more republican and more religiously free: transformed for white men, altered at the edges for women, and divided over slavery rather than united in it. For Loyalists and for Native nations, the Revolution confirmed their losses rather than relieved them.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The last three sentences of the introduction claim change that was "substantial but uneven," name what changed and what did not, and give the reason: change came where it cost property holders little. That is a defensible claim about extent with a line of reasoning the body then follows.
  • Contextualization (1): The opening sentences describe the social order the Revolution inherited (established churches, coverture, property qualifications for voting, slavery legal in all thirteen colonies), and the natural-rights language the imperial crisis after 1763 put into circulation. That is several sentences of relevant context, not a passing reference.
  • Evidence from the documents (1 of 2): Well beyond the required three: the essay uses the content of all seven documents to address the prompt, and describes each accurately; including the harder ones, the two images (the London satire in Doc 2, the embarkation print in Doc 5) and the table's southern row in Doc 4.
  • Evidence from the documents (2 of 2): Each document supports the argument instead of being summarized. Docs 1 and 6 show principle becoming statute; Docs 2 and 3 separate women's political practice from women's legal status; Doc 4 supplies the sectional limit; Docs 5 and 7 supply the people the Revolution cost.
  • Evidence beyond the documents (1): Five pieces of outside evidence are described and used, any one of which would earn the point: Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution and Massachusetts's establishment lasting to 1833; republican motherhood, the Young Ladies' Academy (1787), and Murray (1790); the Constitution's three-fifths, slave-trade, and fugitive clauses (1787); the state confiscation acts and the 1783 Loyalist claims commission with its three thousand-plus claims; Fallen Timbers (1794) and the Treaty of Greenville (1795).
  • Analysis: sourcing (1): Four documents are sourced, two more than the rubric requires. Doc 2: purpose and audience: a London print meant to ridicule, which is itself proof that women's politics had become visible. Doc 3: situation: a private letter to one delegate, asking only for limits on coverture. Doc 5: purpose and audience: a London print made for British readers while Parliament debated compensation, which is why the exiles are drawn as dignified victims. Doc 7: situation: a confederacy negotiating after destroying two American armies.
  • Analysis: complexity (1): One explanatory argument, change followed cost, is sustained across politics, religion, gender, slavery, Loyalists, and Native nations rather than asserted once. The essay qualifies its own claim by showing the same rights language producing gradual abolition in 1780 and constitutional protection for slavery in 1787, and it connects the period forward to 1848. It also uses all seven documents and sources four, which is a second route to the point.

DBQ 2 · Period 4 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which the Market Revolution changed the lives of women in the United States in the period 1800–1848.

Directions

Fifteen minutes to read the seven documents, forty-five to write. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much the Market Revolution changed women's lives, and for which women, and that establishes a line of reasoning. Place the question in a broader context (the household economy before 1815, the transport and factory changes that ended it, or the reform politics that followed 1848). Use the content of at least four documents as evidence for your argument, and bring in at least one specific piece of evidence that is not in the documents. For at least two documents, explain how the point of view, purpose, historical situation, or audience matters to your argument. Finally, show complexity: the documents point in opposite directions (wage work for some women, a sphere without wages for others), and the strongest essays explain why one economic change produced both, then qualify the claim by class, region, and race.

Document 1

Source: Domestic Manufacture: a hand-colored engraving of the kind printed in American almanacs, gift books, and household magazines in the 1820s, showing the inside of a New England farm kitchen. Engraver unidentified; northeastern United States, about 1825. Described, not quoted.

Image: described

One room holds the whole business of making cloth. At the left a woman stands at a great spinning wheel, one arm out to the rim, a basket of carded wool at her feet. Behind her a second woman sits at a hand loom built into the corner, a shuttle in her hand. A girl winds yarn on a swift beside the hearth, where a kettle hangs. A man appears only outdoors, small, through the open doorway. The title is engraved beneath the picture in italic capitals.

Document 2

Source: Table of hands employed in cotton mills, compiled from the returns printed in Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States (the McLane Report), collected by the Secretary of the Treasury and transmitted to the House of Representatives, 1833. Described, not quoted.

Each mill reports its capital, its spindles and looms, and its hands in separate columns for men, women, and children, with average wages beneath. Across the Massachusetts cotton returns the women's column is several times the men's, at the largest Lowell corporations about four of every five hands. The men's wage figures run well above the women's, and the posts listed for men are overseer, machinist, and watchman.

Document 3

Source: Sarah M. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman, Boston, 1838. Grimké, a South Carolinian who had moved north and lectured for the American Anti-Slavery Society, first published the letters in the reform press in 1837.

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

Document 4

Source: Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, Boston, 1841.

The success of democratic institutions, as is conceded by all, depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people. … It is equally conceded, that the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young is committed mainly to the female hand. The mother forms the character of the future man; the sister bends the fibres that are hereafter to be the forest tree.

Document 5

Source: Hand-colored fashion plate (steel engraving), Godey's Lady's Book, Philadelphia, 1844. The monthly, published by Louis Godey and edited by Sarah Josepha Hale, carried fiction, sheet music, and household advice to tens of thousands of subscribers. Described, not quoted.

Image: described

A steel engraving, colored by hand, shows three women and a small child in a parlor. The women wear tightly fitted bodices, sloping shoulders, and wide skirts over layers of petticoats; one holds a book, another arranges flowers. A carpet, draped curtains, and a mantel clock fill the background. The caption names each garment and the month, so readers or their dressmakers could copy them.

Document 6

Source: Petitions for a ten-hour law and the hearings of the Massachusetts House committee on hours of labor, Boston, February 1845. Described, not quoted.

About two thousand Lowell workers, most of them women, signed petitions asking the legislature to limit the working day to ten hours. Organized by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association under Sarah Bagley, the operatives testified before the committee that they worked roughly thirteen to fourteen hours, took half an hour for meals, and breathed air fouled by oil lamps. The committee declined to recommend a law.

Document 7

Source: Declaration of Sentiments, Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, July 1848.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. … He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: describe the household economy Doc 1 pictures and the developments that ended it; Fulton's steamboat (1807), the power loom at Waltham (1814), the Erie Canal (1825), and the cheap factory cloth that made home weaving pointless. Two or three sentences that explain how production left the house, not a phrase. Looking forward works too: married women's property acts and the long fight for suffrage after 1848.
  • Document groupings that support an argument: wage work and the bargaining it produced (Docs 2 and 6); the separate sphere and the market that sold it (Docs 4 and 5, with Doc 1 as the "before"); the political claim that grew out of both (Docs 3 and 7). One body paragraph per group makes the argument visible, and the groups should answer each other rather than sit side by side. The two images are a pairing in themselves: Doc 1's kitchen is full of the tools that make cloth and Doc 5's parlor is full of the cloth, so setting one against the other measures the change in a single move.
  • Evidence beyond the documents that fits: the Lowell turn-outs of 1834 and 1836, when hundreds of operatives walked out over a wage cut and a boardinghouse rent increase; Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (1821) and Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke (1837), which trained women for the new paid work of teaching; New York's Married Women's Property Act of April 1848; Irish famine immigrants replacing Yankee operatives after 1845; enslaved women carried into the cotton South by the domestic slave trade. Describe the example and use it: naming it earns nothing.
  • Sourcing moves worth making: Doc 1 is a print made to be sold, in the decade when mill cloth was already displacing home weaving, so its orderly, well-lit kitchen shows what buyers wanted to admire in household manufacture rather than an ordinary workday; Doc 2 was gathered by the Treasury while Congress fought over the tariff, so manufacturers had every reason to report an orderly, well-paid workforce; Doc 4's author ran female seminaries and wanted housekeeping and teaching treated as trained professions, so the book argues for a status rather than reporting one; Doc 5 is an advertisement, sold to women with money and servants, showing an ideal day rather than a typical one; Doc 7 was written by mostly white, middle-class reformers schooled in abolition, which explains both its natural-rights form and its silences. Two explained sourcing moves earn the point; four or five, sustained, help earn complexity. An image is often the easiest place to source well, because who paid for the picture visibly shapes what is in it.
  • A complexity path: show that the two halves of the evidence are one process (the same removal of production from the household that sent farm daughters to the mills (Docs 2, 6) defined the middle-class wife out of paid work and into the moral sphere of Docs 4 and 5), and then qualify the whole argument by class, region, and race: for enslaved women in the cotton South the same market meant more field labor and sale away from family, and for farm women like the one in Doc 1 the spinning wheel gave way to store cloth without giving way to wages or rights.
Show a 7/7 sample response

Context In 1800 most American women worked in a household that made what it used. Doc 1 is that world in miniature: a wheel, a loom, and a winding swift in one kitchen, and the only man outside the door. Within a generation it came apart. The Boston Manufacturing Company put spinning and weaving under one roof at Waltham in 1814, the Erie Canal slashed the cost of moving goods after 1825, and buying cloth became cheaper than weaving it; production left the house. Thesis The Market Revolution therefore changed women's lives to a great extent, but in two opposite directions at once: it pulled unmarried farm daughters into wage labor, where they learned to bargain as a group, while it defined married middle-class women out of production and into a sphere of moral influence the market itself sold back to them. Both taught women to act collectively, which is why the period ends in an organized demand for rights, though for enslaved and most farm women it changed the work without the status.

Doc evidence For daughters of struggling New England farms the change was a cash wage. In Doc 2 women are about four of every five hands at the largest Lowell corporations, while men hold the supervisory posts and draw markedly higher pay. Sourcing The Treasury gathered those returns for Congress during the 1833 tariff fight, so manufacturers had reason to look orderly and generous: trust the counts of hands more than the impression of conditions. Doc evidence Doc 6 supplies those conditions: two thousand Lowell workers, most of them women, petitioned for a ten-hour day in 1845 and testified to thirteen- and fourteen-hour shifts and air fouled by lamp oil. The petition is itself the measure of change: operatives had become a constituency the legislature had to answer. Outside evidence They had been practicing for a decade: in 1834 and 1836 Lowell women turned out, parading through the streets against a wage cut and then higher boardinghouse rents.

Doc evidence For women whose husbands prospered in the same economy, change ran the other way. Doc 4 tells young women that the moral character of the next generation "is committed mainly to the female hand," making the home a workshop of citizenship precisely because it had stopped being a workshop of cloth. Sourcing Beecher was arguing, not reporting: she ran a female seminary and wanted housekeeping and teaching treated as professions, so the treatise promotes an ideal rather than describing households. Doc evidence Doc 5 shows that ideal being sold: three women in a carpeted parlor in skirts no mill hand could work in, every garment captioned for a dressmaker to copy. Set the pictures side by side: Doc 1's room is full of the tools that make cloth, Doc 5's is full of the cloth. Sourcing Both were engraved to be sold, which makes the pair useful: Doc 1 offered an 1820s buyer a tidy, well-lit kitchen just as mill cloth was making that kitchen unnecessary, and Doc 5 offered her daughter the parlor to buy instead. Domesticity reached the middle-class home as a purchase.

Doc evidence The two experiences met in politics. Doc 3, an abolitionist lecturer writing in 1838, asks "no favors" and refuses to surrender the claim to equality. Doc 7's grievances ten years later are economic before they are political: a married woman is "civilly dead," loses "all right in property, even to the wages she earns," and finds the profitable employments monopolized, which makes sense only where women were already earning. Sourcing Its authors were mostly white, middle-class northeasterners trained in antislavery organizing; copying the Declaration of Independence forced readers to grant women ground they already granted men, and that point of view explains the near-silence about the mill hands of Doc 6. Outside evidence Nor was the claim only rhetoric: Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (1821) and Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke (1837) trained women for the new paid profession of teaching, and in April 1848 New York passed a Married Women's Property Act letting a wife keep property she brought to a marriage.

Complexity The documents look contradictory only until one sees that a single change produced both halves. Taking production out of the household freed the farm daughter of Doc 2 to sell her labor and stripped the wife of Docs 4 and 5 of the productive work that had justified her authority; the mills that hired the first wove the cloth the second bought. But extent depends on which woman is asked, and no document here shows the market's other female labor force. The cotton gin and new Deep South land drove a domestic slave trade that carried roughly a million people out of the Upper South after 1808; the women among them gained neither wages nor a sphere, only longer field hours and the risk of sale away from their children. Nor did the women of Doc 1 vanish by 1848: the wheel fell silent as store cloth arrived, but their days, their legal standing, and their exclusion from the vote did not move.

Measured by wages earned, petitions signed, and rights claimed, the change was dramatic, and in both directions for one reason: the market pulled production out of the home. Measured across the country, it reached Lowell and the parlor first and most farms hardly at all.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The last two sentences of the introduction take a position on extent ("to a great extent, but … in two opposite directions at once"), name the two groups of women and the outcome each experienced, and flag the qualification that follows: a line of reasoning the body then follows, not a restatement of the prompt.
  • Contextualization (1): Four sentences describe the household economy of 1800 and the transport and factory developments that ended it: Waltham in 1814, the Erie Canal after 1825, and the cheap cloth that made home weaving pointless. That is a described broader context, not a passing phrase.
  • Evidence from the documents (1 of 2): All seven documents are used for their content: the wheel, loom, and winding swift in the kitchen of Doc 1, the sex ratio and wage gap in Doc 2, Grimké's refusal to ask favors in Doc 3, Beecher's charge to the "female hand" in Doc 4, the parlor and captioned garments in Doc 5, the 1845 petition and testimony in Doc 6, and the property-and-wages grievances of Doc 7: well past the three required.
  • Evidence from the documents (2 of 2): Each document is used to support the argument rather than summarized. Docs 2 and 6 establish wage work and the bargaining it produced; Docs 4 and 5 establish the sphere and the market that sold it, with Doc 1 as the "before" the other two are measured against; Docs 3 and 7 show the political claim growing out of both, with Doc 7's economic grievances read as evidence that women were already earning.
  • Evidence beyond the documents (1): Two examples are described and put to work: the Lowell turn-outs of 1834 and 1836, with their causes (a wage cut, a rent increase), used to show collective action predating Doc 6; and the female seminaries plus New York's April 1848 property act, used to show the claim in Doc 7 translating into schooling and law.
  • Analysis: sourcing (1): Five documents are sourced with a "so what," and the two strongest moves are on the images. Doc 1: an engraving made to be sold in the 1820s, so the orderly kitchen shows what buyers wanted to admire in household manufacture as mill cloth displaced it, not a typical workday. Doc 5: a commercial plate aimed at buyers, so domesticity arrives as a purchase. Doc 2: collected by the Treasury during the tariff fight, so its wage and condition figures are self-interested. Doc 4: the author ran a female seminary and was promoting a status, so the text argues rather than reports. Doc 7: white middle-class abolitionist authorship explains both its borrowed form and its silence about mill hands. Two would earn the point; five sustains the complexity argument.
  • Analysis: complexity (1): The fifth paragraph explains the nuance that holds the essay together, one economic change caused both the wage work and the separate sphere, and then qualifies the argument with evidence across class, region, and race: enslaved women moved by the domestic slave trade after 1808 and farm women whose legal status did not shift. The qualification is developed across a paragraph and carried into the conclusion, not dropped in as a single "however."

DBQ 3 · Period 5 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which Reconstruction changed the lives of African Americans in the South in the period 1865–1877.

Directions

Fifteen minutes to read the seven documents, forty-five to write. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much Reconstruction changed African American life and in which areas (law, politics, labor, family, safety), and that sets up a line of reasoning. Describe a broader historical context beyond the prompt's years. Use the content of at least four documents to support your argument, and bring in at least one piece of specific evidence not in the documents, described rather than named. For at least two documents, explain how the author's point of view, purpose, historical situation, or intended audience matters to the argument. Finally, show a complex understanding: weigh change against continuity, corroborate or qualify your claim with evidence, or explain how the answer differs depending on whether you measure 1865, 1870, or 1877.

Document 1

Source: Constitution of the United States, Amendment XV, passed by Congress in February 1869 and ratified March 30, 1870.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Document 2

Source: Mississippi, “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for other Purposes,” November 1865: the first of the Black Codes. The same legislature passed a vagrancy act and an apprentice law at the same session; the excerpt is from the sections governing labor contracts.

All contracts for labor made with freedmen … shall be in writing … and if the laborer shall quit the service of the employer before the expiration of his term of service, without good cause, he shall forfeit his wages for that year up to the time of quitting. … Every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman who shall have quit the service … without good cause.

Document 3

Source: Wood engraving of a school for freedpeople, of the kind the Northern illustrated weeklies (Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper) cut for their subscribers between 1866 and 1868; artist unsigned. Described as a composite of the genre rather than as one identified print.

Image: described

A long schoolroom with benches in rows, nearly every seat taken. The pupils range from small children at the front to grown men and women at the back, several of the adults still in work clothes; a few hold spellers or primers open on their laps. A teacher (in these prints sometimes a young white woman sent by a freedmen's aid society, sometimes a Black teacher) stands at a blackboard with a pointer. Well-dressed visitors watch from the doorway.

Document 4

Source: Sharecropping agreement of the kind recorded across the cotton South and reviewed by Freedmen's Bureau agents, 1867–1870, the standard terms, summarized.

The landowner supplies the land, a cabin, seed, a mule, and tools; the family supplies its labor for the year and divides the crop with the owner, commonly one-third to one-half to the family. Food and supplies are bought on credit at the owner's store against the coming harvest. The owner keeps the accounts, the cotton may not be sold until the debt is settled, and the family may not leave before the contract year ends.

Document 5

Source: Testimony taken before the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, United States Congress, 1871; described.

The committee questioned hundreds of witnesses in 1871. Black witnesses (among them Abram Colby of the Georgia legislature and Elias Hill, a South Carolina minister and teacher) described masked men who came to their homes at night, threatened and assaulted them, and ordered them to stop voting the Republican ticket, to resign office, or to give up teaching. Several identified their attackers as neighbors: farmers, a doctor, a lawyer. Many Black voters afterward stayed away from the polls.

Document 6

Source: Representative Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina, speech in the House of Representatives supporting the civil rights bill, January 6, 1874 (Congressional Record). Elliott, born free and educated abroad, had been elected from a Reconstruction district; the bill would bar racial exclusion from inns, theaters, public conveyances, and juries.

I regret, sir, that the dark hue of my skin may lend a color to the imputation that I am controlled by motives personal to myself in my advocacy of this great measure of national justice. Sir, the motive that impels me is restricted by no such narrow boundary, but is as broad as your Constitution.

Document 7

Source: Thomas Nast, “This Is a White Man's Government,” wood-engraved political cartoon, Harper's Weekly, September 5, 1868.

Image: described

Three men stand with hands joined, feet on the chest of a fallen Black Union soldier reaching for a ballot box beyond his grasp. On the left an Irish American ward politician; in the center a former Confederate officer with a knife labeled for the Lost Cause; on the right a Northern financier with a wallet. A burning orphan asylum for Black children stands behind them. The caption quotes the 1868 Democratic platform calling the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional and void.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: what the four million people freed in 1865 were emancipated from (a legal regime in which marriage, literacy, property, and testimony in court were denied by statute), or the wartime steps that made freedom a fact before it was a law: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), Black enlistment in the Union army, Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 (January 1865), and the Thirteenth Amendment. Two or three sentences, not a clause.
  • Document groupings that support an argument: put the documents of new legal standing and of the institutions freedpeople built for themselves together (Docs 1, 3, 6) against the documents of continued economic control (Docs 2, 4), and use the documents of violence and Northern politics (Docs 5, 7) as the hinge that explains why the first group failed to hold. A groupings-based structure beats a document-by-document walk every time.
  • Evidence beyond the documents that fits: Johnson's pardons restoring confiscated land to former owners, which killed the Sherman land grants; roughly two thousand Black men in office, including Senators Hiram Revels (1870) and Blanche K. Bruce (1875) and a Black majority in South Carolina's 1868 constitutional convention; the Enforcement Acts of 1870–71 and Grant's suspension of habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties in 1871; the Freedmen's Bureau superintendent of schools counting more than four thousand schools and close to a quarter of a million pupils by 1870, with freedpeople paying tuition and raising schoolhouses where federal money ran out; the explosive growth of independent Black churches such as the AME; Slaughterhouse (1873), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), and the Compromise of 1877. Describe the evidence; naming it earns nothing.
  • Sourcing moves worth making: Doc 2's historical situation, a legislature elected under Johnson's lenient plan, months after surrender, whose purpose was to rebuild a bound labor force before Congress returned; Doc 6's audience and purpose; Elliott arguing to a House that had to be persuaded and to newspaper readers beyond it, which is why he opens by anticipating the charge of self-interest; Doc 5's purpose, a Republican-led committee assembling a public record to justify federal enforcement, and witnesses giving evidence at real personal risk; Doc 7's audience; Northern Republican readers in an election year; Doc 3's audience and purpose, an engraving cut for the subscribers of a Northern weekly that wanted them to keep paying for the Bureau and the freedmen's aid societies, which is why the scene is orderly and hopeful, while the spread of ages on the benches is the detail no one had a motive to invent. Sourcing an image is usually the easiest place to earn this point: ask who drew it, for which readers, and what that made them show.
  • A complexity path: separate the domains. What freedpeople built for themselves (reunited families, legal marriage, independent churches, schools (Doc 3)) survived the retreat; what depended on federal enforcement (the vote, officeholding, equal access (Docs 1, 6)) was stripped after 1877; what never changed at all was the ownership of land (Docs 2, 4), which is why the rest proved so fragile. Or run the same argument chronologically: 1865, 1870, and 1877 give three different answers to "to what extent," and saying so with evidence is the strongest move available on this prompt.
Show a 7/7 sample response

Context The four million people freed by 1865 had lived under laws that gave their marriages no standing, allowed their children to be sold away, and made teaching them to read a crime in most slave states. Freedom arrived in stages (the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the roughly 180,000 Black men who served in the Union army and navy, the Thirteenth Amendment of December 1865), so that emancipation was settled when Reconstruction began, but its content was not. Thesis Reconstruction transformed African American life in law, politics, and the institutions freedpeople built for themselves, but barely touched their economic position; because the political gains rested on federal enforcement rather than on land, most were reversed within a decade. How great the change looks depends on what is measured, and when.

Doc evidence In law the change was revolutionary. The Fifteenth Amendment (Doc 1) barred any state from denying the vote for race or "previous condition of servitude" and gave Congress power to enforce the ban, making the federal government the guarantor of a Black man's ballot. Outside evidence Under the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 freedmen registered and voted in huge numbers, sending a Black majority to South Carolina's 1868 constitutional convention and putting roughly two thousand Black men into office, among them Hiram Revels, seated in the Senate in 1870. Robert Elliott (Doc 6) argued on the House floor that the Constitution obliged the nation to end racial exclusion from theaters, railroads, and juries. Sourcing His audience explains the opening, which anticipates the charge that "the dark hue of my skin" makes him an interested party: speaking to colleagues who needed persuading and to Northern readers whose enthusiasm was cooling, he claims the Constitution, not a grievance.

Doc evidence Freedpeople also built their own institutions, and the schoolroom engraving (Doc 3) shows it: benches filled front to back, small children in the first rows and grown men and women in work clothes behind them. Sourcing A print like this was cut for the subscribers of a Northern weekly that wanted them to keep funding the Bureau and the freedmen's aid societies, so the scene is composed to reassure. What the artist had no motive to invent is the spread of ages: adults whom state law had forbidden to read were learning beside children. Outside evidence The Bureau's superintendent of schools counted more than four thousand schools and nearly a quarter of a million pupils by 1870, freedpeople paying tuition and raising schoolhouses themselves; the same impulse planted independent African Methodist Episcopal congregations across the South and drove a mass effort to reunite families broken by sale and legalize marriages.

Doc evidence Economically, the continuity is startling. Mississippi's Black Code (Doc 2) required written year-long labor contracts, made quitting cost a full year's wages, and let any white person seize and return a laborer who left. Sourcing Its situation is the point: it was passed in November 1865 by a legislature elected under Andrew Johnson's lenient plan, while Congress was out of session, by men who assumed the old order could be restored intact. Congress struck the codes down with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but the labor system they wanted arrived anyway by private contract. The sharecropping agreement (Doc 4) traded land, a cabin, seed, and a mule for half the crop and a year of bound labor, with supplies bought on credit at the owner's store and the accounts kept by him. Outside evidence That followed from the collapse of land reform: Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 of January 1865 settled freedpeople on Sea Island land, but Johnson's pardons restored the acreage to its former owners within the year, leaving the Bureau supervising contracts instead of distributing farms.

Complexity Violence links the two halves of the argument: it converted economic power back into political power. The 1871 congressional testimony (Doc 5) describes masked night riders ordering Black voters, officeholders, and teachers to stop (attackers identified as local farmers, a doctor, a lawyer), and witnesses who reported that turnout collapsed afterward. Sourcing That record was gathered by a Republican-led committee whose purpose was to justify federal intervention, which is what makes it revealing: the party in power was conceding that the Fifteenth Amendment could not enforce itself. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts of 1870–71, and Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, breaking the Klan there. But Nast's 1868 cartoon (Doc 7) had already drawn the coalition that would prevail, its Black veteran reaching past three joined enemies for a ballot box he cannot touch. After the Panic of 1873, Slaughterhouse the same year, and United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment restrained states but not private mobs, the Compromise of 1877 ended federal protection.

Complexity The extent of the change depends on the yardstick and the date. In 1865 a freedman in Mississippi was bound by law to an employer; in 1870 he voted, and men like him sat in Congress; by 1877 he owned no land and could be kept from the polls. Reconstruction permanently changed the Constitution and what freedpeople built for themselves: church, school, family. It temporarily changed who held political power. It never changed who held the land, which is why the rest proved so easy to take back.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The last two sentences of the introduction make a defensible, evaluative claim: transformation in law, politics, and self-built institutions; almost none in economics; reversal within a decade because the gains rested on enforcement rather than land, and name the yardstick problem the essay then works through. It is a line of reasoning, not a restatement of the prompt.
  • Contextualization (1): The opening two sentences describe the legal regime of slavery that emancipation ended and the wartime stages of freedom (1863 Proclamation, Black enlistment, the Thirteenth Amendment): developments before and at the edge of the period, in more than a passing phrase.
  • Evidence from the documents (1 of 2): The content of all seven documents is used accurately: the Fifteenth Amendment's enforcement clause (Doc 1), the Black Code's contract and recapture provisions (Doc 2), the freedmen's schoolroom engraving with its pupils of every age (Doc 3), the sharecropping terms (Doc 4), the 1871 testimony (Doc 5), Elliott's speech (Doc 6), and Nast's cartoon (Doc 7).
  • Evidence from the documents (2 of 2): The documents are grouped to support the argument rather than summarized in turn: Docs 1, 3, and 6 carry the claim of transformation; Docs 2 and 4 carry the claim of economic continuity; Docs 5 and 7 explain why the first group did not hold.
  • Evidence beyond the documents (1): Five pieces, each described and used: the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the roughly two thousand Black officeholders, including Revels in 1870; the Bureau superintendent's count of more than four thousand schools and nearly a quarter of a million pupils by 1870, paid for in part by freedpeople themselves; the spread of independent AME congregations and the drive to reunite families and legalize marriages; Special Field Orders No. 15 and Johnson's pardons returning the land; the Enforcement Acts, Grant's 1871 suspension of habeas corpus in South Carolina, Slaughterhouse, Cruikshank, and the Compromise of 1877.
  • Analysis: sourcing (1): Four documents are sourced, not two. Doc 6 is read through audience and purpose (persuading colleagues and cooling Northern readers, hence the pre-emptive answer to the charge of self-interest); Doc 2 through its historical situation (a Johnson-era legislature acting before Congress returned); Doc 3 through the audience and purpose of an illustrated weekly selling the Bureau's schools to Northern subscribers, which is why the essay trusts the ages on the benches rather than the composure of the scene; Doc 5 through the committee's purpose of building a case for enforcement.
  • Analysis: complexity (1): Sustained, not a phrase. The essay separates variables (law and politics against labor and land, and what freedpeople built themselves against what depended on federal power) argues that violence is the mechanism converting economic dominance back into political control, and closes by showing that 1865, 1870, and 1877 yield three different answers to "to what extent." Using all seven documents and sourcing four reinforces the same point.

DBQ 4 · Periods 6–7 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which industrialization changed the relationship between workers and employers in the United States in the period 1865–1900.

Directions

Fifteen minutes to read the seven documents, forty-five to write. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much the relationship changed, and in what respects it did not, with a line of reasoning the body paragraphs follow. Contextualize with the work world that industry replaced or with the forces that built the new one. Use the content of at least four documents as evidence for your argument, not as a list. Bring in at least one specific piece of evidence that is not in the documents and explain how it supports the argument. For at least two documents, explain how the point of view, purpose, historical situation, or audience matters to the claim you are making with it. Earn complexity by weighing change against continuity, by showing that the relationship changed in more than one direction at once, or by using all seven documents and sourcing four.

Document 1

Source: Membership certificate of a local assembly of the Knights of Labor; colored lithograph, of the kind issued to members during the order's growth in the 1880s.

Image: described

Inside an ornate printed border, allegorical figures of Labor and Justice stand on either side of a blank panel left for the member's name and assembly number. Small vignettes ring the panel: a forge, a plow, a printing press, a mason at a wall. Clasped hands appear below. Banner lettering across the top demands eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will; a scroll beneath carries the order's motto, that an injury to one is the concern of all.

Document 2

Source: Testimony of John Morrison, a New York City machinist, before the U.S. Senate Committee upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, 1883. Summarized, not quoted.

Morrison tells the senators that new machinery has broken the machinist's trade into subdivisions, so that a man now repeats one operation and is no longer a machinist in the old sense, and that apprenticeship has nearly disappeared. He describes wages set by the firm without negotiation, work that stops for months, and shops so large that a hand never sees the owner. Asked why more men do not organize, he answers that they fear discharge and blacklisting.

Document 3

Source: Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, June 1889.

We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

The rest of the essay argues that the millionaire holds his surplus as a trustee for the community and should give it away in his own lifetime (for libraries, parks, and universities) rather than leave it to heirs or surrender it in wages or taxes.

Document 4

Source: Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, address "What Does the Working Man Want?", Louisville, Kentucky, May 1, 1890.

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.

Elsewhere in the address Gompers defends the eight-hour day as a practical, immediate demand and argues that unions of skilled workers should bargain with employers over wages and hours rather than attempt to replace the wage system.

Document 5

Source: The strike at the Carnegie Steel works, Homestead, Pennsylvania; wood engraving published in Harper's Weekly, July 1892.

Image: described

A full-page engraving looks across the Monongahela River at the Homestead mill. Two barges carrying armed private guards hired by the company are at the works' landing; several hundred locked-out steelworkers and townspeople line the bank behind a barricade of steel beams, some armed, others signaling to the crowd behind them. Smoke rises from the stacks of the plant. The caption names the guards, the company's manager, and the locked-out members of the Amalgamated Association.

Document 6

Source: Justice David J. Brewer, opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court, In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895), upholding the contempt conviction of Eugene V. Debs for violating a federal injunction against the Pullman boycott.

The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails. If the emergency arises, the army of the Nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the Nation to compel obedience to its laws.

Document 7

Source: Strikes and lockouts in the United States, 1881–1900; table compiled from the annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. Description of the data.

One row per year gives the number of strikes, the number of establishments affected, and the number of workers involved. The annual count of strikes rises from roughly 470 in 1881 to more than 1,400 in 1886, the year of the eight-hour campaign, and stays above one thousand in most years of the 1890s; the two decades together record over twenty thousand strikes involving several million workers. Wages and hours are the leading stated causes throughout.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the small-shop, apprenticeship world of artisan labor before the Civil War, in which the employer worked beside a few journeymen; or the forces that replaced it; Bessemer steel from the 1870s, the transcontinental rail network completed in 1869, the corporation and its managers, and roughly twelve million immigrants arriving between 1870 and 1900 to fill the new mills.
  • Document groupings that support an argument: labor's own picture of what it wanted (printed for members in Doc 1, spoken to a crowd in Doc 4) against the employer's view of the same order (Doc 3); the conditions that produced the demands (Docs 2 and 7); and the way conflict was finally settled, by force and by law (Docs 5 and 6). A stronger essay also sets Doc 1 against Doc 4 to show organized labor narrowing its aims after 1886: a certificate that sets the trades side by side and asks for eight hours and mutual obligation, against a federation of skilled craftsmen bargaining over wages and hours.
  • Evidence beyond the documents that fits: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and Hayes's use of federal troops; the Knights' full program (an end to child and convict labor, equal pay for equal work, producer cooperatives to replace the wage system) none of which is legible on the certificate in Doc 1; Haymarket (1886) and the collapse of the Knights; Frick's lockout at Homestead and the militia that reopened the mill nonunion; the Pullman company town and the 1893 wage cuts made without rent cuts; the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) turned against the American Railway Union; Carnegie's vertical integration; AFL membership near half a million by 1900.
  • Sourcing moves worth making: the two images repay sourcing most. Doc 1 was printed by the order for its own members to frame at home, so it shows no strike and no employer: its purpose is to make belonging feel dignified, and the trades pictured side by side advertise a union open to every craft. Doc 5 ran in a national illustrated weekly, whose audience turned one firm's lockout into a public spectacle. Also available: Carnegie's purpose and audience in a magazine of the propertied, three years before Homestead (Doc 3); the historical situation of a Senate investigation opened in the shadow of 1877 and of a witness testifying under oath (Doc 2); Gompers speaking to a movement audience on May Day during the eight-hour campaign (Doc 4); the Court's institutional purpose in Doc 6; protecting commerce and the mails, not judging the strike.
  • A complexity path: argue that the relationship was transformed in structure (collective, adversarial, supervised by courts and troops), while the balance of power ended roughly where it began, with the employer setting terms; or show change running two ways at once, since the same scale that made employers distant also produced Pullman's paternalism; or note who the change did not reach (unorganized, women, Black, and unskilled workers; Southern sharecroppers) and carry the argument forward to 1902 and 1935.
Show a 7/7 sample response

Context Before the Civil War most wage earners worked in small shops beside the owner, entered a trade through apprenticeship, and could hope for a shop of their own. Cheap Bessemer steel, the rail network completed in 1869, and the corporate form destroyed that world in a generation, producing firms that employed thousands of people their owners never met. Thesis Industrialization changed the relationship between workers and employers to a great extent: it replaced a personal, negotiable bond with an impersonal contract inside a corporate hierarchy, drove workers into national organizations to recover the bargaining power they had lost as individuals, and pulled the federal government in as a third party. What it did not change was who decided; by 1900 the employer's advantage had been confirmed in law, and most workers belonged to no union at all.

Doc evidence The first change was in the work and who controlled it. John Morrison told the Senate in 1883 that machinery had broken his trade into subdivisions, so that a man repeated one operation and was no longer a machinist in the old sense, and that men who organized feared discharge and blacklisting (Doc 2). Sourcing Congress opened that investigation after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and Morrison testified under oath to legislators who could act, which is why he dwells on powerlessness, not on grievances a foreman could fix. Doc evidence Employers called the same transformation progress: Carnegie welcomed "great inequality of environment" and the concentration of business "in the hands of a few" as essential to the progress of the race (Doc 3). Sourcing He wrote for propertied readers in a decade when strikes were making great fortunes a political problem, so his purpose is defensive: inequality now needed justifying, and his answer was philanthropy, three years before his own Homestead works locked out its union.

Doc evidence Workers answered collectively, and their answer narrowed as the period went on. A Knights of Labor membership certificate of the 1880s puts the order's claim on one sheet: allegorical Labor and Justice, vignettes of the forge, the plow and the press, the eight-hour demand lettered across the top, and the motto that an injury to one is the concern of all (Doc 1). Sourcing The order printed it for members to frame at home, which is why no strike and no employer appear: its purpose was to dignify belonging, and the crafts set side by side advertise an order open to every trade. Outside evidence Behind that lettering lay a demand to replace the wage system with producer cooperatives; the program carried the Knights to some 700,000 members by 1886, until Haymarket tied them to anarchism and the order collapsed. Gompers's American Federation of Labor replaced it with aims the new order could tolerate: skilled craftsmen bargaining over wages and hours, "more schoolhouses and less jails" instead of a cooperative commonwealth (Doc 4). Doc evidence The Commissioner of Labor's table shows the scale underneath: about 470 strikes in 1881, more than 1,400 in 1886, and over a thousand in most years of the 1890s (Doc 7).

Doc evidence What bargaining could not settle, force did. The Harper's Weekly engraving shows barges of armed private guards at the company landing at Homestead in 1892 and locked-out steelworkers behind a barricade on the bank (Doc 5). Outside evidence Frick had locked the men out to break the union; militia reopened the mill nonunion, and steel went unorganized for forty years. Sourcing A national illustrated weekly printed that scene for a general audience: one firm's quarrel with its employees had become a public spectacle, the opposite of the harmony Doc 1 was made to show. Upholding Debs's imprisonment for defying the Pullman injunction, Justice Brewer then wrote that "the strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions" to interstate commerce and the mails (Doc 6). Outside evidence That injunction rested on the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law written against trusts and first used to real effect against a union.

Complexity The change must therefore be measured in two directions. Structurally the relationship was transformed: by 1900 it was collective, adversarial, organized on both sides, and policed by courts and troops rather than custom. In the balance of power it ended where it began. The AFL's half-million members were a small share of the industrial workforce, overwhelmingly white, male, and skilled, leaving out women, the Black workers barred from most craft locals, and the unskilled immigrants of the mills: the workers Doc 1's motto had promised that an injury to one was the concern of all. Nor was the employer's new distance uniform: Pullman built a model town, then cut wages in 1893 without cutting rents; paternalism, not impersonality, and the cause of the strike that ended in Doc 6. What proved durable was that the relationship had become a public question, which the next generation answered with the state: arbitration in the anthracite strike of 1902, and the Wagner Act of 1935.

Industrialization made the worker one of thousands under an owner he would never meet, and made the union, the strike, and the injunction permanent: an enormous change in everything except who set the terms.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The introduction claims a "great extent" of change, names three specific mechanisms (impersonal contract, national organization, federal government as third party), and qualifies the claim with what did not change: a defensible position with a line of reasoning the body follows, located in the introduction.
  • Contextualization (1): The opening sentences describe the artisan shop and apprenticeship world that preceded industrialization and the developments that replaced it (Bessemer steel, the 1869 rail network, the corporation) several sentences of relevant context, not a passing phrase.
  • Evidence from the documents (1 of 2): The content of all seven documents is described accurately and used: Doc 1 (the certificate's lettering, figures, and craft vignettes) and Doc 4 for labor's aims, Doc 2 for deskilling and insecurity, Doc 3 for the employer's justification, Doc 5 for private force, Doc 6 for federal power, Doc 7 for the scale of conflict.
  • Evidence from the documents (2 of 2): Each document supports the argument rather than sitting in a list: Doc 2 and Doc 3 are set against each other as two readings of the same transformation, Doc 1 against Doc 4 to show labor's aims narrowing after 1886, and Docs 5 and 6 to show force and law settling what bargaining could not. The two images are read against each other as well: the harmony Doc 1 was printed to project against the armed confrontation Doc 5 put before the public.
  • Evidence beyond the documents (1): Several pieces, described and used: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 as the reason for the Senate investigation; the Knights' cooperative program, their 700,000 members, and the collapse after Haymarket (1886); none of it visible on the certificate itself; Frick's lockout, the militia, and forty nonunion years in steel; the Pullman town and the 1893 wage cuts without rent cuts; the Sherman Act turned against the American Railway Union.
  • Analysis: sourcing (1): Four documents are sourced, one more than the point requires, and the two strongest moves are on the images (who produced Doc 1 and for whom (the order printing a certificate for members to hang at home, which is why no employer and no strike appear in it), and the national audience of the illustrated weekly that made Doc 5's lockout a public spectacle) alongside the historical situation of Morrison's sworn testimony (Doc 2) and Carnegie's defensive purpose before propertied readers (Doc 3). Each is tied to a claim in the argument.
  • Analysis: complexity (1): Sustained, not a phrase: the essay argues that structure changed enormously while the balance of power did not, names the workers the change never reached, the unskilled to whom Doc 1's motto had promised solidarity, shows the same scale producing both impersonality and Pullman's paternalism, and connects the period forward to 1902 and 1935, while also using all seven documents and sourcing four.

DBQ 5 · Period 7 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which the New Deal changed the role of the federal government in American life in the period 1929–1945.

Directions

Spend the first 15 minutes reading the seven documents and planning; write for the remaining 45. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much the federal government's role changed and in what respects, and that sets up a line of reasoning. Describe a broader historical context for the prompt (what government did before 1929, or what followed after 1945) in several sentences, not a phrase. Use the content of at least four documents to support that argument, and bring in at least one specific piece of evidence not in the documents. For at least two documents, explain how the author's point of view, purpose, historical situation, or intended audience matters to your argument. Finally, demonstrate complex understanding: qualify the extent of change, weigh the New Deal against the war that followed it, or show how the change looked different depending on who you were.

Document 1

Source: Herbert Hoover, campaign address, Madison Square Garden, New York City, October 22, 1928. (Described, not quoted.)

Speaking near the close of his presidential campaign, the Republican candidate warned against continuing wartime government control of industry into peacetime. He contrasted what he called the American system of rugged individualism and equal opportunity with a European philosophy of paternalism and state socialism, and argued that federal ownership or regulation of business would destroy local self-government, discourage initiative, and concentrate power in Washington.

Document 2

Source: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. … It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself. … I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Document 3

Source: The Social Security Act, Public Law 74-271, enacted August 14, 1935, the act's title, which states its purposes.

An Act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes.

The act funded old-age benefits through a payroll tax on employers and employees, and left unemployment compensation and public assistance to be run by the states under federal standards. Agricultural and domestic workers were not covered.

Document 4

Source: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court, A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, decided May 27, 1935, striking down the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily stops short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional authority. Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power. … We are of the opinion that the attempt through the provisions of the code to fix the hours and wages of employees of defendant in their intrastate business was not a valid exercise of federal power.

Document 5

Source: Editorial cartoon opposing the New Deal, anti-Roosevelt daily press, 1936 presidential campaign. Pen and ink. The artist is unidentified; what follows describes the type of cartoon these papers printed repeatedly that year, not one particular drawing.

Image: described

A cartoon of the kind opposition papers printed through the 1936 campaign. At the center a large figure labeled Uncle Sam lies on his back, staked to the ground by dozens of taut ropes, in the posture of Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Pulling the ropes are small clerks in eyeshades and shirtsleeves, each carrying a satchel lettered with the initials of a New Deal agency: WPA, PWA, CCC, TVA. The Capitol dome stands small and empty in the distance; the caption asks who is governing.

Document 6

Source: Photograph by Dorothea Lange for the federal Resettlement Administration, whose photographic unit was later transferred to the Farm Security Administration. Nipomo, California, March 1936.

Image: described

A destitute pea-picker's family in a roadside migrant camp. A woman of about thirty sits under a canvas lean-to with her hand raised to her chin, looking past the camera; two children turn their faces into her shoulders and an infant sleeps in her lap. Their clothes are worn. The photograph was released to newspapers and became one of the most widely reprinted images of the decade.

Document 7

Source: Table compiled from Historical Statistics of the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census). Figures are approximate. (Described data.)

YearUnemployment rateFederal outlaysOutlays as share of GNP
19293.2%$3.1 billionabout 3%
193324.9%$4.6 billionabout 8%
193616.9%$8.2 billionabout 10%
194014.6%$9.5 billionabout 10%
19451.9%$92.7 billionabout 42%

Note on the series: the standard unemployment figures count workers employed on federal relief projects such as the WPA and the CCC as unemployed, so the table understates how many Americans the federal government was paying directly in the 1930s.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the 1920s Republican ascendancy (Harding's "return to normalcy," Mellon's tax cuts, the retreat of antitrust enforcement), and the older tradition that relief for the jobless, the widowed, and the elderly belonged to families, employers, private charity, and at most the states. Alternatively, look backward to the Progressive Era's regulatory commissions and the income tax authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), or forward to the Fair Deal and the Great Society. Three or four sentences, not a clause.
  • Document groupings that support an argument: Documents 2, 3, 6, and 7 group as the machinery of the new federal role (emergency executive power, permanent social insurance, a federal agency documenting poverty, money spent). Documents 1, 4, and 5 group as the resistance: the individualist orthodoxy the New Deal broke with, the constitutional limit the Court enforced in 1935, and the campaign cartoon's charge that unelected agencies had tied the country down. The two images sit on opposite sides of that divide (one made by a federal agency arguing for its own programs, one drawn against them), so they are the natural pair to compare. The strongest essays put Document 7 in both groups, since its 1940 unemployment line is the best evidence that the New Deal changed government more than it changed the economy.
  • Evidence beyond the documents that fits: the Hundred Days agencies by name and function (FDIC deposit insurance, the CCC, the TVA, the AAA); the Securities and Exchange Commission (1934); the Wagner Act (1935) and the sit-down strikes; Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement and the Townsend pension plan pressing Roosevelt from the left; the court-packing plan of 1937 and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel; the recession of 1937–38 after spending cuts; wartime agencies such as the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration; the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, which put withholding on ordinary paychecks. Describe what the example was and what it did: naming it is not using it.
  • Sourcing moves worth making: Document 1 is a campaign speech defending eight years of Republican prosperity, so it states the orthodoxy in its sharpest form, and Hoover himself later signed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation into law, so the document is a better guide to belief than to practice. Document 2 was spoken at the bottom of the banking panic to a national radio audience, so its war language is a bid for authority before Roosevelt had a program. Document 6 was made by a federal agency whose photographers were hired to build public support for its programs, which is why the family is shown as deserving. Document 5 was drawn for the editorial page of a paper working to defeat Roosevelt, addressed to readers who already distrusted him, so it exaggerates on purpose, and that is what makes it usable: a cartoonist can only satirize what his readers recognize on sight, so the initials on those satchels must have been familiar in ordinary life by 1936. Sourcing the two images against each other (a government camera, an opposition pen) is the strongest single move available on this set.
  • A complexity path: argue that the change was large in the scope and permanence of federal responsibility but modest in redistribution: corroborate with Document 7, where unemployment is still 14.6 percent in 1940, and with Social Security's exclusion of farm and domestic workers, which left out most Black southern workers. Or argue across the period that the war, not the New Deal, finished the job the New Deal started, using the 1945 line of Document 7 against the 1936 and 1940 lines. Either move must run through the essay, not sit in one sentence.
Show a 7/7 sample response

Context Through the 1920s the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations cut Mellon's taxes on high incomes, let antitrust enforcement lapse, and treated prosperity as the business of business. Relief for the jobless and the elderly was left to families, employers, private charity, and at most the states; Washington ran no permanent program, and the federal budget in 1929 was about three percent of national output (Doc 7). Thesis Between 1929 and 1945 the New Deal changed that role fundamentally and permanently, making the federal government the employer of last resort, the guarantor of economic security, and the referee of the national economy. But it changed the scope of federal responsibility far more than the distribution of American wealth: it redefined what government owed its citizens without ending the Depression or covering all citizens equally.

Doc evidence The orthodoxy it broke with was stated by the man Roosevelt defeated: closing his 1928 campaign, Hoover insisted that federal regulation of business would destroy local self-government and initiative, setting rugged individualism against European paternalism (Doc 1). Sourcing That is a campaign speech defending eight years of Republican prosperity, so it states the doctrine at its purest, though better as a guide to belief than to practice, since Hoover himself signed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 to lend federal money to failing banks. In March 1933 Roosevelt inverted it, promising work through "direct recruiting by the Government itself" and asking Congress for "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency" (Doc 2). Sourcing He spoke at the bottom of the banking panic to a national radio audience, before he had a program, which is why it asks for authority rather than policy.

What followed was machinery, not rhetoric. Outside evidence The Hundred Days created the Civilian Conservation Corps, insured bank deposits through the FDIC, and built dams through the Tennessee Valley Authority; the Securities and Exchange Commission began policing Wall Street in 1934, and the Wagner Act of 1935 made Washington the supervisor of union elections. The Social Security Act that August went furthest, committing the government "to provide for the general welfare" through federal old-age benefits, state unemployment compensation, and aid to dependent children, financed by a permanent payroll tax (Doc 3). Old age had stopped being a private misfortune. Sourcing The same machinery aimed a camera: a federal agency sent Dorothea Lange to photograph migrant families so voters would see rural poverty as a national emergency deserving a national answer (Doc 6), which is why the mother is framed as dignified, not blamed.

The change was contested, and the resistance measures its size. A unanimous Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in May 1935: "extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power," and Washington could not fix hours and wages in intrastate business (Doc 4). Sourcing The opposition answered in pictures. A 1936 campaign cartoon stakes Uncle Sam to the ground like Gulliver while clerks with satchels lettered WPA, PWA, CCC, and TVA haul on the ropes (Doc 5), drawn for the editorial page of a paper fighting Roosevelt's re-election and so exaggerated by design, but the exaggeration is the evidence, since a cartoonist can only mock what his readers know on sight. Lange's camera was paid for by the government it argued for (Doc 6); this pen by its enemies; both treat federal agencies as an ordinary fact of life. Outside evidence Both forms of resistance failed. After his landslide re-election Roosevelt proposed in 1937 to add a justice for every one over seventy; the plan died in the Senate, but that April the Court upheld the Wagner Act in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, accepting federal regulation of manufacturing, and never struck down another New Deal law.

Complexity Stopping there would overstate the change. Government grew; the Depression did not end. Federal outlays more than doubled between 1929 and 1936, yet unemployment stood at 14.6 percent in 1940 (Doc 7). Sourcing That series counts WPA and CCC workers as jobless, so it understates how many Americans Washington paid directly, but not the failure, since Roosevelt cut spending in 1937 from fear of deficits and triggered a sharp recession. Nor did the new security reach everyone: Social Security excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the occupations of most Black southerners, and AAA acreage payments went to landowners who often evicted their tenants. Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement attacked from the left, demanding caps on great fortunes.

The war finished what the New Deal started. Outlays leapt from $9.5 billion in 1940 to $92.7 billion in 1945, about 42 percent of national output, and unemployment fell below two percent (Doc 7): evidence that the spending the New Deal never dared attempt would have worked: war, not reform, ended the Depression. Withholding, introduced in 1943, made the income tax a fact of every ordinary paycheck. The federal role changed profoundly between 1929 and 1945, then, less by curing the crisis than by making permanent the claim Hoover denied in 1928: that the security of individual Americans is Washington's business.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The last two sentences of the introduction take a position on extent ("fundamentally and permanently" in the scope of federal responsibility, far less in the distribution of wealth or the reach of coverage), and name the three functions (employer of last resort, guarantor of security, referee of the economy) that the body paragraphs then follow in order. It is a claim about how much changed, not a restatement of the prompt.
  • Contextualization (1): The first four sentences describe the 1920s Republican ascendancy (Mellon's tax cuts, lapsed antitrust enforcement) and the older tradition that relief belonged to families, charity, and the states, with the 1929 budget figure as a measure. That is several sentences of a relevant broader development before the period, not a passing reference.
  • Evidence from the documents (1 of 2): More than three documents are used for their content: Hoover's individualism (Doc 1), Roosevelt's demand for wartime executive power (Doc 2), the Social Security Act's purposes and payroll tax (Doc 3), Schechter (Doc 4), the 1936 opposition cartoon (Doc 5), the Lange photograph (Doc 6), and the outlay and unemployment figures (Doc 7).
  • Evidence from the documents (2 of 2): All seven are used to support the argument rather than summarized in turn. Docs 1, 4, and 5 carry the resistance paragraph; Docs 2, 3, and 6 carry the machinery paragraph; the two images are read against each other rather than described in turn; Doc 7 is used twice and against itself: the 1940 line to show the New Deal's economic failure, the 1945 line to show the war completing the institutional change.
  • Evidence beyond the documents (1): Several outside examples are described and put to work, not merely named: the Hundred Days agencies (CCC, FDIC, TVA), the SEC, the Wagner Act, the court-packing plan of February 1937 and the Court's reversal in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, the 1937–38 recession, Social Security's exclusion of farm and domestic workers, Long's Share Our Wealth movement, and 1943 tax withholding. Each is explained and tied to the claim about federal power.
  • Analysis: sourcing (1): Five documents are sourced, well past the required two. Doc 1 is read as a campaign speech overstating a doctrine its own author departed from with the RFC; Doc 2 is read against its historical situation (the banking panic) and purpose (confidence before program); Doc 5 is read for who drew it and for whom, an editorial page fighting Roosevelt's re-election, which converts its exaggeration into evidence that the agencies were familiar to ordinary readers; Doc 6 is read for the agency's purpose in commissioning it, which explains how the family is framed; Doc 7 is read for how the series defines unemployment, which changes what the number can prove. The two images are sourced against each other (a government camera arguing for the programs, an opposition pen arguing against them), and made to agree on the one fact that matters to the thesis.
  • Analysis: complexity (1): Sustained, not a single phrase. The essay argues on two variables at once, institutional scope (large change) against economic and racial outcomes (small change), corroborates the first with the Court's reversal and the second with the 1940 unemployment line and Social Security's exclusions, answers the counter-argument from the left (Long) as well as the right (Docs 1, 4, 5), and closes by connecting the New Deal to the war that finished it. Using all seven documents and sourcing five supports the same point.

LEQ 1 · Period 2 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which religion shaped the development of the British North American colonies in the period 1607–1754.

Directions

You have 40 minutes and no documents; everything comes from what you know. Answer the prompt with a defensible thesis that takes a position on how much religion shaped colonial development and previews your reasoning. Place the topic in a broader context (what came before, during, or after 1607–1754). Support your argument with specific, accurately dated evidence (names, laws, events, places), and explain how each piece supports your claim rather than just naming it. Organize the essay around a historical reasoning skill (here, causation with comparison across regions). Finally, show complexity: qualify or modify your argument with evidence, weigh religion against other causes, or trace how its influence changed over time.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the Protestant Reformation and England's break from Rome in the 1530s, persecution of Puritans and Catholics under the Stuarts, or the profit motive of joint-stock companies after Spain's silver, two or three sentences, not a phrase.
  • Evidence a reader expects to see, with dates: Massachusetts Bay (1630) and church-member suffrage; Harvard (1636) and the school law of 1647; Roger Williams banished (1635) and Anne Hutchinson (1638); the Maryland Toleration Act (1649); Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania (1681); tobacco Virginia and the slave code of 1705; the Half-Way Covenant (1662); Edwards and Whitefield in the Great Awakening (1739–41).
  • The reasoning skill the prompt invites is causation, and the strongest essays run it through a comparison: religion as the organizing cause in New England and the refuge colonies versus economics and labor as the organizing cause in the Chesapeake and Lower South. One body paragraph per region makes the comparison visible.
  • Explain, don't list. "Harvard was founded in 1636" earns nothing by itself; "Harvard was founded in 1636 because Puritans needed literate ministers, which is why New England had the highest literacy in the English world" earns the second evidence point.
  • A complexity path: show that religion's influence changed over time (declining after the 1691 charter replaced church membership with property as the voting qualification, then reviving in a new, individualistic form in the Great Awakening), or show religion and economics intertwined rather than opposed.
  • Common pitfalls: writing only about New England; confusing Pilgrims (Plymouth, 1620) with Puritans (Massachusetts Bay, 1630); using evidence from after 1754 (the Revolution, Jefferson's Virginia Statute) as if it were in the period; a thesis that says religion "played a role" without saying how much or where.
Show a 6/6 sample response

Context In the century before Jamestown, the Protestant Reformation had split Europe. England's break from Rome under Henry VIII in the 1530s produced a Church of England that satisfied neither Catholics nor Puritans, and under James I and Charles I dissenters faced fines, prison, and the loss of their pulpits. Meanwhile Spain's American silver and the rise of joint-stock companies made colonization look like a way to get rich. English colonists therefore crossed the Atlantic carrying both a Bible and a balance sheet, and which one mattered more depended on where they landed. Thesis Religion shaped the development of the British North American colonies to a significant but uneven extent: it was the organizing principle of New England and the founding purpose of Maryland and Pennsylvania, dictating their governments, settlement patterns, and schools, while in the Chesapeake and the Lower South economic motives and the labor system did far more to shape society than the weakly established Anglican church. Moreover, religion's influence shifted over time, fading before commerce and imperial politics in the late seventeenth century and then returning in a new, more individualistic form in the Great Awakening.

Reasoning Where colonists came for religion, religion shaped everything. Evidence The Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay in 1630 came, in John Winthrop's words, to build a "city upon a hill," and they built institutions to match. Settlement proceeded by covenanted towns clustered around a meetinghouse, and the town meeting grew out of the congregation's habit of governing itself. Only male church members, the "visible saints," could vote in colony elections. Evidence Because Puritans believed every believer must read Scripture, the colony founded Harvard in 1636 to train ministers and passed the school law of 1647 requiring towns of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, which gave New England the highest literacy rates in the English world. Religion also defined the limits of dissent: Roger Williams was banished in 1635 and founded Providence on the principle of separating church and state, Anne Hutchinson was tried and expelled in 1638, and Quakers were whipped and, in Mary Dyer's case, hanged in 1660. Each of these developments was the product of a society organized around a shared faith.

Religion mattered in a different way in the colonies founded as refuges. Evidence Cecilius Calvert received Maryland in 1632 as a haven for English Catholics, and its Act Concerning Religion of 1649 granted toleration to all Trinitarian Christians, the first such law in the colonies, precisely because Catholics were already outnumbered by Protestant settlers. William Penn's Pennsylvania (1681) was a Quaker "holy experiment": Quaker convictions produced religious liberty, fair dealing with the Lenape, no militia, and an open door that drew German Mennonites and other pietists, making Pennsylvania the most diverse colony on the mainland. Here religion shaped development not by imposing uniformity but by creating pluralism.

In the southern colonies, by contrast, religion was a minor force. Evidence Virginia was founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company for profit, and once John Rolfe's tobacco found a market around 1612 the colony's development followed the crop: headright grants after 1618, dispersed riverside plantations, indentured servants, and, after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 exposed the danger of a landless white underclass, a rapid shift to enslaved African labor codified in the slave code of 1705. The Anglican church was legally established, but parishes were enormous, ministers scarce, and vestries dominated by planters. South Carolina, settled from Barbados in 1670, was organized around rice and indigo and had a Black majority by 1708; its society was shaped by the plantation and the slave code, not the pulpit.

Complexity Religion's power also waxed and waned, and the same New England that proves its importance also shows its limits. Declining conversions forced the churches to adopt the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, and the Salem witch trials of 1692 reflected a society anxious that its founding zeal was slipping. The royal charter of 1691 replaced church membership with property ownership as the qualification to vote: a sign that imperial authority and Atlantic commerce were overtaking faith as organizing forces. Yet in the 1730s and 1740s the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards's Northampton revivals and George Whitefield's tours of 1739–40, reasserted religion's shaping power in a new form. Revivalists split congregations into New Lights and Old Lights, founded colleges such as Princeton (1746), and taught ordinary colonists to judge their ministers for themselves, an experience in questioning authority.

Religion, then, was decisive where colonists came for religion and marginal where they came for profit, and even in New England it shared power with commerce after 1690. To say religion "shaped the colonies" is true of New England's towns and Pennsylvania's pluralism; it is far less true of the tobacco and rice societies of the South.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The last two sentences of the introduction take a position on extent ("significant but uneven"), name where religion did and did not dominate, and preview a change-over-time argument: a line of reasoning, not a restatement.
  • Contextualization (1): The opening four sentences describe the Reformation, English persecution of dissenters, and the joint-stock profit motive: developments before the period that explain why colonists carried "both a Bible and a balance sheet."
  • Evidence (1 of 2): Far more than two specific examples appear: Massachusetts Bay 1630, Harvard 1636, the 1647 school law, Williams 1635, Hutchinson 1638, Dyer 1660, Maryland 1649, Pennsylvania 1681, tobacco 1612, Bacon's Rebellion 1676, the 1705 slave code, Carolina 1670.
  • Evidence (2 of 2): Each example is tied to the claim: Harvard and the school law show a faith that required literacy; the banishments show faith defining the limits of dissent; tobacco, headrights, and the slave code show the Chesapeake following the crop rather than the church.
  • Analysis and reasoning (1 of 2): The essay is structured by causation run through comparison: one paragraph each on New England, the refuge colonies, and the South, each asking what force organized that region.
  • Complexity (2 of 2): The fifth paragraph qualifies the argument with change over time (the Half-Way Covenant, the 1691 charter, and the Great Awakening show religion's influence declining and then reviving in a new form), and the conclusion weighs the regions against each other rather than settling for "religion played a role."

LEQ 2 · Periods 3–4 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent of change in ideas about American democracy in the period 1790–1840.

Directions

Forty minutes, no documents. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much ideas about democracy changed, and in what respects, and that sets up a line of reasoning. Describe a broader context, such as the republican assumptions of the Constitution's framers or the reforms that followed 1840. Support the argument with specific, correctly dated evidence and explain how each example shows change or continuity. Because the prompt says "extent of change," organize the essay around continuity and change over time: what was the idea in 1790, what was it by 1840, and what stayed the same? Show complexity by tracking more than one variable (class, race, gender, the role of parties) or by qualifying the degree of change.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the framers' fear of "faction" after Shays's Rebellion (1786–87) and Federalist No. 10; property requirements for voting in nearly every state in 1790; or, looking forward, Seneca Falls (1848) and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) as later fights over who "the people" were.
  • Evidence a reader expects, with dates: Washington's Farewell Address warning against parties (1796); the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798); the election of 1800; states dropping property requirements (Connecticut 1818, Massachusetts and New York 1821); the "corrupt bargain" of 1824 and Jackson's win in 1828; the spoils system and the Bank veto (1832); national nominating conventions (1831–32); the "log cabin" campaign of 1840.
  • The reasoning skill is continuity and change. Frame the thesis as a before-and-after with a qualifier, then devote one paragraph to the 1790s idea, one to the Jacksonian idea, and one to what did not change (or changed for the worse): that third paragraph is where most of the analysis points live.
  • Evidence for the limits of change is what separates a 4 from a 6: New Jersey ending women's and Black men's voting (1807); New York's $250 property test for Black voters only (1821); Pennsylvania's 1838 constitution disfranchising Black men; the Indian Removal Act (1830) and Jackson ignoring Worcester v. Georgia (1832).
  • A complexity path: argue that democracy expanded along the class axis while contracting along the race axis, so that the Jacksonian idea of "the people" was new precisely because it was explicitly white; or explore the new idea of the president as the people's tribune.
  • Common pitfalls: describing events (the Bank War, Nullification) without connecting them to an idea about democracy; treating 1790 as already democratic; using Seneca Falls or the Dorr Rebellion as if they were in the period without flagging that they came after 1840.
Show a 6/6 sample response

Context The framers of the Constitution in 1787 built a republic, not a democracy. Fresh from Shays's Rebellion (1786–87) and the paper-money politics of the state legislatures, James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that a large republic would filter popular passions through representatives able to resist "faction." The Constitution let state legislatures choose senators and decide how presidential electors were selected, and in 1790 nearly every state limited the vote with property or taxpaying requirements; "democracy" was often a term of abuse. Thesis Between 1790 and 1840 ideas about American democracy changed to a great extent along one axis and hardly at all along another. The dominant idea shifted from a deferential republicanism, in which the virtuous few governed for the people and parties were a disease, to a Jacksonian democracy that celebrated the sovereignty of the common white man, mass parties, and majority rule. Yet the boundary of "the people" remained, and in several states was redrawn more tightly, along lines of race and gender, so the democratization of the era was a democratization for white men only.

Reasoning In the 1790s the leaders of the new republic still expected politics to be conducted by gentlemen and ratified by a deferential public. Evidence Washington's Farewell Address (1796) warned against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party," and Federalists regarded the Democratic-Republican Societies of 1793–94 as dangerous mobs. The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious" criticism of the government, and Federalist judges jailed Republican editors under it. The idea behind these actions was that the people spoke at elections and should then defer to their rulers. Even Jefferson's victory in 1800, the first peaceful transfer of power between parties, was framed in his 1801 inaugural as a reunion rather than a party triumph: "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."

By the 1820s that idea was collapsing. Evidence New western states such as Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) entered the Union with no property requirement for white men, and Connecticut (1818), Massachusetts, and New York (1821) dropped theirs in constitutional conventions. The election of 1824 showed the new expectation at work. When the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams although Andrew Jackson had won the most popular and electoral votes, Jackson's supporters denounced a "corrupt bargain," and turnout in 1828 more than doubled to carry Jackson into office. Evidence Jackson turned popular sovereignty into practice: he defended rotation in office, the spoils system, on the ground that any ordinary citizen could do the government's work; his 1832 veto of the Second Bank's recharter attacked it as a privileged monopoly that made "the rich richer and the potent more powerful"; and he claimed that the president, as the only official chosen by the whole nation, was the people's direct tribune. By 1832 every state but South Carolina chose its presidential electors by popular vote, and both parties nominated candidates in national conventions rather than congressional caucuses. Even the Whigs, born in opposition to "King Andrew," adopted the new style: their 1840 "log cabin and hard cider" campaign for William Henry Harrison drew about 80 percent of eligible voters. The idea had moved from suspicion of the majority to celebration of it.

Complexity But the expansion of democracy for white men was accompanied by a deliberate contraction for everyone else, and this was not a leftover from 1790 but a new and explicitly racial definition of the people. Evidence New Jersey, whose 1776 constitution had allowed property-owning women and free Black men to vote, limited the franchise to white men in 1807. The same New York convention of 1821 that freed white men from property tests imposed a $250 property requirement on Black men alone. Pennsylvania's 1838 constitution inserted the word "white" into its suffrage clause, disfranchising free Black men who had voted for decades. Jacksonian democracy also defined itself against Native Americans: Jackson drove the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through Congress and declined to enforce Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which had recognized Cherokee sovereignty. Women, meanwhile, were confined to a separate domestic sphere even as their husbands and brothers gained the vote. The Jacksonians did not simply fail to extend democracy; they wrote its limits into law.

The extent of change, then, depends on where one looks. Measured by the collapse of deference, the legitimacy of parties, and the sovereignty of the white male voter, ideas about democracy changed profoundly between 1790 and 1840. Measured by who counted as one of the people, the era hardened old exclusions into explicit constitutional language, and it would take the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and the Nineteenth in 1920 to begin undoing what the Jacksonian generation wrote down.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The introduction's closing sentences claim a "great extent" of change on one axis and near-continuity on another, naming both: deference to mass democracy; exclusion by race and gender, which sets up the essay's structure.
  • Contextualization (1): Three sentences on the framers' republicanism: Shays's Rebellion, Federalist No. 10, legislative choice of senators, property requirements: describe the pre-1790 situation the essay measures change against.
  • Evidence (1 of 2): Specific, dated examples throughout: the Farewell Address 1796, Sedition Act 1798, election of 1800, state conventions 1818–1821, the 1824 and 1828 elections, the 1832 Bank veto, the 1840 campaign, New Jersey 1807, New York 1821, Pennsylvania 1838, Indian Removal 1830, Worcester 1832.
  • Evidence (2 of 2): Each example is explained as evidence of an idea: the Sedition Act shows the belief that the public should defer after voting; the Bank veto shows the president as tribune against privilege; the $250 test shows the racial redefinition of the people.
  • Analysis and reasoning (1 of 2): The essay is organized as continuity and change: the 1790s idea, the Jacksonian idea, and what persisted or regressed, with the conclusion weighing extent along each axis.
  • Complexity (2 of 2): The fourth paragraph modifies the change argument with contrary evidence and argues that the exclusion was itself a new idea, not a survival: sustained nuance across class, race, and gender rather than a single sentence of "however."

LEQ 3 · Period 5 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which the Civil War and Reconstruction changed the power of the federal government in the period 1861–1877.

Directions

Forty minutes, no documents. State a defensible thesis about how much federal power changed and in what ways, with a line of reasoning the essay then follows. Contextualize with the antebellum understanding of federal power (states' rights, Dred Scott, a tiny national government) or with what came after 1877. Support your argument with specific wartime laws, amendments, court cases, and enforcement actions, each dated and each explained. Use continuity and change (or causation) to frame the essay. Earn complexity by distinguishing kinds of power (constitutional authority versus actual enforcement, economic nation-building versus civil rights), or by showing how much of the change was reversed by 1877.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the antebellum states'-rights tradition from the Kentucky Resolutions (1798) through Nullification (1832–33) to Dred Scott (1857), and a federal government whose largest civilian arm was the Post Office; or the twentieth-century revival of the Reconstruction amendments (Brown, 1954).
  • Evidence a reader expects, with dates: suspension of habeas corpus and Ex parte Merryman (1861); Legal Tender Act, Revenue Act, Homestead Act, Pacific Railway Act, Morrill Act (all 1862); National Banking Acts (1863–64); Enrollment Act and draft riots (1863); Emancipation Proclamation (1863); the 13th (1865), 14th (1868), and 15th (1870) Amendments; Freedmen's Bureau (1865); Civil Rights Act of 1866; Reconstruction Acts (1867); Enforcement Acts (1870–71).
  • The prompt invites continuity and change: what the federal government could do in 1860 versus 1877. Structure by phase (wartime expansion, Reconstruction's constitutional revolution, then retreat), so the essay itself traces the arc of change.
  • Evidence for the retreat is what proves you can evaluate extent: Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Amnesty Act (1872), the Panic of 1873 and the Democratic House of 1874, the Compromise of 1877.
  • A complexity path: separate power on paper from power in practice, or economic powers (currency, banking, land grants; permanent) from civil-rights enforcement (abandoned), and explain why one lasted and the other did not.
  • Common pitfalls: narrating battles; treating Reconstruction as ending in 1865; saying the 14th Amendment "gave Black people rights" without explaining that it made the federal government the enforcer against the states; forgetting that Lincoln, not Congress, drove the wartime expansion.
Show a 6/6 sample response

Context Before 1861 the federal government was a small presence in most Americans' lives. Its largest civilian workforce was the Post Office, its revenue came mostly from the tariff, and it had no national currency, no income tax, and only a token army. The dominant constitutional idea, from the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 through the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, was that the states were the primary guardians of their citizens' rights and that Washington's powers were few and enumerated. Secession in 1860–61 was the ultimate expression of that theory. Thesis The Civil War and Reconstruction changed the power of the federal government to a very great extent in principle and to a more limited extent in practice. The war created a national state that could tax, borrow, conscript, and emancipate, and the Reconstruction amendments made the federal government, for the first time, the guarantor of individual rights against the states. But while the economic and constitutional gains proved permanent, the government's willingness to enforce those rights was temporary; by 1877 the Supreme Court had narrowed the amendments and the Republican Party had abandoned enforcement, leaving the new federal power dormant for nearly a century.

Reasoning The war forced an expansion of national power unthinkable in 1860. Evidence Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861 and ignored Chief Justice Taney's ruling in Ex parte Merryman that he lacked the authority to do so. To pay for the war Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862, creating the first national paper currency, the "greenbacks"; the Revenue Act of 1862, which put the first federal income tax into effect; and the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, which chartered national banks issuing a uniform currency. The Enrollment Act of 1863 imposed the first national draft and provoked the New York City draft riots that July. Evidence And the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, issued under the president's war powers, used federal authority to destroy property in slaves worth billions of dollars: a power no one in 1860 believed the government possessed. Each measure shifted authority from the states to Washington, and each was justified as a war necessity rather than a permanent redefinition of the Union.

Reconstruction converted wartime necessity into constitutional principle. Evidence The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery nationwide, and the Freedmen's Bureau, created in March 1865, put federal agents in Southern counties to supervise labor contracts and run schools. When Southern legislatures passed Black Codes and President Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress overrode him and wrote the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868), which defined national citizenship, guaranteed equal protection and due process against the states, and gave Congress the power to enforce those guarantees. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided ten former Confederate states into five military districts under army commanders; the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barred racial restrictions on voting; and the Enforcement Acts of 1870–71 made private violence against voters a federal crime. Under the Ku Klux Klan Act, Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties in 1871, and federal prosecutions broke the Klan. The federal government had become an active guarantor of rights inside the states: a complete inversion of the antebellum order.

Complexity Yet practice fell far short of principle, and the retreat began almost as soon as the advance. Evidence In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) the Supreme Court read the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges-and-immunities clause so narrowly as to make it nearly useless, and in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) it held that the amendment restrained only state action, not private mobs, gutting the Enforcement Acts. Northern political will collapsed as well. The Amnesty Act of 1872 restored political rights to most former Confederates, the Panic of 1873 turned Northern voters toward economic worries, and the Democrats captured the House in 1874. The Compromise of 1877 that settled the disputed Hayes-Tilden election withdrew the last federal troops from Southern statehouses, and the "Redeemer" governments that followed nullified the Fifteenth Amendment in practice. Meanwhile, the most durable federal expansions were the ones least connected to Black rights: the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, all of 1862, permanently made Washington the patron of economic development. Power over the economy stuck; power over race relations was surrendered.

The Civil War and Reconstruction thus produced a lasting revolution in what the federal government could do and a fleeting one in what it actually did. The nation that emerged in 1877 had a national currency, national citizenship, and three amendments that placed individual rights under federal protection. It would take the NAACP's litigation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make that protection real, but the tools were forged between 1861 and 1870.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The introduction's final sentences make an evaluative claim, "very great extent in principle," "more limited extent in practice", and explain why (enforcement abandoned, Court narrowed the amendments), giving the essay a line of reasoning.
  • Contextualization (1): The opening describes the antebellum federal government and the states'-rights tradition from 1798 to 1857 in four sentences, establishing the baseline against which change is measured.
  • Evidence (1 of 2): Specific dated examples abound: Merryman 1861, Legal Tender Act 1862, Revenue Act 1862, National Banking Acts 1863–64, Enrollment Act 1863, Emancipation Proclamation 1863, the three amendments, Freedmen's Bureau 1865, Civil Rights Act 1866, Reconstruction Acts 1867, Klan Act 1871, Slaughterhouse 1873, Cruikshank 1876, Compromise of 1877.
  • Evidence (2 of 2): Each example is used to support the claim: greenbacks and the income tax show the state gaining fiscal power; the Fourteenth Amendment is explained as making Washington the enforcer against the states; Cruikshank is explained as gutting that enforcement.
  • Analysis and reasoning (1 of 2): The essay is structured as continuity and change across three phases (wartime expansion, constitutional revolution, retreat), and measures 1877 against 1860.
  • Complexity (2 of 2): The essay distinguishes power on paper from power in practice and economic power from civil-rights enforcement, corroborates the retreat with Court decisions and political events, and connects the period forward to 1954 and 1964: nuance sustained through the fourth paragraph and the conclusion.

LEQ 4 · Periods 6–7 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which immigration changed American society in the period 1865–1924.

Directions

Forty minutes, no documents. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much and in what ways immigration changed American society, with a line of reasoning the body paragraphs follow. Contextualize with earlier immigration and nativism (the Irish and Germans of the 1840s–50s, the Know-Nothings) or with the industrial boom that pulled workers across the Atlantic. Support your argument with specific, dated evidence (numbers, laws, strikes, institutions, people), and explain how each shows change. Frame the essay with causation (what immigration caused) or continuity and change (what was different by 1924). Show complexity by treating the nativist reaction as itself a change immigration produced, by weighing change against persistence, or by connecting to earlier or later periods.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the Irish and German wave of 1845–55 and the Know-Nothing (American) Party of the 1850s; the post-1865 industrial boom, steamships, and European upheavals (Italian rural poverty, Russian pogroms after 1881); or the 1965 Immigration Act as the later reversal of 1924.
  • Evidence a reader expects, with dates: roughly 26 million arrivals 1870–1920 and about 15 percent foreign-born in 1910; Chinese labor on the Central Pacific (completed 1869); the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882); Hull House (1889) and Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890); Tammany Hall; the Triangle fire (1911); the Lawrence strike (1912); the literacy test and Asiatic Barred Zone (1917); the Red Scare and Palmer Raids (1919–20); the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the National Origins Act (1924).
  • The reasoning skill is causation: immigration as a cause, American society as the effect. Organize by domain of change (economy and labor, cities and culture, politics and law), so the reader can see you evaluating extent in each rather than telling one story.
  • Explain the mechanism. "Immigrants worked in factories" is a fact; "the 146 mostly immigrant women killed at Triangle in 1911 show that immigrant labor was the base of the garment industry, and their deaths produced New York's factory-safety laws" is evidence supporting an argument.
  • A complexity path: immigration changed society in two opposite directions; creating pluralism and provoking a nativist reaction that wrote racial hierarchy into federal law; or trace continuity in the nativist tradition from the Know-Nothings to the 1924 quotas; or connect the wartime cutoff of European immigration to the Great Migration.
  • Common pitfalls: vague "new immigrants faced discrimination" without laws, dates, or groups; confusing the 1921 and 1924 acts (the 1924 quotas used the 1890 census on purpose); treating Ellis Island (opened 1892) as the only story and omitting Asian immigration and exclusion; running past 1924 into the 1930s.
Show a 6/6 sample response

Context Immigration was not new in 1865. Between 1845 and 1855 nearly three million Irish and Germans had arrived, fleeing famine and failed revolution, and their Catholicism had provoked the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. But the explosion of railroad, steel, coal, and textile production after the Civil War created a demand for workers that Europe's upheavals (Italian rural poverty, Russian pogroms after 1881) were ready to meet, and steamships cut the crossing to under two weeks. Thesis Immigration changed American society to a great extent between 1865 and 1924. Roughly 26 million newcomers built the industrial workforce, turned the nation's cities into ethnically and religiously plural places, and reshaped urban politics and the labor movement. Yet the change was double-edged: the same influx generated a nativist reaction that, by 1924, wrote racial hierarchy into federal law and tried to freeze the nation's ethnic composition. The extent of change was therefore greatest in the economy and the cities, and most bitterly contested in the nation's definition of who could become American.

Reasoning The clearest change was economic: immigrants supplied the labor that made industrialization possible at American scale. Evidence More than ten thousand Chinese laborers built the Central Pacific's route through the Sierra Nevada before the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. By the 1890s Carnegie's Homestead works and the Pennsylvania coal fields were staffed largely by Slavic and Hungarian immigrants, and New York's garment industry ran on Jewish and Italian labor: the 146 workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 were overwhelmingly young immigrant women, and their deaths produced New York's factory-safety laws. Immigrants also shaped the labor movement: Samuel Gompers, a London-born cigar maker, built the American Federation of Labor after 1886, while the largely immigrant mill workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, won the "Bread and Roses" strike of 1912 under the Industrial Workers of the World. Without immigrant labor the American industrial economy of 1900, the world's largest, could not have existed at its size.

Immigration also remade the cities. Evidence By 1910 about 15 percent of Americans were foreign-born, and in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland immigrants and their children were a majority. Ethnic enclaves (Little Italy, the Lower East Side, Chicago's Polish neighborhoods) supported foreign-language newspapers such as the Yiddish Forward (1897), parochial schools, and mutual-aid societies. The Catholic Church became the nation's largest single denomination, and a substantial Jewish population appeared for the first time. Politics adapted: Tammany Hall under Richard Croker and Charles Murphy traded jobs and naturalization help for immigrant votes, while reformers built settlement houses, Jane Addams's Hull House opened in Chicago in 1889, to teach English and lobby for tenement and factory laws. Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) turned the immigrant tenement into a national issue. Immigration thus changed not only who Americans were but what their governments, churches, and reformers did.

Complexity But immigration also changed American society in the opposite direction, provoking a nativist reaction that was itself transformative and drew on an older tradition. Evidence Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first federal law to bar immigrants on the basis of nationality. The American Protective Association (1887) revived the Know-Nothings' anti-Catholicism, and the Immigration Restriction League (1894) pushed a literacy test that passed over Wilson's veto in 1917, alongside an "Asiatic Barred Zone." The Dillingham Commission's report (1911) lent pseudo-scientific respectability to the claim that "new" immigrants were racially inferior. The Red Scare of 1919–20 fused immigrant with radical: the Palmer Raids deported hundreds of foreign-born radicals, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case (1920–27) turned as much on the defendants' Italian anarchism as on evidence. The revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s targeted Catholics and Jews as well as Black Americans. The culmination was the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924, which set quotas at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the 1890 census, deliberately chosen to predate the "new" immigration, and excluded Japanese immigrants entirely. Restriction cut annual arrivals from more than a million in 1907 to a few hundred thousand, and the wartime cutoff of European immigration had already pulled some half a million Black Southerners north in the Great Migration of 1916–19.

Between 1865 and 1924, then, immigration transformed the American economy and city and forced the country into a long argument about its own identity. That the argument ended in the 1924 quotas is itself proof of how much immigration had changed the nation: enough that a majority tried to stop it. The pluralism the immigrants created did not disappear, but it grew up inside a legal framework built to contain it, until the Immigration Act of 1965 dismantled the quotas.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The introduction claims a "great extent" of change, names three domains (workforce, cities, politics), and adds the "double-edged" qualification: a position with a line of reasoning, not a restatement.
  • Contextualization (1): The first three sentences describe the Irish and German wave, the Know-Nothings, and the post-1865 industrial pull and European push: developments before and at the start of the period that explain why the influx happened.
  • Evidence (1 of 2): Well over two specific examples: the Central Pacific 1869, Triangle 1911, Gompers and the AFL 1886, Lawrence 1912, the 1910 census, the Forward 1897, Hull House 1889, Riis 1890, Chinese Exclusion 1882, the APA 1887, the IRL 1894, the 1917 literacy test, Dillingham 1911, Palmer Raids, Sacco and Vanzetti, the 1921 and 1924 acts.
  • Evidence (2 of 2): Each example is tied to a claim about change: Triangle shows immigrant labor as the base of an industry and the origin of safety law; Tammany and Hull House show politics and reform reorganizing around immigrants; the 1890-census quota shows nativism written into law.
  • Analysis and reasoning (1 of 2): The essay is framed by causation and organized by domain of effect (economy, city, law) evaluating extent in each.
  • Complexity (2 of 2): The fourth paragraph argues that immigration changed society in two opposite directions at once, traces continuity in nativism back to the Know-Nothings, and connects the wartime cutoff of immigration to the Great Migration and the story forward to 1965: multiple variables sustained across the essay.

LEQ 5 · Period 8 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which the Cold War shaped American politics and society in the period 1945–1980.

Directions

Forty minutes, no documents. Respond with a defensible thesis that says how much the Cold War shaped domestic politics and society, and where its influence stopped, with a line of reasoning to follow. Contextualize with the end of World War II and the breakdown of the Grand Alliance, or with the Reagan years that followed. Support the argument with specific, dated evidence from both politics (laws, agencies, hearings, elections) and society (spending, schools, suburbs, civil rights, protest), explaining how each was shaped by the Cold War. Frame the essay with causation. Earn complexity by weighing the Cold War against other causes of change, by showing it both fueled and constrained reform, or by tracing how its grip changed over the period.

Your essay
What a reader looks for on this prompt
  • Contextualization that works: the collapse of the wartime alliance over Poland and Germany, Kennan's Long Telegram (1946), and the Truman Doctrine (1947); or the Great Depression and World War II as the last time the federal government had so reorganized American life.
  • Evidence a reader expects, with dates: the National Security Act (1947) and NSC-68 (1950); Executive Order 9835 loyalty program (1947); HUAC and the Hollywood Ten (1947); Hiss and the Rosenbergs; McCarthy from Wheeling (1950) to censure (1954); Interstate Highway Act (1956); Sputnik (1957), NASA and the National Defense Education Act (1958); Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" farewell (1961); Executive Order 9981 (1948) and the government's Cold War argument in Brown (1954); Gulf of Tonkin (1964), Tet (1968), Kent State (1970), War Powers Act (1973), Church Committee (1975).
  • The reasoning skill is causation. Treat "politics" and "society" as two effects and give each a paragraph with a clear mechanism: anticommunism as a loyalty test; defense spending as a shaper of geography and schools; the Cold War as both argument and constraint for civil rights.
  • Then evaluate extent over time: the consensus of the 1950s, its fracture over Vietnam, and its return after Afghanistan (1979). A thesis that says "to a very great extent, but not uniformly across the period" is easier to defend than "completely."
  • A complexity path: show that the Cold War both advanced civil rights (Truman's desegregation order, the Brown amicus brief, Little Rock's global coverage) and narrowed them (the NAACP's purge of leftists, Du Bois's passport); or concede that prosperity, the baby boom, and the movements' own roots explain much that the Cold War did not.
  • Common pitfalls: writing a foreign-policy essay (Berlin, Korea, Cuba) with no domestic effects; ending in 1954 with McCarthy's fall; asserting that "fear was everywhere" without institutions, laws, or dollars; missing that Vietnam and détente are Cold War events too.
Show a 6/6 sample response

Context The United States emerged from World War II as the only major power with its economy intact and the only one with the atomic bomb. But the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union dissolved almost immediately over Poland and Germany; by 1946 George Kennan's "Long Telegram" was urging containment, and in March 1947 Truman asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey in a speech framing the future as a contest between free peoples and totalitarianism. Americans who had just fought one total war were told to prepare for permanent readiness. Thesis The Cold War shaped American politics and society to a very great extent between 1945 and 1980. It built a permanent national security state, made anticommunism the test of political loyalty, redirected federal spending toward science, education, and infrastructure, and gave the civil rights movement both a powerful argument and a set of constraints. Its influence was not unlimited (social change also drew on prosperity, demography, and the movements' own roots, and after Vietnam the Cold War consensus broke down), but even that breakdown was a Cold War event, and the institutions it created survived.

Reasoning The Cold War first reorganized the government and the limits of legitimate politics. Evidence The National Security Act of 1947 unified the armed services under a secretary of defense and created the CIA and the National Security Council, and NSC-68 (1950) called for a rearmament that the Korean War (1950–53) made real, more than tripling the defense budget. Anticommunism then became a domestic weapon. Truman's Executive Order 9835 (1947) instituted loyalty investigations of federal employees; HUAC's 1947 hearings produced the Hollywood blacklist; the Alger Hiss case (1948–50) and the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 convinced millions that subversion was real; and Senator Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling speech of February 1950 launched four years in which an accusation of communism could end a career, until his Senate censure in December 1954. Both parties then competed to be tougher on communism; Kennedy campaigned in 1960 on a supposed "missile gap."

The Cold War also reached into daily life and the struggle for Black freedom. Evidence When the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, Congress answered with NASA and the National Defense Education Act in 1958, pouring federal money into science teaching; the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was justified partly as a "Defense Highways" system. Defense contracts built the Sun Belt. Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and Eisenhower, leaving office in 1961, warned of a "military-industrial complex." Evidence Truman desegregated the armed forces by Executive Order 9981 in 1948 partly to blunt Soviet propaganda, the Justice Department's brief in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) argued that segregation damaged American credibility abroad, and worldwide coverage of Little Rock in 1957 pushed Eisenhower to send federal troops. At the same time anticommunism narrowed the movement: the NAACP purged leftists, W. E. B. Du Bois lost his passport, and civil rights leaders had to prove their loyalty before demanding justice.

Complexity The Cold War's grip was so strong that when it weakened, the weakening itself convulsed politics, yet the Cold War did not cause everything that changed. Evidence Johnson escalated in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) because containment left him no acceptable alternative, and the war's cost (more than 500,000 troops by 1968 and a budget that starved the Great Society) produced the shock of Tet, Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 race, and an antiwar movement that culminated at Kent State in May 1970. The Church Committee's 1975 exposure of CIA plots and the FBI's COINTELPRO fed a distrust of government that Watergate confirmed, and the War Powers Act of 1973, passed over Nixon's veto, reined in a presidency the Cold War had inflated. But the Cold War changed form rather than ending: Nixon's 1972 trip to China and SALT I marked détente, and after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter's Olympic boycott and Reagan's 1980 campaign against détente showed that anticommunism still organized American politics. Meanwhile, the baby boom, the GI Bill, and prosperity created the suburbs and campuses the 1960s movements drew on; the civil rights movement grew from decades of NAACP litigation and Black church organizing; and the women's and environmental movements had their own causes. The Cold War shaped the terrain on which these movements fought (the language of freedom they could use, the accusations they had to answer) more than it created them.

From 1945 to 1980 the Cold War reorganized the American state, set the limits of acceptable politics, redirected the nation's resources, and framed even its reform struggles. Its power was greatest in the 1950s, was challenged by Vietnam, and returned in a harder form by 1980: shaping much, though not everything.

Where the points are earned
  • Thesis (1): The introduction claims a "very great extent," names four mechanisms (security state, loyalty test, spending, civil rights), and qualifies the claim: a defensible position with a line of reasoning the body follows.
  • Contextualization (1): Three sentences describe the end of World War II, the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the Long Telegram, and the Truman Doctrine: the developments that produced the Cold War the prompt asks about.
  • Evidence (1 of 2): Specific dated examples throughout: the National Security Act 1947, NSC-68, EO 9835, HUAC 1947, Hiss, the Rosenbergs 1953, McCarthy 1950–54, Sputnik 1957, NDEA 1958, the Interstate Highway Act 1956, EO 9981, the Brown brief, Little Rock 1957, Gulf of Tonkin 1964, Kent State 1970, War Powers Act 1973, the Church Committee 1975, Afghanistan 1979.
  • Evidence (2 of 2): Each example is explained as a Cold War effect on politics or society: NDEA as Sputnik's consequence, the Brown brief as a credibility argument, the NAACP purge as anticommunism narrowing the movement, the War Powers Act as Congress reining in a Cold War presidency.
  • Analysis and reasoning (1 of 2): The essay is framed by causation (the Cold War as cause, with separate paragraphs on political and social effects and clear mechanisms for each), and evaluates extent across time.
  • Complexity (2 of 2): The essay shows the Cold War both advancing and constraining civil rights, traces the consensus rising, fracturing, and returning, and explicitly weighs alternative causes (prosperity, demography, the movements' own roots): nuance sustained through the third and fourth paragraphs and the conclusion.

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