Text Assignment

Text: Divine, Chapter 3, pp. 75-90 & Chapter 4: 2/8/00

Special Topics: Unity and Disunity: The Great Awakening
                        Migration to America in the Eighteenth Century

Answer one of the following text questions:

• How and why did African slavery get started in North America?  What did slavery mean for African culture?
• What was the nature and significance of British economic policy in the New World?
• Describe the patterns of immigration to the American colonies in the eighteenth century and assess their significance for the different regions.
• What was the importance of the Great Awakening to freedom in American culture?
• To what extent had Americans developed their own identity by the middle of the eighteenth century?  Explain.
• What were the differences between the political cultures of Britain and America in the eighteenth century?  How and why were these differences important?

Choose one of the following:

1.) George Washington, The Exercise of a Schoolboy

Answer at least two of the following primary source questions:

• What do these rules tell you about social order and stratification in colonial Virginia?
• What do they say about George Washington's concept of morality and virtue?
• What do they say about his attitudes on good manners and personal hygiene?
• Why would Washington have been so concerned about the rules of etiquette as a youth of 16?
• What, if anything, do the accompanying images add to the information you have to answer these questions?

2.) Olaudah Equiano describes the horrors of the Middle Passage (1789)
and
A doctor, Alexander Falconbridge, describes conditions on an English slaver (1788)

Answer at least two of the following primary source questions:

• How were slaves brought into captivity and sold into slavery?
• Describe the routine of a slave ship.  What strikes you as most important about this experience?
• What did the enslaved Africans expect from their black captors?  From the European slave traders?
• What did the European slave traders expect from their slaves?  Did they understand how to take care of them?