A) Describe the differing social systems and ideas that connected individuals with the larger society in each of the three “cultural eras” that we have studied this semester: Dominions (1490-1750), Republics (1750-1815), and Democracies (1815-1865). Explain the basic cultural paradigm in each period (Patriarchy, Republicanism, and the “Market Revolution”). In each era, explain how the organization of work, the structure of politics, and the nature of religion, reflected and reinforced the dominant “ideology”? Describe the “revolutionary” forces or events that compelled each cultural era top give way to the next.
B) From 1492 to 1865, slavery occupied a central place in the lives and minds of Americans. Describe the changing meaning of slavery in each third of the course. Explain how most Colonial Americans (1490-1750) believed that slavery was normal, necessary, and perhaps even just. Why were Revolutionary Americans (1750-1815) among the first people in the world to condemn slavery? Why were they still unable to completely destroy it? Among Jacksonian Americans (1815-1865), why did a few people denounce slavery as a sin, others come to see slavery as a threat to their own freedom, and still others become willing to fight a bloody war to preserve it?
C) Describe the dominant conceptions of gender that shaped the lives of American women in each of the three periods examined in this semester. Explain how Patriarchy dictated how women lived in the era 1490-1750 (as exemplified – or challenged – by Mary Rowlandson). Explain the changes (in practice or theory) that the idea of “Republican Motherhood” wrought in women’s lives in the era 1750-1815 (use the real Susanna Rowson, and the fictitious Charlotte Temple as examples). Finally, to what extent does Alexis de Tocqueville describe American women as free in the era 1815-1860? Why did women play such a prominent role in reform and abolitionism?
