Topics: Anything assigned to read on Part III of the syllabus, units 23-30.
What: You will be asked to write one long essay (SA) on a general question and four brief term-identification (ID) essays in which you will identify (who, what, when, where) and explain the significance (it's role in US history) of the term.
General themes:
How America became a modern industrial democracy and the consequences.
How the issue of slavery tore the nation apart.
I will put two of these questions on the final exam. You will need to write about ONE of them.
Was life better for people living in the subsistence-oriented or the market-oriented economy in the early 19th Century? Which system was better for democracy?
How and why did slavery become the central issue in American politics in the 1830s?
To what extent was the relationship between slaves and masters governed by paternalism? (Consider evidence from all the relevant primary documents we read)
Explore the similarities and differences between Lincoln and Douglas in the positions they took in their 1858 debates. What if anything made Lincoln the more attractive anti-slavery candidate?
Explain why the Confederates felt justified in giving up on politics and resorting to violent revolution after Lincoln's election.
Andrew Jackson
Jacksonian democracy
Five civilized tribes
Indian removal
Trail of tears
Indian civilization Act
Subsistence production
Capitalist mode of production
Commercial boom
Ethic of ascetic effort (Market Revolution, 27)
Intensive cultivation
Short-fallow
Demographic Crisis
Putting-out
Proletarianizing
Jamaica
Abolitionism
Elijah Lovejoy
Immediatists
Moral suasion
William Lloyd Garrison
Moral suasion
The Liberator
American Anti-Slavery Society
David Walker
John C. Calhoun
Pro-slavery argument
Gag bill
“A positive good”
Frederick Douglass
Slave Power
White trash
New Orleans slave market
Slave religion
Nat Turner
Virginia Debate
Br’er Rabbit
Cavaliers
Plantation women
Paternalism
The Civil War represents a catastrophic failure of American democracy to resolve its citizens’ differences peacefully. Choose one item from the list below (drop-down menu) and explain how it/they/he played a key role in causing the breakdown of democratic politics and resort to secession and war.
The Mexican War
Wilmot Proviso
Mexican Cession
Popular sovereignty
Henry Clay
Omnibus bill
Fugitive Slave Act
Fire Eaters
Stephen Douglas
The Compromise of 1850
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Transcontinental Railroad
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Missouri Compromise Line
[Bleeding Kansas]
Slave power
Dred Scott
James Buchanan
Chief Justice Taney
Ruffians
Lincoln Douglas debates
Black Republicans
John Brown
Harper's Ferry
Secret Six
Election of 1860
[Lincoln' theory of perpetual union], see First Inaugural