Assignment

1. Explain how and why this “terrible transformation” took place—including both the common and local factors—and analyze the primary social and economic roles that enslaved black people played by the mid-eighteenth century.

Evaluate the primary forms that slave resistance took, analyze the historical forces behind this resistance, and explain its central effects.

3. Explain why slavery was questioned widely during the Revolutionary period and why the Northern and Southern history of the institution diverged so greatly after the Revolution

Explain why the North failed initially to advocate the destruction of slavery. And explain why and how this changed—why and how the Civil War did in fact became for the North a war to abolish slavery.

Explain how subsequent U.S. history might have been different if, during Reconstruction, the plantations of the South had been divided and ex-slaves had been given plots of land and the means to farm these. Evaluate why, despite the demands of freed people, supported by some Radical Republicans, general land redistribution in the South was never implemented by the federal government.