History 1700 MacKay Essay Exam 1

Write essays in response to the following topics. Each essay should reflect your reading and your listening out of which you have gained wisdom and understanding of America's past. Use specific examples, statistics, stories to strengthen your analysis.

You will randomly receive either section A or B. (30 points)

Section A.

Define mercantilism. Using essays from the Oates text and supportive materials, discuss the economic system which was at the heart of European expansion into the Americas. In your discussion, focus your attention on three groups of people:

• Native Americans. How is the intrusion of Europeans into the Americas a catastophe for the native inhabitants? Consider issues of the "Columbian Exchange" and the "American Holocaust." How do the Europeans get away with taking control of the Americas?
• European colonists.  Many of these colonists were the "surcharge of necessitous people." By 1770, more than 2 million people lived and worked in Great Britain's 13 North American colonies.  Describe these European migrants to the English colonies.
• African slaves. Migration to British North America was more black than white before 1800. About 900,000 Europeans migrated to North America and the Caribbean between 1600 and 1800, while about 2,300,000 Africans arrived in the same period. Explain the European enslavement and forced migration of Africans into the Americas. What was the Middle Passage and how did it work to de-humanize Africans?

Section B. 

Define the Market Revolution or industrial capitalism. How was it different from a subsistence economy? Use Oates essays 19, 20 and supportive materials. Focus on three dynamics of that economic system:

• Changes in transportation to effect the market. How is the Erie Canal a symbol of the industrial/market economy of  mid-nineteenth century America? How is it also an example of government involvement in an economic system supposedly based on laissez faire? Why does industrialization develop more in the Northeast than in the South? 
• Changes in human labor/ use of machines. Who were the first industrial workers in the U.S.? Why? How did they try to have control over their own work? What was their argument for government regulation of the developing capitalist, industrial economy?
• Changes in the family/roles of men and women. Using class notes and Internet materials, explain strategies used by white, middle class families to take advantage of the shift from subsistence to capitalist economy in antebellum America. What did it mean for these families to change from home production of goods and services (subsistence economy) to purchase of services and manufactured goods (industrial capitalism)? What characterized the new urban middle class family? What was the "cult of domesticity"? How do we re-think manhood?

Extra points ( up to 5): Choose one of the following:

1. Summarize the arguments that the scholars Mann interviewed are making that:  "Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe." Use specifics from the essay "1491."
2. What did Hamilton promote as the role for the new national government in turning the U.S. economy into one based on investment, industry, and expanded commerce?
3. Define communitarianism. Describe one of the utopian communities of Antebellum American. How is this a resistance to industrial capitalism?