history

FIRST EXAM Olwell - HIS 315K – Spring 2023

You will have until midnight on Monday, February 13, to submit your exam (as a single word- doc) on to the course canvas page. At the top of the first page, please write your name, then “Olwell - HIS 315k - Spring 2023,” and “First Exam”.

Part I: Expository Essay (750-1000 words, 50 points)

Select one of the following four questions and write an expository essay in answer to it. Your

answer should use complete sentences and contain paragraphs, an introduction, and a conclusion. Support your points and arguments with specific evidence and examples taken from the lectures and readings whenever possible. In particular, you should draw upon the primary readings contained in the Presence of Past, and to quote or paraphrase short (no more than one sentence) passages from these documents as appropriate. Since you will have four and half days to write your essay, you may use this time to consult the readings, look over your notes, and also review any of the recorded lectures (or just the relevant parts of them). However, no additional research beyond the material provided in class is required. All submitted essays will be evaluated by the “turn-it-in” software included on canvas. Essays that show a strong correlation to others submitted in the class or to sources on the inter-net will be flagged. Your completed essay should be between 750 and 1000 words long. It should be added to your answer to the primary passage analysis (see below) to form a single word-document and submitted onto canvas no later than midnight Monday, February 13.

1. Explain how the changes that had occurred in England over the course of the 16th-century both inspired and were reflected in Richard Hakluyt’s promotional pamphlet: “Inducements for the Liking of the Voyage Intended Towards Virginia.” How did Hakluyt’s plan as to how the English should colonize America draw upon England’s particular “skill-set” (or culture) as opposed to the “skills” that the Spanish brought to their own colonization enterprise? What part were the natives supposed to play in Hakluyt’s original scheme for Virginia and in the initial business model adopted by the Virginia Company of London? How might the images contained in John White and Theodore DeBry’s book: “The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in That Part of America Now Called Virginia” seem to validate these hopes and plans? Use the historical events that ensued in both Virginia and, later, in New England, to evaluate the possibility of trade as a means to peacefully “civilize” (and colonize) natives. Ultimately, was trade just another mode of conquest? Why? Why not? 2. As they landed in America, both Spanish Conquistadores and English Puritans published (or pronounced) documents that explained and justified what they were doing in terms that were religious but also legal and contractual. Describe the historical circumstances that inspired the creation of both the “Requerimiento” and the “Modell of Christian Charitie.” How did each document reflect the plans and world-view of the people who wrote and/or published them? What was the ostensible purpose of and audience for each document? Do you think this may have differed from their actual audience and purpose? If so, how? If we read each document as a “contract,” how would you describe their various “legal” claims and requirements? What role was accorded to God in each “contract”? What were the proscribed rights and duties of the documents’ publishers (Conquistador or Puritan)? Where did the natives fit in? If the ensuing colonial project did not go well, on whom did each document place the blame, and who would be “justly” subject to punishment?

3. Explain why, beginning in 1618, there was a great demand for labor in colonial Virginia. Why

was “unfree labor” best able to satisfy the need (or greed) of Virginia tobacco planters? Describe the system of unfree labor which supplied most of Virginia’s tobacco workers for the next fifty years. How did this system meet the basic requirements (or hopes) of both planters and workers? Describe several of the factors: demographic, economic, political, and/or cultural, that persuaded wealthy Virginia planters to begin to shift toward using enslaved Africans as their main source of labor after 1660 or so. Give specific examples of some of the laws that were passed by the Virginia elite in this decade to create the legal “chains” by which some people (and their children) were to be defined as the perpetual property of others. Do you think Edmund Morgan, in his essay “Slavery and Freedom the American Paradox,” adopts a Marxist (materialist) or the Hegelian (idealist) approach to history when he suggests that slavery came before racism in Virginia? Explain.

4.) What was at stake when the Virginia court asked Thomas(ine) Hall in 1629: “Whether he were

man or woman?”? Describe the early modern concept of patriarchy and how it drew upon both the bible and the family to justify and conflate the rule of men over women and the king over his subjects. What was a woman’s role according to English law and custom? (Explain what that legal custom was called, and why.) When Englishmen sought to transplant their ideas and practices about gender to America, their cultural “seed” spilled onto very different ground and produced different results. What factors: demographic, religious, and/or economic, reinforced or undermined the power of patriarchs in early Virginia and New England? Why were women “the usual suspects” in witchcraft cases? How was the witch, as depicted in popular belief, the antithesis of the “Good Wife”? Using patriarchal criteria, how (when) was Mary Rowlandson, as she describes herself and her actions in her captivity narrative, behaving as a dutiful “Good Wife”? How (when) was she out of her “proper place”?

Part Two: Primary Document Analysis (c. 500-750 words, 50 points)

Brief extracts taken from four of the primary documents that we have examined in class are printed below. First, choose one of them, identify it and describe its historic context (that is: explain when, where, why, and by whom it was made). Then, focus upon a specific section (a single sentence or short phrase) from your chosen passage and explain how it is particularly revealing about the goals and ideas of the person (or people) that wrote it. First Document Extract:

. . . They neither carry nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron, their darts being wands without iron, some of them have fish’s tooth at the end, and others being pointed in various ways. They are all of fair stature and size, with good faces, and well made. I saw some with marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to ask what it was, and they gave me to understand that people from other adjacent islands came with the intention of seizing them, and that they defended themselves. I believed, and still believe, that they came here from the main land to take them prisoners. They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion. I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak.

Second Document Extract:

… But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition.

Third Document Extract:

…. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

Fourth Document Extract:

… Whereas the only law in force for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master, mistress, or overseer cannot be inflicted upon Negroes, nor the obstinacy of many of them be suppressed by other than violent means, be it enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly if any slave resists his master (or other by his master's order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accounted a felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to punish him) be acquitted from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice (which alone makes murder a felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate.