American History Essay Questions

 Answer one of the following essay questions. Be sure to identify five terms in your essay. Be sure to write the number of the essay question that you are answering.

1. Explain why and how 1850s Americans might have prevented the Civil War.

2. Explain why and how the sectional conflict over the issue of slavery in the 1850s caused the Civil War.

3. Explain why and how the Union won the Civil War.

4. Evaluate the constitutionality of the sectional positions of the 1850s.

5. Explain why and how the Confederacy lost the Civil War.

Answer one of the following essay questions. Be sure to identify five terms in your essay. Be sure to write the number of the essay question that you are answering.

1. Discuss the essential features of the antebellum intellectual movements.

2. Explain why and how the issues of expansion and slavery informed national politics from 1821 to 1849.

3. Discuss the essential features of the economic revolution in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.

4. Discuss the essential features of the antebellum reform movements

5. Explain why and how the United States experienced an economic revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century

  To answer an essay question, you must identify five terms from a weekly study guide.  To identify a term is to cover the who, what, when, where, how, why, context, and significance of the term. 

Weekly Study Guide terms(Words Bank)

Jefferson Davis

King Cotton

First Battle of Manassas

Border Wars

Battle of Shiloh

Antietam

“Contrabands”

Radical Republicans

Emancipation Proclamation

Greenbacks

One-tenth tax

Twenty-Negro Rule

Draft Riots

Lieber Code

Vicksburg

Robert E. Lee

Gettysburg

U.S. Grant

William Tecumseh Sherman

Appomattox Court House

Constitutional Conflict

Compromise of 1850

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Personal Liberty Laws

Franklin Pierce

Ostend Manifesto

Irish Famine

American Party

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Republican Party

“Bleeding Kansas”

James Buchanan

Dred Scott Decision

Mormon War

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

John Brown’s Raid

Election of 1860

Confederate States of America

Fort Sumter

Planter Elites

Small Freeholders

Poor Freemen

Stephen F. Austin

Alamo

Back Protestantism

Gullah Dialect

Task System

Manifest Destiny

Oregon

California

Plains Indians

James K. Polk

Zachary Taylor

“Bear Flag Republic”

Mexican Cession

Wilmot Proviso

“Slave Power” Conspiracy

Free Soil Movement

Forty-Niners

Charles Grandison Finney

Benevolent Empire

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Margaret Fuller

Walt Whitman

Herman Melville

Mother Ann Lee

Charles Fourier

John Humphrey Noyes

Mormonism

Bowery Boys

New York Herald

Edgar Allan Poe

Minstrel Shows

Free African Societies

Nat Turner’s Revolt

Abolitionism

Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)

Seneca Falls Convention

Panic of 1819

Commonwealth System

Canals

Steamboats

Telegraph

Cotton Complex

Waltham-Lowell System

John Woolman

Manumission Act

Cotton Boom

Coastal Trade

Inland System

Chattel Principle

John C. Calhoun

Machine Tools

Unions

Gang-labor System

Middle Class

Self-made Man

Urban Workers