Zinn Chapter 1 “
How is the history of the past used in the present?
How should it be?
What difference does “perspective” make?
What perspective does Zinn employ in the telling of American history, and why?
What does the title of this chapter mean?
What value did he see in the Arawak people?
Why did he abuse them, how did he abuse them, and how do we know about this?
Who were the Arawaks and what happened to them, where are they now?
What were the 3 hallmarks of the beginning of Euro-Indian contact for Indians?
What happened in
Did Powhatan offer a different way in 1607? Why did Virginians reject it?
What happened in
Was what came after conquest really “Progress”?
Describe Indian
societies before
How did they way they structured their lives reveal their cultural values?
Compare Indian societal structure to European, & contrast Indian values to Euro.
Did European values
play a role in
conquest, slavery and death? Which ones?
Zinn Chapter 2 “Drawing the Color Line”
Why is racism unique
in
Is racism “natural” to people, or “conditioned”?
What conditions must change to overcome racism?
<>What conditions characterized the slave trade?
What caused those conditions to be so deplorable?
Was enslavement “worthwhile” for Africans so that they could experience
“Progress”?
Compare the Indian and African societies before and after conquest.
Was what came afterward, even through to today, really “progress”?
How did the condition of racism accompany the development of slavery?
Any connection to English interaction with Indians?
How and why was the
color line
drawn with laws in 17th century
Were they conditioned to be submissive and suitable for slavery?
How did they resist slavery on a day to day basis?
What were some examples of extraordinary resistance? How many?
When and why did white folks join in slave rebelliousness?
What does this inter-racial cooperation tell us about racism?
How did wealthy planters put an end to inter-racial cooperation and why?
Zinn Chapter 3 “Persons of Mean and Vile Condition”
Who were the servants, how did they become servants?
Compare the transatlantic business and transportation of the servant trade to the
slave trade. Why were they so similar?
Compare the servants resistance to oppression to slaves resistance to oppression.
How many servants became landholders after servitude?
Was American a “
How did various colonies help to concentrate wealth? Structures, laws? Examples
What kind of social
system did this
create in
How did the poor, landless, destitute majority respond to the wealthy, landed
majority when they felt particularly abused? Examples.
What lesson did the elites learn from Bacon’s Rebellion?
What lesson did the elites learn in white industrial/commercial cities?
What were the structures, laws, policies, and institutions they created to maintain
control of wealth?
How was it also a complex chain of oppression in other colonies as well?
Zinn Chapter 4 “Tyranny is Tyranny”
Who did they most greatly impact, and where?
Who mobilized the resistance? What was the extent of their control?
How did the rich and the poor share in their grievances? Were they really
“shared” grievances?
What were “regulation” movements? Where, and when?
Would Regulators become Revolutionaries? Why or why not?
next 200 years? Was it a planned conspiracy or a happy coincidence?
What in their English political past helped teach them this lesson?
What was the
significance of Common
Sense and the Declaration of
Why did the
Declaration of
exclude others?
Zinn Chapter 5 “A Kind of Revolution”
How and why did support increase incrementally?
How much resistance was there to the Revolutionary cause? Examples. Why?
How did the Patriot elite overcome that resistance?
What did it mean to blacks, slave and free?
How did blacks interpret the Revolution for themselves?
Why couldn’t Thomas Jefferson extend “liberty” to include blacks?
What kind of political and economic system did it establish?
How were the general public sold on it?
How did it establish elite control?
How are it’s protections “flexible” to suit the needs of wealth?
Zinn Chapter 6 “The Intimately Oppressed”
How did laws support and sanction it? Why did they?
Despite that, what power did Colonial women have, that later women did not?
What effect did the democratic rhetoric have on them, their ideas?
What effect did the war have on their lives, work, and opportunities?
What were their components?
What inspired these restrictive social ideals?
Could all women conform to them?
What sorts of “bonds” did this new womanhood create?
How did middle class women resist?
What brought about the Seneca Falls Convention and the Women’s Rights
Movement in 1848? What discovery were women making?
Zinn Chapter 7 “As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs”
Revolution and before 1800?
What forces led to “Indian Removal” between 1800 and 1840?
Why did the U.S. Government demand removal?
How did they justify it?
What were the variety of methods used to remove them?
Why did they attempt to use Christianity?
How did the government(s) divide people in order to secure removal?
How was removal carried out?
What effect did it have on Indian people?
Why was it so deadly?
Zinn Chapter 8 “We Take Nothing By Conquest, Thank God”
How did he do it?
What justification for war was presented to the people?
Who presented this justification?
What was the reaction of Congress? Why
Was there opposition? From whom?
Was there support? From whom, how, and why? Government’s role?
How long did support last? Why did it fade?
Describe American and Mexican behavior?
Who was the Mexican leader? His character?
How did Mexicans in
What did the Whig Intelligencer mean when it printed “we take nothing by
conquest, Thank God”?
Zinn Chapter 9 “Emancipation Without Freedom”
Did the North agree with him? Who did not?
How did slaves react to the war? Did they all react the same way? Why or why
not?
<>Were all slaves “freed” by these laws?
What didn’t these laws provide? Why did this inadequacy prevent real freedom?
What is freedom?
How, when, and why did Northerners and Republicans go along?
What role did the Supreme Court play in rolling back civil rights? How?
How did some blacks participate in their own subjugation? Who?
Did they all?
1. What does historian Charles Sellers mean by the “fundamental moral anxiety”
produced by slavery?
What did this anxiety produce where slavery existed? And where it didn’t?
How were individual and personal decisions, like Celia’s and Robert Newsom’s
“linked to the political issue of slavery in the larger society”?
<>What political controversy did they step into upon arrival? How did that change the
way the nation thought about slavery?
Describe
What sort of community was it? How did the Newsom family fit in?
3. Why did Robert Newsom purchase his first five slaves?
Why did he purchase Celia, and when?
What political
controversy was
unfolding when he traveled to
Celia?
4. What moral dilemma’s created by slavery’s “fundamental moral anxiety” were faced
by:
Robert Newsom
Virginia and Mary Newsom
Harry and David Newsom
George
Celia
McLaurin Chapters 3 & 4 “The Inquest and the Backdrop”
Why are their identities significant?
How did the
Why were Missourians and the press convinced that Celia had help?
What was Harry Newsom’s gripe with the Missouri Republican?
What issues inspired the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
Why were northerners opposed to the law? Why did their opposition frighten
southerners?
Why was the Kansas-Nebraska Act important to Missourians?
How did they respond?
What influence would all this have on Celia’s trial?
McLaurin Chapters 5 & 6 “The Trial and the The Verdict”
Why was he so important to the outcome of the case?
Who was Jameson and why did Hall appoint him as defense counsel?
What were their moral dilemmas?
Who were its witnesses and why?
What was the defense strategy during trial?
How did Jameson develop it through cross-examination of prosecution witnesses?
What sorts of objections did the prosecution raise? Hall’s reaction?
What were the instructions?
What was the prosecution strategy here, and what were their instructions?
Why did the prosecution object to all of the defense instructions, and how did
Hall respond and why?
How did the defenses
case threaten
the institution of slavery in
Did it threaten more than that?
What was the sentence?
How did Judge Hall react to the defense’s appeal to the State Supreme Court?
Why?
McLaurin Chapters 7 & Conclusion “Final Disposition”
How does McLaurin know who rescued her?
To whom did the defense lawyers make a personal appeal and why?
What was the backdrop for the appeal?
After her execution, why does McLaurin record the costs of her trial and hanging?
The power of the patriarch and the sexuality of their female slaves?
Relations between free white and enslaved black women?
Relations between black men and women in slavery?
Law and slavery?
Attempts to reform slavery law?
The reasons for “justifying slavery” (the “psychic costs”)?
The existence of choice or agency for all involved in slavery?
Zinn Chapter 10 “The Other Civil War”
War” that Zinn referred to?
What conditions created it?
What were it’s battles? It’s casualties? Who were the winners? Losers?
Why was class consciousness difficult to mobilize? Did it appear anyway?
How did the 2 party political system deal with the “other Civil War”?
How did one Civil War distract folks from the “other Civil War”?
Who won the “other Civil War” as a result of the Civil War? How?
How was class consciousness present, yet stifled?
What were its battles? Casualties?
Who were its winners and losers?
How did the 2 party political system deal with the “other Civil War”?