APUSH Periods 1–3 — 1491 to 1800

Three of the nine periods, from before contact to the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and the stretch where the course spends the most time on causes rather than events.

Two questions sit before 1607: how environmental difference produced societies that had almost nothing in common with one another, and what Bartolomé de las Casas actually argued about the encomienda system — which was a moral and religious case, not an economic one.

Four cover the colonial period. Two invented letters home from the 1630s, one from Massachusetts and one from Virginia, where the whole divergence between the regions is visible in what each writer thought worth counting. The turn from indentured servitude to hereditary racial slavery, and what drove it. The House of Burgesses. And the Great Awakening, whose effect on authority went a good deal further than religion.

Four cover the imperial crisis and the founding. What the Seven Years' War did to a relationship that had run on salutary neglect. An invented Boston pamphlet from 1765 that opens by refusing to argue about the size of the Stamp Act duty and then explains exactly what it does object to. The one weakness of the Articles of Confederation that made every other weakness worse. And a pairing of Madison's real sentence from Federalist 51 — "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" — with an invented Anti-Federalist reply, asking only what divides them.

That last question endorses neither side, which is the honest position: the Constitution was ratified with Madison's structure and amended within three years with the Anti-Federalists' enumerated rights, and the argument about which is doing the work has never quite stopped.

Where a source is quoted it is public domain and the words are the real words. Where a source is invented, the question says so in its own first line. Nothing is fabricated and put in a real person's mouth.

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• Explain how environmental difference produced distinct indigenous societies before 1607, and state what las Casas argued about the encomienda system
• Account for the divergence of the Chesapeake and New England from the evidence of who migrated and why
• Give the causes of the shift from indentured servitude to hereditary racial slavery in the Chesapeake
• Describe the growth of colonial self-government and the effect of the Great Awakening on established authority
• Explain how the Seven Years' War ended salutary neglect, and state the colonial constitutional objection to parliamentary taxation
• Name the central weakness of the Articles of Confederation and what followed from it
• Set out the Federalist and Anti-Federalist positions on how liberty is protected, without treating either as the correct one

An invented pamphlet, printed in Boston in 1765 against the Stamp Act, argues: 'It is not the sum that offends us. A shilling laid upon us by our own assembly is a gift; a penny laid upon us by a Parliament in which we have no voice is a tribute.' What argument is the writer making?