GED and HiSET social studies — United States history

American history on these tests is not a memory game about dates. One question in a set might ask which of four events came first; the rest ask why something happened, what followed from it, and what a document actually says. These twelve are written that way, one per period, in order from the colonial quarrel over taxation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Some of them are the standard ground: what the colonists were actually objecting to, which was the authority of a Parliament they had not elected rather than the size of the bill; what the Great Compromise settled between large states and small ones; why the status of slavery in new territories threatened the balance of the Senate and therefore the country.

Others are put together to be worth answering. Removal in 1830 and the destruction of the southern buffalo herd by the 1880s are asked as one question, because the two have the same consequence fifty years apart: a nation that had fed itself now drew rations from an agency, and that is what made confinement enforceable. The three Reconstruction amendments are asked as a sequence rather than a list — ending slavery says what a person is not, citizenship says what he is, and the vote is a third thing again, which is why there are three amendments and not one. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is paired with what it did not reach: registration and voting, which took a second statute the following year, after Selma.

Where a document is quoted, it is quoted exactly, and the rule for this set is strict. Works of the United States government carry no copyright, so the Thirteenth Amendment appears here in full and verbatim, checked against the National Archives text. Anything later than 1930 — a speech, a letter, a column — is paraphrased in plain words and never dressed up as a quotation. Nothing comes from a test publisher's materials.

The wrong answers are the mistakes people actually make: that the Fourteenth Amendment ended slavery, that segregation in the armed forces ended when the war began, that the New Deal pushed the states out of welfare administration when in fact it paid them to run it.

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• State what the colonists' objection to British taxation actually was, and what the Great Compromise settled
• Explain why slavery in the territories, rather than slavery itself, produced the sectional crisis
• Say what removal and the destruction of the buffalo herds had in common as consequences for Native nations
• Put the three Reconstruction amendments in order and say what each added to the one before it
• Explain why industrial workers organized, and what the Progressive era tried to do about industrialization
• Describe how the New Deal changed what a citizen could expect from the federal government
• Describe the home front in the Second World War, including both industrial conversion and internment
• Say what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed, and why voting rights required a second statute in 1965

Primary text is quoted verbatim only where it is in the public domain. From the bank, the Thirteenth Amendment as ratified in 1865: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The question asks what that settles and what it leaves to the two amendments that follow.