Survey 1 — 1607 to the 1990s, period by period

Fifteen questions running from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to the end of the twentieth century, with no more than two from any one period of the course — so it works as a diagnostic across the whole syllabus rather than as revision for one unit.

They are asked the way Section I asks them. Not "what was the Agricultural Adjustment Act" but which policy a described reformer would have supported, which later event most directly resulted from a stated situation, which development best explains the rise of a party, what a described trend indicates about a decade. The course names those moves — causation, comparison, continuity and change, contextualisation — and the multiple-choice section is built out of them.

Several questions are decided by chronology alone. The four options are all real events from adjacent decades, and the only thing separating them is when they happened. This is the most under-practised skill in the whole subject and the one that most often sinks an otherwise good essay: contextualisation is a rubric point, and it is built out of knowing what else was going on at the same time.

The opening question is the model for how the explanations work. Its three wrong options are the Navigation Acts, the headright system and the Stono Rebellion — all real, none invented — and the explanation places each: the Acts governed where tobacco could be sold in the 1650s and 60s, the headright system encouraged indentured servitude from the 1610s, and Stono is South Carolina in 1739, half a century after the shift being asked about. Knowing where a wrong answer actually belongs is worth more than knowing it was wrong.

What this cannot do. The real Section I hangs almost every question on a source — an excerpt, a map, a political cartoon, a table — and these materials carry no images, so nothing here depends on one. That means the source-reasoning half of the section is only partly represented: the reasoning is here, the document is not. Practise that half on College Board's released exams, which have the sources in them.

And it does not touch the document-based question or the long essay, which are 40% of the score between them. Those are produced rather than chosen, and the only preparation for them is to write one under time and mark it against the published rubric.

No primary-source text is quoted anywhere here. Where a question attributes a position to a commentator or a reformer, that position is written for this material and labelled as a paraphrase. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication.

The fourteen flashcards carry what the questions assume: the acts, the doctrines, the parties and the decades they sit in.

• Place events, acts and movements in the right decade, which is what contextualisation is built from
• Reason from a described position to the policy its holder would support
• Identify what most directly resulted from a described situation, rather than what merely followed it
• Explain the rise of a party or a movement by the development that produced it
• Read a described trend as evidence about a period
• Tell apart four real options from adjacent decades — and know where each of the wrong ones belongs
• Cover the whole course, from the colonial period to the 1990s, in one sitting as a diagnostic

Historians generally date the Chesapeake colonies' shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery to the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Which development best explains that shift? — Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 put freed servants and enslaved Africans together in arms against the colonial government, and the lesson the planter class drew was that a population of landless men who had served their terms was a standing danger. The Navigation Acts, the headright system and the Stono Rebellion are all real, and all from the wrong moment or about the wrong question.