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Watson

TakingSides Essay

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Option A

For or Against Bacon’s Rebellion

Purpose:

Skills: To demonstrate the critical thinking and writing skills necessary to write an effective scholarly paper and succeed in a professional career. This will be accomplished by:

· identifying and summarizing relevant historical background information;

· summarizing and analyzing primary sources;

· and arguing for or against a political position.

Knowledge: To identify, describe, and explain the actions, rationales, events, and consequences of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Essay Prompt: It is 1676 and unrest has been brewing on the frontier in colonial Virginia. Surplus planters have been demanding that more land be taken from Native Americans to facilitate more commercial tobacco farming. One in particular, Nathaniel Bacon, is whipping up support among white indentured servants and enslaved Africans to venture into Native lands and attack their villages regardless of their status as “friendly” or “hostile” according to the colonial government led by Governor William Berkeley. Take a side. Do you support Bacon or do you support Berkeley? What sort of consequences will there be to this rebellion particularly for those of the lower economic classes? Write an essay of no less than 900 words. Support your position only with citations from the online textbook, assigned primary documents and video presentations. The essay should include:

· an introduction,

· an underlined thesis statement that identifies your position on the topic,

· and paragraphs with clear topic sentences, relevant historical information, and source citations that explain Bacon’s Rebellion specifically and the politics of class and race in the colonial period generally.

· Citations: Paragraphs must include enough citations to fully support your essay. Citations should be provided for all direct quotes and paraphrases. Citations should be placed directly after relevant sentences. Essays with excessively long quotations will be penalized. (In other words, use citations to support your argument, not be your argument.)

· The essay must include:

· at least four (4) citations from the main body of The American Yawp,

· Citation style: (Yawp, section title)

· For example, if you cited something from the section on Shays’ Rebellion, it would look like this: (Yawp, Shays’ Rebellion)

· at least two (

2

) citations from lecture presentations,

· Citation style: (Watson, lecture title)

· and citations from at least three (3) from the primary sources from the online textbook.

· Citation style: (Author of the primary source last name)

· For example, if you were citing George Washington’s Farewell Address, it would like this: (Washington)

· No works cited page required.

· Length: Most students can usually write an effective paper in 1,000 to 1,200 words. Write what you feel is necessary to get your point across.

· Prohibited: The use of non-course materials is prohibited because I am assessing your effectiveness in using assigned course materials to craft a well-contextualized argument. Papers that cite or plagiarize from outside sources will receive zeroes. The TurnItIn plagiarism checker will be used.

· Mechanical Requirements: Upload your paper to the proper Assignments folder in D2L (you will receive explicit instructions on how to do so) as a Word or pdf by clicking add file. Assignments should be double-spaced in 11- or 12-point Arial or Calibri font with standard margins. Do not submit your paper as a comment, as Apple .pages, or as any form of image (jpeg, tiff, etc.).

Criteria:

This assessment is worth 150 points and counts as 15 percent of the final grade. (Please see full rubric attached to assessment on D2L.)

· Content (40 points)

Does the essay adequately summarize events, ideas, and/or actions relevant to the topic?

Is historical information provided to support the argument as it develops?

Is the cited historical information relevant to the argument?

· Critical Thinking (40 points)

Is the essay’s overall argument logically developed paragraph-by-paragraph and well supported

by historical information?

· Clarity (40 points)

Is the thesis statement underlined and does it state a clear position?

Does each paragraph have a topic sentence that identifies what the paragraph is about?

Is the essay spell-checked?

Are proper nouns capitalized and spelled correctly?

Is each sentence a complete with a clear subject and verb?

· Citations (30 points)

Does this essay cite text from the main body of The American Yawp at least four (4) times?

Does this essay cite lecture presentations at least two (2) times?

Does this essay cite at least three (3) primary sources from the online textbook?

Do the citations advance the essay with new information?

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2

Life in British North America

Pt. 1: The Salem Witch Trials and Women in the Colonies

Salem Witch Trials, Background
Aftermath of King Philip’s War
Glorious Revolution (1688)
Theocracy

Salem Witch Trials
The two Sarahs and Tituba
20 executed (19 women, one man)
Moldy bread, red state/blue state, “nasty” women

Anne hutchinson
Bible study group leader in Boston
Free Grace Controversy
Banished from Massachusetts Bay

Domestic Sphere

“True wives” work in the home, etc.
Plenty of women broke this model
Myth sticks in minds for centuries

Women’s Rights
(Or Lack Thereof)
No right to…
Vote
Sign contracts
Bring lawsuits
Education

Eliza Lucas
Indigo girl
Manages father’s South Carolina plantations

Life in British north America

Pt. 2: How Economics Shaped Life in the Colonies

Georgia
James Oglethorpe: haven for debtors
British want military buffer between Sp. Florida & SC
Slavery outlawed in charter; ban lifted in 1751

Rough Equality
Southern colonies: slave populations growing
Surplus /Subsistence farmers
Inequality in America not as stark (for white men)

African American Culture
Increasing reliance on chattel slavery
Cultural influence: cooking, accents, music
Forms of resistance: subtle and overt

Colonial Slave Uprisings
New York Slave Revolt of 1712
Stono Rebellion (SC), 1739
Colonies pass laws to make slavery more repressive

New England Industrialization
Cold climate, rocky soil
Industrializing & urbanizing
Less reliant on slave labor.
Already a North/South divide.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. Oxford University Press. 1991.
Sources and further reading

Decline of spain

The English Colonies
Pt. 1 – Virginia

The race for north america
French: Acadia, Canada, Louisiana
Dutch: New Amsterdam
English: struggle for permanent settlement
Business and religion

Virginia
Honor of Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen
Joint-stock companies
Cheap land and self-government enticements to take risk

tobacco
Appetite suppressant, medicine for Native Americans
Marketed as wonder drug to Euros
Becomes Virginia’s top cash crop

Headrights & indentures

John smith
Instrumental in founding Jamestown
Pocahontas story
Names region of New England

The English colonies
Pt. 2 – New England

business and religion
Virginia colony was a business venture
New England colonies will be established as experiments in religious freedom

The pilgrims
Fed up with Anglican Church
Plymouth Colony
Mayflower Compact

puritans
John Winthrop & Congregationalists
Massachusetts Bay
Theocracy & persecution
New colonies: Connecticut & Rhode Island

Life in British North America

Pt. 3 – The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

Great Awakening
Itinerant preachers, revivals
Old churches were boring
George Whitefield
Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Effects of the Great Awakening
Injects urgency, passion and emotion
Democratizes religion
Unites colonists against old authority

The Enlightenment
Empiricism: Evidence, logic and reason

John Locke: life, liberty, and property

People are good and should be left to manage their own lives

The Enlightenment in America

Scientific experimentation improves lives
Deism and religious tolerance
Little “r” republicanism

The English Colonies

Pt. 3 – Trouble All Over the Place

Filling in the Map

English Civil War (1642-1651)
Roundheads vs. Cavaliers: Parliament vs. Crown
Colonization on Atlantic seaboard resumes after Restoration

England & the Slave Trade

Chattel slavery
Sugarcane: Antigua, Jamaica, Barbados
Chattel slaves brought to southern Carolina

Settler Colonialism
New England: Pequot War (1637) & King Phillip’s War (1675)
Virginia: Anglo-Powhatan Wars (1610s – 1640s)
“Occupation and elimination of native populations”

Bacon’s Rebellion
William Berkeley (governor) vs. Nathaniel Bacon (rebel)
Racism meets class conflict
White indentures and black slaves join Bacon’s militia

Bacon’s Rebellion (continued)
Gov’t reforms seen as weak and tone-deaf by Bacon
Bacon rejects reforms and burns down Jamestown
Most of the violence directed at Native Americans

Racism Formalized

The lesson: protect privilege; divide labor by skin color
The plan: pass laws that discriminate by skin color
The result: white people will identify by skin color, not economic status

Sources and Further Reading
LeFevre, Tate. “Settler Colonialism.” (In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Ed. John Jackson. New York. Oxford University Press. 2015.) Accessed 17 January 2019.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. 2003.