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Reading Questions: Unit One: The Seeds of Rebellion

Use your own words to answer these questions. When appropriate, you may answer with bullet points. Complete sentences aren’t necessary if you can make the point with phrases. If you prefer typing, you might find it useful to download this sheet from my web site and then just copy these questions into a Word document. I’ve included the page numbers in parentheses to facilitate your reading.

1.	(Prologue) What were the Americans’ view of themselves and their place in the world? (3 – 6)
2.	What was Britain’s view of the role of government and how did it reflect British society? (Don’t worry about the Lord Boodle quote. I’ll talk about that in class.) (16-18)
3.	What points does Middlekauf say about George III’s character that perhaps will be significant in the upcoming crisis? (18-20)
4.	How was Britain financing the three wars it had fought with France since 1688? (22-24)
5.	Briefly summarize the information on the organization of the British army and navy. Think about how this will affect the performance of Britain during the war in America. (24 – 26)
6.	What problems were there in the way Britain had organized their colonial administration that foreshadows problems for relations between Britain and their colonies? (26 – 29)
7.	In what way were the American colonies divided? What did they have in common? (31-32)
8.	Briefly summarize the points that the book makes about the economic groups in the colonies. (a bullet-point list is fine.) (33-42)
9.	Briefly summarize the characteristics of the colonial governments. (42-46)
10.	What effects did the Great Awakening have? (49-51)
11.	What was the radical Whig ideology? (51-52)
12.	Why did the British government decide to maintain a standing army in the colonies? (55-56)
13.	Why did the British issue the Proclamation of 1763 and what tensions did it cause? (58-60)
14.	What were the reasons why the Grenville government passed the Sugar Act? (62-64)
15.	Why did the Sugar Act so anger the colonists? What was the impact of the Act on the colonies? What does the reaction in places like Rhode Island tell you about the mood in the colonies? (65-73)
16.	Summarize the arguments for and against the Stamp Act? (Note Colonel Barré’s speech on p. 79) (77-80)
17.	Briefly summarize (bullet points are fine) what happened when Patrick Henry proposed the Virginia Resolves and their impact on the other colonies. (We’ll be looking at them in more detail in class.) 81, 83-86)
18.	What were James Otis, Jr.’s arguments against writs of assistance? (p. 90) (Don’t worry about trying to absorb the info on the Otis-Hutchinson feud and how Otis, Jr., goes back and forth. Just know that the two families didn’t like each other and that Otis, Jr. was a mite unsteady in his positions sometimes.)
19.	Who were the Loyal Nine and how did they use the North and South End mobs? What happened when they rioted? (92-97)
20.	What happened in the other colonies in response to the Stamp Act. (You don’t need to know all the details of the feuds in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Just have a general idea of the types of actions the crowds took.) (98-111)
21.	What was the response in Britain? How did Lord Rockingham try to resolve the issue? (111-114)
22.	What were the points made in the Parliament between William Pitt and Lord Grenville? (114-118)
23.	What were the reasons why the Stamp Act was eventually repealed? (119-121)
24.	What was the Declaratory Act? (121)
25.	Outline or bullet-point the intellectual arguments that the colonists were making about their rights. (122-130)
26.	The book describes the anxieties that many colonists had about a conspiracy to deprive them of their liberties. List the reasons for this paranoia. (130-138)
27.	What was the role of the mob and why were these men in the mobs motivated to take action? (138 – 141)