Colonial Period

Essay questions:

1. Summarize the motives, expectations, problems, and rewards associated with the age of European expansion.
2. Rank the items in the following list, starting with the one that you think had the most important consequences.  Then justify your ranking.  Finally, speculate as to what might have happened had these events not occurred.
   1. The cultivation of tobacco in Virginia
   2. The introduction of slavery into the plantation colonies
   3. The “enclosing” of croplands in England

3. Which of the New England or middle colonies would you have preferred to live in?  Explain your answer by discussing your selection’s social. Economic, political, religious, and ethnic characteristics.
4. In your opinion, which three of the twelve colonies founded in the seventeenth century made the most significant contributions to the perennial American values of democratic self-government, educational opportunity, religious toleration, social plurality, and economic materialism? Explain your choice.
5. Argue either that an “American” way of life had emerged by the end of the seventeenth century or that the two wholly distinct ways of life, one New England and the other southern, had emerged by the end of the seventeenth century.

Internet-based assignment: