Week 2 — Charters, Covenants, and the Years Between — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 2 of the term — measure the years between the week's founding documents, read the First Charter of Virginia and the Mayflower Compact the historian's way, and correct a popular story about the first colony for someone new to history.

This week you learned what an empire, a colony, and a charter are, how four European powers built colonies, how to source the First Charter of Virginia and the Mayflower Compact, and how to tell a claim a source shows from one that goes beyond it. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's four pinned years, interpret each one, and correct a popular story about the first colony for someone who has never studied it. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is the week's four pinned years, in order:

• 1565 — St. Augustine founded
• 1606 — the First Charter of Virginia
• 1607 — Jamestown founded
• 1620 — the Mayflower Compact

Beside them sit the week's two roster documents. The First Charter of Virginia is a royal charter of King James I, dated 1606 in its own text and kept by the Avalon Project; its pinned fragment is "in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness". The Mayflower Compact is a covenant signed at Cape Cod by settlers bound for the northern parts of Virginia, dated 1620 in its own text and kept by the Avalon Project; its pinned fragment is "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation".

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. The First Charter of Virginia dates from 1606, and Jamestown was founded in 1607. How many years passed from the charter to the founding of Jamestown?
2. St. Augustine was founded in 1565 and Jamestown in 1607. By how many years is St. Augustine older?
3. Jamestown was founded in 1607, and the Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620. How many years passed from Jamestown to the Compact?
4. The First Charter of Virginia dates from 1606, and the Mayflower Compact from 1620. How many years separate the two documents?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the First Charter of Virginia (who made it, when, what type of document it is, and which host keeps it), then name its two stated motives, quoting the pinned fragment exactly, and say whether religious freedom appears among them.
• Problem 2: correct the common belief that Jamestown is the oldest European settlement in the continental United States, name the source the course relies on for that comparison, and name the Native people on whose land St. Augustine was founded.
• Problem 3: source the Mayflower Compact the same way, then explain, quoting its pinned fragment exactly in its own spelling, why it is a covenant for local self-government and not a constitution for a nation.
• Problem 4: sort items 3 and 4 of the evidence-claims set, which is illustrative: item 3, the Mayflower Compact says its signers combined into a civil body politic; item 4, the Mayflower Compact created American democracy. Say which one shows what the source says and which goes beyond it, with a reason for each.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "The Pilgrims founded the first European settlement in America at Plymouth, and their Mayflower Compact was the country's first constitution." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's years and documents, and names one limit of what you can say from the week's two documents (for example, that both were written by English colonists or their king, so neither gives a Powhatan or Wampanoag account). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend asking whether a bronze plaque at a town's edge "tells you why the town was founded." Model answer: "A plaque tells you what the people who paid for it wanted remembered, usually long after the founding. It is a later account, so it may leave out people who were there first or reasons the founders never wrote down. To check it, I would look for a record made at the time, such as the town's own charter or its first meeting minutes. Read side by side, the plaque shows how the town later told its story, and the charter shows what its founders said they wanted."

Use that pattern for your message to the coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date and quoted word against Chapter 2, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the four pinned years and the document each year marks), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places the four years and the two documents, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date and every quoted word from Chapter 2, and quote only the two pinned fragments, in their own spelling. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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