Week 4 — Consent and Empire: Dating the Road from 1763 to 1765 — Traditional alternative (no AI)
Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.
Assignment 4 of the term — measure how the imperial crisis grew out of a century and a half of English colonies, read the week's two documents the historian's way, and explain what the colonists objected to in words someone new to history can follow.
This week you learned how the Seven Years' War ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1763, how Native nations met the new empire, what colonists meant by consent to taxation, how the Stamp Act Congress stated that claim in 1765, and how resistance moved through petitions, boycotts, and crowd action to Lexington and Concord. In this assignment you work four short problems on a chronology that runs from the first English colonies to the Stamp Act Congress, interpret each one, and explain the colonists' objection to 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 a chronology of five years from the course's chronologies, in order:
- 1606 — the First Charter of Virginia
- 1607 — the founding of Jamestown
- 1620 — the Mayflower Compact
- 1763 — the Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War
- 1765 — the Stamp Act Congress declarations
Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:
- The Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War in 1763, and the Stamp Act Congress adopted its declarations in 1765. How many years passed between the two?
- The Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620, and the Stamp Act Congress adopted its declarations in 1765. How many years separate the two?
- Jamestown was founded in 1607, and the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War in 1763. How many years separate the two?
- The First Charter of Virginia was granted in 1606, and the Stamp Act Congress adopted its declarations in 1765. How many years separate the two?
Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:
- Problem 1: source the Treaty of Paris of 1763 (its parties, its year, what type of document it is, and which host keeps it), then say what a close reading finds it leaves out about the people who lived on the lands it moved.
- Problem 2: source the Stamp Act Congress declarations (who made them, the year, what type of document they are, and which host keeps them), then explain why Avalon's title, "Resolutions of the Continental Congress", names the wrong body.
- Problem 3: define the imperial crisis and say how the end of the Seven Years' War set it up, then name the three tools of colonial resistance with one example of each from this week.
- Problem 4: explain what the colonists objected to, quoting the pinned fragment "that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives" word for word, and say whether they objected to all taxes.
Explain it to a non-expert
A coworker says, "The colonists hated paying any taxes at all, and the Revolution was fought over the same things as the Civil War." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about consent and about the causes each war's documents name, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the 1765 declarations show what delegates from nine colonies claimed, not what every colonist believed, and say nothing about the enslaved people in every colony). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.
For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor asking whether a petition signed by a town's shop owners "tells you what the whole town thought." Model answer: "A petition shows what the people who signed it wanted, at the moment they signed it. It is real evidence of their demand, not a poll of everyone in town. People who did not sign, or who could not sign, might have thought something else, and the petition will not tell you. To learn more, I would look for other records, such as letters or meeting notes, and compare them with the petition."
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 4, 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 five years of the chronology), 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 five years and marks the 2 years from the Treaty of Paris to the Stamp Act Congress, 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 4, and quote only the course's pinned words: the declarations' line on consent, word for word, with the Stamp Act Congress as its source. 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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