Week 5 — A Promise, a Letter, and a Treaty: Dating the Revolution's Documents — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 5 of the term — measure the years between the Revolution's documents, date each one from its own words, and explain who the Revolution's promise covered to someone new to history.

This week you learned how the colonies declared independence, how to read the Declaration of Independence for its ideas and its grievances, how to keep a document's date apart from its signing, how the war turned at Saratoga and ended at Yorktown, who the Revolution included and who it left out, and how to date the Treaty of Paris of 1783 from its own words. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's chronology, interpret each one, and explain the Revolution's promise 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 the week's chronology, five years in order:

• 1763 — the Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War
• 1765 — the Stamp Act Congress declarations
• 1776 — the Declaration of Independence, and the year of Abigail Adams's letter
• 1783 — the Treaty of Paris ends the War of Independence
• 1787 — the Constitution signed

Beside it sit the week's three documents: the Declaration of Independence (the Continental Congress, dated 4 July 1776 in its heading, a declaration, National Archives); Abigail Adams's letter to John Adams (Braintree, 31 March 1776, a private letter, Founders Online); and the Treaty of Paris of 1783 (Great Britain and the United States, a treaty, dated the third day of September 1783 in its own last line, Avalon Project).

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

1. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the Treaty of Paris that ended the War of Independence is dated 1783. How many years passed between the two?
2. The Declaration of Independence is dated 1776, and the Constitution was signed in 1787. How many years separate the two?
3. The Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years' War is dated 1763, and the Treaty of Paris that ended the War of Independence is dated 1783. How many years separate the two treaties?
4. The week's chronology runs from the Treaty of Paris of 1763 to the Constitution signed in 1787. How many years does it span?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the Declaration of Independence (who made it, what type of document it is, the date its heading carries, and which host keeps the transcript), then keep that date apart from the signing: say when most delegates signed the engrossed parchment.
• Problem 2: tell the Declaration and the Constitution apart by the job each did, then read the pinned line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" and explain why it stated an ideal rather than the law of 1776.
• Problem 3: date the Treaty of Paris of 1783 from its own last line, name how the Avalon Project's heading disagrees with it, and name one thing the treaty leaves out.
• Problem 4: source Abigail Adams's letter (who wrote it, where, when, what type of document it is, and which host keeps it), and say what a letter of that type can and cannot show.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend says, "The Revolution gave everyone equal rights in 1776, and Abigail Adams's letter proves women were organizing for their rights." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about the Declaration and about the letter, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that a private letter speaks for its writer, not for every woman of her time). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker asking whether a club's founding charter, which promises every member an equal say, "proves the club was fair to everyone." Model answer: "A charter shows what its founders promised, on the day they adopted it. It is real evidence, but of their goals, not of how members were treated afterward. To learn that, I would look for records of who actually voted at meetings and compare them with the promise. Read side by side, the charter shows the promise, and the meeting records show who it covered."

Use that pattern for your message to the friend, 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 5, 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 friend, 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 week's chronology and the three documents' dates), 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 11 years from the Declaration to the Constitution, 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 5, and quote only the course's pinned words: the Declaration's line on equality and Abigail Adams's line, each word for word with its document and date. 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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