Week 7 — Warnings and Changes of Power: Years, Parties, and the Farewell Address — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 7 of the term — measure the years between the new republic's documents, explain its first parties, source Washington's Farewell Address, and explain to someone new to history whose words are whose.

This week you learned how Hamilton's financial program and the bank debate split the new government, how the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republicans formed, how Washington kept the country neutral while the Treaty of Greenville recorded Native nations' cession of land, what Washington's Farewell Address warned and what it left out, how the Alien and Sedition Acts fell on one party's printers, and how the election of 1800 passed power to the other party. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's chronology, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied it whose words are whose. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is four years from the course chronology and one document date, in order:

• 1787 — the Constitution signed, and the editors' date of Madison's The Federalist No. 10
• 1791 — the Bill of Rights ratified
• 1796 — Washington's Farewell Address
• 1801 — Jefferson's First Inaugural Address

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

1. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, and Washington's Farewell Address is dated 1796. How many years separate the two?
2. Madison's The Federalist No. 10 carries the editors' date of 1787, and Washington's Farewell Address is dated 1796. How many years separate the two?
3. Washington's Farewell Address is dated 1796, and Jefferson's First Inaugural Address is dated 1801. How many years separate the two?
4. The Constitution was signed in 1787, and Jefferson's First Inaugural Address is dated 1801. How many years separate the two?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the Farewell Address (author, type of document, host, and year), then quote one of its two pinned fragments word for word. You may add what Chapter 7 teaches about Hamilton's financial program and the bank debate of 1791; that context is welcome but optional.
• Problem 2: keep the Federalists of 1787 and 1788, who supported the proposed Constitution, apart from the Federalist Party of the 1790s, then source The Federalist No. 10 (author and pen name, type of document, host, and whose date its bracketed date is). Naming the two parties of the first party system, and Madison, who wrote The Federalist No. 10 in 1787 and later helped lead the Democratic-Republicans, is welcome.
• Problem 3: source Jefferson's First Inaugural Address (author, type of document, host and the version it prints, and year), then quote one of its two pinned fragments word for word and say which of the two addresses "entangling alliances with none" comes from. Saying what the Farewell Address leaves out about slavery and the people Washington enslaved is welcome.
• Problem 4: keep the Farewell Address (1796) apart from the First Inaugural Address (1801) by author, type of document, and year, naming which one was a published address and which an inaugural address. Explaining why the election of 1800 mattered as a transfer of power between opposing parties is welcome.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "Washington warned against entangling alliances in his famous farewell speech, and the Federalists who campaigned for the Constitution were the same party that later passed the Sedition Act." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about the Farewell Address, the First Inaugural Address, and the two kinds of Federalists, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the Farewell Address shows Washington's advice, not whether Americans followed it). 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 company founder's retirement letter on the company website "shows that the employees agreed with her." Model answer: "A retirement letter shows what the founder wanted to say as she left, written for anyone who reads the site. It is real evidence, but of her advice and her hopes, not of what the staff thought. To learn whether the employees agreed, I would look for records the employees made themselves, such as their own letters or meeting notes, and compare them with hers. Read side by side, the letter shows the message, and the employees' records show the response."

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 7, 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 years of the chronology and the editors' date of The Federalist No. 10), 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 marks the 5 years from the Farewell Address to the First Inaugural Address, 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 7, and quote only the course's pinned fragments of the Farewell Address and the First Inaugural Address. 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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