Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Think about a nursing student reading a clinic's visit count, or a business student checking a sales report against the bank's figure. Each of them has to ask the same question before trusting a number. Where did it come from, and who did it leave out? Hold that question, because it is the new idea in this lecture.
First, though, let's take stock. You have seven weeks of notes behind you. In Week 1 you learned the four moves for reading any source: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration. Weeks 2 and 3 took you through the colonies and the making of slavery in law. Weeks 4 and 5 followed the break with Britain. Week 6 read the Articles and the Constitution, and Week 7 watched the new government survive its first parties.
That's a big pile, so I'm not going to reread it with you. Instead, I'll ask each week for one thing: the line it asks you to keep between two ideas that look alike. Then we'll read one new source, the first federal census, as a table of numbers. After this lecture comes the midterm, which you take on your own, with no AI help. And in Week 9 the course moves on to Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America.
1. Primary versus secondary
Start with something from your own life. Picture a birthday party. The invitation, the photos, and a guest's text that night all come from the party itself. A video someone makes ten years later, explaining what the party meant, comes from later. Both help. They answer different questions.
That's Week 1's first line. A primary source was made during the period you are studying, like a letter, a law, a map, a treaty, or a census return. A secondary source is a later account that interprets primary evidence, like an encyclopedia summary, a museum label, or a documentary.
Let's rerun three items from the course's source-sorting set, which is illustrative. Item 1 is a ship's log kept on a 1620 crossing. It was written during the crossing, so it's primary. Item 2 is a museum label from 1999 about that crossing. It came centuries later, so it's secondary. Item 10 is a printed census schedule certified in 1791. Hold on to that one. It's primary, and it's the new source we'll read later in this lecture.
Pause and try this. A historian's article about colonial boycotts was written long after them. For a question about the boycotts, is it primary or secondary?
Ask when it was made, and about when.
Here's the answer. It's secondary, because it is a later account that interprets the evidence from the time.
The test isn't how old a source looks. It's whether the source was made in the period you're asking about.
2. Contact, conquest, and two towns
Picture two neighbors meeting at a fence for the first time. That's a meeting. Now picture one of them later taking over the other's house by force. That's a different event, even though it started at the same fence.
Weeks 1 and 2 ask you to keep that line. Contact is a meeting between peoples who had not met before. Conquest is taking control of a people and their land by force. Columbus reached Guanahani, in the Caribbean, in 1492. That was contact. Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, and Tenochtitlán, the Mexica capital, fell in 1521, 2 years later. That was conquest.
Keep the exchange two-way, too. The Columbian Exchange set holds 7 items that crossed from the Old World to the Americas and 5 that crossed the other way, 12 in all. Diseases carried from the Old World devastated Indigenous populations, and the Native nations who survived it still live today.
The last line here is about two towns. St. Augustine, a Spanish town in Florida, was founded in 1565. Jamestown, England's first permanent colony in North America, was founded in 1607. That's 42 years apart.
Pause and try this. A classmate calls Jamestown the oldest European town in what is now the United States. What would you say?
Put a year next to each town.
Here's the answer. St. Augustine is older, because it was founded in 1565 and Jamestown in 1607, 42 years later.
Attach the year to the place, and the comparison settles itself.
3. Servitude and slavery
Now a harder line, and I want you to hold it with care. Picture two very different arrangements. One is a contract to work on a farm for a set number of years, after which the worker goes free. The other is no agreement at all. It's a law that says a person, and that person's children, will be held for life.
That's Week 3. Indentured servitude was labor for a term of years, after which the servant was free. Hereditary racial slavery was lifelong bondage that colonial law made inherited through the mother and tied to African descent.
It wasn't built in a single year. The National Park Service reports that Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, dated 1669 in Avalon's heading, gave every freeman of Carolina absolute power over the people he enslaved. Between those two documents sit 50 years in which colonial law built slavery step by step.
Pause and try this. Someone says indentured servants and enslaved people held the same status. Which two questions would show the difference?
Think about an end date, and about children.
Here's the answer. Ask whether the status ends and whether it passes down, because servitude ended and slavery was for life and inherited.
Those two questions keep the statuses apart every time.
4. Two congresses
Picture a tenants' group that meets once to protest a new fee and sends a letter. Years later, after much worse trouble, a larger group meets and starts acting like a government. The names sound alike. The bodies aren't the same.
That's Week 4. The Stamp Act Congress met in 1765 and declared that colonists could be taxed only with their own consent. The First Continental Congress met in 1774, after the Coercive Acts. That's 9 years apart.
There's a sourcing trap here. The Avalon Project titles its page for the 1765 declarations as resolutions of the Continental Congress. The document itself is from 1765, before any Continental Congress met. You trust the document's own date over a page title.
And keep the complaint exact. The colonists didn't object to every tax. They objected to taxes laid without the consent of their own representatives.
Pause and try this. A page title calls a document from 1765 the work of the Continental Congress. Why can't that be right?
Compare the document's year with the year that body first met.
Here's the answer. The First Continental Congress first met in 1774, so a document from 1765 came from the earlier Stamp Act Congress.
The text's own date wins over a heading. You first met that rule in Week 5.
5. Three founding documents
Think about a new club. First it posts a statement saying why it exists. Then it writes a set of rules. Later it throws those rules out and writes better ones. A mission statement isn't a rulebook, and the first rulebook isn't the second.
Weeks 5 and 6 ask you to keep three documents in that order. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, announced independence and gave its reasons. The Articles of Confederation took effect in 1781. Under them each state had one vote, and Congress could not tax. The Constitution, signed in 1787, framed the government that replaced the Articles.
Now the gaps. From the Declaration to the Articles in force is 5 years. From the Articles in force to the Constitution is 6 more. Together that's 11 years, the same as the gap from 1776 to 1787.
One more habit belongs here. Week 5 taught you to date a document from its own text when an archive's heading disagrees, as with the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Pause and try this. A friend says the Articles of Confederation let Congress tax the states. Which document are they thinking of?
Ask which frame of government gave Congress that power.
Here's the answer. They're thinking of the Constitution, because under the Articles Congress could not tax.
Name the power first, and the document follows.
6. Two addresses, two years
Picture a famous line on a poster with the wrong name under it. People walk past it every day, and after a while the wrong name feels right.
That happened to a phrase from Week 7. George Washington's Farewell Address, from 1796, was a published letter, printed in newspapers, that warned against the spirit of party and against permanent alliances. Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address, from 1801, is where you find the phrase "entangling alliances with none". That's 5 years and two different men.
Keep the parties straight while you're here. The Federalists of 1788 supported the Constitution. The Federalist Party of the 1790s formed later, around Hamilton and Adams.
Pause and try this. A slide credits "entangling alliances with none" to Washington. How do you correct it?
Think about which document you would search.
Here's the answer. Credit it to Jefferson's First Inaugural Address of 1801, because the phrase is not in Washington's address of 1796.
Corroboration settles it. You check the document at its host.
7. The first census
Here's the new material. Imagine a food pantry that counts its visitors each week. A volunteer at the door makes tally marks in columns: adults, children, first visits. At the end of the month, someone copies every sheet onto one summary table. That table is your evidence about who came. But you'd want to know who made the marks, and which visitors had no column at all.
A census is an official count of the people who live in a place, taken by a government and reported by area and by category. The first federal census is the count of the people of the United States that began in 1790, 3 years after the Constitution was signed. The Constitution required it so that seats in the House could be divided by population.
Congress gave the job to the U.S. marshals, federal officers of the judicial districts, and their assistants went from household to household. Each district's report was its census return. Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, gathered the returns into a census schedule, a table that reports a count district by district and category by category. He certified it in 1791 with this line: "Truly stated from the original Returns deposited in the Office of the Secretary of State."
So let's source it. It's a statistical return from Jefferson to Washington, and Founders Online keeps it. It's a numeric primary source, a primary source whose main evidence is numbers. Now read it closely. Each district row gives one state, district, or territory. The columns count free white males, split by age, free white females, a column called all other free persons, and enslaved people.
I want to say this part plainly. Every number in that last column is a count of people held in slavery. And notice who has no column at all. The Constitution's rule left out Native people who were not taxed, so most Native people are not in this table.
Pause and try this. The schedule counts free people and enslaved people in separate columns. What does that choice tell you about its makers?
Ask why a government would want those two counts apart.
Here's the answer. It shows the government counted enslaved people as a separate category, because its rule for dividing House seats treated free and enslaved people differently.
Contextualization explains why that column exists. It never excuses it.
8. Two totals and a gap
Picture a club treasurer who adds up the receipts from each event and gets one number. The bank statement shows a slightly different number. Nobody hides it. The treasurer asks which figure is final, and why the two differ.
The census has that kind of puzzle. The schedule lists 17 rows, but it leaves South Carolina's row blank and prints no grand total. South Carolina's return came later, dated 1792, with 249,073 persons.
So we add. The 15 rows other than South Carolina and the Southwest Territory come to 3,644,562. Add South Carolina's 249,073 and the territory's 35,691, and you reach 3,929,326. The Census Bureau total, from the final report of 1793, is 3,929,214. The gap between totals is 112.
That gap isn't an error to hide. It's a record of a figure revised after the first returns came in. The course uses the Census Bureau's 3,929,214, and it names where that figure comes from.
Pause and try this. Two sources give two totals for 1790. What should you write down besides the number you use?
Think about what a careful reader would want to check.
Here's the answer. Write down both totals and where each comes from, because naming the sources lets a reader see why they differ.
A number with its source is evidence. A number without one is a guess dressed up.
9. A pattern is not a cause
Last line. Picture a street where the houses with the most umbrellas by the door also have the wettest sidewalks. The two go together. But umbrellas don't wet the sidewalk; rain does both.
A pattern in a source is two facts that appear together in a source's evidence. It shows that they occurred together. It doesn't show that one caused the other.
Here's the pattern on the schedule. Virginia's 747,610 is the largest of the 17 totals, and Virginia's column of enslaved people is the largest too. So one claim shows what the source says: the schedule lists more enslaved people in Virginia than in any other district. A second claim goes beyond it: that Virginia's large enslaved population caused it to dominate the early republic. The table gives counts. It doesn't give causes.
Pause and try this. Which claim does the schedule itself support: that Virginia held the most enslaved people, or that this made Virginia powerful?
Ask what a table of counts can show.
Here's the answer. It supports the first claim, because the schedule records counts, and the second claim needs other kinds of evidence.
So the reading, in one plain sentence: the schedule shows how the new government reported its first count, certified in 1791, with free and enslaved people in separate columns, and it is not proof of what caused any state's power.
Closing
Let's pull it together, one line per week. A primary source was made in the period you study, and a secondary source comes later. Contact isn't conquest, the exchange ran both ways, and St. Augustine is older than Jamestown. Servitude ended; slavery was for life and passed down. The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 isn't the First Continental Congress of 1774. The Declaration, the Articles, and the Constitution are three different documents. And "entangling alliances with none" is Jefferson's phrase from 1801.
Then the new source. The first federal census began in 1790. Its schedule is a numeric primary source with a maker, a method, and columns someone chose. Its printed rows and the Census Bureau's 3,929,214 differ by 112. And a pattern in its rows is not a cause.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the practice set, and the discussion, then the midterm study guide and the midterm itself. In Week 9 the course moves into Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America.
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