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Week 8 · Midterm study guide

Midterm Exam — Study Guide

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

Coverage — what the midterm covers

The midterm is cumulative over Weeks 1–7, from the worlds before contact through the new republic's first parties. It opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back once you move on.

Format: 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Most of them, 20 in all, ask you to pick the one best option. Three ask you to select every option that applies, and two ask you to judge a statement true or false. Every passage a question asks you to read is printed in the question with its document named, and every year is written in full.

What is in scope, with the number of midterm questions on each course objective:

Midterm coverage by course objective: the weeks its questions come from, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 25
Course objective Weeks its questions come from Main skills Questions
Historical thinking (Objective 1) 1, 2, 3, and 5 Primary and secondary sources for a stated question; sourcing by origin, type, date, and archive; what a source shows against what goes beyond it; dating from the text 6
The Americas, exploration, and colonization (Objective 2) 1 and 2 Societies before contact; motives for exploration; contact and conquest; the two-way Columbian Exchange; the contact-era and early colonial years 3
Colonial society and slavery (Objective 3) 3 Servitude for a term of years against slavery for life; how colonial law built that status; the Atlantic slave trade; sorting a source on slavery for a stated question; the Carolina frame of government 6
The Revolution (Objective 4) 4 and 5 The war that ended in 1763; taxation and consent; the two congresses; the Declaration's claims and grievances; the peace of 1783; the founding years in order 8
The Constitution and the new republic (Objective 5) 6 and 7 The ratification debate and how its documents are sourced; Washington's and Jefferson's addresses 2

Week 3 holds the most questions of any single week, 7 of the 25, and 6 of them are on colonial society and slavery, so give Week 3 the most review time. By week, Week 5 has 6 questions, Week 1 has 5, Week 4 has 3, Week 2 has 2, and Weeks 6 and 7 have 1 each. The Revolution carries the most questions of any objective, 8, spread over Weeks 4 and 5. By difficulty, 11 questions are easy, 11 are medium, and 3 are hard.

Week 8 adds no question to the midterm. Its review of the one distinction each week asks for covers the Weeks 1–7 material this guide reviews too. Its one new topic, the first federal census of 1790 read as a numeric primary source, is taught and practiced in the Week 8 chapter, lecture, practice set, and discussion; no midterm question comes from it.

Topic-by-topic review

Week 8 reviewed the first half by asking each week for the one distinction it asks you to keep. This guide does the same. Each week below gives that distinction first, then the key idea in plain words, the course's definitions, the course example, and the mistakes students make most often with a cure for each. The deeper review for every topic is that week's chapter, lecture page, slide deck, and readings page.

A note on sources before you start. The course quotes only the short pinned fragments of its document roster, exactly as the archive prints them. Everything else this guide says about a document is a paraphrase. The two sorting sets the course uses, one for primary and secondary sources and one for claims about evidence, are illustrative: written for teaching, and describing no real document.

Week 1 — Doing History and Worlds Before 1607

  • The distinction: primary against secondary sources, always for a stated question. Week 1 also asks you to keep contact apart from conquest and St. Augustine apart from Jamestown.
  • Key idea: history is an argument from evidence, not a list of facts. You ask who made a source, when, and why, and then what it can and cannot tell you.
  • Definitions: history is the interpretation of the past from evidence. A primary source is a source made during the period being studied, such as a letter, law, treaty, map, ledger, or census return. A memoir written decades later is still a primary source for its author's own experience, read with the gap in time in mind. A secondary source is a later account that interprets primary evidence, such as a historian's article, a museum label, or an encyclopedia entry. Historical thinking is practiced in this course as four moves. Sourcing asks who made a source, when, why, and for whom, with its type and host, including whether the text is a translation. Contextualization places a source in what was happening around it; it explains a source but never excuses what the source describes. Close reading goes line by line, for what a source says, how it says it, and what it leaves out. Corroboration checks a source against others. The four moves serve habits of mind: causation, change and continuity, periodization, contingency, and significance.
  • The Americas before contact: the Americas were home to large, varied, and complex societies. Cahokia, the great Mississippian city near present-day St. Louis, is the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, in UNESCO's words, and flourished from about 800 to the 1300s. Tenochtitlán was the capital of the Mexica (the Aztecs).
  • Contact and conquest: contact is the meeting of peoples who had not met before, with the trade, exchange, and conflict that follow. Conquest is one people taking control of another people's land and government by force. Columbus's 1492 voyage reached the Caribbean, at Guanahani in the Bahamas, home to the Taíno, and never the Asian mainland he sought. Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, and Spanish forces and their allies destroyed Tenochtitlán in 1521, two years later.
  • The Tordesillas treaty (1494): the crowns of Castile and Aragon and of Portugal set a line from pole to pole to divide newly encountered lands between them, made without the nations who lived there. The course reads it in an English translation that Avalon prints, so a careful citation calls it a translation.
  • The Columbian Exchange: the transfer of crops, animals, people, and diseases between the hemispheres that began after 1492. It ran both ways. Horses, wheat, and sugarcane crossed to the Americas from the Old World, the hemisphere of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and so did smallpox. Maize and potatoes crossed to the Old World. Old World diseases devastated Indigenous American populations with no prior exposure; the course teaches those deaths in words and keys no estimate. Alfred W. Crosby named the concept in his 1972 book.
  • Course example (Dataset A, the contact-era chronology): the six keyed years run 1492, 1494, 1519, 1521, 1565, and 1607. The gaps are 2, 25, 2, 44, and 42 years, and 2 + 25 + 2 + 44 + 42 = 115, the span 1607 − 1492. St. Augustine (1565), founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on Timucua land, is 42 years older than Jamestown (1607). Week 8 reran two items of the source-sorting set (illustrative): a ship's log kept on a 1620 crossing is primary, and a 1999 museum label explaining the crossing is secondary.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) The Americas read as sparsely peopled before 1492. Cure: name Cahokia and Tenochtitlán. (2) Columbus read as reaching the North American mainland. Cure: the Caribbean, at Guanahani. (3) Contact read as the same as conquest. Cure: contact is a meeting; conquest is a takeover by force, and 1519 and 1521 are two different years. (4) The exchange read as one-way. Cure: name one item for each direction. (5) Jamestown read as older than St. Augustine. Cure: 1565 comes 42 years before 1607.

Week 2 — Colonization and Empire

  • The distinction: a charter granted by a ruler against a covenant the settlers made among themselves, and a claim that shows what a source says against one that goes beyond it.
  • Key idea: four European powers built very different colonies, and the English colonies were not one uniform society. Each colony began on the land of a Native nation.
  • Definitions: an empire is a state that rules lands and peoples beyond its own borders. A colony is a settlement planted on distant land and governed, at least at first, from the home country. A charter is a written grant of rights from a ruler to a person or company, stating what land they may settle and what powers and duties they hold. A covenant is a solemn agreement in which people bind themselves to one another. A civil body politic is a group of people who have agreed to form a government for themselves. Self-government means people making and obeying their own laws through officers they choose.
  • Colonies compared: the French and the Dutch built around the fur trade, the Spanish around missions and mines, and the English around settler farms and towns. New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake were distinct regions.
  • The English beginnings: King James I granted Virginia's First Charter in 1606 to the Virginia Company's adventurers, stating religious and money-making aims; religious freedom is not among them. Jamestown (1607), England's first permanent colony in North America, was founded on the land of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom, more than thirty tribes ruled by Wahunsenacawh. The Mayflower settlers signed their Compact at Cape Cod in 1620, a covenant for local self-government, not a constitution for a nation. They founded Plymouth on the homeland of the Wampanoag, whose communities, Mashpee and Aquinnah among them, live in the region today.
  • Course example: charter to colony is 1607 − 1606 = 1 year, Jamestown to the Compact is 1620 − 1607 = 13 years, and 1 + 13 = 14 = 1620 − 1606. Item 4 of the illustrative evidence-claims set, "the Compact created American democracy," goes beyond the source, since the text records one local agreement, not where democracy came from.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) The Compact read as a constitution for a nation. Cure: it is a local covenant. (2) Every colony read as founded for religious freedom. Cure: the 1606 charter states religion and profit, and promises no religious freedom. (3) The colonies read as one uniform society. Cure: name the three English regions and the fur-trade, mission, and settler-farm models.

Week 3 — Colonial Society and the Origins of Slavery

  • The distinction: indentured servitude, labor for a term of years, against racial slavery, which colonial law made lifelong, inherited, and linked to African descent by law.
  • Key idea: slavery in British North America was built by law, step by step, in the decades after 1619. It did not arrive complete.
  • Definitions: indentured servitude is labor for a fixed term of years under a contract, after which the servant was free. A term of years is the fixed length of that contract. The Atlantic slave trade forcibly carried captive Africans across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery in the Americas, a trade in human beings run by European and colonial merchants over several centuries. The Middle Passage was the forced Atlantic crossing, during which very many captives died; most of the people carried went to the Caribbean and South America rather than to British North America. Hereditary means passed from parent to child; in colonial slave law the status passed to a child through the mother. A frame of government is a written plan that sets out who holds power in a colony and how it is to be governed.
  • The story in order: Chesapeake planters first grew tobacco with servants bound for a term of years, then more and more with enslaved Africans held for life. The National Park Service records the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619. Over the decades that followed, colonial laws made enslavement lifelong, passed it through the mother, and linked the status to African descent. Carolina's frame of government, dated 1669 in Avalon's heading, wrote enslavers' power into the colony's founding plan. Source it by the origin, type, and date the roster records, and read Avalon's editorial notes as notes, not as the document's own origin line.
  • The First Great Awakening: a wave of religious revivals in the 1730s and 1740s that emphasized personal conversion and challenged the authority of established clergy.
  • Course example: Jamestown to the 1619 arrival is 1619 − 1607 = 12 years, and 1619 to the Carolina frame is 1669 − 1619 = 50 years, the span over which the week's documents show slavery being built.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) Racial slavery read as fully formed in 1619. Cure: it was built over the following decades. (2) Servitude and slavery read as one status. Cure: ask whether it ends and whether it passes to children. (3) Most enslaved Africans read as carried to British North America. Cure: most were carried to the Caribbean and South America.

Week 4 — The Road to Revolution

  • The distinction: the congress of 1765 against the First Continental Congress of 1774, and objecting to taxes laid without consent against objecting to every tax.
  • Key idea: the war that ended in 1763 left Britain with a vast new empire in North America. Parliament's new taxes raised the question of who could tax the colonies, and colonists answered that only their own representatives could.
  • Definitions: the imperial crisis is the quarrel between Britain and its colonies from 1763 to the fighting of 1775 over who could tax and govern them. The Seven Years' War is the war between Britain and France for empire; its North American name is French and Indian War, and Native nations fought as allies of both sides for their own interests. To cede is to hand over land or a right by a formal agreement. Representation means having a member who speaks and votes for you in the body that makes your laws. Consent is agreement to a law or a tax, given directly or through representatives you helped choose.
  • 1763 and after: in the treaty of 1763, France ceded Canada to Britain; its pinned fragment reads "cedes and guaranties to his said Britannick Majesty, in full right, Canada." No Native nation was a party to it. In the Great Lakes country, an alliance of Odawa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe warriors, led by the Odawa leader Obwandiyag (Pontiac), went to war against British posts in 1763. The Royal Proclamation that year reserved the lands west of the Appalachian river sources to Native nations; read it as the Crown's account of its own policy.
  • Taxes and resistance: the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend duties (1767), and the Tea Act (1773) brought petitions, boycotts, nonimportation agreements, and crowd action. Delegates from nine colonies met in New York City in 1765 as the Stamp Act Congress, and they protested taxes laid without the colonists' consent. Avalon's page title calls that body's declarations a resolution of the Continental Congress, so a careful reader credits the body the text and the record name, not the page title. The Coercive Acts (1774) answered the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, and the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia that year. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
  • Said plainly: slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies whose protests spoke of liberty and of being enslaved by Parliament.
  • A named debate: historians debate whether the Revolution was radical, overturning the old order, or conservative, mainly defending rights and property colonists already claimed. The course gives the strongest case on each side and keys no verdict.
  • Course example: 1765 − 1763 = 2 years, 1774 − 1765 = 9 years between the two congresses, and the crisis spans 1775 − 1763 = 12 years. Item 3 of the illustrative source-sorting set, a 1765 newspaper notice announcing a boycott of British cloth, is primary; item 4, a historian's 2010 article on colonial boycotts, is secondary.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) The two congresses read as one. Cure: 1765 and 1774 are nine years apart. (2) Colonists read as objecting to all taxes. Cure: they objected to taxes laid without their consent, by a Parliament in which they had no representatives. (3) The causes of the Revolution read as the same as the causes of the Civil War. Cure: keep each war's causes in its own century's evidence.

Week 5 — The American Revolution

  • The distinction: the Declaration of 1776, which announced independence, against the Constitution of 1787, which framed a national government; and a document's own date against an archive's heading.
  • Key idea: the Declaration stated ideals and listed grievances against the king. Who those ideals included, in 1776, is a question the evidence answers differently for women, for enslaved and free Black Americans, and for Native nations.
  • Definitions: independence is a people's claim to govern themselves, free of another country's rule. Unalienable rights are rights the Declaration says every person holds by nature and cannot give up. Consent of the governed is the idea that a government's rightful power comes from the agreement of the people it rules. A grievance is a formal complaint about a wrong. Engrossed means written out by hand in a large, formal script on parchment, as the signed copy of the Declaration was. The text's own date is the date a document gives itself in its own words. A private letter is written to one person; it shows its writer's views, not what a wider group believed.
  • The Declaration: Congress adopted it in 1776, and its heading dates it 4 July 1776; the signing of the engrossed parchment is a separate event. Its claim of equal rights stated an ideal, not the law of 1776, when colonial law still held enslaved people in slavery for life.
  • Abigail Adams's letter (1776): writing from Braintree to John Adams, she asked: "I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors." The course reads it at Founders Online as one woman's private argument, not a public movement.
  • The war: Saratoga (1777) helped persuade France into the alliance of 1778, and a British army surrendered at Yorktown in 1781. Patriots supported the break with Britain; Loyalists stayed loyal to the king, sometimes against their own families. Dunmore's Proclamation (1775) offered freedom to people enslaved by Patriots who joined the British forces. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations, split over the war.
  • The peace of 1783: the treaty's own text dates it the third day of September 1783, that is, 3 September 1783, while the Avalon Project's page heading reads 30 September 1783. The text wins, and a careful historian names the disagreement.
  • Course example: 1783 − 1776 = 7 years from the Declaration to the peace, and 1787 − 1776 = 11 years from the Declaration to the Constitution. The two Paris treaties the course reads are 1783 − 1763 = 20 years apart: the first closed the Seven Years' War and the second the war for independence.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) The Declaration read as the Constitution. Cure: one announced independence in 1776; the other framed a government in 1787. (2) The Declaration's equality read as describing the law of 1776. Cure: it stated an ideal that the law of that year did not meet. (3) A date read from an archive's heading. Cure: date the document from its own text and name the mismatch.

Week 6 — Confederation and Constitution

  • The distinction: the Articles of Confederation, with one vote per state and no power to tax, against the Constitution; and the ratification-era Federalists against the Federalist Party that formed later.
  • Key idea: the first frame of government left Congress weak, and the Convention of 1787 built a stronger one through bargains, several of them over slavery.
  • Definitions: the Articles of Confederation were the first frame of government of the United States, adopted in 1777 and in force from 1781, under which "each State shall have one vote" in Congress and Congress had no power to tax. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) set a path from territory to statehood northwest of the Ohio River. It declared: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory". The Great (Connecticut) Compromise gave the House of Representatives seats by population and the Senate two members per state. The three-fifths clause, in paraphrase, counted three fifths of the number of enslaved people when dividing House seats and direct taxes among the states. The slave-trade clause barred Congress from ending the importation of enslaved people before 1808. Ratification is the formal approval that makes a constitution or amendment take effect. Federalists supported the proposed Constitution in 1787 and 1788; Anti-Federalists opposed it or demanded changes, above all a bill of rights. A faction, in Madison's essay, is a group united by an interest or passion that works against the rights of others or the good of the whole.
  • The documents: the Constitution, signed in convention in 1787, opens "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union". The Federalist No. 10, published by Madison under the pen name Publius, carries an editors' date in 1787, printed in square brackets because the essay's text gives none. The Bill of Rights is ten of the twelve amendments Congress proposed in 1789, ratified in 1791.
  • Course example: the Articles took effect 1781 − 1776 = 5 years after the Declaration, and the Constitution was signed 1787 − 1781 = 6 years after that. Of the 12 proposed amendments, 12 − 10 = 2 were not ratified in 1791.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) The Articles read as giving Congress the power to tax. Cure: Congress could only ask the states for money. (2) The three-fifths clause read as counting free Black people. Cure: it counted enslaved people. (3) The ratification-era Federalists read as the Federalist Party of the 1790s. Cure: supporting ratification in 1788 made no one a party member later. (4) The Declaration read as the Constitution. Cure: 1776 against 1787.

Week 7 — The New Republic

  • The distinction: Washington's Farewell Address (1796) against Jefferson's First Inaugural Address (1801), and the phrase each one really carries.
  • Key idea: the new government's first fights, over money, foreign wars, and dissent, produced the first parties, and in 1800 power passed peacefully from one party to the other.
  • Definitions: Hamilton's financial program had the federal government take over the states' war debts (assumption) and create a national bank, the Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791. In the bank debate, Jefferson read the Constitution by strict construction (only the powers the text names), and Hamilton by loose construction (implied powers that support the named ones). The first party system set the Federalist Party of Hamilton and Adams against the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson and Madison. Neutrality is taking neither side in other nations' war, as Washington did in 1793. A published address is a public letter printed in newspapers rather than spoken to an audience. An inaugural address is the speech a President delivers on taking office.
  • The decade: Jay's Treaty kept the peace with Britain and was deeply unpopular. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795), twelve Native nations of the Ohio country ceded land east and south of a boundary across present-day Ohio, dispossession in the new republic. The XYZ Affair led to the Quasi-War with France, and a Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The election of 1800 was the first transfer of power between opposing parties under the Constitution.
  • The two addresses: Washington's Farewell Address, a published address dated 1796, warned against the spirit of party and called it "our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world". Jefferson delivered his First Inaugural in the Senate Chamber in 1801. In it he said: "We are all republicans: we are all federalists." The famous phrase about entangling alliances is Jefferson's, from 1801, not Washington's; giving it to Washington is the slip the course asks you to catch in a chatbot's work.
  • Course example: 1801 − 1796 = 5 years between Washington's warning and Jefferson's address. The Constitution (1787) to the Bill of Rights (1791) is 4 years, and 1791 to the Farewell Address is 5 years.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "Entangling alliances" read as Washington's words. Cure: Jefferson, 1801. (2) The Farewell Address read as a speech he delivered. Cure: it was printed in newspapers. (3) The Federalist Party read as the same group as the ratification-era Federalists. Cure: one formed in the 1790s around Hamilton and Adams; the other was anyone who backed the Constitution in 1787 and 1788.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the midterm's questions. Work each worked example yourself first, then compare your steps. Every scenario below is illustrative, invented for this guide, and describes no real person or document unless it names a document from the course roster. Week 3 gets extra practice, because the midterm leans on it hardest.

Worked example — one exhibit, four sources (Week 1)

A county historical society (illustrative) is building an exhibit on the boycotts of the 1760s. Its curator has four sources. For each, decide primary or secondary for the question "What did colonists do during the boycotts?"

  • A shopkeeper's letter written during a 1767 boycott, describing what customers refused to buy: primary, because it was made during the period it describes.
  • A podcast episode made two centuries later that explains the boycotts: secondary: it is a later account that interprets the evidence.
  • A memoir written forty years later by a man who joined a boycott as a youth: primary for his own experience, read with the forty-year gap in mind.
  • A printed pamphlet of the same decade urging readers to join the boycott: primary, because it comes from the period, though it shows what its writer urged, not what everyone did.

Why it matters: the label depends on when the source was made compared with the question, never on whether it is official, famous, or handwritten.

Worked example — two gaps on the contact-era timeline (Week 1)

A classroom timeline (illustrative) marks the six keyed years of Dataset A. A student wants two gaps that the course example did not measure.

  • Step 1, from Columbus's voyage to the fall of Tenochtitlán: 1521 − 1492 = 29 years.
  • Step 2, from the Tordesillas treaty to the founding of St. Augustine: 1565 − 1494 = 71 years.
  • Step 3, check against the course example: the first gap is 2 + 25 + 2 = 29 years. The second is 25 + 2 + 44 = 71 years. Both agree with the five gaps the course measured.

Why it matters: the 29 years show that a first meeting in 1492 and a conquest in 1521 are separate events, the line between contact and conquest.

Worked example — a two-way garden bed (Week 1)

A community garden (illustrative) plants a bed to teach the Columbian Exchange, with one sign for each direction. Its plants are wheat, sugarcane, maize, and potatoes.

  • Old World to the Americas: wheat and sugarcane.
  • Americas to the Old World: maize and potatoes.
  • What the bed cannot show: diseases crossed too. Smallpox crossed from the Old World to the Americas and devastated Indigenous populations with no prior exposure, so the sign says so in words.

Why it matters: the exchange ran in both directions, and its human cost belongs on the sign as well as its crops.

Worked example — what a charter shows (Week 2)

A museum caption writer (illustrative) drafts two claims about Virginia's First Charter of 1606.

  • Claim A, "The charter names spreading Christianity among its aims": this shows what the charter says, because its text states that aim.
  • Claim B, "The charter proves that Virginia's settlers were deeply religious": this goes beyond the charter. Its text records the aims King James I stated for the company, not what the settlers believed.

Why it matters: a document is evidence of what its makers said, and a claim about other people's minds or about causes needs other evidence.

Worked example — fifty years of law (Week 3)

A teacher (illustrative) asks a class why 1619 is the start of a story and not its end.

  • Step 1, the first gap: Jamestown (1607) to the arrival of Africans in Virginia (1619) is 1619 − 1607 = 12 years.
  • Step 2, the second gap: 1619 to Carolina's frame of government (1669 in Avalon's heading) is 1669 − 1619 = 50 years.
  • Step 3, what the span means: over those fifty years colonial laws made enslavement lifelong, passed it through the mother, and linked the status to African descent. Servitude for a term of years was a contract that ended; the new status had no end and was handed down.

Why it matters: racial slavery in British North America was built step by step by law, and reading it as complete in 1619 erases the choices that built it.

Worked example — where the Middle Passage led (Week 3)

A student's timeline caption (illustrative) reads: "Most captive Africans carried across the Atlantic were brought to the thirteen colonies."

  • Step 1, the course fact: most of the people carried in the Atlantic slave trade went to the Caribbean and South America, not to British North America.
  • Step 2, the correction: "Most captive Africans carried across the Atlantic were taken to the Caribbean and South America; a smaller share was brought to British North America."
  • Step 3, say it with care: very many captives died in the crossing. The course teaches that loss in words and keys no estimate of it.

Why it matters: the slave trade was Atlantic-wide, and British North America's part in it was one piece of a larger trade in human beings.

Worked example — a page title against an origin (Week 4)

A newspaper's history column (illustrative) credits a set of 1765 resolutions to "the Continental Congress" because that is what the archive's page title says.

  • Step 1, the origin: the resolutions came from the Stamp Act Congress: delegates from nine colonies meeting in New York City in 1765.
  • Step 2, the date check: the First Continental Congress first met in 1774, and 1774 − 1765 = 9 years, so it cannot have adopted resolutions in 1765.
  • Step 3, the correction: credit the Stamp Act Congress, then note that the archive's page title differs from the document's origin.

Why it matters: a page title is the archive's label, not the document's own record of who made it.

Worked example — the date in the text (Week 5)

A library catalog (illustrative) lists the peace treaty of 1783 under the date in the page heading Avalon prints, 30 September 1783.

  • Step 1, read the text: the treaty's own closing line dates it the third day of September 1783, that is, 3 September 1783.
  • Step 2, apply the rule: when an archive's heading and a document's text disagree, the text wins.
  • Step 3, write the citation: date the treaty 3 September 1783 from its text, and add that the archive's heading gives a different day.

Why it matters: this is one of the few places the course teaches a day, because the day is the lesson; everywhere else the year is enough.

Worked example — counting seats (Week 6)

A civics club (illustrative) models the Great Compromise for the thirteen original states.

  • Step 1, the Senate: two members per state, so 13 × 2 = 26 senators, whatever each state's size.
  • Step 2, the House: seats by population, so a larger state holds more seats than a smaller one.
  • Step 3, compare the Articles: under the Articles each state had one vote, so 13 states cast 13 votes, again whatever their size.

Why it matters: the compromise kept equal state voting in one chamber and added population-based seats in the other, the bargain that let large and small states agree.

Worked example — catching a misattributed phrase (Week 7)

A speechwriter (illustrative) drafts a line crediting Washington's Farewell Address with the phrase about entangling alliances.

  • Step 1, the source check: that phrase comes from Jefferson's First Inaugural Address, delivered in 1801. Washington's pinned fragment on alliances reads "our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world".
  • Step 2, the date check: 1801 − 1796 = 5 years separate the two addresses.
  • Step 3, the correction: quote Washington's own pinned words, or credit the entangling-alliances phrase to Jefferson.

Why it matters: the two men agreed on avoiding permanent foreign ties, and that agreement is why their words are so easy to swap.

Self-check questions

Try each one, then read the check and the one-line why. Every scenario is illustrative.

  1. A sermon printed during the revivals of the 1740s. For a question about the First Great Awakening, is it primary or secondary? Check: primary. Why: it was made during the period the question studies.
  2. An online encyclopedia entry on Cahokia, written recently. Primary or secondary for a question about Cahokia's people? Check: secondary. Why: it is a later account that interprets the evidence.
  3. A classmate writes that Columbus landed on the North American mainland in 1492. Correct it. Check: he reached the Caribbean, at Guanahani in the Bahamas. Why: he reached neither the North American mainland nor the Asian mainland he sought.
  4. Which is older, St. Augustine or Jamestown, and by how many years? Check: St. Augustine, by 1607 − 1565 = 42 years. Why: the Spanish town on Timucua land came first.
  5. A friend says the French, Dutch, Spanish, and English colonies were all built the same way. Correct the claim. Check: the French and Dutch built around the fur trade, the Spanish around missions and mines, and the English around settler farms and towns. Why: the course compares four different models of empire.
  6. A poster says the Chesapeake colonies were founded for religious freedom. What does Virginia's 1606 charter say? Check: it states religious and money-making aims and promises no religious freedom. Why: not every colony was founded for religious freedom.
  7. An illustrative ship's notice offers passage to Virginia in return for seven years of labor. What status is that, and does it end? Check: indentured servitude, which ends when the seven years are served. Why: it was a contract for a term of years, not a status for life.
  8. Did the revivals of the First Great Awakening come before or after the 1669 Carolina frame? Check: after, in the 1730s and 1740s. Why: the revivals belong to the next century.
  9. What did France cede to Britain in the treaty of 1763, and was any Native nation a party to it? Check: Canada, and no Native nation was a party. Why: the pinned fragment reads "cedes and guaranties to his said Britannick Majesty, in full right, Canada," and the treaty was made among European crowns.
  10. Who led the alliance that went to war against British posts in the Great Lakes country in 1763? Check: the Odawa leader Obwandiyag (Pontiac). Why: Odawa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe warriors fought for their own nations' interests.
  11. A blog says colonists refused to pay any tax at all. Correct it. Check: they objected to taxes laid without their consent. Why: colonists argued that only their own representatives could tax them.
  12. Abigail Adams asked her husband to "Remember the Ladies." What does her letter show, and what does it not show? Check: it shows one woman's private argument in 1776. Why: a private letter is evidence of its writer's view, not of a public movement.
  13. Did the Native nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy all take one side in the war? Check: no; the confederacy split. Why: each nation weighed its own interests in a war between others.
  14. How many years after the Declaration did the Articles take effect, and what power did their Congress lack? Check: 1781 − 1776 = 5 years; it had no power to tax. Why: it could only ask the states for money.
  15. A note says the three-fifths clause counted free Black people as three fifths of a person. Correct it. Check: it counted enslaved people, for House seats and direct taxes. Why: the clause applied to people held in slavery, not to free Black people.
  16. In the bank debate, which reading of the Constitution did Jefferson take, and which did Hamilton take? Check: Jefferson took strict construction, and Hamilton took loose construction. Why: Hamilton argued that a bank was an implied power; Jefferson said the text named no such power.
  17. What did the twelve Native nations of the Ohio country record in the Treaty of Greenville (1795)? Check: a cession of land east and south of a boundary line across present-day Ohio. Why: the treaty is a record of dispossession in the new republic.

Check yourself — choose one. Write two or three sentences to a friend.

  • (a) Give the strongest case that the Revolution was radical, and the strongest case that it was conservative, each with one piece of course evidence. The course keys no verdict, so judge your reasoning, not your side.
  • (b) Explain why a historian dates a document from its own text rather than an archive's heading, using the 1783 treaty as your example.

Either one rehearses an explain-why skill the midterm checks.

Watch before the exam

These eleven videos are already linked on the Weeks 1–7 readings pages, and every one has captions. Use them to review and to connect weeks, not to learn anything new. Several of them give their own figures or a claim the course does not pin, so sorting those from the course's record is part of the review.

Study plan

A short countdown. Count back from the day you plan to sit the midterm. The course meets in person twice a week, so each step below fits around a class meeting.

  • Two weeks out: as you finish Week 6, start a one-page sheet with one line per week: the distinction it asks you to keep and the years that go with it.
  • One week out: as you finish Week 7, reread the Week 3 review above and redo the two Week 3 worked examples from scratch. Week 3 holds 7 of the 25 questions.
  • At the first class meeting of Week 8: take the practice exam once, cold. Note which objectives cost you the most. Remember that it has only 2 questions on colonial society and slavery, while the midterm has 6.
  • Three or four days before you sit it: reread the topic reviews for your two weakest objectives, and redo the matching worked examples without looking. Finish each one with one plain sentence about what the source shows and what it does not.
  • Two days before: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy-and-paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) for active recall. Tell it which areas the practice exam exposed, and ask it to drill those first.
  • The day before: retake the practice exam, explain every miss out loud, and work the self-check questions above.
  • Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for all seven weeks. Then stop studying; a few slow breaths and a look at your one-page sheet are enough.

This guide is for review. The exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam are where you rehearse. Pulling ideas back out of memory, not rereading, is what makes them stick.

Exam format

Every one of the 25 questions counts the same, and the midterm checks your own understanding without AI. The questions come one at a time, and there is no going back, so settle each one before you move on. After you submit, Canvas shows your score.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

  • Name the move first. Before you look at the options, say which move the question asks for. It may be sorting a source for a stated question or sourcing a document by origin, type, date, and archive. It may be matching a fragment to its document, or putting years in order.
  • Sort for the question asked. Primary or secondary depends on when the source was made compared with the period the question studies, not on whether it is official or famous.
  • Write the years down. For an order question, write each year on scratch paper and check that each one is later than the one before. Two events a year apart, or two documents with the same name, are where slips happen.
  • Read the fragment's own words. A pinned fragment is printed exactly as the archive prints it, old spellings and capitals included. Ask what kind of document would say those words, and when.
  • Credit the origin, not the label. An archive's page title or heading is its own description. The document's text and the roster's record of its origin decide who made it and when.
  • Watch the trap options. Most wrong options apply one of the predictable mistakes above to the same facts. Look for a later congress in place of an earlier one, a famous person in place of the real maker, an archive heading in place of the text's own date, or a year one off.

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