Week 11 — A Declaration, a Treaty, and a Moving Border — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 10 of the term — measure the years between the documents of an expanding country, source a declaration and a treaty from their own texts, and explain to someone new to history what a treaty's own words do and do not prove.

This week you learned how the phrase manifest destiny was used to justify expansion, how the Texas delegates declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and what their declaration leaves out, how Texas was annexed and Oregon divided, how the U.S.-Mexican War began in disputed land and was opposed at home, and how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 moved the border over people who stayed while no Native nation was a party to it. 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 what a treaty's own words do and do not prove. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is five years from the course chronology, in order:

• 1776 — the Declaration of Independence
• 1803 — the Louisiana Purchase Treaty
• 1830 — the Indian Removal Act and Jackson's removal message
• 1836 — the Texas Declaration of Independence
• 1848 — the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

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

1. The Texas Declaration of Independence was made in 1836, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848. How many years separate the two?
2. The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and the Texas Declaration of Independence was made in 1836. How many years separate the two?
3. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed in 1803, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848. How many years separate the two?
4. The Indian Removal Act and Jackson's removal message date to 1830, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848. How many years separate the two?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by origin, type, and host, and date it from its own closing line rather than from a later step listed on Avalon's page heading; then quote its Article VIII fragment word for word.
• Problem 2: source the Texas Declaration of Independence by origin, type, host, and year, and quote its pinned fragment word for word; then write one plain sentence about what that fragment shows and what it does not show.
• Problem 3: restate the Article VIII passage in your own plain words, then write one plain sentence about what that passage shows and what it does not show.
• Problem 4: use the treaty's own parties to show whether any Native nation agreed to it.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "The treaty with Mexico was signed at Queretaro on the day it was proclaimed, and its Article VIII proves that every Mexican family in those lands kept its home." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the treaty cannot tell you how any one family fared after 1848). 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 brass plaque calling a downtown building "the oldest in town" proves that it is. Model answer: "A plaque shows what the group that put it up wanted visitors to believe about the building. It is real evidence, but of that group's claim, not of the building's age. To check, I would look for records made when the building went up, such as a deed or a tax roll, and set them beside the plaque. Read side by side, the plaque shows the claim, and the records show whether it holds."

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 11, 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 12 years from the Texas declaration to the treaty, 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 11, and quote only the course's pinned fragments of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Never put manifest destiny in quotation marks as if quoting the 1845 essay. 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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