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Week 15 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 15 — Freedom, Citizenship, and the Vote: Reading Reconstruction and the Whole Roster — Traditional alternative (no AI)

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

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

Assignment 14 of the term — measure the years between Reconstruction's amendments, read the 14th Amendment closely, argue one claim about the whole period from three dated documents, and explain to someone new to history what the amendments did and did not do.

This week you learned how Presidential Reconstruction readmitted the Southern states on lenient terms and how Congressional Reconstruction followed from the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, what the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments did, what freedpeople built and the violence that opposed them, and why Reconstruction ended in 1877. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's chronology, interpret each one, argue one claim about the whole period from three dated documents, and explain to someone who has never studied it what the amendments did and did not do. 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 four chronology years, with one year from Week 12, in order:

  • 1857 — Dred Scott v. Sandford
  • 1865 — the 13th Amendment ratified
  • 1868 — the 14th Amendment ratified
  • 1870 — the 15th Amendment ratified
  • 1877 — the end of Reconstruction

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

  1. The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, and the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. How many years separate the two?
  2. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. How many years separate the two?
  3. The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, and Reconstruction ended in 1877. How many years separate the two?
  4. Dred Scott v. Sandford was decided in 1857, and the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. How many years separate the two?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: state what the 13th Amendment did and what the 14th Amendment did, then keep the two apart in one sentence of your own.
  • Problem 2: source the 14th Amendment (type of document, host, and year) and quote its citizenship fragment word for word, then write the one plain sentence that says what its text shows and what it does not.
  • Problem 3: state what the 15th Amendment did, quote its pinned fragment word for word, and name one thing its list leaves out; then tell Presidential Reconstruction, Johnson's lenient readmission, apart from Congressional Reconstruction under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.
  • Problem 4 (the course synthesis): argue one claim about the whole period from three dated documents on the roster: the Declaration of Independence (1776), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and the 14th Amendment (1868). Source each by type, date, and host, quote one pinned fragment from each word for word, state your claim, and acknowledge one other reading. Then choose the one move of the four (sourcing, contextualization, close reading, or corroboration) your claim leans on most, and say in one sentence why another move fits this case less well.

The three synthesis documents and their pinned fragments:

  • The Declaration of Independence, a declaration of 1776 kept by the National Archives: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
  • Dred Scott v. Sandford, a Supreme Court decision of 1857 kept by the National Archives: "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution"
  • The 14th Amendment, a constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 and kept by the National Archives: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States"

Explain it to a non-expert

A neighbor says, "The 14th Amendment gave everyone the vote, and Reconstruction ended the same year it was ratified." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about what the 14th and 15th Amendments did and the year Reconstruction ended, and names one limit of what you can say from the amendments' text alone (for example, that a text shows what was written into the Constitution, not how far it was kept). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend saying that a new library rule "lets everyone borrow rare books," when the rule says only that no one may be refused a library card because of the town they live in. Model answer: "The rule is about cards, not rare books, and it names one reason a person cannot be turned away: their town. It says nothing about age, fees, or which books a card lets you take out. To know what a rule does, I read its list, not its reputation. The rule shows what the library promised on paper, and it does not show how the desk staff applied it."

Use that pattern for your message to the neighbor, 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 15, 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 neighbor, 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), 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 1776, 1857, 1865, 1868, 1870, and 1877 and marks the 11 years from Dred Scott v. Sandford to the 14th Amendment, 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 15, and quote only the course's pinned fragments. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

After this assignment

The cumulative final exam comes in Week 16. Its study guide, practice exam (the Final Practice Exam), and exam-prep tutorial sit in the Week 16 exam bundle. The synthesis move you practice in Problem 4, choosing three dated documents, quoting them exactly, choosing the move your claim leans on, and stating another reading in one plain sentence, is the same move those materials ask you to make with every unit of the course.

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