Final Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored final exam for U.S. History to 1877. It is cumulative: its questions reach all eight course objectives, from the historian's way of reading a dated document, first taught in Week 1, to the Civil War and Reconstruction in Weeks 14 and 15. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new module and no new material.

The final has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Thirty-two ask you to select exactly one option, two ask you to select every option that applies, and six ask you to judge a statement true or false. Seventeen questions are on the easier side, 20 are of medium difficulty, and 3 are harder.

Each question asks for a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Primary Source Workshops. You date and order events from the course's two chronologies, subtract one year from another, match a pinned fragment to the document it comes from, source a document by its origin, type, year, and archive, say what a measure or an amendment did, and tell what a source shows from a claim that goes beyond it. Every fragment, year, and illustrative source a question uses is printed in the question, so nothing depends on a picture, a map, or a color. As the syllabus says, no question keys a verdict on a historians' debate, a revised estimate, or a date the course teaches only in words.

Coverage and scope

The syllabus says the final gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 6 to 8, while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 5. The questions were drawn from the course's question bank, and this form leans that way strongly. Thirty-nine of the 40 questions come from the material of Weeks 9 to 15, one comes from Week 2, and every one of the eight objectives appears at least once.

Thirty-one questions check only Objectives 6 to 8, the objectives Weeks 9 to 15 introduce. Eight check only one of Objectives 1 to 5. The remaining question, on how to read the wartime order's own words, counts under Objective 1 and Objective 8 at once. Here is what this form actually contains, first by week and then by objective.

No question is drawn directly from the material of Week 1 or Weeks 3 to 8, and none repeats a midterm question.

The objective column adds to 41, not 40, because one Week 14 question counts under two objectives. Every other question counts under exactly one.

Read the two tables together. Week 10 carries the most questions, 8, so the reform movements, abolitionism, the Week 10 workshop narrative and how a told life is sourced, and the sorting of primary and secondary sources deserve the most review time. Weeks 13 and 15 come next with 7 each, then Weeks 12 and 14 with 5 each, Week 11 with 4, and Week 9 with 3. By objective, the changes of the early and middle nineteenth century (Objective 6) is the heaviest, with 13 questions across Weeks 9 to 12. The Civil War and Reconstruction (Objective 8) follows with 10, and the sectional crisis (Objective 7) has 9.

Here is the ground each week taught. These are the topics the questions come from, not the questions themselves:

• Week 2: the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonies compared; the royal charter and the covenant of the early 1600s; the order of the first English colonies; trade, alliance, and war with Native nations.
• Week 9: the purchase of Louisiana from France and its treaty of cession; the War of 1812; the market and transportation revolutions; the line Congress drew across the purchase lands; Jacksonian democracy; the removal law, Jackson's removal message, and the forced removals; the nullification crisis.
• Week 10: the Second Great Awakening; temperance, schooling, and asylum reform; abolitionism, with Black abolitionists among its leading voices; the week's dictated narrative, its teller and its writer, and its dates; the women's rights convention at Seneca Falls; primary and secondary sources from the illustrative source-sorting set.
• Week 11: manifest destiny as a phrase, never a law; the Texas delegates' declaration and what it leaves out; annexation and the Oregon question; the U.S.-Mexican War; the peace that ended that war, its Article VIII, and what expansion meant for Mexicans and Native nations.
• Week 12: the cotton economy and the domestic slave trade; the lives and resistance of enslaved people; Douglass's second autobiography; the territorial measures of the 1850s and popular sovereignty; the Supreme Court's ruling in the Scott family's freedom suit.
• Week 13: the Republicans' rise; the Lincoln–Douglas debates; John Brown's raid; the election of 1860; the secession declaration adopted by South Carolina's convention and the cause it names; secession; Lincoln's first address as President; Fort Sumter; the debate over whether the war was inevitable.
• Week 14: strategy, resources, and the scale of the war; self-emancipation; the order Lincoln issued as a war measure, what it did and did not free, and the earlier proclamation it recites; Black military service; Lincoln's speech at the cemetery and its manuscript copies; total war and the home fronts.
• Week 15: the President's plan and then Congress's plan for Reconstruction; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; what freedpeople built; the backlash and racial violence; the end of Reconstruction; the debate over how far Reconstruction failed; the course synthesis.

The early objectives still count. Nine questions check one of Objectives 1 to 5, and eight of them sit inside a later week's material, the way those weeks called the early tools back. Objective 1, the historian's four moves, runs through the later weeks' documents: Week 10 asked whose words are on the page of a told life and sorted sources as primary or secondary, Week 11 read a treaty article for what it shows and what goes past it, Week 14 dated the parts of a document that recites an older one, and Week 15 sourced the roster again for the synthesis. Week 12 called back Week 3's statuses of bound labor as it taught the cotton economy. Week 13 set the Revolution's causes beside the causes of secession, the Week 4 line. Week 15 measured the amendments against the Constitution-making years of Week 6. The ninth question comes from Week 2 itself, on the order of the first English colonies.

These notes map the skills the final checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.

Instructions

• Attempts: one. The final is a single scored attempt.
• Time limit: there is no time limit. Take the time you need, as long as you submit before the exam closes.
• Window: the final opens in Week 16 and closes at the due time your instructor sets. Start early enough to finish comfortably inside that window.
• Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and once you move on you cannot go back to an earlier question. Settle each one before you move to the next.
• Materials: every fragment, year, and illustrative source a question needs is printed in the question. Scratch paper helps for writing two years one above the other before you subtract, or for listing events in order. The syllabus sets no rule on notes or other materials, so follow what your instructor announces before the final opens.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed options stay hidden so the final stays fair for every student.

Academic integrity

The final is an individual, scored assessment, and it is closed to AI. Do not use a chatbot or any other AI tool, do not get help from another person, and do not share or post the questions during or after your attempt. The syllabus closes the final to AI, requires it to be entirely your own work, and names using AI on the final as one of the three violations that matter most in this course. The final confirms that you personally can identify a source, date and order events, and match a document, a person, or a measure to its significance.

The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice final, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the final word for word.

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