PIONEER HIGH SCHOOL / AP US HISTORY
SUMMER ASSIGNMENT 2013
DIRECTIONS & ADVICE
Welcome to Advanced Placement United States History! This course offers you the exciting opportunity to study
American History at the college level and to continue to develop your skills as a serious scholar. Because of the
volume of material covered in class, we need to use the summer to get a head start on our work. Our summer
assignment will also provide a foundation for our class activities during the first several weeks of school, and the
score you earn on the summer assignment will be a major component of your grade during the first grading period.
We urge you to take the assignment seriously and complete it thoroughly. Procrastination and laziness are probably
the greatest obstacles to success in AP US History, so start this assignment early.
SUMMER ASSIGNMENT DIRECTIONS
1.
Check out a copy of The American Pageant from the Pioneer textbook depository before the end of school this
year. If you are unable to check out a copy of text for any reason, PDF versions of the chapters required are
available on Mr. Glasser’s download page (http://pioneerhigh.org/high/school/staff_info/C8209).
2.
Acquire a copy of Pioneer’s official AP review guide: United States History: Preparing for the Advanced
Placement Examination by Newman and Schmalbach (Amsco Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-56765-660-2). The
book is available from the Pioneer Student Store or online.
3.
Read the attached Reading Guide. It highlights the most important details you should take away from the
reading, and it identifies the things you should be able to do after you have finished the reading. Keep these
things in mind as you do the reading.
4.
Read Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 in The American Pageant. As you read, you might find it helpful to
read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 in the review guide.
5.
Take thorough notes on the reading. Notes may be handwritten or typed and in whatever format you prefer.
They must, however, be submitted in hard copy on the first day of school. Typing your notes is not required but
is highly recommended, as doing so will make your life much easier later on.
6.
Review the Reading Guide. Make certain you have addressed all of the objective and key terms in your notes. If
you find you are missing information, go back through the chapters and find what you need.
7.
Reorganize your notes. When we need to use information from the textbook it will rarely come in the same
order it appeared the book. You should therefore always reorganize your notes by topic or theme. Notes that are
not reorganized in some way cannot earn full credit. We provide some advice on this step below.
8.
Prepare for the test. On the first day of school, you will take an essay on the material in the summer assignment.
Notes will not be permitted.
ADVICE FOR BEING EFFICIENT AND FOR EARNING A GOOD GRADE
o When writing notes, find a balance between too little information and too much information. Notes that are too
sparse are not very useful study tools. Notes that are too dense take too much time to create. Each chapter’s notes
should take the average student about three hours complete. (Keep this in mind: Reading your notes should be
significantly more efficient than reading the textbook.)
o Don’t obsess about dates. Track dates of some key events, but for the rest of the events, simply understand
whether they came before or after your key events.
o Find a note-taking format that works for you. We don’t care what system you use; just have a system. Use a
traditional outline format or some other format that you’ve used with success in the past.
o When writing notes, find a balance between writing too few words and too many words. Write enough
explanation about each fact so that you’ll be able to use these notes in May to study for the AP exam. Do not,
however, write complete sentences. It will take you too long.
o Prepare for the test by outlining the old AP essays at the end of the Reading Guide.
ADVICE ON REORGANIZING YOUR NOTES
It is a requirement of this assignment to reorganize your notes by topic or theme. Information in this “second draft”
of your notes should be grouped by main ideas that help you make connections between different time periods and
geographic areas. (This process is substantially easier if your notes are typed, because you can just copy and paste
things into the appropriate places. Re-copying handwritten notes, however, can help some people memorize the
information. You’ll need to decide which is more valuable for you.) Our goal in requiring this reorganization is to
help you begin to see how information might be used to support a historical argument in an essay.
Look at the first essay prompt on the Reading Guide: “Analyze the origins and development of slavery in Britain’s
North American colonies in the period 1607 to 1776.” Information about slavery appears in all three chapters of the
summer reading (and in both chapters of the review book). Before you could write a good essay in response to this
prompt, you would have to comb through your notes and identify relevant information. Since most essay tests won’t
announce their questions in advance, you’ll need to be prepared to write a variety of essays by doing this kind of
reorganization in advance.
At its most basic level, this reorganization can be by topic. For example: politics, society, slavery, religion, or the
role of women. (AP European History students may think about using PERSIA.) More advanced reorganization will
be by theme. Themes are simple statements about major historical trends. Themes generally contain a noun and a
verb. For example: “religious freedom increases,” “slaves replace indentured servants,” and “the colonies become
more unified.” We encourage you to try to identify several themes in your reorganization and group historical
evidence that demonstrates the theme. A list of evidence under the “slaves replace indentured servants” theme might
include: plantations, encomienda, tobacco, Bacon’s Rebellion, Sir John Berkeley, the headright system, and freedom
dues. (There are many more items that could be added to this list, but this should give you the idea.) Each of these
helps explain the theme and could reasonably be used in an essay about the economic transformation of the British
colonies.
We realize this process is unfamiliar to many of you, but we insist that you attempt it. Your notes will be graded on
how thorough and complete they are AND on whether you have reorganized them. Summer notes cannot earn an
A if they are organized in the same order as the information appears in the textbook.
FINAL THOUGHTS
As an AP student, you are expected to be independent and self-sufficient in many things. If you have a question
while working on this assignment, re-read these directions, make your best assumption, and move forward. Do your
best to figure out questions that you encounter. If, however, you encounter unanswerable questions, you may e-mail
them to [email protected] or [email protected]. Please allow at least a week for a reply.
Finally, if you register for AP US History at Pioneer on or before July 15, you are responsible for completing the
summer assignment in full by the first day of school. If you register for the class after this date, do your absolute
best to complete the work, and then see your teacher on the first day of school to negotiate an extension. All students
must eventually complete the summer assignment in full, so it is to your advantage to finish as much as possible
before the start of school.
We hope you have a rewarding and relaxing summer and look forward to seeing you in the fall.
Mr. Peter Glasser
Mr. Patrick Bernhardt
PIONEER HIGH SCHOOL / AP US HISTORY
SUMMER ASSIGNMENT 2013
READING GUIDE
OBJECTIVES. After reading Chapters 2 through 4, you should be able to:
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Explain the source of the rivalry between England and Spain and describe its intensification in the 1600s.
Relate the early hardships of the Jamestown settlers and John Smith's role in keeping the colony going.
Describe how the early immigration patterns created diverse colonial settlements.
Summarize how early colonial governments flourished.
Explain the causes of early friction between backcountry and tidewater settlers.
Illustrate the early relationships between the settlers and Native Americans.
Describe how cash crops such as sugar and tobacco played such a dominant role in the southern economy.
Distinguish between the Pilgrims and Puritans, and indicate what role each group played in New England.
Explain how splinter groups of Puritans and non-Puritans founded colonies outside Massachusetts.
Explain how the Dutch and French settlements differed from the English.
Explain the significance of the term “salutary neglect” in terms of British rule.
Compare and contrast the extent to which religious freedom existed in the colonies.
Compare and contrast the political, economic, and cultural landscapes within the colonies.
Compare how morality rates influenced the development of society in the three colonial regions.
Explain the development of indentured servitude and the transition to slavery.
Describe the trade patterns of the colonies and the development of slavery as an economic institution.
Examine the development of education and the arts in the colonies.
Describe the ways that the frontier differed from the Atlantic coast settlements.
Explain the roles of both women and African-Americans in colonial society.
Explain the early slave rebellions and white settler response.
Describe the significance of the Great Awakening throughout the colonies.
Compare and contrast English and colonial economies.
Relate the impact of “benign neglect” on the colonies.
Describe the founding of each colony in North America.
KEY TERMS. After reading Chapters 2 through 4, you should be able to define and to identify the significance of:
Spanish Armada (1588)
encomienda
Roanoke
Jamestown
Virginia Company, Charter
Queen Elizabeth
John Smith
Powhatan Confederacy
Anglo-Powhatan Wars
John Rolfe and Pocahontas
Irish tactics
plantation economy
joint-stock companies
primogeniture
House of Burgesses
George Calvert, Lord Baltimore
Act of Toleration (1649)
Barbados Slave Code of 1661
English Civil War
Restoration colonies
relationship with Native Americans in South
William Penn
bread colonies
Quakers / Society of Friends
Florida Settlement
James Oglethorpe
Georgia, “buffer colony”
North Carolina “squatters”
Protestant Reformation
Puritans / Puritanism
Separatists / Separatism
Calvinism
Mayflower Compact
Plymouth
Massachusetts Bay Colony
John Winthrop
Great Migration
corporate colonies
royal colonies
proprietary colonies
Congregational Church
Anne Hutchinson
Roger Williams
Rhode Island “sewer”
Connecticut, Fundamental Orders (1639)
King Phillip’s War
New England Confederation
Dominion of New England
Sir Edmund Andros
Navigation Laws
William and Mary / Glorious Revolution
salutary neglect
New Amsterdam, Dutch colony
blue laws
Chesapeake colonies
survival rates
tobacco economy
headright system / indentured servitude
freedom dues
Bacon’s Rebellion
Sir William Berkeley
middle passage
slave codes
chattel slavery
halfway covenant
Salem witch trials
triangular trade
mercantilism
SAMPLE ESSAY PROMPTS. You should be prepared to address any of the following prompts in a short essay:
AP 2011
Analyze the origins and development of slavery in Britain’s North American colonies in the period
1607 to 1776.
AP 2005
Compare and contrast the ways in which economic development affected politics in Massachusetts and
Virginia in the period from 1607 to 1750.
AP 2000
Analyze the cultural and economic responses of TWO of the following groups to the Indians of North
America before 1750: British, Spanish, and French.
AP 1998
Analyze the extent to which religious freedom existed in the British North American colonies prior to
1700.
AP Prep
Assess the validity of this statement: Socially, politically, and economically, the northern colonies
were vastly more successful than either the middle or southern colonies.