Final Study Guide (H174 – MW CLASS – F11)
Part I. Key Terms for Final Exam
You will get six terms in your exam. Each is worth 10 points. As thoroughly as possible, locate each term
in time and place, and explain its significance for the revolution.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
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18.
19.
Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation Line
First Continental Congress accomplishments and Second Continental Congress accomplishments
Ideologies of liberalism, republicanism (Whig), and religion
Common Sense
Precedents for Declaration of Independence and Declaration of Independence
smallpox and malaria in the war years
British problems in recruitment
Myths about American soldiers (based on Lexington and Valley Forge)
Washington’s “respectable army” by 1777
Motivations for British focus on army (and not navy)
Tensions between rebel soldiers and civilians
Blacks in military service
Northern campaign Timeline, 1775-1778, from British advantages to rebel advantages
Battle of Long Island and British response to Washington’s retreat
Consequences of the 1777 British campaign
Southern campaign Timeline, 1775-1781, and why the British lost
Articles of Confederation to Constitution
Newburgh conspiracy
Place of loyalists (blacks, Natives, whites)
Part II. Essay Questions
You will get two of the following questions. Each is worth 20 points. Make sure your answers provide
sufficient context (dates, turning points, regions, significant actors, patterns of change).
1. Who fought in the American Revolution and why?
Discuss the role of the propertied and the property-less soldiers during the war years.
Discuss the role of blacks and natives during the war.
2. How do we understand women’s changing role during the American Revolution?
Discuss Mary Silliman, and the servant girl, and also Mr. Silliman in relation to the
privateer.
Discuss the four documents from Major Problems including the Declaration of
Sentiments (1848).
3. How did troubling questions about slavery get settled in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
century?
Discuss the anti-slavery arguments and their limits.
Discuss the emergence of scientific racism.
4. We can understand the Revolution as a War of American Independence, as a settler rebellion,
and as a Long War for the West. Explain the participants, events, and turning points that are
highlighted in each understanding.
5. Some historians consider the war in the south a “race war.”
Discuss how slaves affected the British and the rebel forces.
Can the blacks who joined British forces be considered “loyalists?” Discuss.
6. Bob Middlekauff writes, “Men who have more than their lives to lose make one sort of
revolution, and those who have only their lives to lose make another” (637). Discuss how the
revolutionaries moved towards the framing of the Constitution.