Term 1- Last Extra Credit Due by Wednesday Oct 23

Question 1 is based on the following two passages.

“Massachusetts did not have a social order before the American Revolution that would
breed sharp internal class conflicts. The evidence does not justify an interpretation of the
Revolution in Massachusetts as an internal class conflict designed to achieve additional
political, economic, and social democracy. Although democracy was important as a factor
in the conflict, it was a democracy which had already arrived in the colony long before
1776. . . . [B]efore 1776, [democracy was] a reality which interfered with British policies. If
the British had been successful, there would undoubtedly have been much less democracy
in Massachusetts—hence [my] interpretation that the Revolution was designed to preserve
a social order rather than to change it.”
— Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the
Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780, 1955


“Those who . . . have asserted that the Revolution aimed only at separation from Great
Britain are quite right, but only insofar as they have described the attitudes of the elite:
what the common people and articulate radicals made of the Declaration of Independence
may have been quite a different matter. . . .” “[P]oor people in early America expressed
discontent in some way against the rich. During the period of the American Revolution
there was just such an expression from below: the powerless refused to stay in the places
to which a theory of deference and subordination assigned them. Among the most blatant
cases are those of Negroes who petitioned for that freedom to which . . . they claimed they
had a natural right.”
— Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” 1968


Based on the two interpretations above of the origins of the American Revolution, complete the
following three tasks:
A) Briefly explain the main point made by Passage 1.
B) Briefly explain the main point made by Passage 2.
C) Provide ONE piece of evidence from the era of the American Revolution that is not
included in the passages, and explain how it supports the interpretation in either passage

******Note that the short-answer questions do not require students to develop
and support a thesis statement. Do not go over 1 page in length ********