Note: Anything underlined represents a link to a primary source document.
Unit Main Themes help guide your notetaking. Not all information is equal. Ideas and facts that help you deal with themes are the most important. Themes may vary by teacher in this course. Here are the themes for Ms. Sallee’s Unit 2:

1. Hearts and minds ripe for revolution

2. Colonies as the "offspring of the avant garde"

3. Was Great Britain tyrannical?

Lesson 1 The Enlightenment and Great Awakening
NON: read pp. 124-128 begin at Enlightenment and Awakening and stop at The Consumer Revolution

1) Note and understand the major ideas of the Enlightenment and their impact on Americans like Benjamin Franklin, clergy, and common colonists.
2) What was the Great Awakening?
3) Note the impact and effects of the Great Awakening.

4) How English were the colonists?

5) Note the economic differences between England and America

Discussion question: Do the beliefs of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening contradict one another?

Map: Northampton, North and South Carolina, Philadelphia

Handout on Jonathan Edwards, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and excerpt from Ben Franklin's Autobiography

Lesson 2 Politics and the Imperial System
NON: Read pp. 129-133 Begin at Politics in England and America and stop at Toward the Seven Years War.

1) What were the colonists two minds about English government? Understand the structure and organization of British government.
2) What tools did the English executive bureaucracy use to manage Parliament?
3) What did colonial governments look like? How similar were they to the English model?
4) How did the English view their colonies in North America?
5) Note England’s “haphazard” administration of its colonies and its impact on Americans on pp. 133-4.

Discussion Question: Traditional or stereotypical explanations of the American Revolution portray the colonists as throwing off the tyranny of a monarchical government, does today’s readings alter this perception? To what extent did colonists live in a democratic society?

Map: Charleston, New York City, Baltimore

Lesson 3 French and Indian War
NON: Read pp. 137-142 Primarily you are studying this war as a turning point in Imperial policy toward the colonies.

1) How is the section "joys of being English" a set-up for why the war is a turning point?
2) Where was this war fought?
3) Note Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union and the problems of colonial unification (turn back to 133 for this one)
4) Understand the role of William Pitt
5) How were the colonists' expectations and at odds with many British statesmens' attitudes?


In class view Benjamin West's painting of General Wolfe. How does this painting suggest Americans felt about the British army at the end of the war? It is also worth remembering that Wolfe said, "The Americans are, in general, the dirtiest, the most contemptably cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending on them in action, they fall down in their own dirt. . . "

Lesson 4: Pontiac’s Rebellion and Taxes
NON: Read pp. 143-146. Begin at “The Imperial Crisis” and stop at “Beginnings of Colonial Resistance”

1) What factors/developments led the English to keep troops along the Frontier?
2) Note how Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763 came to affect westward migration.
3) What are the reasons behind Grenville's new policies

Discussion Question: Were Americans in 1763 ready for Revolution? Why or why not?

Map: Appalachian mountains, Ottawa territory, Louisville, North Carolina, Ohio River

Lesson 5: Colonial Resistance
NON: Read pp.146-149

1) Note the impact of Locke on the thinking of the colonials.
2) Be sure to understand the influence of the English Opposition or Whig tradition on American radicals (Who were .
3) What was the economic situation in the colonies as England increased its efforts to tax the colonies?
4) Note the Stamp Act resolves and what impact the repeal of the Stamp Act had

5) Who were the Sons of Liberty?

Discussion question: Were early American opponents to the Stamp Act simply economically self-interested individuals who didn’t want to pay taxes or did they have larger concerns?

Map: Boston

Lesson 6: Colonial Resistance Part II. Start at the Resistance Organizes but also read the tan section on “Street Theater.”
NON: 150-top of 154

1) Who is organizing the resistance and how are they able to be effective?
2) What is international about the colonial resistance?
3) What was the impact of the Boston Massacre on the colonists and on Parliament? (click here for an American account of this event and here for a British perspective. In class view Paul Revere's famous engraving of the Boston Massacre. Useufl website on the Boston Massacre http://www.bostonmassacre.net/
4) Resistance Revived

Discussion question: What point are the authors of the textbook arguing in the section “Street Theater”? In what ways does this section change your understanding of colonial protests against British rule?

Map: New York, New Jersey

Lesson 7: Violent Conflict in British North America
NON: 154-157 to The Fighting Begins

1) How did the empire "strike back"?
2) What was the fear of conspiracy and how would the Quebec Act play into it?
3) What are some of the steps that move the colonists closer "toward revolution"?
4) What were the issues the First Continental Congress debated?

Map: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia

Lesson 8:  The Fighting Begins
NON: 157-to top of 166

1) Note where fighting begins before a revolution is declared.  Who was Thomas Paine and why is Common Sense such an important document? 
2) Conspiracies and Realities
3) What were the main arguments made against seeking independence?
4) The Decision for Independence

Discussion question: Consider the Declaration of Independence and what parts seem new and what parts build on ideas that you have seen among colonists before 1776.
Map: Georgia, Lexington, Concord

Lesson 9:   Prepare for Debate

Test for this unit: (60% short answer; 40% essay)