Was Military stragegy or politics the key to American victory in the war? How did the two coincide?
Did the Loyalists deserve to be persecuted nad driven out of the country? What difference does it make to understand the Revolution as a civil war between Americans as well as a war against the British?
Why was the French Empire ultimately so much less successful than either the Spanish or the British? Why did the northern colonies develop a very different social and economic system based on small-scale farming and business?
Why did the sourthern colonies develop an economic and social system based on large-scale plantaiton agriculture? What were the causes and effects of the Great Awakening? How did such an intense religious revival affect those who experienced conversion as well as those who did not? How democratic as colonial American socie ...continues
What forces drove the original colonists in North America to expand their areas of settlement further and further inland?
Were the Salem Witch Trials a peculiar, aberrant moment in an age of superstition, or did they reflect common human psychological and social anxieties that could appear in any age? How harshly should those who prosecuted the "witches" be condemned?
Why did slavery grow to be such an important institution in colonial America? What were the effect of slavery on the Africans who were brought to the New World?
What commercial, religious, and nationalistic incentives drove Europeans to embark on the hazardous course of establishing overseas colonies? What happened to both the Europeans and the Inndians when their worlds collided after 1492? In what ways were b oth societies changed?
What was the Revolutionary movement really all about and the amount of taxation? The right of government to tax? The political corruption of Britain and the virtue of America? The right of a king to govern America? The colonies' growing sense of national identity apart from Britian?
The Declaration of Independence
What was radical and new in the Declaration of INdependence and what was old and traditional? What did statments like, "all men are created equal" mean in their historical context and what did they come to mean later?
