Extra Credit Review Questions for US History I
Directions: answer as many of the following questions you can. You will get 1/3 of a point
EC for each correct answer. Your answers must be hand written!
Due Monday 6/16/14 NO EXCEPTIONS
1. Describe two ways English colonists took advantage of America’s natural resources.
2. What are the “natural rights” of a citizen according to John Locke?
3. What were two key results of the French-Indian War?
4. What is mercantilism?
5. What were the effects of the plantation system on Southern society?
6. Why did many coastal towns become new centers for shipbuilding in the early days of the colonies?
7. Who was William Pitt?
8. What did the Committees of Correspondence do?
9. How were ideas from the Enlightenment incorporated into the Declaration of Independence?
10. Around the time of the Boston Tea Party, what factors led to Colonists’ growing resentment of the British?
11. What did the Intolerable Acts do?
12. Why was France willing to help America win the war?
13. Name three provisions of the Treaty of Paris.
14. What does “taxation without representation” mean?
15. In which region of the country were loyalist sympathies strongest?
16. Describe the provisions of the Land Ordinance of 1785.
17. What were the views of the Federalists?
18. What is meant by “checks and balances”? Give one example of checks and balances in the Constitution.
19. What were the views of the Antifederalists?
20. Why was the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution?
21. Who is known as the “Father of the Constitution” and why?
22. What did the Northwest Ordinances provide for?
23. What did the Virginia Plan call for?
24. What was the Great Compromise and what or whom did it compromise between?
25. Why did some leaders refuse to attend the Constitutional Convention?
26. Why did Daniel Shays lead an armed rebellion to close a courthouse?
27. What executive departments did Congress first establish, and whom did President Washington choose to
head each department?
28. Why was the United States capital moved to the new Federal City in the South in the late 1700s?
29. How did the debate over creation of a national bank become a constitutional issue?
30. What were the first four Cabinet departments that Congress created in 1789?
31. What was the difference between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans?
32. Why did the farmers in the western frontier object to the excise tax on whiskey?
33. What question on foreign policy did the French Revolution raise in the United States?
34. Why was the Louisiana Purchase significant to the territory of the United States?
35. What is judicial review?
36. What were the terms of the Missouri Compromise?
37. Discuss the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the North.
38. How did the Battle of New Orleans affect Andrew Jackson’s political career?
39. What did Jackson suspect was a “corrupt bargain,” and who did he believe participated in it?
40. What is the nullification theory?
41. Why did Henry Clay and Daniel Webster introduce a bill to renew the charter of the National Bank in 1832
rather than when the first charter would expire in 1836?
42. Name four innovations or improvements in transportation between 1807 and 1841.
43. What was the greatest advancement in communications in this period, and who patented it?
44. How did cotton production influence the spread of slavery?
45. How did the economy of the North differ from the South?
46. Name three groups of people who used the Oregon Trail.
47. What was Moses Austin’s Texas Venture and what was its effect on the population of Texas?
48. Why did the Mexican government become concerned about the loyalties of American settlers in Texas in
the early 1800s?
49. What were the conditions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
50. How did Americans find out that there was gold in California?
51. What did Polk’s slogan “Fifty four Forty or Fight” mean?
52. What was the purpose of the Pony Express?
53. Why could Stephen F. Austin not rely on the original agreement for settlement of Texas that his father,
Moses Austin, had negotiated with the Spanish?
54. What did Sam Houston’s troops accomplish at San Jacinto?
55. Why did southerners support the annexation of Texas?
56. What excuse did President Polk use to ask Congress to declare war on Mexico?
57. What was the Mexican Cession?
58. What is popular sovereignty and what part did it play in the election of a proslavery territorial legislature in
Kansas?
59. Why were the Lincoln-Douglas debates important?
60. How did South Carolina convention delegates justify the state’s secession from the Union?
61. What was the Lecompton Constitution and why was it controversial?
62. Besides the admission of California to the Union what other provision of the Compromise of 1850 became
very controversial in the North?
63. What provision of the Constitution did slaveholders cite as a protection for slavery?
64. How did the Kansas-Nebraska Act weaken the Democratic Party?
65. What was the main issue of the Free Soil Party?
66. What caused the Territory of Kansas to be called “Bleeding Kansas?”
67. Why did anti-slavery newspapers refer to the pro-slavery sheriff’s raid on Lawrence as the “Sack of
Lawrence”?
68. What did John Brown and his followers do to at Pottawatomie Creek to avenge the Sack of Lawrence?
69. What did Representative Preston Brooks do in the Senate in response to Senator Charles Sumner’s
criticism of the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
70. What were Abraham Lincoln’s early views on slavery, before he ran against Douglas?
71. Even though Stephen Douglas won reelection to the Senate in 1858, what did Lincoln win from that
election? What did Douglas lose?
72. Why was Lincoln able to win in 1860?
73. If Confederate troops had been more experienced, what might have been the outcome of the Battle of
Bull Run?
74. Why did Confederate leaders want their army to keep fighting until after the election of 1864?
75. Why was the North better equipped for the Civil War than the South?
76. At the beginning of the Civil War, why did the South expected to win the recognition, if not the support, of
France and Britain?
77. List four resource advantages the North held over the South when the Civil War began.
78. What was General Winfield Scott’s plan and why was it named after the anaconda?
79. Describe four new weapons of war that were used in the Civil War.
80. Why were Union victories at Shiloh, New Orleans, and Vicksburg vital to winning the war?
81. Why did President Lincoln become impatient with General McClellan?
82. Who did the Emancipation Proclamation actually free?
83. Why did General Robert E. Lee decide to invade Union territory in Pennsylvania?
84. What was the purpose of the Thirteenth Amendment?
85. What did General Sherman’s army do as it marched from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia?
86. How did Congress attempt to control the violence of terrorist groups?
87. Name three changes brought to the South by new state governments established under Radical
Reconstruction.
88. What was the Fourteenth Amendment?
89. List five economic problems that the South faced following the Civil War.
90. What was President Lincoln and his supporters’ position regarding secession of southern states?
91. What event that happened on April 14, 1865, less than a week after Lee’s surrender, changed the course
of Reconstruction?
92. How did President Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction differ from Lincoln’s and the Wade-Davis plan?
93. Why did Congress refuse to seat 12 newly-elected Confederates after the 1866 elections?
94. What legislation did Congress pass in an attempt to combat the influence of the Black Codes?
95. How did the election of 1866 affect the course of Reconstruction and set up a confrontation between
Congress and the president?
96. What control over the South was set up under the first Reconstruction Act passed by Congress over
Johnson’s veto in 1867.
97. What specific charge did Congress use against President Johnson in 1868 to begin impeachment
proceedings?
98. What does the Fifteenth Amendment provide?
99. Who were the scalawags and carpetbaggers?
100. Name three accomplishments of Republican state governments in the South during Reconstruction.
101. What economic arrangement did a sharecropper have with an employer?
102. What was the goal of the Ku Klux Klan and what methods did it use to accomplish this?
103. What act set aside money for state colleges and what effect did it have?