| Colonial Society | |
| Is History True? YES: Oscar Handlin, from Truth in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) NO: William H. McNeill, from Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians, The American Historical Review (February 1986) Oscar Handlin insists that historical truth is absolute and knowable by historians who adopt the scientific method of research to discover factual evidence that provides both a chronology and context for their findings. William McNeill argues that historical truth is general and evolutionary and is discerned by different groups at different times and in different places in a subjective manner that has little to do with a scientifically absolute methodology. | |
| Was Disease the Key Factor in the Depopulation of Native Americans in the Americas? YES: Colin G. Calloway, from New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (The John Hopkins University Press, 1997) NO: David S. Jones, from Virgin Soils Revisited, William and Mary Quarterly (October 2003) Colin Calloway says that while Native Americans confronted numerous diseases in the Americas, traditional Indian healing practices failed to offer much protection from the diseases introduced by Europeans beginning in the late-fifteenth century and which decimated the indigenous peoples. David Jones recognizes the disastrous impact of European diseases on Native Americans, but he insists that Indian depopulation was also a consequence of the forces of poverty, malnutrition, environmental stress, dislocation, and social disparity. | |
| Was Colonial Culture Uniquely American? YES: Gary B. Nash, from Jack Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) NO: David Hackett Fischer, from Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989) Gary Nash argues that colonial American culture emerged from a convergence of three broad cultural traditions-European, Native American, and African-which produced a unique tri-racial society in the Americas. David Hackett Fischer contends that the cultural traditions of colonial America and the United States were derived from English folkways transported by migrants from four different regions in the British Isles. | |
| Were the First Colonists in the Chesapeake Region Ignorant, Lazy, and Unambitious? YES: Edmund S. Morgan, from American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (W.W. Norton, 1975) NO: Russell R. Menard, from From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland, William and Mary Quarterly (January 1973) Professor Edmund S. Morgan argues that Virginia's first decade as a colony was a complete "fiasco" because the settlers were too lazy to engage in the subsistence farming necessary for their survival and failed to abandon their own and the Virginia's company's expectations of establishing extractive industries such as mining, timber, and fishing. According to Professor Russell R. Menard, the indentured servants of seventeenth-century Maryland were hardworking, energetic, and young individuals who went through two stages of history: From 1640 to 1660 servants provided large planters with an inexpensive labor force, but they also achieved greater wealth and mobility in the Chesapeake than if they remained in England; after 1660 opportunities for servants to achieve land, wealth, and status drastically declined. | |
| Did Colonial New England Women Enjoy Significant Economic Autonomy? YES: Gloria L. Main, from Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England, The William and Mary Quarterly (January 1994) NO: Lyle Koehler, from A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Illinois Press, 1980) | |
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