Homework Set #3 : Zinn Chapter 2 pages 32-end and Chapter 3 (Due: Tuesday September 19)
Mindi Sitterud
No unread replies. No replies.
Homework Set #3 : Zinn Chapter 2 pages 32-end and Chapter 3
(Location:Go to “Files,” then folder “Course Readings:” “A People’s History of the United States”
Zinn Chapter 2 (pg 32-end)
.
1.List at least five forms of slave resistance.
2.List at least five instances or pieces of evidence that might suggest that slave masters feared slave
populations (what did they say or do that might evidence fear).
3.Stono Rebellion:
4.List at least 3 examples of how black people and white people interacted outside the slave/master
relationship.
5.What did slave masters fear more than a slave rebellion?
6.List at least 3 “privileges” (or “small gifts of status”) ultimately provided poor whites and/or
whites completing their servant contracts.
7.What was the strategic purpose of these privileges? What did the “small gifts of status” prevent or
discourage?

Zinn Chapter 3 (All)

1.Levelling:
2.How did a British person become a “human commodity?” (Keywords- enclosures, vagrancy)
3.List at least 5 realities endured by indentured servants that could be compared with chattel
slavery.
4.What percentage of indentured servants failed to achieve a reasonable quality of life in the long
term (died, returned to England or endured dire poverty)?
What percentage that survived and remained in North America remained landless?
5.LIsting at least 3 facts or examples, describe the general social/class structure of the colonial
period.
6.According to Zinn, in traditional accounts of American history, conflict with Britain has
overshadowed this conflict, which characterized the last quarter of the 1600s.
7. Who were the “persons of mean and vile character?”
8.In what context did the conditions experienced by poor and indentured whites begin to matter to
the elite?
9.Why did the elites increasingly decide that blacks and Indians needed to be a “check on each
other?” what were some of the ways in which this was done?
10.What made Bacon’s Rebellion so threatening to the elite?
11.List at least 3 ways in which a wedge between blacks/servants/slaves and poor whites/indentured
whites was created.
12.Why was the middling class (or “middling sort”) important to the colonial elite and what type of
rhetoric (or language) was used to win them over?