Reference no: EM133327364

1. Pick out four of the myths

2. Explain the extent to which each myth has a foundation in fact

AND

3. Correct each myth so that it accurately conveys what we know about the history of the subject. (You should end up with four separate short essays.)

1. For most of American history before the Civil War (1607-1861), America was divided into a free North and a slave South.

2. American westward expansion in the antebellum period was catastrophic for Native Americans, but beneficial to the vast majority of Americans who migrated to the West.

3. One of the reasons Abraham Lincoln hesitated to publish the Emancipation Proclamation was that some of the Union states were also slave states.

4. The Supreme Court's 1857 decision in the case Scott v. Sanford threatened to undermine the distinction between slave and free states by making it impossible to prohibit slavery.

5. By the time Thomas Jefferson became President, most adult white men could vote, and most states chose their representatives to the Electoral College on the basis of the popular vote. (In other words, the votes of ordinary white men mattered in presidential elections)

6. Native Americans played important roles in the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, but they were largely peripheral to the War of 1812.

7. The raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 was planned as a slave rebellion, but it failed when the expected slaves did not show up.

8. The transportation and market revolutions in the first half of the nineteenth-century brought both increasing wealth and increasing economic inequality in the United States.

9. The "Trail of Tears" was made possible by Andrew Jackson's decision not to enforce a Supreme Court ruling on the status of the Cherokees.