Choose two groups from the colonial/Revolutionary period to compare, based on their experiences with and definitions of liberty. What sort of “privilege” was liberty to each group? What does this comparison reveal to you about the meaning of liberty and the structure of colonial society overall?Please, see attached file for detail instruction.
20191015214924essay1_intruction__1_.docx
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Essay 1
Concepts of Liberty in Colonial North America
For you first essay you will consider the topic of liberty, and how this concept, with both
a factual and symbolic meaning during the colonial and Revolutionary period in U.S.
history, impacted the lives of men and women of British, African, and indigenous
descent, and of free and unfree people. One way to do this is to compare the way in
which these different groups experienced liberty (the factual meaning) and the way in
which different groups understood or talked about liberty (the symbolic meaning). For
example, the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of Liberty had specific goals they
worked towards in regards to “liberty” whereas when compared to an enslaved person’s
ideas of “liberty” the two meanings appear quite different.
Another way to think of these distinctions, between factual and symbolic meanings,
between who has liberty and who does not, is as a pie or cake: the whole entire
pie/cake is liberty, and the less I take, the more YOU have to eat later. Similarly,
colonists during the Revolutionary period inherited ideas about liberty as a comparative:
“…contrary to our ingrained illusion, the meaning of ‘liberty,’ as outlined by the Founders
and understood by their contemporaries, was one of ‘privilege’—that is, of advantage, or
of power, over those who did not possess it— and therefore an ingredient of a world
view that inherently assumed social inequality.”
Any account of Revolutionary liberty in particular should be deeply rooted in the
relationship between these two groups— that is, between those who enjoyed the full
privileges of freedom and those who held only a few, or none. Privilege cannot be
construed without the existence of the unprivileged, in the same way that a single
person living on a desert island cannot be said to possess liberty.”
Rozbicki, Michal Jan. Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, University of Virginia
Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csla/detail.action?docID=3443934.
Essay Prompt
Choose two groups from the colonial/Revolutionary period to compare, based on their
experiences with and definitions of liberty. What sort of “privilege” was liberty to each
group? What does this comparison reveal to you about the meaning of liberty and the
structure of colonial society overall?
Getting Organized
To get started, you will create an outline to be submitted prior to the actual essay. This
outline has a separate submission section here: Essay 1 outline which also includes
further instructions.
I have included an entire module on how to write a history essay – please review this
module before you begin/submit Essay 1: A. Essay General Instructions
I highly recommend reviewing sections 4.3, 4.5, 5.2, 5.4, 7.2 of the OpenStax textbook
to help get you started.
Below are the requirements:
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4 pages minimum (not including the cover page and bibliography)
typed, Times New Roman, 12 point font, double spaced
1 inch margins
cover page, bibliography page, Chicago style citations
reference to at least two secondary sources (can include textbook or the
available excerpted texts embedded in the modules)
Submit via Canvas, due Sunday, October 20, 11:59pm
**For a reference on Chicago style, review the The Little, Brown Handbook pdf posted
in the Chicago Style Citations module following this week’s module, or refer to the OWL
Purdue page: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/
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