This week you will be reading a chapter from After the Fact called, Serving Time in Virginia. It focuses on the very high mortality rate in early Virginia.
In this chapter the authors of the book want to address: what are the challenges that historians’ face when working with documents? What is the potential problem with John Smith’s Autobiography? What challenge does the short government proclamation about planting corn and not tobacco present?
So first you need to read the chapter, and then answer the following 3 questions:
- What experiences did John Smith write about? How much veracity is there to what he recorded about his experiences?
- Who was Sir Edwin Sandys, and how did his policies and reforms impact the colony?
- Why was labor critical to the boom economy, and in what ways did planters acquire that labor? What kinds of abuses did the labor system spawn?
The assignment is worth 50 points (and if you go above and beyond you can earn 10 points of extra credit).
- Each answer should be a paragraph to several paragraphs long and fully address all parts of the question
- This assignment is due on Sunday, no late work is accepted.
Attached is a sample of a very good After the Fact answer from an actual student in U.S. History
