History of the United States I / Unit 6 USH1 0784 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
What the Revolution Reinforced
The idea
The anchor's closing claim for this chapter is a hard one and it is stated plainly. In the new United States, the Revolution largely reinforced a racial identity based on skin colour. Whiteness, now a national identity, denoted freedom and stood as the key to power. Blackness, more than ever before, denoted servile status. Despite their class and ethnic differences, White revolutionaries stood mostly united in their hostility to both Black and Native Americans.
In practice
Most American revolutionaries, the anchor says, clinging to notions of Black inferiority.
Where people slip
Hold this beside the Declaration in entry 0757. A war fought in the name of a self-evident equality ended by hardening the categories it might have dissolved, and the anchor says so directly rather than leaving it for the reader to infer. This is the claim Unit 07 tests against the Constitution the same men then wrote.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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