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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who directed the film entitled The Birth of a Nation?

2. How many African Americans attended the parade and mock funeral for slavery held in a particular city in 1865?

3. What event "compelled many Northern white people to acknowledge the humanity of black people" (65)?

4. When the Civil War ended, the South exchanged slavery for what practice?

5. In what year was the "nation's first federal civil rights law" (6) enacted?

Short Essay Questions

1. In what way did Charles Carroll equate evolution with atheism?

2. Describe the experience Gates had in college that served as the impetus for writing Stony the Road.

3. Explain the significance of Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton.

4. How does Gates go about interweaving the two themes of healing and justice?

5. In Part Two: The Old Negro, Gates explores the way in which the ideology of white supremacy was transmitted using which four distinct discourses?

6. What two events led to the shift in Agassiz's worldview?

7. Discuss one disease identified within Samuel Cartwright's 1851 publication entitled "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race" within De Bow's Review.

8. Which experiences of Abraham Lincoln's does Gates cite as causing his ideas about race to evolve?

9. To what source did proponents of monogenesis turn for justification for their theory?

10. To what modern event does Gates connect the period of Redemption and why?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What messages does Gates, Jr. send to the audience about the themes of individualism and collectivism?

Essay Topic 2

How does Gates, Jr. employ the use or rejection of fallacy within Stony the Road and how does the inclusion of fallacy help Gates, Jr. to prove particular points made within the text?

Essay Topic 3

How does Gates, Jr.’s use of the first and second person point of view serve the purposes of the text? Discuss how Gates, Jr.’s choice of point of view helps to advance the treatment of at least three particular themes within the text.

(see the answer keys)

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