ompose a paper that answers the question (five to seven pages, Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced, Chicago Style Citation) Students will be asked to incorporate three secondary sources (books, scholarly articles, websites associated with research organizations, etc.) and one primary source. The topic will pertain to issues of race, politics, society, and culture from the British colonial period until the Reconstruction period. 

 Students should pay particular attention to the structure of their paper, making sure that its paragraphs are grouped in logical sections, that ideas flow from paragraph to paragraph, and that each paragraph ties back to the central argument or thesis of the paper. Evidence should be employed to support the author’s argument and should be analyzed to clarify the evidence’s meaning for the reader.

Essay Question: How and why did prior European ideas on difference change and make room for “race” as a salient social category in the British colonies by the eighteenth century? 

 The following question can help you construct your response, but you do not need to answer each and every one of the questions below: What role did European travel narratives to Africa and the Americas play in how Europeans began to conceive of race? Did European philosophers during the Enlightenment speak about race, and what were their ideas? How did labor systems in the colonial Americas (encomienda, indenture, slavery) come to coincide with race in European empires? How did British law on land use and slavery impact the way people viewed race? Were “mixed-race” people important in establishing social hierarchy in the British colonies, and how were they considered?