AP Insight Building Block A quiz

The picture above best expresses which of the following middle-class views about women in the mid-nineteenth century?

• Women were the moral and spiritual strength of the family.

• Women played a subordinate role to men in parenting children.

• Women had earned the right to vote due to their important role as mothers.

• Women should limit the number of their children by delaying marriage.

In the early 1830’s, the majority of workers in the textile mills of Massachusetts were

• newly arrived immigrants form Ireland

• men who were heads of households

• married women whose children were of school age

• young unmarried women from rural New England

“Few historians would dispute that the market revolution brought substantial material benefits to most northeasterners, urban and rural.... Those who benefited most from the market revolution—merchants and manufacturers, lawyers and other professionals, and successful commercial farmers, along with their families—faced life situations very different from those known to earlier generations. The decline of the household as the locus of production led directly to a growing impersonality in the economic realm; household heads, instead of directing family enterprises or small shops, often had to find ways to recruit and discipline a wage-labor force; in all cases, they had to stay abreast of or even surpass their competitors.”

Sean Wilentz, historian, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848,” published in 1997

Which of the following cultural and social shifts resulted most directly from the trends described in the excerpt?

• A sharp decline in regional differences

• The emergence of new ideas about the proper roles of husbands and wives

• A decline in the income gap between those in the wealthiest class and those in the working class

• An increase in the importance placed on extended family relationships

The method of mass production that developed during the nineteenth century was a process that

• relied on the use of power-driven machinery

• utilized wireless communications to improve efficiency

• gave workers greater autonomy, less supervision, and the chance to be creative

• relied on guilds to train artisans

“Joseph Smith... came from nowhere. Reared in a poor Yankee farm family, he had less than two years of formal schooling and began life without social standing or institutional backing. His family rarely attended church. Yet in the fourteen years he headed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smith created a religious culture that survived his death, flourished in the most desolate regions of the United States, and continues to grow worldwide....In 1830 at the age of twenty-four, he published the Book of Mormon....He built cities and temples and gathered thousands of followers before he was killed at age thirty-eight.”

Richard Lyman Bushman, historian, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder, 2005

The developments described in the excerpt best illustrate which of the following?

• The Second Great Awakening

• The abolitionist movement

• The ideal of republican motherhood

• The increased acceptance of Catholics