1. How did the factors of population, economics, disease, and climate shape the basic social conditions and ways of life of early Americans in both the South and New England?

2. How did African-Americans develop a culture that combined African and American elements?
What were some of the features of that culture?

3. How did the numbers and condition of women affect family life and society in New England, among southern whites, and among African-American slaves? Compare and contrast the typical family conditions and ways of life among various members of these three groups.

4. How did the harsh climate and soil, stem religion, and tightly knit New England town shape he "Yankee character"?

5. Compare the conditions of seventeenth-century social, economic, and religious life in New
England and the Chesapeake region.

6. How did the Salem witch episode reflect the tensions and changes in seventeenth-century New
England life and thought?

7. In what ways did the English and Africans who came to America in the seventeenth century have to shape their society and way of life to fit the conditions they faced in the New World?