1. What factors accounted for the tremendous expansion of cotton production in the South? How was this expansion linked to slavery and westward movement?
2. How would you characterize the life of a plantation slave? What insights does Hannah Craft's opening account provide into the special vulnerability of slave women? Why were religion and family such key features of the world that slaves built for themselves? What evidence is there of resistance and rebellion among the salves?
3. What was the position of free black southerners in southern society? How were their freedoms restricted?
4. Why were improvements in transportation so essential to the growth of the economy after 1815? What were the nature and scope of these improvements?
5. What was the religious impulse behind the first wave of reform? What innovations in reaching a mass audience did the benevolent reformers pioneer?
6. What drew women into reform? Why did many of them feel a special affinity for abolitionism?