Trace one political vocabulary across two revolutions
Three steps, the way the exam actually works: work through the lab, write down your own observations, then answer a 8-point free response. What you recorded goes to the grader with your writing, so a conclusion that does not follow from your own evidence will cost you the point — exactly as it would with a real reader.
Predict before you look
- Locke argued that government exists to protect pre-existing natural rights and may be replaced if it attacks them. Write that claim in one sentence before you begin.
- If two documents written thirteen years apart on different continents share a vocabulary, name two possible explanations other than one copying the other.
Nothing to submit here — these are to think through, so the prediction below is an informed one rather than a guess.
Commit to an answer now. It is not graded and being wrong costs nothing — the point is to have something specific to reconcile against once you have the data.
Answer every prediction to unlock the lab. A sentence is enough.
Run the investigation
Predictions first
The procedure and the simulation unlock once you have committed above. Observing before predicting is how a wrong intuition survives a lab intact.
Record what you found
This is your reading of the source, not ours. The grader sees them, so your conclusions have to follow from what you actually recorded.
| Year of the Declaration of Independence | |
|---|---|
| Year of the Declaration of the Rights of Man | |
| The three rights named in the Declaration of Independence | |
| The four rights named in the French declaration | |
| A right in one list that is absent from the other | |
| Where the American text locates a government’s just powers | |
| Where the French text locates sovereignty | |
| The thinker or tradition both point-of-view analyses name |
Answer the free response
Using both documents: (a) Quote the phrase from each that names the source of legitimate authority, and explain what the two have in common. (b) Identify a right that appears in one list and not the other, and offer a historical explanation for the difference rather than merely noting it. (c) Both point-of-view analyses name the same intellectual tradition. Explain how ideas travel between countries, and state what evidence would be needed to show that the French text was influenced by the American one specifically rather than by their shared source. (d) Explain why the fact that two documents share a vocabulary is weak evidence that they mean the same thing, using the political context of each.
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