1. Compare and contrast the founding and early development of Virginia and Plymouth. Since both were English colonies, how do you account for their differences?
2. Compare and contrast the early-seventeenth-century settlements in North America of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English.
3. Discuss the religious and political conflicts and the economic conditions in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England that made the English interested in exploration and colonization in the Western Hemisphere.
4. "The Atlantic world brought few benefits to West Africans and Native Americans." Illustrate this statement by discussing the African slave trade and its impact and the effects of European settlements in America on the indigenous peoples.
5. Discuss the concept of social reciprocity. How did it operate in Native American, West African, and traditional European societies? In what ways was it breaking down in Western Europe by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?