United States History Student Edition

F

Complete Your Inquiry EVALUATE SOURCES AND USE EVIDENCE Refer back to the Compelling Question and the Supporting Questions you developed at the beginning of the lesson. 1. Analyzing What themes or types of information are common within these sources? How do these subthemes fit within the major theme of survival? 2. Inferring How did relationships with Native Americans and with other colonists affect peoples’ ability to deal with hardships in the colonies? 3. Gathering Sources Which sources helped you answer the Supporting Questions and the Compelling Question? Which sources, if any, challenged what you thought you knew when you first created your Supporting Questions? What information do you still need in order to answer your questions? What other viewpoints would you like to investigate? Where would you find that information? 4. Evaluating Sources Identify the sources that helped answer your Supporting Questions. How reliable is each source? How would you verify the reliability of the source? COMMUNICATE CONCLUSIONS 5. Collaborating Work with a partner to discuss how people survive the hardships of a new environment. How do these sources provide insight into the difficulties and successes related to colonial life? Use the graphic organizer that you created at the beginning of the lesson to help you. Share your conclusions with the class. TAKE INFORMED ACTION Creating a Public Service Announcement Early colonists needed food and shelter to survive. Homelessness and food insecurity remain serious issues today. Use what you have learned about surviving hardships to write and produce a public service announcement (PSA) about one of these problems or another problem in your community that threatens people’s survival. In your PSA, inform people of the seriousness of the problemw.

Infant Mortality in Colonial America Survival in the American colonies was especially difficult for the youngest colonists. Infant mortality is a count of children who die before their first birthday and is often used to measure a group’s overall health or quality of life. In her poem, Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts mourns the death of one of her grandchildren.

SECONDARY SOURCE: POPULATION STATISTICS

Year

Sex

Infant Deaths (rate per 1,000 births)

1600–1700

males females males females

202 313

PRIMARY SOURCE: POEM In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old. With troubled heart and trembling hand I write, The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight. How oft with disappointment have I met, When I on fading things my hopes have set. Experience might ʼfore this have made me wise, To value things according to their price. Was ever stable joy yet found below? Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe? I knew she was but as a withering flower, That’s here today, perhaps gone in an hour; 105 178 Source: “Mortality Change in America, 1620–1920,” by Stephen J. Kunitz. Human Biology 56,3 (Sept. 1984). 1700–1800

Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass, Or like shadow turning, as it was. — by Anne Bradstreet, 1669

EXAMINE THE SOURCES 1. Identifying How does Bradstreet indicate in her poem that the child was in delicate health? Explain the imagery she uses in her writing. 2. Drawing Conclusions What do the data in the table and the poem reveal about death in the early colonies?

Bradstreet, Anne; John Harvard Ellis, ed. In memory of my dear grand-child Anne Bradstreet, in The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse. Charlestown: Abram E. Cutter, 1867.

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