High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Foundational American Literature

An 1840s essayist writes: "The frontier makes all men equal; I have seen three farmers in my county rise to wealth." The chief weakness of this support is that it

An 1850s essayist writes: "The town clock rules us like a small iron king, and we obey its every tick." "Small iron king" suggests the clock is

A 1776-style pamphlet asks: "Shall we, who would not kneel to a king, now kneel to our own fear?" Repeating "kneel" mainly serves to

An early-1900s novel reads: "The whistle blew, and four hundred men became one gray shuffle toward the gate." Calling the men "one gray shuffle" mainly

From a letter written by a New England schoolmistress, Abigail Thorne, to her sister in 1789:

My dearest Prudence,—

Thou wouldst scarce credit the alterations wrought in our little village since last we corresponded. The meeting-house, so long the axis about which our small society revolved, is now rivalled by a printing-office lately established by one Mr. Halyard, a gentleman lately arrived from Philadelphia. He proposes to circulate a weekly gazette, and already the farmers gather of an evening not to hear Parson Willett expound the Scriptures, but to hear Mr. Halyard read aloud reports from the Continental Congress and, more astonishing still, essays disputing the very foundations of our received wisdom.

I confess, Prudence, that I find myself of two minds. There is undeniable good in the spread of intelligence: our young men speak now with a confidence and breadth I had not thought possible in this hamlet. Yet I mark also a certain hardening in them—a readiness to dispute what they once received with becoming humility. Farmer Coombs's boy, but sixteen, lectured his own father last Sabbath upon the errors of monarchical thinking, and the poor man knew not whether to reprove or applaud him.

Our pastor, whom thou wilt remember as a man of gentle temper, grows daily more melancholy. He confided to me that he fears the printed page shall in time usurp the pulpit, and that men shall come to trust more in what they read in solitude than in what they hear together in the Lord's house. I know not whether his fears be prophecy or the natural sorrow of an aging shepherd who sees his flock disperse to newer pastures.

Do write soon, and tell me whether such changes visit thy own quiet corner of the Commonwealth.

Thine in constant affection, Abigail

The passage is best understood as a reflection on which tension characteristic of the late eighteenth century?

From a political pamphlet published anonymously in Boston, 1774:

Let it not be imagined, fellow-countrymen, that the present controversy is a mere quarrel over coin. Were it only a tax of threepence upon tea, or a duty upon paper, we might endure it as we have endured worse afflictions of weather and season. But the principle upon which the tax is laid is a principle of unlimited claim: that Parliament, in which no man among us hath voice or vote, may reach across three thousand miles of ocean and lay its hand upon our substance at pleasure. Grant the smallest such tax, and you have granted the largest; for the right to take a farthing is the right to take a fortune. He who yieldeth the principle hath yielded all, though the sum yielded be but a penny.

Some among our own countrymen, men of sober temper and no ill intent, counsel patience. They urge that the sums presently demanded are trifling, that Parliament may yet be moved to justice by petition, and that open resistance shall bring upon us calamities greater than the grievance itself. To these I say: the disease we suffer is not in the amount extracted, but in the doctrine asserted; and no petition, however humbly framed, can extract from our masters a renunciation of a power they esteem the very jewel of their sovereignty.

The pamphleteer's central rhetorical strategy is best described as which of the following?

From "The Weaver's Daughter," a short story published in a Philadelphia magazine, 1847:

Martha stood at the loom that had been her mother's, and her mother's mother's before that, and felt for the first time that its familiar clacking rhythm was not the heartbeat of her life but the ticking of a clock that measured out a diminishing hour. Word had come that morning from her cousin Jane, gone these two years to the great mills at Lowell, describing wages paid in coin, a boarding-house where young women read poetry of an evening, and a Sabbath one might spend entirely at one's own disposal. Jane's letter, folded now in Martha's apron pocket, seemed to weigh more than the bolt of finished cloth upon the bench.

Her father, when she had shown him the letter at breakfast, had said nothing for a long while. Then he had observed, quietly, that the coin paid in Lowell was drawn from the same well as the coin paid anywhere: from the labor of hands. He did not forbid her going. He did not, indeed, say anything of her going at all. He only remarked, as he rose from the table, that a hand which had learned to move at another's bidding might, in time, forget how to move at its own.

Martha turned the shuttle in her fingers. Through the window she could see the road that ran east, past the meeting-house, past the mill-pond, and on—she knew, though she had never traveled it—to the turnpike, and thence to the cars, and thence to Lowell. It was a road her feet had never taken. It was, she thought, the only road she had ever truly considered taking.

The father's remark that "a hand which had learned to move at another's bidding might, in time, forget how to move at its own" primarily functions to:

From a lecture delivered before a Lyceum audience in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1852:

We are told, and often, that the age is one of unparalleled progress. The rail-cars gird the continent; the telegraph annihilates the distances between our cities; the steam-press pours forth intelligence in such volume that no man may hope to read the tenth part of what is daily printed. Of these marvels I have no wish to speak disparagingly. Yet I would ask my hearers to consider whether the enlargement of our means hath been attended by any corresponding enlargement of our ends. The rail-car conveys us with prodigious speed—but whither, and for what purpose, is a question the rail-car cannot answer. The telegraph transmits intelligence across a thousand miles in an instant—but the wisdom of what is transmitted is not increased by the swiftness of its passage. A foolish message, delivered by lightning, remaineth a foolish message still.

I fear we have mistaken the multiplication of instruments for the elevation of life. We have grown wondrous clever at the how, and correspondingly indifferent to the why. A man may traverse the continent, correspond with the antipodes, and read a dozen gazettes before breakfast, and yet be, in the essential business of being a man, no further advanced than his grandfather who did none of these things.

The lecturer's argument depends most critically upon which unstated assumption?

A poem published in a New England literary magazine, 1858:

The Surveyor

He came with brass and tripod to the wood, With chain and level, compass, book, and pen, And where the hemlock and the birch had stood He set his sighting-post, and reckoned then

The acreage, the boundary, the line By which the wilderness might be possessed, And into columns wrote what once was thine, O nameless country of the wandering West.

I do not blame him: he but did the work His fathers set him, and his sons shall do; Yet I have marked how, where his numbers lurk, The green world thins, and something falls from view—

Some presence, nameless, that the forest kept While it was still unmeasured, and unmapped.

The poem's attitude toward the surveyor is best characterized as:

From an editorial in a Midwestern agricultural journal, 1893:

We are informed by the political economists of the eastern colleges that the sufferings of the western farmer are the natural and inevitable consequence of "overproduction"—that we have grown too much wheat, raised too many hogs, and that the remedy is to grow and raise less. One is invited to admire the ingenuity of this doctrine. The nation contains, upon a moderate estimate, some millions of persons insufficiently fed and insufficiently clothed. The nation contains also, we are told, a superabundance of food and fiber, so great that its producers must be ruined by their own success. The remedy, we are gravely instructed, is not that the hungry should eat, nor that the ill-clad should be clothed, but that the farmer should plant less next spring.

One would think, in reading such counsel, that food and hunger existed in separate universes, incapable of communication—that the wheat lay in Nebraska and the empty stomach in New York, and that no conceivable arrangement of men or of institutions could bring the one into contact with the other. That such an arrangement is difficult, we grant. That it is impossible, or that its difficulty relieves us of the obligation to attempt it, we deny.

The editorial's rhetorical strategy is best described as which of the following?

From a magazine essay by Cornelia Vance, 1896:

I have been asked, in a letter from a young woman in Ohio, whether I recommend that a girl of eighteen who feels within herself a genuine vocation for authorship should proceed to New York, engage a room in a respectable boarding-house, and undertake to live by her pen. The letter has an eagerness, and a solemnity, that carry me back some thirty years, to my own arrival in that city under precisely similar auspices.

My first impulse, upon reading her letter, was to write in reply what everyone had written in reply to me: that the plan was rash, that literature is a poor livelihood, that a girl unprotected in a great city courts miseries she cannot imagine, and that she should remain at her mother's side and write, if she must write, in the intervals of household duty. I began such a letter, and destroyed it. For it occurred to me that this counsel, which was pressed upon me by every well-meaning person of my acquaintance in 1866, was counsel which, had I followed it, would have produced a Cornelia Vance whom I should not now recognize, and whose books, such as they are, would not exist.

And yet I could not, in honesty, write the opposite letter either—could not urge her to come, and promise her that the venture would repay her. For I have known too many who came, and failed, and returned home with a bitterness that no achievement of mine could have consoled. What I finally wrote, and what I offer here to any young woman similarly situated, was this: that no one, not even I who have made the experiment, can tell her whether she should make it; that the counsel of her elders, myself included, is the counsel of persons whose lives took particular shapes and who cannot easily imagine other shapes; and that the decision, being irremediably hers, ought at least to be made in the full knowledge that it is so.

The essay's structure—stating an initial impulse, then rejecting it, then rejecting its opposite as well—principally serves to:

From "Aunt Marguerite's Parlor," a short story set in Louisiana, 1889:

When visitors came to the house on Rue Dauphine—and in those years many came, for Aunt Marguerite's parlor was reckoned among the pleasantest in the Quarter—they were shown first into the front room, with its rosewood pianoforte, its French windows opening upon the balcony, and its portrait of the late Colonel in his militia uniform above the mantel. Here Aunt Marguerite received them, poured coffee from a silver service that had belonged to her mother, and conversed in the fluent, slightly antique French of her girlhood upon such topics as befit a lady of her station: the health of relations, the last opera at the French house, the recent marriage of some remote cousin at Baton Rouge.

It was only after several visits, and only if she judged them worthy of the honor, that a guest might be led—almost inadvertently, as it seemed—into the small back parlor. This room contained no pianoforte and no portraits. It contained an enormous walnut secretary crowded with account books, a map of the parish upon which each of her tenant farms was marked in a hand at once elegant and pitiless, and a great ledger in which, so it was whispered among her nieces, Aunt Marguerite recorded not only the sums owed her but the moral character of every debtor. In this room she spoke English, and she did not offer coffee.

The story's use of the two parlors most likely functions to:

From a novel published serially in 1878. In this excerpt, the young clerk Edwin Hale considers a job offer:

Mr. Prescott's proposal, laid before him at the close of business Friday, had at first seemed the very consummation of every hope Edwin had permitted himself since coming down to the city three years before. A partner's desk before his thirtieth year; a share, however modest, in the profits of the firm; the removal of that perpetual anxiety about the rent which had shadowed even his happiest evenings—these were prizes for which he had labored, and which he had believed himself to desire above all things.

And yet, sitting now in his narrow room with the gaslight turned low, Edwin found that he could not summon, in contemplation of these prizes, the exultation which their arrival ought by every reasonable measure to have produced. Instead, he was conscious of a strange dry heaviness, as of one who has climbed a considerable hill only to discover that the view from its summit, for which the climb had been undertaken, was after all the same view he had left behind at its foot.

He thought of his father, who had spent forty years as chief clerk to a country attorney and had died still in that office, apparently content. He thought of Mr. Prescott himself, whose gout and irritability had grown together with his fortune. He thought of the ledger he had closed that evening, and of the ten thousand ledgers he should close hereafter, each much resembling the last. Somewhere in the street a hurdy-gurdy played a waltz which Edwin recognized from his boyhood, and he was surprised to find that his eyes had grown wet, though he could not have said precisely for what he grieved.

The passage most fully develops which of the following themes?

From "The Auction," a sketch published in an abolitionist newspaper, 1839:

The morning was uncommonly fair, and the square before the courthouse had filled early. Gentlemen in fresh linen conversed of the cotton market; ladies inspected the wares of a French milliner beneath a striped awning; a boy of perhaps ten years sold ginger-cakes from a tray suspended by a leather strap about his neck. It was, in every particular save one, such a scene as any traveler might have witnessed in any prosperous Southern town upon a market-day.

The exception stood upon a low wooden platform at the eastern end of the square: a woman of perhaps thirty years, a child of four clinging to her skirts, and beside her an auctioneer in a fawn-colored waistcoat who was addressing the crowd upon the subject of her excellent constitution and mild temper, as one might describe a serviceable mare. She herself looked neither at him nor at the buyers, but at the sky above the courthouse cupola, where a pair of swallows were engaged in the ancient business of pursuing insects on the wing.

A gentleman near me consulted his watch, remarked to his companion that he must not be late to dinner, and moved off in the direction of a handsome brick house at the corner. The bidding commenced. The child began to cry, and was quieted. Somewhere, a church-bell struck the hour of eleven, precisely as it had struck the hour of eleven on ten thousand mornings before, and would strike the hour of eleven, God willing, on ten thousand mornings to come.

The sketch achieves its rhetorical force primarily through which technique?

From "The Immigrant's Room," a sketch published in a settlement-house magazine, 1899:

The room measured, I judged, some twelve feet by fourteen. In it lived Mr. and Mrs. Kaczmarek, their four children ranging in age from two to eleven years, and a boarder, Mr. Novak, who worked the night shift at the packing-house and who therefore, by a domestic arrangement of some ingenuity, slept in the same bed as the two older children, they occupying it by night and he by day. Along one wall stood a coal stove, upon which Mrs. Kaczmarek cooked; beside it a wooden trunk which served in turn as chair, table, and, when opened, as a repository for such family belongings as could not be hung upon the row of nails driven into the door. The single window gave upon an air-shaft some four feet in width, at the bottom of which lay a considerable accumulation of refuse thrown from the windows of the floors above.

And yet, seated in this room upon the wooden trunk with a cup of tea which Mrs. Kaczmarek had insisted upon preparing for me, I found myself the object of a hospitality so scrupulous, so evidently the expression of a code of courtesy transported entire from a village in Galicia, that I began to feel the awkwardness lay upon my side of the exchange rather than on hers. I had come, as our society's phrase had it, to "investigate the conditions" of her life. She was receiving me as a guest. These were not, I gradually understood, the same transaction, and it was not clear to me that my construction of what was occurring was the truer one.

The narrator's realization in the final paragraph most significantly complicates which assumption underlying the settlement-house movement's investigative work?

From an essay by Josiah Sturgis, published in a New York quarterly, 1867:

We are entered now upon the second act of our great national drama, and it is not yet clear whether it shall prove comedy or tragedy. The war concluded, we tell ourselves, with the vindication of the Union and the striking off of the shackles from four millions of our countrymen. And so, in a sense, it did. Yet a Union preserved upon paper is not the same as a Union restored in fact; and a freedom decreed by statute is not the same as a freedom enjoyed in the ordinary transactions of daily life. The former is the work of an afternoon and a proclamation; the latter is the labor of a generation, and perhaps of several.

Those who believe our task is finished mistake the striking of a chain for the opening of a door. The chain being struck, the freedman stands where he stood before, save that he is no longer bound. He hath still to walk—which is to say, he hath still to be permitted to walk, and taught to walk, and provided with a road upon which walking shall lead somewhere. Of these three necessities, we have addressed ourselves in earnest to none.

The metaphor of "striking the chain" versus "opening the door" functions in the passage chiefly to: