Unit 11 Make Up Test Assignment
Short Answer Constructed Response Questions
These questions are based on the accompanying documents and are designed to test your ability to
work with historical documents. Some of these documents have been edited for the purpose of this
question. Keep in mind that the language and images used in a document may reflect the historical
context of the time in which it was created.
Analyze the documents and answer the short answer questions that follow each document in the space
provided.
Document 1
Mandela Speech: “I am Prepared to Die” (1964)
Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing,
and not work which the Government declares them to be capable of. Africans want to be allowed to live
where they obtain work, and not be removed from an area because they were not born there. Africans
want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented
houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not
confined to living in their own ghettoes. African men want to have their wives and children to live with
them where they work, and not be forced into an unnatural existence in men's hostels. African women
want to be with their menfolk and not be left permanently widowed in the Reserves. Africans want to
be allowed out after eleven o'clock at night and not to be confined to their rooms like little children.
Africans want to be allowed to travel in their own country and to seek work where they want to and not
where the Labor Bureau tells them to. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want
security and a stake in society. .
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against
white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a
democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared
to die.
1. Describe the historical circumstances that led Nelson Mandela to write this speech.
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Document 2
Image of the first South African elections (1994)
2. Using Document 2, explain the photographer’s purpose for taking this photo of voting lines.
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Document 3
3. Describe the geographic circumstances that led to the partition plan shown above.
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Document 4
Declaration of Israel's Independence, Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948
ACCORDINGLY, WE, the members of the National Council, representing the Jewish people in Palestine
and the Zionist movement of the world, met together in solemn assembly today, the day of the
termination of the British mandate for Palestine, by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish
and of the Resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations...THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open
to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the
country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace
taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without
distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and
culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and
will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations...
4. Using Document 4, explain the purpose of the Declaration of Israel’s Independence.
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Document 5
5. Explain what led up to the partition of Pakistan and India?
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Document 6
Duane Damon, “From Genghis to Kublai,” Calliope, A Cobblestone Publication
History’s Greatest Migration
4,000,000 People Cross the Punjab to Seek New Homes
The mass migration and exchange of populations in the Punjab—Moslems moving west
into Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs trekking east into India—have now reached a scale
unprecedented in history. Accurate statistics are impossible to obtain, but it is reasonable
to estimate that no fewer than four million people are now on the move both ways.
What this means in terms of human misery and hardship can be neither imagined nor
described. Within the past few weeks the conditions over a wide area of Northern India,
including the whole of the Indus Valley and part of the Gangetic Plain, have deteriorated
steadily. It is no exaggeration to say that throughout the North-west Frontier Provinces, in
the West Punjab, the East Punjab, and the Western part of the United Provinces the
minority communities live in a state of insecurity often amounting to panic.
Farther afield in the eastern parts of the United Provinces and to a less extent in Bihar and
Bengal, much tension and friction prevail but there has hitherto been little movement of
population…
6. Using Document 6, identify what the effect of the migration on the people in Pakistan and India.
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Document 7
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Navajivan Publishing House, 1946
EDITOR: Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of
resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant [offensive] to my conscience, I use
soul-force. For instance, the Government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me. I do not
like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be
termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It
involves sacrifice of self. Everybody admits that sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of others.
Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is unjust, only the person using it suffers. He does
not make others suffer for his mistakes. Men have before now done many things which were
subsequently found to have been wrong. No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a
particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate
judgment. It is therefore meet [proper] that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and
suffer the consequence whatever it may be. This is the key to the use of soul-force. . . .
(This passage was written by Mohandas Gandhi to help explain how India can become free)
7. Explain Gandhi’s passage about the conflicts of government and freedom (soul-free).
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Document 8
Photograph by Vithalbhai Jhaveri, May 1930
Protesters preparing to march in Dharasana, photographed by Vithalbhai Jhaveri,
an Indian photographer and filmmaker who chronicled the life of Gandhi.
8. Using Document 8, explain the photographer’s bias in documenting the event shown.
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Document 9
Mohandas Gandhi, “Letter to Lord Irwin,” March 1930.
Sabarmati, India, March 1930
Dear Friend,
Before embarking on Civil Disobedience and taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I
would ... approach you and find a way out. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less
human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst therefore I hold the
British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he
may have in India…. And why do I regard the British rule a curse? …Even the salt [the peasant] must use
to live is so taxed as to make the burden fall heaviest on him…. The tax shows itself still more
burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is one thing he must eat more than the
rich man….
My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence, and thus make them see
the wrong they have done to India…. But if you cannot see your way to deal with these evils and if my
letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the eleventh day of this month I shall proceed with such co-
workers of the Ashram [Community] as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the Salt Laws….
(Lord Irwin was the English governor in India. Gandhi wrote this letter before marching to the sea and
breaking the English Salt Tax law. Gandhi’s march to the sea is generally called “The Salt March.” Most
historians consider it the turning point of the movement to free India from British control. The Salt Tax
Law made it illegal for Indians to manufacture or collect their own salt.)
9. Explain the historical circumstances that led Gandhi to write this letter.
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Document 10
Nelson Mandela, Biographical Details, African National Congress online
1952 Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws
… When the ANC [African National Congress] launched its Campaign for the Defiance
of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance
Campaign was conceived as a mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball
from a core of selected volunteers to involve more and more ordinary people, culminating
in mass defiance. Fulfilling his responsibility as Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela travelled
the country organizing resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and brought to
trial for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had
consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to avoid all
violence.
For his part in the [1952] Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening
[disobeying] the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence.
Shortly after the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and
confined to Johannesburg for six months.…
10. Using Document 10, explain the African National Congress’ actions to silence Nelson Mandela.
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Document 11
11. Using Document 11, looking at this list of actions to end apartheid is their one that you think
help the cause the most?
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Document 12
Excerpt from the weekly journal Young India, published by Gandhi and his followers, June 29th, 192
It is my claim that as soon as we have completed the boycott of foreign cloth we shall have evolved so
far that we shall necessarily give up the present absurdities and remodel national life in keeping with the
ideal of simplicity and domesticity implanted in the bosom of the masses. We will not then be dragged
into an imperialism which is built upon exploitation of the weaker races of the earth, and the acceptance
of a giddy materialistic civilization protected by naval and air forces that have made peaceful living
almost impossible. On the contrary we shall then refine that imperialism into a commonwealth of
nations which will combine, if they do, for the purpose of giving their best to the world and of
protecting, not by brute force but by self -suffering, the weaker nations or races of the earth. Non-
cooperation aims at nothing less than this revolution in the thought world. Such a transformation can
come only after the complete success of the spinning wheel. India can become fit for delivering such a
message, when she has become proof against temptation and therefore attacks from outside, by
becoming self-contained regarding two of her chief needs-food and clothing.
12. Describe how this weekly journal would keep the fight for independence going in India?
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Document 13
Source: Front page of the Hindustan Times, August 15, 1947.
Image is in the public domain and courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
13. Using Document 13, explain who the audience is for the headlines in this newspaper.
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Part 2 – Short Essay:
Why was there a need to change the ruling of countries after World War II? What actions seem to be
the most effective in the fight for freedom during the Rise of New Nations after World War II in Africa
and India.
The actions that lead to more success in the rise of new nations in Africa and India were
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Body sentence 1:_______________________________________________________________________
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Body Sentence 2: ______________________________________________________________________
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Body Sentence 3: ______________________________________________________________________
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Conclusion: ___________________________________________________________________________
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