New York State Regents Examination Global History and Geography II

A geography class in Jamaica, Queens, spread a paper map of a rail line that once carried coal from a mine town to a port. Under the title the scale is printed as an equation: 1 centimeter = 20 kilometers. The teacher, Ms. Adeyemi, said the equation belongs to the ground, not to the width of the desk.

Students measured the gap between the mine symbol and the port symbol. The gap was 4 centimeters. Ms. Adeyemi told them to multiply, not add. Four times 20 kilometers is 80 kilometers. A classmate added 20 and 4 and announced 24 kilometers. She marked 24 wrong. The 4 counts centimeters. The 20 is kilometers per centimeter. Those are not numbers you add.

The legend says a black square is a coal mine and an anchor is a port. A thin red line is the rail. The red line is not the scale. The scale is the equation under the title. A dotted line is a wagon road that the rail replaced for heavy coal.

A corner note says the map is a classroom copy of a line in another country, drawn so the class can practice the scale. It does not claim the mine is in Queens. Jamaica, Queens, is where the class is sitting. The 80 kilometers belong to the places drawn on the map.

Ms. Adeyemi wrote the check on the board in one line: measure the centimeters, multiply by 20, and keep the unit kilometers. She wrote 24 beside a cross. She wrote 80 beside a check.

The student assembly at a high school in Albany voted on one proposal: whether the club fair would include a booth for a history exhibit on colonies and self-rule. The clerk handed one paper slip to each person in the room. Students who were absent did not get a slip.

The count was 64 yes and 36 no. The clerk added the stacks before she spoke. 64 plus 36 is 100, so 100 students voted. She wrote both numbers on the board and left them there while the room argued.

A senior in the front row said the result was unanimous and asked her to throw the no slips away. The clerk refused. Unanimous would mean every slip said the same thing. Thirty-six slips said no. The yes side had more votes, so the booth would be added, but the vote was not unanimous.

The assembly rule, printed on the agenda, says a proposal passes when yes votes outnumber no votes. The rule does not require every voter to agree. It also says absent students are not counted, because they received no slip.

The clerk taped both stacks to the minutes and wrote one line underneath: 100 students voted, and the vote was not unanimous. The no votes stay on the record so a later reader will not describe the booth as something nobody opposed.

After a walk to the falls, Ms. Pell's class in Cohoes read a handout she had written for the lesson. The handout speaks in the voice of a mill hand called Hester in 1846. Ms. Pell said the voice is the lesson's voice, built to show how the mills beside the falls used water, long days, and child workers.

Hester's first paragraph says she left a farm on the Mohawk because the mill paid cash and the farm had paid in food and chores. A water wheel, turned by the river, drives the looms. She watches threads on a machine that spins many strands at once, faster than the hand wheel her mother still uses at home. The handout calls that machine the reason one mill can outwork a row of cottages.

The class underlined the hours. Hester says the bell rings before sunrise and again after dark, and that her day at the looms is about twelve hours. She boards in a house the mill owns, with a bed she shares and a rule against late visitors. The cash wage is real, and so is the tiredness.

Her brother Lem is eleven and sweeps under the frames. Hester writes that the overseer likes small workers for the low spaces. She does not call that kindness. She calls it a use of children. She asks the reader to hold both facts: the mill buys the family's shoes, and the mill spends Lem's childhood to do it.

The last lines say the river can freeze and idle the wheel. On those days there is no cash. Hester does not ask to return to the farm. She asks for a shorter bell and a bed Lem does not have to earn under a frame.

The industry board in a Utica classroom holds a notice the class wrote after a lesson on engines. The notice says early mills had to sit by falling water because a wheel needed a river. A steam engine, burning coal to heat water into steam, could turn machines where no falls existed. That change let factories gather near coal, near ports, and near crowds of workers.

The next paragraph describes division of labor in the class's words. One worker no longer makes a whole shoe. One cuts, one stitches, and one attaches the sole. The notice says the split makes each task faster and makes the worker easier to replace. It does not say the split makes the work more interesting.

A third paragraph is about cities. Factory whistles pulled people off farms. Towns that gained mills gained renters, soot, and a clock that did not match the sun. The notice names no mayor. It names the change: work moved from the household to the mill floor.

The last paragraph sets a limit. Steam did not invent trade, and it did not end farming. Steam changed where machines could stand and how fast a good could be made in pieces. A student who writes that every farmer vanished has gone past the notice.

Imani, a student in Staten Island, wrote to her cousin Dee about a harbor card beside a map of a distant port that a European empire once ruled. She copied the class definition in her own sentence: a colony is a place governed by a foreign power, whose people did not choose that flag.

Under the definition the card lists three motives. First, raw materials, such as cotton, rubber, or metal, shipped out for factories at home. Second, buyers, meaning new places to sell the cloth and tools those factories made. Third, a naval stop, a harbor where ships could take on coal. Imani adds that pride in a large empire sat beside those motives, but the three lines on the card are materials, buyers, and the coal stop.

A red sticker says the people already living at the port had their own rulers and markets. The empire's arrival was not a gift they had requested. Resistance, the sticker says, could look like a refused tax, a hidden harvest, or an open fight.

Imani tells Dee not to mix up two words. An alliance is an agreement between governments that still rule themselves. A colony does not keep that kind of self-rule. The card marks it as a mistake to treat the two words as synonyms.

The bottom line says this port is an example, not the only colony that ever existed. The card does not give the port's rainfall, and it does not claim every person in the empire grew rich.

A class in the Bronx acted out a meeting from the late nineteenth century in which European powers discussed claims in Africa. The stage directions say the table has European delegates and no African ruler with a vote. The directions call that absence the fact the scene must show.

On the floor the class taped a map. Several borders were drawn with rulers, straight across regions where the stage notes say people shared a language on both sides of the line. A straight border on a European map could split a people or lock rivals inside one new line. The notes do not say Africans had no borders of their own before the meeting. They say those older ties were not the lines the delegates drew.

A narrator card says the powers wanted control of land, labor, and resources, and wanted to keep their rivalries from turning into a war among themselves in Europe. African consent is not listed as a goal of the meeting.

After the scene a student asked whether every later conflict in Africa was the fault of those lines alone. The teacher wrote an answer on the board: the lines mattered, and later conflicts also had local causes. It is too simple to blame every fight on the meeting, and too simple to ignore the meeting.

The playbill states the two facts the class was required to keep: African rulers did not have a vote at that table, and some borders were drawn with little regard for people already living there. The speeches at the desks were written by the class for the lesson.

A handout in a Brooklyn classroom explains how a war that began in Europe in 1914 pulled in distant lands. The first cause it lists is alliance promises: governments had agreed to support partners, so a crisis between two states could drag the partners in. The second is a crisis in the Balkans, where the killing of an heir raised the temperature in a region already full of rival claims. The third is empire: powers already competed for colonies, status, and arms.

The handout then says the fighting settled into trenches. Soldiers lived in ditches, machine guns swept open ground, and the lines moved little for long stretches. It calls that stalemate a result of weapons that punished an attack across open ground. It does not say cavalry charges decided the war.

A geography paragraph says empires treated colonies as sources of soldiers and supplies. A man in Africa or India could be ordered into a war planned in Europe. The handout says that is one reason a European crisis became a world war. The war was not world-sized only because maps were printed large. Ruled lands and overseas routes were pulled in.

The last paragraph gives one dated fact for the United States. This country entered the war in 1917, after years of official neutrality. Attacks on ships helped end that neutrality. The handout does not say the country entered in 1914, and it does not print a speech.

After a unit on the war that ended in 1918, a class in Rochester filled a chart called The Settlement. The chart says the defeated state lost territory, faced limits on its army, and was handed a bill for damages. The class named that bill reparations. Many people in the defeated state, the chart says, read the bill as humiliation rather than as a fresh start.

A second column describes politics at home in that state. The bill, the lost land, and a story that the government had been betrayed made public life more bitter. The chart does not say bitterness was the only cause of the next war. It says the settlement left a grievance that later speakers could use.

A third column is about a league the victors helped start. The league was meant as a place to talk before the next war. The same box says the league had no army of its own. A member could ignore a scolding. A talking room without a force of its own could not, by itself, stop a determined invasion.

The bottom row corrects a classmate who had written that every country signed happily and that the bill was small. The chart says no. The defeated state resented the terms, and the bill was large enough to be a political wound. The chart also says the United States never joined that league, even though a United States president of that era had urged a new kind of association. It states the absence as a fact and does not quote him.

A library wall in Flushing holds a timeline the history club posted for the war that reshaped the middle of the twentieth century. The first mark is 1939: a large European war begins when one army crosses into Poland. The club's sentence says Britain and France then entered against that army's government. The mark does not say the war began in 1914.

The next mark is December 1941. The club writes that an attack on a United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, brought this country into the war. Before that attack the country was sending aid and was not yet a formal combatant. December 1941 is the turn into formal fighting.

A black-bordered card is not a battle date. It says the Nazi state in Germany, with its collaborators, carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews, and also murdered Roma people, disabled people, and political prisoners. The card calls that crime the Holocaust. It says the murder was policy, not a side effect of bombs falling on a city. It asks readers not to treat the number as a rumor.

Two marks end the war. The war in Europe ended in May 1945. The war against Japan ended in August 1945, after the United States used a new kind of bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after the Soviet Union entered that fight. The card does not celebrate the bomb. It says the bomb killed huge numbers of people at once, and that the war's end and the weapon's use are tied in those August days.

The footer says the dates to remember from this wall are 1939, 1941, May 1945, and August 1945, plus the card that names the Holocaust as planned murder. The wall does not print a speech, and it does not print a treaty.

The Harbor School in Red Hook posted a notice the civics class drafted as the rules of a model town. Article 1 says a person in the model town may speak an opinion in the square, including an opinion the mayor dislikes. Article 2 says a person may gather to worship, or may stay home from worship, and the town clerk may not demand a fee for either choice.

Article 3 says no guard may strike a person, or refuse that person sleep, in order to force a confession. Article 4 says a person may not be locked up without being told the charge in words that person can follow. The class added Article 4 after a skit in which a guard would not state a charge and said only that the person already knew.

Article 5 is a limit. The right to speak does not allow a person to smash the school windows or to block the fire stairs. A right is not a permit for harm. Telling a student no about the windows does not erase Article 1.

Article 6 says the rules apply to every person in the model town, including guests and including the mayor's own family. A rule that protects only friends is a club password, not a right. The class printed that sentence in darker ink.

The footer says the notice does not set taxes, does not draw a map, and does not name a real mayor. It sets speaking, worship, safety from a forced confession, notice of a charge, a limit against harm, and equal coverage.

A notebook from a class in Yonkers tracks one colony's change of flag. The place had been called the Gold Coast and was ruled from far away by Britain. In 1957 it became Ghana, a self-governing state. On this page, decolonization means a colony taking self-rule and replacing the foreign flag.

The page names Kwame Nkrumah as a leader of that change. He and others organized people, won elections the empire had opened, and pressed until the foreign rulers left. The page does not say he acted alone, and it does not say every colony used the same path. A side box says some colonies fought long wars, while this page's case used political organizing and negotiation backed by public pressure.

The new flag did not finish the hard parts. The economy still leaned on crops grown for export, and borders drawn earlier stayed in place. Self-rule meant Ghanaians, not a distant office, made the laws. It did not mean the price of those crops suddenly obeyed the new flag.

A comparison line says a neighbor's independence is a different story and a different year. The notebook tells the reader not to paste 1957 onto every African state. Ghana's year is the year on this page. The Gold Coast's older name belongs to the colonial period the flag change ended.

The last note says Nkrumah later lost power, which the class records so the story is not a fairy tale. A hard later chapter does not erase the 1957 change. The foreign flag had come down.

A seminar in New Rochelle kept a chart of the rivalry after 1945 between the United States and the Soviet Union. The chart calls it a cold war because the two did not fight each other in a declared world war of their own, even while they built nuclear weapons that could destroy cities. The danger was real because a direct war might not have stayed limited.

One column contrasts economies as the class defined them for the chart. In the United States column, farms and factories are mostly owned by private people and companies, and buyers and sellers set many prices. In the Soviet column, the state owns the major industries and plans what they produce. The arrangements were different. The chart does not say every American was rich or every Soviet worker was poor.

A sketch of Berlin shows a wall built across the city in 1961. The caption says the wall stopped people from leaving the eastern side for the western side. It was made of concrete and guards. It was not a metaphor for any classroom disagreement. Families used the wall as a fact, because it decided which relatives they could visit.

A short box describes a crisis in 1962 over nuclear missiles placed in Cuba, close to the United States. Ships, warnings, and talks ended the standoff without a launch. The box calls it a near miss. It does not say either side fired those missiles.

The last row gives two later dates. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened and then came down. In 1991 the Soviet Union broke apart into separate states. The rivalry as a contest between those two superpowers ended with that breakup. Conflict in the world did not end.

A chart in a Poughkeepsie classroom defines two words the class had been using loosely. A nation, the chart says, is a people who share a language, a story, or both, and who often want political independence. A state is a government that has borders, laws, and the power to enforce them. The headline says the two do not always match.

The first example is an empire. An empire can hold many nations under one distant government. Sharing a ruler is not the same as sharing one nation. The people did not all ask to be one people. They were gathered by conquest or by claim.

The second example is a split nation. People who share a language can live under different states, with a border between cousins. Wanting one government of their own is a nationalist aim. Getting it requires a political change, not just a shared song. The chart does not say every shared language must become a state.

The third example is a state of many nations. The chart points at a country where several peoples, with different languages, share one government and one passport. That country is one state. Calling it one nation would erase the peoples inside it. Loyalty to the state and loyalty to a nation can point to different places.

A footer warns about a slogan. The slogan says each nation must have its own state and each state must hold only one nation. That slogan has been used to expel people who do not fit. The chart does not endorse the slogan. It asks students to notice when a word is doing the work of a removal.

A class from Queens visited a small exhibit on the Haitian Revolution. The first card says that in 1791 enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose against slavery. They were not asking for a kinder version of bondage. They were breaking it.

The second card names Toussaint Louverture as a leading general of that revolution. He had been enslaved, gained freedom, and then commanded armies that fought the French colonial order and also fought rival empires that tried to use the island. He was captured and died in a French prison in 1803. The revolution did not die with him.

The third card gives the year 1804. Haiti declared independence that year and abolished slavery in the new state. The card says Haiti was the first state in the modern Atlantic world born from a successful revolt of enslaved people. The guide asked the class to keep that claim tied to this card.

The fourth card describes the price. France later demanded a heavy payment from Haiti to recognize the new state, and that payment drained the country for generations. Neighboring powers, including slaveholding ones, were slow to treat Haiti as a normal state. Independence on the card is real, and so is the isolation that followed.

Jules wrote in the visit log that the exhibit challenged a habit: telling the age of revolutions as a story in which liberty belonged first to enslavers and merchants. The cards put enslaved people at the center of a fight for freedom. He does not add a speech. He adds that sentence.

A history club in Buffalo posted a notice about the city's growth in the age of factories and rails. In the mid-nineteenth century the port, the canal link, and the rail yards pulled in workers from nearby farms and from other countries. The city grew because work was there, not because the lake moved.

Families packed into tenements, several people to a room, with a sink that might be shared down the hall. On a sample floor in the lesson, eight families used one sink. The notice says that count is a lesson example from a floor plan the teacher drew. Crowding was a condition of the new city, not an accident in one unlucky building.

Factory whistles replaced the sun as the signal to start. A worker who arrived late could lose the day's pay. That clock was a kind of power. It belonged to the employer who set the whistle, not to the season.

Reformers pressed for safer stairs, cleaner water, and rules against the worst crowding. Reform was a response, not the cause of the move to the city. People came for wages. The rules came after the rooms were already full.

The footer does not claim every farmer left the land, and it does not claim the lake caused the tenements. It claims a chain: port, canal, and rail brought work; work brought people; people filled rooms faster than sinks and statutes did.

The drama class in Syracuse taped a notice beside a play about a march for the vote. The marchers in the play want women to cast ballots in the same elections where men already vote. The play is set before that right is settled in law.

A character named Mrs. Keene argues the other way. She says a woman's work is the home, and that a ballot will pull her out of it. The narrator card answers without insult. That argument was used to keep the law unchanged. Calling a task traditional is not the same thing as proving a person should lack a vote.

A date card gives two marks the class checked in a reference book. In 1917, voters in New York State approved a state change that let women vote in New York. In 1920, a change to the United States Constitution extended women's voting rights across the states. The state mark came first. The national mark widened the story. It did not erase it.

The marchers carry blank signs. The class refused printed slogans from any real campaign. The director, Mr. Okonkwo, said a blank sign can still mean a demand if the scene explains it. The demand is the ballot. The signs do not ask for a shorter mill day in this play, even though that was a real fight in the same era. This scene is about the vote.

The program's last line says the play does not claim every woman agreed with the march, because Mrs. Keene is on the stage. Disagreement did not decide the outcome once the law changed. After the marks on the date card, the argument about the home no longer controlled the ballot box.

A board in a Mount Vernon classroom lists rules of a system the class is studying in South Africa. The system was called apartheid, and it sorted people by race. The law limited where a person classified as Black could live, work, and walk. A pass was a paper a person could be forced to show. Without the right paper, a person could be arrested for being in the wrong zone of that person's own country.

The system was not a custom that sat only in private prejudice. It was written into law and enforced by police and courts. That difference matters. A private insult is cruel. A pass law decides who may stand on a street.

People marched, refused the pass, and organized unions and political groups. The board names Nelson Mandela as one leader who was imprisoned for years and later released. It does not quote him. Imprisonment did not mean the resistance had been a rumor.

The board gives two later marks. Pass laws were repealed in 1986, and other racial statutes were taken off the books in the early 1990s. In 1994, South Africa held a nationwide election in which adults of every race could vote. Those steps ended apartheid as a legal system of racial rule. A ballot does not rebuild a house, return a lost wage, or undo a childhood spent under a pass law. The vote showed the legal sorting was over. It did not finish the repair.

The footer says the board is about South Africa's apartheid system, not about every injustice everywhere. Students should not use the word as a decoration for any strict teacher. The word on this board means a racial legal order backed by the state.