Like the U.S.-China Relations HAT, this assessment measures students' ability to contextualize and periodize two historical documents by placing them on a timeline. The first document is a newspaper article outlining policy changes included in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the second is a broadside advertising the sale of Native American land by the United States Department of the Interior under the allotment system created by the Dawes Act of 1887. This HAT draws on students’ historical knowledge, but in a way that requires more than the simple recall of information. To place these documents in context, students must understand how the federal government’s policies on Native American lands changed significantly from the assimilationist policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the New Deal reforms of FDR’s administration.
