I do not understand my assignment?

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My english is not very good. My teacher gave me a open book quiz I don't understand. Maybe you can explain to me what I am suppose to do.

Varying Viewpoints
Colonial America: Communities of Conflict or Consensus?

The earliest historians of colonial society portrayed close-knit, homogeneous, and hierarchical communities. Richard Bushman in From Puritan to Yankee (1967) challenged that traditional view. He described colonial New England as an expanding, open society in which the colonist gradually lost the religious discipline and social structure of the founding generations. Rhys Isaac viewed the Great Awakening in the South as similar evidence of erosion in the social constraints and deference that once held colonial society together.

Some scholars dispute that a loss of common faith and morals undermined colonial communities. Christine Heyrmann in particular argued in Commerce and Culture (1984) that the decline of traditional mores was overstated and that religious beliefs and commercial activities coexisted throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Similarly, colonial historian Jack Greene has suggested that the obsession with the decline of defernce obscures the fact that colonies outside New England, like Virginia and Mary-land, actually experienced a consolidation of religious and social authority throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming more hierarchical and paternalistic, not less.

Since the 1970s, some historians have also attacked the traditional idea that New England was the home of American freedom and that the South spawned hierarchical, aristocratic communities. They argue that not only did the South produce many of the founders -Washington, Jefferson, and Madison - but that republican principles were actually strongest in the Virginia. Some scholars, notably Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), consider the willingness of wealthy planters to concede the equally and freedom of all white males a device to ensure racial solidarity and to mute class conflict.

Few historians still argue that the colonies offered boundless opportunites for inhabitants, white or black. Whether one accepts Morgan's aruguments that "Americans bought their independence with slave labor" or those interpretations that point to the rising social conflict between whites as the salient characteristic of colonial society on the eve of the Revolution, the once-common assumption that America was a world of equality and consensus no longer reigns undisputed. Yet because one's life chances were still unquestionably better in America than in Europe, immigrants who viewed America as a land of opportunity continued to pour in.

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I don't either. My guess is that you are to write a persuasive essay about whether or not YOU THINK the colonies were homogeneous or not and back up your argument with evidence.