I get a lot of mileage out of The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli. I also second anything by Eamon Duffy - much of his material is actually medieval.

It depends on how it's done. Critical thinking, research, argumentation can all be considered skills or competencies that we can easily teach. But yes, we need a little discretion in how we assess them.

There's the work of Michel Mollat, especially Le commerce maritime normand à la fin du Moyen Age, though I can't recall how much 16thC material was in it.

Drive through and you'll notice the empty space between the populated areas (Detroit-Windsor, Vancouver-Seattle might be the exceptions).

Economic decoupling will be a challenge for sure, but there are factors not always apparent on striking visuals and graphs.

2) Large scale visuals make it seem like there's an unbroken connection between the Canadian and US populations, but on the ground there's often much more going on in southern Canada than the northern US. Southern Quebec and Alberta, for example, are more developed than northern New York or Montana.

1) Politically, the Canadian confederation is essentially an anti-US defensive alliance, the same way that the Swiss confederation is essentially an anti-Habsburgh alliance (as far as I understand). The sudden sense of Canadian unity out of Quebec illustrates this nicely.

My students absolutely do this. I catch the ones I catch..