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Native Societies and European Contact, 1491 to 1607

How diverse native societies adapted to North America's environments before contact, why European states sailed west, what the Columbian Exchange did to both sides of the Atlantic, how the Spanish built an empire on native and African labor with a caste hierarchy, and how Europeans and native peoples misunderstood, borrowed from, resisted, and justified their treatment of one another. Topics: Native Societies Before European Contact, European Exploration and the Columbian Exchange, Labor and Caste in the Spanish Colonial System, Cultural Contact, Resistance, and Justification, Putting the Period Together.

Colonial North America, 1607 to 1754

How Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England built different kinds of colonies; why the British colonies split into distinct regions with different economies, labor systems, and politics; how an Atlantic trade network and imperial mercantilism tied the colonies to Britain; how colonists, native peoples, and enslaved Africans allied with, fought, and resisted one another; and how transatlantic religious and Enlightenment ideas made colonists both more British and more restless under British control. Topics: Models of European Colonization, Regions of the British Colonies, Transatlantic Trade and Imperial Control, Colonists and American Indians, Slavery in the British Colonies, Colonial Society, Ideas, and Britain, Putting the Period Together.

Revolution and the New Nation, 1754 to 1800

From the Seven Years' War to the election of 1800: how Britain's victory over France led to taxes and controls that united the colonies in resistance, the Enlightenment and religious ideas that justified independence, why the Patriots won, what the Revolution changed at home and abroad, the experiments with state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation, the compromises and debates that produced the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the precedents, parties, foreign crises, frontier conflicts, and emerging national culture of the Washington and Adams years. Topics: The Seven Years' War and Its Aftermath, Taxation, Resistance, and Mobilization, Revolutionary Ideals, The War for Independence, Effects of the Revolution at Home and Abroad, State Constitutions and the Articles of Confederation, Making and Ratifying the Constitution, The Federalist Era, National Identity and Slavery's Regional Divide, Putting the Period Together.

The Early Republic and the Age of Jackson, 1800 to 1848

How the young republic grew into a market economy and a mass democracy: the policy fights and Supreme Court rulings of the Jefferson era, the Louisiana Purchase and the Monroe Doctrine, regional interests behind the American System and the Missouri Compromise, the market revolution's technologies and its effects on work, class, family, and migration, expanded white male suffrage and the Democrat-Whig party system, Indian removal, a Romantic national culture, the Second Great Awakening and the reform movements it inspired, and the cotton South's deepening commitment to slavery. Topics: The Jefferson Era, the Courts, and Louisiana, Regional Interests and the Federal Government, America on the World Stage, The Market Revolution, Democracy and the Age of Jackson, National Culture and the Second Great Awakening, The Age of Reform, The South and African American Life, Putting the Period Together.

Expansion, Civil War, and Reconstruction, 1844 to 1877

How the drive to the Pacific reopened the question of slavery and broke the nation apart: the motives and policies behind westward expansion, the Mexican-American War and its costs for Mexican Americans and native peoples, the Compromise of 1850, the immigration and free-labor arguments that divided the regions, the failure of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott to settle anything, the collapse of the party system and secession, how the Union mobilized and won, how Lincoln turned the war into a fight against slavery, and how Reconstruction rewrote the Constitution, briefly opened Southern politics to Black citizens, and then gave way to sharecropping, segregation, and disfranchisement. Topics: Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, The Mexican-American War and Its Aftermath, The Compromise of 1850, Immigration, Free Labor, and the Slavery Debate, The Failure of Compromise, Realignment, the Election of 1860, and Secession, Fighting and Winning the Civil War, Reconstruction, The End of Reconstruction and Its Legacy, Putting the Period Together.

Industry, the West, and the Gilded Age, 1865 to 1898

How the United States became an industrial nation after the Civil War and what that did to the people caught up in it: railroads, mines, and farms filling the West at the expense of native nations; the New South's limits; the technologies and corporate structures that produced steel, oil, and trusts; workers' fight with management; the new immigrants and the cities they built; a rising middle class and the Gospel of Wealth; critics who imagined alternatives; and the politics of tariffs, machines, laissez-faire, and the Populist demand for a government that served farmers and workers. Topics: Settling and Transforming the West, The New South, Technology and Big Business, Workers and Unions, Immigration and the City, Middle Class, Wealth, and Reform Ideas, Government, Parties, and Populism, Putting the Period Together.

Empire, Reform, Depression, and World War, 1890 to 1945

How the United States became a world power and a modern industrial democracy in half a century: the debate over empire and the Spanish-American War, the Progressive campaign to make government answer to industrial problems, entry into World War I and the retreat from Wilson's League, the consumer culture and bitter cultural fights of the 1920s, the Great Depression and the New Deal's limited welfare state, the isolationist 1930s, and the mobilization, victory, and moral questions of World War II that left the United States the most powerful nation on Earth. Topics: Imperialism and the Spanish-American War, The Progressive Era, World War I, The 1920s, The Great Depression and the New Deal, From Isolation to World War II, Putting the Period Together.

Cold War America and the Struggle for Rights, 1945 to 1980

How the United States lived as a superpower and argued with itself about what that required: containment and its swings between confrontation and detente, the Red Scare, the postwar boom that built the suburbs and the Sun Belt, mass culture and its critics, the civil rights movement from Brown to Black Power and the movements it inspired among women, Latinos, American Indians, and gay Americans, Vietnam and the protests it provoked, the Great Society's high tide of liberalism, the environmental and energy crises of the 1970s, and the conservative and evangelical revival that had reshaped politics by 1980. Topics: The Cold War Abroad, The Second Red Scare, Prosperity, Suburbs, and Mass Culture, Early Civil Rights, 1945 to 1960, The Vietnam War, Liberalism and the Great Society, Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Environment, Energy, and the Conservative Turn, Putting the Period Together.

Conservatism, Globalization, and the Twenty-First Century, 1980 to the Present

The United States since 1980: the conservative ascendancy that began with Reagan and the policy and culture-war debates it left running, the end of the Cold War and the new interventions that followed, an economy remade by digital technology, globalization, and the shift from factories to services, the continued movement of people to the Sun Belt and the new immigration from Latin America and Asia, and the wars, civil-liberties questions, and energy and climate debates that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. Topics: Reagan and the Conservative Era, The End of the Cold War, A Changing Economy, Migration and Immigration since 1980, Challenges of the Twenty-First Century, Putting the Period Together.

Historical Thinking and Writing

The skills that turn knowledge of events into historical thinking: reading a source for its point of view, purpose, audience, and situation; comparing what sources claim; placing a development in its context; explaining causation, continuity and change, and comparison; making a defensible claim and supporting it with evidence; and planning short answers and essays. Topics: Reading Sources, Historical Reasoning, Building an Argument.