AP US History Topic Outlines

1. Discovery and Settlement of the New World, 1492-1650

  1. Europe in the sixteenth century
  2. Spanish, English, and French exploration
  3. First English settlements
  4. Jamestown
  5. Plymouth
  6. Spanish and French settlements and long-term influence
  7. American Indians

2. America and the British Empire, 1650-1754

  1. Chesapeake country
  2. Growth of New England
  3. Restoration colonies
  4. Mercantilism; the Dominion of New England
  5. Origins of slavery

3. Colonial Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

  1. Social structure
  2. Family
  3. Farm and town life; the economy
  4. Culture
  5. Great Awakening
  6. The American mind
  7. "Folkways"
  8. New immigrants

4. Road to Revolution, 1754-1775

  1. Anglo-French rivalries and Seven Years' War
  2. Imperial reorganization of 1763
  3. Stamp Act
  4. Declaratory Act
  5. Townshend Acts
  6. Boston Tea Party
  7. Philosophy of the American Revolution

5. The American Revolution, 1775-1783

  1. Continental Congress
  2. Declaration of Independence
  3. The war
  4. French alliance
  5. War and society; Loyalists
  6. War economy
  7. Articles of Confederation
  8. Peace of Paris
  9. Creating state governments
  10. Political organization
  11. Social reform: women, slavery

6. Constitution and New Republic, 1776-1800

  1. Philadelphia Convention: drafting the Constitution
  2. Federalists versus Anti-Federalists
  3. Bill of Rights
  4. Washington's presidency
  5. Hamilton's financial program
  6. Foreign and domestic difficulties
  7. Beginnings of political parties
  8. John Adams' presidency
  9. Alien and Sedition Acts
  10. XYZ affair
  11. Election of 1800

7. The Age of Jefferson, 1800-1816

  1. Jefferson's presidency
  2. Louisiana Purchase
  3. Burr conspiracy
  4. The Supreme Court under John Marshall
  5. Neutral rights, impressment, embargo
  6. Madison
  7. War of 1812
  8. Causes
  9. Invasion of Canada
  10. Hartford Convention
  11. Conduct of the war
  12. Treaty of Ghent
  13. New Orleans

8. Nationalism and Economic Expansion

  1. James Monroe; Era of Good Feelings
  2. Panic of 1819
  3. Settlement of the West
  4. Missouri Compromise
  5. Foreign affairs: Canada, Florida, the Monroe Doctrine
  6. Election of 1824: end of Virginia dynasty
  7. Economic revolution
  8. Early railroads and canals
  9. Expansion of business
  10. Beginnings of factory system
  11. Early labor movement; women
  12. Social mobility; extremes of wealth
  13. The cotton revolution in the South
  14. Commercial agriculture

9. Sectionalism

  1. The South
  2. Cotton Kingdom
  3. Southern trade and industry
  4. Southern society and culture
  5. Gradations of White society
  6. Nature of slavery: "peculiar institution"
  7. The mind of the South
  1. The North
  2. Northeast industry
  3. Labor
  4. Immigration
  5. Urban slums
  6. Northwest agriculture
  1. Westward expansion
  2. Advance of agricultural frontier
  3. Significance of the frontier
  4. Life on the frontier; squatters
  5. Removal of American Indians

10. Age of Jackson, 1828-1848

  1. Democracy and the "common man"
  2. Expansion of suffrage
  3. Rotation in office
  4. Second party system
  5. Democratic Party
  6. Whig Party
  7. Internal improvements and states' rights: the Maysville Road veto
  8. The Nullification Crisis
  9. Tariff issue
  10. The Union: Calhoun and Jackson
  11. The Bank War: Jackson and Biddle
  12. Martin Van Buren
  13. Independent treasury system
  14. Panic of 1837

11. Territorial Expansion and Sectional Crisis

  1. Manifest Destiny and mission
  2. Texas annexation, the Oregon boundary, and California
  3. James K. Polk and the Mexican War; slavery and the Wilmot Proviso
  4. Later expansionist efforts

12. Creating an American Culture

  1. Cultural nationalism
  2. Education reform/professionalism
  3. Religion; revivalism
  4. Utopian experiments: Mormons, Oneida Community
  5. Transcendentalists
  6. National literature, art, architecture
  7. Reform crusades
  8. Feminism; roles of women in the nineteenth century
  9. Abolitionism
  10. Temperance
  11. Criminals and the insane

13. The 1850's: Decade of Crisis

  1. Compromise of 1850
  2. Fugitive Slave Act and Uncle Tom's Cabin
  3. Kansas-Nebraska Act and realignment of parties
  4. Demise of the Whig Party
  5. Emergence of the Republican Party
  6. Dred Scott decision and Lecompton crisis
  7. Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858
  8. John Brown's raid
  9. The election of 1860; Abraham Lincoln
  10. The secession crisis

14. Civil War

  1. The Union
  2. Mobilization and finance
  3. Civil liberties
  4. Election of 1864
  5. The South
  6. Confederate constitution
  7. Mobilization and finance
  8. States' rights and the Confederacy
  9. Foreign affairs and diplomacy
  10. Military strategy, campaigns, and battles
  11. The abolition of slavery
  12. Confiscation Acts
  13. Emancipation Proclamation
  14. Freedmen's Bureau
  15. Thirteenth Amendment
  16. Effects of war on society
  17. Inflation and public debt
  18. Role of women
  19. Devastation of the South
  20. Changing labor patterns

15. Reconstruction to 1877

  1. Presidential plans: Lincoln and Johnson
  2. Radical (congressional) plans
  3. Civil rights and the Fourteenth Amendment
  4. Military reconstruction
  5. Impeachment of Johnson
  6. African American suffrage: the Fifteenth Amendment
  7. Southern state governments: problems, achievements, weaknesses
  8. Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction

16. New South and the Last West

  1. Politics in the New South
  2. The Redeemers
  3. Whites and African Americans in the New South
  4. Subordination of freed slaves: Jim Crow
  5. Southern economy; colonial status of the South
  6. Sharecropping
  7. Industrial stirrings
  8. Cattle kingdom
  9. Open-range ranching
  10. Day of the cowboy
  11. Building the Western railroad
  12. Subordination of American Indians: dispersal of tribes
  13. Farming the plains; problems in agriculture
  14. Mining bonanza

17. Industrialization and Corporate Consolidation

  1. Industrial growth: railroads, iron, coal, electricity, steel, oil, banks
  2. Laissez-faire conservatisme
  3. Gospel of Wealth
  4. Myth of the "self-made man"
  5. Social Darwinism; survival of the fittest
  6. Social critics and dissenters
  7. Effects of technological development on worker/work-place
  8. Union movement
  9. Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor
  10. Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman

18. Urban Society

  1. Lure of the city
  2. Immigration
  3. City problems
  4. Slums
  5. Machine politics
  6. Awakening conscience; reforms
  7. Social legislation
  8. Settlement houses: Jane Addams and Lillian Wald
  9. Structural reforms in government

19. Intellectual and Cultural Movements

  1. Education
  2. Colleges and universities
  3. Scientific advances
  4. Professionalism and the social sciences
  5. Realism in literature and art
  6. Mass culture
  7. Use of leisure
  8. Publishing and journalism

20. National Politics, 1877-1896: The Gilded Age

  1. A conservative presidency
  2. Issues
  3. Tariff controversy
  4. Railroad regulation
  5. Trusts
  6. Agrarian discontent
  7. Crisis of 1890s
  8. Populism
  9. Silver question
  10. Election of 1896: McKinley versus Bryan

21. Foreign Policy, 1865-1914

  1. Seward and the purchase of Alaska
  2. The new imperialism
  3. Blaine and Latin America
  4. International Darwinism: missionaries, politicians, and naval expansionists
  5. Spanish-American War
  6. Cuban independence
  7. Debate on Philippines
  1. The Far East: John Hay and the Open Door
  2. Theodore Roosevelt
  3. The Panama Canal
  4. Roosevelt Corollary
  5. Far East
  6. Taft and dollar diplomacy
  7. Wilson and moral diplomacy

22. Progressive Era

  1. Origins of Progressivism
  2. Progressive attitudes and motives
  3. Muckrakers
  4. Social Gospel
  5. Municipal, state, and national reforms
  6. Political: suffrage
  7. Social and economic: regulation
  8. Socialism: alternatives
  9. Black America
  10. Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey
  11. Urban migration
  12. Civil rights organizations
  13. Women's role: family, work, education, unionization, and suffrage
  14. Roosevelt's Square Deal
  15. Managing the trusts
  16. Conservation
  17. Taft
  18. Pinchot-Ballinger controversy
  19. Payne-Aldrich Tariff
  20. Wilson's New Freedom
  21. Tariffs
  22. Banking reform
  23. Antitrust Act of 1914

23. The First World War

  1. Problems of neutrality
  2. Submarines
  3. Economic ties
  4. Psychological and ethnic ties
  5. Preparedness and pacifism
  6. Mobilization
  7. Fighting the war
  8. Financing the war
  9. War boards
  10. Propaganda, public opinion, civil liberties
  11. Wilson's Fourteen Points
  12. Treaty of Versailles
  13. Ratification fight
  14. Postwar demobilization
  15. Red scare
  16. Labor strife

24. New Era: The 1920s

  1. Republican governments
  2. Business creed
  3. Harding scandals
  4. Economic development
  5. Prosperity and wealth
  6. Farm and labor problems
  7. New culture
  8. Consumerism: automobile, radio, movies
  9. Women, the family
  10. Modern religion
  11. Literature of alienation
  12. Jazz age
  13. Harlem Renaissance
  14. Conflict of cultures
  15. Prohibition, bootlegging
  16. Nativism
  17. Ku Klux Klan
  18. Religious fundamentalism versus modernists
  19. Myth of isolation
  20. Replacing the League of Nations
  21. Business and diplomacy

25. Depression, 1929-1933

  1. Wall Street crash
  2. Depression economy
  3. Moods of despair
  4. Agrarian unrest
  5. Bonus march
  6. Hoover-Stimson diplomacy; Japan

26. New Deal

  1. Franklin D. Roosevelt
  2. Background, ideas
  3. Philosophy of New Deal
  4. 100 Days; "alphabet agencies"
  5. Second New Deal
  6. Critics, left and right
  7. Rise of CIO; labor strikes
  8. Supreme Court fight
  9. Recession of 1938
  10. American people in the Depression
  11. Social values, women, ethnic groups
  12. Indian Reorganization Act
  13. Mexican American deportation
  14. The racial issues

27. Diplomacy in the 1930s

  1. Good Neighbor Policy: Montevideo, Buenos Aires
  2. London Economic Conference
  3. Disarmament
  4. Isolationism: neutrality legislation
  5. Aggressors: Japan, Italy, and Germany
  6. Appeasement
  7. Rearmament; Blitzkrieg; Lend-Lease
  8. Atlantic Charter
  9. Pearl Harbor

28. The Second World War

  1. Organizing for war
  2. Mobilizing production
  3. Propaganda
  4. Internment of Japanese Americans
  5. The war in Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean; D Day
  6. The war in the Pacific: Hiroshima, Nagasaki
  7. Diplomacy
  8. War aims
  9. Wartime conferences: Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam
  10. Postwar atmosphere; the United Nations

29.Truman and the Cold War

  1. Postwar domestic adjustments
  2. The Taft-Hartley Act
  3. Civil Rights and the election of 1948
  4. Containment in Europe and the Middle East
  5. Truman Doctrine
  6. Marshall Plan
  7. Berlin crisis
  8. NATO
  9. Revolution in China
  10. Limited war: Korea, MacArthur

30. Eisenhower and Modern Republicanism

  1. Domestic frustrations; McCarthyism
  2. Civil rights movement
  3. The Warren Court and Brown v. Board of Education
  4. Montgomery bus boycott
  5. Greensboro sit-in
  6. John Foster Dulles' foreign policy
  7. Crisis in Southeast Asia
  8. Massive retaliation
  9. Nationalism in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America
  10. Khrushchev and Berlin
  11. American people: homogenized society
  12. Prosperity: economic consolidation
  13. Consumer culture
  14. Consensus of values
  15. Space race

31. Kennedy's New Frontier; Johnson's Great Society

  1. New domestic programs
  2. Tax cut
  3. War on poverty
  4. Affirmative action
  5. Civil rights and civil liberties
  6. African Americans: political, cultural, and economic roles
  7. The leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  8. Resurgence of feminism
  9. The New Left and the Counterculture
  10. Emergence of the Republican Party in the South
  11. The Supreme Court and the Miranda decision
  12. Foreign Policy
  13. Bay of Pigs
  14. Cuban missile crisis
  15. Vietnam quagmire

32. Nixon

  1. Election of 1968
  2. Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy
  3. Vietnam: escalation and pullout
  4. China: restoring relations
  5. Soviet Union: détente
  6. New Federalism
  7. Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade
  8. Watergate crisis and resignation

33. The United States since 1974

  1. The New Right and the conservative social agenda
  2. Ford and Rockefeller
  3. Carter
  4. Deregulation
  5. Energy and inflation
  6. Camp David accords
  7. Iranian hostage crisis
  8. Reagan
  9. Tax cuts and budget deficits
  10. Defense buildup
  11. New disarmament treaties
  12. Foreign crises: the Persian Gulf and Central America
  13. Society
  14. Old and new urban problems
  15. Asian and Hispanic immigrants
  16. Resurgent fundamentalism
  17. African Americans and local, state, and national politics