AP United States History Syllabus 2016-17
Instructor: Mr. SiebenthalAvailability: Periods 2, 5, & before/After School
Room: 247Phone #: (303) 326-4645ext. 64645
E-mail: Textbook: The American Nation, 12th Edition, by
Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty
Website:
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The AP U.S. History course is designed to provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in U.S. history. Students should learn to assess historical materials—their relevance to a given interpretive problem, reliability, and importance—and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. An AP U.S. History course should thus develop the skills necessary to arrive at conclusions on the basis of an informed judgment and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively in essay format. In 2014, the AP US History Exam shifted to a skills-based format. Teachers cannot cover all details for US History, and need more time to focus on developing students’ understanding of the learning objectives and use of the historical thinking skills.
Concept Outline:
Period / Date Range / Approximate Percentage of….Instructional Time / AP Exam
1 / 1491-1607 / 5% / 5%
2 / 1607-1754 / 10% / 45%
3 / 1754-1800 / 12%
4 / 1800-1848 / 10%
5 / 1844-1877 / 13%
6 / 1865-1898 / 13% / 45%
7 / 1890-1945 / 17%
8 / 1945-1980 / 15%
9 / 1980-present / 5% / 5%
Themes
While the course follows a narrative structure supported by the textbook and audiovisual materials, the following seven themes described in the AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description are woven throughout each unit of study:
1. Identity (ID)
2. Work, Exchange, and Technology (WXT)
3. Peopling (PEO)
4. Politics and Power (POL)
5. America in the World (WOR)
6. Environment and Geography (ENV)
7. Ideas, Beliefs, and Culture (CUL)
There are 9 Summative unit assessments. This is done to help maintain comprehension throughout the course in hopes that more retention will occur in May before the AP US Exam..
Historical Thinking Skills
The historical thinking skills provide opportunities for students to learn to think like historians, most notably to analyze evidence about the past and to create persuasive historical arguments. Focusing on these practices enables teachers to create learning opportunities for students that emphasize the conceptual and interpretive nature of history rather than simply memorization of events in the past. Skill types and examples for each are listed below.
I. Chronological Reasoning
Compare causes and/or effects, including between short-term and long-term effects
Analyze and evaluate historical patterns of continuity and change over time
Connect patterns of continuity and change over time to larger historical processes or themes
Analyze and evaluate competing models of periodization of American history
II. Comparison and Contextualization
Compare related historical developments and processes across place, time, and/or different societies, or within one society
Explain and evaluate multiple and differing perspectives on a given historical phenomenon
Explain and evaluate ways in which specific historical phenomena, events, or processes connect to broader regional, national, or global processes occurring at the same time
III. Crafting Historical Arguments from Historical Evidence
Analyze commonly accepted historical arguments and explain how an argument has been constructed from historical evidence
Construct convincing interpretations through analysis of disparate, relevant historical evidence
Evaluate and synthesize conflicting historical evidence to construct persuasive historical arguments
Analyze features of historical evidence such as audience, purpose, point of view, format, argument, limitations, and context germane to the evidence considered
Based on analysis and evaluation of historical evidence, make supportable inferences and draw appropriate conclusions
IV. Historical Interpretation and Synthesis
Draw appropriately on ideas and methods from different fieldsof inquiry or disciplines
Analyze diverse historical interpretations
Apply insights about the past to other historical contexts or circumstances, including the present
Evaluate how historians’ perspectives influence their interpretations and how models of historical interpretation change over time
Aurora Public Schools APUSH Standards + guiding comments:
Standard / Comments / QuarterStandard 1: Globalization
Standard 2: Politics and Citizenship
Standard 3: Religion
/ Students demonstrate or do not demonstrate the following
o Pre-Columbian Societies
o Transatlantic Encounters and Colonial Beginnings, 1492-1690
o Colonial North America, 1690-1754
o The American Revolutionary Era
o The Early Republic
o Transformation of the Economy and Society in Antebellum America
/ 1,4
Standard 4: American Diversity
Standard 5: American Identity
Standard 6: Demographic Changes
/ Students demonstrate or do not demonstrate the following
o The Transformation of Politics in Antebellum America
o Religion, Reform, and Renaissance in Antebellum American
o Territorial Expansion and Manifest Destiny
o The Crisis of the Union
o Civil War
o Reconstruction
/ 2
Standard 7: Economic Transformations
Standard 8: Environment
Standard 9: Reform
/ Students demonstrate or do not demonstrate the following
o The Origins of the New South
o Development of the West in the Late Nineteenth Century
o Industrial America in the Late Nineteenth Century
o Urban Society in the Late Nineteenth Century
o Populism and Progressivism
o The Emergence of America as a World Power
/ 3,4
Standard 10: Culture
/ Students demonstrate or do no demonstrate the following
o The New Era: 1920s
o The Great Depression and the New Deal
o The Second World War
o The Home Front During the War
o The United States and the Early Cold War
o The 1950s
o The Turbulent 1960s
o Politics and Economics at the End of the Twentieth Century
o Society and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century
o The United States in the Post-Cold War World
/ 4
Grading Policies: The majority of your grade is based on large summative assessments and projects. However, approximately 20% of your grade is determined by formative assignments. Thus, if you do not complete homework or attend class, this will have a negative impact on 20% of your grade.
Standards-based guidelines: Marks indicate levels of proficiency on individual assessments and are recorded in the teacher grade book (Infantile Campus). Capital letters indicate summative assessments. Lower case letters indicate formative assessments.
Adv/adv / AdvancedP/p / Proficient
PP/pp / Partially Proficient
U/u / Unsatisfactory
M/m / Missing
(+) and (-) symbols communicate a range within a proficiency level.
Capital letters: summative or “major” assignments/assessments
Lower Case: formative or “practice” assignments/assessments
Critical Thinking Synthesis Questions for the Course: Debating The Past
Quarter 1:
How many Indians perished with European settlement?
Were puritan communities peaceable?
Was economic gain the colonists’ main motivation?
Was the American Revolution rooted in class struggle?
What ideas shaped the Constitution?
Did Thomas Jefferson father a child by his slave?
How did Indians and settlers interact?
Quarter 2:
Was early nineteenth-century America transformed by a “market revolution”?
For whom did Jackson fight?
Did the antebellum reform movement improve society?
Was there an “American Renaissance”?
Did the frontier change women’s roles?
Did slaves and masters form emotional bonds?
Was the Civil War avoidable?
Why did the South lose the Civil War?
Were Reconstruction governments corrupt?
Quarter 3:
Was the frontier exceptionally violent?
Were the industrialists “robber barons” or savvy entrepreneurs?
Did immigrants assimilate?
Did the frontier engender individualism and democracy?
Were city governments corrupt and incompetent?
Were the progressives forward-looking?
Did the United States acquire an overseas empire for economic reasons?
Did a stroke sway Wilson’s judgment?
Quarter 4:
Was the decade of the 1920s one of self-absorption?
What caused the Great Depression?
Did the New Deal succeed?
Should the United States have sued atomic bombs against Japan?
Did Truman needlessly exacerbate relations with the Soviet Union?
Would JFK have sent a half-million American troops to Vietnam?
Did mass culture make life shallow?
Did Reagan end the Cold War?
Do historians ever get it right? (History repeating itself)
Unit One
Day One
Instructions Timeline activity and Origins
American History Video: SNL
Origins:
Passage to Alaska
Cahokia: The Hub of Mississippi Culture
MesaVerde, Colorado
Diffusion of Corn
August, Week One
Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas
Columbus
Spain’s American Empire
Indians and Europeans
Relativity of Cultural Values
Disease and Population Losses
Spain’s European Rivals
The Protestant Reformation
English Beginnings in America
The Settlement of Virginia
“Purifying” the Church of England
Bradford and Plymouth Colony
Winthrop and Massachusetts Bay Colony
Troublemakers: Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson
Other New England Colonies
French and Dutch Settlements
Maryland and the Carolinas
The Middle Colonies
Indians and Europeans as “Amercanizers”
August, Week Two
American Society in the Making
What is an American?
Spanish Settlement
The Chesapeake Colonies
The Lure of Land
“Solving” the Labor Shortage: Slavery
Prosperity in a Pipe: Tobacco
Bacon’s Rebellion
The Carolinas
Home and Family in the South
Georgia and the Back Country
Puritan New England
The Puritan Family
Puritan Women and Children
Visible Puritan Saints and Others
Democracies Without Democrats
The Dominion of New England
Prosperity Undermines Puritanism
A Merchant’s World
The Middle Colonies: Economic Basis
The Middle Colonies: An Intermingling of Peoples
“The Best Poor Man’s Country”
The Politics of Diversity
Rebellious Women
August, Week Three and Four
America in the British Empire
The British Colonial System
Mercantilism
The Navigation Acts
The Effects of Mercantilism
The Great Awakening
The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Edwards
The Enlightenment in America
Colonial Scientific Achievements
Repercussions of Distant Wars
The Great War for the Empire
The Peace of Paris
Putting the Empire Right
Tightening Imperial Controls
The Sugar Act
American Colonistis Demand Rights
The Stamp Act: The Pot Set to Boiling
Rioters or Rebels?
Taxation or Tyranny?
The Declaratory Act
The Townshend Duties
The Boston Massacre
The Pot Spills Over
The Tea Act Crisis
From Resistance to Revolution
September, Week One
The American Revolution
“The Shot Heard Round the World”
The Second Continental Congress
The Battle of Bunker Hill
The Great Declaration
1776: The Balance of Forces
Loyalists
Early British Victories
Saratoga and the French Alliance
The War Moves South
Victory at Yorktown
The Peace of Paris
Forming a National Government
Financing the War
State Republican Governments
Social Reform
Effects of the Revolution on Women
Growth of a National Spirit
The GreatLand Ordinances
National Heroes
A National Culture
Unit Two
September, Week Two
The Federalist Era: Nationalism Triumphant
Border Problems
Foreign Trade
The Specter of Inflation
Daniel Shay’s “Little Rebellion”
To Philadelphia, and the Constitution
The Great Convention
The Compromises That Produced the Constitution
Ratifying the Constitution
Washington as President
Congress Under Way
Hamilton and Financial Reform
The Ohio Country: A Dark and Bloody Ground
Revolution in France
Federalists and Republicans: The Rise of Political Parties
1795: All’s Well That Ends Well
Washington’s Farewell
The Election of 1796
The XYZ Affair
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The Kentucky and Virginia Revolves
September, Week Three
Jeffersonian Democracy
The Federalist Contribution
Thomas Jefferson: Political Theorist
Jefferson as President
Jefferson’s Attack on the Judiciary
The Barbary Pirates
The Louisiana Purchase
The Federalists Discredited
Lewis and Clark
Jeffersonian Democracy
The Burr Conspiracy
Napoleon and the British
The Impressment Controversy
The Embargo Act
September, Week Four
National Growing Pains
Madison in Power
Tecumseh and Indian Resistance
Depression and Land Hunger
Opponents of War
The War of 1812
Britain Assumes the Offensive
“The Star Spangled Banner”
The Treaty of Ghent
The Hartford Convention
The Battle of New Orleans
Victory Weakens the Federalists
Anglo-American Rapprochement
The Transcontinental Treaty
The Monroe Doctrine
The Era of Good Feelings
New Sectional Issues
Northern Leaders
Southern Leaders
Western Leaders
The Missouri Compromise
The Election of 1824
John Quincy Adams as President
Calhoun’s Exposition and Protest
The Meaning of Sectionalism
October, Week One
Toward a National Economy
Gentility and the Consumer Revolution
Birth of the Factory
An Industrial Proletariat?
Lowell’s Waltham System: Women as Factory Workers
Irish and German Immigrants
The Persistence of the Household System
Rise of Corporations
Cotton Revolutionizes the South
Revival of Slavery
Roads to Market
Transportation and the Government
Development of Steamboats
The Canal Boom
New York City: Emporium of the Western World
The Marshall Court
October, Week Two
Jacksonian Democracy”
“Democratizing” Politics
1828: The New Party System in Embryo
The Jacksonian Appeal
The Spoils System
President of All the People
Sectional Tensions Revived
Jackson: “The Bank… I WILL KILL IT!”
Jackson’s Bank Veto
Jackson Versus Calhoun
Indian Removals
The Nullification Crisis
Boom and Bust
Jacksonianism Abroad
The Jacksonians
Rise of the Whigs
Martin Van Buren: Jacksonism Without Jackson
The Log Cabin Campaign
October, Week Three
The Making of Middle-Class America
Tocqueville and Beaumont in America
Tocqueville in Judgment
A Restless People
The Family Recast
The Second Great Awakening
The Era of Associations
Backwoods Utopias
The Age of Reform
“Demon Rum”
The Abolitionist Crusade
Women’s Rights
October, Week Three and Four
An American Culture
In Search of Native Grounds
The Romantic View of Life
Emerson and Thoreau
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
The Wider Literary Renaissance
Domestic Tastes
Education for Democracy
Reading and the Dissemination of Culture
The State of the Colleges
Civic Cultures
American Humor
Unit Three
November, Week One
Westward Expansion
Tyler’s Troubles
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty
The Texas Question
Manifest Destiny
Life on the Trail
California and Oregon
The Election of 1844
Polk as President
War with Mexico
To the Halls of Montezuma
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Fruits of Victory: Further Enlargement of the United States
Slavery: The Fire Bell in the Night Rings Again
The Election of 1848
The Gold Rush
The Compromise of 1850
November, Week Two and Three
The Sections Go Their Ways
The South
The Economics of Slavery
Antebellum Plantation Life
The Sociology of Slavery
Psychological Effects of Slavery
Manufacturing in the South
The Northern Industrial Juggernaut
A Nation of Immigrants
How Wage Earners Lived
Progress and Poverty
Foreign Commerce
Steam Conquers the Atlantic
Canals and Railroads
Railroads and the Economy
Railroads and the Sectional Conflict
The Economy on the Eve of Civil War
November, Week Four
The Coming of the Civil War
The Slave Power Comes North
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Diversions Abroad: The “Young America” Movement
Stephen Douglas: “The Little Giant”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
Know-Nothings, Republicans, and the Demise of the Two-Party System
“Bleeding Kansas”
Senator Sumner Becomes a Martyr for Abolitionism
Buchanan Tries His Hand
The Dred Scott Decision
The Lecompton Constitution
The Emergence of Lincoln
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
John Brown’s Raid
The Secession Crisis
December, Week One
The War to Save the Union
Lincoln’s Cabinet
FortSumter: The First Shot
The Blue and the Gray
The Test of Battle: Bull Run
Paying for the War
Politics as Usual
Behind Confederate Lines
War in the West: Shiloh
McClellan: The Reluctant Warrior
Lee Counterattacks: Antietam
The Emancipation Proclamation
The Draft Riots
The Emancipated People
African American Soldiers
Antietam to Gettysburg
Lincoln Finds His General: Grant at Vicksburg
Economic and Social Effects, North and South
Women in Wartime
Grant in Wartime
Grand in the Wilderness
Sherman in Georgia
To Appomattox Court House
Winners, Losers, and the Future
December, Week Three
Reconstruction and the South
Presidential Reconstruction
Republican Radicals
Congress Rejects Johnsonian Reconstruction
The Fourteenth Amendment
The Reconstruction Acts
Congress Supreme
The Fifteenth Amendment
“Black Republican” Reconstruction: Scalawags and Carpetbaggers
The Ravaged Land
Sharecropping and the Crop-Lien System
The White Backlash
Grant as President
The Disputed Election of 1876
The Compromise of 1877
Unit Four
January, Week One
In the Wake of War
Congress Ascendant
The Political Aftermath of War
Blacks After Reconstruction
Booker T. Washington: A “Reasonable” Champion for Blacks
White Violence and Vengeance
The West After the Civil War
The Plains Indians
Indian Wars
The Destruction of Tribal Life
The Lure of Gold and Silver in the West
Big Business and the Land Bonanza
WesternRailroadBuilding
The CattleKingdom
Open-Range Ranching
Barbed-Wire Warfare
January, Week Two
An Industrial Giant
Essentials of Industrial Growth
Railroads: The First Big Business
Iron, Oil, and Electricity
Competition and Monopoly: Railroads
Competition and Monopoly: Steel
Competition and Monopoly: Oil
Competition and Monopoly: Retailing and Utilities
American Ambivalence to Big Business
Reformers: George, Bellamy, Lloyd
Reformers: The Marxists
The Government Reacts to Big Business: Railroad Regulation
The Government Reacts to Big Business: The Sherman Antitrust Act
The Labor Union Movement
The American Federation of Labor
Labor Militancy Rebuffed
Whither America, Whither Democracy?
January, Week Three
American Society in the Industrial Age
Middle-Class Life