United States History and Geography: Growth and Conflict
The framing of the Constitution, the founding principles, regional differences, the Civil War, WWI and the rise and effects of industrialization
- The political and economic causes and consequences of the War of 1812 and the major battles, leaders and events that led to a final peace
- The changing boundaries of the United States and the relationships the country had with its neighbors (current Mexico and Canada) and Europe, including the influence of the Monroe-Doctrine, and how those relationships influenced westward expansion and the Mexican-American War.
- The major treaties with American Indian nations during the administrations of the first four presidents and the varying outcomes of those treaties
8.6 THE DIVERGENT PATHS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FROM 1800 TO THE MID-1800'S AND THE CHALLENGES THEY FACED, WITH EMPHASIS ON THE NORTHEAST
- The influence of industrialization and technological developments on the region, including human modification of the landscape and how physical geography shaped human actions (e.g., grown of cities, deforestation, farming, mineral extraction)
- The physical obstacles to and the economic and political factors involved in building a network of roads, canals and railroads (e.g., Henry Clay's American System)
- The reasons for the wave of immigration from Northern Europe to the United States and the growth in the number, size and spatial arrangements of cities (e.g., Irish immigrants and the Great Irish Famine)
- The lives of black Americans who gained freedom in the North and founded schools and churches to advance their rights and communities
8.7.THE DIVERGENT PATHS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE SOUTH FROM 1800 TO THE MID-1800'S AND THE CHALLENGES THEY FACED
- The development of the agrarian economy in the South, the locations of the cotton-producing states and the significance of cotton and the cotton gin
- The origins and development of slavery; its effects on black Americans and on the region's political, social, religious, economic and cultural development; and the strategies that were tried to both overturn and preserve it (e.g., through the writings and historical documents on Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey)
- The characteristics of white Southern society and how the physical environment influenced events and conditions prior to the Civil War
- The lives of and opportunities for free blacks in the North with those of free blacks in the South
8.8 THE DIVERGENT PATHS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE WEST FROM 1800 TO THE MID 1800'S AND THE CHALLENGES THEY FACED
- The election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, the importance of Jacksonian democracy and his actions as president (e.g., the spoils system, veto of the National Bank, policy of Indian removal, opposition to the Supreme Court)
- The purpose, challenges and economic incentives associated with westward expansion, including the concept of Manifest Destiny (e.g., the Lewis and Clark expedition, accounts of the removal of Indians, the Cherokees' "Trail of Tears," settlement of the Great Plains) and the territorial acquisitions that spanned numerous decades
- The role of pioneer women and the new status that western women achieved (e.g., Laura Ingalls Wilder, Annie Bidwell; slave women gaining freedom in the West; Wyoming granting suffrage to women in 1869)
- The importance of the great rivers and the struggle over water rights
- Mexican settlements and their locations, cultural traditions, attitudes toward slavery, land-grant system and economics
8.9 THE EARLY AND STEADY ATTEMPTS TO ABOLISH SLAVERY AND TO REALIZE THE IDEALS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
- The leaders of the movement (e.g., John Quincy Adams and his proposed constitutional amendment, John Brown and the armed resistance, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass)
- The abolition of slavery in early state constitutions
- The significance of the Northwest Ordinance in education and in the banning of slavery in new states north of the Ohio River
- The importance of the slavery issue as raised by the annexation of Texas and California's admission to the union as a free state under the Compromise of 1850
- The significance of the States' Rights Doctrine, the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso (1846), the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay's role in the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision (1857) and the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858)
- The lives of free blacks and the laws that limited their freedom and economic opportunities
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