Advanced Placement Program (AP) curriculum is designed to give students a through understanding of United States history, requiring students to master historical and analytic skills, including; chronological and spatial think, historical research, and historical interpretation. The AP curriculum strives to prepare students to assess historical materials, evaluate relevance and reliability, and deal critically with problems, and materials in United States history. The course is equivalent to a full-year introductory college class, thus preparing students for intermediate and advanced college courses. Students have an opportunity to demonstrate content mastery by taking an end of the course AP Exam in May.

1.  Students will explore the discovery and settlement of the New World, 1492-1650.

• Understand the role of Europe in the sixteenth century.
• Examine the Spanish, English, and French exploration.
• Explore the significance of the First English settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth.
• Understand the Spanish and French settlements and long-term influence.
• Discuss the role of the American Indians.

• Understand the role of Chesapeake country.
• Examine the growth of New England.
• Explain restoration of the colonies.
• Investigate Mercantilism; the Dominion of New England.
• Read and discuss the origins of slavery.

• Understand the Social Structure including the family, farm and town life, and the economy.
• Explore the Culture of Colonial Society - The Great Awakening: the great religious revivals and the leaders involved, including the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the Civil War revivals, the Social Gospel Movement, the rise of Christian liberal theology in the 19^th century, the impact of the Second Vatican Council, and the rise of Christian fundamentalism in current times. Focus on the American mind and "Folkways."
• Understand the role of new immigrants.

• Understand the Anglo-French rivalries and Seven Years’ War.
• Examine Imperial reorganization of 1763 including the Stamp Act, Declaratory Act, the Townsend Acts, and the Boston Tea Party.
• Read and explain the philosophy of the American Revolution including the Enlightenment and the rise of democratic ideas as the context in which the nation was founded.
• Explore the ideological origins of the American Revolution: the divinely bestowed unalienable natural rights philosophy of the founding Fathers and the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution.
• Review the significance of the addition of the Bill of Rights.

• Understand the role of the Continental Congress.
• Examine the significance of the Declaration of Independence.
• Explain the French alliance, war and society, Loyalists and war economy.
• Read and understand the Articles of Confederation.
• Understand the Peace of Paris.
• Understand the role of creating state governments using political organization and social reform.

• Understand the significance of the Philadelphia Convention: drafting the Constitution.
• Explain Federalists versus Anti-Federalists; the history of the Constitution after 1787 with emphasis on federal versus state authority and growing democratization. (Federalist Papers)
• Bill of Rights.
• Discuss Washington’s presidency, Hamilton's financial program, foreign and domestic difficulties and the beginnings of political parties.
• Explore John Adams’ presidency and the Alien and Sedition Acts, the XYZ affair, and the election of 1800.

• Understand Jefferson’s presidency; the Louisiana Purchase, the Burr conspiracy, the Supreme Court under John Marshall, neutral rights, impressment, and embargo.
• Investigate the role of Madison.
• Understand the War of 1812, its causes, the invasion of Canada, the Hartford Convention, the Treaty of Ghent, and New Orleans.

• Understand the role of James Monroe; Era of Good Feelings.
• Examine the Panic of 1819.
• Explain the Settlement of the West.
• Understand the Missouri Compromise.
• Understand and explain foreign affairs in Canada, Florida and examine the Monroe Doctrine.
• Read and understand the Explore Election of 1824: End of Virginia dynasty.
• Explain the Economic revolution with the early railroads and canals, the expansion of businesses with the beginnings of the factory system, the early labor movement; women and social mobility; extremes of wealth, the cotton revolution in the South, and commercial agriculture.

• Understand the South as cotton kingdom, the center of southern trade and industry, as well as southern society and culture.
• Explain how the North dealt with both Northeast industries including labor, immigration, and urban slums and northwest agriculture.
• Explore the Westward expansion and how it brought about advances the agricultural frontier, changed the significance of the frontier and life on the frontier; squatters, as well as the removal of the American Indians.

• Understand Democracy and the "common man" with expansion of suffrage and rotation in office.
• Explore the Second party system included the Democratic Party and the Whig Part.
• Analyze internal improvements and states’ rights: the Maysville Road veto.
• Explain the Nullification Crisis included the Tariff issue and The Union: Calhoun and Jackson.
• Understand the Bank War: Jackson and Biddle.
• Understand the role of Martin Van Buren, the independent treasury system and the Panic of 1837.

• Review the Manifest Destiny and mission.
• Discuss the Texas annexation, the Oregon boundary, and California.
• Investigate James K. Polk and the Mexican War; slavery and the Wilmot Proviso.
• Understand the later expansionist efforts.

• Review cultural nationalism.
• Read and discuss education reform/professionalism.
• Research Religion and revivalism.
• Understand Utopian experiments: Mormons, Oneida Community; incidences of religious intolerance in the United States (e.g. persecution of Mormons, anti-Catholic sentiment, anti-Semitism).
• Explore the role of Transcendentalists.
• Study National literature, art, and architecture.
• Analyze reform crusades including feminism; roles of women in the nineteenth century, abolitionism, temperance, criminals and the insane, describe the contributions of various religious groups to American civic principles and social reform movements (e.g. civil and human rights, individual responsibility and the work ethic, anti-monarchy and self-rule, worker protection, family-centered communities).

• Read and discuss the Compromise of 1850.
• Study the Fugitive Slave Act and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• Understand the Kansas-Nebraska Act and realignment of parties and the demise of the Whig Party and emergence of the Republican Party.
• Analyze the Dred Scott decision and Lecompton crisis.
• Discuss the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858.
• Research the John Brown’s raid.
• Review the election of 1860; Abraham Lincoln.
• Explain the secession crisis.

• Compare the Union, mobilization and finance, civil liberties and the Election of 1864.
• Analyze the South, a confederate constitution, mobilization and finance, and the States’ rights and the Confederacy.
• Understand foreign affairs and diplomacy during the Civil War.
• Discuss military strategy, campaigns, and battles of the Civil War.
• Understand the abolition of slavery, Confiscation Acts, Emancipation Proclamation, Freedmen’s Bureau, Thirteenth Amendment.
• Research the effects of war on society, inflation and public debt, role of women, devastation of the South, and changing labor patterns.

• Understand the Presidential plans of Lincoln and Johnson.
• Research the Radical (congressional) plans including civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, military reconstruction, impeachment of Johnson, and African-American suffrage: the Fifteenth Amendment.
• Analyze Southern state governments: problems, achievements, and weaknesses.
• Compare the Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction.

• Research the Politics in the New South, the Redeemers, White and African Americans in the New South, and the Subordination of freed slaves: Jim Crow.
• Analyze the Southern economy; colonial status of the South, sharecropping and Industrial stirrings.
• Define Cattle kingdom, open-range ranching and the day of the cowboy.
• Explain Building the Western railroad.
• Read and discuss the subordination of American Indians: dispersal of tribes.
• Discuss farming the plains; problems in agriculture.
• Review the mining bonanza.

• Investigate the Industrial growth: railroads, iron, coal, electricity, steel, oil, banks; corporate mergers that produced trusts and cartels and the economic and political policies of industrial leaders.
• Understand Laissez-faire conservatism, Gospel of Wealth, myth of "self-made man," Social Darwinism; survival of the fittest: the similarities and differences between the ideologies of Social Darwinism and Social Gospel (e.g., biographies of William Graham Summer, Billy Sunday, Dwight L. Moody), social critics and dissenters.
• Compare the effects of technological development on worker/work-place.
• Research the union movement, the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor and Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman.

• Understand the lure of the city; the changing landscape, including the growth of cities linked by industry and trade; the development of cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class.
• Analyze the role of immigration.
• Explain city problems, slums, machine politics; the effect of urban political machines and responses by immigrants and middle-class reforms.
• Read and discuss awakening conscience; reforms, social legislation, settlement houses: Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, structural reforms in government

• Explain education, colleges and universities, and scientific advances.
• Discuss professionalism and the social sciences.
• Read and discuss realism in literature and art.
• Understand the significance of mass culture.

• Understand a conservative presidency.
• Compare issues of tariff controversy, railroad regulation, and trusts.
• Discuss Agrarian discontent.
• Research the Crisis of 1890s, populism, silver question, election of 1896: McKinley versus Bryan.

• Research Seward and purchase of Alaska.
• Understand the new imperialism; students trace the rise of the U.S. to its role as a world power in the 20^th century, Blaine and Latin America, International Darwinism: missionaries, politicians, and naval expansionists, Spanish-American War, Cuban independence, debate on Philippines.
• Review the Far East: John Hay, the Open Door and the purpose and effects of the policy.
• Compare Theodore Roosevelt; Roosevelt’s Big Stick diplomacy, Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, and Wilson’s Moral Diplomacy, drawing on relevant speeches, the Panama Canal, Roosevelt Corollary, Far East.
• Analyze the Taft and Dollar Diplomacy.
• Analyze the Wilson and Moral Diplomacy.

• Read and discuss the Origins of Progressivism, progressive attitudes and motives, muckrakers, social Gospel.
• Understand municipal, state, and national reforms, Political: suffrage, Social and economic: regulation, the effect of political programs and activities of the Progressive (e.g., federal regulation of railroad transport, Children’s Bureau, the 16^th Amendment, Theodore Roosevelt).
• Discuss Socialism and alternatives.
• Analyze Black America, Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey, urban migration, Civil Rights organizations.
• Compare Women’s role: family, work, education, unionization, and suffrage.
• Understand Roosevelt’s Square Deal, managing the trusts, and conservation.
• Analyze Taft, Pinchot-Ballinger, and Payne-Aldrich Tariff conservation.
• Read and discuss Wilson’s New Freedom, tariffs, banking reform, and the Antitrust Act of 1914.

• Analyze the problems of neutrality, submarines, economic ties, psychological and ethnic ties.
• Understand preparedness and pacifism.
• Research mobilization, fighting the war, financing the war, war boards, propaganda, public opinion, civil liberties, and the political, economic and social ramifications of World War I on the home-front.
• Understand Wilson’s Fourteen Points, The Treaty of Versailles, and the Ratification fight.
• Explain the Postwar demobilization, Red scare, and the Labor strife.

• Explore the Republican governments, business creed, and the Harding scandals.
• Understand Economic development, prosperity and wealth, farm and labor problems, the monetary issues of the late 19^th and early 20^th century that gave rise to the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the weaknesses in key sectors of the economy in the late 1920s.
• Research new culture, consumerism: automobile, radio, movies, women, the family; the passage of the 19^th Amendment and the changing role of women in society, modern religion, literature of alienation, Jazz age, Harlem Renaissance: the Harlem Renaissance and new trends in literature, music, and art, with special attention to the work of writers (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes).
• Compare the conflict of cultures, prohibition, bootlegging, Nativism, Ku Klux Klan, Religious fundamentalism versus modernists.
• Analyze myth of isolation, replacing the League of Nations, business and diplomacy.

• Understand the significance of the Wall Street crash.
• Analyze the Depression economy.
• Read and discuss the moods of despair, agrarian unrest, and the Bonus march.
• Research Hoover-Stimson diplomacy in Japan.

• Research Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR Library), background, ideas, and philosophy of New Deal.
• Understand 100 Days; "alphabet agencies."
• Discuss the Second New Deal.
• Analyze critics, left and right.
• Discuss the effects and controversies of New Deal economic policies and the expanded role of the federal government in society and the economy since the 1930’s (e.g. Works Progress Administration, Social Security, National Labor Relations Board, farm programs, regional development policies and energy development such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, California Central Valley Project, Bonneville Dam).
• Understand the rise of CIO; labor strikes: the advances and retreats of organized labor, from the creation of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization to current issues of a post-industrial multinational economy, including the United Farmworkers in California.
• Research the Supreme Court fight.
• Study the Recession of 1938.
• Compare American people in the Depression, social values, women, ethnic groups, Indian Reorganization Act, Mexican-American deportation, and the racial issue.

• Understand Good Neighbor Policy: Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
• Read and discuss the role of the London Economic Conference.
• Discuss the role of Disarmament.
• Understand Isolationism: neutrality legislation.
• Discuss Aggressors: Japan, Italy, and Germany.
• Research Appeasement.
• Review Rearmament; Blitzkrieg and Lend-Lease.
• Analyze the Atlantic Charter.
• Read and discuss the impact of Pearl Harbor.

• Understand organizing for war, mobilizing production, propaganda, and the internment of Japanese Americans.
• Research the war in Europe, Africa, Mediterranean, and D-Day.
• Discuss the war in the Pacific: Hiroshima, Nagasaki; the decision to drop atomic bombs and the consequences.
• Understand the role and sacrifices of individual American soldiers, as well as the unique contributions of the special fighting forces (e.g. the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442 Regimental Combat team, and the Navajo Codetalkers).(See AHS World War II Links)
• Review the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home-front, including the internment of Japanese Americans (e.g.Fred Korematsu v. United States of America) and the restrictions on German and Italian resident aliens; the response of the administration to Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups; the role of women in military production; the role and growing political demands of African Americans.
• Discuss diplomacy, war aims, wartime conferences: Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam.
• Investigate the Postwar atmosphere; the United Nations.

• Research the Postwar domestic adjustments.
• Understand the Taft-Hartley Act.
• Read and discuss the Civil rights and the election of 1948.
• Analyze the Containment in Europe and the Middle East, Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan: the effect of massive aid given to western Europe under the Marshall Plan to rebuild itself after the war, and its importance to the U.S. economy. (Truman Library)
• Discuss the Revolution in China.
• Understand limited war: Korea and MacArthur.

• Discuss domestic frustrations; McCarthyism. (SCORE web sites on McCarthyism)
• Research the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery bus boycott, and the Greensboro sit-in.
• Explain John Foster Dulles’s foreign policy, crisis in Southeast Asia, massive retaliation, nationalism in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Khrushchev and Berlin.
• Discuss American People: homogenized society, prosperity: economic consolidation, consumer culture, and consensus of values.
• Research the Space race.

• Explain the new domestic programs, tax cut, war on poverty, and affirmative action.
• Understand civil rights and civil liberties, African Americans: political, cultural, and economic roles, the role of civil rights advocates (e.g. biographies of A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, Thurgood Marshall, James Farmer, Rosa Parks), including the significance of Martin Luther King’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and "I Have a Dream" Speech, resurgence of feminism: the women’s rights movement from the era of Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony and the passage of the 19^th Amendment to the movement launched in the 1960’s, including differing perspectives on the role of women, the New Left and the Counterculture, emergence of the Republican party in the South, the Supreme Court and theMiranda decision.
• Explore Foreign Policy, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, and Vietnam quagmire.
• Explain the effects of foreign policy on domestic policies and vice versa (e.g., protests during the war in Vietnam and the "nuclear freeze" movement).

• Read and discuss the Election of 1968.
• Understand Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, Vietnam: escalation and pullout, China: restoring relations, Soviet Union: détente.
• Research New Federalism.
• Research the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.
• Explain the Watergate crisis and Nixon’s resignation.

• Explain the New Right and the conservative social agenda.
• Review the role of Ford and Rockefeller.
• Investigate Carter, deregulation, energy and inflation, Camp David accords, and Iranian hostage crisis.
• Review Reagan, tax cuts and budget deficits, defense buildup, new disarmament treaties, foreign crises: the Persian Gulf and Central America.
• Discuss society, old and new urban problems, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, resurgent fundamentalism, African Americans and local, state, and national politics.
• Compare the effects on society and the economy of technological development since 1945, including the computer revolution, changes in communication, advances in medicine, improvements in agricultural technology, and the changing role of women in society as reflected in the major entry of women into the labor force and the changing family structure.

AP U.S. History Web Page
http://www.collegeboard.org/ap/history/index.html