US History Topic Outline

Pre-Columbian Societies

• Early inhabitants of the Americas
• American Indian empires in Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi Valley
• American Indian cultures of North America at the time of European contact

Transatlantic Encounters and Colonial Beginnings, 1492-1690

• European Situation
• Growth of English Democracy
• First European contacts with Native Americans
• Spain's empire in North Americas
• French Colonization of Canada
• English settlement of New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the South
• From servitude to slavery in the Chesapeake region
• Religious diversity in the American Colonies
• Resistance to colonial authority: Bacon's Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, and the Pueblo Revolt

Colonial North America, 1690-1754

• Population growth and immigration
• Transatlantic trade and the growth of seaports
• The eighteenth-century back country
• Growth of plantation economies and slave societies
• The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening
• Colonial governments and imperial policy in British North America

The American Revolutionary Era, 1754-1789

• The French and Indian War
• The Imperial Crisis and resistance to Britain
• The War for Independence
• State constitutions and the Articles of Confederation
• The Federal Constitution

The Early Republic, 1789-1815

• Washington, Hamilton and shaping of the national government
• Emergence of Political Parties: Federalists and Republicans
• Republican Motherhood and education for women
• Beginnings of the Second Great Awakening
• Significance of Jefferson's Presidency
• Expansion into the trans-Appalacian West
• Native American resistance to expansion
• Growth of slavery and free Black communities
• The War of 1812 and its consequences

Transformation of the Economy and Society in Antebellum America

• The transportation revolution and creation of a national market economy
• Beginnings of industrialization and changes in social and class structures
• Immigration and nativist reaction
• Planters, yeoman farmers, and slaves in the cotton South

The Transformation of Politics in Antebellum America

• Emergence of the second party system
• Federal authority and its opponents: judicial federalism, the Bank War. Tariff controversy and states' rights debates
• Jacksonian democracy and its successes and limitations

Religion, Reform and Renaissance in Antebellum America

• Evangelical Protestant Revivalism
• Social Reforms
• Ideals of domesticity
• Transcendentalism and utopian communities
• American Renaissance: literary and artistic expressions

Territorial Expansion and Manifest Destiny

• Forced removal of Native Americans to the trans-Mississippi West
• Western migration and cultural interactions
• Territorial acquisitions
• Early Imperialism: the Mexican War

The Crisis of the Union

• Pro-Slavery, and Anti-Slavery arguments and conflicts
• Compromise of 1850 and popular sovereignty
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Emergence of the Republican Party
• Abraham Lincoln, the Election of 1860, and secession

Civil War

• Two societies at war: mobilization, resources, and internal dissent
• Military strategies and foreign diplomacy
• Emancipation and the role of African Americans in the war
• Social, political and economic effects of war in the North, South and the West

Reconstruction

• Presidential and Radical Reconstruction
• Southern state governments: aspirations, achievments, failures
• Role of African Americans in politics, education, and the economy
• Compromise of 1877
• Impact of Reconstruction

The Origins of the New South

• Reconfiguration of southern agriculture: sharecropping and crop lien system
• Expansion of manufacturing and industrialization
• The politics of segregation: Jim Crow and disenfranchisement

Development of the West in the Late Nineteenth Century

• Expansion and development of western railroads
• Competitors for the West: miners, ranchers, homesteaders and Native Americans
• Government policy toward Native Americans
• Gender, race, ethnicity in the far West
• Environmental impacts of western settlement

Industrial America in the Late Nineteenth Century

• Corporate consolidation of industry
• Effects of technological development on the worker and workplace
• Labor and Unions
• National politics and influence of corporate power
• Migration and immigration: the changing face of the nation
• Proponents and opponents of the new order: Social Darwinism and Social Gospel

Urban Society in the Late Nineteenth Century

• Urbanization and the lure of the city
• City problems and machine politics
• Intellectual and cultural movements and popular entertainment

Populism and Progressivism

• Agrarian discontent and political issues of the late nineteenth century
• Origins of Progressive reform: municipal, state and national
• Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson as Progressive Presidents
• Women's roles: family, workplace, education, politics and reform
• Black America: urban migration and civil rights initiatives

The Emergence of America as a World Power

• American imperialism: political and economic expansion
• War in Europe and American neutrality
• The First World War at home and abroad
• Treaty of Versailles
• Society and economy in the postwar years

The New Era: 1920's

• The business of America and the consumer economy
• Republican politics: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover
• The culture of Modernism: science, the arts, and entertainment
• Responses to Modernism: religious fundamentalism, nativism, and Prohibition
• The ongoing struggle for equality: African Americans and women

The Great Depression and the New Deal

• Causes of the Great Depression
• The Hoover Administration's response
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal
• Labor and union recognition
• The New Deal coalition and its critics from the Right and the Left
• Surviving hard times: American society during the Great Depression

The Second World War

• The rise of fascism and militarism in Japan, Italy and Germany
• Prelude to war: policy of neutrality
• The attack on Pearl Harbor and United States declaration of war
• Fighting a multifront war
• Diplomacy, war aims. And wartime conferences
• The United States as a global power in an Atomic Age

The Home Front During the War

• Wartime mobilization of the economy
• Urban migration and demographic changes
• Women, work, and family during the war
• Civil liberties and civil rights during wartime
• War and regional development
• Expansion of government power

The United States and the Early Cold War

• Origins of the Cold War
• Truman and containment
• The Cold War in Asia: China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan
• Diplomatic strategies and policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations
• The Red Scare and McCarthyism
• Impact of the Cold War on American Society

The 1950's

• Emergence of the modern civil rights movement
• The affluent society and "the other America"
• Consensus and conformity: suburbia and middle-class America
• Social critics, nonconformists, and cultural rebels
• Impact of changes in science, technology, and medicine

The Turbulent 1960's

• From the New Frontier to the Great Society
• Expanding movements for civil rights
• Cold War confrontations: Asia, Latin America, and Europe
• Beginning of Détente
• The antiwar movement and the counterculture

Politics and Economics at the End of the Twentieth Century

• The election 1968 and the "Silent Majority"
• Nixon's challenges: Vietnam, China, Watergate
• Changes in the American economy: the energy crisis, deindustrialization and the service economy
• The New Right and the Reagan Revolution
• End of the Cold War

Society and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century

• Demographic changes: surge of immigration after 1965, Sunbelt migration, and the graying of America
• Revolutions in biotechnology, mass communication, and computers
• Politics in a multicultural society

The United States in the Post-Cold War World

• Globalization and the American economy
• Unilateralism vs multilateralism in foreign policy
• Domestic and foreign terrorism
• Environmental issues in global context