Teaching with

These topics will fulfill one or more of the following requirements in High School United States History I and II for the 2018 Massachusetts State Standards:

 

High School United States History I

• Topic 1: Origins of the Revolution and the Constitution

  • 8. Describe the Constitutional Convention, the roles of specific individuals (e.g. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Washington, Roger Sherman, Edmund Randolph), and the conflicts and compromises (e.g., compromises over representation, slavery, the executive branch, and ratification

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• Topic 3: Economic growth in the North, South, and West

  • 2. Analyze the effects of industrial growth throughout antebellum America, and in New England, the textile and machinery industries and maritime commerce

    • b. The impact of the cotton gin on the economics of Southern agriculture and slavery and the connection between cotton production by slave labor in the South and the economic success of Northern textile industries.

  • 3. Describe the role of slavery in the economics of the industrialized North and the agricultural South, explain reasons for the rapid growth of slavery in southern states, the Caribbean islands, and South America after 1800, and analyze how banks, insurance companies, and other institutions profited directly or indirectly from the slave trade and slave labor.

  • 4. Research primary sources such as antebellum newspapers, slave narratives, accounts of auctions, and the Fugitive Slave Act, to analyze one of the following aspects of slave life and resistance (e.g., the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, the rebellion of Denmark Vesey of 1822, the rebellion of Nat Turner in 1831; the role of the Underground Railroad; the development of ideas of racial superiority; the African American Colonization Society movement to deport and resettle freed African Americans in a colony in West Africa).

 

• Topic 4: Social, political, and religious change

  • 1. Describe important religious and social trends that shaped America in the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g., the First and Second Great Awakenings; the increase in the number of Protestant denominations; the concept of “Republican Motherhood;” hostility to Catholic immigration and the rise of the Native American Party, also known as the “Know-Nothing” Party).

  • 2. Using primary sources, research the reform movements in the United States in the mid-19th century, concentrating on one of the following and considering its connections to other aspects of reform:

    • a. The Abolitionist movement, the reasons individual men and women (e.g. Frederick Douglass, Abbey Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Angeline and Sarah Grimké, Charles Lennox Remond, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Theodore Weld) fought for their cause, and the responses of southern and northern white men and women to abolitionism.

 

• Topic 5: The Civil War and Reconstruction: causes and consequences

  • 6. Analyze the consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction (e.g., the physical and economic destruction of the South and the loss of life of both Southern and Northern troops; the increased role of the federal government; the impeachment of President Johnson; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the expansion of the industrial capacity of the Northern U.S.; the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau and organizations such as the American League of Colored Laborers, the National Negro Labor Council, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union; the accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction; the presidential election of 1876; and the end of Reconstruction).

  • 7. Analyze the long-term consequences of one aspect of the Jim Crow era (1870s–1960s) that limited educational and economic opportunities for African Americans (e.g., segregated public schools, white supremacist beliefs, the threat of violence from extra-legal groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka)

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High School United States History II

• Topic 4: Defending democracy: the Cold War and civil rights at home

  • 6. Evaluate accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement (e.g., the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act) and how they served as a model for the later feminist, disability, and gender rights movements of the 20th and 21st centuries; collect and analyze demographic data to investigate trends from 1964 to 2010 in areas such as voter registration and participation, median family income, or educational attainment among African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white populations.

  • 9. Research and analyze issues related to race relations in the United States since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including: the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and its impact on neighborhood integration; policies, court cases, and practices regarding affirmative action and their impact on diversity in the workforce and higher education; disparities and trends in educational achievement and attainment, health outcomes, wealth and income, and rates of incarceration; the election of the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama, in 2008 and 2012.