A complete survey of United States history from the peoples of pre-contact North America to the present day. Each week pairs written lessons with free full-text readings from The American Yawp and OpenStax U.S. History, tracing how a diverse and often divided nation wrestled with its founding ideals of liberty and equality. The course treats slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and the long…

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Week 1 - Contact & Colonization

Native America and the first European colonies

Describe the diversity of Indigenous societies in North America before 1492.
Explain the causes and consequences of the Columbian Exchange.
Compare early Spanish, French, and English patterns of colonization.

Long before 1492, North America was home to millions of people living in societies as varied as the continent itself. In the Southwest, Ancestral Puebloans built multistory stone towns and irrigated the desert. Along the Mississippi River, the city of Cahokia housed tens of thousands at its height around 1100 CE, larger than London at the time. In the Northeast, peoples of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy governed themselves through a sophisticated council system. These were not empty lands awaiting discovery but a crowded, changing world of farmers, traders, and diplomats.

The Columbian Exchange

Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage, funded by Spain, linked two hemispheres that had developed apart for millennia. The resulting Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals, people, and diseases in both directions. Maize, potatoes, and tomatoes transformed diets in Europe, Africa, and Asia; horses and cattle reshaped Native life on the Plains. But the deadliest travelers were microbes. Smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which Indigenous peoples had no immunity, killed an estimated 50 to 90 percent of the population of the Americas over the following century, one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history.

Rival colonial projects

Europeans came for different reasons and built different kinds of colonies. Spain conquered wealthy empires in Mexico and Peru and extracted silver and labor through the encomienda system. France built a fur-trading network along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi that depended on Native alliances. England arrived later, planting Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 as a profit-seeking venture and, in 1620, the Pilgrims' Plymouth colony as a refuge for religious dissenters. From these small, fragile footholds a new set of societies would grow.

Key terms
Columbian Exchange: The transfer of plants, animals, people, and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world after 1492.
Cahokia: A large Mississippian city near present-day St. Louis, home to tens of thousands around 1100 CE.
Encomienda: A Spanish labor system granting colonists the right to demand tribute and forced work from Native peoples.
Haudenosaunee: The Iroquois Confederacy, a powerful alliance of Northeastern nations governed by a shared council.
Jamestown: The first permanent English settlement in North America, founded in Virginia in 1607.
Virgin soil epidemic: An outbreak in a population with no prior immunity, causing catastrophic death rates among Native Americans.

Week 2 - Colonial Society & Slavery

Colonial regions and the Atlantic slave trade

Distinguish the economies and societies of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies.
Explain how and why racial slavery took root in British North America.
Describe the structure and human cost of the Atlantic slave trade.

By the eighteenth century, British North America was not one society but several. The New England colonies, settled largely by Puritan families, built tight-knit towns around farming, fishing, shipping, and religious life. The Middle colonies - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania - were the most diverse, mixing English, Dutch, German, and Scots-Irish settlers and many faiths, and grew wealthy exporting grain. The Southern colonies, from the Chesapeake to the Carolinas, developed plantation economies growing tobacco, rice, and indigo for export, and came to depend on enslaved labor.

From servitude to racial slavery

Early Virginia relied heavily on indentured servants, poor Europeans who traded years of labor for passage across the Atlantic. But servants eventually went free and demanded land, and after Bacon's Rebellion (1676) revealed the danger of armed, landless former servants, planters turned decisively to enslaved Africans, whose bondage was made lifelong and hereditary in law. Colonial legislatures wrote slave codes defining enslaved people as property, stripping them of rights, and tying slavery explicitly to African ancestry. Slavery in the Americas became racial in a way it had not always been elsewhere.

The Middle Passage

The Atlantic slave trade forcibly carried roughly 12.5 million Africans across the ocean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; about 10.7 million survived the voyage known as the Middle Passage, chained in the holds of ships in conditions of appalling cruelty. Enslaved people were not passive victims: they preserved languages, faiths, and family ties, resisted through everything from work slowdowns to open revolt, and built enduring African American cultures. Their coerced labor generated much of the wealth of the colonial and, later, national economy.

Key terms
Indentured servant: A laborer bound to work for a set number of years, often in exchange for passage to the colonies.
Bacon's Rebellion: A 1676 uprising in Virginia that pushed planters toward hereditary racial slavery over indentured servitude.
Slave codes: Colonial laws defining enslaved people as property and denying them legal rights based on race.
Middle Passage: The brutal transatlantic voyage that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas.
Chattel slavery: A system treating enslaved people as inheritable personal property with no legal personhood.
Triangular trade: The Atlantic network exchanging manufactured goods, enslaved people, and raw commodities among Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Week 3 - The Road to Revolution

Imperial crisis from 1763 to 1775

Explain how the aftermath of the French and Indian War strained relations with Britain.
Analyze colonial objections to new taxes and the idea of "no taxation without representation."
Trace the escalation from protest to armed conflict by 1775.

Britain won the French and Indian War (1754-1763), driving France from most of North America, but victory left the empire deep in debt and facing the cost of governing vast new territory. To raise revenue and assert control, Parliament tightened its grip on the colonies. The Proclamation of 1763 barred settlement west of the Appalachians, angering land-hungry colonists, and a series of new taxes followed. Many colonists, long accustomed to governing their own affairs, saw these measures as a betrayal of their rights as Englishmen.

Taxation and resistance

The Stamp Act (1765) taxed printed materials and provoked fierce resistance organized by groups like the Sons of Liberty. Colonists insisted on "no taxation without representation": since they elected no members to Parliament, they argued, Parliament had no right to tax them directly. Boycotts of British goods proved economically powerful, and Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but asserted its authority through the Declaratory Act. Fresh duties under the Townshend Acts reignited the conflict, and tensions turned deadly with the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British soldiers killed five colonists.

From tea to war

In 1773, protesting a tax on tea and the East India Company's monopoly, colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party. Parliament retaliated with the Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in the colonies), closing Boston's port and curbing Massachusetts self-government. Delegates gathered in the First Continental Congress (1774) to coordinate resistance. When British troops marched to seize colonial arms, fighting erupted at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The imperial quarrel had become a war.

Key terms
French and Indian War: The North American theater of a global war (1754-1763) that expanded British territory but created huge debts.
Stamp Act: A 1765 tax on printed materials that sparked organized colonial resistance.
No taxation without representation: The colonial principle that Parliament could not tax people who elected no members to it.
Boston Tea Party: The 1773 destruction of British tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation and monopoly.
Coercive Acts: Punitive laws of 1774, known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, that closed Boston's port and curbed self-rule.
Sons of Liberty: Networks of colonial activists who organized protests and boycotts against British policies.

Week 4 - The American Revolution & Independence

War and the Declaration, 1775 to 1783

Explain the arguments and significance of the Declaration of Independence.
Identify the turning points that led to American victory.
Assess who gained and who was left out of the Revolution's promise.

When war began, independence was not yet the goal for most colonists. That changed in 1776, when Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense made a plain-language case for a break with monarchy and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In July, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson. Its ringing claim that "all men are created equal" and endowed with "unalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" announced a revolutionary principle - even as the document's author and many signers enslaved other human beings.

Winning the war

The Continental Army, led by George Washington, faced the world's strongest military. Washington's strategy was less to win outright than to keep his army alive and the cause going. The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 was the war's turning point: it convinced France to enter the war as an ally, bringing troops, money, and a navy. After years of grinding conflict, a combined American and French force trapped the British at Yorktown in 1781, forcing a surrender that broke Britain's will to fight. The Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized American independence.

A revolution for whom?

The Revolution's ideals outran its reality. Its language of liberty inspired enslaved people to seek freedom, sometimes by joining the British, who offered emancipation to those who fled Patriot masters. Northern states began gradual abolition, yet slavery survived and expanded in the South. Women like Abigail Adams urged leaders to "remember the ladies," but gained no political rights. Native nations, many of whom sided with Britain, lost land and leverage. The Revolution was genuinely radical in its ideas and deeply limited in whom it immediately freed.

Key terms
Common Sense: Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet arguing in plain language for American independence.
Declaration of Independence: The 1776 document announcing the colonies' separation from Britain and asserting natural rights.
Battle of Saratoga: The 1777 American victory that persuaded France to ally with the United States.
Treaty of Paris (1783): The agreement in which Britain recognized U.S. independence and its western borders.
Continental Army: The colonial fighting force, commanded by George Washington, that fought the war for independence.
Remember the ladies: Abigail Adams's 1776 appeal urging that women's interests be considered in the new republic.

Week 5 - The Constitution & the New Republic

Framing a government, 1787 to 1800

Explain why the Articles of Confederation were replaced.
Describe the major compromises of the Constitutional Convention.
Analyze the debates that shaped the early republic and its first political parties.

The first national government, under the Articles of Confederation, deliberately kept central power weak. Congress could not tax, regulate trade, or enforce its laws, and the resulting disorder, dramatized by Shays's Rebellion (1786-87), an armed uprising of indebted Massachusetts farmers, convinced many leaders that reform was urgent. In 1787, delegates met in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention, ostensibly to revise the Articles, and instead wrote an entirely new framework of government.

Compromise and the Constitution

The Convention balanced competing interests through compromise. The Great Compromise created a bicameral Congress with a House apportioned by population and a Senate giving each state equal votes. The morally troubling Three-Fifths Compromise counted three-fifths of the enslaved population for representation and taxation, boosting Southern power while denying those same people any rights. The Constitution also protected the slave trade until 1808 and required the return of fugitive slaves. Its federalism divided power between nation and states, and separation of powers split authority among three branches with checks and balances.

Ratification and first parties

Ratification pitted Federalists, who favored the new charter and a stronger union, against Anti-Federalists, who feared centralized power and demanded protections for individual liberty. Their insistence produced the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, in 1791. Under President Washington, disagreements over finance, foreign policy, and the reach of federal power hardened into the nation's first political parties: Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. The peaceful transfer of power after the bitter election of 1800 proved the system could hold.

Key terms
Articles of Confederation: The first U.S. framework of government, which created a weak central authority unable to tax.
Great Compromise: The agreement creating a House based on population and a Senate with equal state representation.
Three-Fifths Compromise: A provision counting three-fifths of enslaved people for representation and taxation.
Federalism: The division of power between a national government and the states.
Bill of Rights: The first ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing individual liberties.
Checks and balances: The system by which each branch of government can limit the powers of the others.

Week 6 - Jefferson, Jackson & Expansion

Democracy and removal, 1800 to 1840

Assess the significance of the Louisiana Purchase and westward expansion.
Explain the growth of popular democracy in the Jacksonian era.
Analyze the causes and human cost of Indian Removal.

The early republic expanded dramatically in size and self-confidence. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson seized the chance to buy the vast Louisiana Purchase from France, doubling the nation's territory and opening enormous lands to settlement, and, in the South, to the spread of slavery. The Lewis and Clark expedition mapped routes west, and a rising tide of white settlers pressed against the lands of Native nations. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states but exposed how expansion inflamed the slavery question.

The rise of Jacksonian democracy

By the 1820s and 1830s, most states had dropped property requirements for voting, dramatically widening the electorate among white men. Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, presented himself as champion of the "common man" against entrenched elites. This Jacksonian democracy celebrated popular participation and the spoils system of political patronage. Yet its expansion of democracy was explicitly racial and gendered: as white male suffrage grew, free Black men in several states actually lost the vote, and women and Native peoples remained excluded.

Indian Removal

The era's democratic rhetoric coexisted with brutal dispossession. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized forcing eastern Native nations west of the Mississippi. Even when the Cherokee won their case at the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Jackson refused to protect them. The result was the Trail of Tears, the forced march of the Cherokee and other nations, during which thousands died of exposure, disease, and starvation. Expansion and democracy for some were built directly on the removal of others.

Key terms
Louisiana Purchase: The 1803 acquisition of French territory that doubled the size of the United States.
Jacksonian democracy: A movement expanding political participation for white men while celebrating the common citizen.
Spoils system: The practice of rewarding political supporters with government jobs.
Indian Removal Act: An 1830 law authorizing the forced relocation of eastern Native nations westward.
Trail of Tears: The deadly forced march of the Cherokee and other nations from their homelands to Indian Territory.
Missouri Compromise: An 1820 agreement admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free to keep the sectional balance.

Week 7 - Slavery, Reform & Sectionalism

Reform movements and a house divided

Describe the system of slavery in the antebellum South and how enslaved people resisted it.
Explain the goals of antebellum reform movements, including abolition and women's rights.
Analyze how sectional conflict over slavery pushed the nation toward disunion.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the cotton gin and booming demand had made the South a slave society of immense economic power. Enslaved people labored under violence and the constant threat of sale that shattered families. Yet they resisted in countless ways - preserving families and faith, running away, and, in cases like Nat Turner's rebellion (1831), rising in revolt. The Underground Railroad helped thousands reach freedom, aided by figures such as Harriet Tubman, herself formerly enslaved.

An age of reform

The same decades saw a wave of reform movements, many rooted in religious revivalism. The abolitionist movement, led by Black activists like Frederick Douglass and white allies like William Lloyd Garrison, demanded an immediate end to slavery. In 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention launched an organized women's rights movement, its Declaration of Sentiments boldly declaring that "all men and women are created equal." Reformers also pursued temperance, prison and asylum reform, and public education, convinced that society could be perfected.

The widening sectional rift

Every attempt to manage slavery's expansion deepened the divide. The Compromise of 1850, including a harsh Fugitive Slave Act, satisfied no one for long. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) turned Northern opinion against slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) reopened the question of slavery in the territories and ignited violence in "Bleeding Kansas." The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857) declared that Black people had no rights and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories, inflaming the North further. Compromise was collapsing.

Key terms
Abolitionism: The movement demanding an immediate end to slavery.
Underground Railroad: A secret network that helped enslaved people escape to free states and Canada.
Seneca Falls Convention: The 1848 gathering that launched the organized women's rights movement in the United States.
Fugitive Slave Act: An 1850 law requiring the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, even in free states.
Kansas-Nebraska Act: An 1854 law letting territories decide on slavery by popular sovereignty, sparking violence.
Dred Scott decision: An 1857 Supreme Court ruling that denied Black citizenship and barred Congress from restricting slavery in the territories.

Week 8 - The Civil War

Secession, war, and emancipation

Explain why Southern states seceded after the election of 1860.
Identify the major turning points of the Civil War.
Analyze how the war became a struggle to end slavery.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, on a platform of halting slavery's expansion, convinced Southern leaders that their slave society was in danger. Eleven states seceded to form the Confederate States of America, insisting on their right to preserve and extend slavery; their own declarations of secession named the protection of slavery as the central cause. War began when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. What many expected to be a short conflict became the deadliest war in American history, killing roughly 750,000 people.

The course of the war

The Union held key advantages in population, industry, and railroads; the Confederacy counted on cotton diplomacy and skilled generals. Early Confederate victories in the East gave way to Union momentum. Antietam (1862), the bloodiest single day in American history, gave Lincoln the opening to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect January 1, 1863, declaring enslaved people in rebelling states free and redefining the war as a fight against slavery. The twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863 marked the war's turning point.

Emancipation and Union victory

Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors, many formerly enslaved, fought for the Union and their own freedom. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln recast the war as a test of whether a nation "conceived in Liberty" could endure, calling for "a new birth of freedom." After Ulysses S. Grant's relentless campaigns, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. Days later Lincoln was assassinated. The war preserved the Union and destroyed slavery, but left the nation to reckon with what freedom would mean.

Key terms
Secession: The withdrawal of Southern states from the Union to form the Confederacy.
Confederate States of America: The government formed by seceding Southern states to preserve slavery.
Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln's 1863 order declaring enslaved people in rebelling states to be free.
Battle of Gettysburg: The 1863 Union victory in Pennsylvania that marked a turning point in the war.
Gettysburg Address: Lincoln's brief 1863 speech redefining the war as a struggle for freedom and democracy.
Appomattox: The site of Lee's 1865 surrender to Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.

Week 9 - Reconstruction

Rebuilding and its betrayal, 1865 to 1877

Explain the goals and achievements of Reconstruction.
Describe the Reconstruction Amendments and the rights they promised.
Analyze why Reconstruction ended and what replaced it.

After the war, the nation faced enormous questions: On what terms would the Southern states rejoin? What would freedom mean for four million formerly enslaved people? Reconstruction (1865-1877) was the era in which Americans tried to answer them. Freedpeople seized the moment, reuniting families, building churches and schools, seeking land, and voting and holding office in large numbers for the first time. The Freedmen's Bureau offered aid and education, though limited resources and fierce opposition constrained it.

The Reconstruction Amendments

Three constitutional amendments aimed to secure freedom in law. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to all born in the United States and promised "equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barred denying the vote based on race. During Radical Reconstruction, Congress imposed military oversight on the South and enabled biracial governments that expanded public education and civil rights, a genuine, if fragile, experiment in interracial democracy.

Backlash and abandonment

White Southern resistance was ferocious. The Ku Klux Klan and allied groups used terror and murder to suppress Black political power. As Northern will faded and violence mounted, the disputed election of 1876 produced the Compromise of 1877, under which federal troops withdrew from the South. "Redeemer" governments then rolled back Black rights, laying the groundwork for Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement that would last for generations. Reconstruction's promises remained unfulfilled - an "unfinished revolution."

Key terms
Reconstruction: The 1865-1877 effort to reintegrate the South and define the rights of freedpeople.
Freedmen's Bureau: A federal agency providing aid, education, and legal help to formerly enslaved people.
Fourteenth Amendment: The 1868 amendment granting birthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws.
Fifteenth Amendment: The 1870 amendment barring denial of the vote based on race.
Compromise of 1877: The deal that resolved the 1876 election and ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops.
Jim Crow: The system of legally enforced racial segregation and disfranchisement that followed Reconstruction.

Week 10 - Industrialization & the Gilded Age

Big business, labor, and inequality

Explain how industrialization transformed the American economy after the Civil War.
Analyze the rise of big business and the response of organized labor.
Evaluate the politics and inequalities of the Gilded Age.

In the decades after the Civil War, the United States became the world's leading industrial power. Railroads knit the nation into a single market, while new technologies, abundant resources, and a growing workforce fueled explosive growth. Giant corporations emerged, dominated by industrialists like Andrew Carnegie in steel and John D. Rockefeller in oil, who built monopolies and trusts that controlled entire industries. Admirers called them "captains of industry"; critics called them "robber barons" for their ruthless tactics.

Workers and the labor movement

Industrial wealth rested on the labor of millions who often worked long hours for low pay in dangerous conditions. Workers organized to fight back. Unions like the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor sought better wages and hours, and confrontations sometimes turned violent, as in the Haymarket affair (1886), the Homestead Strike, and the Pullman Strike. Employers and courts frequently sided against unions, and the struggle over the rights of labor became one of the era's defining conflicts.

Gilded Age politics and thought

Mark Twain named the era the Gilded Age - glittering on the surface, corrupt beneath. Politics were marked by patronage and machine rule, and the gap between rich and poor yawned wide. The doctrine of Social Darwinism justified inequality as natural, while defenders of unregulated capitalism preached laissez-faire. Yet reformers, farmers, and workers increasingly demanded that government check corporate power - a demand that would swell into the Populist and Progressive movements.

Key terms
Gilded Age: The late 1800s era of rapid industrial growth, vast wealth, and deep corruption and inequality.
Monopoly / trust: Arrangements that let a single company or combination dominate and control an entire industry.
Robber barons: A critical label for industrialists who amassed fortunes through ruthless business practices.
American Federation of Labor: A federation of skilled-worker unions focused on wages, hours, and working conditions.
Haymarket affair: An 1886 Chicago labor rally that turned deadly and set back the labor movement.
Social Darwinism: The misuse of evolutionary ideas to justify social inequality as natural and inevitable.

Week 11 - Immigration, Cities & the West

Newcomers, urban growth, and the frontier

Describe the scale and sources of immigration in the late nineteenth century.
Explain the growth of American cities and the challenges of urban life.
Analyze the conquest and settlement of the West and its impact on Native peoples.

Between the 1870s and 1910s, tens of millions of immigrants arrived, increasingly from southern and eastern Europe, alongside Asian immigrants on the West Coast. Many passed through Ellis Island in New York or Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. They filled the factories and cities, forming vibrant ethnic neighborhoods. Their arrival also fueled nativism, hostility to the foreign-born, which produced measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the first major U.S. law to bar a group by nationality.

The rise of the city

America urbanized rapidly. Cities swelled with newcomers and grew upward with steel-framed skyscrapers and outward with streetcars. But rapid growth brought overcrowded tenements, disease, and political machines like New York's Tammany Hall that traded services for votes. Reformers and journalists exposed these conditions; Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives documented slum poverty, and settlement houses like Jane Addams's Hull House tried to aid immigrant communities.

Closing the frontier

In the West, railroads, miners, ranchers, and farmers pushed onto lands still held by Native nations. The federal government waged war and confined Native peoples to reservations, and the Dawes Act (1887) sought to break up communal tribal lands and force assimilation, costing Native nations millions of acres. The massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) marked a grim close to armed Native resistance. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier was "closed," even as the mythology of the West took hold in American culture.

Key terms
Ellis Island: The main immigration station in New York Harbor that processed millions of European arrivals.
Chinese Exclusion Act: An 1882 law barring Chinese immigration, the first U.S. law to exclude a group by nationality.
Nativism: Hostility toward immigrants and a preference for native-born inhabitants.
Tenement: A crowded, often unsafe urban apartment building housing many poor and immigrant families.
Political machine: A party organization that traded jobs and favors for votes and loyalty.
Dawes Act: An 1887 law dividing tribal lands into individual plots to force Native assimilation, costing tribes vast acreage.

Week 12 - Progressive Era & American Empire

Reform at home, expansion abroad

Explain the goals and reforms of the Progressive movement.
Describe the expansion of American power overseas around 1900.
Analyze the tensions between democratic ideals and imperial and racial realities.

By 1900, many Americans concluded that industrial society needed active reform. The Progressive Era brought a broad, if varied, push to curb corporate power, clean up government, and address social ills. Investigative journalists called muckrakers, such as Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed the meatpacking industry, spurred laws like the Pure Food and Drug Act. Progressives won reforms including the direct election of senators, the income tax, and expanded regulation of business, and women reformers were central throughout.

Reformers and their limits

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embraced parts of the Progressive agenda, from trust-busting to conservation to banking reform. The long campaign for women's suffrage triumphed with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Yet Progressivism had real limits and blind spots: many Progressives supported segregation and immigration restriction, and the era coincided with the entrenchment of Jim Crow, prompting Black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and organizations like the NAACP to press for racial justice the mainstream movement neglected.

The United States as a world power

Abroad, the nation flexed new muscle. The Spanish-American War (1898) ended Spanish rule in Cuba and gave the U.S. control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, where a brutal war suppressed Filipino independence fighters. The U.S. annexed Hawaii, asserted an "Open Door" in China, and built the Panama Canal. This new imperialism stirred sharp debate: could a republic founded on self-government rule distant peoples without their consent?

Key terms
Progressive Era: An early-1900s reform movement to curb corporate power and address social problems.
Muckrakers: Investigative journalists who exposed corruption and abuses to spur reform.
Nineteenth Amendment: The 1920 amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.
Spanish-American War: An 1898 war that ended Spanish rule in Cuba and gave the U.S. an overseas empire.
Imperialism: The policy of extending a nation's power over foreign territories and peoples.
NAACP: A civil rights organization founded in 1909 to combat racial discrimination and segregation.

Week 13 - World War I & the 1920s

Global war and a decade of change

Explain why the United States entered World War I and how the war affected the home front.
Describe the cultural conflicts and consumer boom of the 1920s.
Analyze the tensions between modernity and tradition in the postwar decade.

The United States entered World War I in 1917, after years of neutrality, provoked by German submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram. American troops helped tip the balance to Allied victory in 1918. At home, the war expanded federal power, mobilized the economy, and fueled a wave of patriotism that curdled into repression: the Espionage and Sedition Acts jailed dissenters, and German Americans faced suspicion. President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic vision for a League of Nations failed when the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and the country turned inward.

Boom and its anxieties

The 1920s roared with prosperity and cultural ferment. Mass production made automobiles, radios, and appliances widely available, and a new consumer culture spread through advertising and installment buying. Cities pulsed with jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance produced a flowering of Black art, music, and literature. Yet the decade also saw Prohibition, which banned alcohol and bred organized crime, a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and strict new immigration quotas favoring northern Europeans.

Modernity versus tradition

The 1920s were a battleground between change and reaction. The Great Migration of Black Southerners to Northern cities reshaped American life and culture. "New Women" claimed greater independence after winning the vote. But many Americans recoiled from these changes: the Scopes Trial (1925) dramatized the clash between evolutionary science and religious fundamentalism, and rural, native-born Protestants often felt besieged by urban, immigrant, and modern culture. The decade's contradictions ran deep beneath its glittering surface.

Key terms
World War I: The 1914-1918 global war the United States entered in 1917 on the Allied side.
League of Nations: Wilson's proposed international body, which the U.S. Senate declined to join.
Harlem Renaissance: A 1920s flowering of African American art, music, and literature centered in Harlem.
Prohibition: The nationwide ban on alcohol (1920-1933) that fueled organized crime.
Great Migration: The mass movement of Black Southerners to Northern and Western cities in the twentieth century.
Scopes Trial: A 1925 trial over teaching evolution that spotlighted the clash of science and fundamentalism.

Week 14 - The Great Depression & New Deal

Economic collapse and federal response, 1929 to 1939

Explain the causes and human impact of the Great Depression.
Describe the major programs and philosophy of the New Deal.
Assess how the New Deal reshaped the role of the federal government.

The stock market crash of October 1929 signaled the start of the Great Depression, the deepest economic collapse in American history. By 1933, roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, banks failed by the thousands, and families lost homes and farms. In the Plains, drought and poor land use created the Dust Bowl, driving desperate migrants westward. President Herbert Hoover's limited response left many feeling abandoned, and shantytowns called "Hoovervilles" spread.

The New Deal

Elected in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised a "New Deal" and launched a flurry of programs in his first hundred days. The New Deal pursued "relief, recovery, and reform." Agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration put millions to work; the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to a poor region; and banking and stock market regulations sought to prevent future crises. FDR's fireside chats over the radio reassured a frightened nation.

A new role for government

The Social Security Act (1935) created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, establishing a lasting safety net, while the Wagner Act protected workers' right to organize, fueling a surge in union membership. The New Deal did not end the Depression - that took the spending of World War II - and it often shortchanged Black Americans, farmworkers, and domestic workers, who were excluded from key programs. Still, it permanently expanded the federal government's responsibility for economic security and forged a Democratic coalition that shaped politics for decades.

Key terms
Great Depression: The severe worldwide economic downturn of the 1930s that began with the 1929 crash.
Dust Bowl: The drought and dust storms that devastated the Great Plains and displaced farm families.
New Deal: FDR's programs for relief, recovery, and reform during the Depression.
Social Security Act: A 1935 law creating old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
Wagner Act: A 1935 law protecting workers' right to organize and bargain collectively.
Fireside chats: FDR's radio addresses that reassured and informed the public during hard times.

Week 15 - World War II & the Cold War

Global conflict and superpower rivalry

Explain the U.S. role in World War II and the war's impact at home.
Describe the origins and central features of the Cold War.
Analyze how anticommunism and superpower rivalry shaped American life.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II. The nation mobilized totally: factories churned out weapons, women entered the workforce in vast numbers as "Rosie the Riveter," and the economy finally roared out of the Depression. The war also brought injustice at home, most notably the forced internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans. Abroad, U.S. forces fought across Europe and the Pacific, and the war ended after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The full horror of the Holocaust, the Nazi murder of six million Jews, came into view.

The Cold War begins

Victory gave way to rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers left standing. The Cold War was a decades-long global contest between capitalism and communism, fought through proxy wars, alliances, an arms race, and propaganda rather than direct combat. The U.S. adopted a strategy of containment, aiding Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and forming NATO. The rivalry turned hot in Korea (1950-1953) and cast a shadow over the globe as both sides amassed nuclear weapons.

The Cold War at home

Fear of communism reshaped American society. The Red Scare and the reckless accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, known as McCarthyism, ruined careers and chilled dissent. Yet the postwar years also brought prosperity: the GI Bill sent veterans to college and helped fuel a booming middle class and the growth of suburbs. That prosperity was unevenly shared, often excluding Black families through discriminatory housing and lending, setting the stage for the civil rights struggles to come.

Key terms
Pearl Harbor: The 1941 Japanese attack that brought the United States into World War II.
Japanese American internment: The wartime forced relocation and imprisonment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans.
Cold War: The prolonged rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after World War II.
Containment: The U.S. strategy of preventing the spread of communism.
McCarthyism: The aggressive anticommunist campaign of accusations and blacklisting in the early Cold War.
GI Bill: A law providing education and home-loan benefits to World War II veterans.

Week 16 - Civil Rights to the Present

Rights movements and modern America, 1954 to today

Explain the goals, strategies, and achievements of the civil rights movement.
Describe major social and political changes from the 1960s to the present.
Connect the long struggle over rights and democracy to current events.

In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruled school segregation unconstitutional, energizing the civil rights movement. Through the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, activists used nonviolent protest to confront Jim Crow. Their courage, met with fierce and often violent resistance, produced landmark laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public life, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected the ballot. The movement also inspired others - for women, Latinos, Native Americans, and LGBTQ Americans - to demand equality.

An era of upheaval and realignment

The 1960s and 1970s brought turmoil and change: the divisive Vietnam War and the protests against it, the rise of a youth counterculture, and the Watergate scandal that forced President Nixon's resignation in 1974 and deepened public distrust of government. A conservative resurgence, crystallized by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, reshaped politics around lower taxes, deregulation, and traditional values. The Cold War ended peacefully around 1989-1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the U.S. as the sole superpower.

Into the present

Recent decades have been shaped by the September 11, 2001 attacks and the ensuing wars, a digital and economic revolution, deepening political polarization, and continuing debates over immigration, inequality, and race, including the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The country elected its first Black president in 2008 and has grown more diverse than ever. The great themes of this course - the meaning of freedom, who counts as a full citizen, and the reach of democracy - remain unsettled and hotly contested. Use the sidebar "latest" links to see how these long histories play out in today's headlines, and to connect what you have learned to the news of your own moment.

Key terms
Brown v. Board of Education: The 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional.
Civil Rights Act of 1964: A landmark law banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: A law that outlawed practices used to deny Black Americans the vote.
Vietnam War: A long, divisive Cold War conflict that sparked major antiwar protest at home.
Watergate: The political scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974.
Black Lives Matter: A twenty-first-century movement against racial injustice and police violence.

United States History