CROSSROADS

OUTLINE

Unit I: A WORLD OF THEIR OWN: AMERICA TO 1500s
Content and Concepts:

  1. Historians use a variety of methods, tools, and techniques to find out about the past.
  2. Geography affects culture.
  3. Indian tribes had their own histories, cultures, systems of government and laws, and understandings of how to live in the world.
  4. The Americas before the arrival of European explorers, missionaries, settlers, and colonists were home to a remarkable range of societies and cultures.

These four concepts divide neatly between substantive and methodological. The first and second concepts emphasize historical methodology: Just as in the middle-school curriculum, the teacher can use Unit I to introduce his or her students to the mindset and methods of the historian. Throughout the secondary-school curriculum, the teacher should encourage students to think of themselves as historians exploring the past -- using the tools the profession has developed over time, gathering and assessing evidence, framing arguments, and so forth.

The third and fourth concepts actually span the full range of the eight themes at the core of the Crossroads curriculum. This unit will introduce students to a wide variety of societies different from their own, and, by giving them the opportunity to apply familiar analytical concepts to unfamiliar peoples and societies, will enable them to explore those societies' and peoples' ideas, customs, usages, economies, religions, and dealings with one another.

Unit II: CONTACT: EUROPE AND AMERICA MEET, 1492-1673
Content and concepts

  1. Many geographic, economic, technological, personal, and political factors having their roots in the decades and centuries before the 1490s induced Europeans to launch voyages of exploration and discovery.
  2. The goals, purposes, and methods of the exploring European countries varied, reflecting the range of societies, cultures, and political systems that these countries possessed.
  3. Many -- but not all -- Europeans viewed and experienced the process of contact with American Indians as a process by which more civilized Europeans conquered barbaric Americans Indians for the rightful possession of the fertile and rich American territories.
  4. Many -- but not all -- Indians viewed and experienced the process of contact with European explorers, missionaries, and settlers as a process by which alien invaders shattered traditional cultures and ways of life.

Unit III: THE FOUNDING OF NEW SOCIETIES: 1607-1763
Content and concepts

  1. Geographic, economic, political, and social factors all shaped the development of the colonies.
  2. Europeans settled in the colonies for a variety of reasons. They also founded the communities in a variety of ways.
  3. Colonial society was monarchic. As a result, social rank was highly significant for both society as a whole and for the lives of individuals.
  4. The societies founded by the colonists were diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, government, and social rank.

Unit IV: WHAT WAS THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION? 1760-1836
Content and concepts

  1. The American Revolution had many causes -- political, economic, constitutional, social, legal, and ideological.
  2. The American Revolution also had many effects -- political, economic, constitutional, social, legal, and ideological -- beyond the mere winning of independence from Great Britain.
  3. Americans "revolutionized" their state and national constitutions.
  4. The United States Constitution was a document of compromise, balance, and flexibility.
  5. Challenges faced by the young nation led to broadened interpretations of the Constitution.

Unit V: THE AMBIGUOUS DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: 1800-1848
Content and concepts

  1. Various concepts and practices of democracy flourished in this period -- first the elitist democracy of Jeffersonian America, then the broader and more turbulent democracy of the Jacksonian period, and finally a profusion of movements for social and political reform in the 1840s.
  2. Americans continued to struggle to devise the proper balance among the power of the federal government, the sovereignty of the states, and the rights of individuals.
  3. As the nation more than doubled in size between 1800 and 1848, geographic, economic, political, and social differences among the North, South, and West spurred the growth of sectional rivalries and differences in interests.
  4. A distinctive American culture flowered during this period, encompassing innovations in and contributions to science, technology (especially transportation and communication), literature, and philosophy.
  5. Between the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States changed from a fragile new republic in a world of great powers to the dominant force in the Western Hemisphere -- while persisting in its indifference to European affairs.

Unit VI: "NOW WE ARE ENGAGED IN A GREAT CIVIL WAR": 1848-1880
Content and concepts

  1. The institution of slavery, which dehumanized African-Americans and exacerbated sectional tensions among North, South, and West, helped bring about the Civil War.
  2. From the 1780s to the 1850s, politicians hammered out a series of compromises among the sections that preserved the Union and delayed the outbreak of civil war, but in the 1850s efforts to use compromise to stave off civil war became increasingly desperate and ineffective.
  3. The Civil War transformed the nature and tools of war, the relations of individuals to their governments, and the lives of soldiers and civilians.
  4. As President, Abraham Lincoln not only led the Union in the Civil War, but led the Union in the war of ideas and arguments with the Confederacy; after his death, his victory in that war helped make him a beloved national hero and the central figure in American political thought.
  5. Reconstruction promised African-Americans a better way of life -- but Reconstruction failed by 1877, leading by the end of the century to the nation's abandonment of its African-American population and the rise of a segregated South.

Unit VII: "WHAT, THEN, IS THIS AMERICAN?": ca. 1865-1900
Content and concepts

  1. The rising tide of westward expansion shattered Indian civilizations in the American West, and gave rise to a thriving frontier civilization composed of such people as miners, cattlemen, and homesteaders.
  2. The United States became an industrial giant due to the rapid development of manufacturing technology, the growth of industrial capital investment, and the expansive growth of the industrial work force.
  3. The industrialization of the United States also led to the formation and growth of a labor union movement, as workers organized to defend their interests; the resulting conflict between management and labor threatened the nation's social peace and harmony.
  4. In this period, the United States was inundated by successive waves of immigrants from Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe and from Asia; these newcomers rapidly expanded the spectrum of American cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity but also faced ethnic and racial prejudice.
  5. At the end of the 19th century, the United States was poised to assume a leadership role in the community of nations.

Unit VIII: WAVES OF REFORM: 1890s -- 1921
Content and concepts

  1. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Populist and Progressive reformers exposed corruption, revitalized political institutions, regulated industry and commerce, attempted to cure social ills, extended political rights, and protected natural resources.
  2. These waves of reform differed in their origins, goals, and methods, with Populists focusing on the agrarian Middle and Far West and Progressive becoming a largely urban movement. Populists and Progressives even differed among themselves as to what reforms the nation should undertake and whom those reforms should benefit.
  3. In the first decades of the twentieth century, culminating with its entry into the First World War in 1917, the United States asserted a new leadership position in the world.
  4. This new role raised several questions: (i) Should the United States emulate the European great powers and become an imperial nation? (ii)What relationship should the United States have with its Western Hemisphere neighbors? (iii)Having reluctantly entered and helped to win the First World War, should the United States shoulder a major share of responsibility for world affairs by becoming a member of the League of Nations?

Unit IX: BOOM AND BUST: 1921-1933
Content and concepts

  1. Though Prohibition was supposed to make Americans more virtuous, sober, honest, and industrious, it actually led to lawlessness and corruption in American public and private life.
  2. Changes in technologies of transportation and communication, in values and habits, and in economic life transformed the face of American life in the 1920s, confirming that the United States had become decisively an urban nation with a diverse population and spectrum of values.
  3. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was both the culmination of political, social, and economic forces that had gone out of control in the 1920s and the harbinger of a vast and deep economic slump that would dominate the 1930s.
  4. The Great Depression dramatically changed the lives of most Americans, and began to change both their understanding of the economic system and the place of government in American life.

Unit X: THE AGE OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: 1933-1945
Content and concepts

  1. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Administration changed the role of government in solving the nation's problems, and Roosevelt skillfully made the Presidency the focus of American public life.
  2. The New Deal programs improved the lives of individual Americans during the Great Depression and transformed the role of the federal government in national life for half a century.
  3. The United States reluctantly found itself an increasingly important force in world politics in the 1930s, becoming the leading Allied power in the Second World War.
  4. The Second World War unleashed on the world by the Axis powers shattered the lives of millions of people around the world, and reached new levels of destructiveness, horror, and cruelty; at the same time, in large part because of the war aims of the United States and its allies, Americans continue to remember that war as "the good war."
  5. The development of the atomic bomb by the United States was a triumph of American scientific and technological endeavor; at the same time, the decision by President Harry S Truman to drop the atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific was difficult and controversial.

Unit XI: LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD: 1945-1975
Content and concepts

  1. Beginning in 1946, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a Cold War that led to political and military confrontations around the world.
  2. Postwar prosperity and the development of new technologies improved the lives of many Americans.
  3. In the 1950s, African-Americans launched a diverse reform movement under the banner of Civil Rights, pursuing strategies of litigation, political action, and nonviolent resistance to establish their right to equal protection of the laws. This movement ultimately made great strides in achieving civil rights, and inspired other movements such as that for women's rights and equality, but many obstacles have blocked the achievement of full social and economic equality for African-Americans and women.
  4. The Vietnam Conflict, a bitter struggle between the "free world" and Communist powers for political control of Asia, led to profound and bitter division in the United States.
  5. A succession of hammer-blows between 1963 and 1974 -- the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the collapse of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968; and the Watergate crisis that drove President Richard Nixon from office in 1974 -- shattered Americans' confidence in the nation's future.

Unit XII: A NATION IN QUANDARY: 1975 -- PRESENT
Content and concepts

  1. The succession of political and economic crises that dominated the 1970s continued to undermine Americans' faith in their political and economic systems.
  2. In the 1980s, American politics and society experienced a profound conservative shift in values and political assumptions that, for the first time in half a century, questioned the basic assumptions of American public life.
  3. The American economic system continued to experience relative decline when compared with the economies of the Pacific Rim nations such as Japan and South Korea -- in particular, declines in the strength and competitiveness American manufacturing industries.
  4. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 and the overthrow of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe transformed the face of world politics and brought an end to the Cold War, but the United States, the world's last superpower, struggled to define its place in world affairs and to work with other nations to devise a structure of world politics to succeed the Cold-War split between the Free World and the Communist bloc.
  5. American politics became increasingly volatile in the 1980s and 1990s, as the electorate seesawed between its perennial distrust of big, centralized government and its abiding desire that government help solve such major national problems as that of health care and care for the elderly.