Concepts:

There are at least two reasons for high school students to engage fully in the experience of Americans during the period in American history. The first appears in the opening of CROSSROADS Essay VI, which points out that this period is "a perfect historical laboratory to examine central questions of understanding history. . . ." The five questions that follow force the student to think well beyond the period. They force the student to reflect on earlier studies and to anticipate both future studies of history and their own futures as well.

Does a great event, such as the Civil War, have an identifiable cause (or set of causes)?

What is the place of "great men" (such as Lincoln or Lee) and what is the place of ordinary people in history?

What place does politics play in history? Is it central, or is it just a preoccupation of those who have power, irrelevant to those who do not have it?

What do such concepts as "freedom," "emancipation," "slavery," "federalism," and "equality" mean? Do they have one unchanging meaning over time, or do they change over time?

Is war glorious, terrible, or both? What does it mean to go to war, to take part in war?

A second is to build the realization that war of any kind -- whether between nations (such as the French and Indian, 1812, and Mexican wars), revolutionary (such as the war for American independence) or between civilians of one nation (such as the Civil War) -- is the most drastic, unwanted, and inhumane means by which humans attempt to solve their differences. This point is borne out by the attempts by the people of the United State to use persuasion and compromise to avoid such drastic solutions, by the horror and devastation that the war brought to both paries, and by the complex and troubling legacy the Civil War left for posterity.

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Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5