United States History: 1877 to the Present

This is where the course starts: the period right after Reconstruction when factories, railroads, and a handful of very rich men reshaped the country faster than the law could keep up. Your child will look at real strike accounts, wage data, and immigration numbers and build an argument about whether industrial growth mostly helped ordinary Americans or mostly hurt them, and the honest answer is 'it depends who you ask,' which is the point.

1. The distinguishing features of a trust versus a monopoly+

   Given a definition and a short scenario, the student classifies a described business arrangement as either a trust, a monopoly, both, or neither, and states which feature of the scenario determined the classification.

2. The gap between the Sherman Antitrust Act's text and its actual enforcement in the Gilded Age+

   The student explains why the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) was rarely enforced against major trusts during the period it was in effect within this unit, citing at least one specific structural or political reason from the unit's sources.

3. The robber baron vs. captain of industry interpretive framework applied to the same historical actor+

   Given Carnegie's 'Gospel of Wealth' excerpt and a Homestead strike worker's account describing the same company, the student compares how each source characterizes the relationship between industrial wealth and worker welfare, and identifies the value each author prioritizes.

4. The mixed and group-dependent effects of industrialization on wages, immigration, and urban living conditions+

   The student infers, from a set of unlabeled wage, immigration, and urban population data for 1877-1900, whether industrialization's effects on ordinary Americans were uniformly positive, uniformly negative, or mixed depending on which group is examined, and states which specific data point most complicates a one-sided claim.

5. The pattern of government intervention favoring employers in Gilded Age labor disputes+

   Given a new, previously unseen primary source excerpt from a Gilded Age labor dispute the student has not studied (e.g., a coal strike outside the unit's covered cases), the student determines which side of the strike the government sided with and generates a plausible reason why, based on patterns identified across the unit's studied strikes.

6. The builder-versus-destroyer historical debate over Gilded Age big business, evaluated across a mixed document set+

   The student constructs a DBQ argument answering whether big business in the Gilded Age was more a builder or destroyer of American opportunity, using all 5 provided documents, that explicitly addresses at least one instance where two documents are in tension rather than treating all documents as pointing the same direction.

7. The chronological sequence of major Gilded Age economic and labor events, 1877-1900+

   The student recalls the correct chronological order of five key events (Sherman Antitrust Act 1890, Homestead Strike 1892, Panic of 1893, Pullman Strike 1894, formation of a major trust) without reference to notes.

8. The role of government policy (tariffs, land grants, court injunctions) in enabling industrial growth, against a purely self-made narrative+

   Given an argument claiming 'industrialists were entirely self-made and government played no role in their success,' the student critiques the argument by identifying at least two specific pieces of counter-evidence from the unit (e.g., tariff protection, land grants to railroads) that the claim ignores.

9. The transferability of the builder/destroyer interpretive framework to market concentration in an unstudied historical or contemporary context+

   Given a claim about a completely different historical period never discussed in this course (e.g., 21st-century Big Tech antitrust debates, described only in a short unlabeled scenario), the student determines whether the same builder/destroyer interpretive tension from the Gilded Age applies, and justifies the judgment using the structural criteria (market control, worker/consumer impact, government response) developed in this unit rather than any surface similarity.

Now that your child knows what was broken in the Gilded Age, this unit asks whether the fixes actually worked, or whether the people doing the 'fixing' were also doing some controlling of their own. It's 14 days of matching specific abuses to specific reforms, and confronting the uncomfortable fact that the same reformers who protected factory workers also pushed immigration restriction and other exclusionary laws.

1. Muckraking journalism as a documentary genre exposing specific industrial/urban conditions+

   Given a primary-source excerpt from a muckraking text (e.g., The Jungle, How the Other Half Lives), the student identifies the specific abuse or condition the author is documenting and states it in one sentence.

2. The causal relationship between a specific documented industrial/economic abuse and a specific Progressive-era regulatory response+

   The student matches a specific Gilded Age abuse (named in Unit 1) to the single Progressive-era reform or regulatory agency that most directly targeted the mechanism of that abuse, citing text from both units.

3. The legal distinction in antitrust law between firm size and anticompetitive practice+

   The student explains why the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts targeted the mechanism of monopolistic pricing/rebate practices rather than the existence of large companies as such.

4. The dual character of Progressive-era reform legislation as simultaneously protective and controlling+

   The student classifies a list of specific Progressive-era reforms (workplace safety laws, prohibition, immigration literacy tests, direct primary, eugenics-based sterilization statutes) according to whether each expanded protection for a group or restricted/controlled a group.

5. The internal contradictions and shared underlying motives (social control, efficiency, moral order) within the Progressive coalition+

   The student constructs a written argument explaining why the same Progressive coalition could simultaneously support protective labor legislation and restrictive/exclusionary legislation, resolving the apparent contradiction rather than merely listing both types.

6. The conservation-versus-preservation distinction in Progressive-era federal land policy+

   Given the contrasting cases of Gifford Pinchot's conservationist resource-management approach and John Muir's preservationist approach, the student infers the underlying disagreement about the purpose of federal public land, without being told the distinction in advance.

7. The multi-decade organizational campaign (state campaigns, NAWSA strategy, wartime leverage) leading to constitutional ratification+

   The student traces the specific sequence of organizational and legislative steps between the initial moral/political claim for women's suffrage and the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, without skipping intermediate institutional steps.

8. The general procedure of matching a documented abuse's specific mechanism to a reform's specific legal provision+

   The student applies the abuse-to-reform matching procedure (developed in this unit) to a specific reform-abuse pair from a Progressive-era policy area not directly taught in this unit's lessons (e.g., pure food/drug regulation applied to a not-previously-discussed adulteration practice, or banking-panic regulation applied to the Federal Reserve Act).

9. The recurring, generalizable tension between market freedom and government regulatory authority as a pattern across historical periods, not a fact specific to 1900-1916+

   The student generalizes the regulation-vs-market tension identified across Units 1-2 into a statement about how the boundary between market freedom and government authority gets renegotiated, applicable beyond the Progressive Era.

This 16-day unit (second quarter) covers how a total war rebuilt the American economy and government at an even bigger scale than the New Deal did, and asks a hard, uncomfortable question: how do you fight a war for freedom abroad while denying it to Japanese Americans, Black service members, and women at home? Your child will build a single evidence-based essay across the whole unit rather than writing it all at the end.

1. The transition from New Deal relief spending to wartime deficit spending as the mechanism that ended the Depression+

   Explain how the shift from Depression-era relief spending to wartime production spending (1940-1944) ended mass unemployment, citing at least two specific mechanisms (military conscription reducing labor supply, federal war contracts).

2. Categories of home-front wartime measures (economic mobilization, social control, civil liberties restriction)+

   Classify a set of ten short home-front practices (rationing books, victory gardens, war bond drives, price controls, women riveters, Japanese American removal orders, Double V campaign editorials, labor union no-strike pledges, propaganda posters, conscription notices) as primarily economic mobilization, primarily social control, or primarily civil liberties restriction, and justify borderline cases.

3. The legal/political justification mechanisms behind Japanese American incarceration versus military segregation+

   Compare the legal and political mechanisms used to justify Japanese American incarceration (Executive Order 9066, Korematsu v. United States) with the legal and political mechanisms used to justify continued segregation of Black service members, identifying one structural similarity and one structural difference in how the federal government justified each.

4. The persuasive intent embedded in a specific piece of wartime government propaganda+

   Infer the likely motivation behind a specific instance of wartime government messaging (a Rosie the Riveter poster, an Office of War Information film clip, or a war bond advertisement) by identifying who is being addressed, what behavior is sought, and what is left unsaid, using no external source beyond the artifact and its publication context.

5. Corroboration of an unseen primary source against previously studied unit evidence on the home front+

   Given a primary source excerpt the student has not seen before (e.g., a letter from a Japanese American internee, a Double V campaign editorial, or a war worker's oral history not used in class), corroborate its claims against at least one other unit source and identify one point of agreement and one point the new source adds that class sources did not cover.

6. An argument evaluating U.S. fidelity to its stated WWII war aims using home-front and incarceration/segregation evidence+

   Construct a source-based written argument, using at least one home-front document and one incarceration-or-military-segregation document, that takes a defensible position on whether the U.S. lived up to its stated war aims, addressing at least one plausible counterargument.

7. The generalizable legal pattern of 'military necessity' reasoning as applied beyond the Japanese American incarceration case+

   Given a brand-new case not covered in this unit (e.g., internment-adjacent restriction of German or Italian resident aliens, or a hypothetical modern wartime civil-liberties scenario), predict and justify whether the same legal reasoning used in Korematsu could apply, generalizing the 'military necessity outweighs individual rights claim' pattern beyond the taught case.

8. The chronological sequence of events from U.S. neutrality to the Pearl Harbor attack+

   Recall the chronological sequence of the road to Pearl Harbor (Neutrality Acts, Lend-Lease, oil embargo on Japan, Pearl Harbor attack, declaration of war) in correct order.

9. The Double V campaign's dual-victory framing and its logic+

   Summarize the Double V campaign's dual aims (victory over fascism abroad, victory over racism at home) and explain why the Pittsburgh Courier framed the two as inseparable rather than sequential.

An 18-day unit (originally planned for 17, but two lessons needed a second day each) on how the 1960s produced both the biggest civil rights laws in a century and a war that badly damaged public trust in government. Your child extends the movement-mechanics pattern from Unit 4 to Black Power, women's liberation, and environmental organizing, and works through Vietnam's escalation and the gap between what officials said and what was actually happening on the ground.

1. The chronological sequence of Great Society legislation and Vietnam escalation, 1963-1972+

   Given a blank 1963-1972 timeline, place at least 8 major Great Society and Vietnam escalation events in correct chronological order and state one causal link between two adjacent events.

2. The mechanism differences between Great Society programs and New Deal agencies+

   Explain how at least two specific Great Society programs (e.g., Medicare, Head Start) targeted a different population or mechanism than a named New Deal agency, using the regulation-vs-market thread vocabulary.

3. The four-part social movement mechanics frame applied to post-1965 civil rights organizing+

   Apply the four-part social movement mechanics frame (organizing, media strategy, legal strategy, backlash) developed in Unit 4 to explain the post-1965 civil rights movement's shift toward economic justice and Black Power.

4. The shared organizing/media/legal-strategy structure across the women's liberation and environmental movements+

   Compare the organizing, media, and legal strategies of the women's liberation movement and the environmental movement to identify a shared underlying structure, before either strategy set was explicitly named as an instance of the movement-mechanics frame.

5. The applicability and limits of the movement-mechanics frame when applied to the anti-war student movement+

   Given no prior instruction connecting the frame to this specific case, determine whether the anti-Vietnam-War student movement fits the four-part movement-mechanics frame or requires a modified version of it, and justify the determination with evidence.

6. Evidence of a credibility gap between official statements and battlefield reality in Vietnam-era primary sources+

   Evaluate a primary source news broadcast or government statement about the Vietnam War for evidence of a credibility gap, citing specific textual or visual details that contradict an official claim.

7. The relative causal weight of Vietnam versus domestic unrest in damaging public trust in government, 1963-1972+

   Construct a ranked causal argument, using at least four primary sources, for whether Vietnam or domestic unrest did more lasting damage to American public trust in government, explicitly weighing and connecting the sources rather than listing them.

8. The containment doctrine as applied to the strategic logic of Vietnam intervention+

   Recall the definition and one historical application of 'containment' and 'sphere of influence' from Unit 5, then correctly apply 'containment' to explain the strategic logic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Covers 1973 to 1991: the pivot away from the New Deal/Great Society approach toward deregulation and tax cuts, the assembly of the modern conservative coalition, and the Soviet Union's collapse. This 16-day unit treats the 1980s as another turn of two arguments the course has followed since Unit 1, how much the government should regulate the economy, and what containment actually means, rather than as an isolated decade about one president.

1. Stagflation as a crisis of the Keynesian policy consensus+

   Explain how stagflation (simultaneous inflation and unemployment) undermined confidence in the Keynesian demand-management consensus that had governed U.S. economic policy since the New Deal.

2. Supply-side and monetarist economic policy versus Keynesian demand management+

   Classify specific 1980s policy changes (e.g., ERTA tax cuts, airline and trucking deregulation, Fed interest rate policy under Volcker) as either supply-side/monetarist or Keynesian in their underlying economic logic.

3. The continuity and change in the regulation-vs-market argument across 100+ years of U.S. history+

   Compare the economic-argument thread from Unit 1 (laissez-faire vs. trust regulation), Unit 3 (New Deal regulation), and Unit 7 (deregulation) to identify what stays constant in the underlying dispute and what changes with each era's circumstances.

4. The composition of the New Right political coalition+

   Identify the three major constituencies (economic conservatives, religious/social conservatives, Cold War hawks) that made up the New Right coalition and give a specific 1970s-80s example of each.

5. Social movement mechanics (organizing, media strategy, backlash) applied to the New Right+

   Explain how the mechanics of social movement organizing (framed explicitly in Unit 6) apply to the New Right as a movement -- its organizing infrastructure, media strategy, and use of backlash against the 1960s-70s left -- rather than treating it only as a set of election results.

6. Continuity and change in containment doctrine from Truman/Kennan through Vietnam to the Reagan Doctrine+

   Compare the Reagan Doctrine's approach to containment with the containment doctrine as originally articulated by Kennan and applied in Vietnam (Units 5-6) to determine what continued and what changed.

7. Competing historical explanations for the Soviet collapse (internal weakness vs. external/U.S. pressure)+

   Given a primary source excerpt from a U.S. policymaker or a Soviet official never encountered in class, infer which side of the internal-weakness-versus-external-pressure debate about Soviet collapse the author's evidence would support, and identify what additional evidence would be needed to test that inference.

8. A defensible causal argument about the primary cause of Soviet collapse, structured to rebut the counter-argument+

   Construct a rebuttal-integrated causal essay arguing a primary cause of Soviet collapse that explicitly anticipates and answers the strongest evidence for the opposing causal explanation, using both U.S.-policy and internal-Soviet evidence.

9. Transfer of the regulation-vs-market and engagement-vs-restraint frameworks to an unstudied case+

   Given an economic or foreign-policy scenario from a country or era never studied in this course (e.g., a hypothetical or real case of a government facing simultaneous inflation and stagnant growth, or a great power confronting an ideological rival in decline), apply the regulation-vs-market and containment-vs-restraint frameworks built across this course to generate a reasoned prediction of likely policy responses and their contested justifications.

10. Single-cause claims about Soviet collapse versus multi-causal historical explanation+

    Critique a textbook or documentary claim that attributes Soviet collapse to a single cause (e.g., 'Reagan won the Cold War') by identifying what evidence the claim omits and what alternative causal weighting a professional historian might offer.

Roughly 1991 to 2008: the period after the Soviet Union fell when the U.S. had no single organized rival, global trade expanded fast (NAFTA, WTO, China), and 9/11 eventually ended that whole interlude. This 16-day unit asks what happens to the regulation-vs-market argument and the containment argument once each one's original reason for existing (New Deal-era problems, the Cold War) is gone.

1. The shift from containment to a post-Cold War foreign policy without a single organizing rival+

   Given a timeline of 1989-2001 events, identify which events represent continuity with Cold War containment logic and which represent a genuinely new foreign policy problem.

2. Competing candidate organizing logics for post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy+

   Explain why the absence of a single rival power (like the USSR) made it harder for policymakers in the 1990s to agree on a single goal for U.S. foreign policy, using at least two competing candidate goals (humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, counterterrorism) as evidence.

3. Humanitarian intervention decisions in the 1990s+

   Given a case (Somalia 1993, Bosnia 1995, Rwanda 1994, or Kosovo 1999), classify the U.S./international response as intervention or non-intervention and identify the stated justification offered at the time.

4. The inconsistency of humanitarian intervention criteria across 1990s cases+

   Compare the Rwanda non-intervention and Kosovo intervention decisions to infer what conditions made U.S./NATO policymakers more willing to act in one case than the other.

5. The domestic wage and employment effects of trade liberalization in the 1990s-2000s+

   Using NAFTA/WTO-era trade and manufacturing wage data, generate a claim about whether free trade made the average American worker better or worse off, and identify at least one piece of the data that complicates a simple yes/no answer.

6. The regulation-vs-market thread as a transferable analytic framework+

   Given an unfamiliar current trade or globalization dispute (e.g., a 2020s tariff or outsourcing controversy never discussed in class), apply the regulation-vs-market framework built across this course to predict which side of the debate different political and economic actors would likely take, and justify the prediction with evidence from at least two prior units.

7. September 11th and the war on terror as a turning point in U.S. foreign policy organization+

   Explain how the September 11th attacks functioned as a hinge point that ended the 1990s' multiple-candidate foreign policy debate and replaced it with counterterrorism as the new organizing logic.

8. Post-Cold War foreign policy patterns as competing frameworks for evaluating new cases+

   Given a novel post-2008 foreign policy decision never discussed in class (e.g., a 2010s or 2020s intervention debate), evaluate whether it more closely resembles the 1990s humanitarian-intervention pattern or the post-9/11 counterterrorism pattern, and justify the choice with named criteria.

9. The tech and information economy's economic effects in the 1990s+

   Summarize the main claim and at least one piece of supporting evidence from an assigned reading on the tech/information economy's effect on late-1990s productivity and employment.

10. A data-supported argument about globalization's domestic economic effects+

    Draft a thesis-driven explanatory paragraph using at least two numerical data points from trade/wage sources to support a claim about globalization's domestic effects, correctly citing which source each data point came from.

The capstone unit. Sixteen days pulling together the post-9/11 security state, the 2008 financial crisis, and today's social movements that use digital tools, and requiring your child to connect each one back to arguments built earlier in the year. It ends with a research-based essay and the course's cumulative final exam.

1. Post-9/11 security legislation and institutions+

   Recall the sequence and basic provisions of major post-9/11 security legislation and institutions (PATRIOT Act, Department of Homeland Security, warrantless surveillance programs).

2. The causal chain of the 2008 financial crisis+

   Execute the basic financial-crisis causal chain (subprime lending -> mortgage-backed securities -> bank failures -> TARP/bailout -> Dodd-Frank) by correctly sequencing and labeling each stage.

3. Deregulatory reasoning across the Gilded Age and pre-2008 periods+

   Compare the deregulatory arguments used to justify Gilded Age trust behavior (Unit 1) with those used to justify pre-2008 financial deregulation, identifying structural similarities and differences in the reasoning.

4. Post-2008 regulatory expansion (Dodd-Frank, consumer protection agencies)+

   Explain why federal regulatory power expanded after 2008 in terms consistent with the course's recurring claim that crises expand federal power more durably than they contract it.

5. Organizing tactics of a contemporary social movement+

   Classify organizing tactics used by a contemporary movement (e.g., Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or immigration-reform organizing) according to the movement-mechanics framework (organizing, media strategy, legal strategy, backlash) built in Units 4-6.

6. Prediction of policy response in an unfamiliar liberty-security scenario+

   Given a security-policy scenario the student has not encountered in class (e.g., a hypothetical future surveillance technology or emergency-powers debate), infer where on the liberty-security spectrum U.S. policy is likely to land and justify the inference using the course's recurring crisis-expands-power pattern.

7. A course-long synthesis argument linking a contemporary issue to prior units+

   Generate a research-based synthesis essay connecting one contemporary issue (security, economic regulation, or a social movement) to at least two named prior units, constructing an original argument about continuity or change.

8. Framing and omission in a contemporary immigration-debate source+

   Critique a documentary or op-ed source's framing of immigration and demographic change by identifying what evidence or perspective the source omits.