Grade 8 · printable course

United States History to Reconstruction, with Civics

Grade 8 · 455 pages · 76 lessons · PDF, print at home

This is the year your child learns how the United States actually came to be, not as a highlight reel, but as a story with real costs and real disagreements that were never fully settled. They'll start with Indigenous nations and colonial charters, move through revolution and constitution-writing, watch the country expand west while slavery expands with it, then follow the whole thing into civil war and the messy attempt to rebuild afterward. Along the way they're doing real detective work with primary sources, letters, laws, speeches, court rulings, and learning to ask "who benefited, who paid, and how do we know?" instead of just memorizing dates. The civics side isn't a separate topic; it's the same question, who gets power, and who can take it away, asked again and again from 1600 to 1877.

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What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

United States History to Reconstruction, with Civics

76 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: Encounter and Colonization10 lessons
  1. 1.Territorial extent of named Indigenous nations and European colonial claims, 1600
  2. 2.The governing structure of a specific named Indigenous nation prior to contact
  3. 3.The Columbian Exchange as a bidirectional transfer of goods, organisms, and disease
  4. 4.The profit motive embedded in colonial charter language
  5. 5.The legal distinction between indentured servitude and chattel slavery
  6. 6.The relationship between regional climate/cash crop and dominant colonial labor system
  7. 7.Author's perspective and purpose in an unfamiliar primary source
  8. 8.The incompleteness of a single-perspective colonization narrative
  9. 9.The distribution of benefit and cost across groups during colonization, evidenced across four source types
  10. 10.The chronological sequence from first contact to established triangular trade
Unit 2: The Road to Revolution10 lessons
  1. 11.Colonial charter rights and Navigation Acts trade restrictions from Unit 1
  2. 12.The policy shift from salutary neglect to direct parliamentary enforcement after 1763
  3. 13.The escalating pattern of colonial responses to the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act
  4. 14.The shared natural-rights structure underlying Locke's political philosophy and Paine's Common Sense
  5. 15.The four-part logical structure of the Declaration of Independence
  6. 16.The logical relationship between specific grievances and the Declaration's natural rights claim
  7. 17.The differing views of legitimate authority held by Loyalists and Patriots describing the same events
  8. 18.The logical adequacy of grievances in an unfamiliar colonial petition, evaluated by the same evidentiary criterion used for the Declaration
  9. 19.The adequacy of the Declaration's grievances as support for its independence claim
  10. 20.The four required structural elements of the summative essay (grievances, rights claim, evaluation, evidence)
Unit 3: Founding a Government: The Constitution and the Bill of Rights8 lessons
  1. 21.The structural weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation
  2. 22.Enumerated, reserved, and concurrent powers under federalism
  3. 23.The interaction between separation of powers and checks and balances
  4. 24.The structural similarity between the Great Compromise and the Three-Fifths Compromise
  5. 25.The specific prohibition or requirement in a named Bill of Rights amendment
  6. 26.The allocation of authority across branches and levels of government under the Constitution
  7. 27.The dual function of the Bill of Rights as limitation on government and enumeration of citizen power
  8. 28.Definitions of separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances
Unit 4: The Early Republic: Testing the New Government9 lessons
  1. 29.The absence of explicit judicial review language in Article III of the Constitution
  2. 30.Marshall's reasoning chain in Marbury v. Madison establishing judicial review
  3. 31.Loose versus strict construction as applied to the national bank debate
  4. 32.Loose versus strict construction as a transferable interpretive framework
  5. 33.The distinction between nullification and secession as constitutional claims
  6. 34.The enforcement gap between a Supreme Court ruling and executive/state action during Indian Removal
  7. 35.The chronological sequence of federal Indian Removal policy 1830-1838
  8. 36.The gap between legal ruling and enforcement in the Cherokee removal case
  9. 37.The general relationship between judicial rulings and enforcement across differing branches of government
Unit 5: Expansion and Its Costs8 lessons
  1. 38.Vocabulary of territorial expansion (cession, annexation, popular sovereignty)
  2. 39.Territorial boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, Mexican Cession, and Missouri Compromise line
  3. 40.Conflicting accounts of territorial acquisition (U.S. official narrative vs. Indigenous/Mexican accounts)
  4. 41.Categories of territorial-expansion cost (displacement, slavery expansion, political compromise)
  5. 42.The compromise pattern across the Great Compromise, Three-Fifths Compromise, and Missouri Compromise
  6. 43.The economic relationship between cotton agriculture, land demand, and support for territorial expansion
  7. 44.Application of the compromise-line pattern to an unfamiliar, hypothetical territory
  8. 45.Manifest Destiny as ideology versus political justification
Unit 6: A House Dividing: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis9 lessons
  1. 46.The cotton economy's dependence on chattel slavery and its ties to Northern industry
  2. 47.Authorship and perspective markers in 1850s slavery-debate primary sources
  3. 48.The recurring structure of legislative compromise on slavery, 1787-1850
  4. 49.The Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling's dual constitutional reasoning on citizenship and congressional power over territories, and its nationwide reach beyond the named parties
  5. 50.Visual argument and bias in an unfamiliar 1850s political cartoon
  6. 51.Popular sovereignty as applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas
  7. 52.The feasibility of political compromise on slavery by 1860, argued from primary sources
  8. 53.The general pattern of deferred compromise applied to an unstudied sectional conflict
  9. 54.The chronological sequence of major sectional-crisis events, 1850-1860
Unit 7: The Civil War12 lessons
  1. 55.Sectional-crisis vocabulary (secession, popular sovereignty, border states, nullification) and Article I/II powers language
  2. 56.Union and Confederate material resources and their strategic implications
  3. 57.The relationship between material resources and chosen military strategy
  4. 58.Lincoln's stated public purpose for the war, 1861-1862
  5. 59.The Emancipation Proclamation's stated geographic scope
  6. 60.The gap between the Emancipation Proclamation's legal text and its popular reputation
  7. 61.The accuracy of a popular claim about USCT combat role, tested against evidence from an engagement not covered in class
  8. 62.The constitutional text governing habeas corpus suspension
  9. 63.The competing constitutional claims of security and individual liberty in the Merryman case
  10. 64.The relationship between wartime executive actions and the peacetime constitutional powers they draw on
  11. 65.Application of the security-versus-liberty constitutional framework to a wartime case not covered in class
  12. 66.Civil War casualty data compared to other American wars
Unit 8: Reconstruction: A Second Founding10 lessons
  1. 67.Presidential vs. Congressional Reconstruction plans (Ten Percent Plan, Wade-Davis Bill)
  2. 68.The conflict between presidential and congressional authority over Reconstruction
  3. 69.The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments
  4. 70.The conflict between state Black Codes and the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause
  5. 71.The criteria distinguishing Black Codes from early Jim Crow measures
  6. 72.The Freedmen's Bureau's functions and Black political participation during Reconstruction
  7. 73.The causal link between the Compromise of 1877 and the collapse of Reconstruction enforcement
  8. 74.The recurring pattern of deferred-cost compromise across U.S. history to 1877
  9. 75.The overall trajectory and outcome of Reconstruction (1865-1877)
  10. 76.The Reconstruction Amendments' names, numbers, and dates

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