Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Teacher's Edition, Volume II: From 1877

Based on the Book by Wilfred M. McClay

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 12 — A Nation Transformed: The Coming of Modern America

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

12.1 Chapter Opener

12.2 Symbol of a Changed Nation

12.3 The Rise of Big Business

12.4 Three Titans

12.5 New Arrangements

12.6 The Conditions of Industrial Labor

12.7 Cities and Immigrants & 12.8 Settling the West

12.9 The End of the Frontier

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 13 — Becoming a World Power: A Divided Heart

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

13.1 Chapter Opener

13.2 The Temptation of Empire

13.3 The Course of Empire

13.4 The Dilemmas of Empire

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 14 — The Progressive Era: A New Science of Government

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

14.1 Chapter Opening

14.2 The Many Sides of Progressivism

14.3 Two Progressive Answers

14.4 A Presidential Progressive

14.5 The Republicans Split

14.6 Wilson Takes Command

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 15 — Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Mission to a Shattered Continent

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

15.1 Chapter Opener

15.2 Righteous Warrior

15.3 Breaking the Deadlock

15.4 A Design for Peace

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 16 — From Boom to Bust: The Twenties

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

16.1 Chapter Opener

16.2 An Age of Business

16.3 A Culture of Prosperity

16.4 Culture Wars and Countercurrents

16.5 Coolidge’s America

16.6 The Crash

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 17 — The New Deal:: A Reappraisal of Values

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

17.1 Chapter Opening

17.2 A Sinking Presidency

17.3 A New Deal for the American People

17.4 A Bold Beginning with Mixed Results

17.5 FDR’s Challengers

17.6 The New Deal Halted

Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 18 — The Finest Hour:: World War II

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

18.1 Chapter Opening

18.2 Overcoming Neutrality

18.3 America Joins the Allies

18.4 Mobilizing the Arsenal of Democracy

18.5 Europe First

18.6 Defeating Imperial Japan

18.7 The Mantle of Leadership Passes to America

Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 19 — All Thoughts and Things Were Split:: The Cold War

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

19.1 Chapter Opening

19.2 Times of Promise and Peril

19.3 Truman’s Challenges

19.4 Containment and the Truman Doctrine

19.5 Israel

19.6 The Cold War Hardens

19.7 Hot War in Korea

19.8 A Hero Becomes President

19.9 A Civil Rights Movement at Home

Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 20 — Out of Balance: The Turbulent Sixties

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

20.1 Chapter Opening

20.2 A New Frontier

20.3 Stumbles Abroad

20.4 A Rising Tide for Civil Rights

20.5 The Age of Johnson

20.6 The Great Society

20.7 The Democrats Collapse

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 21 — Fall and Restoration:: From Nixon to Reagan

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

21.1 Chapter Opening

21.2 The Domestic Nixon

21.3 Nixon’s Victory… and Defeat

21.4 The Diminishing Presidency

21.5 A Bicentennial Hope

21.6 An Overwhelmed Presidency

21.7 The Rise of Ronald Reagan

21.8 The Presidency Restored

Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Chapter 22 — The World Since the Cold War:: The Search for a New Order

Chapter Overview

The Planner

Backgrounds

Background Reading for Educators

Daily Lesson Plan

22.1 Chapter Opening

22.2 Bush and the End of the Cold War

22.3 America After the Cold War

22.4 The Clinton Presidency

22.5 A Time of Polarization

22.6 Obama, Trump, and Beyond

22.7 Reasons for Hope

Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment — Answer Key

Student Map Appendix

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Appendix: Founding Documents

Declaration of Independence

Constitution of the United States

Bill of Rights and Amendments

Florida United States History Honors Standards, Volume I & II

Florida United States History Honors Standards Found in This Volume

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Teacher's Edition, Volume II: From 1877

INTRODUCTION

A Few Words to Teachers

“Society is indeed a contract. . . . It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Land of Hope tells one long story. It is the story of the American people—of the ideals they inherited, the institutions they built, the mistakes they made, and the hopes that carried them from one generation to the next. Wilfred M. McClay wrote it not as a catalog of names and dates but as a narrative with shape, movement, and meaning: the story of a people who have repeatedly believed that the way things are given to us need not be the final word about them.

This Teacher’s Edition is a companion to that story. It does not retell the Student Edition. Instead, it supplies what teachers and homeschooling parents need to bring the story to life: chapter overviews, historical background, guidance on primary sources, works of art, and maps, questions, exercises, writing assignments, timelines, daily lesson plans, language support, and assessments. It is designed not only to help students understand Land of Hope but also to deepen the teacher’s command of the history being taught. Good instruction in history depends upon a teacher who is continually learning, and this book has been written with that teacher in mind.

The Teacher’s Edition offers more than any one course will use, and this is deliberate. One group may come to life over a document, another through debate, another through the close study of a painting or map. The materials are ordered so that they can be found readily, but they are not meant to crowd out the teacher’s judgment. Choose what serves the students before you, the time available, and the questions that deserve to be pursued.

A Guide, Not a Script

No history course can include every worthy person, document, or question, nor should it try. Part of the craft of teaching is deciding where to linger—which conversations to pursue, which sources to dwell on, and which possibilities to reserve for another year. This book leaves those judgments with the teacher, where they belong.

The lesson plans therefore provide structure without prescribing a performance. The “In a Single Class Period” pathway offers one workable route through a lesson’s materials, usually identifying what to read, what exercise to use, which questions to discuss, how to bring the lesson to a close, and what to assign next. It is a recommendation, not a requirement. Other materials in the lesson allow a teacher to expand, compress, or redirect that route.

The same principle applies at the kitchen table. Homeschooling parents may use the suggested class-period plan as written, divide a lesson across shorter meetings, replace group discussion with oral narration or conversation, and adapt collaborative exercises for one or two students. The intellectual destination remains the same even when the path and pace differ.

How the Book Is Organized

Each chapter follows the corresponding chapter of Land of Hope and uses Student Edition page references throughout. It opens with an overview of the history and its principal themes, then moves through planning and teacher preparation to daily instruction and assessment. Cross-references connect sources, images, maps, and ideas across lessons and chapters so that students do not lose sight of the larger narrative.

The Chapter Overview

The Chapter Overview lets the teacher take in the whole before descending into the parts. The Chapter Summary refreshes the narrative and places important people, ideas, and events in relation to one another. The Chapter Learning Objectives state what students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter’s end. The Key Persons and Key Concepts sections identify the principal figures, institutions, and ideas. The Timeline fixes the chapter’s events in order. Chronology alone does not explain history, but it helps students follow the narrative.

The Chapter Planner

The Planner divides the chapter into numbered lessons corresponding to sections of the Student Edition. It supplies page ranges, estimates the number of class periods each lesson may require, and lists the teaching points that the section is meant to convey. Use it to see the chapter’s proportions, anticipate where additional time may be valuable, and make deliberate choices before teaching begins. The suggested pacing is a planning aid, not a checklist for coverage.

Backgrounds and Background Reading

The Backgrounds section prepares the teacher to use the chapter’s epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps. These notes supply context, identify connections, and suggest ways to ask what a source reveals, what it cannot establish by itself, and how it helps students understand the history presented in the chapter. Written and visual sources are treated as evidence rather than ornament: a painting, photograph, map, speech, or letter has a maker, a setting, a purpose, and limits that students can learn to examine.

Background Reading for Educators follows with a short list of books for teachers who want to read further. The list is neither required reading nor an endorsement of every argument in every title. It is an invitation to continue learning. One useful practice is to choose a single book from the list each time the course is taught; over several years, that modest habit builds genuine depth.

Daily Lesson Plans

The Daily Lesson Plans are the working heart of the Teacher’s Edition. Each lesson corresponds to a portion of the Student Edition and follows a stable sequence, allowing teachers to become familiar with the organization and then concentrate on the history. The recurring elements serve distinct purposes:

For a Single Class Period. A concise pathway through the lesson identifies a manageable combination of reading, exercise, discussion, closure, and homework.

Essential Understanding. A concise statement identifies the central historical idea students should grasp by the lesson’s end. It guides the teacher’s emphasis and provides the focus for the Daily Recap.

Lesson Objectives. These describe what students should be able to do once the lesson is complete. They translate the Essential Understanding into observable intellectual work.

Key Dates. A selective chronology identifies dates and sequences students should know. Dates matter here because they clarify order, causation, and change over time.

Key Concepts. Explanations develop the ideas and relationships on which the lesson turns, placing concepts in their historical setting rather than treating them solely as vocabulary to memorize.

Key Terms. Concise definitions establish the vocabulary students need in order to read, discuss, and write about the lesson accurately.

Classroom Experience. This portion gathers the lesson’s suggested homework, exercises, questions, and teacher guidance. It is a menu from which the teacher builds the day’s instruction.

Suggested Homework Assignments. Reading and written work prepare students for the lesson or extend it afterward. Assignments should be chosen according to time, purpose, and students’ readiness.

Suggested Exercises and Foundational Skills Opportunities. Activities make historical thinking visible through close reading, writing, geography, debate, civic discourse, comparison, critical thinking, and problem solving. The skill label identifies the principal habit being practiced; the historical content remains central.

Guiding Classroom Questions and Insights. Questions organize discussion around the Essential Understanding. Emphasized questions deserve priority when time is short. Accompanying Insights suggest the substance and reasoning of a strong response without requiring students to reproduce a fixed script. Context notes supply background, Further prompts extend the inquiry, and Teaching Notes offer practical advice.

Formative Assessment. A brief check near the lesson’s end combines Recall items, which confirm essential factual knowledge, with an Explain item, which asks students to deploy what they have learned. The paired acceptable responses help the teacher decide whether to proceed, review, or reteach material.

Daily Recap. A short closing synthesis returns the lesson to its Essential Understanding and gives the teacher language for drawing the day’s threads together.

Looking Ahead. A brief bridge identifies the question or development that carries the narrative into the next lesson.

Language Support. Targeted teaching supports help English-language learners participate in the lesson’s reading, discussion, and writing while working toward the same historical understanding as their classmates. They are available when needed, not intended as the standard sequence for most students.

Language Support

Language Support appears at the end of each lesson plan for easy reference; its position does not mean that it should be taught at the end of class. It is intended chiefly for English-language learners who need help with the academic English required to read historical texts, follow discussion, or express their ideas. It can also help a student whose understanding exceeds what they can readily communicate in English. Most students will use the regular lesson without these additional supports. Teachers should select them according to need and use them at the relevant point in the lesson, including before students encounter unfamiliar language.

The four recurring supports can be used separately or together:

Establish first. Introduce the essential words and phrases students will need to understand the lesson. Explain them in their historical context and check that students can use them meaningfully.

Frames that carry the reasoning. Offer sentence beginnings or structures that help students express a comparison, cause, consequence, or claim. Students must still supply the historical evidence and explanation; the frame helps them put their reasoning into words.

Rehearse aloud, then write. Let students formulate and test an answer in speech before developing it in writing. A brief exchange with a partner or teacher can help them organize both the idea and the language needed to express it.

Show understanding without a paragraph. Where appropriate, use a sequence, diagram, chart, labeled map, or oral explanation to assess historical understanding without making extended prose the only means of demonstrating it. Include labels, captions, or a brief explanation as appropriate to the student’s proficiency. When sustained writing is itself the objective, use the alternative as preparation for that writing rather than as a substitute.

These supports are consistent with general principles of the WIDA English Language Development Standards Framework, particularly its integration of language development with social studies learning. Vocabulary gives students access to the content; sentence frames and oral rehearsal help them explain relationships and support claims; varied forms of response allow them to demonstrate understanding while developing English. Teachers using WIDA should adapt these supports to the appropriate grade-level Language Expectations and each student’s proficiency profile, in consultation with language specialists where available. Retain required accommodations and reduce optional scaffolding as students gain independence. The section supplements, rather than replaces, a student’s English-language-development instruction.

Assessment

Assessments appear at two levels. The Formative Assessment within each lesson helps the teacher judge understanding and decide what needs further attention. The Summative Assessment at the end of the chapter evaluates learning across the chapter. Its recurring sections include Timeline; Key Persons and Concepts; Geography; Short Answer; and Essay, with additional source work where appropriate.The Answer Key follows the student assessment’s organization and supplies answers, model responses, and essay scoring guidance.

The assessments are models, not mandates. Teachers may use them as written, select individual sections, alter the number of questions, or substitute work completed during the chapter. When a prompt is adapted, its answer or scoring guidance should be adapted with it so that the two remain aligned.

The Standards Index

The Standards Index identifies connections between the curriculum and Florida’s state standards so that teachers and administrators can locate the knowledge and skills addressed. Use it alongside the chapter and lesson plans; it is a reference tool, not a separate teaching sequence.

Using the Book Well

Begin planning with the Chapter Overview and Planner. For each lesson, identify the Essential Understanding, choose the materials that best serve it, and decide what evidence will show that students have understood it. The single-class-period pathway provides a sound default when time is limited; the larger collection of sources, questions, and exercises allows teachers to revisit difficult material or pursue a topic in greater depth.

Do not mistake abundance for obligation. Time spent well on one document or one question is worth more than a hurried pass through everything a lesson contains. What matters is that students retain the narrative, learn to reason from evidence, and become capable of explaining why events unfolded as they did.

A Final Thought

We hope this Teacher’s Edition helps you tell that one long story well. Every class will linger over different people, documents, images, and questions. So it should be: the American story is rich enough to reward those differences anew each year. If these pages deepen students’ understanding and help teachers continue learning as they teach, they will have accomplished their purpose.

OUR APPROACH

Thinking Historically

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”

—Cicero, Orator

As students study American history, they should also learn what it means to study history. The past is everything that has happened; history is our effort to recover, question, and understand it through the evidence that survives. Students need to ask how we know what happened, why some accounts are more trustworthy than others, and where our knowledge remains incomplete.

This is not a specialized art reserved for scholars. It is a disciplined way of attending to the world that any thoughtful person can learn and that free citizens require. Land of Hope is written for readers who will inherit a country, and an inheritance should first be understood. The habits described here—weighing evidence, following a story through time, distinguishing established facts from disputed interpretations, listening to those who came before—are habits of good citizenship as much as of good historical inquiry.

History Begins with Evidence

The word history comes from the Greek historía, meaning inquiry or knowledge acquired by investigation. The name points to the work of the historian: asking questions and seeking answers that can be tested against evidence.

Many students imagine that the past comes down to us whole and settled, as if narrated by someone who saw everything. One of the first things a history course should do is show them where knowledge of the past comes from: historical accounts draw on letters, laws, logbooks, ledgers, speeches, photographs, paintings, artifacts, and ruins. The historian has learned to ask careful questions of such evidence.

This is why Land of Hope consistently puts sources before students. When they read Columbus’s log describing the islands he encountered or King Manuel’s letter announcing a sea route to India, they are not being handed the past itself. They are being handed evidence from which an account of the past is built and asked to see how that reconstruction was done.

History Unfolds in Time

Facts about the past remain inert until they are placed in order. A date memorized in isolation means little; the same date set within a sequence of causes and consequences begins to mean a great deal. To think historically is to see events not as a heap but as a developing sequence—to ask what came before, what followed, and how one development altered the conditions in which the next occurred.

Land of Hope follows the American story through time while tracing themes that connect one period to another. Narrative helps students understand how events relate to one another; chronology lets them test whether a proposed cause could have preceded its effect. Knowing the order of events is a beginning, not an explanation in itself.

History Is Interpreted, Not Invented

One of the most demanding lessons of historical study is that interpretation is necessary without being arbitrary. History is built on evidence, but evidence does not speak for itself. It must be read, weighed, placed in context, and interpreted, and thoughtful people sometimes interpret the same evidence differently. This does not mean that every account is equally sound. It means that between the evidence and the finished account lies the work of judgment—and that this work can be done well or badly.

Students learn this best by watching it happen. Consider two bodies of sixteenth-century images of the New World: John White’s watercolors, painted from life among peoples he observed, and Theodor de Bry’s engravings, based on White’s work but made by an artist who never crossed the Atlantic and who reshaped White’s images for European eyes. Set side by side, the two sets of images vividly demonstrate that every source has a maker, a purpose, an audience, and a history of transmission. Every source invites the same essential questions: Who made this? For whom? Why? What does it reveal? What does it leave out? What other evidence would help us understand it?

History Is a Conversation

To study history is to enter a conversation with people who cannot answer back—and yet, if we read carefully, very nearly do. People of the past left words, images, institutions, and objects behind them. The historian’s task is partly to listen: to let them speak in their own voices before rendering a verdict upon them.

That conversation extends into the classroom. History is not merely received; it is discussed, argued over, and reasoned through aloud. Good questions do not ask students to guess what the teacher is thinking, nor do they pretend that every answer is equally sound. They ask students to reason from evidence, explain their conclusions, and listen to one another with an openness to reconsidering their own views.

History Requires Imagination

To understand people of the past, students need more than names and dates. They must imagine their way into a world not their own. This is not imagination in the sense of invention; historical imagination remains bound by evidence. It is imagination in an older and deeper sense: the power to enter a way of life whose assumptions, fears, and hopes may be strange to us, and to see it from within before judging it from without.

The book’s stories, works of art, epigraphs, maps, and primary voices help make a vanished world briefly inhabitable, so that students meet the past as something once lived rather than merely finished. Cultivated over a year, this sympathetic imagination disciplined by evidence becomes one of the most valuable gifts a history course can give. It approaches what we mean by wisdom about human affairs.

History Ends in Judgment

The end of this work is judgment—but judgment of a particular kind, which comes only after understanding. People in the past lived under conditions unlike our own, and before evaluating their choices we owe them the effort of seeing the world as they saw it. This is not the same as excusing them. It requires only that understanding come first and that judgment, when it comes, rest on evidence rather than on the accident of our having been born later.

Two temptations lie on either side of that path. One is to condescend to the past—to treat earlier generations as benighted and history as the record of how much better we have become. The other is to romanticize it—to admire our forebears uncritically and refuse to see their failures plainly. The book steers between these temptations and asks students to face the American story whole.

It asks for one thing more, which gives the book its name. Land of Hope approaches the past not only with scrutiny but with gratitude: the recognition that we have received far more than we made and that those who came before us, for all their faults, left an inheritance deserving both thanks and honest examination. Gratitude is not the enemy of judgment; it keeps judgment from curdling into contempt. To think historically, in the end, is to hold the two together—to tell the truth about the past and to receive it as one’s own.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Nation Transformed

The Coming of Modern America

1865–1901 · pp. 370–411

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

The Civil War marks the boundary between early America and modern America. Prior to the Civil War, the United States was a decentralized agrarian country, with a few cities, many largely autonomous communities, and a weak national government. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the United States had a powerful, unified, and increasingly centralized state, was one of the world’s great commercial and industrial powers, and featured numerous cities linked by a formidable national transportation system. The country had undergone a dramatic change, and it occurred in a mere thirty-five years—in historical terms, a blink of an eye.

The Grand Review of the Union Armies at the conclusion of the Civil War symbolized the ascent of federal power. In a solemn but also celebratory procession ordered by the War Department for May 23, 1865, two hundred thousand Union soldiers marched for two days through the streets of Washington, D.C., in a line that stretched for twenty-five miles. There had never been such a display in all of American history. The Grand Review affirmed the enduring rise of national power, national unity, national governance, and national consciousness.

These developments raised important questions about American identity though, perhaps the most pressing of which was whether the U.S. Constitution—an eighteenth-century document designed for a small, decentralized, agrarian republic—was now obsolete. Many argued that the Constitution was ill-suited to the modern United States, which by 1900 had become the world’s leading industrial power.

The growth of the postbellum American economy makes for a fascinating story. Railroads were the single most important driver of American economic development, and by 1881 they accounted for 94 percent of rolled steel purchases in the United States. Highly capital intensive, the railroad industry became the first in America to attract major investment from domestic and foreign investors, leading to the rise of entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt. The railroads also promoted concentrations of wealth and commercial power, as the emergence of a truly national market incentivized the creation of vertically integrated corporations by means of consolidation.

The late nineteenth century was an age of prodigious invention, with hundreds of thousands of patents granted during this dynamic period. The petroleum industry in particular expanded rapidly. At first, petroleum was primarily used for kerosene lighting, but by the 1870s it was being refined to produce naphtha, gasoline, and various lubricants and waxes. John D. Rockefeller incorporated the Standard Oil Company of Ohio in 1870. By 1879, he controlled 90 percent of the nation’s refining capacity, becoming the richest man in America. Also playing a key role in economic development was J. Pierpont Morgan, an investment banker who financed and stabilized the fast-growing American industrial economy. Morgan became so wealthy and influential that he played an extraordinary quasi-public role in financial crises: in 1895 his banking syndicate helped replenish the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserve, and in 1907 he organized private efforts to stabilize the banking system during a severe panic. The concentration of such power in the hands of private individuals called into question whether American democracy itself had become eclipsed by plutocracy, with the wealthy stockpiling fabulous fortunes as the country industrialized.

American industrialization transformed the nature of work itself. It led to an astounding increase in the number of industrial wage laborers—from 885,000 in 1860 to more than 3.2 million in 1890—in work environments that were often both dangerous and exploitative. It was a turbulent time for American labor, with notable and often bloody demonstrations, such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket riot in 1886, the Homestead steel strike of 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894.

Industrialization and urban growth also changed the character of American cities. Prior to 1870, American cities had been “walking cities” with compact and diverse urban cores. With the dramatic economic changes of the postbellum era came sprawling cities that were organized around segregated rings of affluence, with the wealthiest neighborhoods typically at the edges of the urban environment. The living conditions of city centers deteriorated rapidly, as the poor inhabited densely packed neighborhoods teeming with crowded tenement buildings. A new brand of urban politics arose to address the problems of the urban poor, revolving around “bosses” and their “political machines,” which promised to address the most pressing material needs of city dwellers, although in ways that would have startled the American Founders.

The great waves of immigration that helped to populate the new American cities also constituted an important element in postwar industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. America had always attracted immigrants, representing to them a land of hope and opportunity. But the character of its immigrant population changed dramatically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Up until the 1870s, the majority of immigrants had been Protestants from Northern and Western Europe. Between 1880 and 1920, an estimated twenty million immigrants came to America, with the bulk of them from Eastern and Southern Europe. Instead of Protestantism, most practiced Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Judaism. The new urban environment would become the crucible of a new culture, which increasingly came to define the American experience just as large-scale settlement of the West had begun to “close” the country’s frontier.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The various transformations of American society wrought by the related trends of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and modernization from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s.

• The Civil War ushered in the enduring centralization of governmental power amid the triumph of northern industrial interests over the ruined planter elite of the South.

• Spurred by innovation, consolidation, and business-friendly policies like high tariffs, the American economy grew rapidly throughout the late nineteenth century.

• The growth of the railroad industry transformed the country physically, culturally, economically, and financially; railroads created the first truly national transportation system, and the intricate complexity of their operations led to the emergence of enormous management bureaucracies, the first instances of American “big business” in the present-day sense of the term.

• In their ruthless pursuit of efficiency and market dominance, business magnates like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan came to dominate the steel, oil, and railroad industries, respectively. Their corporate power, vast wealth, and philanthropic efforts shaped numerous important developments in late nineteenth-century American society.

• The rise of big business generally, and of railroad corporations in particular, led to a standardization and “nationalization” of American life, with the introduction of time zones, the popularization of chain stores and mail-order catalogs, and the decline of many small businesses that were incapable of competing with national distribution and procurement networks.

• Industrialization and the widespread adoption of heavy machinery also led to a degradation of working conditions, leading to (sometimes violent) strikes and the formation of unions.

• These trends were compounded by a flood of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, itself made possible by improved transportation, which packed impoverished laborers into America’s rapidly expanding cities and led to the rise of corrupt urban “political machines,” as well as major cultural dislocation for both arriving immigrants and native-born Americans.

• Meanwhile, continued settlement of the West led to the closing of the American frontier, with various consequences for America’s self-understanding, the significance of which is still debated to this day.

Key Persons

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877)

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937)

George Westinghouse (1846–1914)

J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913)

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924)

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926)

Chief Joseph (~1840–1904)

Key Concepts and Terms

Bessemer Process

Telegraph

Montgomery Ward

Sears, Roebuck and Company

Molly Maguires

Great Railroad Strike (1877)

Haymarket Riot (1886)

Pullman Strike (1894)

Socialist Party

Political “machines”

Ellis Island

Nez Perce people

Plains people

Dawes Severalty Act

World Columbian Exposition

Timeline

1865 The Grand Review of the Union armies in Washington, DC (May 23–24)

1867 Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidates control over the New York Central Railroad

1869 The final spike is driven in the Transcontinental Railroad, connecting the East and West coasts by train (May 10)

1870 John D. Rockefeller incorporates Standard Oil (January 10)

1871 Drexel, Morgan & Co. is established in New York City

1877 The Great Railroad Strike ends after fifty-two days (September 4)

1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act is signed into law, limiting Chinese immigration (May 6)

1886 Samuel Gompers forms the American Federation of Labor (December 8)

1887 The Dawes Severalty Act is passed, breaking up Native American reservation lands (February 8)

1888 Richard Sears issues his first mail-order catalog

1890 The Census Bulletin declares the end of the American frontier (June 2)

1892 Ellis Island opens as an immigration center (January 1)

1892 The Carnegie Steel Company is founded in Pittsburgh (July 1)

1892 Union strikers defeat private security agents at the Homestead Steel Works but lose the strike when the state militia intervenes (June–November)

1893 The World’s Fair opens in Chicago (May 1)

1893 Frederick Jackson Turner writes “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (July 12)

1894 The Pullman Strike begins, shutting down rail traffic west of Detroit (May 11)

1901 U.S. Steel becomes the nation’s first billion-dollar company (February 26)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

12.1 Chapter Opener – p. 373 (.5 to 1 class)

• The aftereffects of the Civil War

• The shift from an agrarian to a predominantly industrial economy and society

12.2 Symbol of a Changed Nation – pp. 374–376 (.5 to 1 class)

• The Grand Review of the Union armies

• The increasing centralization of the country

12.3 The Rise of Big Business – pp. 376–381 (1 to 2 classes)

• The United States becomes a major industrial power

• The expansion of the railroads

• The emergence of the modern business corporation

• The consequences of a national transportation system

• The standardization of time

12.4 Three Titans – pp. 381–385 (1 to 2 classes)

• A time of great invention and innovation

• Steel production, Andrew Carnegie, U.S. Steel

• Oil production, John D. Rockefeller, and Standard Oil

• J.P. Morgan and the early American financial system

12.5 New Arrangements – pp. 385–387 (.5 to 1 class)

• The shift away from the founding vision

• The costs and benefits of industrialization

• The early signs of cultural homogenization

12.6 The Conditions of Industrial Labor – pp. 387–393 (.5 to 1 class)

• Skyrocketing numbers of industrial wage laborers

• Degraded work conditions

• Resistance to unionization

• The labor-related violence and strikes of the late nineteenth century

12.7 Cities and Immigrants & 12.8 Settling the West – pp. 393–405 (1 to 2 classes)

• Urbanization begins in earnest

• The conflict between urban life and traditional American ideals

• The changing character of cityscapes

• Municipal politics in America’s burgeoning cities

• Diversification of the immigrant population

• Modernization and deracination

12.9 The End of the Frontier – pp. 406–411 (.5 to 1 class)

• The Wild West and cowboy culture

• The fate of the Plains Indians in the late nineteenth century

• The closing of the frontier “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907 (p. 371)

Adams wrote of these seven years that man had translated himself into a new universe having no common scale of measurement with the old—the sentence the book sets at the head of the chapter, and the frame for everything that follows it. Adams was the great-grandson of one president and the grandson of another, and the remark carries the weight of a man watching the republic his family helped found become something he could not measure by inherited standards. The chapter’s argument is contained in the phrase no common scale of measurement: industrial concentration did not merely enlarge American life, it changed the units in which American life could be described. Teachers can use the epigraph twice—at the opening, to set the expectation that students are about to read about discontinuity rather than growth, and again at 12.9, where Turner makes the same claim about the frontier that Adams makes about the whole era. Adams supplies the chapter’s question; Turner supplies one answer to it.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 12.1 · Eugene Debs, “Socialism,” September 21, 1906 (p. 391)

Debs was five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for president and, at the time of this address, the most prominent socialist in the United States. He appears alongside Carnegie: two men looking at the same industrial order and reaching opposite conclusions about whether it could be reformed or had to be replaced. Debs argues that competition in industrial life is practically outgrown, that the scale of machinery and production compels the concentration of capital, and that this concentration in turn compels the workers to combine. His account of the two sides—one taking profit, the other doing the work—is polemical, and students should read it as advocacy rather than description. Its instructional value is that it makes the period’s central economic question arguable. Use this source together with Carnegie’s essay; neither does the work alone.

Primary Source 12.2 · Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” June 1889 (p. 391)

Carnegie’s essay is the classic defense of great fortune in American letters, and it sits opposite Debs on the same book page. Carnegie does not deny that industrial concentration produced enormous inequality; he argues that the inequality is the price of progress and that the man of wealth holds his surplus as a trustee for the community, obliged to administer it during his lifetime rather than bequeath it. Carnegie acted on the argument—the libraries bearing his name were its execution. Students who have read Debs will notice that both men accept the same premise, that concentration is inevitable, and divide entirely on what follows from it. The essay is the chapter’s best case study of entrepreneurship and its defence, since Carnegie is both the man who built the fortune and the writer who justified it. Teachers should give students the chronology, because it changes the reading: Carnegie published this in 1889, three years before the Homestead strike of 1892, in which strikers at his own steel works defeated private security agents and then lost to the state militia. Whether the Gospel of Wealth survives Homestead is the sharpest question the chapter can put to a class.

Primary Source 12.3 · Samuel Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration, 1835 (p. 402)

Morse is better known for the telegraph, and the man whose invention the chapter credits with transforming communication also wrote a nativist pamphlet. The pamphlet predates the chapter’s period by half a century, which teachers should make explicit—the book includes it because the argument it makes recurs in the 1880s and 1890s, not because it belongs to them. Morse’s target is the naturalized citizen he regards as insufficiently assimilated, and his language about a man who is neither foreigner nor native is the period’s suspicion in its rawest form. Handle with care and with context. Its instructional function is to let students see nativism argued rather than summarized, and to set it against the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which is nativism enacted. The distinction between argument and statute is worth drawing explicitly, since students often assume the second follows automatically from the first. Morse also complicates the chapter’s picture of its own inventors: the telegraph appears in the Summative Assessment as the technology that made near-instant long-distance communication possible, and students who have identified it there can be told whose pamphlet this is.

Primary Source 12.4 · Andrew Carnegie, “The Triumph of America,” 1885 (p. 403)

Carnegie’s second appearance in the chapter, and the more quantitative one. Where “The Gospel of Wealth” defends the distribution of industrial fortune, “The Triumph of America” celebrates the scale of American industrial production itself, and its confidence is the mood the chapter is describing. Printed opposite Morse, it produces a second deliberate pairing: national self-congratulation beside national anxiety, on the same page, in the same decade. Teachers who used the Debs–Carnegie pairing at 12.4 can use this one at 12.7, where the chapter turns to cities and immigrants, and ask students what the two Carnegie texts share. The essay supports the Summative Assessment’s essay question on whether industrialization created more opportunity than hardship, because Carnegie is the strongest available witness for one side of it.

Figures

Figure 12.1 · The Ironworker’s Noontime, Thomas Pollock Anshutz, 1880 (p. 370)

The chapter’s opening plate, set opposite the Adams epigraph. Anshutz painted ironworkers resting in the yard of the Belmont Nail Works in Wheeling, West Virginia—not at labor but between shifts, washing and stretching. Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 61.28 cm, held by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The painting is a landmark of American realism, and its instructional value lies in what it declines to do: it neither idealizes industrial work nor indicts it. The men are individuated, tired and ordinary. Teachers opening the chapter can ask students what the painter chose to show and what he left outside the frame, which is the same question the chapter asks about the era.

Figure 12.3 · East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, Andrew J. Russell, 1869 (p. 378)

Russell photographed the celebration at Promontory, Utah, that followed the driving of the last spikes of the transcontinental railroad, work begun in January 1863 after a decade of planning and fundraising. Photograph, 25.4 × 33.02 cm, held by the Oakland Museum of California. Russell was the Union Pacific’s own photographer, which students should be told: this is a company record of a company achievement, and the crowd of officials and workmen is arranged for the camera. The book records that the final spike was inscribed with a prayer that God continue the unity of the country as the railroad united the two great oceans. The image anchors lesson 12.3 and pairs naturally with Map 12.1. The scale is worth putting in front of students: the thirty miles of railway laid by 1830 had become more than 160,000 miles by 1890. Teachers should note who is absent from Russell’s frame: the Chinese and Irish labor that built the line is not among the officials arranged for the camera.

Figure 12.8 · Sears, Roebuck and Co. Catalogue, No. 111, 1902 (p. 386)

Pages from the Sears mail-order catalog offering pocket watches. Held by the International Tool Catalog Library at the Internet Archive. Sears began in Minneapolis in 1886 as a modest watch and jewelry catalog and grew into a business whose catalogs advertised a vast range of consumer goods to customers in the most remote parts of the country. It makes an abstraction concrete: the consumption community of lesson 12.5 is visible here as a printed page a farm family could hold. Teachers can set it beside the chain-store exercise in 12.5 and ask what the catalog did to the local merchant—the same question the exercise puts to students in the role of a municipal council. The book dates Richard Sears’s first mail-order catalog to 1888, which places this 1902 issue fourteen years into the business’s growth and makes it a record of what mail order had become rather than how it began. The Summative Assessment tests Montgomery Ward and Sears directly.

Figure 12.9 · Group of Breaker Boys. Smallest is Sam Belloma, Pine Street, Pittston, Pennsylvania, Lewis Wickes Hine, 1911 (p. 389)

Hine photographed boys who sorted rock and debris from coal in the breakers. Held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The book records that underground hard-rock mining was dangerous for everyone—the Twin Shaft Mine at Pittston caved in during 1896, killing fifty-eight men—and that breaker boys, though less exposed to catastrophe, still risked cuts and burns from sharp rock and the chemicals used in washing coal. Hine’s photographs were made as advocacy for child-labor reform, and teachers should say so, because the image’s purpose is part of its evidence. Use it with the union-organizer exercise in this lesson, which it gives human stakes. The book prints alongside it a passage from John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children, 1906, describing cut and crushed fingers as common among the boys, worse accidents in the machinery or the chute, and dust that laid the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption. Teachers should put Spargo’s account beside the photograph and ask what each shows that the other cannot.

Figure 12.12 · What Are You Laughing At? To the Victor Go the Spoils, Thomas Nast, 1871 (p. 396)

Nast’s wood engraving, 39 × 26.9 cm, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nast’s campaign against the Tweed Ring is the period’s most consequential demonstration that a cartoonist could move politics, and Tweed’s reported complaint about his constituents not being able to read but being able to see pictures is the reason the form matters. Use it to teach the urban political machine. Because it is an interpretive image rather than a photograph, it also asks students to read cartoons as historical arguments. The book explains the machine’s method precisely: organizations like Tammany Hall controlled city government by mobilizing immigrant voters and dispensing jobs, contracts and services in exchange for political loyalty, and under Tweed the organization became notorious for bribery, kickbacks and election fraud. That description is worth giving students before the cartoon, because Nast assumes knowledge his readers already had.

Figure 12.16 · The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz, 1907 (p. 404)

Stieglitz photographed from the first-class deck of the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, looking down at passengers crowded into steerage. The ship was sailing eastward on a June 1907 crossing to Europe, and the book records that those below may have been immigrants turned away by American officials—a detail that reverses the image’s obvious reading and is worth withholding from students until they have offered one. Stieglitz considered it the single photograph he would choose to represent his work. Held by the collections cited in the book’s credits. Read it alongside Map 12.2: it shows migration’s other direction. The vantage point is the lesson: the photographer is on the deck he is photographing down from. The book supplies the scale that makes one ship representative: in 1907 more than a million people passed through Ellis Island, an average of five thousand a day, most having crossed in steerage compartments deep in the hulls. Ask students whether a photograph taken from above can represent the people below it.

Figure 12.17 · Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Edward S. Curtis, 1903 (p. 407)

Photogravure, 39.7 × 28.1 cm, held by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Chief Joseph led Nez Perce resistance to forcible removal from ancestral lands in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon, and became known afterward for his speeches on behalf of his people. Curtis photographed him in 1903, late in a life spent arguing a case already lost. It closes a thread running back through chapters 8 and 9. Teachers should note that Curtis’s project of photographing Native Americans was itself shaped by an assumption that he was recording a vanishing people—an assumption the portrait’s subject spent his life contesting. That tension is the reason to teach the image rather than merely reproduce it. The book gives the words the chapter attaches to him—that in surrendering he would fight no more forever—and reads the surrender as the loss not of a battle but of a way of life, handed over to the duplicities of federal Indian policy and its attempt to Americanize the tribes. Set beside the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which lesson 12.9 already teaches, the portrait gives that statute a face. Teachers should resist letting the image close the subject elegiacally.

Maps

Map 12.1 · American Railroads, circa 1890 (p. 379)

The book records that by 1890 the initial thirty miles of railway laid at the start of the era had become the network this map shows. The map turns the chapter’s claim about railroads from an assertion into something students can see and measure. It should be read against Figure 12.3: the photograph shows the moment of completion at Promontory, the map shows what completion made possible over the following two decades. Teachers can ask students to describe the distribution in geographic terms—where the network is dense, where it is sparse, and what that predicts about which places grew. The book’s caption supplies the comparison that gives the map its force: thirty miles of railway laid by 1830 had become more than 160,000 miles by 1890. The map also sets up lesson 12.9, because the territories it crosses are those the 1890 Census Bulletin would declare too settled to carry a frontier line.

Map 12.2 · Population Growth and Immigration, 1880–1920 (p. 400)

The book records that political upheaval and other crises abroad drove the migration this map charts. The Summative Assessment’s Geography items work directly from it, asking students to sum the figures for Japan and China and compare the total with Latin America’s, and to identify the states whose populations were 34 per cent or more foreign-born. It shows both origin and destination. The map’s own figures are worth reading aloud before students calculate anything: Italy 4,127,462, Austria-Hungary 4,004,940, Russia 3,237,079, Germany 2,527,202, against Japan 241,662 and China 124,015. The asymmetry is the point of the Chinese Exclusion Act’s inclusion in the same chapter: the population the statute excluded was among the smallest on the map. Students should find that comparison themselves.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1995.

Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill & Wang, 1967.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. New York: Coward-McCann, 1938.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.1 Chapter Opener (p. 373)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Page 373, the chapter opening.

Exercise: The Critical Thinking and Problem Solving exercise, the textbook introduces several concepts that will be discussed in this chapter: Industrialization, urbanization, centralization, and professionalization

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign Symbol of a Changed Nation (pp. 374–376).

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The ways in which the Civil War transformed America, not only in the South but throughout the country.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Make a prediction for how America will be transformed after the Civil War.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1865 The Civil War concludes

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

There are many ways to interpret the Civil War: as a battle to preserve the Union, a crusade for freedom, a triumph of democracy, a tragic clash between incompatible cultures, a failed war for Southern independence, a victory for capitalism, etc.

In the context of U.S. history, the fundamental importance of the Civil War is that it marks the transition from “Early America”—characterized by decentralized government, a largely agrarian society, the almost exclusive practice of Protestant Christianity, and a political order with many aristocratic elements—to “Modern America”—a country increasingly centralized, urbanized, democratized, and culturally homogenized, even amid increasing ethnic and religious diversity due to immigration.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Urbanization: introduced here as one of the forces by which the book says the Civil War marks the boundary between early America and modern America.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Twelve.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Fill in the following blanks from the text: “The Civil War marks the boundary between the early _______ and the ______ ______?” (America, modern, America)

The Civil War transformed America. From what into what?

What five “-ization” processes are mentioned in this section?

Which notable figures viewed the Civil War as a fight for southern independence?

Which notable figures viewed the Civil War as a fight for the preservation of the Union?

What were some of the most important technological innovations of the period preceding the Civil War?

When did the Civil War officially end?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The textbook introduces several concepts that will be discussed in this chapter: Industrialization, urbanization, centralization, and professionalization. Even though the author recognizes them to be abstractions, ask students to guess what they think these words mean. Ask them to predict the changes that will occur to the nation during this chapter.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What are some of the different ways the Civil War has been interpreted over time?

Insight: The Civil War has been subject to a variety of interpretations. It has been understood as a battle to preserve the Union, a crusade for freedom against slavery in the United States, a clash between two cultures, a failed war for Southern independence, and a victory for capitalism.

What two periods in American history was the Civil War a dividing line between, and what were some of the characteristics of each period?

Insight: The Civil War marked the boundary between early America and modern America. The “early America” period was characterized by decentralized government, a largely agrarian society, the almost exclusive practice of Protestant Christianity, and a political order with many aristocratic elements. The rise of “modern America” brought a country increasingly centralized, urbanized, democratized, and culturally homogenized, even amid increasing ethnic and religious diversity due to immigration.

How did the nation’s status as an agrarian society change after the Civil War?

Insight: The nation had historically been a decentralized agrarian republic with few cities, but in the period following the Civil War, it grew into a new, larger, more unified, more consolidated, and more powerful nation-state. The nation shifted toward a predominantly industrial economy and society during this period.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what year did the Civil War end?

Name one industry the war expanded.

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1865. (2) Iron and steel for the armies, or the railroads built to move them.

Explain

The book says the war changed America outside the South as much as within it. Name one change beyond the South and say why the war produced it.

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. The growth of centralized federal power, which the war required and did not give back; industry enlarged to supply the armies; the rail network built to move them.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

The Civil War transformed America, and not only because of the effects of the Union’s victory on the socioeconomic systems of the South. The enormous technological advances and social upheavals wrought by industrialization in the United States accelerated after the destruction of the South’s agrarian elite, who due to war and emancipation could no longer politically compete with industrial interests.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

In 12.2 students watch the Grand Review of the Union armies march down Pennsylvania Avenue—the moment the book uses to show a changed nation displaying itself.

Language Support

For students still building academic English. Each support supplies the words for what students can already grasp, drawn from the lesson's central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Urbanization. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. The chapter’s four abstractions—industrialization, urbanization, centralization, professionalization—share the suffix -ization, which turns a state into a process. Build the pattern once: industry → industrialization, city (urban) → urbanization. Students then predict centralization and professionalization from their roots rather than memorizing four separate words.

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Urbanization means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.2 Symbol of a Changed Nation (pp. 374–376)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 374–376.

Exercise: The Writing Skills exercise, assign students to write brief letters, using the details provided in the text about the Grand Review of the Union armies, to describe to family members living on a remote farm what the experience of beholding the spectacle would have been like.

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Rise of Big Business (pp. 376–381).

Essential Understanding

The Grand Review of the Army in Washington, D.C. and how it symbolized the changed nature of postwar America.

Lesson Objectives

• Describe the sights, sounds, and feelings from the perspective of a spectator watching the Grand Review.

• Explain the tension that existed between the principles of limited government and the emerging realities of centralized power.

Key Dates

1865 The Grand Review of the Union armies in Washington, DC (May 23–24)

Key Concepts

The Grand Review in May 1865 reflected the trend toward centralization that emerged from the Civil War, with a rise in national unity, national power, and national self-consciousness.

The disciplined and coordinated Union ranks provided a stark contrast with the disorganized regiments that had assembled in the capital before being routed at Manassas in 1861.

Key Terms

Grand Review: the parade of the Union armies through Washington that the lesson treats as the symbolic close of the war and the threshold of the new industrial nation.

Trust: A legal arrangement used to place the stock or control of separate firms in the hands of trustees, allowing formerly independent companies to be managed under unified control.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Twelve, “Symbol of a Changed Nation.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What did the Grand Review symbolize?

Reading Comprehension: who was General William Tecumseh Sherman?

Did the Grand Review, as a representation of the postwar era, suggest that America was diverging from the original vision of the Founders?

Which famous American poet described the Grand Review? In what terms?

How long did the march occur after Appomattox? After Lincoln’s death?

What was the great constitutional question in the aftermath of the war that the text mentions?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Writing Skills: Assign students to write brief letters, using the details provided in the text about the Grand Review of the Union armies, to describe to family members living on a remote farm what the experience of beholding the spectacle would have been like. They should be sure to incorporate as many sensory details as possible and to conclude the letter by describing the ultimate effect of the procession. The letter should run 150–200 words and be addressed directly to the family member, in the voice of someone who was there. Have a few students share their work in class and discuss.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Ask students to identify the political tension that exists between limiting government through the division of powers and the need to coordinate various aspects of society, which often requires centralized mechanisms. Which consideration was more important to the Founders? Discuss whether the relative importance of these aims changed over the course of the nineteenth century. What, if any, implications were there for the Constitution?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What was the Grand Review of the Union armies and was it successful?

Insight: The Grand Review of the Union armies was a solemn, but celebratory parade of two hundred thousand Union soldiers marching for two days through the streets of Washington, D.C. in May 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. The procession, which stretched for twenty-five miles, made for an extraordinary spectacle that affirmed the unity of the American nation and attracted a far greater audience of visitors than originally expected.

How did the Grand Review transform the Union soldiers into “national men” in a way that was different from past wars involving the United States?

Insight: There were no such Grand Reviews at the end of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, or the Mexican War. The soldiers who had fought in those campaigns had made up smaller armies that quickly dispersed back to their home states following those wars. The sea of coordinated blue uniforms worn by the soldiers of the Grand Review visibly contrasted with the assortment of diverse and disorganized attire of soldiers who fought in past wars and even of the Northern soldiers at the start of the Civil War in 1861. More importantly, the Grand Review represented the welding together of diverse individuals into a modern, nationalized military organization.

What concerns might those watching the Grand Review have had about its implications for the nature of the American republic?

Insight: The Grand Review symbolized the ascent of federal power through a display that was unprecedented in American history. Given America’s historic distrust of large standing armies and the concentration of power, it also raised questions about how the Constitution’s limitations on the centralization of power would endure in the future, and whether the warnings of Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry had been right when they feared the Constitution would ultimately usher in an overly centralized government regime “incompatible with the genius of republicanism.”

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Grand Review?

How many days did it last?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) The parade of the Union armies through Washington. (2) Two—23 and 24 May 1865.

Explain

Why might a spectator have found the Grand Review troubling as well as stirring?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. It displayed federal power on a scale Americans had not seen, and the country’s inherited suspicion of standing armies and centralized authority made that display double-edged.

Daily Recap

The Grand Review was an apt symbol for America’s new postwar reality. A military parade in the first place befitted an imperial power more than it did a decentralized republic that had been in existence for less than a century. Historically, Americans had generally identified more with their individual states than with the United States as a whole. But with the end of the Civil War, that would begin to change.

Looking Ahead

In 12.3 the same organizing energy turns from armies to railroads, and the country builds the first business large enough to need a new word for it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Grand Review, Trust. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Centralized is the lesson’s load-bearing word and its opposite is not decentralized but limited. Give students the pair as the book uses it—limited government against centralized power—and have them complete two frames: “Before the war, power was mostly ____.” / “After the war, power moved toward ____.”

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Grand Review means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.3 The Rise of Big Business (pp. 376–381)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 376–381.

Exercise: The Speaking Skills exercise, ask students to categorize all of the factors that contributed to economic growth during this time period.

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign Three Titans (pp. 381–385).

Essential Understanding

America’s transformation into an industrial power, particularly with respect to the development of the national railroad network.

Lesson Objectives

• Categorize the different factors that led to economic expansion.

• Explain the significance of the national railroad network.

Key Dates

1867 Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidates control over the New York Central Railroad

1869 The final spike is driven in the Transcontinental Railroad, connecting the East and West coasts by train (May 10)

Key Concepts

After the Civil War, the United States experienced explosive economic growth, as the Gross National Product increased on average by 4 percent annually for the rest of the nineteenth century. In 1865, America’s industrial output was less than any of the major European Powers’; by 1900, it was the greatest in the world.

The nation’s economic expansion was both enabled and compounded by the growth of the railroad industry, which created enormous demand for raw materials and labor while also forging a truly national marketplace.

Due to their complexity and capital needs, railroad companies inaugurated the modern business corporation, with their sophisticated financial structures and enormous management bureaucracies. They also helped to standardize the country, particularly through the introduction of time zones.

Key Terms

Corporation: the legal form that allowed capital to be raised and risk spread on a scale no partnership could reach, and which the book treats as the enabling structure of the era's industry.

Trust: the combination of firms under unified control that concentrated an industry's output in few hands.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Twelve, “The Rise of Big Business.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

By what year had the United States become the world’s largest industrial power?

In what respect were railroads the first “big business”?

How did the capital needs of railroad construction transform the structure of business partnerships?

How did a modern business corporation differ from preexisting business models?

Who was Cornelius Vanderbilt?

What other advancements did the advent of railroads entail for America?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Speaking Skills: Ask students to categorize all of the factors that contributed to economic growth during this time period. Factors include population growth, lavish raw materials, transportation infrastructure, investment capital, and laws and policies that promoted business. After leading students through all the categories, separate the class into small groups. Each group will be assigned to one category and prepare a small presentation about what this category is all about and why it is the most important category.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Over the course of the late nineteenth century, the United States became the leading industrial power in the world in terms of GNP. Ask students to make a list of the pros and the cons of this rapid economic expansion. Are there any downsides or “hidden costs” to this rapid economic transformation? It might help to ask students to make a comparison to the modern age of technological expansion. What are the pros and cons today?

Writing Skills: Ask students to consider the various consequences of the railroads’ expansion identified in the text. Which was the most consequential? Have them choose one in particular and, in a few written paragraphs, justify their choice. Then poll the class as to their opinions and discuss the topic as a group. The written piece should run 200–300 words across two or three paragraphs and be addressed to a classmate who has chosen a different consequence, so that the argument has to persuade someone who disagrees.

Analytical Skills: Railroads reached sparsely settled states on the same logic students have just categorized. Ask students to apply this chapter’s account of railroad expansion to a single state: what would a railroad have to promise investors, and what would it change for the towns it reached and the towns it bypassed? Have students identify, from this chapter’s own list of factors, the two that best explain why late-nineteenth-century capital moved into a sparsely settled state, and say which of the chapter’s consequences of railroad expansion they would expect to arrive first.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How much did the United States’ industrial power grow during the post-Civil War period?

Insight: The U.S. experienced major economic growth during the post-war period, with Gross National Product (GNP) rising an average of 4 percent per year. The U.S. economy grew from a size that was smaller than any major European power in 1865 to the world’s largest economy by 1900.

How much did the development of the railroad industry contribute to the industrial growth of the United States during this period?

Insight: Railroads drove much of American economic development during this period. The amount of railroad track in the United States grew from 35,000 miles as of 1865 to 193,000 miles by 1900, more track than in all of Europe, including Russia. The need to purchase train cars, locomotives, and tracks led to railroads accounting for 94 percent of rolled steel purchases in the United States by 1881. The large amount of money needed to construct railroads also led to the creation of the modern business corporation and attracted major investment from domestic and foreign investors alike.

What did the rise of railroads have to do with linking the country together through the standardization of time?

Insight: Before this period, time was determined by the position of the sun at any given place, with the sun being at its highest point at “noon.” But the need to coordinate schedules for trains traveling across long distances required the adoption of standard time zones. That system was settled on at a meeting of major railroad executives at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago in 1883.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Name two factors behind postwar economic growth.

By how much did railroad mileage grow between 1830 and 1890?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Population growth, raw materials, transportation infrastructure, investment capital, pro-business law and policy. (2) From about thirty miles to more than 160,000.

Explain

Why are the railroads called the first big business?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. They required pooling amounts of capital no single owner could supply, and their scale forced new forms of organization and management that other industries then borrowed.

Daily Recap

The expansion of railroads affected not only the American economy but also the national spirit. The superimposition of a truly national transportation system changed the way Americans understood themselves and related to one another, forging a more unified, connected, and economically integrated nation.

Looking Ahead

In 12.4 the chapter turns from the industry to three men who mastered it—Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Morgan in finance.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Corporation, Trust. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Capital in this chapter means money invested in an enterprise, not a city or a letter. Flag the three meanings explicitly for English learners, then supply the phrase students will meet repeatedly: to pool capital means several investors combining money that none of them had alone.

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Corporation means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.4 Three Titans (pp. 381–385)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 381–385.

Exercise: The Compare and Contrast exercise, encourage students to revisit John D. Rockefeller’s approach to “vertical integration.”

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign New Arrangements (pp. 385–387).

Essential Understanding

The life, commercial rise, and legacy of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan.

Lesson Objectives

• Explain the significance of the careers of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan.

• Analyze the role of competition in the economy.

Key Dates

1870 John D. Rockefeller incorporates Standard Oil (January 10)

1871 J. Pierpont Morgan and Anthony Drexel establish Drexel, Morgan & Co. in New York City

1892 The Carnegie Steel Company is founded in Pittsburgh (July 1)

1901 U.S. Steel becomes the nation’s first billion-dollar company (February 26)

Key Concepts

Just like the railroads, the development of steel manufacturing and oil refining significantly expedited industrial expansion in the United States.

While the First Industrial Revolution was driven in large part by iron, coal, and textiles, seen earlier in Ch. 6, through the boom in the textile factory system and internal improvements, including a growing national network of canals, roads, and railroads, the Second Industrial Revolution shifted to a new set of driving industries, in particular steel, oil, and electricity.

Business titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan achieved market dominance in these industries through their practice of consolidation and their use of novel financial structures like trusts and holding companies.

As discussed in the previous section, the telegraph was an essential component of the railroads, serving as a kind of nervous system that provided the near-instant, reciprocal communication needed for the command and control of rail traffic. This same need for near-instant, long-distance communication extended beyond the railroads to the titans of industry, who relied on it to coordinate their own vast enterprises spread across the country.

These private individuals accumulated such great wealth and commercial power that they effectively overshadowed public officials in their influence and social importance.

Key Terms

Vertical integration: This business practice refers to the process by which a company takes control of multiple stages of production and distribution within its supply chain. The author calls Rockefeller an early proponent of vertical integration, attempting to control every aspect of the production of oil products, from extraction to refining to distribution. Andrew Carnegie achieved vertical integration in the U.S. steel industry through his control of raw materials (mines), production facilities (steel mills), and transportation networks (railroads), allowing him to supply a superior product than his competitors at a lower cost. John D. Rockefeller later pursued a similar strategy at Standard Oil, expanding beyond refining into oil extraction and distribution in an effort to control every stage of the supply chain.

Horizontal integration: This business practice refers to the process by which a company buys out its competitors at the same stage of an industry, coming to dominate that stage. Standard Oil grew in part this way: Rockefeller bought out rival refiners until he controlled 90 percent of the oil refining capacity in the United States, making his services all but necessary for American customers. This initial phase of horizontal consolidation set the stage for Rockefeller’s later push into vertical integration.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Twelve, “Three Titans.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What advancements were made in the production of steel and petroleum during the nineteenth century? How did they become important resources and who were the major figures involved in their development?

What contributions did Great Britain make to the development of the steel industry?

How much did American oil production increase from the mid-1860s to 1890?

What did “vertical integration” mean in the context of oil production?

Further: Make sure students can distinguish between horizontal and vertical integration. The first occurs when a company buys out its competitors in the same line of business; the second when it takes control of the stages above and below it in the supply chain.

What role did finance play in the economic expansion and development of postwar America? Who was its most important figure?

What economic beliefs animated the views of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan? What effect did these beliefs have on the economy?

Which business magnate was asked to bail the U.S. government out on two separate occasions?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The textbook notes that “hundreds of thousands of patents were granted during this dynamic economic period.” First, have students identify the different technological advancements discussed in the section. Then, ask them to consider how steel and oil were driving factors in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Insight: Electricity was also a driving factor in the Second Industrial Revolution, seen in Morgan's General Electric. Consider sharing with students the story of its key figures, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla, whose competing visions determined how electricity would power the nation. Edison championed direct current (DC); Westinghouse, working with Tesla's patented AC motor, championed alternating current (AC), which could travel efficiently over long distances and power both lights and machinery, a decisive advantage DC lacked. This rivalry, the “War of the Currents,” was ultimately won by Westinghouse and Tesla's AC system, which became the foundation for the national electrical grid that still powers American homes, businesses, and industry today.

Further: Provide students with a list of African American and women inventors and entrepreneurs during the Second Industrial Revolution. Instruct students to choose two inventors, one African American and one woman, and have them record each invention, its date, and one concrete way it changed how Americans worked or lived. Then, have them select one entrepreneur who made this economy possible and how. Ask this closing question: Why do you think the contributions of these inventors and entrepreneurs are less well-known than those of figures like Westinghouse, Edison, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie? How did these titan figures achieve market dominance?

Compare and Contrast: Encourage students to revisit John D. Rockefeller’s approach to “vertical integration.” Choose another business magnate from this chapter and apply this method to his product. What are the different “elements of production” that he would have needed to possess to achieve vertical integration.

Writing Skills: Ask students to consider the careers and legacies of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan. Allow students to pick one of these titans of industry and write a short ~200 word essay about their importance in American history. After students finish writing, do an activity that matches students up with others who wrote about a different titan of industry. Students will share with each other until everyone has reviewed all the titans. The essay is addressed to a classmate who has studied a different figure, which is the audience the matching activity actually supplies.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The text mentions Rockefeller and Morgan’s shared belief regarding the undesirability of competition. Ask the class whether business competition is wasteful because disorderly or useful precisely for that reason. Consider examining this question in the context of a modern industry: such as the development of personal computers (in which a start-up—Apple—displaced an incumbent company—IBM).

Guiding Classroom Questions

What company did John D. Rockefeller found and how significant did he and his company become?

Insight: John D. Rockefeller incorporated the Standard Oil Company of Ohio in 1870, which dominated the oil industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1879, he controlled 90 percent of the nation’s refining capacity, becoming the richest man in America. He held those scattered assets together with legal instruments like trusts and the device of a 'holding company' in ways that were innovative – but that also raised concerns about his holding what was essentially a monopoly over a central and indispensable feature of the economy. He was also an early proponent of vertical integration, which meant controlling every aspect of the production of oil products, from extraction and refinement to distribution. He was also recognized for his significant philanthropic contributions, including the establishment of the University of Chicago and several major foundations.

Further: Have Students discuss how Rockefeller’s use of trusts, holding companies, and vertical integration helped him be one of the most successful men of his age.

Who was J. Pierpont Morgan and how great were the impacts on the U.S. economy of his efforts to bring “consolidation” to various industries?

Insight: J. Pierpont Morgan was an investment banker in New York who financed and stabilized the fast-growing American industrial economy. By acquiring and consolidating companies he helped organize major corporations including U.S. Steel and General Electric. Morgan would become so wealthy and influential that, in both 1895 and 1907, the president of the United States called upon him to bail out the government from fiscal crises.

Who was Andrew Carnegie and how did recent technological advancement contribute to the success of his industry?

Insight: Andrew Carnegie immigrated to Pennsylvania from Scotland as a boy, worked in a textile mill, and rose to become a titan of the steel industry. He established Carnegie Steel, which was later consolidated with involvement by J.P. Morgan to become the world’s first billion-dollar company, U.S. Steel, in 1901. This industry benefitted from the 1855 invention in Great Britain of the Bessemer process that revolutionized steel production, which had previously been excessively expensive.

Further: Have students research Sir Henry Bessemer and the invention of the Bessemer Process. Compare the significance of that with the significance of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin from Lesson 6.6 and make an argument about the ripple effects of each throughout the economic, social, and political frameworks of their period. Have students pick an inventor and invention and make an argument for why it was the more important of the two.

Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie are often called titans of the Second Industrial Revolution. Recalling the previous section, what social, political, and economic conditions or opportunities occurred that could have allowed a small number of individuals to gain such enormous control over entire industries? What do their combined stories suggest about the underlying causes of the Second Industrial Revolution?

Insight: Recalling the previous section, post–Civil War America possessed a combination of economic, social, and political conditions ideal for sustained industrial growth. Economically, the nation had abundant natural resources, plentiful sources of capital, excellent transportation systems, and numerous new inventions and technologies. Socially, the population was growing rapidly, in part due to the arrival of millions of immigrants, which expanded the domestic market and supplied a large workforce for the industrializing economy generally. Politically, businesses benefited from a friendly legal and political structure that respected private property, regulated and taxed business only lightly, and imposed protective tariffs to keep foreign competition at a minimum. Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie took advantage of this combined climate, and employed new technology, access to capital, and the ability to consolidate competitors as means of achieving great economic success. Their combined success stories suggest that the Second Industrial Revolution was not driven by a single cause, but by economic, social, and political factors reinforcing one another across the economy at once.

Further: As students work through Lessons 12.5–12.9 (economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century, labor conditions, unionization, class conflict, urbanization, and population increase), have them keep this question in mind: how did the causes described above shape the course and consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution? Students will answer this question in the Summative Assessment Essay Question.

Compare the businesses and financing of the First Industrial Revolution described in Chapter 6, “A National Economy” section, to those shown by these three titans of the Second Industrial Revolution. What changed in the scale, financing, and organization of American business between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions?

Insight: Chapter 6 describes how changes in state laws fostered entrepreneurship and made it possible for corporations to raise large amounts of capital through stock sales. These financed textile mills and internal improvements, including canals, roads, and railroads, which connected the growing national economy. At that time, businesses were generally smaller and more dispersed. No single business or individual had the same kind of industrial domination that emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By the time of Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie, businesses continued to raise capital through stock sales but also used novel financial structures like trusts and holding companies to organize and consolidate control across entire industries. Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the nation's oil refining capacity by 1879. Morgan's investment banking firm helped organize U.S. Steel and General Electric through a process his contemporaries called “Morganization.” Carnegie Steel was consolidated, with Morgan's involvement, into U.S. Steel, which in 1901 became the nation's first billion-dollar company.

Steel, the railroads, and the telegraph, three hallmarks of the Industrial Revolution, did not develop one after another but together. Reflect back on what lesson 12.3 said about railroads and the telegraph, and trace how each of the three made the other two possible.

Insight: Steel was "superior to iron for most purposes, particularly railroad tracks," but it was "too expensive to manufacture until the 1855 invention in Great Britain of the Bessemer process, which revolutionized steel production" — after which American output ran from "77,000 tons of steel produced in 1870" to "11.4 million tons in 1900." Cheap steel made long-distance track possible, and the railroads in turn became the customer whose demand made the mills worth building. (Have students re-examine map 12.1 and 6.3 and note the extent of the railroad expansion, and the areas of the country that had the most and least railroad access). The telegraph closes the circle. The chapter calls it "an essential component of the railroads, serving as a kind of nervous system for the lines, a source of near-instant and reciprocal communication, indispensable for the command and control of the line's activity," and states the dependence in both directions: the two "were always built together, a sign that the relationship between them was symbiotic; the railroads could not have functioned efficiently without the telegraph, and the telegraph lines could not have been built without the cleared lands that had been prepared for the construction of the railroad lines." Furthermore, Rockefeller's scattered assets and Morgan's assembled corporations were manageable only because goods could move across the country and orders could travel faster than the goods.

What social, political, and economic changes would the arrival of the first railroad likely bring to a small Wyoming town in 1890?

Insight: By 1890, the initial thirty miles of railway that had been laid by 1830 had expanded to more than 160,000 miles nationwide (Map 12.1), including the Transcontinental Railroad connecting the eastern network to the West Coast. Wyoming's own lines remained comparatively sparse next to the dense webs already covering the Northeast and Midwest. Economically, some predictions might include falling prices on manufactured goods shipped in, new markets opening for local products shipped out, and a wave of new jobs and businesses following the line itself. Socially, students might expect an increase in long-distance travel, a shift in daily rhythm to a railroad timetable rather than local reckoning by the sun, and the town's population growing as newcomers arrived. Politically, towns might increasingly move from Jefferson's vision of an agrarian republic toward a larger, more unified, more consolidated, and more powerful nation-state.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Match each man to his industry—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan.

In what year was Standard Oil incorporated?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Steel; oil; finance. (2) 1870.

Explain

What is the difference between vertical and horizontal integration, and which did Rockefeller use?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Vertical integration means owning every stage from raw material to finished product; horizontal means owning many companies at the same stage. The book treats Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as the chapter’s case of vertical integration.

Daily Recap

The personages of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan epitomize the industrialist spirit that shaped the United States in the late nineteenth century. The transformations that they drove in large part enabled America to compete with and eventually to overcome the existing industrial powers of Europe, paving the United States’ rise to superpower status in the twentieth century.

Looking Ahead

In 12.5 the chapter moves from the men who built the fortunes to what industrial scale did to ordinary American life—the catalog, the chain store, the consumption community.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Vertical integration, Horizontal integration. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Vertical and horizontal integration are spatial metaphors and English learners often reverse them. Draw the two shapes on the board once: vertical is owning every stage from raw material to finished product; horizontal is owning many companies at the same stage. Students label which is which before using either word.

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Vertical integration means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.5 New Arrangements (pp. 385–387)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 385–387.

Exercise: The Analyzing Figures exercise, ask students to study the images of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Catalogue (Figure 12.8).

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Conditions of Industrial Labor (pp. 387–393).

Essential Understanding

The ways in which the economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century altered American life, for better and for worse.

Lesson Objectives

• Analyze the pros and cons of the economic changes that happened in the late nineteenth century.

• Create an argument about the effects of chain stores in communities.

Key Dates

1888 Richard Sears issues his first mail-order catalog

Key Concepts

The growth of big business brought prosperity and rising living standards but also undermined aspects of traditional communal life.

Offering new products of great variety at competitive rates, mail-order catalogs and chain stores often drove local enterprises out of business, further standardizing commercial and cultural life across the United States.

Key Terms

Island community: The predominant form of social organization in early nineteenth-century America, these largely self-sufficient communities consisted of provincial towns together with their immediate rural surroundings and were characterized by a highly localized way of life, featuring many small businesses, long-standing personal ties, and cultural idiosyncrasies.

Consumption community: Rising to prominence with the emergence of national advertising and mass-produced goods in the late nineteenth century, these “thin” associational communities are organized around shared consumption patterns, resulting in greater cultural homogenization across localities.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Twelve, “New Arrangements.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Americans react to the rise of businessmen such as J.P. Morgan and their enormous influence on national affairs?

What was the Sears and Roebuck catalog?

What were some of the trade-offs involved in the industrialization of America?

What are “communities of consumption”? How do they contrast with “island communities”?

Who objected most to mail-order businesses?

What is a twenty-first century analog to the mail-order catalogs of the late 1800s?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analyzing Figures: Ask students to study the images of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Catalogue (Figure 12.8).

What do the catalogs depict? What stands out to them?

What messaging and images did the catalogs use to attract customers?

Encourage students to consider when the company was founded (1892) and tell them when Sears filed for bankruptcy (2018). What other businesses have risen to take its place? What do advertisements look like today, and how are they different?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are members of a municipal council considering whether to allow a “chain store” to open up in town. Have them write ~150 word letters arguing for or against the proposed store, justifying their positions by considering the pros and cons of their decisions’ consequences. The letter is addressed to the other members of the council, who will vote on the question, and should keep to the ~150 words so that the strongest reason has to come first.

Civic Discourse: Ask students whether they consider island communities or consumption communities to be, all things considered, the superior form of social organization. Stage a debate in class between the two sides, polling students for their opinions both before and after the arguments.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Name two of the most famous mail-order retail companies and describe how their business model impacted the lives of American consumers.

Insight: Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company used huge, lavishly illustrated mail-order catalogs to reach potential customers even in rural, remote parts of the country. Their goods reached customers in rural and remote parts of the country, helping to raise standards of living while providing products at lower costs that could be delivered directly to customers’ doors with the help of the nation’s expanded railroad network.

What does it mean to say that America had been a nation of “island communities” in the beginning of the 19th century through the Civil War?

Insight: The United States was largely a nation of “island communities” during this period, consisting of towns and villages (and their surrounding rural lands) that were largely self-sufficient communities that featured a highly localized way of life, many small businesses, long-standing personal ties, distinct cultural traits, and limited direct connections to the larger world.

What were some of the economic tradeoffs that innovations like mail-order companies, chain stores, and railroads brought to farmers and businesses?

Insight: The introduction of the railroad into rural communities meant that farmers were no longer restricted to selling their goods only to those nearby and could instead reach customers at far greater distances. This in turn meant that those farmers had to compete against distant competitors. Similarly, local small businesses objected to the competition from mail-order arrangements and chain stores even as these provided a greater selection of goods to customers at lower prices.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Name the two largest mail-order companies.

In what year did Richard Sears issue his first catalog?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Montgomery Ward; Sears, Roebuck and Company. (2) 1888.

Explain

What did a mail-order catalog let a rural family do that they could not do before?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Buy from a national range of goods without a local merchant stocking them—which widened choice and lowered prices, and at the same time undercut the local merchant on whom the town had depended.

Daily Recap

Day-to-day economic realities were transformed by the industrialization of the United States. In many ways this was a positive development, but especially in the context of small-town life the cultural cost of rising living standards was significant. The question of how to balance economic efficiency with the need for human community remains pertinent to this very day.

Looking Ahead

In 12.6 the chapter turns to the people producing the goods rather than buying them, and to the conditions in the factories and mines.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Island community, Consumption community. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Island community and consumption community are the book’s own paired terms and neither is transparent. Give a one-line gloss for each—an island community is a town that supplies itself; a consumption community is people spread across the country buying the same things—then have students sort five familiar examples into the two.

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Island community means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.6 The Conditions of Industrial Labor (pp. 387–393)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 387–393.

Exercise: The Analyzing Figures exercise, instruct students to study Group of Breaker Boys (Figure 12.9).

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign Cities and Immigrants & 12.8 Settling the West (pp. 393–405).

Essential Understanding

The changing nature of the American labor force and working conditions as the nation became increasingly industrialized; the rise of organized labor and leaders such as Eugene V. Debs.

Lesson Objectives

• Describe the working conditions in the factories and coal mines.

• Explain the purpose of labor unions and the obstacles they faced in the late nineteenth century.

Key Dates

1877 The Great Railroad Strike ends after fifty-two days (September 4)

1886 Samuel Gompers forms the American Federation of Labor (December 8)

1892 Union strikers defeat private security agents at the Homestead Steel Works but lose the strike when the state militia intervenes (June–November)

1894 The Pullman Strike begins, shutting down rail traffic west of Detroit (May 11)

Key Concepts

As industrialization progressed, the nature of work itself changed, with workers’ schedules and working conditions adapting to the needs of heavy machinery.

Steel mills, oil refineries, and manufacturing plants featured much tedious, dangerous, and unsanitary work. The large industrial labor pool and cultural divisions among workers made it difficult for them to organize and to advocate for themselves effectively.

In many instances, disgruntled and underpaid workers resorted to violence in their demonstrations against business owners, which tended to undermine the popularity of their own cause among the public.

Some organizers, such as the American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers and the American Railway Union’s Eugene Debs made progress through their activism. Debs even became a national political figure as a leader of the Socialist Party, though his influence, like that of unions themselves, was constrained by Americans’ deep-rooted cultural emphasis on individualism.

Key Terms

Molly Maguires: This secret society of Irish immigrant coal miners engaged in quasi-terroristic activities directed against mine owners in western Pennsylvania. Several of its members were tried and executed in the late 1870s.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Twelve, “The Conditions of Industrial Labor.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

By what percentage did the number of American industrial workers increase in the second half of the nineteenth century? What was the increase in absolute terms?

To what degree was upward mobility possible for workers in this time?

What were conditions like in industrial workplaces during the second half of the nineteenth century? How did they differ from the workplaces of today?

Who was Samuel Gompers?

Why were Americans often reluctant to join labor unions?

What were some of the violent labor demonstrations that took place in the late nineteenth century?

Who was Eugene V. Debs?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analyzing Figures: Instruct students to study Group of Breaker Boys (Figure 12.9). In a class discussion or a written reflection, ask the following questions:

What does the image depict? What do you notice in this picture?

When and where was it made?

What stands out about the boys clothes and facial expressions?

What does the picture suggest about their working conditions?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are aspiring union organizers in 1880s-era Pittsburgh at a steel mill whose workforce is divided along cultural lines. Assign them to write a brief appeal arguing that workers should overlook their ethnic and professional differences (such that skilled workers such as smiths should join with unskilled laborers like furnace operators) to band together and negotiate for better working conditions and pay. Have them share their work in small groups and then discuss a few volunteers’ letters as a class. The appeal should run 200–250 words and be addressed to the mill’s own workers—skilled and unskilled together—rather than to a sympathetic outsider, since persuading that divided audience is the difficulty the exercise is about.

Civic Discourse: Trade unions became more prevalent in the late nineteenth century, advocating for better wages, hours, and working conditions, often through striking (withholding labor). Were such tactics justified? Have students choose a side to defend regarding whether or not unions should be able to go on strike, irrespective of disruptions to work environments and the associated complications for society (e.g., many critical social functions depended upon continually operating railroad transportation).

Civic Discourse: The strikes in this lesson were answered at three levels of government: local police, state militia, and in 1894 federal authority. Ask students what each level owed the people involved, and what a citizen in 1892 could reasonably ask of a town, a state, and the nation. Then ask which of those responsibilities the chapter shows being met and which it shows being contested. Students should ground each claim in an event from the lesson rather than in a general principle.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were working conditions in factories and coal mines like during this period?

Insight: While industrialization provided an increase in standards of living and higher purchasing power for wage earners, working conditions in the new industries were often both dangerous and exploitative. Workplace fatalities reached twenty-five thousand in the year 1913 alone. Sixty-hour workweeks and the use of child labor were common, with one out of every six children in the nation working full time in 1880. Factory labor was often repetitive and monotonous.

How did the pool of industrial wage laborers change from 1860 to 1890 and what impact did this have on workers’ ability to obtain improved working conditions?

Insight: The number of industrial wage laborers in the U.S. skyrocketed from 885,000 in 1860 to more than 3.2 million in 1890. The large industrial labor pool and cultural divisions among workers made it difficult for them to organize and to advocate for themselves effectively.

How did labor-related violence and strikes of the late nineteenth century advance or hinder the objectives of labor organizers?

Insight: Several notable and violent labor-related demonstrations took place between the 1870s and the 1890s, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket riot in 1886, the Homestead steel strike of 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894. The results of labor-related violence against business owners tended to undermine the popularity of their own cause among the public.

What did organized labor ultimately achieve during this period, and how did its failures shape the movement's future direction?

Insight: The craft unions associated with the American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, enjoyed the most success since their members were skilled workers, and the AFL was narrowly focused on higher wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. Unskilled workers, who wanted more substantial reforms, did not have a comparable organization to advocate for their cause. The violent labor responses, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket riot of 1886, failed to achieve their objectives and win the American public's sympathy. Labor discontent contributed to the success of Eugene Debs's Socialist Party, which was growing in popularity among farmers and workers alike, drawing nearly a million votes in the 1912 presidential election.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

How many industrial wage laborers were there in 1860, and in 1890?

Who founded the American Federation of Labor, and when?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 885,000; more than 3.2 million. (2) Samuel Gompers, 1886.

Explain

Why did unions struggle to gain support in this period?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. American culture prized individualism; and because the labor pool had grown so large, workers who organized could be fired, cut loose and replaced—the book notes that the passive-resistance tools available to enslaved people were not available to wage laborers.

Daily Recap

As America transformed from an agrarian into an industrial society, so too did its labor force and thus its citizenry undergo fundamental changes. Emerson’s theme of self-reliance, and the Founders’ stress on self-rule, sat uneasily with the conditions of wage work, in which individual workers depended on their employers for survival. It became an open question whether America could preserve her founding identity in the wake of such drastic socioeconomic changes.

Looking Ahead

In 12.7 the chapter follows those workers home, into the cities and immigrant neighborhoods that industrial labor filled.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Molly Maguires. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Strike, union, organize and scab travel together in this lesson and several have common non-labor meanings. Pre-teach the four as a set with the labor sense only, then give the frame students will need for the organizer exercise: “We are asking for ____ because ____.”

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Molly Maguires means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.7 Cities and Immigrants & 12.8 Settling the West (pp. 393–405)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 393–405.

Exercise: The Reading Comprehension exercise, ask a student in class to read aloud “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 as part of a fundraising appeal for the Statue of Liberty, and consider the following questions: in what sense is the Statue of Liberty, and America generally, the “Mother of Exiles”? Why does she invite “the wretched refuse” and the “homeless, tempest-tost” to be sent to her? In what way is the poem consistent and inconsistent regarding the original purpose of the sculpture? How does it reflect the aspirations and conditions of immigrants in the late nineteenth century?

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The End of the Frontier (pp. 406–411).

Essential Understanding

The explosive growth of both cities and immigration from Europe and (in the Western states) East Asia as a result of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Lesson Objectives

• Explain how urbanization transformed American society in the late nineteenth century.

• Analyze how urbanization changed the traditional ideal of what it meant to be an American.

• Describe the experience of new immigrants living in American cities in the nineteenth century.

Key Dates

1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act is signed into law, limiting Chinese immigration (May 6)

1892 Ellis Island opens as an immigration center (January 1)

Key Concepts

The population of America’s cities surged in the post-Civil War era, driven by workforce changes and mass immigration.

Tensions arose between the realities of urban life—which were characterized by poverty, corruption, and interdependence—and traditional American aspirations like self-reliance and living close to nature.

The layouts of cities were themselves transformed, as highly compact walkable districts gave way to sprawling metropolises with an inner core of poverty surrounded by ringed neighborhoods of rising affluence. The residents of these early suburbs often commuted to work using electric-powered trolleys.

The destitution of many urban immigrants gave rise to “machine politics,” in which informal networks controlled by “bosses” dominated municipal government through their use of patronage. The widespread trading of votes for city services stood at a distance from the Founders’ hope that America’s political system would be guided first and foremost by civic virtue, as powerful machines like Tammany Hall in New York prized loyalty to their own organization above all else.

Key Terms

Urbanization: the movement of population into cities that the lesson treats as the defining demographic fact of the period.

Tenement: the dense urban housing form in which much of that population lived.

Homestead: the parcel of public land granted to settlers, the mechanism by which the West was occupied.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh and eighth sections of Chapter Twelve, “Cities and Immigrants” and “Settling the West.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What is urbanization?

How did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson appraise the civic potential of city-dwellers in comparison to that of farmers?

What did the cities of industrial America look like? What was their layout?

What were living conditions in American cities like in the late nineteenth century?

How did American politics change as a result of urbanization?

What technological innovation contributed to immigration by making ocean voyages faster and cheaper?

Why were native-born Americans sometimes suspicious and fearful of immigrants?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Reading Comprehension: Ask a student in class to read aloud “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 as part of a fundraising appeal for the Statue of Liberty, and consider the following questions: in what sense is the Statue of Liberty, and America generally, the “Mother of Exiles”? Why does she invite “the wretched refuse” and the “homeless, tempest-tost” to be sent to her? In what way is the poem consistent and inconsistent regarding the original purpose of the sculpture? How does it reflect the aspirations and conditions of immigrants in the late nineteenth century?

Civic Discourse: The text examines at length the effects of urbanization, modernization, immigration, and industrialization on American society in the late nineteenth century. Ask the class to write a paragraph summarizing each of these processes. The paragraphs should include a definition of what each process entailed and how they challenged or changed the traditional ways of what it meant to be an American. Each of the four paragraphs should run 80–120 words and be written for a reader who has not read the chapter, so the definition has to do real work. After students have finished, lead a class discussion. What process would be the hardest to adjust to? Why did these changes occur all at once during this era? Are there transformational economic changes occurring now, and if so, how do they compare to back then?

Writing Skills: Was urbanization a positive development? Have students, after reading the chapter up to this point, write a substantive paragraph answering this question. They should cite statistics and other evidence from the text in defending their answer. The paragraph should run 150–200 words and be addressed to a reader who has taken the opposite view.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How significant was the growth in America’s urban population during the late nineteenth century?

Insight: In 1790, just 3.3 percent of the U.S. population lived in cities, but by 1890, the share of America’s population living in cities had risen to 33 percent. Cities like Chicago tripled their population between 1880 and 1900, while New York grew from 2 million to 3.5 million during that time.

Did American urbanization align or clash with the vision of the Founders and of earlier Americans like Emerson and Thoreau?

Insight: The urbanization of this period clashed with the ideals of self-sufficiency and closeness to nature that had been prized by the generations of Emerson and Thoreau. It also clashed with the wariness of cities that had been expressed by many of the founders. Thomas Jefferson had declared, “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” George Washington agreed, saying, “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded.” Moreover, the widespread trading of votes for city services during this period stood at a distance from the Founders’ hope that America’s political system would be guided first and foremost by civic virtue, as powerful machines like Tammany Hall in New York prized loyalty to their own organization above all else.

How did the composition of immigration change after the Civil War?

Insight: Until the 1870s, most immigrants had been Protestants from Northern and Western Europe. Between 1880 and 1920, an estimated twenty million immigrants came to America, with the bulk of them from Eastern and Southern Europe. Instead of Protestantism, most practiced Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Judaism. The “new immigration” after the Civil War was in large part a consequence of steam power. When the Atlantic could be crossed only by sail, the voyage was simply too long for immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Steamships shortened the voyages, and railroads allowed travel from the interior to a port, so for the first time large numbers of Italians and Jews and Poles and Greeks were able to come to the United States.

How did the experience of Asian immigrants in the West compare to that of European immigrants in the East during this period?

Insight: In the pre-Civil War years, Chinese immigrants were drawn by the Gold Rush, with some twenty-five thousand arriving in California by the early 1850s. Around this time, Irish immigrants fleeing famine and Germans fleeing political upheaval were arriving in the East. After the Civil War, Chinese and Japanese immigration increased alongside a new wave of Eastern and Southern European immigration. All groups faced hostility from those who feared they would not assimilate into American culture or who saw them as a threat to American jobs. The textbook mentions suspicion toward these European immigrants for their Catholic or Jewish faith, as well as nativist beliefs in their racial or cultural inferiority. With the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese were the first to face a federal law that imposed an absolute ban on immigration by members of a specific ethnic group, particularly laborers.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What share of Americans lived in cities in 1790?

What did the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 do?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 3.3 percent. (2) Barred Chinese immigrants, particularly laborers, from entering the United States.

Explain

How did immigration after the Civil War differ from what came before?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Before the war, most immigrants were Protestants from Northern and Western Europe, with many Irish, German, and Asian immigrants in the pre-Civil War years; between 1880 and 1920 the numbers rose enormously and the sources shifted toward Southern and Eastern Europe, and greatly increased on the Pacific coast toward East Asia. While all immigrant groups faced hostility, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first federal law to place an absolute ban on a specific ethnic working group.

Daily Recap

In industrializing, urbanizing, and modernizing, America became a different place from what it had been prior to the Civil War. These trends all undeniably involved departures from much of the previously-held vision and self-understanding of Americans. But in time these new characteristics were reconciled and fused with the features of America as it had already existed.

Looking Ahead

In 12.9 the chapter closes on the frontier—the Census Bulletin of 1890, Turner’s thesis, and the Plains Indians whose lands the settlement crossed.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Urbanization, Tenement, Homestead. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Nativism and native-born look related and mean nearly opposite things in this lesson. Separate them explicitly. Then supply the comparative frames the assessment expects: “Earlier immigrants came mostly from ____, while later immigrants came mostly from ____.”

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “Urbanization means ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

12.9 The End of the Frontier (pp. 406–411)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 406–411.

Exercise: The Reading Comprehension exercise, assign students to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and to analyze its arguments.

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Prepare for the Summative Assessment.

Essential Understanding

Westward Expansion and its relationship to early American ideals; cowboy culture; and wars against Plains Indians.

Lesson Objectives

• Draw conclusions about how the concept of the “frontier” influenced American ideals.

• Describe the conflicts and controversies that existed in the American West.

Key Dates

1887 The Dawes Severalty Act is passed, breaking up Native American reservation lands (February 8)

1890 The Census Bulletin declares the end of the American frontier (June 2)

1893 The World’s Fair opens in Chicago (May 1)

1893 Frederick Jackson Turner writes “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (July 12)

Key Concepts

As the American frontier shifted westward into the continent’s interior, the lack of established legal and social norms—as well as the overwhelmingly male composition of the settler population, who frequently clashed with the region’s indigenous tribes—engendered a freewheeling culture of violence and individualism that has become mythologized as the “Wild West.”

As a result of the 1890 Census, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the western frontier had become “closed.” The western territories all attained statehood by 1912 due to their burgeoning populations, signaling the end of the Wild West.

Meanwhile, in 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his influential “frontier thesis” in Chicago, arguing that Americans’ democratic culture, pragmatic character, and exuberant spirit resulted from the availability of free land on the country’s western frontier.

While controversial, Turner’s thesis raised the question of what the disappearance of a continental frontier would mean for a people that had come to understand itself as shaped by the settler experience.

Key Terms

Frontier thesis: Frederick Jackson Turner’s argument, presented in Chicago in 1893, that the frontier experience had shaped American character and institutions.

Dawes Severalty Act: the 1887 law that divided many tribal reservation lands into individual allotments as part of a federal assimilation policy; large amounts of remaining “surplus” land subsequently passed out of Native ownership.

Plains Indians: the peoples of the western interior whose conflicts with the American government the lesson takes up alongside the frontier’s closing.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the ninth section of Chapter Twelve, “The End of the Frontier.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

When was the heyday of the American cowboy?

How much of the West does the U.S. government still own?

What notable conflicts took place between the Plains Indians and the American government?

What was Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the frontier’s importance in American history?

Where did Turner first present his influential essay in 1893?

Which explorer does Turner reference repeatedly in his work?

Which legislative act attempted to “Americanize” the Plains Indians in 1887?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Reading Comprehension: Assign students to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and to analyze its arguments. What, according to Turner, is the defining aspect of the American people? What is the frontier’s ultimate significance for Turner? Does he view the United States as a single nation or as a collection of states and regions? Why?

Writing Skills: If Turner’s thesis were correct, that “the first period of American history” was over, what could come next? Ask students to consider what new frontiers Americans have explored or pioneered since the 1890s, and to write about one in particular in a ~200 word essay. How does their chosen frontier compare to Turner’s analysis in terms of its particular significance to American history? The essay is addressed to a reader who knows Turner’s thesis but not the frontier the student has chosen, so the comparison has to be made explicit rather than assumed.

Civic Discourse: To this day, the federal government owns a majority of land in several western states, including 80 percent of Nevada. Ask students to consider whether such federal control of state lands is compatible with American political ideals. How can states effectively govern their internal affairs under such circumstances?

Analytical Skills: Turner delivered his frontier thesis in 1893, three years after the Census Bulletin he built it on. Ask students how a historian turns a government finding into an interpretation, and what that interpretation then does to the way later Americans understood their own past. Have them separate three things the lesson runs together: what the 1890 Census actually recorded, what Turner argued it meant, and why the argument was persuasive to the people who heard it. Historical knowledge is obtained one way and transmitted another, and the gap between them is the subject here.

Analytical Skills: Turner’s frontier thesis is the chapter’s own example of a claim that was widely believed and then argued over for a century—the lesson already notes that it was controversial. Ask students to find three present-day online sources about the frontier thesis and evaluate each on four points: who wrote it, who sponsors or hosts the site, when it was published or last revised, and what evidence it actually cites. Have them identify which sources present Turner’s argument as settled fact, which present it as a historical interpretation that has been contested, and which give no indication either way. The exercise asks students to judge the reliability of what they find, not to settle whether Turner was right.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did the notion of the wild west fit with the reality of the federal government’s ownership and influence over lands in the Western states during the late nineteenth century?

Insight: The heyday of cowboys riding the open range steering cattle drives of three thousand heads was fairly brief, lasting only a couple decades after the Civil War, as farms and ranches began butting up against each other. The federal government was also heavily involved in the Western states, owning roughly half the land of the West and exerting significant authority over matters such as Indian policy.

What was the impact on the Plains Indians of the expansion westward and the exercise of the power of the federal government?

Insight: Native peoples across the West faced sustained encroachment on their lands and increasingly coercive federal policies. Many Plains peoples were defeated militarily and confined to reservations; elsewhere in the West, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce resisted forced removal before surrendering in 1877. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 pursued assimilation by dividing many tribal lands into individual allotments and opening large amounts of “surplus” land to non-Native ownership, accelerating the loss of tribal land.

What was the primary message of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”?

Insight: Turner argued that the western frontier had given rise to the traits that shaped the American intellect: its “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” as well as its “practical, inventive turn of mind” and its “dominant individualism.” Turner believed the frontier had shaped the moral development of the United States away from the corruption of Europe. Turner suggested that with the closing of the American frontier, the forward-looking factors that had shaped American development were now gone.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 do?

Roughly how many Plains Indians does the book count?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Broke up Native American reservation lands into individual family allotments. (2) About 250,000.

Explain

What did the 1890 Census Bulletin declare, and why did it matter?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. That settlement in the West had become so widespread there could hardly be said to be a frontier line any longer—the finding on which Turner built his thesis three years later that the frontier had shaped the American character.

Daily Recap

As industrializing eastern cities swelled with immigrants, Americans were also moving westward. While coastal areas had already been settled, especially during the California gold rush, the regions in and around the Rocky Mountains were now being filled in with American settlement. Until the 1890s, America had always been a place of abundance, including and especially of land. If this abundance and opportunity was quintessential to the American idea, then what effect did the end of westward expansion have on American national identity?

Looking Ahead

Chapter Thirteen asks what a nation without a continental frontier does next, and finds part of the answer beyond the continent.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first. Frontier, homestead, reservation, allotment. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence. Frontier carries a specific meaning here that its everyday use does not—a line of settlement, not a wilderness.

• Frames that carry the reasoning. “The frontier meant ___.” · “___ happened because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write. In pairs, students say one sentence using each term before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph. A student may build a labelled list or diagram instead of prose.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

The questions and answers that follow offer a range of ways to assess students’ understanding of the chapter. Teachers may use the assessment as written or select and adapt questions to suit their students and course of study.

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest (1) to latest (6).

A. The final spike in the Transcontinental Railroad connects the East and West by train

B. U.S. Steel becomes the nation’s first billion-dollar company

C. Ellis Island opens as an immigration center

D. Standard Oil is incorporated by John D. Rockefeller

E. Chinese immigration is limited by the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law

F. Samuel Gompers forms the American Federation of Labor

Answer: 1–A · 2–D · 3–E · 4–F · 5–C · 6–B

Key Persons and Concepts

Fill in the blank.

The Great Railroad Strike was one of the first major nationwide labor strikes and revealed deep tensions between workers and railroad corporations.

The Bessemer Process allowed steel to be mass-produced quickly and cheaply, fueling rapid industrial growth in the late nineteenth century.

George Westinghouse developed alternating current (AC) technology, competing directly with Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) system.

Corrupt urban Political Machines gained power by providing jobs, housing, and assistance to immigrants in exchange for votes.

Ellis Island served as the primary gateway for immigrants arriving from Europe during the peak years of immigration.

The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 attempted to assimilate Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands into individual family allotments.

Montgomery Ward pioneered the mail-order catalog business, allowing rural Americans to purchase goods without traveling to a city.

Sears, Roebuck and Company became one of the largest mail-order retailers in the country, offering everything from clothing to entire houses through its catalog.

The Telegraph allowed for near-instant long-distance communication, transforming business, journalism, and railroad coordination.

Several members of the Molly Maguires were tried and executed after being accused of murder and sabotage in the coalfields.

Geography

Use Map 12.2 to answer the questions below.

Using the map, what is the difference when you add numbers for Japan and China and compare them with Latin American immigrants during this time period?

A: Between 1880 and 1920, Japan and China together sent 365,677 immigrants—241,662 from Japan and 124,015 from China—while Latin America sent 653,472. The difference is 287,795, and the three regions together account for 1,019,149. That combined total is still far short of the largest European source: Italy alone sent 4,127,462.

Which states fall into the highest settlement percentage category (34 percent and over)? What do these states have in common—consider geography, industry or proximity to entry points.

A: States with areas containing 34 percent or more of their population from immigrants include Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Texas. Common threads that can explain immigration in these states include farmland being offered relatively cheap. Many came from agricultural backgrounds and land was difficult to attain in Europe. Michigan and Wisconsin had growing industries that included timber, mining, and manufacturing. Many immigrants were able to find employment in these areas. Texas is the outlier and reflects a different pattern. Mexican immigrants came for jobs in agricultural labor such as ranching and farming.

Short Answer

What would have seemed extraordinary or inspiring, and what might have been concerning to Americans watching the Grand Review of the Union armies in 1865?

A: The sight of hundreds of thousands of Union troops marching through the streets of Washington was a potent symbol of the newfound unity of the American nation, in which national identity was becoming more important than regional and state loyalties. The Grand Review showed how individual soldiers had become part of something greater through their military service. The reasons for concern came from the same source. To those watching the spectacle, perhaps too much power was being concentrated in the national government, and states and localities were losing their particular characters. Were Anti-Federalists such as Patrick Henry correct that the Constitution would now give rise to an overly centralized national government that was “incompatible with the genius of republicanism”?

Explain the significance of the development of railroads.

A: The railroads were the first “big business” in that they required the pooling of large amounts of capital, they were organized as corporations with multiple owners, and they created large management bureaucracies to run the enterprise. Railroad construction and operations drove demand for industrial products, accounting for 94 percent of rolled steel purchases in the United States by 1881, while also giving rise to other major economic innovations such as the mail order companies delivering goods to communities across the nation.

Describe the role of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan in the industrialization and economic development of the United States.

A: Carnegie was the primary figure in the steel industry. Rockefeller ran Standard Oil. Morgan was an important investment banker who pioneered methods of corporate finance. Both men thought competition wasteful and sought to consolidate. Morgan’s consolidations produced firms such as U.S. Steel.

Analyze the pros and cons of the economic changes that happened in the late nineteenth century, including via mail order companies and chain stores.

A: Mail-order companies and chain stores provided Americans with greater access to many goods at lower prices. However, these companies threatened locally owned businesses that could not compete with the buying power of larger companies. There were also trade-offs with innovations like the railroad; they gave farmers the ability to market their goods at farther distances, but this meant that farmers would face greater competition than before. In summary, American communities were becoming more enmeshed in a national economic and cultural system, and local autonomy and self-determination declined.

What were working conditions in factories and coal mines like for laborers during the late nineteenth century?

A: Work in factories was repetitive and monotonous, with working conditions controlled mainly by the needs of the machinery. Workers were governed by the clock, and shifts were extremely long and tiring. In many ways, the work was dehumanizing. Many children were working in dangerous industries like coal mining.

Describe the rise of organized labor, the influence of leaders including Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers, and the effects of labor related violence.

A: Although unions struggled to gain support because of the individualism in American culture, Gompers and Debs did have some successes. Gompers led the American Federation of Labor, which organized skilled workers and focused on core labor issues: higher pay, shorter hours, and better working conditions. Debs led the American Railway Union, which allowed both skilled and unskilled workers to join. He also led the Socialist Party, which elected many mayors and drew almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1912. During this period there were several instances of labor-related violence, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Pullman strike of 1894, which often set public opinion against organized labor.

How did urbanization transform the United States during the late nineteenth century?

A: There was dramatic growth in the number of Americans living in cities and the size of cities. In 1790, only 3.3 percent of the population lived in cities. By 1890, that number had grown to 33 percent. Chicago’s population tripled between 1880 and 1900. The layout of cities changed from a “walking city” in which social classes were mixed together to a segmented city with recognizable wealthy and poor districts connected by streetcars. Urban poverty was concentrated in the core of cities.

How did immigration of the late nineteenth century differ from earlier periods and how did this immigration impact American society and the immigrants themselves?

A: Up until the Civil War, immigration had primarily come from northern and western Europe, chiefly from Britain, Ireland, and the German states. After the war, the number of immigrants increased dramatically, and now immigrants were primarily coming from eastern and southern Europe. Most were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish rather than Protestant. For the immigrants, they were leaving a pre-modern existence centered on agriculture and entering a world of urban, industrialized living. Immigrants created distinctive ethnic enclaves such as Little Italys and Chinatowns. This gave immigrants a chance to gain contacts with people of their own ethnic groups, but it also increased suspicion among the native-born who doubted their ability to assimilate. Samuel Gompers and others called for immigration restrictions to reduce competition with native-born workers.

How did the development of the West impact the Plains Indians?

A: Westward settlement brought sustained encroachment on Native lands and intensified federal efforts to confine, remove, and assimilate Native peoples. Many Plains peoples were defeated militarily and confined to reservations, while western leaders such as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce resisted forced removal. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 divided many tribal lands into individual allotments and opened large amounts of “surplus” land to non-Native ownership, contributing to a major loss of tribal land.

What was meant by the “closing of the frontier,” and what did historians at the time think about this development?

A: In 1890, a Census Bulletin declared that there were so many pockets of settlements in the West that “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” anymore—that the frontier was closed. This meant that for the first time in its history, the United States did not have a Western frontier in which to look toward for expansion. In 1893, Historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” that the availability of free land on the frontier had been the source of “the American intellect”—its coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, its “practical inventive turn of mind,” and its “dominant individualism.” Turner declared “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

Examine the social, political, and economic causes of the Second Industrial Revolution, and explain how those causes shaped its course and consequences for the nation and its people in both the opportunities it created and the challenges it produced. Use at least the following references to inform your answer:

The personal origins, career, and writings of Andrew Carnegie.

The work and writings of Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers.

Scoring Guidance:

The question: Examine the social, political, and economic causes of the Second Industrial Revolution, and explain how those causes shaped its course and consequences for the nation and its people in both the opportunities it created and the challenges it produced.

A strong response addresses causes, course, and consequences as connected stages, not three separate lists. For causes, it should reach beyond a single factor to the combination the chapter documents: abundant capital and natural resources, rapid population growth fed by immigration, and a political and legal climate that favored business through light regulation and protective tariffs. For course, it should reach the conditions and conflicts the chapter documents concretely: the breakers and the mines, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Homestead in 1892, the rise of the AFL alongside Debs's more radical American Railway Union, and the growth of cities and immigration that reshaped American life. For consequences, it should reach both the opportunities, such as the mail-order catalog and chain store putting a national range of goods within reach of rural households, the fortunes industrial scale made possible for men like Carnegie and Rockefeller, and the hardships those same forces produced, including labor's repeated setbacks and the Socialist Party's rise out of that frustration.

The strongest responses recognize that the same economic, social, and political conditions that caused industrial growth are what shaped its course and consequences. For instance, the technological improvements which made goods cheap and plentiful are the same improvements which made individual workers replaceable. Responses that treat causes, course, and consequences as three separate stories, rather than one continuous chain, do not demonstrate the interconnectedness of the courses, causes, and consequences, and as a result form a weaker response.

Credit specific evidence over general characterization. For instance, a response naming the Bessemer process, Ellis Island, the American Federation of Labor, or Standard Oil demonstrates a stronger grasp of the material than a response describing the era as “a time of great change and also great problems.”

Do not require a verdict on opportunity versus hardship. Students may conclude that opportunity outweighed hardship, that it did not, or that the question cannot be settled. Any of the three earns full credit if the evidence is handled honestly. Carnegie and Debs, in the chapter's paired primary sources on Socialism and Capitalism, disagree on exactly this point, and a student who notices that the chapter itself declines to adjudicate has understood the reading.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Becoming a World Power

A Divided Heart

1867–1917 · pp. 412–441

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

For most of the nineteenth century, the United States enjoyed a long respite from involvement in world affairs. Many at the time believed such “apartness” to be America’s ideal and natural state. John Quincy Adams, in an 1821 address celebrating the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and that, while she is a “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” she remains “the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Such rhetoric stood in an uncertain relationship with the language that Adams employed two years later in his drafting of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the United States would not accept any further European colonization of the Western Hemisphere but would instead regard itself as the region’s dominant power. The two perspectives are not entirely contradictory, but there is certainly a tension between them. How would the United States assert its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere without ever “going abroad,” likely in a southerly direction, to support republicanism and perhaps destroy a few “monsters” in the process?

By the late nineteenth century, the concept of imperialism was in the air, all around the world. Most of the major European nations, and a few minor ones, as well as Japan in the Far East were aggressively seeking out imperial acquisitions in Africa and Asia. America too began to acquire major overseas possessions, starting in the 1890s. But for Americans, there was a problem: how was one to reconcile such actions with the fundamental American principles of liberty and inherent human equality?

Some imperialists simply ignored those principles by drawing on doctrines of “scientific” racism; others embraced the paternalistic concept of imperial rule as a “civilizing mission.” But the driving force behind such expansion was a small but influential group of elite thinkers and public officials who came to believe that the acquisition of overseas possessions by the United States was necessary to the nation’s commercial and political interests. This group included such figures as naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts; Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy; and Indiana attorney Albert Beveridge, whose soaring 1898 Senate campaign speech “The March of the Flag” expertly wove together all the elements—religious, strategic, humanitarian, commercial, ideological—of the pro-imperial case.

Asia in particular was a target of expansionists, who ultimately had their eyes on the limitless markets of China and the rest of the Far East, and the first American steps toward expansion occurred in that direction, with the acquisition of Alaska from Russia and then the islands of Hawaii and Samoa. But then came Cuba, still a Spanish colony, although one rocked periodically by unsuccessful revolts against increasingly ruthless Spanish rule. The United States followed the separatist movement with interest, partly because of extensive American commercial interests in Cuba but also because the cause of Cuban independence was one for which Americans felt instinctive sympathy. When the Spanish government brutally suppressed an insurrection that began in February 1895, the American public was outraged. If there were ever a monster worth going abroad to destroy, Spain seemed to be the one.

Such public sentiments are difficult for elected officials to resist. After the destruction of the American battleship the USS Maine on February 15, 1898, in Havana harbor, with a loss of most of her crew, President McKinley faced the heat of an inflamed American public demanding vengeance. On April 20, Congress recognized the independence of Cuba by joint resolution and authorized the use of force to drive out the Spanish. Two days later, McKinley announced a blockade of Cuba’s northern coast and the southeastern port of Santiago. The Spanish promptly declared war in response.

The war itself was brief and one-sided, as disastrous for Spain as can be imagined, a dizzying example of a world turned upside down. After a mere 114 days, the United States had become a world power, and Spain had lost that status forever, in a war that became known there simply as El Desastre (the Disaster). But the peace to follow would present the United States with far greater difficulties than it had imagined. With the collapse of Spanish rule, Spain’s colonial possessions were also plunged into crisis. The Philippines needed stable and humane governance, but it was not clear how it could be governed effectively without violating American principles. The stage was set for a great national debate.

McKinley finally concluded that there was no alternative to annexation. But this position put the United States in opposition to an indigenous anti-Spanish insurrectionary movement that saw itself as the rightful successor to Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. The ensuing conflict lasted until spring 1902 and cost many more lives than had war with Spain.

The Philippines were not the only problem facing the newly imperial United States. The principles of the Founding were being fudged left and right, as in the case of Puerto Rico, ceded to the United States by Spain. It was ultimately granted an indeterminate and intermediate status, somewhere between colonial dependency and fully incorporated statehood. In addition, relations with Cuba, the original cause for the war, became complicated, with interventionist policies like the Platt Amendment and the Roosevelt Corollary fomenting tension.

America’s heart was always divided in its approach to imperial expansion, which helps explain why the Philippines and Cuba eventually became independent while Puerto Rico and Guam remained U.S. territories. It was not easy to recognize what was wise and proper in John Quincy Adams’s admonitions and at the same time to recognize that the growth of American wealth and power brought with it claims about responsibilities toward the rest of the world.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The development of the United States into an imperial power by the turn of the 20th century.

From the earliest decades of the United States, tension emerged in the country’s approach to foreign policy between its traditional isolationism as articulated in Washington’s farewell address and the more expansive implications of the Monroe Doctrine.

While American overseas involvement was modest over the course of the nineteenth century, westward expansion was one of the country’s defining themes. Through the Louisiana Purchase, Mexico cession, Oregon Treaty, and purchase of Alaska, the United States more than quadrupled in size.

The late nineteenth century was characterized by a scramble among European powers to acquire overseas possessions for various economic, political, social, and ideological reasons. In short, such competition was mutually reinforcing, as industrializing nations could not afford to be outcompeted for access to natural resources and strategic advantages that imperial expansion secured.

Amid this scramble, the McKinley administration moved in 1898 to annex Hawaii, which had been subject to American economic and cultural influence for decades and was increasingly eyed by the British and Japanese.

America’s emergence as an imperial power was secured through its decisive victory in the Spanish-American War, which resulted in its acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as its lasting influence in Cuban affairs.

Their sudden possession of vast overseas territory considered unsuitable for statehood presented Americans with a newfound challenge: how to reconcile their increasing involvement in the governance of other peoples with the political principles of the American Founding, particularly the ideals of liberty, equality, and self-determination.

This challenge was somewhat resolved in the case of the Philippines by Congress’s commitment to the islands’ eventual independence. Measures such as the Platt Amendment and the Roosevelt Corollary, though, signaled a lasting commitment to advancing American interests through overseas involvement, especially in the Western Hemisphere, even at the expense of foreign nations’ sovereignty.

Key Persons

Albert Beveridge (1862–1927)

Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924)

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914)

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)

William McKinley (1843–1901)

William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951)

Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911)

George Dewey (1837–1917)

John Hay (1838–1905)

Jane Addams (1860–1935)

William Dean Howells (1837–1920)

William James (1842–1910)

Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964)

Jones Act (1917)

William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

Elihu Root (1845–1937)

Key Concepts and Terms

Scientific racism

Social Gospel

Yellow journalism

Platt Amendment

Roosevelt Corollary

Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901)

Open Door Policy

Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)

Timeline

1867 Secretary of State William Seward purchases Alaska from Russia (March 30)

1895 The Cuban War of Independence begins (February 24)

1896 William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election (November 3)

1898 The American battleship Maine explodes in Havana’s harbor (February 15)

1898 Congress approves a declaration of war against Spain (April 25)

1898 Commodore George Dewey destroys the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay (May 1)

1898 In Cuba, U.S. troops win at El Caney and San Juan Hill (July 1); Santiago falls to U.S. (July 17)

1898 Joint session of Congress votes to annex Hawaii (July 7)

1898 American forces take Manila, ending Spanish rule in the Philippines (August 13)

1898 The signing of the Treaty of Paris ends the Spanish-American War (December 10)

1899 The Philippine-American War begins (February 4)

1899 Secretary of State John Hay formally announces the Open Door Policy to allow equal trading access in China to all nations (September 6)

1900 Eastern islands of Samoa officially annexed by the United States (February 16)

1901 William Howard Taft becomes the civilian governor of the Philippines

1903 Cuba and the United States agree on the Platt Amendment (May 22)

1903 With U.S. backing, Panama declares independence from Colombia (November 3)

1904 Panama cedes control of the Panama Canal Zone to the United States (May 4)

1904 Roosevelt delivers his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 6)

1914 The Panama Canal opens to traffic (August 15)

1917 Congress passes the Jones-Shafroth Act or the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1917 (March 2)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

13.1 Chapter Opener – pp. 415–419 (.5 to 1 class)

• American foreign policy and isolationism

• Review of John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine

• The tension between the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny

13.2 The Temptation of Empire – pp. 419–423 (.5 to 1 class)

• The imperial ambitions of other nations

• The difference between imperialism and colonialism

13.3 The Course of Empire – pp. 423–428 (1 to 2 classes)

• Westward expansion of the United States: Alaska, Samoa, & Hawaii

• The events leading to the Spanish-American War

• The Spanish-American War

13.4 The Dilemmas of Empire – pp. 428–441 (1 to 2 classes)

• The United States becomes a world power

• Problems in the Philippines

• McKinley’s diplomacy

• Puerto Rico

• Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

• China’s decline, the Boxer Rebellion, and McKinley’s “open door” policy

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Albert Beveridge, speech before Congress on the Philippines, January 9, 1900 (p. 413)

Beveridge asks who dares halt a flag that has never paused in its onward march, now that history’s largest events are carrying it forward and Americans are at last one people, strong enough for any task. The book sets this at the head of a chapter subtitled A Divided Heart. Beveridge speaks for one half of a country that did not agree with him. He had just returned from the Philippines and was among the Senate’s most confident imperialists, and the speech is expansion stated without hedging—providential, racial, and certain. Teachers should let students hear it at full strength before meeting Aguinaldo at Primary Source 13.3, because the chapter’s tension collapses if the expansionist case is presented as obviously wrong. The epigraph also sets up the chapter’s closing question, which is whether a republic can acquire an empire and remain a republic. Beveridge thought the question answered. The chapter does not.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 13.1 · Josiah Strong, “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future,” from Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, 1885 (p. 422)

Strong was a Congregationalist minister and the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, and Our Country was widely read. His argument fuses Protestant mission with racial confidence: the Anglo-Saxon peoples, he holds, are being prepared for a competition of races in which they will spread their institutions across the earth. Teachers should be direct with students that this is a racial argument, made respectably, by a clergyman, to a mass audience—and that its respectability is the historical fact worth understanding. Use it where the chapter asks what tempted a continental republic outward. Strong supplies the answer the subtitle calls divided: expansion presented not as conquest but as duty. Set beside Mahan at Primary Source 13.4, it shows the two halves of the case—moral obligation and strategic interest—being made in the same decade by men who never coordinated.

Primary Source 13.2 · President William McKinley, interview, The Christian Advocate, January 22, 1903 (p. 432)

McKinley’s account of how he decided to annex the Philippines is among the most quoted passages in the history of American imperialism, and it is quoted because it is so unguarded. He describes pacing the White House at night, praying for guidance, and concluding that there was nothing left to do but take the islands and educate and Christianize the Filipinos. The interview was published five years after the decision and two years after McKinley’s death, which teachers should tell students: it is a recollection shaped by knowing how the story turned out, not a record made at the time. That is what makes it useful in class. The passage also carries an assumption students can identify without prompting—that the Filipinos were not already Christian, which most were. It appears facing Aguinaldo’s reply, and the two should be read together; teachers should assign the pair together and never McKinley alone.

Primary Source 13.3 · A Filipino, “Aguinaldo’s Case Against the United States,” September 1, 1899 (p. 433)

Published anonymously in the North American Review, this is the Filipino answer to McKinley, printed on the facing page. Emilio Aguinaldo had led the revolt against Spain and then against the United States, and the case put here is that Filipinos had already won their independence and were having it taken by a republic founded on the right to self-government. Neither source does the work alone. Teachers who assign only McKinley leave students with a decision and no one on the other side of it; teachers who assign only Aguinaldo leave them with a grievance and no account of the reasoning it answers. Read together, they give the chapter its title: a divided heart is not a metaphor for American ambivalence but a description of an argument with two sides, both audible in the book.

Primary Source 13.4 · Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, 1897 (p. 438)

Mahan was a naval officer and the president of the Naval War College, and his 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History was widely read abroad as well as at home. His argument is strategic rather than moral: national greatness rests on commerce, commerce requires a navy, a navy requires coaling stations and bases, and bases require territory. Mahan’s argument was taken up by Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Beveridge, and it shaped the case made for acquisitions in this chapter—Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, the Canal Zone. Students should trace where the logic holds. Teachers can use him to show students that empire had a technical case as well as a providential one, and that the technical case was the more influential of the two inside government. Set against Strong at Primary Source 13.1, Mahan lets students ask which argument was doing the real work, and whether the moral case was persuasion or justification.

Figures

Figure 13.1 · United States Fleet in the Straits of Magellan, the Morning of February 8, 1908, Henry Reuterdahl, 1910 (p. 412)

The chapter’s opening plate, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 170.18 cm, held by the U.S. Naval Academy Museum at Annapolis. The book records that Theodore Roosevelt dispatched the world cruise of the Great White Fleet as a test of American naval capability and a demonstration of it. Reuterdahl painted the fleet in the Straits of Magellan—the passage a canal would shortly make unnecessary, which is the point of the chapter’s last lesson. Teachers opening the chapter can ask what a country is saying when it sends sixteen battleships around the world and what it costs to say it. The painting is celebratory and students should notice that; it was made four years after the cruise, for a navy, by an artist who sailed with it. Set it against Figure 13.16 at the chapter’s close and the same fleet reads differently.

Figure 13.3 · Uncle Sam’s Dream of Conquest and Carnage—Caused by Reading the Jingo Newspapers, Udo J. Keppler, 1895 (p. 420)

Chromolithograph, held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Keppler drew for Puck, and the cartoon attacks the war fever the yellow press was stoking three years before there was a war. Uncle Sam sleeps and dreams violence he has read into himself. It establishes that opposition to expansion was contemporary, not retrospective. Students often assume anti-imperialism was a later judgment. Here it is, in 1895, in a mass-circulation magazine. Pair it with Figure 13.7, the Evening Journal front page, and ask which of the two is the accurate picture of what newspapers were doing.

Figure 13.6 · Destruction of the U.S. Battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, February 15, 1898, Kurz & Allison, circa 1898 (p. 426)

Lithograph, held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Kurz & Allison produced popular battle prints for a mass market, and this one renders the explosion as spectacle. The cause of the explosion was not established at the time and the book notes that more recent reviews of the evidence have suggested an internal explosion, ignited by a fire in the ship’s coal bunker, and that we will almost certainly never know for sure. The print asserts a catastrophe done to the ship. That gap between what was known and what was depicted is the instructional value: students can compare the image with the caption’s own careful wording. It is also the chapter’s clearest case of an image doing political work before any evidence had been gathered.

Figure 13.7 · Front page of the New York Evening Journal, Night Special, March 25, 1898 (p. 426)

Newspaper, held by the Library of Congress Serial and Government Publications Division. This is Hearst’s paper three weeks before the declaration of war, and it is the primary evidence for what students will otherwise take on trust when the Guide says “yellow press.” A front page is a better teaching object than a description of one, because students can see how much of it is the story and how much is the type. It pairs directly with Figure 13.3: Keppler’s cartoon says the papers are manufacturing a war, and this is one of the papers doing it.

Figure 13.10 · School Begins, Louis Dalrymple, 1899 (p. 434)

Chromolithograph, held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Dalrymple depicts Uncle Sam as schoolmaster to a class of new possessions—Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines drawn as unwilling children, with the existing states as accomplished pupils behind them. The racial caricature is explicit and teachers should prepare students for it rather than let it arrive unremarked; the argument it makes was mainstream in 1899. Read against Primary Source 13.3 on the facing argument, it shows students what Aguinaldo was answering—not merely a policy but a picture of who was fit to govern whom.

Figure 13.11 · General Emilio Aguinaldo, circa 1900 (p. 435)

Photograph, credited through Album / Archivo ABC / Bridgeman Images. Aguinaldo led the Philippine revolt against Spain, declared independence in 1898, and then led the resistance to American annexation until his capture in 1901. The portrait matters because the opposing voice is otherwise a text without a face—Primary Source 13.3 was published anonymously, and students meeting only the essay can read it as a position rather than a person. Teachers can ask why a man who had already declared his country independent appears in American sources as a general rather than a president.

Figure 13.16 · Putting His Foot Down, J. S. Pughe, 1899 (p. 441)

Chromolithograph, held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The book records that personifications of Germany, Italy and other powers are shown carving up a map while Uncle Sam plants his foot on it, holding a new trade treaty with China—the Open Door policy of Secretary of State John Hay, which sought equal trading access rather than territory. This is the chapter’s closing figure and its closing argument: the United States entered the imperial competition on terms it claimed were different. Whether they were different is exactly the question the chapter leaves open.

Maps

Map 13.1 · The Spanish-American War in the Philippines and the Caribbean, 1898 (p. 430)

The book records that Spain’s defeat cost it the last of an empire that had once spanned two hemispheres. The map is the chapter’s only cartographic object and it does work no text substitutes for: it shows the Philippines and the Caribbean on one sheet, which is how the war was actually fought and not how it is usually remembered. Students who have read the Cuban story and then see Manila Bay on the same map can be asked the question the map raises by itself—why a war declared over Cuba opened with a naval battle seven thousand miles away. That is Mahan’s logic at Primary Source 13.4 made visible.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Beisner, Robert L. Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Dover, 1995.

Massie, Robert. Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. New York: Random House, 1991.

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 2001.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

13.1 Chapter Opener (pp. 415–419)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 415–419, the chapter opening.

Exercise: The Reading Comprehension exercise, ask students to read aloud the excerpts from John Quincy Adams’s speech (pp. 416–417).

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Temptation of Empire (pp. 419–423).

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

American foreign policy began the nineteenth century with a preference for political independence from European quarrels, yet the Monroe Doctrine asserted a special American interest in the Western Hemisphere. The lesson asks whether those positions can be reconciled and why growing American power made strict noninvolvement increasingly difficult to sustain.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Analyze John Quincy Adams’s statement about the ideal national disposition toward foreign policy.

• Evaluate whether George Washington’s foreign policy vision is a realistic standard to maintain.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1821 John Quincy Adams delivers an address to Congress celebrating the Declaration of Independence (July 4)

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Beginning with the successful conclusion of the War of 1812 and lasting through nearly the rest of the nineteenth century, the United States enjoyed a long respite from any major involvement in international controversies.

John Quincy Adams understood that in its unconcern for foreign affairs, America could convey an impression of self-satisfied indifference to the rest of the world. Adams’ address celebrating the Declaration of Independence, delivered to Congress on July 4, 1821 articulated the deep-seated American preference for republican movements and constitutional institutions around the world and expressed pride in the belief that history was moving in their direction, with America leading the way.

Meanwhile, the Monroe Doctrine, which Adams helped author, declared that the United States would oppose further European colonization or political intervention in the Western Hemisphere while promising not to interfere in Europe’s internal affairs. The doctrine therefore combined nonentanglement with a distinct claim about the political future of the Americas—a tension later generations would interpret more expansively.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Isolationism: This somewhat pejorative term refers to the tradition of opposition in American politics against extensive interventions abroad, which are regarded as pernicious to American interests and as violating the principles of self-government. Its seminal articulation was Washington’s Farewell Address.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Thirteen, “A Divided Heart.”

Assign several of the following questions:

What is isolationism? How is it connected to American self-understanding?

To what degree could America be called isolationist in the nineteenth century?

How did the idea of American “apartness” play into the thinking of such previously-discussed figures as John Winthrop, George Washington, and Ralph Waldo Emerson?

What did John Quincy Adams mean by the line, “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”?

What was the Monroe Doctrine’s central holding?

How was the Monroe Doctrine in conflict with John Quincy Adams’ speech of 1821?

What were the conditions in Europe in the nineteenth century? How did these conditions impact America’s ability to adhere to its “isolationist” founding ideals and the Monroe Doctrine?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Reading Comprehension: Ask students to read aloud the excerpts from John Quincy Adams’s speech (pp. 416–417) and lead them through the following exercises: Start by telling students to rephrase, in their own words, the main message that Adams is expressing. After students have attempted their own rephrasing individually, invite them to share with a partner or a small group. Next, lead the class in a discussion of the following questions: What ideals does Adams claim that America has held? Are his ideals realistic? Do they still apply to us today, or was there a different standard that worked back then but not now?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Refer students back to the quotations of the Monroe Doctrine excerpted in Chapter Six. What, if any, tension exists between them and Adams’ speech? How did the Monroe Doctrine understand the United States’ approach to foreign policy? Which document better represents the country’s approach to foreign policy?

Civic Discourse: Put Adams’s 1821 address beside the Monroe Doctrine. Ask students to define the boundary each text draws between sympathy, example, warning, and intervention. Can the two positions be reconciled? Require students to cite a phrase or principle from each before giving a judgment. As an extension, ask whether the distinction remains workable once the United States possesses greater economic and military power.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What did John Quincy Adams mean by his famous declaration that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”?

Insight: Adams argued that America should serve as a shining example of republican government and that America supported movements around the world that sought to vindicate the right of self-government. But he opposed the active involvement of the United States in conflicts abroad, especially in Europe.

What “tension” does the author identify between Adams’s advocacy of noninterference in other countries’ affairs and the Monroe Doctrine’s (also authored by Adams) declaration of American primacy in the Western Hemisphere?

Insight: The Monroe Doctrine seemed to commit the United States to interfering in the Western Hemisphere if its interests were threatened. There was tension between this commitment and Adams’s idea that America should not seek out problems to solve in other countries.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what year was the Monroe Doctrine declared?

Who wrote that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1823. (2) John Quincy Adams.

Explain

What tension does the book identify between the Monroe Doctrine and Washington’s advice?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Washington counselled against entanglement in foreign quarrels, while the Doctrine committed the United States to a standing position on an entire hemisphere—a commitment that would require power to enforce and involvement to maintain.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

In the Revolutionary War, Americans had regarded themselves as a separate nation and demanded to be recognized as such. Consequently, Americans have often identified with an anti-imperial outlook, imagining that it would be possible to simply defend our borders while preserving our treasured system of government indefinitely. The Monroe Doctrine acknowledged that the country would need to involve itself in international affairs, at least in the Western Hemisphere. But as the Western powers became industrialized and global economic conditions became more competitive and more integrated, America eventually adopted the posture of a “world power,” with the attendant imperial tendencies.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

In 13.2 the chapter asks what tempted a republic built on that advice to look outward anyway, and finds the answer in a European scramble the United States had watched for decades.

Language Support

For students still building academic English. Each support supplies the words for what students can already grasp, drawn from the lesson's central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: isolationism, foreign intervention, Monroe Doctrine, Western Hemisphere.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Isolationism means ___.” · “The Monroe Doctrine warned European powers not to ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students explain how the Monroe Doctrine could limit European action while also increasing America’s responsibility in the Western Hemisphere.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column chart comparing Washington’s warning against entanglement with the Monroe Doctrine’s claim about the Western Hemisphere.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

13.2 The Temptation of Empire (pp. 419–423)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 419–423.

Exercise: The Critical Thinking and Problem Solving exercise, have students create a graphic organizer to define imperialism and categorize the causes of the imperial motivations in the United States.

Discuss: The one Guiding Classroom Question in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Course of Empire (pp. 423–428).

Essential Understanding

The motivations and incentives that led to the scramble to establish global empires in the nineteenth century; the contradiction between the aims of imperialists and American founding ideals; and the attempts to reconcile this inconsistency.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Define “imperialism” and identify examples of imperialism in European history.

• Explain why imperial motivations became influential in the United States.

Key Dates

1885 Josiah Strong publishes Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis

1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan publishes The Influence of Sea Power upon History

1898 Albert Beveridge delivers his Senate campaign speech “The March of the Flag”

Key Concepts

It is common to distinguish imperialism from colonialism, on the basis that the latter word, which comes from the Latin word for farmer (colonus), involves a process of migration and permanent settlement, whereas imperialism involves the administration of power from afar.

In very rough terms, imperial tends to refer to the activity of domination, while colonial tends to refer to the activity of settlement.

Nineteenth-century imperialism placed the most technologically advanced nations of the world on a collision course with liberal principles of inherent human equality and liberty, principles that were also on the rise in the Western world.

Also relevant was the paternalistic concept of imperial rule as a “civilizing mission,” in which a temporary period of political dependence or tutelage was deemed necessary in order to uplift backward or “uncivilized” societies to the point where they were capable of maintaining liberal institutions and self-government on their own.

Key Terms

Scientific racism: This ideology cited pseudo-sciences such as phrenology to argue for the purported inherent inferiority and incapacity of the “lesser” or “lower” races living in subordinate countries. It was sometimes cited as a justification for imperialism.

Social Gospel: This influential strain of Protestantism emphasized the achievement of social harmony and well-being through the active transformation of the world. It motivated much missionary activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Thirteen, “The Temptation of Empire.”

Assign several of the following questions:

What drove the nineteenth century trend of imperialism?

What distinguishes imperialism and colonialism?

How were the prospects of managing an empire different in the nineteenth century from in the time of Ancient Rome?

How did the practice of imperialism relate to the principles of liberalism?

What was the “paternalistic concept of imperial rule”? Why was it more palatable to Americans than other such concepts?

Who was Alfred Thayer Mahan and what was his influence?

Insight: Sea power, as Mahan defined it, has economic, geographic, and military aspects. A nation’s merchant marine, its civilian fleet which carries cargo, is the basis for its navy, because many essential jobs such as navigation are the same for all ships. (In the same way, a large civilian fleet of airliners today is the base for a strong air force, and in fact many airline pilots are trained first in the military and serve as reserve Air Force or Navy pilots.)

Insight: In the modern era, a great power needs a global navy, which requires bases around the world. Accordingly, in Mahan’s view, a great nation needs overseas possessions. An empire (such as the U.S. informally built after 1898) served the nation both as a source of raw materials and prestige, while crucially enabling its navy to operate around the world.

Further: In the U.S. context, Mahan was especially significant for his influence on Theodore Roosevelt. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Teddy Roosevelt read Mahan and then went out and built the Panama Canal.

Further: In the European, and indeed the global, context, Mahan’s influence was most significant as a contributing factor to the Anglo-German naval arms race of the early twentieth century, which was one of the crucial contributing factors to the First World War.

How do Mahan and Strong’s imperialist arguments differ?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Have students create a graphic organizer to define imperialism and categorize the causes of the imperial motivations in the United States. On the top of their notes, they should write the world “Imperialism” and then have separate sections underneath to write the definition, historical examples, and motivations for imperialism in the United States. Students should use this section of reading to complete the organizer. After students have finished, review the answers as a full class and lead them in a discussion using the following questions:

Classify the arguments for overseas expansion in the reading as strategic, commercial, ideological, humanitarian or providential. Which category best explains the policies the United States actually pursued, and which evidence from the text supports that conclusion?

Do you think the industrial revolution motivated and reinforced imperial expansion? How so? Can you cite evidence of this in the text?

What is different about imperialism in this time period from the imperialism of Ancient Rome? What are the similarities?

Reading Comprehension: Encourage students to examine the text’s excerpt from Albert Beveridge’s “The March of the Flag.” What is the main concern of his speech? What benefits does he identify with imperial expansion? Who does he claim will be its greatest benefactor? Why?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What is the difference between imperialism and colonialism?

Insight: “Imperialism” refers to the domination of one country or people by another country or people. “Colonialism” refers to settling a country with the people of another country.

Why did the paternalist vision of imperialism appeal to Americans?

Insight: The paternalist account of imperialism argued that “civilized” peoples had the duty to uplift the “uncivilized” peoples by exercising temporary control over them. This belief could have both a racial and cultural dimension. The paternalist idea fit with longstanding American ideals that the country was a city on a hill that would serve as a shining example to the world. Also, this idea went alongside a Christian missionary impulse.

Name some Americans who advanced the pro-imperial case.

Insight: Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer, argued for the importance of expanding naval power to make the United States a significant player in world affairs. Henry Cabot Lodge, senator from Massachusetts, argued for adding Hawaii to the United States. Theodore Roosevelt worked to expand the American Navy. Albert Beveridge of Indiana made the famous speech “The March of the Flag” that gathered various strands of imperialist thinking together. Josiah Strong, a minister, argued in Our Country that Anglo-Saxon peoples were providentially destined to spread across the world.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Name two European powers building empires in this period.

Who wrote Our Country?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy—any two the text names. (2) Josiah Strong.

Explain

Why did imperial motives become influential in the United States when they did?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. The continental frontier had closed, industry was producing more than the domestic market absorbed, naval strategists argued that commerce required bases, and a widespread belief in Anglo-Saxon mission supplied a duty to match the interest.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

A small but influential group of elite thinkers and public officials came to believe that the acquisition of overseas possessions was a necessary next step in the national story. Nonetheless, it was difficult to reconcile America’s transformation from a continental to a global power with its founding political principles, among both the people and the decision-making elite. For the people, the most persuasive counterargument was the idea that a paternalistic empire was necessary to bring the blessings of American ideals to other peoples, especially uncivilized peoples. For the elites, it was idea, espoused by politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert Beveridge, that the economic prosperity promised by imperial expansion was implicit in America’s destiny as a commercial republic.

Looking Ahead

In 13.3 the argument stops being an argument. Alaska, Hawaii and then a war with Spain turn the temptation into territory.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: imperialism, colonialism, human equality, civilizing mission.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Imperialism differs from colonialism because ___.” · “The idea of a civilizing mission conflicted with equality because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students explain one argument nineteenth-century imperialists used and one way it conflicted with American founding principles.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a comparison chart with columns for imperialism, colonialism, and the principle of self-government.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

13.3 The Course of Empire (pp. 423–428)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 423–428.

Exercise: The Writing Skills exercise, ask students to imagine that they are a journalist for the New York Journal or the New York World and have been assigned by your editor to describe the situation in Cuba prior to the Maine event.

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Dilemmas of Empire (pp. 428–441).

Essential Understanding

The course of nineteenth-century American expansionism, from the purchase of Alaska, to the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Explain how “yellow journalism” influenced public opinion prior to the Spanish-American War.

• Evaluate the territorial expansions that took place in this era and compare them to previous examples of American expansion.

Key Dates

1867 Secretary of State William Seward purchases Alaska from Russia (March 30)

1895 The Cuban War of Independence begins (February 24)

1896 William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election (November 3)

1898 The American battleship Maine explodes in Havana’s harbor (February 15)

1898 Congress approves a declaration of war against Spain (April 25)

1898 Commodore George Dewey destroys the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay (May 1)

1898 In Cuba, U.S. troops win at El Caney and San Juan Hill (July 1); Santiago falls to U.S. (July 17)

1898 Joint session of Congress votes to annex Hawaii (July 7)

1898 American forces take Manila, ending Spanish rule in the Philippines (August 13)

1898 The signing of the Treaty of Paris ends the Spanish-American War (December 10)

1900 Eastern islands of Samoa officially annexed by the United States (February 16)

Key Concepts

President William McKinley, citing “Manifest Destiny” and noting Japanese interest in taking over the islands for themselves, decided to annex Hawaii, which was accomplished by a joint resolution of Congress in 1898.

Shortly before McKinley’s election, Cuban separatists had launched a war of independence against the Spanish Empire. The United States looked on with interest, partly because of the proximity and strategic importance of Cuba, as well as America’s commercial interests, but also because the cause of Cuban independence was one for which Americans felt instinctive sympathy.

McKinley had in fact run on a platform advocating for Cuban independence from Spain, as well as for the construction of a canal connecting the Caribbean with the Pacific, both of which policies implied escalating U.S. involvement in Latin America.

Amid rising tensions, war was declared after the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor. Though the explosion was likely accidental, foul play by the Spanish was suspected, and America’s growing expansionist faction seized on the controversy as an opportunity to advance their aims. The war itself was brief and one-sided, marking the end of Spain’s empire and the beginning of an American one.

Key Terms

Yellow journalism: This phrase refers to a lurid and attention-grabbing approach to journalism that employs sensationalism to maximize sales. Its practice contributed to the outbreak of the Spanish-American war.

politicastro: This Spanish term connotes a small-time political hack who cares only about public acclaim. It was used by a Spanish ambassador in an internal communication to disparage President McKinley, and the publication of his letter contributed to an escalation of tensions between the United States and Spain in the months preceding the Maine’s destruction.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Thirteen, “The Course of Empire.”

Assign several of the following questions:

When, from whom, and as a result of whose negotiations was Alaska acquired?

What prompted the annexation of Hawaii?

What events led America to become militarily involved in Cuba?

How did McKinley react to the sinking of the Maine?

What led to the outbreak of war?

What was the outcome of the naval battle at Manila Bay?

What was the immediate outcome of the Spanish-American War?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are a journalist for the New York Journal or the New York World and have been assigned by your editor to describe the situation in Cuba prior to the Maine event. Have them write a 150–300 word brief about the country in the style of yellow journalism, seeking to promote humanitarian aid for its citizens, and discuss their work in small groups. The brief is written for the paper’s ordinary readers rather than for an editor, which is what makes the yellow-journalism register the point of the exercise.

Geography: To build students' understanding of the Spanish-American War, show them Map 13.1, which places the Philippines and the Caribbean on a single sheet. Point out Havana on the Caribbean panel, where the Maine was downed. How did the event's location contribute to the outbreak of war? Then account for why a war declared over Cuba opened with a naval battle on the other side of the world. Have students trace both fleets and read the dates the map attaches to them to create a timeline of the major battles of the war. Ask students to identify the other places the map labels around Cuba and around the Philippines. Have students analyze how the geography of each region might have shaped its culture and its ability to defend itself.

Civic Discourse: Review with students the various means through which America had expanded over the North American continent prior to the Civil War: the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican Cession, the Oregon Treaty. Lead students in a short discussion of each territorial expansion and examine whether it deserves to be considered distinct or separate from America’s expansion being discussed in this section. Are these all continuations of the same phenomenon? Same motivations? Or should we categorize them differently?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What were some of the first territories that the United States acquired outside of what is now the “lower 48” states?

Insight: William Seward, secretary of state for President Johnson, acquired Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. An American naval base was established in Samoa. After conflicts between native Hawaiians, American sugar planters, and ethnic Asians, President McKinley annexed Hawaii in 1898.

How did conflict in Cuba lead to the Spanish-American War?

Insight: Cuban nationalists had repeatedly attempted to gain independence from Spain, and the “yellow journalism” of New York newspapers played up the cruelty of the Spanish toward the Cubans. President McKinley made moves to support Cuban independence, sending the battleship Maine to the island. Then in February 1898, the Maine exploded, and the Spanish were blamed (though it is still unclear to this day who was responsible). The inflamed American public pressured McKinley to recognize Cuban independence, and he did, while also declaring a blockade of the island. The Spanish declared war on the United States in response.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what year did the United States purchase Alaska?

What ship exploded in Havana harbor, and when?

Where did the U.S. Navy win a decisive early battle of the war, and against which country’s fleet?

What was the immediate outcome of the Spanish-American war?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1867. (2) The USS Maine, 15 February 1898. (3) Manila Bay, against the Spanish fleet. (4) A quick American victory, decided in a matter of weeks, with Spain defeated and forced to give up territory. (Note— while victory came quickly, the war’s consequences would prove more complicated as America determined how to manage this territory. Have students keep this in mind amid the transition from Lesson 13.3 to 13.4)

Explain

How did yellow journalism influence opinion before the Spanish-American War?

Acceptable responses: Mass-circulation papers competing for readers printed the Cuban conflict in the most inflammatory terms available and treated the Maine explosion as an attack before any cause had been established, producing a public demand for war that the government did not create and could not easily resist.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

It is important to remember how the United States ultimately became embroiled in the scramble for empire. In the case of Hawaii, competition from other would-be imperialists (the Japanese) prompted annexation. Concerning Cuba and the Philippines, the somewhat counter-intuitive prospect of ensuring independence for other peoples (the Cubans and the Filipinos) through gaining control of their territory was a contributing factor. In any case, by the end of the nineteenth century, geographical encroachment and ideological shifts had become mutually reinforcing, marginalizing proponents of continued U.S. isolationism.

Looking Ahead

In 13.4 the war is won in ten weeks and the difficulty begins—what a republic does with territory it did not intend to keep.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: annexation, Hawaii, yellow journalism, Spanish-American War.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Yellow journalism influenced opinion by ___.” · “American expansion reached Hawaii and Cuba through different paths because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students distinguish the long-term causes of war with Spain from the immediate events that intensified public pressure for war.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a cause-and-effect chain linking Cuban rebellion, newspaper coverage, the USS Maine, and the declaration of war.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

13.4 The Dilemmas of Empire (pp. 428–441)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 428–441.

Exercise: The Civic Discourse exercise, ask students to imagine that they are members of the U.S.

Discuss: The two Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Prepare for the Summative Assessment.

Essential Understanding

Victory in the Spanish-American War forced Americans to confront a problem their republican tradition had not resolved: whether a nation committed to self-government could govern peoples who had not consented to American rule. The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Roosevelt Corollary, and the Open Door policy offered different answers to that problem.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Describe the difficulties that occurred as a result of America’s victory in the Spanish-American War.

• Analyze the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Key Dates

1899 The Philippine-American War begins (February 4)

1899 Secretary of State John Hay formally announces the Open Door Policy to allow equal trading access in China to all nations (September 6)

1901 William Howard Taft becomes the civilian governor of the Philippines

1903 Cuba and the United States agree on the Platt Amendment (May 22)

1903 With U.S. backing, Panama declares independence from Colombia (November 3)

1904 Panama cedes control of the Panama Canal Zone to the United States (May 4)

1904 Roosevelt delivers his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 6)

1914 The Panama Canal opens to traffic (August 15)

1917 Congress passes the Jones-Shafroth Act or the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1917 (March 2)

Key Concepts

As the Treaty of Paris (1898) forced Spain’s departure from its former colonies, it suddenly fell to the Americans, as the victorious party, to take responsibility for ensuring that the Philippines had stable and humane governance.

McKinley concluded that he had only one viable option. As he put it, “there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” A Filipino insurgency against American rule followed, and William Howard Taft later served as the islands’ civil governor.

In 1917, Congress passed the Jones Act, which affirmed the American intention to grant the Philippines eventual independence. That finally happened on July 4, 1946.

Nonetheless, the principles of America’s Founding were being fudged left and right, particularly the commitment to self-determination. In the case of Puerto Rico, whose population far surpassed (and surpasses) Hawaii’s, a status exceeding that of a colonial dependency but not quite approaching statehood was ultimately settled on.

Cuba, meanwhile, was granted formal independence relatively quickly. However, the Platt Amendment ensured that the U.S. would maintain an active, and even an imperious, participant in Cuban affairs, while the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine sought to justify intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

While perhaps conflicted about its new found status as an imperial power, the United States entered the twentieth century with the counsel of Washington’s Farewell Address firmly relegated to the past.

Key Terms

Platt Amendment: This congressional legislation imposed several restrictions on Cuban independence, notably empowering the U.S. to make a protectorate of the island in the event of internal political instability; it was notably invoked in 1906, resulting in a three-year occupation.

Roosevelt Corollary: Articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine holds that the United States must exercise, albeit “reluctantly,” “an international police power” in the Western Hemisphere.

Boxer Rebellion: This armed revolt against foreign influence by Chinese nativists with backing from the Qing dynasty broke out in China in 1899. It ultimately failed, with the imperial government’s acceptance by 1901 of foreign troops’ being stationed in Beijing.

Sino-Japanese War: Lasting from 1894 to 1895, this war between Japan and China stripped the latter of its autonomy, as it effectively became subject to the control of various outside governments.

Open Door Policy: This term refers to a pillar of the McKinley administration’s foreign policy. It advocated for the Chinese market to remain open on an equal basis to the various Western imperial powers, each of which would respect the country’s territorial integrity.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Thirteen, “The Dilemmas of Empire.”

Assign several of the following questions:

How did the situation in the Philippines confront American leadership with a dilemma?

Who were some of the prominent U.S. anti-imperialists? What were their arguments?

What did McKinley conclude regarding the Philippines?

What was William Howard Taft’s approach to governance of the Philippines?

How did Cuban independence proceed? What was the relevance of the Platt Amendment?

What was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine?

What role did America play around the turn of the century in international relations regarding China?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Civic Discourse: Ask students to imagine that they are members of the U.S. Senate deciding whether to ratify the Treaty of Paris (1898), particularly the cession of the Philippines to the United States. Divide them into groups depending on whether they support the cession and have them debate the matter, citing American foreign policy precedents to justify their reasoning. Each senator should prepare a floor speech of about three minutes, addressed to fellow senators who hold the opposite view and who will vote afterwards—not to the class or the teacher.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Ask students to examine the pros and cons of the Roosevelt Corollary. First, review the definition of the Roosevelt Corollary by asking students to explain what it is and how it compares to the Monroe Doctrine. Next, in a class discussion or a written exercise, have students explain:

what might be beneficial about the Roosevelt Corollary

what negative consequence might the result of the Roosevelt Corollary

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Have students revisit Mahan’s arguments for sea power from the homework assignment in Lesson 13.2. Ask students to explain how a canal connecting the Caribbean to the Pacific served this same logic. Then, divide the class into small groups and have them engage in a small research project on the construction of the canal, including its major obstacles.

Insight: Mahan saw the canal in economic terms, as a way of expanding trade and commerce around the world and “advancing the frontiers of civilization.” Sea power, as Mahan defined it, has economic, geographic, and military aspects. A great nation needs overseas possessions to serve as sources of raw materials and to let its navy operate around the world.

Insight: The canal's construction faced major obstacles. Disease, particularly yellow fever and malaria, had doomed an earlier French attempt to build the canal in the 1880s, and was only brought under control through a major mosquito-control and sanitation campaign. The engineering itself was immense, especially at the Culebra Cut, where workers had to dig through miles of mountainous terrain prone to landslides. The project also required an enormous labor force, recruited largely from the Caribbean, to sustain years of continuous construction

Civic Discourse: As a class, consider the various ways in which American founding principles were, in the text’s phrasing, “being fudged left and right” by increasingly imperialistic tendencies. Instruct students to identify specific cases and, for each case, describe the problems or challenges that occurred as a result.

Reading Comprehension: Encourage students to read Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Note that, while doubtless offensive, it offers important insights into contemporary justifications of imperialism. How does it encapsulate the thought at the time? How does it dehumanize non-white people, and what is its implied rationale for imperialism?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

How was the Spanish-American War a “splendid little war”? What problems did it introduce for the United States?

Insight: The war was very brief, with the United States winning decisively. The U.S. acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. But the victory introduced the problem of what to do about the Philippines.

What was the strongest premise in the case for annexing the Philippines, and what was the strongest premise in the anti-imperialist case? Identify the point at which the two arguments actually disagree—about American interests, the capacity for self-government, or the legitimacy of ruling without consent.

Insight: Americans who opposed Filipino annexation were diverse. There was opposition to the United States ruling another territory without that territory having full civil and political rights. Others believed that the racial makeup of the Philippines would prevent full integration into the U.S. Labor leaders, for instance, feared that immigration of Filipinos would create destructive competition with American workers. It may be helpful context to return to this chapter's epigraph, in which Beveridge declared: "That flag has never paused in its onward march. Who dares halt it now—now, when history's largest events are carrying it forward; now, when we are at last one people, strong enough for any task, great enough for any glory destiny can bestow?" Have students discuss which side, the practical objections above, or Beveridge's appeal to destiny and national pride, they find more persuasive, and why.

What happened as a result of the annexation of the Philippines?

Insight: Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo engaged in war against the United States. This was a guerilla-style war that cost Americans over 4,000 lives and took three years. The Americans finally defeated the nationalists, and President McKinley appointed William Howard Taft as governor of the Philippines. Taft governed deftly, winning the trust of the Filipinos, and the U.S. pledged in 1917 to eventually grant independence to the Philippines. This finally happened in 1946.

How does the debate over the Philippines compare to the earlier debates over Alaska, Samoa, and Hawaii?

Insight: Lesson 13.3 covered the motives behind the first territories the United States acquired outside the continental states. Have students compare those earlier motives to the case for annexing the Philippines and to the anti-imperialist objections above: were Americans arguing about the same thing each time, or did the terms of the debate change as the territories got farther from home?

What was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine?

Insight: President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1904 that due to problems related to poor governance in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas, the United States would “reluctantly” use “an international police power” to ensure stability in the Western Hemisphere. For example, Roosevelt intervened in the financial system of the Dominican Republic to prevent a collapse.

How did President McKinley’s “open door” policy toward China differ from the policy of major European and Asian powers?

Insight: The “open door” policy stated that instead of European and Asian powers carving up China into spheres of influence, China should remain whole, and all nations should have the right to trade with it. Thus, instead of dominating China, as other powers desired to do, the U.S. proposed that China should maintain its independence. This was an example of the anti-imperial strain of American thought asserting itself.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Who led Filipino resistance to American annexation?

What did the Open Door policy seek?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Emilio Aguinaldo. (2) Equal trading access to China, rather than territory.

Explain

What did the Roosevelt Corollary add to the Monroe Doctrine?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Monroe had told European powers to stay out of the hemisphere; the Corollary claimed for the United States a right to intervene in the affairs of hemispheric neighbors to forestall the disorder that might invite them back. A doctrine of exclusion became a warrant for involvement.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

America’s foray into imperialism encapsulates the difficulty of reconciling ideological commitments with the reality of foreign affairs. Given global economic and political exigencies, it is unclear whether America’s commitment to non-intervention and self-determination could survive the nineteenth century. Is it possible to remain true to America’s founding political principles when confronted by powers that ignore or deny them? This is a question that still bedevils the foreign policy establishment today, and related tensions have long persisted in the American political conscience.

Looking Ahead

Chapter Fourteen turns from what the United States was doing abroad to what Progressives believed it should be doing at home—and finds the same confidence in expert management applied to a different object.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: self-determination, Platt Amendment, Roosevelt Corollary, Open Door Policy.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Self-determination means ___, yet American policy in ___.” · “The Roosevelt Corollary extended the Monroe Doctrine by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students explain how American policy after the Spanish-American War created tension between strategic power and the principle of self-government.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a four-part chart for the Philippines, Cuba, the Caribbean, and China naming the principal American policy and the problem it was meant to address.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

The questions and answers that follow offer a range of ways to assess students’ understanding of the chapter. Teachers may use the assessment as written or select and adapt questions to suit their students and course of study.

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest to latest. Number one is the earliest; number five is the latest.

Answer: 1–A · 2–D · 3–C · 4–E · 5–B

A. William Seward purchases Alaska from Russia

B. Roosevelt delivers his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

C. The Philippine-American War begins

D. The Spanish-American War begins

E. William Howard Taft becomes civilian governor of the Philippines

Key Persons and Concepts

Fill in the blank.

The battleship Maine exploded in a Cuban harbor, igniting a firestorm of American opposition to Spain and leading to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.

William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were rivals who edited the New York Journal and the New York World, respectively. They published sensationalist writing known as “yellow journalism” and relentlessly covered events in Cuba from an anti-Spanish bent.

Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong was a noted advocate of the Social Gospel, a movement within Protestantism that argued for pursuing social justice through spreading Christianity and civil liberty throughout the world.

Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, which stated that China should be open to trade with the rest of the world but should not be carved up into spheres of influence by other world powers.

Emilio Aguinaldo led Filipino rebels against Spain and became the first president of the Philippine Republic before the United States annexed the country.

Geography

Identify the location according to the map:

This map shows fighting in two theaters thousands of miles apart—the Philippines and the Caribbean. What does this tell you about the scale of American naval power by 1898?

Based on the map, was the Spanish–American War primarily a land war, a naval war, or a combination of both? Support your answer with at least two specific details from the map.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

How did John Quincy Adams’s statements about American foreign policy reveal a “divided heart”?

A: In a speech, Adams famously declared that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” reflecting an instinct for noninterference in the affairs of other nations, especially European nations. But Adams also drafted the Monroe Doctrine, which seemed to commit the United States to becoming the leading power in the Western Hemisphere, even as the Doctrine warned Europe to stay out of the Americas. This reflected the “divided heart” of Americans toward the rest of the world. There was a core belief that America should not interfere with other nations, but Americans also wanted to pursue national interests through a muscular foreign policy.

What was the “paternalist” argument for American imperialism?

A: Pro-Imperialists believed that advanced nations, such as the United States, had a duty to uplift the “uncivilized” nations through temporary rule, until those nations were ready for self-government. Christian leaders such as Josiah Strong argued that by spreading Christianity and civil liberty, Americans could help the rest of the world.

Why did Americans generally sympathize with Cuban rebels who sought independence from Spain?

A: There were several reasons. Cuba was geographically close to the United States, and Americans had many commercial ties to the island. There had a been a long history of Americans, especially southerners, seeking to acquire Cuba for the United States. Finally, the Cuban struggle for independence mirrored the American national story.

What were the main causes of the Spanish-American War?

A: In an expression of concern about Spanish attacks against Cuban rebels, President McKinley moved the battleship Maine to Havana. Then on February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded, and the Spanish were blamed for it. The anti-Spanish fervor led the United States to recognize Cuban independence, and McKinley instituted a blockade of Cuba. Spain declared war in response.

What were the outcomes of the Spanish-American War, and how did these outcomes introduce complications for American foreign policy?

A: After the American victory, Spain agreed to Cuban independence and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States. The Spanish also allowed the U.S. to take control of the Philippines. This introduced the problem of whether to annex the Philippines, and many Americans were strongly opposed, believing that the Filipinos were unable to assimilate to American society.

What was the policy of the United States toward the Philippines following the Spanish-American War?

A: Although Filipinos had already formed a republic under President Emilio Aguinaldo, the United States decided to annex the islands. There followed a war between Filipino insurgents and the U.S., only ending in American victory after a bloody three-year conflict. President McKinley then appointed William Howard Taft as civilian governor of the Philippines, who deftly managed many problems. In the Jones Act of 1917, the U.S. committed to eventual independence for the Philippines, which happened in 1946.

What was the Platt Amendment and why did Cubans resent it?

A: The Platt Amendment was a provision passed by Congress in 1903 that gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs in order to maintain Cuban independence and to protect the rights of Cuban citizens. The Amendment also restricted treaties that Cuba could make with other countries. Finally, Cuba had to provide the U.S. with land for a naval base (Guantánamo Bay). Cubans resented this provision because it seemed to contradict the American commitment to Cuban autonomy and independence.

What was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine?

A: President Theodore Roosevelt declared that, due to the Monroe Doctrine’s warning against European interference in the Americas, and because of chronic problems of misgovernance in the Americas, the United States was required to “reluctantly” police its neighbors in order to maintain stability. An example of the Roosevelt Corollary in action is Roosevelt’s intervention in a financial crisis in the Dominican Republic.

How did the Open Door Policy in China reflect American anti-imperial impulses?

A: In response to the foreign domination of China by Britain, Russia, Japan, and others, Secretary of State John Hay declared that these powers should cease carving China into spheres of influence and should instead allow all countries to trade freely with China. This policy reflected American commitments to self-government while opening up new markets for trade.

Discuss Alfred Thayer Mahan’s arguments for building the Panama Canal.

A: Mahan saw a canal as a logical step in expanding trade and commerce around the world, binding the entire world more closely together. He also thought a canal would “[advance] by thousands of miles the frontiers of European civilization in general, and of the United States in particular,” thus furthering the American mission of bringing civilization to the rest of the world.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong response takes the chapter’s own subtitle seriously. A Divided Heart is not decorative. The chapter’s argument is that the United States acquired an overseas empire while holding principles that condemned empire, and that both the acquisition and the discomfort were genuine.

Credit responses that give the expansionist case its strength before answering it. Beveridge in the epigraph, Strong at Primary Source 13.1, and Mahan at Primary Source 13.4 make three different arguments—providential, racial-civilizational, and strategic—and a response that treats expansion as self-evidently indefensible has not engaged the chapter. The strongest responses notice that the strategic case and the moral case were made independently and reinforced each other.

Credit responses that locate the contradiction precisely. It is not that Americans were hypocritical in general. It is that a country founded on the right of a people to govern itself annexed a people who had just declared they were governing themselves. McKinley and Aguinaldo, Primary Sources 13.2 and 13.3, appear on facing pages, which lets students compare the competing arguments directly; a response that uses both is doing the chapter’s work.

Do not require a verdict. A student may conclude that the expansion was justified, that it was not, or that the two halves of the American position could not be reconciled and were not. All three earn full credit where the evidence is handled honestly. The book does not settle it either.

Evidence over characterization. A response naming the Open Door, the Roosevelt Corollary, the Teller Amendment or the Maine is doing the work; one describing the period as “a time when America became a world power” is restating the chapter title.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Progressive Era

A New Science of Government

1887–1913 · pp. 443–475

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

Progressivism had many predecessors, including visionary writers like Henry George and the prairie reformers who created the Populist Party. But Progressivism itself was a predominantly middle-class movement, with its heartbeat in the small towns and growing cities of the upper Midwest. Particularly in Wisconsin, Progressivism enjoyed a pinnacle of success. It sought not merely to help the poor and oppressed but to change the system that brought about those ills: to correct the abuses, inequities, and inefficiencies that the new industrial economy had created and, in doing so, to restore the preconditions of democracy. In that sense, they were both reformist and conservative: willing to endorse dramatic changes in the service of rescuing and recovering older values.

A certain high-mindedness characterized the Progressives, which reflected their Protestant religious roots. They tended to distrust politics, which they found to be a dishearteningly grubby business of deal making and vote trading, and preferred to entrust as many governing functions as possible to impartial experts, equipped with the requisite knowledge for delivering equitable and efficient results. In their eyes, the chief task facing the country was that of proper regulation. Rather than reject and dismantle modern industry, they thought its vast productivity should instead be directed to serve the public interest and not private interests alone.

Progressives embraced two, somewhat incongruous, approaches to that end: the antitrust method, which used the power of government to break up monopolies and large concentrations of corporate wealth and power, and the consolidation method, which affirmed some large corporations in order to regulate them in service to the general welfare. These alternatives, both of which required unprecedented expansion of federal power, brought into question the status of the Constitution itself. Was it still the indispensable foundation of American law and life? Or had the increasingly urban and industrializing America passed it by, rendering it an outmoded eighteenth-century document no longer suited to the needs of a twentieth-century world?

The national phase of Progressivism began properly in 1901 with the ascent to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, upon the assassination of President William McKinley. An activist by temperament, Roosevelt was not inclined to defer to the Constitution. He interpreted the Constitution as a charter not of enumerated powers but of enumerated prohibitions. In his view, the president as “steward” of the nation was permitted to do anything necessary for the well-being of the people.

Despite his reputation in American folklore as a “trust buster,” Roosevelt in fact tended to favor the consolidationist approach to regulation, a preference that would grow stronger over the years of his presidency. Henceforth the government, Roosevelt claimed, must be “the senior partner in every business,” a stunning change from former presidents’ laissez faire attitude toward business.

By the end of 1907, buoyed by his early success and anxiously eyeing the imminent end of his term as president, Roosevelt began calling for radical reforms, such as income and inheritance taxes, federal control over the stock market, and stricter regulation of interstate corporations. His rhetoric also became notably more strident. He denounced the “malefactors of great wealth” for their “predatory” behavior. Such proposals and such rhetoric still fell far short of a socialist vision, but they were strident enough to antagonize the conservative “Old Guard” of the Republican Party and foreshadow a coming intraparty division. Ultimately, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, one of the most exciting and unusual elections in American history, especially notable for Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy.

Like Roosevelt, Wilson held that the Constitution had been built on a mechanical, Newtonian model and that government is not a machine but a living thing that must adapt. He favored something closer to the British parliamentary system, which would draw the executive and legislative branches together more closely and make the president as active in the legislative process as he was in the execution of laws. Even the natural-rights doctrines of human equality and fundamental rights were subject to his skepticism. “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he insisted in a 1907 speech. “We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.”

Despite his inexperience, Wilson enjoyed one of the most impressive beginnings of any president in American history. Ever the activist, he moved quickly, putting his theories about a parliamentary-style presidency to the test: lowering tariffs, creating a federal income tax, devising a central banking system to regulate elements of the national economy, and instituting the Federal Trade Commission as an antitrust instrument.

There were many other reforms in his first term: advances in labor organizing, creation of a system of federal farmland banks, a Federal Highways Act to coordinate construction, child labor laws, an eight-hour workday for railway employees—in short, a dazzling array of legislative and executive accomplishment. In addition, the ratification in 1913 of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, the latter ensuring the popular election of senators rather than their selection by state legislatures, seemed to herald the dawning of a new, more streamlined, more efficient, more nationalized era. Progressivism seemed triumphant and old-fashioned constitutionalism seemed on the way out.

Wilson had enjoyed marked success in promoting his Progressive domestic agenda. His approach was about to be tested in the larger and more unforgiving arena of world politics.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The origins, central tenets, and various reforms of the Progressive movement, particularly its influence on American life between 1898 and 1917, a period now known as the Progressive Era.

• Progressivism arose in the late nineteenth century as a response to the social and institutional dislocations wrought by industrialization and related trends such as urbanization and mass immigration.

• Its precursor as an organized political movement was the radical agrarianism of the Populist Party, which culminated in the near-election of William Jennings Bryan to the Presidency in 1896.

• In contrast to Populism, though, Progressivism was predominantly middle class and multifaceted in both its constituency and its program, which aimed to accommodate and harness the potential of industrial capitalism rather than to oppose it outright.

• Progressivism’s reform agenda was diverse and far-reaching, including initiatives as varied as Prohibition, the democratization of elections, police reform, and antitrust litigation. Generally, Progressivism was characterized ideologically by a view of human nature as fundamentally good, with no inherent limit to the improvability of the world, in scientific methods, and in the promise of expert opinion to enhance the efficiency of public services. Politically, Progressivism promoted the implementation of safety and health codes, the institution of compulsory schooling, and the regulation of corporate affairs to serve the public interest.

• Many adherents of Progressivism were explicitly critical of the U.S. constitutional system, particularly its many checks on the power of government, which in their view impeded the government’s optimal functioning.

• Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to govern in a recognizably Progressive way. He expanded the federal government’s involvement in the American economy while professing a “stewardship” theory of the Presidency, according to which the public welfare could legitimize any presidential action that was not specifically excluded by the Constitution.

• Roosevelt was succeeded in 1909 by the more restrained and conventional William Howard Taft, and a vicious intraparty dispute erupted upon Roosevelt’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to gain the Republicans’ nomination again in 1912.

• The Democrats meanwhile nominated the thorough-going Progressive governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who shared Roosevelt’s critical view of the Constitution. Wilson was easily elected, as the Republican coalition splintered due to Roosevelt’s third-party run as the Progressive Party’s nominee.

• The early years of Wilson’s presidency witnessed the implementation of an ambitious and wide-ranging reform program, including the creation of a federal income tax, a central banking system, and the Federal Trade Commission, which was explicitly dedicated to combating anticompetitive practices.

Key Persons

Henry George (1839–1897)

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898)

Washington Gladden (1836–1918)

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918)

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925)

Jacob Riis (1849–1914)

Ida Tarbell (1857–1944)

Robert La Follette (1855–1925)

John Dewey (1859–1952)

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931)

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915)

Mark Hanna (1837–1904)

John Muir (1838–1914)

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968)

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915)

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Progressivism

free silver

muckrakers

initiative (political)

referendum

original sin

eugenics

Interstate Commerce Act

Sherman Antitrust Act

independent regulatory agency

stewardship theory of the presidency

Antiquities Act (1906)

Meat Inspection Act

Pure Food and Drug Act

Sierra Club

U.S. Forest Service

public administration

Federal Reserve Act

Federal Trade Commission

Timeline

1887 Congress passes the Interstate Commerce Act to regulate U.S. railroads (February 4)

1890 Congress attempts to curb monopolies with the Sherman Antitrust Act (July 2)

1896 William Jennings Bryan is nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention (July 10)

1901 Theodore Roosevelt is inaugurated as president following McKinley’s assassination (September 14)

1902 Roosevelt intervenes in the anthracite coal strike, threatening to seize the mines and forcing a settlement (May–October)

1904 Wisconsin Governor Robert La Follette champions the Wisconsin Idea

1904 Theodore Roosevelt wins the presidential election (November 8)

1905 Roosevelt establishes the U.S. Forest Service (March 1)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act, creating eighteen new national monuments (June 8)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Hepburn Act to regulate railroad prices (June 29)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (June 30)

1908 William Howard Taft wins the presidential election (November 3)

1912 Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters found the Progressive Bull Moose Party (August 7)

1912 Woodrow Wilson wins the presidential election (November 5)

1913 The Sixteenth Amendment is ratified, allowing Congress to levy federal income tax without apportionment (February 3)

1913 The Seventeenth Amendment is ratified, establishing direct election of U.S. senators (April 8)

1913 Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act (December 23)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

Chapter Fourteen · The Progressive Era (4 to 8 class periods)

14.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 445–449)

• The intellectual precursors to the Progressive Era

• Progressivism as a response to the changes wrought by industrialization

• The Populist Party

• William Jennings Bryan and The Election of 1896

14.2 The Many Sides of Progressivism (pp. 449–458)

• Progressivism as a middle-class movement

• Progressive ideals: the public interest, impartiality, efficiency, expert knowledge, and the regulation of business

• The influence of muckrakers

• The tension in Progressives’ push to democratize elections and simultaneously restrain democratic institutions

• Its implicit paternalism

14.3 Two Progressive Answers (pp. 458–460)

• The antitrust method

• The consolidation method

14.4 A Presidential Progressive (pp. 460–466)

• Biography of Theodore Roosevelt

• Theodore Roosevelt’s governing philosophy

• Roosevelt’s environmental conservationism

14.5 The Republicans Split (pp. 466–470)

• William Howard Taft as Roosevelt’s successor

• The Republicans’ intraparty dispute

• Woodrow Wilson wins the Democratic Party nomination

• Woodrow Wilson’s background and ideas

14.6 Wilson Takes Command (pp. 470–475)

• The Election of 1912

• The early years of the Wilson administration

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Edward Ryan, Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, speech to students in Madison, Wisconsin, 1873 (p. 443)

Ryan was addressing law students seventeen years before the Sherman Antitrust Act and thirty before Ida Tarbell, and the questions he put to them recur through the chapter. Which shall rule, wealth or man? Which shall lead, money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate wealth? Notice how much is loaded into the third question. Ryan assumes that public office should be held by the educated, and that expertise and virtue travel together—which is the Progressive premise itself, stated before the movement had a name. Students who read the epigraph at the start and again after lesson 14.3 will find that the middle term has become the argument: if intellect should lead, who decides which intellect, and what happens to the ordinary voter Ryan is defending? The Wisconsin connection is worth drawing out: La Follette built the Wisconsin Idea in Ryan’s state a generation later, staffing government with university experts. Ryan died in 1880 and never saw the movement his question anticipated. The chapter’s later lessons supply three different answers to him—La Follette’s experts, Roosevelt’s regulated trusts, and Wilson’s dissolved ones—and none of them is quite the answer Ryan seems to expect.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 14.1 · Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” 1892 (p. 447)

Addams had founded Hull House in Chicago three years earlier. The title is doing precise work: she is arguing that settlement houses are necessary for the people who run them as much as for the neighborhood they serve. Her charge against her own century is blunt. Democracy has made little attempt to assert itself in social affairs; Americans have not moved past their eighteenth-century leaders, who believed political equality alone would secure all good to all men. She names the gap directly—the ballot was given to the freedman and the franchise to the immigrant while both were left in what she calls practical social ostracism. That is the Progressive diagnosis in one sentence: formal political rights without social conditions to make them mean anything. Students should notice she is not asking for new laws here. She is asking educated people to go and live in the districts they propose to reform. Hull House itself is not in this excerpt and students will need it supplied: a house in an immigrant district of Chicago where educated women lived, offering food, clothing, classes, a kindergarten and a meeting place. The word subjective in her title is the whole argument, and it repays a minute of class time.

Primary Source 14.2 · Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906 (p. 463)

Sinclair was a socialist who spent seven weeks undercover in the Chicago packing houses, and he wrote a novel rather than a report. The passage the book prints is the sausage description: rejected meat returning from Europe mouldy and white, dosed with borax and glycerine and dumped back into the hoppers; meat piled in rooms where water from leaky roofs dripped over it and thousands of rats raced about. It is fiction carrying documentary force, which is exactly what makes it a demanding source. Sinclair meant to indict the labor system and famously said he had aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach. The Meat Inspection Act followed within months. Set it beside Figure 14.11, the Puck cover published the same season, and the pair shows two media making the same case to two different audiences within months of each other. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were both signed on June 30, 1906.

Primary Source 14.3 · Theodore Roosevelt, “New Nationalism” Speech, August 31, 1910 (p. 468)

Roosevelt gave this at Osawatomie, Kansas, out of office and about to challenge the man who had succeeded him. The argument is that the object of every wise struggle for human betterment has been equality of opportunity, that nations rise from barbarism to civilization through it, and that one of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. What follows is the sentence that separates him from Wilson: the essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been to take from some one man or class the right to enjoy power or property they use against the common welfare. Roosevelt is not proposing to break the trusts up. He is proposing that the federal government be strong enough to govern them. Read directly against Primary Source 14.4. Osawatomie was John Brown’s town, and Roosevelt was there dedicating a battlefield memorial. Students should weigh what a politician gains by announcing a program of national economic power from that particular ground, two years before splitting his party to run on it.

Primary Source 14.4 · Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1913 (p. 472)

Wilson had been a professor of politics before he was a governor, and it shows. His argument is that the Constitution was made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory—that the Federalist writers took their model from the solar system, holding Congress, the judiciary and the president in their orbits by a kind of gravitation. Government, he says, is not a machine but a living thing, accountable to Darwin and not to Newton. That is a remarkable thing for a president to publish. He is arguing that the separation of powers was built on a mistaken analogy, and that a living organism must be free to adapt rather than balanced against itself. Set beside Roosevelt, the disagreement is narrower than the rhetoric suggests: both want a national government equal to industrial power, and they differ on whether to regulate concentration or dissolve it. The New Freedom was assembled from Wilson’s 1912 campaign speeches and published the year he took office, so it is a program rather than a memoir.

Figures

Figure 14.1 · George Bellows, Cliff Dwellers, 1913 (p. 442)

Oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A tenement street on the Lower East Side in high summer—crowds spilling off the sidewalk, laundry strung overhead, children in the road, a streetcar pushing through the mass of people. Bellows was a contributing editor of the socialist magazine The Masses and a leading painter of the Ashcan School, which set out to show urban poverty as it was rather than as genre painting had made it. The picture is worth pausing on because it is not simply grim. There is light and color and evident life in it. The Progressives who looked at streets like this saw both things at once: a vitality worth protecting and a density that no eighteenth-century notion of local self-government could regulate. The title is ironic—cliff dwellers were ancient Puebloans, and Bellows is calling modern New York a settlement of the same kind. Bellows painted it in 1913, and it hangs now in Los Angeles.

Figure 14.2 · Jane Addams, 1912 (p. 447)

Photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Addams sits for a formal portrait at fifty-two, twenty-three years after founding Hull House in Chicago. The settlement provided food and clothing, but the book is careful to say that what mattered more were the social services, the fellowship and the education it gave impoverished immigrant families. Pair the portrait with Primary Source 14.1: the photograph shows a woman of the educated class, dressed for respectability, and the essay beside it is her argument that people like her must go and live among the poor rather than administer them from a distance. Addams would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Students should be able to say what a settlement house was and what distinguished it from charity. Note also what the portrait does not show, and what Primary Source 14.1 supplies: Addams’s charge that Americans had given the ballot to the freedman and the franchise to the immigrant while leaving both in social ostracism. The photograph shows the reformer; the essay shows the argument that made her one.

Figure 14.4 · “Ida Tarbell May Take Stand in Oil Hearing,” Albuquerque Citizen, November 27, 1908 (p. 451)

Newspaper, Library of Congress Serial and Government Publications Division. A New Mexico paper reports that Tarbell may be compelled to testify about the sources behind her reporting during the legal proceedings against Standard Oil. Her 1904 exposure of the company’s practices had led the government toward breaking it up. It catches the muckraker at the moment her method is on trial rather than her subject: a journalist being asked to give up how she knew what she knew. Tarbell’s father had been ruined by Standard Oil, which students should weigh rather than ignore. The summative assessment asks them to name what Tarbell is remembered as; this is where the word muckraker can be given its edge. The Albuquerque Citizen is a small western daily, which is itself evidence—a Standard Oil hearing in the East was news in New Mexico. Students can be asked why a monopoly in oil mattered to readers two thousand miles from the refineries, and the railroads in Figure 14.7 answer them. Puck was a mass-circulation humor magazine, not a reform journal, and the octopus was already a stock figure for monopoly when Keppler used it. Berryman drew for the Washington Star and had access to the president he satirized, which shows in the affection of the drawing. The trust standing safely to one side is doing as much work as the one on the ground, and students who miss it will read the cartoon as simple approval when it is closer to a question.

Figure 14.7 · Udo J. Keppler, Next!, 1904 (p. 459)

Photomechanical print, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; published in Puck. Standard Oil is drawn as an octopus, its tentacles wrapped around the steel and copper industries, an unidentified state house, the shipping industry, the United States Capitol and the railroads, with one tentacle reaching toward the White House. The cartoon is an argument about kind, not degree: the danger is not that the company is large but that it has taken hold of the government meant to regulate it. Students can be asked which tentacle is doing the most work—the state house, which is already grasped, or the White House, which is not yet. Keppler published this the year Tarbell’s series appeared and the year Roosevelt won the presidency outright. Puck was a mass-circulation humor magazine, not a reform journal, and the octopus was already a stock figure for monopoly when Keppler used it. The image is worth setting against Figure 14.9, where Berryman draws the same president dividing trusts into good and bad rather than confronting one that has taken hold of the state.

Figure 14.9 · Clifford Kennedy Berryman, The President’s Dream of a Successful Hunt, 1907 (p. 462)

Drawing, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Roosevelt stands in hunting gear over the body of the Bad Trust while the Good Trust looks on. Berryman is the cartoonist who drew the 1902 bear that gave the teddy bear its name, and he uses the outdoorsman persona here to make a policy point precisely. Roosevelt did not believe trusts were inherently wrong; he held that concentration was a natural and necessary feature of a modern economy and that only corrupt and overreaching trusts needed breaking. That distinction is the whole of his antitrust record and it is what separates him from Wilson. Berryman drew for the Washington Star and had access to the president he satirized, which shows in the affection of the drawing. The trust standing safely to one side is doing as much work as the one on the ground, and students who miss it will read the cartoon as simple approval when it is closer to a question.

Figure 14.11 · Carl Hassmann, The Meat Market, 1906 (p. 463)

Puck cover, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. This ran two weeks before Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act, which required sanitary care and slaughter and federal inspection of meat sold in the United States. Printed on the same page as Sinclair’s sausage passage, it shows how fast the argument moved: a novel in February, a magazine cover in June, a federal statute at the end of the month. Students should notice what the cartoon does that the novel cannot—it addresses the consumer directly, at the counter, where the reader already stands. Sinclair wanted his readers to think about the men in the plants. The cartoonist knew they were thinking about dinner, and used it. Hassmann signed the cover with a monogram rather than a name, as Puck artists often did.

Figure 14.16 · Udo J. Keppler, On the Way to the Promised Land, 1914 (p. 474)

Puck illustration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Wilson is drawn as Moses, William Jennings Bryan behind him, striking a rock hewn in the shape of a man and labeled Practical Politics with a branch labeled Campaign Pledges. Two fountains pour from the rock, Currency Reform and Tariff Reform, and businessmen and laborers crowd around to collect the flow. The cartoon is admiring and sceptical at once. The reforms are real—the Federal Reserve Act and the tariff both passed—and the cartoonist has still drawn a politician striking practical politics to get them. Bryan, three times defeated, stands in the position of Aaron. Keppler drew Next! ten years earlier; students can compare what he thought the danger was then and what he thinks has been achieved now. Puck folded four years later. The cartoon assumes its readers know both the Exodus story and the 1912 campaign well enough to catch a rock labeled Practical Politics, which tells students something about the literacy a mass magazine could take for granted in 1914.

Maps

Map 14.1 · The Election of 1896 (p. 449)

The map opens the chapter’s political story. Republican William McKinley defeated the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, but the book is careful about the margin: the popular vote was too close for Republican comfort, and a spirit of populism was afoot in the land. Read the map by region rather than by winner. Bryan carried the agrarian South and West, McKinley the industrial Northeast and the upper Midwest, and that division runs through the period—farmers and small producers against concentrated capital and the cities it built. Bryan ran three times and lost three times, and the causes he lost with kept arriving in law afterwards, which is the useful thing for students to see. Bryan is Figure 14.3 in the book and appears again in Figure 14.16 twenty years later, standing behind Wilson as secretary of state. Following one man across a chapter is a good way to show students that a losing side does not simply disappear.

Map 14.2 · Wet and Dry Jurisdictions, January 1, 1919 (p. 454)

The map shows which counties and states permitted the sale of alcohol on the eve of the Eighteenth Amendment. The book traces the Temperance Movement back to the popular religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, which is worth stating plainly to students who expect Progressivism to be secular and technocratic: this reform came out of the churches. The map also shows something else—a great many Americans did not share that view of alcohol, and the dry map is patchy rather than national. Prohibition arrived as a constitutional amendment over a country that was still divided about it. The date matters: January 1919 is six years past the chapter’s close, so the map shows where the movement arrived, not where it stood in 1913. Local option is the mechanism the patchwork records: counties and municipalities voting themselves dry long before any national ban. That is the initiative and referendum of lesson 14.3 doing real work, and it is worth naming so the reform machinery and the reform are not taught as separate things.

Map 14.3 · Lands Preserved by Theodore Roosevelt, 1908 (p. 465)

Roosevelt designated approximately 230 million acres as national parks, monuments and forests, nearly all of it west of the Mississippi where vast stretches remained under federal ownership. His primary tool was the 1906 Antiquities Act, which, as the book’s map caption puts it, allowed him to act by executive proclamation alone, bypassing Congress entirely. Roosevelt later said he was prouder of these achievements than anything else he accomplished in office. Both halves of that sentence are teachable. The conservation is the achievement students expect; the method is a central question of the chapter, because it is executive power used at scale on the president’s own judgment of the public good. That is the Stewardship Theory in practice rather than in definition. The summative Geography item works this map, and the western concentration has a plain cause: eastern land had long since passed into private hands. Roosevelt later said he was proudest of this record. Students can compare the acreage with the size of their own state, and then ask a harder question teachers can put to students: whether a good outcome reached by proclamation alone sets a precedent a citizen should welcome.

Map 14.4 · The Election of 1912 (p. 471)

Wilson won a decisive electoral victory, and the map is worth reading with students: the split in the Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt shaped the field. The arithmetic is worth doing with students. Wilson took a decisive electoral majority on a minority of the popular vote, while Roosevelt on the Bull Moose ticket and Taft as the sitting Republican president together outpolled him. A party that split did not merely lose—it lost while commanding more votes than the winner. Set the map beside Map 14.1 and the sixteen years between them show the same country sorting itself along a different seam: not agrarian against industrial now, but two rival answers to what industry had made. The Socialist Eugene Debs took roughly six percent in the same election, which students should notice before concluding that the country had only two answers on offer. Wilson governed for eight years on the strength of a Republican quarrel.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Morris, Edmund. Colonel Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 2011.

Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2002.

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 2001.

Pestritto, Ronald and William Atto. American Progressivism: A Reader. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 445–449)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 445–449.

Exercise: The Chapter Epigraph, Ryan on wealth and intellect; Figure 14.1, Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers; Map 14.1, the election of 1896.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on what industrial America had become and why its government no longer fitted it.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fourteen, Section Two, “The Many Sides of Progressivism” (pp. 449–458).

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The origins of Progressivism and the Progressive Era: its social context, its dates, and the key figures of its early years.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Define Progressivism and evaluate the arguments in favor of Progressivism.

• Explain the popularity of William Jennings Bryan.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1896 William Jennings Bryan is nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention (July 10)

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

The Progressive movement was a variegated response to the numerous social disruptions caused by industrialization and its related developments. Combating widespread corruption, urban poverty, and the increasing concentration of political and economic power were among the Progressives’ primary aims.

The national political relevance of the ultimately predominantly middle-class movement had its origin among a surprising demographic. In the late nineteenth century, agrarians of the Midwest and South formed the Populist Party to preserve the vitality of their farming communities, advocating a radical political program that included bimetallism and the nationalization of railways.

While the Populists eventually dissipated as a third party, they helped to nominate William Jennings Bryan for president within the Democratic Party in 1896. Embracing bimetallism, Bryan went on to lose a close race to William McKinley, though his impressive showing signaled a coming realignment in national politics.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Bimetallism: This approach to monetary policy advocates for linking both gold and silver reserves to the money supply, allowing for the conversion of dollar notes to either currency. Championed by William Jennings Bryan against the more monetarily restrictive gold standard, it motivated much of his support among rural farmers in the presidential election of 1896.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the introductory section of Chapter Fourteen.

Assign several of the following questions:

What time period is often referred to as the Progressive Era?

What were some of the written works that preceded and helped shape the course of the Progressive Era?

Was the movement for economic reform in the late nineteenth century primarily an urban or a rural movement, or was it equally present in both settings?

What was the platform of the People’s Party (the Populists)?

Who was William Jennings Bryan?

Which fantasy novel was the second best-selling book of the nineteenth century in the United States?

What was Bryan’s stance regarding monetary policy? Why did his position attract support from some voters and opposition from others?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Public Speaking: Write the word “Progressivism” on the board and ask students to brainstorm all the descriptive elements that the textbook uses to define this movement. Ask students to write down these descriptions so that everyone understands the beliefs, goals, and examples of initiatives that can be included under the umbrella of Progressivism. Next, assign the following project to students: as an advocate (or opponent) of Progressive reform, construct a short speech, though no shorter than 200 words, describing what makes the movement (un)suitable for the problems of its time. Have a few students volunteer their work in class, and then use the following questions for class discussion:

What were the problems facing society and the economy during this time? Other than Progressivism, what might be a response to those problems?

When should a social or economic problem be dealt with by the federal government, and when should it be left to the people of a free society or the local governments? What are some example of reform ideas that fit into each category?

Analytical Skills: Progressive-era reformers pursued change through different paths, some working entirely outside government while others took office themselves. Have students compare the methods of different reformers, both within government and without, including Henry George, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, Jane Addams, and William Jennings Bryan. Ask students: George, Gladden, Rauschenbusch, and Addams all worked outside government, yet used very different methods, including writing, preaching, and direct community service. Bryan, by contrast, sought change by running for office directly. Using specific examples from the text, explain what each reformer's approach was, and why some chose to work outside government while Bryan chose to seek it directly.

Further: Have students identify the author, audience, and purpose of Jane Addams's "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (Primary Source 14.1), which describes city neighborhoods where people "live for the moment side by side... without fellowship... without social organization of any kind." Ask students: did Addams and the settlement house movement seek to shape public policy directly, or to address social problems through community action instead? Consider the actual work of Hull House, providing "social services, fellowship, and education," as evidence for your answer.

Reading and Comprehension: Read the excerpts from Bryan’s speeches out loud together as a class, and lead a discussion about his rhetorical skills. Was he popular because of his ideas, the way he spoke, or a combination of both? What techniques and literary sources did he draw on the most? Why might they be particularly effective? Ask students to recall previous examples of effective speakers in history. Do they share anything in common with Bryan? What conclusions can students draw from this?

Civic Discourse: Recall Jefferson’s vision for America, as a republic populated by virtuous, self-sufficient farmers. Ask students to consider whether technological innovation has made the ideals of Jeffersonian republicanism irrelevant. Did the industrial revolution vindicate Alexander Hamilton? Why or why not, and how so? This exercise asks students to recall material from earlier in the course. See Lesson 5.3, Analyzing Figures, for Jefferson's agrarian vision. See Lesson 12.1, Key Concepts and Guiding Question 3, and Lesson 12.3, Key Concepts and Guiding Questions, for America's shift from an agrarian society to a major industrial power.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What made William Jennings Bryan a divisive figure?

Insight: Bryan was a gifted speaker, much like a preacher including the use of Bible verses. But his goal was to adopt and promote controversial causes. He taunted his opposition for not being generous, promoted a change to the silver standard instead of gold, and opposed urban and industrial values while favoring agrarian and rural communities.

Was the presidential election of 1896 unprecedented? Why or why not?

Insight: The election of 1896 was unprecedented in several respects. It was the first modern campaign to feature large-scale, organized fundraising and mass-marketing tactics. William Jennings Bryan broke with tradition by campaigning personally across the country, giving hundreds of speeches directly to voters rather than relying on surrogates, as had been customary. The election also crystallized a stark ideological choice, specifically, gold versus silver, industrial versus agrarian interests. These issues realigned party coalitions for decades afterward.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what year did Congress pass the Interstate Commerce Act, and what did it regulate?

Acceptable responses: 1887; the railroads.

Explain

Why did Progressives argue that an eighteenth-century constitution could not govern a twentieth-century country?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: industrial concentration, mass immigration and the growth of cities had produced problems no locality could solve alone, and the separation of powers was designed to slow government rather than to direct an economy. The chapter puts the question directly—was the Constitution still the indispensable foundation, or a creaking document the new America had passed by?

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Although the Progressive Era’s conventional chronological start date is 1898, its roots reach back to earlier in the nineteenth century. A combination of socioeconomic factors contributed to its rise, and a series of intellectual and political figures such as William Jennings Bryan gave shape to the nascent movement and introduced it to the practical realities of American society and democracy.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

The next lesson opens up the word itself: how many different movements were calling themselves Progressive at once.

Language Support

For students still building academic English. Each support supplies the words for what students can already grasp, drawn from the lesson's central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: progressive, industrial, reform, regulation

Frames that carry the reasoning: “By 1900 the United States had become __, but its government was still __.” “One problem this created was __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students describe one difference between 1787 America and 1900 America to a partner before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column list—what changed, what did not.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.2 The Many Sides of Progressivism (pp. 449–458)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 449–458.

Exercise: Primary Source 14.1, Addams on settlement work; Figure 14.2, Addams in 1912; Figure 14.4, Tarbell and the oil hearing; Map 14.2, wet and dry jurisdictions.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on how many different movements the word Progressive was carrying at once.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fourteen, Section Three, “Two Progressive Answers” (pp. 458–460).

Essential Understanding

The precepts of Progressivism as a system of sociopolitical ideas and practices.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Analyze various examples of Progressive policies that were enacted.

• Draw conclusions about the coherence of the Progressive worldview.

Key Dates

1904 Wisconsin Governor Robert La Follette champions the Wisconsin Idea

Key Concepts

The widespread appeal of Bryan’s radical 1896 platform signaled the birth of a new age in U.S. politics.

The impetus of the Progressive Era was the widespread perception that the economic and social revolutions of late nineteenth-century America had distorted or displaced the institutions that had previously ordered social and political life. Accordingly, Progressives set about reforming old institutions and devising new ones to address these challenges.

The political and social program of Progressive reform was as varied as its membership, and the movement was not dominated by any particular organization. Generally, though, Progressives worked to implement scientific and impartial governance, through civil service reform, the use of expert opinion, and the expansion of governmental authority, particularly in the regulation of business, the delivery of public services, and matters of public health. Ideologically, many shared a view of human nature as fundamentally good, with no inherent limit to the improvability of the world through social reform and the application of science, championing means as varied as eugenics, compulsory schooling, and the temperance movement.

Key Terms

Original sin: This Christian theological doctrine holds that human nature is inherently corrupted as a result of the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Despite Progressivism’s religious roots, its adherents generally denied original sin, believing instead in the improvability of the world.

Muckrakers: Coined by Theodore Roosevelt, this term refers to influential Progressive Era journalists who sought to promote social reform through the investigation and publicization of various abuses.

Eugenics: Once common due to the influence of social Darwinism, proponents of eugenics seek to increase the prevalence of desired biological traits in the population through regulating various aspects of human reproduction. One of the darker sides of the Progressive movement was many of its members’ advocacy of eugenics as a scientific program that promised to boost social wellbeing.

Scientific management: The “gospel of efficiency” that Progressive business reformers such as Frederick Winslow Taylor brought to the workplace, prescribing the exact motions and techniques to be used on the assembly line to maximize productivity. The book uses it to pose a tension students should weigh: how such an approach could be reconciled with a religious tradition insisting on the dignity of work and of the worker.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the second section of Chapter Fourteen, “The Many Sides of Progressivism.”

Assign several of the following questions:

By how narrow of a margin did McKinley win the popular vote over Bryan?

Who were the Progressives? From what professional and economic classes did they generally hail?

What was the significance of “the public interest” within Progressivist thinking?

What was the city-manager system of governance? How was it part of Progressivism? How did it depart from the previous model?

Who was Robert La Follette?

Who was John Dewey and what were his principal ideas?

How did the scientific and the religious roots of Progressivism come into conflict?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Reading Analysis: Ask students to pick two of the Progressive policies from this section that they find to be the best ideas. Instruct them to describe the policies in writing and explain why they find them to be good ideas. Next, invite students to share their responses in a group with other students. One member of the group should play the role of “devil’s advocate” to ask critical questions about the policy, in order to encourage discussion and critical thinking about the effects of this policy.

Reading Comprehension: Encourage students to re-read the text’s excerpt from Dewey’s “Individualism, Old and New.” In a written exercise or a class discussion, ask students to respond to the following questions:

What does he mean by “external” and “internal” change?

Which would precede the other?

How does he describe the inner man?

Does he have a high view of society? Why or why not?

Argumentation: Discuss the following question in class: were the tenets of Progressivism incompatible with its religious roots? Students may consider in particular Progressivism’s views on the improvability of the world on the one hand and its similarity to the Social Gospel movement on the other.

Civic Discourse: Ask students to consider what, if any, tensions existed between Progressivism and the principles of the American Founding. What were Progressivism’s views on equality and natural rights?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were the Progressives’ religious origins? What assumptions did they make about mankind?

Insight: Progressivism emerged partly as a reaction to the religious thinking of the era, and many Progressives came to believe that the social problems of their day could not be solved through religion alone. Traditional religious thought held that inner transformation, individuals reforming their own character and morality, would naturally produce a better society. Progressives believed that by reforming society’s external structures and conditions first, inward peace and contentment would follow as a result.

Insight: This shift reflected a deeper assumption about human nature: rather than seeing individual moral failing as the root of social ills, many Progressives viewed people as products of their environment, meaning that changing external conditions could fundamentally reshape human character and behavior.

Insight: Some strands of Progressivism stood in direct opposition to the religious and moral thinking of the day. Certain Progressives embraced eugenics and held views that looked down on minorities, with some supporting segregation and immigration restriction as ways to eliminate elements of society they deemed undesirable or unfit.

Which Progressive-era views would be disfavored today?

Insight: One notable failing of Progressivism in its original iteration was its racism.

Insight: The Progressives believed themselves to be scientific, and their racism was based on “scientific” principles widely held at the time, primarily involving evolution. If some races build skyscrapers while others live in grass huts, it seemed self-evident that the first were superior to the second and should rule them. Margaret Sanger’s desire to control or remove “inferior” types of humans was quite compatible with much Progressive thought.

What inspired the temperance movement? How did Progressives view temperance?

Insight: While there was a religious element to outlawing liquor, Progressives were champions of the temperance movement because they were concerned about how it negatively affected working-class people, namely when it came to undermining their health, cohesiveness or family bonds, living standards and other areas of life.

Insight: Progressives also believed bars to be breeding grounds for crime and prostitution. Even more concerning, Progressives thought bars to be gathering places for opposing political machines to control elections.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What was the Wisconsin Idea, and who implemented it?

Acceptable responses: Robert La Follette’s program as governor and later senator, employing university experts and scientists to systematize the civil service, alongside direct primaries, railroad regulation, tax reform and worker protections.

Explain

Why does the chapter say Progressivism had many sides rather than one?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: the same label covered Prohibition, election reform, police reform, settlement work, conservation, antitrust and educational reform—causes that did not agree with one another and were pursued by people who would not have called themselves allies. What united them was a belief that expertise and organized effort could improve public life.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

In the aftermath of the election of 1896, Progressivism came rapidly to the fore in American political life. The accomplishments of its adherents were numerous: improved safety standards and social conditions, cleaner and more orderly cities, reduced corruption and corporate malfeasance. And yet its emergence also heralded a departure from many principles of the American Founding, particularly the Founders’ belief in the intrinsic fallibility of human nature and the consequent need for constitutional checks on governmental power.

Looking Ahead

The next lesson narrows to the central economic question and the two rival answers given to it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: settlement house, temperance, muckraker, civil service

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Progressives wanted to reform __, because they believed __.” “Another group of Progressives worked on __ instead.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: each student names one Progressive cause aloud and says who it was meant to help.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a spider diagram with Progressivism at the center and four causes branching from it.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.3 Two Progressive Answers (pp. 458–460)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 458–460.

Exercise: Figure 14.7, Keppler’s Next!; Primary Source 14.3 and Primary Source 14.4 read against each other.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on the two rival answers to concentrated economic power.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fourteen, Section Four, “A Presidential Progressive” (pp. 460–466).

Essential Understanding

Two important approaches of the Progressivist movement to advance its political aims.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Explain the difference between the anti-trust method and the consolidation method.

• Draw conclusions about the constitutionality of the Progressive approach to governance.

Key Dates

1887 Congress passes the Interstate Commerce Act to regulate U.S. railroads (February 4)

1890 Congress attempts to curb monopolies with the Sherman Antitrust Act (July 2)

Key Concepts

A notable difference between Progressives and Populists was in their respective attitudes toward capitalism. While Populists were explicitly hostile to large private concentrations of wealth and commercial power, Progressives accepted them as a necessary reality of life in the industrial age, insisting that governmental oversight could ensure that corporations serve the public weal.

There were primarily two regulatory methods that Progressives championed to align corporate and public interests.

The antitrust method involved the forced division of large corporations to ensure sufficient marketplace competition, whereas the consolidation method accepted such corporations and even entrenched their dominance (albeit indirectly) through regulation formulated to serve the public interest.

Key Terms

Capitalism: A capitalist economic system is one in which the means of production are owned and controlled by private individuals and organizations. Progressive-era reformers generally did not seek to abolish private ownership; they sought to regulate, discipline, or redirect corporate activity through public rules and administrative oversight. Those measures expanded government’s role within a capitalist economy rather than simply making the economy “less capitalistic.”

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the third section of Chapter Fourteen, “Two Progressive Answers.”

Assign several of the following questions:

Regarding which issues was there no Progressive consensus?

What was the “anti-trust approach” of the Progressives?

What was the “consolidation method” of the Progressives?

Were these approaches novel? If not, what were their precedents?

What is capitalism?

Was Progressivism focused more on local or national issues, or was it equally concerned with them?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Argumentation: Ask students to write an opinion within the context of this chapter, responding to the following question: is the Constitution an “indispensable foundation of American law and life”? Or should it be circumvented (bypassing the amendment process) to meet the needs of changing times? Why or why not?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Ask students to make a graphic organizer in their notes to compare the two approaches discussed in this section: The antitrust method vs. the consolidation method. Under each approach, students should explain what they are, the rationale behind them, and examples of each. After students have completed the organizer, use the following questions for a written reflection or a class discussion:

How can regulation result in the consolidation of a large corporation? Why might a big corporation want more regulations? (A helpful example to share with students is the modern banking industry, where big banks sometimes welcome cumbersome regulation in order to secure their market dominance.)

Which of the two is the more effective approach, and why? Does it depend on the industry? What are the pros and cons of each?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What were Progressives’ views on capitalism? According to them, what were its successes and failures as it relates to the entire economic system?

Insight: Progressives generally did not reject capitalism outright. Most accepted it as the basic economic system while arguing it needed serious correction. They credited industrial capitalism with real successes: it had driven remarkable growth, technological advances, and rising material abundance. But they saw serious failures alongside those gains: extreme concentrations of wealth and corporate power (trusts and monopolies), corruption of politics by big business, dangerous working conditions, child labor, and inequality between owners and laborers.

Insight: Progressives argued that unregulated markets could not correct these problems on their own, since competition had given way to monopoly power that crushed smaller competitors and left workers and consumers with little bargaining power. Their proposed solution was not to abolish capitalism but to have government actively regulate it through antitrust enforcement, labor protections, and oversight of banking and industry. In this sense, Progressives saw capitalism as fundamentally sound but in need of active management to keep it fair and stable.

Before reading the next sections, how do you think Progressive leaders would likely regard the Constitution?

Insight: Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, leaders of the Progressive movement in their own right, were convinced that the U.S. Constitution was defective and inadequate and wanted to limit checks and balances. Both supported a strong presidency.

Insight: Roosevelt argued for making it easier to amend the Constitution with a majority vote.

Insight: Wilson favored the British parliamentary system which blended the legislative and executive branches together. Wilson thought that the government should be more fluid and evolving, determined by the times we live in.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Under the Stewardship Theory, what happened to the presumption of constitutional authority?

Acceptable responses: It shifted from “show me where it is permitted” to “show me where it is forbidden”—the president may act for the public good unless the Constitution prohibits it.

Explain

How did the New Nationalism and the New Freedom answer the same problem differently?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: both held that the federal government must be equal to concentrated industrial power. Roosevelt would accept large combinations and regulate them through a strong national government; Wilson would use the law to break them up and restore competition. The difference is regulation against dissolution.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

A central priority of the Progressive movement was to regulate commercial life, particularly large industrial corporations, to promote the public’s welfare. Depending on the context, Progressive leaders embraced one of two (opposing) methods for doing so, either attempting to break up concentrations of corporate power or else regulating them in ways that ultimately consolidated their position.

Looking Ahead

The next lesson takes those answers into the White House and watches one of them govern.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: trust, monopoly, competition, regulation

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Roosevelt would __ large companies, while Wilson would __.” “Both of them agreed that __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: partners take one side each and state its position in a sentence before writing.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column comparison, New Nationalism and New Freedom.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.4 A Presidential Progressive (pp. 460–466)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 460–466.

Exercise: Figure 14.9, Berryman on the good and bad trusts; Figure 14.11, The Meat Market; Primary Source 14.2, Sinclair; Map 14.3, lands preserved by Roosevelt.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on the Stewardship Theory and what it reversed.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fourteen, Section Five, “The Republicans Split” (pp. 466–470).

Essential Understanding

The life and political career of Theodore Roosevelt from his upbringing to his presidency, including his personality, outlook, and actions taken while in office.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Describe the personal and political achievements of Theodore Roosevelt.

• Evaluate the changes Roosevelt brought to the office of the presidency.

Key Dates

1901 Theodore Roosevelt is inaugurated as president following McKinley’s assassination (September 14)

1902 Roosevelt intervenes in the anthracite coal strike, threatening to seize the mines and forcing a settlement (May–October)

1904 Theodore Roosevelt wins the presidential election (November 8)

1905 Roosevelt establishes the U.S. Forest Service (March 1)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act, creating eighteen new national monuments (June 8)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Hepburn Act to regulate railroad prices (June 29)

1906 Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (June 30)

Key Concepts

Theodore Roosevelt’s rise marked the first time that an avowed Progressive had entered the White House. A fascinating figure, Roosevelt was a polymath, adventurer, war-hero, and political phenomenon who rapidly advanced from patrician origins in New York City to national prominence.

Roosevelt took an activist approach to the Presidency, employing an unprecedently expansive understanding of presidential power. Under his “stewardship” theory, the president was understood as being entrusted with promoting the public’s welfare and could pursue any means to that end. Accordingly, Roosevelt interpreted the Constitution as a charter of enumerated prohibitions rather than enumerated powers, recognizing the authoritative nature of the Bill of Rights (and subsequent amendments) while marginalizing the importance of the document’s original articles and intended design.

Over the course of his popular and transformative time in office, Roosevelt embarked on an ambitious program of Progressive reform. He oversaw passage of: the Hepburn Act, which gave a federal commission the power to set railroad rates; the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts, which improved quality control in food processing and drug production; and the Antiquities Act, which proclaimed various national monuments. He also worked to preserve the country’s natural beauty through instituting the U.S. Forest Service and creating many national parks and preserved forestlands.

While notably successful in suing to prevent a railroad merger backed by J.P. Morgan in the Northern Securities case, he generally adopted a consolidation approach to corporate regulation. More broadly, his Square Deal program involved a promise to treat the interests of capital and labor equally, and as equally subordinate to the overarching importance of the common good.

Key Terms

Northern Securities Co.: This 1904 Supreme Court case forced the dissolution of a railroad monopoly devised by Wall Street interests that the Roosevelt administration had sued to prevent.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the fourth section of Chapter Fourteen, “A Presidential Progressive.”

Assign several of the following questions:

What was Theodore Roosevelt’s reputation before becoming president?

What was his upbringing and background?

What were his political inclinations? How did he govern?

Was he a Progressive? In what way?

What did Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) address?

What service did Roosevelt create to oversee the national parks?

What congressional act directly impacted the railroad system?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Civic Discourse: After students have read this section, ask them pick out two of Teddy Roosevelt’s greatest life achievements. Students should write two paragraphs for each achievement: 1) a summary of the achievement, and 2) an explanation about why they think it was important or interesting. The achievements can be chosen from before or during his presidency. After students have finished their paragraphs, they should share with a partner or a small group. As a concluding exercise, lead a full class discussion about Roosevelt’s personality traits and how they are revealed by his achievements.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: After students have read this section and completed the homework questions, lead students in a Socratic seminar discussion about Roosevelt, using the following questions in a sequence:

What stood out to you about Roosevelt’s life? How would you describe his personality?

How did Roosevelt’s stewardship theory depart from the tradition of U.S. politics to that point? What is your opinion about his attitude toward the Constitution? What might be long-term ramifications if other presidents held this view?

In the text, Roosevelt is quoted as saying the federal government must be “the senior partner in every business.” What did he mean by that? What were the implications of this statement for U.S. politics and American life more broadly? Is there merit to Roosevelt’s opinion? Why might some disagree with it?

What aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency do you think should be emulated by modern presidents? Which aspects should be avoided?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

How was Roosevelt well suited for public office? What were some of his qualities in need of polishing?

Insight: Roosevelt was well suited for public office in several ways. He came from a wealthy family with a strong tradition of public service, modeled especially by his father, which gave him both the means and the motivation to pursue a life devoted to serving others. Politics also demands tenacity, and Roosevelt developed this trait early: by overcoming a sickly childhood through sheer determination, he built a tough, resilient character that refused to quit in the face of adversity.

Insight: Roosevelt had qualities that needed refining. He was fiercely strong-willed, but this same strength could make him a difficult collaborator. His forceful personality and unbending resolve sometimes crowded out the spirit of compromise that effective governance in American politics often requires.

How might Roosevelt’s childhood ailments have shaped his adult character?

Insight: Roosevelt’s youth was marked by chronic illness and physical frailty. He suffered frequent bouts of asthma, headaches, fevers, and stomach pains, along with poor eyesight, which often left him housebound and unable to participate in normal childhood activities. Rather than letting this define his son, Roosevelt’s father built him a home gym and set him on a rigorous fitness regimen, one that would be impressive even by modern standards, including weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling, boxing, horseback riding, hiking, climbing, swimming, and rowing.

Insight: Overcoming these ailments as a young man forged the character traits that would later define his success. Physically, he developed seemingly boundless energy, which he channeled relentlessly toward achieving his goals. He built a persistence that refused to accept defeat, along with a thick skin that let him weather criticism without being deterred by it. This early experience of turning weakness into strength through sheer discipline also instilled in him a lifelong belief that willpower could overcome almost any obstacle, a conviction that would shape both his personal ambitions and his approach to leadership later in life.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Which two food and drug laws did Roosevelt sign on the same day in 1906?

Acceptable responses: The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both on June 30, 1906.

Explain

Why does the chapter call Roosevelt the first president to govern in a recognizably Progressive way?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: he used federal power actively rather than waiting to be authorized—intervening in the anthracite coal strike, distinguishing good trusts from bad and breaking the bad ones, creating the Forest Service, and preserving some 230 million acres largely by executive proclamation under the Antiquities Act.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency witnessed the implementation of many Progressive reforms on a national level. His approach to the Constitution and the powers of his own office, though, reveal a critical tension between Progressivism and the Founders’ approach to politics. If the president, or government more broadly, may do anything they deem necessary to promoting the public welfare, what good is there in having a constitution at all?

Looking Ahead

The next lesson follows what happened when Roosevelt’s chosen successor turned out to govern differently.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: stewardship, conservation, inspection, proclamation

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Roosevelt believed a president may __ unless __.” “An example of this was __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students say aloud the difference between “show me where it is permitted” and “show me where it is forbidden.”

Show understanding without a paragraph: a labeled timeline of four Roosevelt actions, 1902 to 1908.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.5 The Republicans Split (pp. 466–470)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 466–470.

Exercise: Map 14.4, the election of 1912.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on how a governing party split and what the split produced.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fourteen, Section Six, “Wilson Takes Command” (pp. 470–475).

Essential Understanding

The end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, the intraparty dispute at the 1912 Republican convention, and the emergence of Woodrow Wilson.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Compare and contrast the governing styles of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

• Analyze the political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson.

Key Dates

1908 William Howard Taft wins the presidential election (November 3)

1912 Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters found the Progressive Bull Moose Party (August 7)

Key Concepts

William Howard Taft was elected president in 1908, having been anointed Roosevelt’s successor after distinguished service as governor-general of the Philippines and secretary of war. A lawyer by profession, however, Taft had a far more limited vision of executive authority than Roosevelt, and his more conventional approach to governance proved unsatisfactory in Roosevelt’s eyes.

As such, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican Party nomination in 1912. When Taft received the nomination, Roosevelt’s supporters formed the Progressive Party, so Roosevelt’s campaign continued as an independent candidate.

The chief beneficiary of this intraparty split was Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, the Democrats’ candidate, who had previously served as a professor of politics and as the president of Princeton University. Wilson’s academic writing featured much criticism of the U.S. constitution’s design, and like Roosevelt he believed the president should take a more active role in the legislative process.

Running on a Progressive platform he termed the New Freedom, Wilson adopted many of Roosevelt’s proposed reforms as his own.

Key Terms

The New Nationalism: This comprehensive plan for sweeping social legislation was proposed by Theodore Roosevelt at a speech in 1910. Setting the tone for Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign, it called for nationwide devotion to the public interest and for more extensive governmental involvement in corporations, even to the extent of “controlling them.”

The New Freedom: Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 campaign platform, this Progressive program advocated for lower tariffs and the expansion of the federal government’s commercial regulatory power, through banking reform, additional protections for workers and unions, and the establishment of a Federal Trade Commission to regulate anticompetitive practices.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the fifth section of Chapter Fourteen, “The Republicans Split.”

Assign several of the following questions:

How did Theodore Roosevelt end his presidency?

Who was William Howard Taft?

What did Roosevelt’s idea of New Nationalism entail?

What happened at the Republican Party convention in 1912?

Who was Woodrow Wilson? What was his background? What were his political ideas?

What were Roosevelt and Wilson’s views on the Constitution? In what sense were they similar and yet distinct?

What were Roosevelt and Wilson’s views on the best forms of governance and administration? How did they differ?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: In a written exercise or a class discussion, ask students to compare and contrast the views of President Taft, President Wilson, and President Roosevelt. Possible areas of comparison: Approach to the Constitution, views on executive authority, approach to dealing with big business, and government style. Students should provide evidence from the text when making the comparisons.

Reading Analysis: In a written exercise or a class discussion, ask students to identify the writings that Wilson used to defend his view of the Constitution and government. How does he view the Founding documents of the United States, and why does he view them this way? How might this view be justified during the time period? What might a contemporary critic of Wilson have said about this view?

Public Speaking: Ask students to choose a presidential candidate from 1912 and to write a brief speech in support of their candidacy. Allow a few volunteers to address the class and discuss their various appeals.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

Looking ahead to his book The New Freedom (Primary Source 14.4), Wilson redefines the tyranny of the modern age, saying, “We mean, specifically, the conduct of our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use.” How did Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Wilson's New Freedom platform answer the same problem of corporate consolidation differently?

Insight: Roosevelt's New Nationalism called for a stronger federal government that would vigorously control the large industrial combinations which he viewed as inevitable. Wilson's New Freedom platform, in direct opposition to Roosevelt, argued that the government should instead dismantle giant trusts and then step aside, thereby restoring competition among smaller businesses and enabling free enterprise.

How did Wilson regard the various branches? Was there a superior model of government to that instituted by the U.S. Constitution in his view? Why?

Insight: Wilson argued that the Founders had built the Constitution on a mechanical, Newtonian model of government, one based on the idea of checks and balances, with power deliberately fragmented among independent branches so that no one part could dominate the others. Wilson believed this framework treated government as a machine of interacting parts rather than as a living organism that grows and adapts over time.

Insight: Wilson favored a Darwinian, or organic, conception of government instead, one that saw the state as a living thing subject to the laws of evolution rather than a fixed contrivance of checks and counterweights.

Insight: Wilson admired features of the British parliamentary system, in which the executive and legislative branches worked in close coordination with one another and better served public interest. He believed that the separation of powers in the American system often produced deadlock and inefficiency.

How, in the text, does Wilson define administration? What is the scope of its power and authority?

Insight: Specifically, “public administration” was a topic Wilson extensively studied and wrote about and was a field of study he helped to create. Wilson defined administration as the actual executive function of government.

Insight: Wilson believed that the running of the government should be more efficient by lying outside the proper sphere of politics. There should be a separation of the political and administrative side. He believed the administrative side should be run by highly professionalized, independent civil servants, which we understand to be bureaucracy.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Which party did Roosevelt and his supporters found in 1912, and on what date?

Acceptable responses: The Progressive Bull Moose Party, August 7, 1912.

Explain

How did Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom answer the same problem of corporate consolidation differently?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: Roosevelt’s New Nationalism accepted big-business consolidation as inevitable and called for a stronger federal government to control it through permanent, active regulation. Wilson’s New Freedom argued that government should break up the great trusts and then allow competition and free enterprise to reassert themselves rather than maintain ongoing federal oversight.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

The presidential election of 1912 testified to the general appeal of Progressivism in early twentieth-century America. While Woodrow Wilson received the Democrats’ nomination with a thoroughly Progressive platform, Theodore Roosevelt’s support splintered the Republican coalition. The era of limited federal power as enumerated by the Constitution was ebbing away, with an emergent Progressive consensus in the ascendant.

Looking Ahead

The next lesson takes up what Wilson did with the presidency the Republican split handed him.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: nomination, third party, coalition, split

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The Republican Party divided because __.” “The result of the division was __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain to a partner what happens to a vote when a party runs two candidates.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a simple bar comparison of the three 1912 totals.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

14.6 Wilson Takes Command (pp. 470–475)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 470–475.

Exercise: Figure 14.16, Keppler’s On the Way to the Promised Land.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on what Wilson enacted and how far it differed from what he had campaigned on.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fifteen, “Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Mission to a Shattered Continent” (pp. 477 ff.).

Essential Understanding

Woodrow Wilson’s victory in the election of 1912 and the first years of his presidency.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Describe Woodrow Wilson’s early actions as president.

• Draw conclusions about the proper balance between political continuity and national self-improvement.

Key Dates

1912 Woodrow Wilson wins the presidential election (November 5)

1913 The Sixteenth Amendment is ratified, allowing Congress to levy federal income tax without apportionment (February 3)

1913 The Seventeenth Amendment is ratified, establishing direct election of U.S. senators (April 8)

1913 Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act (December 23)

Key Concepts

Due to the intraparty Republican split, Woodrow Wilson emerged victorious from the presidential election of 1912, winning a landslide in the electoral college despite receiving less than 42 percent of the popular vote. Humiliatingly, Taft won only two states and placed third, the worst-ever result for a sitting president or major party-nominee. Between Wilson, Roosevelt, and the socialist Eugene Debs, Progressive and Progressive-adjacent candidates received nearly three-quarters of the electorate’s support, setting the high-water mark for Progressivism in presidential politics.

Upon his inauguration, Wilson quickly set about instituting major reforms, and his first term was arguably the most significant since the Civil War. Most notably, he instituted the first federal income tax, created a central banking system, and enhanced the government’s capacity for trust busting through the newly formed Federal Trade Commission.

Key Terms

Sixteenth Amendment: Ratified in 1913, this amendment empowered Congress to tax incomes, thereby transforming the nature and reach of federal taxation.

Seventeenth Amendment: Ratified in 1913, this amendment requires the direct election of U.S. senators, who were originally chosen indirectly via state legislatures. Part of the Progressive movement’s effort to democratize elections, it significantly decreased the national influence of the various state governments.

Federal Reserve System: Instituted by the Wilson administration, this independent governmental agency oversees the U.S. monetary system, regulates private banks, and serves as a lender of last resort in financial markets. Its structure features 12 regional reserve banks that are jointly responsible for setting monetary policy under the leadership of a board of governors.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Encourage students to read the sixth section of Chapter Fourteen, “Wilson Takes Command.”

Assign several of the following questions:

What was the result of the 1912 election? How did it come about?

What was historic about the vote total for Roosevelt?

Who was the fourth-place candidate that received 900,000 votes? What was his political ideology?

What did Woodrow Wilson achieve in his first term?

What were Wilson’s views on checks and balances and the constraints of the Constitution on executive power?

What were his views on race?

What was the Federal Reserve Act?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are Taft in the waning months of 1912 and have them write a letter to Roosevelt urging him to drop out. How could it be in Roosevelt’s interests that Taft rather than Wilson be president, or would Roosevelt have more in common with his fellow progressive than his fellow Republican? Invite students to share their work in small groups and then discuss as a class.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Ask students to consider why the Constitution originally required senators to be chosen by state legislatures. What might the merits of this method be? Was it preferable to the direct election of senators, as we have today?

Civic Discourse: Ask a student to read aloud G.K. Chesterton’s fence metaphor as quoted in the penultimate paragraph of the text and discuss the following questions: what wisdom, if any, can be gleaned from Chesterton’s observation? Is it relevant to the Progressives’ relationship to the Constitution, as the text suggests? Why or why not?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

In what ways would Wilson likely have butt heads with President Lincoln? Why?

Insight: Wilson and Progressivism tended to be indifferent to the plight of minorities. Wilson, himself, seemed hostile to Black Americans.

Insight: Wilson criticized the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as something outdated, especially considering the needs of his day.

Insight: It was Lincoln’s goal to preserve and defend the Declaration and Constitution. He believed it to be the foundation of what needed to be saved in order for America to endure.

Wilson had campaigned on the New Freedom and governed increasingly like the New Nationalism. Does that make him inconsistent, or does it tell us something about the office?

Insight: The chapter says Wilson seemed more and more to shed the ideas he had campaigned on and to act in a way indistinguishable from his rival’s program. Both men wanted a national government equal to industrial power; once in office, building institutions to regulate concentration proved easier than dissolving it. Students may reasonably read this as conviction meeting practicality rather than as a betrayal of it.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

Which two amendments were ratified in 1913, and what did each establish?

Acceptable responses: The Sixteenth, allowing Congress to levy a federal income tax without apportionment, and the Seventeenth, establishing direct election of senators by the people rather than by state legislatures.

Explain

The chapter says Wilson came to act in a way indistinguishable from the New Nationalism. What does that mean?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: he had campaigned on breaking up concentrations and restoring competition, but governed by building national institutions—the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission—that regulated concentration instead. The chapter reads this as Wilson shedding the New Freedom in office.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Helped considerably by Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy, Wilson was elected president in 1912, with the election’s outcome suggesting broad popular support for Progressive reforms. He subsequently enacted an ambition program of reform, fundamentally changing the course of American commerce and governance with such measures as the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.

Looking Ahead

The next chapter takes Wilson’s new government into a European war it had no wish to join.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: amendment, tariff, central bank, commission

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Wilson campaigned on __ but governed by __.” “One law that shows this is __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students name one Wilson reform and say which level of government it created.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a four-row table—reform, year, what it did.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

The questions and answers that follow offer a range of ways to assess students’ understanding of the chapter. Teachers may use the assessment as written or select and adapt questions to suit their students and course of study.

Timeline

Answers as ordered below; the pairings are one-to-one.

1. C

2. E

3. D

4. A

5. B

6. F

A. Theodore Roosevelt founds the Progressive Bull Moose Party

B. The Sixteenth Amendment is ratified, allowing Congress to levy federal income tax

C. Congress creates the Sherman Antitrust Act, attempting to curb monopolies

D. Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act

E. Roosevelt establishes the U.S. Forest Service

F. President Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

Ida Tarbell is remembered as one of the era’s leading ____muckrakers____; a journalist who exposed corporate and political corruption.

____Progressivism____ pursued goals as varied as Prohibition, election reform, police reform and antitrust litigation. It was grounded in the belief that man could be perfected and it valued scientific method.

The ____Sherman Antitrust Act____ was the first major federal law aimed at curbing monopolistic business practices.

Under the ____Stewardship Theory____, the presumption of constitutional authority shifted from “what is permitted” to “what is prohibited”.

The ____Pure Food and Drug Act____ aimed to prevent the manufacture of food and pharmaceutical products that are poor in quality or substance in order to protect citizens.

____William Jennings Bryan____, the “boy orator” who ran for president, advocated for expanding the currency supply through unlimited silver coinage (Free Silver Movement).

The ____Federal Reserve Act____ of 1913 created the nation’s central banking system and remains the foundation of U.S. monetary policy today.

____Upton Sinclair____’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, exposed unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry and helped spur passage of a bill that would protect citizens from ill-processed food.

The ____Federal Trade Commission____ was created in 1914 to investigate and prevent unfair and anticompetitive business practices.

Geography

Using the map (14.3), write the answers to the questions using complete sentences.

Based on the map, does national forest land appear more heavily concentrated in the interior mountain states or along the Pacific coast? Explain what this suggests about the kind of terrain Roosevelt’s administration prioritized for conservation.

Model response: Students should describe the pattern shown on their specific map, connecting it to the idea that Roosevelt’s conservation program focused on interior mountain states which were resource-rich, and often sparsely populated. The land was valuable for timber and watershed protection rather than for cropland.

Using the map, why did President Roosevelt use the lands west of the Mississippi for National forests and not more in the East?

Model response: Most federally owned, unallocated public land was concentrated in the West, since eastern land had already been largely settled, sold, or granted to states and individuals by 1906.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

What social and institutional forces gave rise to Progressivism in the late nineteenth century?

Model response: Progressivism arose largely as a response to the Industrial Revolution, rapid urbanization and mass immigration. These forces strained existing social and institutional arrangements, prompting reformers to seek new tools for managing an increasingly industrial, urban society.

Model response: Progressivism sprang from the middle class trying to make sense of a country that had industrialized faster than its institutions could keep up.

How did Progressivism differ from Populism in terms of its constituency and its stance toward industrial capitalism?

Model response: Unlike the agrarian, working-class Populists, Progressivism was predominantly a middle-class movement. Rather than opposing industrial capitalism outright as did the Populists, Progressives sought to accommodate and harness it through regulation and reform.

Why were many Progressives critical of the U.S. constitutional system?

Model response: Many Progressives objected to the Constitution’s numerous checks on governmental power, such as the separation of powers and federalism, viewing these features as obstacles to efficient governance. They believed a more centralized, expert-driven government could better address modern problems than one restrained by these structural limits.

Who succeeded Theodore Roosevelt and how did he compare with Roosevelt’s presidency?

Model response: William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president in 1909. Taft was more of a traditional Republican than he was a Progressive like the former president. He lacked Roosevelt’s leadership and was wary of using the previous president’s executive authority. He attempted to continue Roosevelt’s reforms and could be considered a greater “trust buster” than Roosevelt.

Model response: Roosevelt grew dissatisfied with Taft on several counts, and the two broke. Roosevelt ran in 1912 on the Progressive “Bull Moose” ticket; he and Taft together outpolled Wilson, but the split Republican vote gave Wilson the presidency.

Why was Wilson able to win the presidency so easily in 1912?

Model response: Wilson won easily because the Republican coalition splintered when Roosevelt launched his third-party run, known as the Bull Moose Party, as the Progressive Party’s nominee. This division split the Republican vote between Taft and Roosevelt, clearing the way for Wilson’s victory.

Briefly describe two major reforms, federal income tax and the central banking system, enacted early in Wilson’s presidency.

Model response: Ratified via the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, this gave the federal government a permanent, direct source of revenue tied to individual earnings rather than relying primarily on tariffs. It also gave Wilson’s administration room to lower tariff rates (through the Underwood Tariff) without starving the government of funds.

Model response: The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created a network of regional reserve banks overseen by a central board in Washington. It was designed to provide an elastic currency and a lender of last resort, addressing the recurring banking panics that had plagued the country since the mid-1800s.

Explain the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, and describe how each reflected the broader Progressive belief that government-enforced safety and health codes were necessary to protect workers and the public.

Model response: The Pure Food and Drug Act required accurate labeling of ingredients in food and medicine and banned the manufacture or sale of unsafe or mislabeled products. It targeted the patent medicine and food industry, which had been selling food and remedies with undisclosed and sometimes dangerous ingredients.

Model response: The Meat Inspection Act, passed the same year, mandated federal inspection of livestock before and after slaughter and imposed sanitary standards on meatpacking facilities.

Model response: Together, these two laws marked a shift toward the federal government taking an ongoing, expert-driven regulatory role in protecting consumer and worker safety, rather than leaving oversight to the states or to the market. They reflected the broader Progressive belief that scientific inspection and government expertise were needed to guarantee basic public health standards.

Who is considered the first president to govern in a recognizably Progressive way, and how did he understand the powers of his office in light of the Stewardship Theory?

Model response: Theodore Roosevelt is generally considered the first president to govern in a recognizably Progressive way. He justified expanding federal power through a “stewardship” theory, holding that the president could take any action serving the public welfare unless the Constitution specifically prohibited it.

Model response: As the book puts it, Roosevelt interpreted the Constitution as a charter not of enumerated powers but of enumerated prohibitions — the president permitted to do anything necessary for the people’s well-being that was not expressly forbidden. That is the stewardship theory.

What was the purpose of the Federal Trade Commission, established under Wilson?

Model response: The Federal Trade Commission was Wilson’s answer to the antitrust question — an agency created to investigate and act against unfair methods of competition on a continuing basis, rather than to break firms up case by case.

How did Wilson’s approach to reform differ in method, though not necessarily in underlying philosophy, from Roosevelt’s?

Model response: Both men shared the underlying Progressive belief that the federal government should play an active role in guiding economic life. Roosevelt relied heavily on executive power to justify federal action. Wilson pursued his agenda primarily through legislative and institutional reforms, such as the income tax, the central banking system, and the FTC.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

The prompt asks students to distinguish the referendum, the recall and the initiative, and strong answers keep the three separate rather than treating them as one bundle of reforms. The initiative lets citizens propose a law and put it on the ballot themselves; the referendum lets them vote directly on a measure the legislature has produced; the recall lets them remove an official before the end of a term. Credit students who notice what the three have in common—each moves a decision from elected representatives to voters directly—and who can say why Progressives who also wanted government run by trained experts would want that. The best answers hold both halves of the era’s thinking at once: La Follette staffed Wisconsin’s government with university professors and championed the direct primary in the same program. Answers will vary; no single account of the tension is privileged, provided the three mechanisms are correctly distinguished and the argument is made from the chapter.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Woodrow Wilson and the Great War

Mission to a Shattered Continent

1914–1920 · pp. 477–511

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

When the Great War began to convulse Europe in late summer 1914, Americans were reminded of the benefits of their traditional neutrality. The carnage seemed utterly senseless. How could an isolated terrorist act in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo lead to a general conflagration engulfing nearly all the nations of Europe and affecting much of the rest of the planet?

President Wilson immediately issued a declaration of neutrality and instructed the nation to remain impartial “in thought, as well as action” with respect to the unfolding conflict. His policy seemed wise. Fueled by the illusion that it could be ended quickly with a master stroke, the war soon spun out of control, descending to levels of hellish mayhem and mass slaughter unprecedented in their enormity and horror. Who could wish to take part in such madness?

But a policy of neutrality would prove hard to sustain in the end, just as at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Faced with British naval supremacy, the Germans resorted to submarine warfare, launching torpedoes even at merchant targets flying neutral flags in order to challenge the Allies’ control of the seas. This was a risky approach, as became evident with the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915 off the Irish coast, with a loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans. The American public was outraged, and Wilson responded accordingly, extracting a German promise to cease targeting merchant and passenger ships. The issue subsided for the time being, while greatly aiding Wilson’s reelection efforts in 1916. “He kept us out of war!” became the Democrats’ campaign slogan.

But mere neutrality would not be enough for Wilson. Once reelected, he embarked on an effort to assert American moral leadership in the world, attempting to broker a settlement to the war in Europe. But he was too late; the Germans had already decided to resume their unrestricted submarine warfare, knowing that in doing so, they would likely face American entry into the war. But they took the risk, hoping to land a quick and decisive blow—and for a hesitant and confused mobilization on the American side.

They did not get their wish. Wilson quickly asked Congress for a declaration of war in a speech that decried Germany’s submarine policy as “warfare against mankind” and declared that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” A rapid American military mobilization began, coordinated by the War Industries Board, which was granted the power to set production quotas and allocate raw materials, while also encouraging companies to use mass-production techniques and product standardization to increase efficiency. American forces were in France by July 1917 and by Fall 1918 numbered more than a million strong in Europe, injecting much needed reinforcements to the Allied effort, which finally proved too much for the weary German army to withstand. The Germans were forced to surrender and sign an armistice on November 11—the day we now celebrate as Veterans Day.

Wilson recognized that the world now faced a pivotal moment amid the wreckage of this astoundingly costly conflict. He believed that his idealistic “Fourteen Points” could be the basis for a new international order, guaranteeing a world “fit and safe to live in.”

To ensure that his visionary proposals got a fair hearing at the Allies’ peace conference, he decided to go in person to Paris to lead the American delegation. He arrived in Europe to a hero’s welcome. But once the conference got to work, he found it impossible to overcome the obstinacy and cynicism of the other Allied leaders. In the end, he had to sacrifice all his other hopes to gain his final point, a proposed “association of nations,” which eventually became the League of Nations. His other aims, he believed, could be attained in due course if such an organization, committed to collective security and mutual accountability, could be established. Wilson was willing to accept that bargain.

It was clear almost from the start that Wilson had miscalculated. Powerful domestic foes, such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, strongly opposed the League. Soon, 39 Republican senators or senators-elect—enough to block ratification of the treaty—publicly announced their opposition to it. Nevertheless, Wilson brushed their objections aside contemptuously and vowed to “crush” all opposition. Welcoming a major confrontation, he seemed entirely confident that he would prevail.

But Lodge proved a formidable foe, and Wilson’s rigidity was his greatest weakness, as he refused to consider any substantive changes, particularly to the controversial Article X, which seemed to undermine American national sovereignty. Despite his undertaking a nationwide speaking tour to rally public support, he was unable to persuade the Senate. The United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and Republicans triumphed in the elections of 1920 as an ailing Wilson departed into retirement.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The causes, course, and immediate aftermath of the First World War, particularly from the perspective of the United States, with a focus on the actions of the Wilson administration.

• The assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Summer of 1914 triggered the outbreak of the First World War, as great power tension that had escalated in Europe over previous decades erupted into a conflict unprecedented for its magnitude and lethality.

• The U.S. remained neutral for the first half of the war, though the Germans’ sinking of the Lusitania and diplomatic cable suggesting an anti-American alliance with Mexico increased public support for involvement.

• Following his narrow reelection, the failure of his attempt to broker peace, and the Germans’ resumption of unrestrained submarine warfare, Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany, which Congress swiftly approved in April 1917.

• The U.S. war effort was characterized by extensive governmental intervention in the economy to coordinate military production under the oversight of the War Industries Board. Such measures were accompanied by an aggressive propaganda campaign and the censorship of anti-war figures, including even the imprisonment of the notable socialist activist Eugene Debs.

• America’s entry into the war proved decisive. While Germany had gained the advantage after its defeat of Russia, the mobilization of U.S. forces was prompt enough to halt the Germans’ last major offensive on the Western Front in the Spring of 1918. After numerous reversals in subsequent months, Germany signed an armistice, effective November 11.

• Wilson traveled to the Paris Peace Conference to advocate for his idealistic “Fourteen Points” program. His proposals met resistance from the other Allied leaders, whose aims differed from his and from one another’s, and the Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on Germany. Nonetheless, the treaty did include a provision to establish a League of Nations to oversee international conflicts, and Wilson embraced the treaty as a promising first step.

• Nonetheless, domestic politicians, notably the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Henry Cabot Lodge, were skeptical of League of Nations membership. Wilson proved unable to secure ratification of the treaty, and Republican presidential nominee Warren Harding won a landslide victory in the election of 1920, promising a “return to normalcy” after the turmoil of the Wilsonian era.

Key Persons

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)

Henry James (1843–1916)

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924)

John J. Pershing (1860–1948)

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)

David Lloyd George (1863–1945)

Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (1860–1952)

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923)

Key Concepts and Terms

Allied powers

Central Powers

Ferdinand, Franz (1863–1914)

Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)

Triple Entente

Sinking of the Lusitania (1915)

Zimmermann telegram (1917)

War Industries Board

Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917 and 1918)

Moral Equivalent of War

Bolshevik Communists

American Expeditionary Force

German Empire

Tsarist Russia

Fourteen Points

Boston Brahmins

League of Nations

War Guilt Clause

Timeline

1914 The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28)

1914 Woodrow Wilson issues the Proclamation of Neutrality (August 4)

1915 A German U-boat sinks the British liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans (May 7)

1916 The Battle of the Somme (July 1–November 18)

1916 Woodrow Wilson wins re-election as president (November 7)

1917 Germans initiate unrestricted submarine warfare (February 1)

1917 The Zimmermann Telegram, proposing a German-Mexican alliance, inflames American opinion (March 1)

1917 Congress approves Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany (April 6)

1917 Congress passes the Espionage Act (June 15)

1917 The American Expeditionary Force marches through Paris (July 4)

1918 Wilson announces his Fourteen Points plan (January 8)

1918 Soviet Russia withdraws from the war (March 3)

1918 Congress passes the Sedition Act (May 16)

1918 American and French troops launch the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 26)

1918 Germany signs an armistice ending the war (November 11)

1919 The Treaty of Versailles is signed (June 28)

1920 The League of Nations is formed (January 10)

1920 The U.S. Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles, keeping America out of the League of Nations (March 19)

1920 Republican Senator Warren G. Harding wins the presidential election (November 2)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

15.1 Chapter Opener – pp. 476–485 (1 to 2 classes)

• The many contributing factors to the outbreak of World War I

• The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

• Wilson maintains American neutrality

• The first two years of the war: deadlock and trench warfare on the Western Front

• German U-Boat attacks and the sinking of the Lusitania

• Election of 1916

15.2 Righteous Warrior – pp. 485–495 (1 to 2 classes)

• The Zimmermann Telegram

• U.S. entry into the war

• The enormous challenge of mobilization

• Administrative centralization to coordinate the war effort

• The Espionage Act and the Sedition Act

• Wilson at war as Progressivism in practice

15.3 Breaking the Deadlock – pp. 495–503 (.5 to 1 class)

• Revolution in Russia

• American troops arrive in France

• The AEF’s campaign

• The German surrender

• The war’s staggering casualty totals

15.4 A Design for Peace – pp. 504–511 (1 to 2 classes)

• The sociocultural and territorial effects of the war

• Wilson’s Fourteen Points

• Wilson’s postwar diplomacy in Europe

• The League of Nations and Henry Cabot Lodge

• Warren G. Harding’s “return to normalcy” campaign

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Epigraph: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks,” The Crisis, July 1918 (p. 477). Du Bois calls 1918 the crisis of the world and the great Day of Decision—the year the world would decide whether to submit to military despotism or put down German militarism and inaugurate what he calls the United States of the World. The editorial is famous for what surrounds that sentence. Du Bois, the most prominent Black intellectual in America and a founder of the NAACP, used “Close Ranks” to urge Black Americans to set aside their grievances for the duration and enlist, on the argument that loyalty in war would earn citizenship in peace. It did not, and he spent the following decade saying so. Teachers should give students the argument on its own terms first—a war for democracy abroad is worth joining even by people denied it at home—and only then the outcome. Figure 15.10, the 369th Infantry coming home, gives students a case to test it against. Read the epigraph again at the end of lesson 15.4.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 15.1. Charles Emelius Lauriat Jr., The Lusitania’s Last Voyage, 1915 (p. 484)

A survivor’s account, published the same year, of the sinking that killed 128 Americans on May 7, 1915. Lauriat was a Boston bookseller traveling on business; his narrative is close, physical and unliterary, which is exactly its value beside the poster it faces. One is a man describing what he saw; the other is an image built to make an audience feel something and act. Neither is lying. Ask what each can do that the other cannot, and which one moved American opinion further. The chapter is careful that the Lusitania did not bring the United States into the war: that took another two years and a telegram.

Primary Source 15.2. Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War, April 2, 1917 (p. 487)

The speech that took America into the war, delivered four days before Congress approved it. Wilson had won re-election five months earlier on a record of neutrality, and the address has to explain the reversal—which it does by relocating the war’s stakes from American interest to human principle. The world must be made safe for democracy; the United States fights not to conquer but for the rights of nations. The book’s text is the National Archives version. Two things to give students. First, the argument’s structure: Wilson does not claim America was attacked in the ordinary sense, he claims a form of warfare has been declared against mankind. Second, its consequence—the same principle that justified entry made the peace impossible to deliver, which is the subject of lesson 15.4.

Primary Source 15.3. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” 1920 (p. 503)

Owen wrote it in 1917 and 1918; he was killed on November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice, and the poem was published posthumously. It describes a gas attack on exhausted men—blood-shod, lame, coughing like hags—and ends by naming the Latin tag as the old lie: it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. The poem is the only literary primary source in the chapter and the only one written by a combatant, which sets it against Wilson’s prose.

Primary Source 15.4. Woodrow Wilson, Speech on the League of Nations at Pueblo, September 25, 1919 (p. 508)

Wilson’s speech at Pueblo, September 25, 1919. He was touring the West to take the League over the Senate’s head, and he collapsed the following day; a stroke a week later ended his effective presidency. It appears with Primary Source 15.5 under a single head, For and Against the League of Nations; read together they give students one half of an argument, not a document to be read alone. Wilson argues that the Covenant sits at the front of the treaty deliberately, and that without the concerted purpose of the great governments behind it the settlement will fall down like a house of cards.

Primary Source 15.5. Henry Cabot Lodge, Senate Speech Opposing the League of Nations, February 28, 1919 (p. 509)

The other half. Lodge chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had already gathered thirty-nine Republican signatures to a round robin against the League before Wilson returned from Paris. His objection is constitutional and prudential rather than isolationist: he argues that Article X would convert a wartime expedient into a permanent and indissoluble alliance, entered coolly and with no war exigency, and that extending the Monroe Doctrine to all the world would destroy it, since a doctrine that protects everywhere protects nowhere. Teach the two speeches together and let students find that both men are arguing about the same question—what a nation may bind its future self to—and reaching opposite answers from the same premise about American exceptionalism.

Figures

Figure 15.1. Troops Waiting to Advance at Hattonchâtel – St. Mihiel Drive, William James Aylward, circa 1918 (p. 476)

The chapter-opening plate, facing the Du Bois epigraph. Charcoal, ink wash and gouache on paper, held by the National Museum of American History. Aylward was an official war artist, and the caption is precise about what he chose: American soldiers in a quiet moment before the advance at St. Mihiel in September 1918—the first American-led offensive of the war, against positions the Germans had held for nearly four years. The picture is of waiting, not fighting.

Figure 15.4. Enlist, Fred Spear, 1915 (p. 484)

Color rotogravure, 82 × 57 cm, held by the Library of Congress. A woman sinking with her child, one word beneath. Spear made it in the months after the Lusitania went down, and it is the most economical piece of persuasion in the chapter—no argument, no text beyond the imperative, no reference to the ship. It sits on the same page as Lauriat’s survivor account, and the two together show students how an event becomes a cause.

Figure 15.5. Gassed, John Singer Sargent, 1919 (p. 488)

Oil on canvas, 231 × 611 cm, held by the Imperial War Museum in London. Sargent was sixty-two and the most celebrated society portraitist of his generation when he was commissioned to paint a war memorial; he went to the Western Front in 1918 and produced this instead—a frieze of blinded men, roped together hand to shoulder, being led toward a dressing station. The scale matters and should be given to students as a fact: six metres wide, a history painting’s dimensions used for casualties rather than a triumph. Owen and Sargent chose the same subject within a year of each other.

Figure 15.7. For Every Fighter a Woman Worker, Ernest Hamlin Baker, 1918 (p. 491)

Color lithograph, held by the Library of Congress. Produced by the YWCA for the United War Work Campaign of November 1918, and the full title carries the argument: Back our second line of defense.

Figure 15.8. Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist, Harry R. Hopps, circa 1918 (p. 493)

Color lithograph, 106 × 71 cm, Library of Congress. A gorilla in a spiked German helmet carrying off a woman, club in hand, stepping onto an American shore. It is the chapter’s clearest instance of wartime dehumanization of an enemy, and it should be taught as such rather than as a curiosity.

Figure 15.10. 369th Infantry Troops Return Home, circa 1919 (p. 501)

Photograph, National Archives. The 369th were the Harlem Hellfighters, an African American regiment that served under French command and returned to a parade up Fifth Avenue. Du Bois asked Black Americans to close ranks and enlist on the argument that service would be answered with citizenship; this photograph is the moment of return, before that argument was tested. Teachers who use the epigraph in lesson 15.1 should come back to this image in 15.4 and put the question directly.

Figure 15.12. Big Four, Edward Jackson, 1919 (p. 506)

Photograph, Library of Congress, cataloged as Council of Four at the Paris Peace Conference. Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy and Wilson of the United States, the four men who dominated a conference that included delegates from every nation that had opposed Germany. The book is blunt that Wilson found it impossible to make headway against the obstinacy and cynicism of the other three, and that sentiment overwhelmingly favored punishing Germany. Three of these four are listed in the chapter’s Key Persons and appear nowhere else in the Guide, which makes this entry the place students meet them.

Figure 15.14. They Won’t Dovetail, Gustavo A. Bronstrup, 1919 (p. 511)

Editorial cartoon showing Wilson trying to fit together the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations and the Constitution of the United States. It states the constitutional objection in one visual joke—the same objection Lodge makes at length in Primary Source 15.5.

Maps

Map 15.1. Submarine Attacks during World War I, May 1917–January 1918 (p. 497)

A modern map made for this volume. It plots the U-boat campaign in the approaches to Britain and France during the months after American entry, and it is the map that explains why the convoy system mattered and why the Atlantic was a theater rather than a crossing.

Map 15.2. American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, 1917–18 (p. 497)

Also made for this volume, and the map the chapter’s Summative Assessment already uses. It shows the AEF’s seaport supply lines through nine French cities and the routes running inland to supply headquarters. Mihiel offensive shown in Figure 15.1.

Map 15.3. World War I in Europe, 1914–18 (p. 500)

The theater map—Allied powers, Central powers, neutrals, and the Western and Eastern fronts.

Map 15.4. Post-War Boundaries of Europe after 1920 (p. 501)

The same continent after the settlement, and it should be taught as a pair with Map 15.3 rather than on its own. Four empires are gone and a row of new states stands where they were.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2002.

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

15.1 Chapter Opener (pp. 476–485)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 476–485, the chapter opening.

Exercise: The Chapter Epigraph with Figure 15.1, then the Geography exercise comparing Europe in 1815 with Europe in 1914.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on how the war began and what Americans first made of it.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fifteen, Section Two, “Righteous Warrior” (pp. 485–495).

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The basics of European international relations leading up to and into World War I; America’s initial commitment to neutrality and its eventual wavering; Wilson’s reelection in 1916.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Identify the major countries of the two alliance blocs of World War I and explain their motivations.

• Create an argument for or against America’s involvement in World War I.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1914 The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28)

1914 Woodrow Wilson issues the Proclamation of Neutrality (August 4)

1915 A German U-boat sinks the British liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans (May 7)

1916 The Battle of the Somme (July 1–November 18)

1916 Woodrow Wilson wins re-election as president (November 7)

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

World War I initially seemed to most Americans a strictly European matter, so much so that it reminded them of why they had historically wanted America to be a nation apart in the first place.

Today, more than a century later, there is no clear consensus among historians about the primary cause of this devastating conflict that changed Europe and the world forever, ending a long period of unparalleled optimism and confidence and replacing it with one of persistent anxiety and doubt about the very idea of progress itself.

The war was precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The Kingdom of Serbia had been at odds with Austria-Hungary over the status of Bosnia, and more generally over the status of the Slavic peoples in the region. It was in connection with this controversy that a Bosnian revolutionary associated with a Serbian nationalist organization killed Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, setting off a chain reaction that led to the outbreak of war throughout Europe within just a few weeks.

It quickly became a war of unprecedented magnitude and ferocity, as the most civilized nations of the world employed terrifying weapons like poison gas and lethal tactics like trench and submarine warfare. Airplanes, used for reconnaissance and combat for the first time in a major war, and battleships added new dimensions to a conflicted already reshaped by these weapons on land and at sea. German submarine attacks on merchant and passenger ships eventually forced the Allies to adopt the convoy system, grouping ships together under naval escort to survive the crossing.

Each of these weapons changed how the war was fought. Poison gas made open trenches hazardous, driving both sides toward gas masks and protective equipment as standard battlefield gear. The submarine turned merchant shipping into a military target, forcing the Allies to adopt the convoy system described above. The airplane, used mainly for reconnaissance early in the war, gradually extended combat into the air as well. Battleships, by contrast, proved less decisive than expected: the one major fleet engagement of the war, the Battle of Jutland in 1916, was largely inconclusive, and Germany's High Seas Fleet spent most of the war avoiding direct confrontation with Britain's navy rather than contesting it outright. The Wilson administration initially maintained American neutrality. After the sinking of the passenger liner the RMS Lusitania, Woodrow Wilson demanded that the Germans disavow their strategy of unrestrained submarine warfare and indemnify the victims’ families. Germany eventually gave assurances, and the issue subsided for a time. Wilson was narrowly reelected in 1916, campaigning on the slogan, “He kept us out of war!”

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Allied Powers: The coalition of Great Britain, France, and Russia, formerly the Triple Entente, formed one side of the First World War, to which the other major powers of Italy, Japan, and the United States were later added.

Central Powers: The alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary formed the other side of the First World War, to which the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria were later added.

Franco-Prussian War: This brief war in 1870–71 unified Imperial Germany after Prussia’s decisive victory, upsetting the balance of power in Europe and leading to lingering tension between France and Germany, both of which contributed to the outbreak and intensity of the First World War.

RMS Lusitania: Once the world’s largest passenger liner, this boat was sunk by a German torpedo off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915, with a loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign the introductory section of Chapter Fifteen.

Assign several of the following questions:

What was the American public’s initial attitude regarding World War I?

What were some of World War I’s causes?

How and when did the war begin?

What was Wilson’s position on the war during his first term?

What elements characterized fighting on the Western Front?

How did the war proceed in its first two years?

What events began to erode America’s commitment to neutrality?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Reading Comprehension: Based on the text, ask students to make a chart or graphic organizer to identify and describe the motives of the major initial belligerents in the Great War, namely Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain. (Notice that Italy maintained neutrality during the war’s first year, despite its defensive alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary.) After students have completed the chart, instruct them to write answers to the following questions, which can be used for class discussion:

Why does the author say that the cause of the war is hard to understand?

Despite the lack of clarity behind the exact causes of a war of such magnitude, what factors do we know contributed to the cause of war?

In your view, could the Great War have been avoided?  How?

What was America’s position at the outbreak of the war? (Note: Have students keep this in mind for later comparison with America’s eventual entry in 1917, following the sinking of the Lusitania and the Zimmerman Telegram).

Geography

Share with the class maps of Europe from 1815 (after the Congress of Vienna) and 1914 (before the outbreak of the Great War). Ask students what differences they notice. What implications did such changes have for the balance of power among European powers?

Persuasive Writing: Ask students to imagine that they are living in May 1915 and have just read that the Lusitania has been sunk, resulting in the loss of more than 100 American lives. Have them write a letter to the President of approximately 150 words, pleading for either intervention in the war or continued neutrality. In the letter, students should reference several specific historical developments that were described in the textbook as a way of explaining their point of view. What might be the short- or long-term consequences of their desired course of action?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

How did Europe’s “civilizational self-immolation” extend beyond its borders?

Insight: The phrase means literally to destroy oneself deliberately. Europe was the dominant civilization in the world, and they essentially destroyed themselves from within.

Insight: Because of colonialism and imperialism, other nations around the world were drawn into the war. The world was affected by its results. Because Europe’s major powers held colonial empires across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the war drew those territories into the conflict as well. Colonial troops fought and died on European battlefields, and fighting broke out directly in colonial theaters like Africa and the Middle East. A conflict rooted in European rivalries ended up reshaping much of the globe far beyond the continent itself.

What elements did the Great War share with the American Civil War? How did they differ?

Insight: Like the American Civil War, the common belief was that World War I would end quickly, which was not the case. Also like the Civil War, new, highly destructive weapons were used that resulted in enormous casualties.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What event began the war, and on what date?

Acceptable responses: The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, June 28, 1914.

Explain

Why did Wilson fail to secure Senate approval of the Treaty of Versailles and American membership in the League of Nations?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range. A strong answer identifies both the constitutional concern over commitments such as Article X and Wilson’s refusal to accept Lodge’s reservations or negotiate a compromise.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

The outbreak of the Great War raised the question of whether the United States would be able to maintain its traditional position of neutrality regarding European disputes. For the first two years of the war, the Wilson administration preserved American neutrality, and Wilson was narrowly reelected in 1916 by championing that accomplishment.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

The next lesson takes up why a president re-elected on having kept the country out of the war asked Congress to enter it five months later.

Language Support

For students still building academic English. Each support supplies the words for what students can already grasp, drawn from the lesson's central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: alliance, neutrality, mobilization, ultimatum

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The alliance system turned a local crisis into a general war because .” “American opinion in 1914 was because __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students say the answer to a partner before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a marked map of the 1914 alliances, a chain of five events from Sarajevo to general war, or three sentences.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

15.2 Righteous Warrior (pp. 485–495)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 485–495, the second section.

Exercise: The Senate debate of April 1917, with Primary Source 15.2 and Figure 15.4.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on the Zimmermann telegram and the change in German naval policy.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fifteen, Section Three, “Breaking the Deadlock” (pp. 495–503).

Essential Understanding

How and as a result of which events the United States entered World War I in 1917.

Lesson Objectives

• Describe the sequence of events that prompted the United States to enter World War I.

• Evaluate the rationale for the United States declaring war in 1917.

Key Dates

1917 Germans initiate unrestricted submarine warfare (February 1)

1917 The Zimmermann Telegram, proposing a German-Mexican alliance, inflames American opinion (March 1)

1917 Congress approves Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany (April 6)

1917 Congress passes the Espionage Act (June 15)

1918 Congress passes the Sedition Act (May 16)

Key Concepts

On January 22, 1917, Wilson gave an extraordinary speech in Washington, which he directed not to the Senate but rather to “the people of the countries now at war,” advocating for a peaceful resolution as the Great War entered its fourth calendar year.

His efforts for peace were swiftly thwarted, and amid the resumption of unrestrained submarine warfare by Germany the United States in fact entered the war in April.

Wilson proved to be an effective, if somewhat overreaching, wartime leader. Under governmental oversight, the speed of U.S. mobilization exceeded Germany’s fears. Everywhere one looked, a bureaucratic agency was in charge of a sector of the economy.

The Wilson war effort achieved what many Progressives most earnestly desired: the government’s direction of the American economy, and indeed of the entire society, in pursuit of a common social aim.

This was another example of a fundamental conflict that we have already seen, between the centralizing, consolidating, harmonizing ideas at the center of Progressive thought and the competitive idea at the heart of the Constitution, which involves the channeling of conflict itself, through checks and balances, the separation of powers, and other structures that protect against the dangers of concentrated power.

Key Terms

The Zimmermann telegram: This message from the German foreign minister instructed his ambassador in Mexico to propose an alliance with the Mexican government. In the event of American entry into World War I, Mexico would divert U.S. attention and resources from Europe, in exchange for some of the territories it had lost in the Mexican War. The interception of the telegram by British intelligence and its publicity inflamed American public opinion and contributed to the declaration of war against Germany.

War Industries Board: The War Industries Board (WIB) oversaw effort to coordinate economic activity in service to the war effort. Under the WIB, industrial production increased by a phenomenal 20 percent. For Progressives, as the book puts it, it was exhibit A in illustrating the benefits a top-down coordination of the economy could bring.

The Espionage and Sedition Acts: The Espionage Act of 1917 prescribed fines and jail sentences for persons convicted of aiding the enemy or of obstructing recruitment for the draft. The Sedition Act of 1918 went even further, prohibiting anyone to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the armed forces.

Committee of Public Information (Creel Committee): A propaganda machine produced by the Wilson administration to drum up support for the war effort. Hundreds of speakers, including movie stars, artists, writers, and celebrity performers, along with films, posters, and pamphlets, promoted the sale of Liberty Bonds, food conservation, and other important elements of federal war policy.

War bonds: Government debt securities sold to the public to help finance the war effort; purchasers lent money to the federal government in return for repayment with interest.

The Moral Equivalent of War: This influential 1910 essay by William James pondered the possibility of a shared social undertaking that could elicit the same willingness to sacrifice for the whole, and the same disciplined ethos, as military conflict, and yet be directed toward entirely peaceful purposes.Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign the second section of Chapter Fifteen, “Righteous Warrior.”

Assign several of the following questions:

How did Wilson involve himself in World War I after winning the 1916 election?

How did German policy regarding marine warfare change in 1917?

What was the Zimmermann telegram?

Why did America finally enter the war?

What were the challenges of mobilization? Who took charge? How did the Progressives see the mobilization effort?

How did World War I bring a central tension of Progressivism–that between democracy and efficiency–to the surface?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Wilson won reelection campaigning on the slogan, “He kept us out of the war!” And yet, within a month of his second inauguration, the U.S. entered World War I. Instruct students to make a list of all the events that prompted American involvement in the war. After reviewing these events with students, use the following question for either a written exercise or a class discussion: What considerations might have shaped Wilson’s position on the war, both in the run-up to his reelection and after he was ensured another term in office?

Civic Discourse: Conduct a class discussion about the meaning of a pluralistic society. In the decades preceding World War I, the United States had become increasingly diverse due to mass immigration. Invite students to imagine how such societies can persuade their citizens to practice self-sacrifice to achieve public goals. Is the catalyzing effect of some crisis the only recourse for an otherwise motley and disorganized nation? What about a pluralistic society at war? Did Wilson wield his powers properly? What are the limits for political leaders of free countries during war time?

Debate: Ask students to imagine that they are members of the U.S. Senate in April 1917, considering Wilson’s declaration of war. Stage a debate regarding whether it should be approved and then have the class vote on the matter. Note that the actual vote was 82-6 in favor.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What was the War Industries Board? What immediate impacts did it have on the U.S.? What was its long-term significance?

Insight: The War Industries Board (WIB), along with many other agencies, was created to meet the demands of wartime mobilization. It coordinated priorities for raw materials, production, and purchasing across major industries, seeking greater efficiency and less waste while leaving most firms in private ownership. Its broad coordinating authority made the WIB an important example of Progressive-era confidence that expert administration could direct economic activity toward a common national purpose.

Insight: The actions of the WIB resulted in industrial production increasing by 20%, a high margin compared with traditional production. Because of a lack of labor, due to men leaving for war, it gave opportunity for women and black men to join the workforce.

Insight: Wartime mobilization redirected labor, capital, and industrial capacity toward military production. When the war ended, contracts were cancelled, military production fell, and millions of servicemen returned to civilian life, producing a difficult transition in some industries and labor markets. Postwar unemployment and dislocation had multiple causes, however, and should not be attributed simply to the disappearance of wartime jobs.

Which events could have prompted American entry to the war but failed to do so? Which finally brought the United States in, and why?

Insight: The carnage of the war gave Americans and their president good reason to want no part of it. But German commerce raiding, the sinking or seizure of commercial ships, threatened to pull the U.S. into the conflict. The sinking of the Lusitania, which killed American civilians onboard, pushed the country even closer to war. War was narrowly avoided at that point only because Germany pledged to halt its attacks on civilian ships.

Insight: American opinion was further inflamed by the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico, offering to help Mexico reclaim Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in exchange for joining Germany in a war against the United States.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Name the two German decisions of early 1917 that moved the United States toward war, with their dates.

Acceptable responses: Unrestricted submarine warfare, resumed February 1, 1917; the Zimmermann Telegram proposing a German-Mexican alliance, which inflamed American opinion on March 1, 1917.

Explain

Wilson won re-election in November 1916 on having kept the country out of the war. What changed by April?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: the two German decisions above, and the fact that unrestricted submarine warfare made continued neutrality a policy the Germans would not permit rather than one America could choose. A strong answer will use Wilson’s own reframing in Primary Source 15.2—he does not argue that America was attacked in the ordinary sense, but that a form of warfare had been declared against mankind.

Daily Recap

Following German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the publicity of their attempted diplomatic maneuvering against the United States, the Wilson administration guided America’s entry into World War I. Much of the economy was centrally coordinated by governmental agencies to enhance the war effort, and restrictive measures like the Espionage and Sedition Acts were implemented to marginalize domestic anti-war activities.

Looking Ahead

The next lesson takes up what two million American soldiers did to a war whose lines had barely moved in nearly four years—and what the same war did at home to people who criticized it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: neutrality, unrestricted submarine warfare, telegram, declaration of war

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare because , and the consequence was .” “Wilson justified entering the war on the grounds that __ rather than __.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students say the answer to a partner before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column chart of arguments for and against entry as a senator would have heard them, a dated sequence from February to April 1917, or three sentences.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

15.3 Breaking the Deadlock (pp. 495–503)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 495–503, the third section.

Exercise: The Geography exercise on Map 15.3 and Map 15.4, then Primary Source 15.3 with Figure 15.5.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on convoying and on what American entry did to the Allies.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign students to read Chapter Fifteen, Section Four, “A Design for Peace” (pp. 504–511).

Essential Understanding

American entry into and involvement in World War I, culminating in German surrender in 1918.

Lesson Objectives

• Compare the effects of World War I on the various countries that participated.

• Describe the changes that were made to the political map of Europe after World War I.

Key Dates

1917 The American Expeditionary Force marches through Paris (July 4)

1918 Soviet Russia withdraws from the war (March 3)

1918 American and French troops launch the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 26)

1918 Germany signs an armistice ending the war (November 11)

Key Concepts

The entry of the Americans to the war effort was a huge psychological boost to the exhausted Allies, who were depleted in resources but even more depleted in spirit, particularly after Germany had knocked Russia out of the war in early 1918.

After helping France and Britain withstand the Germans’ last major offensive on the Western Front, American troops broke through German defenses, reversing their gains.

Confronted by increasing domestic turmoil, the Germans were forced to surrender and signed an armistice effective November 11, the day Americans now celebrate as Veterans Day.

Key Terms

Bolshevik Communists: Led by Vladimir Lenin, this revolutionary group seized power from the provisional government in Russia over the course of 1917, igniting the Russian Civil War. Under Lenin’s authority, they sued for peace with Germany, making significant concessions at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

American Expeditionary Force: This American force under the command of General John J. Pershing arrived in Paris on July 4, 1917 and acted as a kind of quick-deployment vanguard to assist the Allied war effort on the Western Front.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign the third section of Chapter Fifteen, “Breaking the Deadlock.”

Assign several of the following questions:

How did the Germans use naval warfare to their advantage?

What effect did American entry into World War I have on the Allies?

What curbed the loss of American naval vessels from 1917–1918?

How did American involvement in the war proceed in 1917 and 1918?

How did the war conclude?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Reading Comprehension: Encourage students to listen to and read the lyrics of Cohan’s song “Over There.” In a written exercise or a class discussion, ask students to respond to the following questions: What does it convey? How does it reflect the feelings of the Allies? What is its perception of American military might?

Geography: Instruct students to study the World War I in Europe map (Map 15.3) and the Post-War Boundaries of Europe after 1920 (Map 15.4). Ask them to point out the changes that were made to Europe after the Treaty. What is new? What is different? What do they think would have happened if the U.S. had not entered the war?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Instruct students to compare how the war affected the various countries that participated. This can be done as a written exercise or in a graphic organizer. Encourage students to think about the political and economic effects as well as the casualties that are described at the end of this section. Contextualize this comparison by having students review the timeline of the war, with particular attention to the course of America’s military involvement (the American Expeditionary Force’s arrival in 1917 and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918) in relation to the war’s other major turning points.

Analyzing Figures (Compare and Contrast): Have students reflect on Figure 15.10, “36th Infantry Troops Return Home.” (Note: Refer back to the Background section for this Figure).

Who does it depict? Why would this be important to capture?

Have students review it again in light of this Chapter’s epigraph by W. E. B. Du Bois, which urged African Americans to set aside their grievances and enlist, arguing that wartime loyalty would earn full citizenship in peace. Was his promise actualized in the postwar years?

Further: Using figure 15.10 and Du Bois’s “Close Ranks” as a starting point, ask students to research the experiences of four other demographics in service — Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, conscientious objectors, and American women. Ask them to identify what the war asked of them, and what, if anything, it granted them in return. Provide students with a list of resources to which they can refer.

Further: Then return to the home front. Have students repeat the research exercise above for demographics who remained in the U.S. during the war — European Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, women, and dissenters. Provide a list of resources pertaining to these groups once more.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What happened in Russia in 1917?

Insight: It is a common misconception that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist government. The actual sequence of events was as follows: Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 in favor of his brother; on the next day, his brother refused the crown, and a provisional government led by the Russian parliament was established; the following month, Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd to de-Germanize the term, since Burg is German for “castle” and a common suffix in city names); in November, Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg amid growing social unrest; in December, a provisional armistice was signed between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers; in March 1918, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which officially ceased Russian involvement in World War I.

How was Veterans Day founded? What was its significance then and what is it now?

Insight: Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, established to commemorate the end of fighting in World War I, which ceased at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. Congress made it a national holiday in the 1930s, originally intended to honor the veterans of World War I, “the war to end all wars”. After World War II and the Korean War, however, Congress amended the holiday in 1954 and renamed it Veterans Day to honor all American veterans of all wars, not just World War I.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibit, and roughly how many people were convicted under them?

Acceptable responses: The Espionage Act targeted those aiding the enemy or obstructing recruitment; the Sedition Act went further, prohibiting disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the government, the Constitution or the armed forces. More than a thousand people were convicted, including Eugene Debs, sentenced to ten years for advocating resistance to conscription.

Explain

The Supreme Court upheld those convictions in Schenck v. United States. What did Holmes’s reasoning allow, and what did it not settle?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: Holmes’s figure of a man falsely shouting fire in a theater allowed speech to be restricted where its circumstances create a danger, which permitted wartime prosecution of criticism. A strong answer will notice what the figure does not settle—who decides which speech is the false alarm, and whether a country fighting for democracy abroad can suspend it at home. Figure 15.8 shows the climate in which that question was answered.

Daily Recap

Due to its successes on the Eastern Front and Russia’s eventual withdrawal, Germany seemed to possess the initiative as World War I entered its fourth and final year. But American involvement, boosted by rapid mobilization, turned the tide against the Germans, who were forced to sue for peace amid the implosion of their own government.

Looking Ahead

The next lesson takes up the peace: what Wilson wanted from it, what he got at Paris, and why the Senate refused it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: convoy, sedition, conscription, armistice

Frames that carry the reasoning: “American entry changed the war because .” “The Sedition Act went further than the Espionage Act in that .”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students say the answer to a partner before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Map 15.3 marked with the Western Front’s movement across four years, a two-column chart of what each Act prohibited, or three sentences.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

15.4 A Design for Peace (pp. 504–511)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 504–511, the fourth section.

Exercise: The Speaking Skills exercise as a senator in 1920, with Primary Source 15.4 and Primary Source 15.5.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold, on the Fourteen Points and what Wilson hoped the peace would achieve.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Begin Chapter Sixteen.

Essential Understanding

How peace was negotiated in Europe, with particular attention to the involvement of President Woodrow Wilson, especially his Fourteen Points and the idea of the League of Nations; the ensuing results of the 1920 election.

Lesson Objectives

• Evaluate Woodrow Wilson’s ideas presented in the Fourteen Points.

• Describe the key provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

• Create an argument about the League of Nations.

Key Dates

1918 Wilson announces his Fourteen Points plan (January 8)

1918 Germany signs an armistice ending the war (November 11)

1919 The Treaty of Versailles is signed (June 28)

1920 The League of Nations is formed (January 10)

1920 The U.S. Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles, keeping America out of the League of Nations (March 19)

1920 Republican Senator Warren G. Harding wins the presidential election (November 2)

Key Concepts

A decisive victory had been won by the Allies, but in its wake came immense confusion, instability, and displacement; widespread starvation and deprivation; and great uncertainty regarding the future.

The war had prompted the collapse of four empires – Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and the Ottoman Empire – and necessitated redrawing the map of Europe.

With communism on the rise in Russia, a militant ideology was at large in the world, offering itself as a radical alternative and threatening to sweep Europe’s disintegrating bourgeois society aside in favor of a new international order such as the world had never seen.

In many ways, Wilson’s Fourteen Points were formulated in a similar spirit, calling for a new global order of free and self-governing nations willing to submit to consensual collective decision-making rather than favoring unilateral action in the pursuit of narrow national interest.

While Wilson was unable to enlist the other Allied powers to support his idealistic program, he did emerge from the Treaty of Versailles with the promise of a multilateral organization that could translate his principles into concrete realities, the League of Nations.

However, there were many “strong reservationists” regarding the League domestically. Led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, they demanded major changes that would protect American sovereignty. Wilson stubbornly refused to negotiate and ultimately failed to secure ratification of the treaty, as Republicans swept to electoral victory in 1920 promising a “return to normalcy.”

Key Terms

Fourteen Points: Wilson’s postwar peace plan promoted multilateral decision-making and the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Europe.

Boston Brahmins: These members of Boston’s historic elite upper class were noted for their refinement and exclusivity; among their most prominent members was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the first majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

League of Nations: The final of Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for an “association of nations” to resolve international disputes, which promised to become a reality after a plan for the League was drafted at the Paris Peace Conference as part of the Treaty of Versailles.

War Guilt Clause: The legal basis for the reparations imposed on Germany, this provision in the Treaty of Versailles assigned Germany and its allies with the sole responsibility for the outbreak of World War I.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign the fourth section of Chapter Fifteen, “A Design for Peace.”

Assign several of the following questions:

What was the immediate aftermath of World War I in Europe?

How did Woodrow Wilson hope to employ the aftermath of the war to achieve his political aims?

What were the Fourteen Points? What were their pros and cons?

What took place at the peace conference in Paris in 1919?

Who was Henry Cabot Lodge and how did he oppose President Wilson?

What was the League of Nations?

What was the result of the election of 1920?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The text mentions that the French and Anglo-American approaches to the defeated Germans differed at the Paris Peace Conference. Ask students to write a substantive paragraph explaining what elements of the treaty they think should be included or not. Should Germany be punished financially? Should their army be disabled? Should land be taken away? After students have finished their paragraphs. Invite students to share with the full class, or have the students share their responses in small groups. In a class discussion afterward, talk about the reasons why the severe punishments were added to the treaty, and what the effects were. How might a different approach to Germany at the Treaty of Versailles have prevented the outbreak of World War II? Are there any big picture lessons we can learn from this?

Reading Comprehension: Provide and encourage students to read the entirety of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech. What political entities does Wilson envision ending? What assurances does Wilson offer Germany, which at this point had not yet surrendered? Which of the Fourteen Points seem realistic and which excessively idealistic, perhaps to the point of fantasy?

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are a U.S. senator in 1920 who has been approached by Henry Cabot Lodge regarding President Wilson’s desired “association of nations.” In a short 2–3-minute speech, have them either criticize or defend the League of Nations and the United States’ prospective participation in it, using Primary Sources 15.4 and 15.5 as reference points Invite a few student volunteers to share their work in class.

Further: Remind students that the League of Nations was not a separate agreement: Wilson had written its charter into the Treaty of Versailles itself, the same treaty that punished Germany financially, reduced its army, and stripped it of territory. Voting for the League therefore meant voting for the whole treaty, provisions included.

Guiding Classroom Questions

In what respect did Europe continue to face danger and uncertainty in the wake of the war?

Insight: After the Treaty of Versailles, Germany resented the War Guilt Clause, having to take the blame for the war along with the loss and damage that occurred. The treaty’s economic reparations crippled Germany’s economy and bred long-term instability. The redrawing of borders, which included not just Germany, but the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, created new and fragile states. Many historians point to these unresolved grievances as a direct line to the rise of extremism and the outbreak of a second war just two decades later.

Did Wilson seem arrogant or heavy-handed? How was his approach to negotiating with League skeptics ultimately counter-productive?

Insight: Wilson may have been both. He was considered arrogant in presenting his Fourteen Points as his answer for Europe. He could also be stubborn. His approach to negotiation and compromise has been much debated. He yielded to the British and French and Italian leaders, letting them impose harsh terms on Germany that generated lingering animosity. But he took a hard line with Senator Lodge, who was no isolationist and could have been won over had Wilson respected his and the Senate’s role to “advise and consent.” Wilson compromised when he should have stood firm and was stubborn when he should have compromised. His own idealistic vision, and his certainty of his own high moral rectitude, blinded him to the relevant realities.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Who were the Big Four, and on what date did the Senate reject the Treaty of Versailles?

Acceptable responses: Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy and Wilson of the United States. The Senate rejected the treaty on March 19, 1920, keeping America out of the League of Nations.

Explain

Lodge was not an isolationist. What, then, was his objection to the League?

Acceptable responses: A defensible range: that Article X would turn a wartime expedient into a permanent and indissoluble alliance, entered coolly and with no war exigency—a commitment the country had refused to make in war and would now make in peace. A strong answer will add his second argument, that extending the Monroe Doctrine to all the world would destroy it, since a doctrine protecting everywhere protects nowhere, and will notice that Wilson and Lodge argue from the same premise about American exceptionalism to opposite conclusions.

Daily Recap

The Treaty of Versailles officially ended the First World War, though it did not resolve the many problems and tensions that emerged from it. While Russia was engulfed by Communism and Central Europe faced continued instability, Woodrow Wilson attempted to champion American participation in the League of Nations to prevent similar such conflicts. His uncompromising approach ultimately proved ineffective, resulting in his political defeat and the Democrats’ electoral rout in 1920.

Looking Ahead

Chapter Sixteen takes up the decade that followed—a country that had been told the war would remake the world, and then declined to help run it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: covenant, ratification, self-determination, reparations

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Wilson argued the League was necessary because .” “Lodge objected that Article X would .”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students say the answer to a partner before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Map 15.3 and Map 15.4 side by side with the new states marked, a two-column chart of Wilson’s case against Lodge’s, or three sentences.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Matching — Answers

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest (1) to latest (6).

3 | The Zimmermann Telegram is discovered, angering many Americans.

6 | Germany signs an armistice, ending the war.

2 | 128 Americans die when the Germans sink the Lusitania.

1 | The Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated.

4 | Congress approves Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany.

5 | Soviet Russia withdraws from World War I.

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons: Fill in the blank.

Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, ____John J. Pershing____ insisted that U.S. troops fight as a distinct, unified army rather than being folded into existing British and French units.

____Vladimir Lenin____ led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917 and pulled Russia out of World War I with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

The ____Franco-Prussian War____ was the 1870–1871 conflict between France and Prussia that resulted in a decisive Prussian/German victory and helped unify Germany as a nation-state.

The ____Zimmermann Telegram____ was an intercepted German communication proposing a military alliance with Mexico against the United States, which helped push America toward entering World War I.

The ____War Industries Board____ was established to coordinate and oversee American industrial production for the war effort during World War I.

The ____Espionage and Sedition Acts____, passed in 1917 and 1918, criminalized speech and actions deemed disloyal or obstructive to the U.S. war effort.

The ____American Expeditionary Force____ was the name given to U.S. military forces sent to fight in Europe during World War I under General John J. Pershing.

President Wilson’s ____Fourteen Points____ outlined his vision for a just and lasting peace, including principles like self-determination and open diplomacy.

The ____League of Nations____ was the international organization established after World War I, championed by Wilson, intended to promote collective security and prevent future conflicts.

Many historians argue that the ____War Guilt Clause____, from the Treaty of Versailles, contributed to lasting German resentment and economic hardship, factors that later fueled the rise of extremism in the interwar period.

Geography — Answer Key

Using the maps (15.2), answer the questions below.

The AEF’s seaport supply lines ran through nine French cities. Name them.

Model response: Marseille, Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire, Nantes, Brest, Cherbourg, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Rochefort

Of those nine ports, which four had supply lines running directly to AEF supply headquarters?

Model response: Brest, Saint-Nazaire, Nantes, and Cherbourg

Using the map scale bar, estimate the length of the front line in miles.

Model response: Students can determine between 400 and 600 miles

The Western Front ran through which two countries?

Model response: France and Belgium

Short Answer — Model Responses

What triggered the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, and why did such a localized event lead to a continent-wide war?

Model response: Historians are not in complete agreement about what began World War I. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary set off the immediate crisis that led to war. On its own, the killing of one royal figure might have stayed a regional dispute, but decades of building tension among Europe’s great powers turned it into something larger. Since the Franco-Prussian war, the balance of power in Europe had been in flux as nations competed worldwide for resources, markets, imperial acquisitions as well as for military superiority, diplomatic advantage and national prestige. Rival alliances, competing ambitions, and years of militarization meant that a single incident could pull the whole continent into conflict.

Explain how great-power tension in the decades before 1914 made World War I possible.

Model response: European powers had spent years building rival alliances, expanding their militaries, and competing for influence and territory. As a way to protect their interests, individual nations began forming alliance blocks. Great Britain, France and Russia formed the Triple Entente while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy formed the Triple Alliance. This left the continent primed for a wide conflict, since any crisis involving one power risked pulling in its allies as well. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the spark that ignited this accumulated tension.

Describe the position the United States held during the first half of the war and how that position began to shift.

Model response: Upon the European alliances declaring war on one another, with other nations quickly drawn in, the United States, considered the world’s foremost industrial power, announced its unwillingness to choose a side or take part in the fighting. President Wilson issued the Proclamation of Neutrality, instructing Americans to remain impartial so that sympathies for their homelands would not “excite passion” against one another.

Model response: America’s desire to trade with all parties, regardless of their side in the war, became an issue that helped draw the nation toward war. German U-boats targeted civilian ships attempting to carry supplies to Europe. At the same time, Germany could see that American neutrality was not truly impartial, since American bankers were lending money to the Allied war effort.

Model response: Ultimately, the German U-boat sinking of the Lusitania had a major effect on American public opinion, as it revealed that Germany was willing to kill civilians. The Zimmermann Telegram further inflamed opinion, revealing that Germany had attempted to enlist Mexico in an attack against the United States.

What was the Lusitania, and why did its sinking affect American public opinion?

Model response: The Lusitania was a British ocean liner sunk by German forces during the war. Because it was a civilian passenger ship, the attack shocked Americans and was seen as evidence of German ruthlessness. The incident helped shift public sympathy away from neutrality and toward support for the Allies.

What was the significance of the diplomatic cable intercepted by the Allies, and how did it affect American attitudes toward Germany?

Model response: The intercepted cable revealed a German proposal for an alliance with Mexico against the United States. Its discovery outraged Americans and inflamed American opinion, as the book puts it, by proposing a German–Mexican alliance. This revelation, alongside the Lusitania sinking, significantly increased public support for American involvement in the war.

What German military policy directly precipitated the U.S. declaration of war, and why was it so provocative?

Model response: Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare directly preceded the United States’ declaration of war. This policy meant German submarines would attack any ship, including neutral and passenger vessels, without warning. Because this endangered American lives and shipping, it was seen as a direct act of aggression against the United States.

What does the imprisonment of Eugene Debs suggest about civil liberties in the United States during the war?

Model response: The Espionage Act and the Sedition Act resulted in censoring those who openly opposed the war. Eugene Debs was one of over one-thousand people convicted under these two acts. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. His conviction shows that the government was willing to restrict free speech and punish political dissent in the name of wartime unity. Even a well-known public figure was not protected from prosecution for opposing the war. This reflects the broader wartime pattern of censorship and suppression of anti-war voices alongside the economic mobilization effort.

How did The Espionage Act of 1917 and The Sedition Act of 1918, two pieces of legislation passed by Congress, differ from each other?

Model response: The Espionage Act focused on persons believed to be aiding the enemy or obstructing the recruitment of soldiers for the draft. The Sedition Act went further. Speaking, printing, writing, or publishing “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution or the armed forces was prohibited. Fines and jail time were the results if a person was convicted.

What role did American forces play in halting Germany’s last major offensive in the spring of 1918?

Model response: American troops mobilized quickly enough to help stop Germany’s last major offensive on the Western Front. Their arrival reinforced soldiers who were exhausted in body and spirit on the Allied lines at a critical moment in the fighting. This timely intervention helped turn the momentum of the war against Germany.

Model response: When Germans launched their last big final assault in 1918, they saw early victories, having been reinforced by their soldiers on the Russian front. But a counterattack by the AEF was successful and encouraging to European troops. The Americans continued to press on while the French and British pushed through to the west, driving them back to the German border and forcing the Germans to admit defeat.

What did Wilson hope to accomplish at the Paris Peace Conference?

Model response: President Wilson hoped his Fourteen Point plan would be his crowning achievement as he brought peace to Europe. It was an idealistic program for postwar peace and involved fashioning a new international order that was safe and fit to live in. He hoped to shape a settlement based on principles like self-determination and cooperative international relations rather than punishment. His vision reflected a desire to prevent future wars through reform rather than retribution.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong response identifies the Espionage and Sedition Acts accurately and explains what each prohibited. It should weigh the wartime rationale against the constitutional objection, using specific evidence — the more than one thousand convictions, and Debs’s ten-year sentence for advocating resistance to conscription. Students may argue either way, but should address both the government’s reasoning and the cost to civil liberties.

Model response: Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for an end to secret treaties between European governments, with diplomacy conducted openly instead. They also called for freedom of the seas, reduced trade barriers, and a reduction in armaments across nations. Beyond these specifics, the plan proposed adjusting colonial claims and redrawing the map of Europe — but Wilson prized one point above all: the creation of an association of nations that would work together to preserve peace.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From Boom to Bust

The Twenties

1913–1929 · pp. 513–549

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

“They won the war but lost the peace.” Never was that adage more applicable than to the victorious Allied powers of World War I. The British economist John Maynard Keynes observed their months of deliberation in Paris and came away predicting that the harsh terms of the peace settlement would lead to another and far worse war. Sadly, he was later vindicated.

Keynes’s pessimism was echoed in the disillusionment felt by many Americans in the wake of the war. Wilson’s grand rhetoric—about the nation’s noble war aims in making the world safe for democracy, self-determination, and free commerce—now rang pitiably hollow. Some even went so far as to suspect that American intervention in the war had occurred under false pretenses and was promoted primarily for the benefit of financial and banking interests as well as the munitions industry.

The faltering domestic economy provided another source of anxiety. Returning veterans found housing, automobiles, and consumer goods to be in very short supply, resulting in surging prices. There was widespread labor unrest, as unions sought to hold their own through the inflationary environment. Racial and ethnic tensions, fed by the tight labor and housing markets, led to multiple urban riots erupting in 1919, notably a July riot in Chicago that left thirty-eight dead and more than five hundred injured. And, making matters worse, the raging Spanish influenza epidemic killed almost seven hundred thousand Americans.

When Harding called for a “return to normalcy,” the American public welcomed his promise of relief from such things. Harding faced significant challenges, as he inherited a deep economic downturn that began in January 1920 and lasted through much of 1921, during which time commodity prices, particularly for agricultural products, fell sharply and unemployment soared. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s insistence that high wartime taxes be reduced without delay proved to be the right medicine for the economy. By the end of 1922, real GNP was already inching up, and by 1923 it was rising sharply and would continue to increase steadily over the next several years. The Harding administration oversaw the beginning of what would prove to be one of the most concentrated periods of economic growth and general prosperity in U.S. history. Annual economic output grew 42 percent over the 1920s, with an average rate of GNP increase at an impressive 4.7 percent per year. In addition, the national debt was cut in half, from $33 billion in 1919 to $16 billion by 1929.

The sheer size of the American economy was simply astounding. The United States was truly becoming the economic colossus of the world, the source of nearly half of global output. During the 1920s, automobiles became to the economy of the twentieth century what railroads had been to that of the nineteenth: a key industry that was not only a big business in its own right but also a powerful economic multiplier, giving rise to important by-products, subsidiary industries, and various other ripple effects.

Many historians consider the 1920s to be the first decade of “our times.” For the first time, many of the standard features of American life as we know it today—pervasive mass communications, personal automobiles, motion pictures, a consumer-oriented economy, professional sports, celebrity culture, readily available credit, the widespread availability of cheap electrical power, and so on—began to become commonplace.

Though successful in reviving the economy, Harding’s administration struggled with corruption among its ranks. Fortunately for the country, Harding was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, a man of high probity who continued the laissez faire policies of Andrew Mellon, further reducing income tax rates and spending. By 1927, income taxes affected only the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans—others paid no federal income tax at all—and the economy continued to thrive.

Coolidge chose not to run for a second term in 1928 and was succeeded by Herbert Hoover, his and Harding’s commerce secretary, a brilliant former businessman and mining engineer. In the 1928 election, Hoover cruised to victory against the Democratic candidate Al Smith while riding the general wave of prosperity. As Hoover took office in 1929, the stock market was booming.

In retrospect, we can now see that the country was in the grip of a speculative mania, a bull market that had begun in 1927 and quickly led to unsustainable euphoria. Caught up in a classic economic bubble, many investors forgot that no boom lasts forever.

On September 3, the stock market reached its peak and on “Black Thursday,” October 24, the bottom fell out, as a broad sell-off sent prices collapsing. The Dow Jones Index fell from a September high of 381 to 198, and three years later stood at 41 — less than one-ninth of its peak value.

Although this great stock market crash was a herald of the coming Great Depression, it was not its principal cause. Stock markets rise and fall, sometimes with extreme volatility, but their activity is largely self-corrective over time, like that of any market. Excessive sell-offs lead to bargain prices, which stimulate demand among buyers. This was the case even in 1929. Stocks rallied later in the year, and business activity did not begin to decline notably until the Spring of 1930. But once the Great Depression had taken hold, its effects spread worldwide and plagued the United States throughout the 1930s.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The cultural, political, and economic developments that took place in America from the end of World War I until the onset of the Great Depression, with a particular focus on the central features of the “Roaring Twenties.”

In the aftermath of World War I, there was widespread backlash to the growth of governmental power and foreign interventionism that characterized the Wilson administration. Compounding matters, a sharp deflationary recession plagued the postwar economy, which struggled to reintegrate millions of demobilized former servicemen.

Promising a “return to normalcy,” Ohio senator Warren Harding won a landslide victory in 1920 to succeed Wilson. Though plagued by corruption, his administration implemented laissez faire economic policies that led to a surge in industrial output and general prosperity for most of the next decade.

The automobile industry in particular grew rapidly, reshaping Americans’ lifestyles, workplaces, and even courtship patterns. Henry Ford personified the quintessentially American “rags-to-riches” story as an everyman who rose to great heights of commercial and cultural prominence without losing the trappings of simplicity.

The Roaring Twenties were a time of cultural revolution—with the spread of national media, celebrity culture, consumer credit, and professional sports—but also reaction: immigration was curtailed, Prohibition was implemented, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived and rebranded as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish organization, in addition to its antiblack agenda, with a national following stretching from Oregon to Maine.

The decade’s politics were distinctly conservative, and the business-friendly, limited-government policies of Calvin Coolidge in particular represented a sharp rebuke to the leading lights of the Progressive Era.

The stock market boom came to an end in October, 1929. A selling frenzy led to plunging stock prices and the onset of the Great Depression, the exact causes of which remain debated to this day.

Key Persons

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)

Henry Ford (1863–1947)

Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937)

Thomas Edison (1847–1931)

Louis Armstrong (1901–1971)

Irving Berlin (1888–1989)

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977)

Eugene Debs (1855–1926)

Duke Ellington (1899–1974)

Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939)

Greta Garbo (1905–1990)

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

Jerome Kern (1885–1945)

Babe Ruth (1895–1948)

Jack Dempsey (1895–1983)

Bobby Jones (1902–1971)

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974)

Frederick Lewis Allen (1890–1954)

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946)

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

Al Smith (1873–1944)

Key Concepts and Terms

Red Scare

Great American Songbook

Tin Pan Alley

pseudo-event

Darwinism

Prohibition (1920-1933)

Teapot Dome scandal (1921-1923)

Black Thursday (Oct. 24, 1929)

Great Depression (1929-1939)

Timeline

1913 Henry Ford introduces the moving assembly line (December)

1914 World War I begins (July 28)

1917 America enters World War I (April 6)

1918 The Spanish Influenza pandemic breaks out (Spring)

1919 The Eighteenth Amendment is ratified (January 16)

1919 The Palmer Raids begin (November)

1920 The Depression of 1920 begins, lasting eighteen months (January)

1920 The Eighteenth Amendment takes effect (January 17)

1920 The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified (August 18)

1920 The first broadcast radio station in the nation, KDKA, commences operation in Pittsburgh (November 2)

1921 The Emergency Quota Act establishes limits on immigration (May 19)

1923 President Harding dies; Vice President Coolidge is sworn in as president (August 2–3)

1923 The Senate opens investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal (October)

1924 The Johnson-Reed Act is passed, restricting immigration by country of origin (May 26)

1924 Coolidge is elected president (November 4)

1925 The Scopes Trial takes place in Dayton, Tennessee (July)

1927 Charles Lindbergh departs from New York to Paris, the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight (May 20)

1927 Coolidge unexpectedly declines to seek another term (August 2)

1927 Warner Bros. releases the first “part-talkie” feature film, The Jazz Singer (October 6)

1928 Herbert Hoover wins the presidential election (November 6)

1929 “Black Thursday” marks the beginning of the Wall Street crash (October 24)

1929 “Black Tuesday” escalates the stock market crash as 16 million shares are panic-sold (October 29)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

16.1 Chapter Opener – pp. 512–519 (.5 to 1 class)

• The appeal of Harding’s promised “return to normalcy”

• The flawed Treaty of Versailles

• Postwar unrest: strikes, race riots, Spanish influenza

• The spread of Bolshevism to America

16.2 An Age of Business – pp. 519–526 (.5 to 1 class)

• The postwar economic downturn

• Harding’s reversal of Wilson’s policies

• Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury

• The economy recovers

• Manufacturing booms

• Henry Ford

16.3 A Culture of Prosperity – pp. 526–532 (.5 to 1 class)

• New phenomena: electrification, jazz, and professional sports

• Charles Lindbergh and the first transatlantic flight

16.4 Culture Wars and Countercurrents – pp. 532–540 (1 to 2 classes)

• Unprecedented forms of mass communication

• The Roaring Twenties: both a cultural revolution and a counterrevolution

• Prohibition

16.5 Coolidge’s America – pp. 540–546 (.5 to 1 class)

• Harding’s troubles

• Coolidge succeeds Harding

• Coolidge’s origins and character

• Hoover is elected president

• Hoover’s background and pre-political career as an engineer

• A realignment takes place within the Democratic Party

16.6 The Crash – pp. 546–549 (.5 to 1 class)

• October 1929: the stock market crashes

• Two competing theories about the economic collapse

• The Great Depression: its conditions and its causes

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday, 1931 (p. 513)

Allen's line is that prosperity is more than an economic condition — it is a state of mind. It stands at the head of a chapter that ends in the Crash. If prosperity is partly psychological, then so is its collapse, and a decade can end in ruin without the factories or the farmland having gone anywhere. Only Yesterday appeared in 1931, two years after the crash it describes, and it is the founding popular account of the twenties as a distinct era — the source of most of the images students already carry about the decade. Teachers should tell students that the epigraph is a retrospective judgment written in the wreckage, not a contemporary one. That is what makes it useful: Allen is naming the mood of the boom from the far side of the bust, and the chapter asks students to hold both at once. The chapter's own title, From Boom to Bust, is Allen's thesis in four words.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 16.1 · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, April 10, 1925 (p. 535)

The book excerpts the passage on the music from Gatsby's house through the summer nights, the men and girls coming and going like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars, and the Rolls-Royce that became an omnibus on weekends. Fitzgerald published in April 1925, four years before the Crash, and the novel sold modestly in his lifetime; its standing as the novel of the decade is a later verdict. That matters instructionally, because students meet the excerpt already knowing how the story of the twenties ends and Fitzgerald did not. Teachers should press on what the passage is actually doing: the party is described entirely from outside, by a neighbour, in the language of things that arrive and depart. Nobody in it is named. Set it against Primary Source 16.3, where Hoover describes the same decade as a system of self-government founded on individual initiative, and students can be asked which account they would trust about how the prosperity was experienced — and whether the two are describing the same country.

Primary Source 16.2 · Calvin Coolidge, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1925 (p. 541)

Coolidge argues that the resources of the country are almost beyond computation but that the cost of its combined governments is likewise almost beyond definition, and he names excessive taxation a species of legalized larceny. The phrase is the entry point: larceny is a criminal term, and Coolidge is deliberately applying it to a lawful act of the state. Teachers should let students sit with how strong the claim is before evaluating it, because Coolidge's public reputation — the laconic New Englander of the anecdotes on p. 543 — makes it easy to underestimate the argument he is making. This is the fullest statement in the chapter of the governing philosophy the book summarizes as making America safe for enterprise rather than making the world safe for democracy. Paired with Andrew Mellon's tax program, it gives students the decade's fiscal policy in the words of the president who held it.

Primary Source 16.3 · Herbert Hoover, "Rugged Individualism" Campaign Speech at Madison Square Garden, October 22, 1928 (p. 545)

Hoover tells his audience that over 150 years Americans have built a form of self-government and a social system peculiarly their own, differing essentially from all others in the world — the American system, founded on a particular conception of self-government. The speech was delivered two weeks before the 1928 election that Map 16.2 records, and roughly a year before Black Thursday. Teachers should make the dating explicit: this is the high-water mark of confidence in the decade's economic order, spoken by the man who would preside over its collapse, and students who read it knowing what came next will find it hard not to read it as irony. Resist that. Let the case be heard at full strength, because the open question is whether the Crash refuted the philosophy or merely overtook it. Set against Primary Source 16.1, it also gives the decade's two self-descriptions — the party and the system — composed within three years of each other. Teachers can return to it when they reach lesson 16.6.

Figures

Figure 16.1 · Vogue Magazine Cover, Harriet Meserole, 1927 (p. 513)

The book records that Meserole's Art Deco illustration, published in a magazine built on women's purchasing power, pairs an elegantly dressed woman with abstract skyscrapers rising behind her, reflecting the commercialism, glamour and technological ambition of the decade. Three of the chapter's threads are in one image — consumption, the city, and the new public visibility of women — and teachers opening the chapter can ask students to name what they see before being told what it means. It is worth saying plainly that this is an advertisement's view of the decade, made to sell a magazine to women who could afford it. Set it against Figure 16.22 at the chapter's close and the same decade reads differently.

Figure 16.2 · Emergency Hospital at Camp Funston during Influenza Pandemic, circa 1918 (p. 518)

The book records that Camp Funston was a large U.S. Army infantry training camp during the First World War and the site of some of the first recorded American cases of the worldwide influenza pandemic. The photograph belongs to lesson 16.1 because it supplies the thing students most often miss about "normalcy": Harding was not offering a retreat from an idyllic past but a recovery from a war and a pandemic that had happened to the people listening. A ward of cots in a drill hall makes that concrete in a way the phrase cannot. Teachers can ask what a country wants after two years like that, and then read the Harding passage on p. 517 against the answer.

Figure 16.5 · Workers on the Ford Moving Assembly Line, 1913 (p. 522)

The book records that the first moving assembly line in the world began operation at a Ford Motor Company plant in Highland Park, Michigan, on December 1, 1913, and that under the new process an entire automobile could be built in a fraction of the previous time. This development is dated at the very top of the Timeline, twelve years before the decade the chapter is named for. Teachers should use it to make the sequence explicit: the technique precedes the boom and produces it. Students who grasp that the assembly line is a method rather than a machine will follow the rest of lesson 16.2 — the price falls, the market widens, and the roads on Map 16.1 become necessary.

Figure 16.8 · Advertisement for "Race Records by Columbia Race Stars," circa 1920 (p. 527)

The book records that race records were produced and marketed specifically for African-American consumers from the 1920s through the early 1940s, and gives alongside it the figure that by 1929 forty percent of American families owned radios. The advertisement gives students the decade’s Black musical culture as commerce, which a portrait of a musician would not: it shows the music as a commercial product with an identified market. Teachers can ask what it means that a segregated market was also a profitable one, and what recording and radio did to music that had previously travelled only by performance. It pairs directly with Figure 16.10, Louis Armstrong, whom the book names among the musicians who came north.

Figure 16.17 · Thirty Thousand KKK Hold Midnight Rite, Underwood & Underwood, circa 1920 (p. 536)

The book records that this photograph was taken at a midnight Ku Klux Klan meeting in Illinois attended by nearly thirty thousand members from Chicago and the surrounding area, and that the 1920s Klan was a revival. Illinois is the point worth drawing out. Students arrive expecting the Klan to be Southern and Reconstruction-era, and this image places thirty thousand of them outside Chicago in the decade of Gatsby and the radio. The book's account of the revived Klan is that it rebranded as anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish in addition to its antiblack agenda, with a following that reached from Oregon to Maine. Teachers should prepare students for the photograph rather than let it arrive unremarked, and should set it beside the prosperity of lesson 16.3 rather than after it: the two belong to the same decade rather than to a sequence.

Figure 16.18 · League of Women Voters Poster, 1920 (p. 539)

The book records that the League of Women Voters was founded by Carrie Chapman Catt six months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a nonpartisan organization intended to help women exercise their new right to vote. The founding date is the point worth pressing: the organization existed before the right did, which tells students something about how the amendment was expected to arrive and what its advocates thought would be needed afterwards. A right that nobody knows how to use is not yet a working right. It gives the Nineteenth Amendment a consequence rather than only a ratification date.

Figure 16.20 · Calvin Coolidge, 1924 (p. 542)

The book records that the photograph was taken only weeks before Coolidge's victory in the 1924 presidential election, and pairs it with the account of his swearing-in — administered in the family parlor at 2:47 a.m. by the light of a kerosene lamp, by his own father, a notary public. The two facts together are the lesson: a president of the world's largest economy took office in a house without electricity. Teachers can use the contrast to complicate the decade's image of itself, and to set up Primary Source 16.2 — the same man arguing that the resources of the country are beyond computation.

Figure 16.22 · Oct. 29 Dies Irae, James Naumburg Rosenberg, 1929 (p. 548)

The book records that this sketch by the New York corporate lawyer and self-taught artist James N. Rosenberg was printed on the front page of the New York Times on January 12, 1930, and depicts Black Tuesday and the stock market collapse. Dies Irae — day of wrath — is the opening of the Latin requiem mass, and teachers should gloss it, because the title is the argument: a financial event rendered as a day of judgment. The image is the chapter’s closing figure; set it against Figure 16.1. Two illustrations, both commercial, both published, three years apart, one selling the decade and one burying it. Ask students what changed between them and whether the picture on p. 513 contained any warning of the picture on p. 548.

Maps

Map 16.1 · Highways and Roadways, 1925 (p. 523)

The book records that the automobile brought with it the need for a network of roads, and that by 1925 around three million miles of highways, rough roadways and trails existed but lacked centralization and maintenance. The map's instructional value is the qualifier: the mileage is enormous and the network is not yet a system. Students who have just met the assembly line at Figure 16.5 can be asked what a country does after it can build cars faster than it can drive them anywhere — and the answer, visible on the sheet, is that the roads follow the cars rather than preceding them.

Map 16.2 · The Election of 1928 (p. 544)

The book records that after Coolidge declined to run again despite his popularity and likely victory, Republican Herbert Hoover won a smashing victory over Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee for president from a major party. The map shows two of the chapter’s threads at once: the scale of the Republican hold on the decade, and the religious dimension of the culture wars taught in lesson 16.4, since Smith's Catholicism is inseparable from the result. Set beside Figure 16.21, the portrait of Smith, and beside Primary Source 16.3, delivered two weeks before the vote, students can be asked what the electorate believed it was choosing — and how much of that belief survived the following October.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931.

Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.1 Chapter Opener (pp. 513–519)

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: Pages 513–519.

Exercise: Figure 16.2, the influenza ward at Camp Funston, before any discussion of "normalcy."

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign An Age of Business (pp. 519–526).

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The nature of the abnormality alluded to in Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan, which promised “a return to normalcy.”

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

• Describe the various social and economic problems that occurred in the final years of Woodrow Wilson's presidency.

• Assess the overall domestic effects of the United States involvement in World War I.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1918 The Spanish Influenza pandemic breaks out (Spring)

1919 The Palmer Raids begin (November)

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

“They won the war but lost the peace” became history’s verdict on the victorious powers of World War I.

John Maynard Keynes firmly believed that the Treaty of Versailles imposed excessive reparations on Germany, which would almost certainly be counterproductive to the kind of general economic recovery needed in the aftermath of such a destructive conflict.

Domestically, Americans had become impatient with the drastic levels of regulation imposed to enhance wartime efficiency; they were equally upset by Wilson’s decision to “take the harness off ” with the abrupt removal of such regulations, such that the peacetime economy faltered due to the sudden withdrawal of governmental involvement.

Wartime suffering, the disillusionment over the botched settlement, economic chaos, widespread strikes and riots, a terrifying epidemic, and an upsurge in militant radicalism—all of these troubling events took place over the final years of Wilson’s presidency, leading Americans to welcome Warren Harding’s promised “return to normalcy.”

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Normalcy: Harding's term for the postwar condition he promised to restore — not a retreat to an imagined past but a recovery of ordinary life after war and pandemic.

Palmer Raids: the mass arrests and deportations of suspected radical aliens begun by Attorney

General A. Mitchell Palmer in November 1919.

Red Scare: the postwar fear that revolutionary radicalism had taken root among unassimilated immigrant populations.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Sixteen.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What did Warren G. Harding mean by his promise of a “return to normalcy”?

What did the economist John Maynard Keynes predict about the long-term outcome of the Treaty of Versailles?

How and why did the post-World War I demobilization process affect the economy?

What happened to returning veterans looking for work during demobilization, and what happened to the price of housing, autos, and consumer goods?

What did some Americans suspect regarding the true motivation of U.S. entry into the war?

What were the causes of the civil unrest that roiled America’s cities during 1919?

To what degree did Spanish influenza impact the United States?

What was Bolshevism and how was its influence felt in postwar America?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from John Maynard Keynes. Conduct a class discussion with the following questions: What stands out to students about this excerpt? What accounts for Keynes' pessimism? Were his concerns warranted?

Civic Discourse: Ask students to write a substantive paragraph response to the following question, focusing on one or two specific historical factors: What made Harding's "return to normalcy" campaign slogan effective? After students have finished writing, conduct a class discussion and write each of the historical factors on the board as a way to reinforce the takeaways from this section of reading. Factors will include: war-weariness and a general consensus that the war was a mistake; disillusionment with idealistic rhetoric; economic problems associated with the whiplash of war regulations followed by their reversal in peacetime; social disruptions in peacetime when veterans returned to try to find their place; the pandemic; fears of communism

Debate: Assign students to debate the following resolution: all things considered, American involvement in World War I was a mistake. Following student arguments, poll the class for a final vote and discuss which points they found most persuasive.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

How did the postwar views of John Maynard Keynes differ from Woodrow Wilson's optimism? How did Wilson's views compare to those of the American public?

Insight: John Maynard Keynes took a far darker view of the treaty negotiations. He believed that demanding extreme reparations from Germany would be counterproductive to economic recovery, and he predicted that such harsh penalties would eventually provoke a war even worse than World War I. He saw that the rest of Europe were so weary from the war that they could not see beyond their own immediate needs. Keynes had little patience for Wilson's optimism. In his eyes, he believed Wilson arrived at the negotiations not with the wisdom and foresight of an Abraham Lincoln, but with the high-flown idealism of a provincial Presbyterian minister. In Keynes's assessment, Wilson was outmatched by his European counterparts, and he considered it naive to place so much faith in the creation of the League of Nations.

In the postwar era, how did economic competition affect some race relations?

Insight: Rapid change causes stress, and stress can induce fear, which in turn may result in violence. The United States had been substantially at peace from 1865 to 1917. Its last major foreign war, against Spain in 1898, had been both brief and wildly successful. The American people in 1917 were ill-prepared, psychologically, for their country to assume a major role in world affairs. There was no “manifest destiny” to be significantly and permanently involved in the political affairs of Europe and Asia, and George Washington's advice against “entangling alliances” was not only remembered but celebrated for its enduring relevance.

Insight: The workforce had transformed during the United States' involvement in World War I. Many women moved into factory jobs to replace men who had joined the military, and millions of African Americans moved from the South to take jobs in northern factories. When veterans returned home, they wanted their jobs back and displaced many of these workers. African Americans who had migrated North to escape the post-Reconstruction South, resisted displacement, not wanting to return to agricultural work in the Jim Crow South.

Insight: As a result of job and housing shortages upon the return of veterans, close to twenty-five race riots broke out in cities around the country as tensions continued to build.

Insight: Housing, autos, and consumer goods were in very short supply as factories attempted to adjust in a postwar economy. This resulted in rising prices and shortages as the cost of living doubled from what it had been before the war.

Did U.S. Attorney General Palmer take unwarranted action? If he had not received a letter bomb, would he have deported so many radical aliens?

Insight: The Red Scare was not invented out of nothing: bombings and attempted bombings gave officials a real security problem to confront. But the existence of a genuine threat does not establish the guilt of each person arrested or deported. Ask students to separate three questions that are often collapsed: Was there political violence? Did the government have grounds to investigate it? Were the methods used in particular raids consistent with evidence, due process, and proportionality?

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what month and year did the Palmer Raids begin?

Whose call for a "return to normalcy" opens the chapter?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) November 1919. (2) Warren G. Harding.

Explain

The book asks us not to accept the standard characterization of "normalcy" as nostalgic and unrealistic. What does it offer instead?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer works from the historical moment rather than the phrase — the country had come through a world war and an influenza pandemic that killed on a scale the book records at Camp Funston, and Keynes described a public whose power of feeling beyond its own material well-being had been temporarily eclipsed and which needed rest. On that reading, normalcy is not a wistful retreat into small-town simplicity, but a demand for ordinary life after an extraordinary five years, which is why the words resonated with a large majority of voters.

How did the Bolshevik revolution in Russia end up contributing to raids on immigrants in America?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer traces the chain the chapter lays out rather than asserting prejudice at the start: the Bolshevik Revolution raised the question whether America's own postwar turbulence was a harbinger of revolutionary violence; the number of radicals promoting such causes was tiny, but so had been the number of Bolsheviks, and Lenin had proved that organized terrorism did not require many; then thirty-six letter bombs were intercepted in April 1919 and eight more went off in June, one at Attorney General Palmer's own home. When the bomber turned out to be an Italian American radical, it gave credence to the connection of radicalism with the still largely unassimilated immigrant population, and Palmer built machinery for rapidly deporting radical aliens. A strong answer also notices that the raids were initially popular — the Washington Post wrote that "there is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty" — and that objections on constitutional grounds came later.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

The aftermath of World War I witnessed a dramatic backlash to the Wilson administration among much of the American public. Fatigued from the war effort, combating economic instability, and facing threats from both a global pandemic and the spread of Communism, many longed for a return to simpler times, with widespread prosperity, limited government, and blissful unconcern over foreign affairs.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

In 16.2 the desire for rest becomes a governing philosophy. Harding and Mellon set out to make America safe for enterprise rather than the world safe for democracy, and Ford's assembly line supplies the prosperity that makes the philosophy look correct.

Language Support

For students still building academic English — words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson's central claim.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: normalcy, demobilization, Red Scare, reparations. Pair each with a plain-language gloss before it is used in a sentence.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “Normalcy meant ___.” · “___ happened because ___.” · “One effect of demobilization was ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students say why the postwar mood turned before they write it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column chart of wartime measures and their postwar removal, or a labelled timeline of 1919–1921.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.2 An Age of Business (pp. 519–526)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 519–526.

Exercise: Figure 16.5, the moving assembly line, and establish that it is a method rather than a machine; then Map 16.1, which raises the road question by itself.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign A Culture of Prosperity (pp. 526–532).

Essential Understanding

The early years of the Harding administration and the socioeconomic situation in postwar America, particularly the significance of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and the automobile industrialist Henry Ford.

Lesson Objectives

• Evaluate the economic policies that were implemented in the early years of the Harding administration.

• Explain the success of the Ford Motor Company.

Key Dates

1913 Henry Ford introduces the moving assembly line (December)

1920 The Depression of 1920 begins, lasting eighteen months (January)

Key Concepts

Against Progressive philosophies of governance, which emphasized a large, vigorous, and highly directive public sector led by an activist president, the new Republican governing class championed the idea that, as Calvin Coolidge put it, “the chief business of the American people is business.”

Harding sought to reverse the force of Wilson’s regulatory agencies, not by eliminating them, but by appointing business-friendly men to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Trade Commission. Coolidge, Mellon, and Harding’s policies all reflected the belief that increased economic freedom through free-market capitalism would generate broad prosperity.

The banker-financier Andrew W. Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury for over a decade and led efforts to reduce taxation. He argued that excessive taxes put pressure on the taxpayer to withdraw his capital, and that, paradoxically, reducing taxes and increasing market freedoms would increase government revenues and general prosperity over the long term.

Harding did not stop at domestic policies, he also asked Congress to approve higher tariffs, which set the terms on which goods from other countries could enter the American market. This was not insignificant to the global economy, as the United States was producing nearly half the world’s output and around 40 percent of the world’s total wealth.

Economic output grew 42 percent over the 1920s, with an average GNP increase of 4.7 percent per year. In addition, Mellon’s policies were successful in halving the national debt, from $33 billion in 1919 to $16 billion by 1929.

Fueling this great economic expansion were a multitude of advances in manufacturing and industrial production, each creating economies of scale that vastly increased productivity and efficiency, such as Henry Ford’s invention of the moving assembly line.

Ford became a kind of national celebrity, a symbol of the potential for an American everyman to make it from rags to riches, while apparently maintaining his simplicity of character.

As we will see in Lesson 16.3, these broad economic and manufacturing booms, as well as a spurt of useful consumer inventions, would change consumer culture and marketing.

Key Terms

Associationalism: the governing approach favoured by the Republican administrations of the decade, relying on voluntary cooperation between government and business rather than direction by the state.

Mellon's tax theory: Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's argument that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid but instead pressure the taxpayer to withdraw capital from productive business — and, paradoxically, that reducing rates could increase revenue.

Moving assembly line: the production method introduced at Ford's Highland Park plant on

December 1, 1913, under which an entire automobile could be built in a fraction of the previous time.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Sixteen, “An Age of Business.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

In what ways did Harding represent a departure from the Progressive political approach of his predecessors?

Which policies of the Wilson administration did Harding reverse?

How did Harding improve the government’s attitude toward and treatment of African Americans?

How did the economy respond to Andrew Mellon’s economic policies?

What was Henry Ford’s great innovation? How did it change the industrial landscape?

How many miles of highway were built in the United States between 1921 and 1929?

How did Ford’s automobiles transform the economy?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking: Ask students to write down a list or summary of Mellon's policies described in the first part of this section. Next, in a written exercise or a class discussion, pose the following questions to students: What was the rationale for these policies? Do you agree with his approach? Do you think these ideas are consistent economic principles, or did they apply just to these particular circumstances? Can they apply to the modern context? Do you find any parallels to modern presidents?

Writing Skills: Assign students to prepare, imagining that they are a communications executive at Ford, a 100-200 word advertisement for a local 1920s newspaper arguing that a factory position at Ford is better than what competitors can offer. What might convince someone to join or to continue working for the Ford Motor Company? Students should demonstrate their knowledge of the Ford company by providing specific historical details from the text.

Civic Discourse: In a written exercise or a class discussion, pose the following questions to students: What did Ford mean when he said that, “History is bunk”? Is history still worth studying in fast-changing times? Why or why not?

Civic Discourse: Calvin Coolidge is frequently remembered for claiming that, “the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world.” What did Coolidge mean by this statement? Was he correct? Assign half the students in the class to write a defense of this statement, and the other half to write a critique of this statement. Invite several students to share their written responses with the class and hold a class discussion. Afterward, instruct every student to write their own opinion about the statement, regardless of which side they were originally assigned to argue.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What reasoning animated Andrew W. Mellon's views on taxation? How was his a novel approach?

Insight: Mellon argued that lower tax rates would encourage investment, expand economic activity, and ultimately strengthen federal revenues. The economy did grow rapidly during much of the decade, but students should distinguish the policy’s rationale from the harder historical question of how much of that growth can be attributed to any single cause.

Insight: To understand Mellon's tax reforms, it is essential to remember the difference between tax rates and tax revenue. If lower tax rates “make the pie bigger” (i.e., grow the whole economy), then the government's share of the pie, its revenue, may be larger even if it takes a lower percentage. Similarly, a quarter slice of a 12” pizza is smaller than a sixth of one that is 16”.

How did Ford attempt to humanize American factory life? Was he successful? Why or why not?

Insight: Ford popularized the forty-hour work week, albeit in part to increase the productivity of his workers. Whatever Ford's motives, shorter working hours gave millions the leisure and opportunity to travel outside their immediate neighborhoods on a weekly basis.

Insight: Ford also paid his laborers a higher wage than other factories due to the grinding, demanding elements of what was boring, or even dehumanizing work on an assembly line.

Insight: He provided European immigrants with classes after work to help them learn the English language and acclimate to American life.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

On what date did the first moving assembly line begin operation, and where? (December 1, 1913, at a Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan.)

How did Coolidge summarize the new Republican philosophy of governance? (That the chief business of the American people is business.)

Explain

Rather than eliminating Wilson's regulatory agencies, Harding took a different approach. What was it, and why might it have been more effective than abolition? Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Harding appointed business-friendly men to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission — changing what the agencies did without changing what they were. A strong answer sees that this required no legislation and provoked no fight over the agencies' existence, and that it left the machinery in place for a later administration to use differently.

Daily Recap

Though the economy struggled to reintegrate former servicemen after World War I, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s pro-business policies helped jump-start growth. The automobile industry in particular surged during the broad prosperity of the 1920s, and Henry Ford became an American cultural icon for his populist image and self-made success.

Looking Ahead

In 16.3 the prosperity produced by the assembly line reaches ordinary households — radio, film, recorded music and the automobile — and creates the first genuinely national popular culture.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: assembly line, mass production, regulation, revenue.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “The assembly line changed production because ___.” · “When a government reduces ___, revenue may ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students say what mass production does to the cost of a good before writing it.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: a four-step diagram of one product moving along an assembly line, each step labelled.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.3 A Culture of Prosperity (pp. 526–532)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 526–532.

Exercise: Figure 16.8, the race records advertisement, with the book's figure that by 1929 forty percent of American families owned radios.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign Culture Wars and Countercurrents (pp. 532–540).

Essential Understanding

The social and economic changes of the 1920s and the role of technological innovation in enabling them.

Lesson Objectives

• Identify the new products and industries that first became important in the 1920s.

• Explain why Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight was an especially famous feat.

Key Dates

1927 Charles Lindbergh departs from New York to Paris, the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight (May 20)

Key Concepts

Many historians consider the 1920s to be the first decade of “our times.” Many of the standard features of American life as we know it today—pervasive mass communications, personal automobiles, motion pictures, a consumer-oriented economy, professional sports, celebrity culture, readily available credit, the widespread availability of cheap electrical power, and so on—began to become commonplace.

By 1929, the movies had taken the country by storm, transitioning from black-and-white silent films into "talkies." In many cities films were shown in "picture palaces," large urban theaters often owned and run by the Hollywood studios themselves, seating as many as two thousand people at a time.

African Americans moving north during and after the First World War, in what became known as the Great Migration, brought their music with them and contributed to the development of a fresh American sound. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were among the figures of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of African American art and culture that lasted through the 1930s.

Sports became a model of how the new mass communications media not only reported events but created them, cultivating the buzz of excitement and aura of celebrity that surrounded professional sports and the athletes who took part in them.

Perhaps the event of the decade that was most celebrated by the media was Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 airplane flight from New York to Paris, the first solo transatlantic flight in history.

Key Terms

Tin Pan Alley: the New York centre of popular song publishing whose composers and lyricists — many of them descendants of Jewish immigrants, among them Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin— produced the first entries in what became the Great American Songbook.

Race records: recordings produced and marketed specifically for African-American consumers from the

1920s through the early 1940s.

Mass culture: the first genuinely national popular culture, created when radio, film and recorded sound allowed the same performance to reach the whole country at once.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Sixteen, “A Culture of Prosperity.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Which new technologies emerged or first became commonplace during the 1920s?

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

What new genres of music became popular during the 1920s?

What were the first Hollywood films like?

What were the original professional sports in America?

Who was Charles Lindbergh?

Why was there such great enthusiasm for Charles Lindbergh? What accounted for his popularity?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking: Instruct students to write a reflection on the role of sports in society. Why did professional sports first become big business and a major American cultural phenomenon during the 1920s? What preconditions had to be met to enable their prominence?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York, welcoming Charles Lindbergh back to the United States after his successful flight to Paris. Assign them to write a brief speech, introducing Lindbergh at a ticker-tape parade. In their speeches, students should promote the event in the style of the times and try to include cultural references based on the information they learned from this section of the textbook. Invite a few volunteers to share their work in class.

Civic Discourse: Ask students to consider why Lindbergh’s flight so captured the popular imagination of Americans during the 1920s. What about his achievement seemed so timely? Was this an "event" or a "pseudo-event"? Discuss the topic as a class.

Writing Skills: Have students select one of the six figures pictured on pages 530–531 and research and write a five-paragraph essay about that person. The opening paragraph should name which realm the figure belongs to — Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, popular music, or sports — and state what the essay will argue about the figure's importance. The three body paragraphs should cover, in turn: the figure’s background and achievements; how the figure changed his or her own realm; and which medium carried that celebrity to the public — film, the phonograph record, radio, the mass-circulation newspaper, or the illustrated magazine. The conclusion should argue what this one person's fame reveals about American culture in the 1920s.

Further: Students should search for original media featuring their figure — photographs, film footage, recordings, newsreels, or newspaper coverage — and experience it in its original form rather than in summary. Have them analyze what that particular medium could do that no other medium of the period could, and what qualities of the specific piece helped build the person's fame.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why do historians consider the 1920s to be the first decade of “our times”? Is this accurate? How so or why not?

Insight: The 1920s demonstrated economic and cultural transformation never seen before. Inventions such as electricity in cities and faster communication and travel transformed everyday life for Americans. Families were able to purchase automobiles at high rates, while motion pictures, professional sports, celebrity culture, and consumer credit all became commonplace. These are the same types of things that captivate Americans today.

How did new forms of communication focus the national attention on specific events?

Insight: Electronic technologies made experiences repeatable and also expanded audience sizes. Phonographs allowed the same music to be played repeatedly. Whereas only thousands can watch a sporting event from the stands or a play at a local theater, millions can listen to play-by-play on the radio or watch a film.

Insight: Radio was central to this shift. Stations cropped up across the nation, and by 1929, 40% of Americans owned a radio. Station owners used this new reach to broadcast important news and events, drawing listeners' attention to the same stories at the same time. Sports like baseball and boxing became something people could follow live, as announcers delivered play-by-play commentary to attentive audiences. Radio also brought culture into homes that had never had access to it before. People with no way to see a live play or hear live music could now be enraptured by dramas and music broadcast right into their living rooms.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

By 1929, what proportion of American families owned radios? (Forty percent.)

Name two Tin Pan Alley composers the book identifies. (Any two of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin.)

Explain

Lindbergh's return drew a welcome the book describes as far grander than the one given to returning soldiers of the First World War. What does that comparison tell us about the decade?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer connects it to the lesson's argument about mass communication — a single individual could now be known to the entire country at once, and celebrity on that scale was newly possible. Better answers notice what the comparison implies about the war: a nation that had wanted rest from it in 1920 gave its largest public welcome seven years later to an achievement with nothing to do with it.

Daily Recap

By the 1920s, improvements to devices like the radio, phonograph, and film projector enabled mass communication, bringing unprecedented celebrity to figures like Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth. Local traditions and provincial pastimes began to yield to the popular mores of a truly national culture.

Looking Ahead

In 16.4 the same decade produces its own reaction. Prohibition, immigration restriction, the Scopes trial and a revived Klan are not what came after the prosperity but what ran alongside it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: broadcast, recording, celebrity, consumer.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “Broadcast means ___, so a person in one town could ___.” · “A celebrity is someone who ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students name one thing their grandparents could not have heard at home, and say why.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: three captions for three images — a radio set, a record, a film poster — naming what each made possible.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.4 Culture Wars and Countercurrents (pp. 532–540)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 532–540.

Exercise: If a single period is all there is, teach Primary Source 16.1 with Figure 16.17 — Fitzgerald's party and the Klan rally in Illinois, the same decade — and assign Prohibition and the Scopes trial as reading. The pairing is the lesson's argument; the trials are its evidence.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign Coolidge’s America (pp. 540–546).

Essential Understanding

The various forms of reaction against the sociocultural revolutions taking place in the 1920s.

Lesson Objectives

• Draw conclusions about whether the Roaring Twenties was a time of revolution or reaction.

• Form an opinion about the Eighteenth Amendment.

Key Dates

1919 The Eighteenth Amendment is ratified (January 16)

1920 The Eighteenth Amendment takes effect (January 17)

1920 The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified (August 18)

1920 The first broadcast radio station in the nation, KDKA, commences operation in Pittsburgh (November 2)

1921 The Emergency Quota Act establishes limits on immigration (May 19)

1924 The Johnson-Reed Act is passed, restricting immigration by country of origin (May 26)

1925 The Scopes Trial takes place in Dayton, Tennessee (July)

1927 Warner Bros. releases the first “part-talkie” feature film, The Jazz Singer (October 6)

Key Concepts

The 1920s were the first great era of national advertising, which went hand in hand with the development of mass media and a national consumer economy. Advertising promoted spending on leisure activities like spectator sports and cinemagoing. The new mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, radio broadcasting, and to some extent motion pictures all provided new media for advertisements to reach consumers. New manufacturing and sales practices, like consumer credit, Ford's assembly line production and General Motors' deferred payment plan for the Frigidaire (See also: Lessons 16.2 and 16.3), decreased the price and increased the accessibility of goods, and as a result further increased consumer spending.

Frederick Lewis Allen’s 1931 book Only Yesterday depicted the 1920s as witnessing a “revolution in manners and morals,” a refrain that is echoed in nearly all textbook accounts of the decade, often using those very same words.

While to some extent there was a revolution in manners and morals during the 1920s, in which the social significance and cultural expression of class, region, religion, and race underwent dramatic change, it is important to recognize that revolution and counterrevolution were both occurring at the same time.

The Roaring Twenties was also a time when the rise of liberal Progressivism and modernism in urban churches was more explicitly countered by conservative Protestants. They insisted on a renewed commitment to key Christian doctrinal tenets, those deemed “fundamental” or foundational, hence the term fundamentalism. Support for Prohibition, immigration restrictionism, and even outright racism grew as well during the decade.

Key Terms

Darwinism: Formulated by the English biologist Charles Darwin, this theory of evolution holds that human beings, as well as other species, developed incrementally over many generations as a result of certain genetic mutations’ being favored by environmental conditions, in a process known as natural selection. Its opponents, such as William Jennings Bryan, disputed Darwin’s claim that human beings are descended from apes and argued that the theory’s social implications justified predation against the weak on the basis of “survival of the fittest.”

Prohibition: This ban against the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages throughout the United States took effect in January 1920 after ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. Leading to widespread illegal activity and the rise of organized crime, Prohibition was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in December 1933.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Sixteen, “Culture Wars and Countercurrents.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did the popular perception of American history change during the 1920s?

What impact did the advent of modern advertising have on American society?

In what sense was there widespread reaction against the revolution in “manners and morals” during the 1920s?

How did fundamentalism emerge during the 1920s?

What was Prohibition? How and why did it gain popular support?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Ask students to recall their research paper from 16.3: At the cross-section of the Harlem Renaissance, Hollywood, Civil Rights, Jim Crow, changing sexual mores, etc., all six figures were emblems of the “revolutionary” aspects of the Roaring Twenties. Ask students to grapple with the rise of such celebrities alongside the fundamentalist movement, Prohibition, and the resurgence of the KKK. The text claims that the 1920s were “a time of cultural bifurcation, in which action and reaction tracked with one another like the moving parts of a reciprocating engine.” Using their research papers as the backdrop, have students break into groups and debate: Were revolution and reaction balanced in the 1920s? Or did one win out? If so, which one and why?

Further: Have students provide background to their group about the figure that they chose to write their research paper on in lesson 16.3 to aid in the discussion.

Writing Skills: In a written exercise or a class discussion, ask students to respond to Bryan’s criticisms of evolution, specifically that it undermines the basis of human dignity? Is Bryan right? If so, does that mean Darwinism must be untrue?

Civic Discourse: Herbert Hoover once called Prohibition a “noble experiment.” Invite students to read the Eighteenth Amendment and consider if Prohibition created more problems than it solved. Why or why not? Are there other "noble experiments" that have proved to be counterproductive? What are they? What lessons can be learned about the idea of a “noble experiment”?

Civic Discourse: Using the Nineteenth Amendment and the League of Women Voters as a jumping off point, ask students to research four freedom movements active in this period — African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and women. Ask them to identify which rights each movement claimed, what methods it used, and what resistance it met either in written form or in a chart. Provide students with a list of resources for each group as a starting point for their research.

Critical Thinking: Direct students to this lesson's Timeline and have them use it to draw their own, placing on it the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Emergency Quota Act, the Johnson-Reed Act, and the Scopes Trial. Beside each, have them write one paragraph describing it, then mark whether the measure expanded liberty or restricted it, and for whom.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Was Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday an accurate depiction of the 1920s? How might it have been shortsighted?

Insight: Allen was accurate to a point. He was commenting on what he saw, which was a focus on a small group of people who were part of high society, made up of upper and upper-middle-class people. They had money and time to indulge in all the excess that were noted by the author. He wasn't delving into the lives of the middle class and poor. He didn't consider various social classes and status, different regions of the U.S., religion, race, or many other considerations which could have been made.

What ideas about race became prominent in the 1920s?

Insight: Darwinian evolutionary theory, particularly the idea that one group of human beings might be more evolved than another, seemed to lend legitimacy to “scientific racism.”

Further: Ask students to distinguish the claims at work here — biological evolution, Social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism are distinct ideas, and the chapter’s actors did not hold them in the same combinations.

How was the KKK of the Reconstruction Era different from the KKK of the 1920s? And why did support for it change and vary across the country? Use Figure 16.17 to help develop your answer.

Insight: The KKK was founded after the Civil War in 1865 to intimidate and suppress the black population (See Lesson 11.4). But by the 1920s, its inherent principle had shifted in response to developing social, racial, and economic concerns. From 1919 through 1921, more than a million immigrants entered the country. They not only introduced new cultures, folkways, and religions to the country, but also competed with the existing population for work and housing. In response to these concerns, the KKK rebranded as an anti-immigrant, anti- Catholic, and anti-Jewish organization, in addition to its original anti-black agenda. The rebranded organization grew more popular than its southern Reconstruction-era predecessor, with a national following stretching from Oregon to Maine.

Further: Ask students to recall what they learned in this chapter about Bolshevism, the Red Scare, the labor strikes of 1919, and the race riots of that same year (See Lesson 16.1), and ask them to construct an argument for why the KKK might also have been hostile to labor unions.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

In what year and place was the Scopes Trial held? (July 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee.)

Which two laws ended the era of mass immigration that had begun after the Civil War? (The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.)

Explain

Scopes lost his case, yet the book says fundamentalism was decisively set back. How can both be true? Acceptable responses: a defensible range. The legal verdict was never in doubt — the textbook did teach Darwinian evolution — but the trial was covered by some two hundred reporters including H. L. Mencken and staged as a duel between Bryan and Clarence Darrow, and the ridicule and negative publicity did the damage that the verdict did not. A strong answer distinguishes winning in court from winning in public, and better answers note the book's caution that recent historians such as Edward Larson have complicated the standard account.

Daily Recap

Though the period witnessed many revolutionary trends, such as the rise of mass media and jazz and the emergence of “flapper culture” among urban women, the 1920s also featured societal reaction against such innovations. Often neglected in discussions of the Roaring Twenties is the fact that a majority of the American public supported conservative politicians and (at least early in the decade) championed the cause of Prohibition.

Looking Ahead

In 16.5 the decade's politics reach their calmest surface — Coolidge's America, and a 1928 election won by 444 electoral votes to 87 — while beneath it a new political coalition is already forming.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: prohibition, quota, fundamentalism, ridicule.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “Prohibition was meant to ___, but ___.” · “A quota limits ___ by ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students state one aim and one difficulty of prohibition before writing either.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column list: what a reform intended, and what followed from it.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.5 Coolidge’s America (pp. 540–546)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 540–546.

Exercise: Figure 16.20 with the book's account of the parlor swearing-in at 2:47 a.m; then Primary Source 16.2, and let students weigh legalized larceny before evaluating it.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: The Formative Assessment.

Homework: Assign The Crash (pp. 546–549).

Essential Understanding

The end of the Harding administration, Calvin Coolidge’s tenure as president, and the election of Herbert Hoover.

Lesson Objectives

• Describe Coolidge's political philosophy about the economy and the American founding.

• Contrast Coolidge's perspective on the Declaration of Independence with that of Woodrow Wilson.

Key Dates

1923 President Harding dies; Vice President Coolidge is sworn in as president (August 2–3)

1923 The Senate opens investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal (October)

1924 Coolidge is elected president (November 4)

1927 Coolidge unexpectedly declines to seek another term (August 2)

1928 Herbert Hoover wins the presidential election (November 6)

Key Concepts

Calvin Coolidge managed to restore confidence in the office of the presidency after Harding’s misjudgments and mismanagement. His policies, meanwhile, were fully in keeping with the small-government, pro-business ideal to which Harding and the Republican Party had been committed.

After the election of 1928, Herbert Hoover succeeded Coolidge as president. The inauguration of a former mining engineer born in small-town Iowa was a reminder that one still did not have to be born into great wealth to become president.

Key Terms

Teapot Dome Scandal: In this attempted theft of federal oil reserves, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall leased two of the three western oil fields to private companies without a competitive bidding process in exchange for significant bribes.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Sixteen, “Coolidge’s America.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was the downfall of the Harding administration?

Under what circumstances did Calvin Coolidge succeed Harding?

What was Coolidge’s background?

What was the setting of Coolidge’s first inauguration?

What policy inclinations guided Coolidge’s approach to governance?

When did Herbert Hoover succeed Coolidge? What was Hoover’s background?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from Coolidge’s Philadelphia address on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Conduct a class discussion using the following questions: What does Coolidge mean when he references the "finality of the Declaration"? Where in the speech can you find a rebuke to Wilson and the other critics of the American founding? Explain why this is a rebuke of the Progressive arguments we have already seen. Do you agree or disagree with Coolidge's assertions about the Declaration?

Speaking Skills: Though he suffered a landslide defeat in the Presidential Election of 1928, Al Smith is remembered for being a strong and effective orator. Assign students to write a brief stump speech for Smith, articulating why the country should change course after eight years of prosperity under Republican administrations. Ask them to present their work in small groups and then invite a few volunteers to address the entire class.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What did Coolidge argue in his July 1926 address on the Declaration of Independence?

Insight: Coolidge gave this speech in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926. His speech was in defense of the Declaration as previous administrations had treated it and spoken about it as out of date. Coolidge reminded Americans of the exceptional character of their revolution and the enduring importance of liberty and equality proclaimed as natural rights by the Declaration.

What does Coolidge mean by the “finality of the Declaration”? Are his words a rebuke to Wilson and other critics of the Founding? How so or why not?

Insight: Coolidge is rebuking the Progressive's and President Wilson's ideas that the Declaration is outdated considering the advancements that had been made in the past 150 years. While not calling them out directly, Coolidge declares the finality of the Declaration in stating that certain truths – All men are created equal, all are endowed with inalienable rights, and government derives its power from the consent of the governed – are final. They cannot be revised and are the foundation of the United States. He derided any other thought on the matter as taking the United States backwards, not forward.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the electoral vote in the 1928 presidential election? (Hoover 444, Smith 87.)

What did Coolidge call excessive taxation? (A species of legalized larceny.)

Explain

Hoover's 1928 victory was overwhelming, yet the book calls the appearance deceiving. What was forming beneath it?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Al Smith was an Irish Catholic, the first Catholic nominated by a major party, and an outspoken opponent of Prohibition; working-class ethnic Catholics had already been swinging toward the Democrats, and although Smith drew too few to win, the potential for a new coalition of urban workers, farmers and anti-Republican voters was visible in the result. A strong answer treats a losing candidate's vote as evidence about the future rather than only about the past.

Daily Recap

Calvin Coolidge restored integrity to the federal government after the corruption-plagued years of the Harding administration. Under his leadership, taxes were further reduced, immigration was curtailed, and regulators were constrained. Coolidge’s understated and business-friendly approach proved appealing and has since become popularly associated with the limited scope of governmental ambitions during the 1920s.

Looking Ahead

In 16.6 the confidence of Primary Source 16.3, delivered two weeks before the 1928 vote, meets October 1929. The chapter ends by asking what the Crash actually refuted.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: inaugural, taxation, coalition, nominee.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “An inaugural address is the moment when ___.” · “Lowering taxation was expected to ___ because ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students say what a coalition is, using their own example, before writing the definition.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: a labelled timeline of one election year: nominee, vote, inaugural.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

16.6 The Crash (pp. 546–549)

In a Single Class Period

Read: Pages 546–549.

Exercise: The price sequence the book gives — U.S. Steel, Montgomery Ward, General Motors — before any general account of the Crash.

Discuss: The Guiding Classroom Questions in bold.

Close: Figure 16.22, then the Formative Assessment.

Homework: Begin Chapter Seventeen.

Essential Understanding

The stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression.

Lesson Objectives

• Describe the various factors that contributed to the Great Depression.

• Explain two different economic theories for why the Great Depression happened.

Key Dates

1929 “Black Thursday” marks the beginning of the Wall Street crash (October 24)

1929 “Black Tuesday” escalates the stock market crash as 16 million shares are panic-sold (October 29)

Key Concepts

Though the great stock market crash was a herald of the coming Great Depression, and perhaps even marked its beginning, it was not its principal cause.

Some place the principal blame for the Great Depression on underconsumption, citing a lack of broadly distributed purchasing power in the economy that led to deficits in demand. Others blame bad public policy for turning what could have been an ordinary recession into a full-blown and persistent global depression.

Key Terms

Black Thursday: On October 24, 1929, prices on the New York stock exchange began to decline, which suddenly triggered a selling frenzy, leading to plummeting stock valuations.

Great Depression: Caused in part by imbalances in the world economy resulting from the Great War and its aftermath, this global economic downturn was the most severe in modern economic history, ultimately ceasing only due to increases in production as a result of World War II.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Sixteen, “The Crash.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What precipitated the stock market crash of 1929?

How was buying stocks “on margin” a dangerous practice?

Did the stock market crash cause the Great Depression?

What was “Black Tuesday”?

What are the two principal explanations for what caused the Great Depression?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Public Speaking: Ask students to imagine that they are Herbert Hoover, addressing the American public via radio address in late October 1929. How would they explain to the public what happened and why? What advice would they give to the people about what should be done? Have students discuss their work in small groups and then invite a few volunteers to address the entire class.

Critical Thinking: Instruct students to choose one of the theories about the cause of the Great Depression and write a short argument about why this theory is the better theory. Next, bring the class together and list all of the factors mentioned in the book that contributed to the cause of the Great Depression. List these factors on the board and then invite several students to share their arguments about the theoretical causes. During the discussion, reinforce to students that both theories can contain elements of truth. As a final exercise, instruct students to imagine they are assigned to write a short explanation in a children's textbook about the cause of the Great Depression. How would they explain it?

Further: Here are some specific questions that can be brought into the class discussion: In what ways might "margin buys" have exacerbated the stock market bubble? Are there any lessons we can learn about a credit-based economy? How big of a factor was the postwar situation in Europe? What economic policies could the federal government have enacted (if any) that would have led to a better situation?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

In what sense was the Democratic Party stronger than it seemed during the Republican-dominated decade of the 1920s?

Insight: While the Republicans were in power, a realignment was taking place politically. Working-class Catholics were turning to the Democratic Party. The Party was also luring urban workers, farmers, and states that were anti-Republican in the South. A strong economy kept that growth at bay. But when the economy would slip, Democrats could prevail.

What role did the Federal Reserve play in causing the crash?

Insight: Among the many reasons for the stock market crash and also the Great Depression was the economy's “excess productive capacity.” The country had simply built too many factories during the 1920s. Part of the blame for such unsustainable investment rested with the newly created Federal Reserve banking system, which by inflating the money supply and keeping interest rates low encouraged over-investment in manufacturing.

What happened on Black Thursday and on Black Tuesday, and why are both dated?

The book says wealth was placed in too few hands. How does that explain a downward spiral rather than a single bad day?

Hoover told the country the economy stood on a sound and prosperous basis. Why might a president say that in the last week of October 1929?

Figure 16.22 was published in January 1930, months after the Crash. What does the delay suggest about how quickly its meaning became clear?

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

On what date did Black Tuesday fall, and how many shares changed hands? (October 29, 1929; sixteen and a half million.)

What did a share of U.S. Steel fall from, and to? (From $262 on September 3 to $150 by November 13, and eventually as low as $22.)

Explain

The book gives a structural explanation for the Depression rather than only a market one. What is it? Acceptable responses: a defensible range. The wealth created by modern industrial capitalism was placed in too few hands, leaving the mass of potential consumers unable to buy what an ever more productive economy was producing; unsold goods piled up, production paused, layoffs followed, purchasing power fell further, and bank closures and collapsing agricultural prices joined the spiral. A strong answer identifies the mechanism as a loop rather than a sequence, and better answers connect it back to the productivity gains of lesson 16.2.

Daily Recap

The final years of the 1920s witnessed an unsustainable boom in stock prices, which ended in the Fall of 1929 with a sudden crash. Economists differ as to the fundamental cause of the subsequent Great Depression, with some citing underconsumption and others governmental policy. Whatever the answer, there is no doubt that the Hoover administration proved ineffective in relieving the severe economic distress faced by millions of Americans.

Looking Ahead

Chapter Seventeen opens with a counterfactual — what if Coolidge had still been president when the crash came — and asks whether Hoover's response failed because it did too little or because the problem had outgrown any response.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

• Establish first: share, panic, spiral, purchasing power.

• Frames that carry the reasoning: “A share is ___, so its price rises when ___.” · “The spiral continued because ___ led to ___.”

• Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students explain what panic does to a price before writing about the Crash.

• Show understanding without a paragraph: a line that rises and then falls, labelled at three moments with what people were doing.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

The questions and answers that follow offer a range of ways to assess students’ understanding of the chapter. Teachers may use the assessment as written or select and adapt questions to suit their students and course of study.

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest (1) to latest (5).

4 | Scopes Trial takes place in Dayton, Tennessee (July 1925)

1 | Eighteenth Amendment takes effect (January 1920)

5 | Herbert Hoover wins the presidential election (November 1928)

2 | Emergency Quota Act establishes limits on immigration (May 1921)

3 | Senate opens investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal (October 1923)

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

____Henry Ford____ revolutionized manufacturing by pioneering the moving assembly line for automobile production.

Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight in a plane called the "____The Spirit of St. Louis____."

____Bobby Jones____ was an amateur athlete who dominated the sport of ____golf____ during the 1920s.

____Charlie Chaplin____, best known as the Tramp, achieved fame during the era of Silent film, before "talkies" became standard.

Composers like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin contributed many of the songs that became part of ____The Great American Songbook____.

The ____Red Scare____ was a period of intense fear of communism and radical political movements in the U.S. following World War I.

____Prohibition____ was the nationwide legal ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933.

____Tin Pan Alley____ was the nickname for the New York City district where music publishers and songwriters produced commercial popular songs in the early 20th century.

The ____Teapot Dome Scandal____ involved the secret leasing of federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes during the Harding administration.

____Black Thursday____ refers to October 24, 1929, the day a massive wave of stock selling triggered panic on Wall Street.

The ____Great Depression____ was a severe worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted through the 1930s.

Geography

Identify the location according to the map (16.2).

In the election of 1928, list the states won by Al Smith.

A: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island

In 1928, which state had the largest population, as told by the largest number of electoral votes?

A: New York, with 45 electoral votes.

Which states had the smallest population, as told by the smallest number of electoral votes?

A: It's a tie -- Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware

Determine the percentage of electoral votes for each candidate.

A: Hoover received 83.6% and Smith received 16.4%

Short Answer

Short Answer Questions: Each question should be answered with around 2 - 4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

Why did many Americans react negatively to the Wilson administration in the years immediately following World War I?

A: Many Americans grew weary of the expanded federal power Wilson had used to mobilize the country for war, along with his internationalist foreign policy, including his push for the League of Nations. After years of sacrifice and government intervention in daily life, there was a strong public desire to scale back Washington's role and refocus on domestic concerns.

What economic challenges did the U.S. face immediately after World War I?

A: After the swift wartime demobilization, returning veterans came home with no suitable jobs available for them, while the shortage of housing, automobiles, and consumer goods caused prices to spike and doubled the cost of living from prewar levels. These factors fueled labor unrest and race riots throughout the country.

How would you characterize the Harding administration's economic approach, and what was its outcome?

A: Harding's administration pursued laissez-faire policies, favoring minimal government regulation and lower taxes to encourage business growth. Despite being marked by significant corruption scandals, these policies contributed to a surge in industrial output and general prosperity through much of the 1920s.

What was significant about Henry Ford's approach to manufacturing?

A: Ford pioneered the moving assembly line, which dramatically increased production efficiency and lowered the cost of automobiles like the Model T. This innovation made car ownership accessible to average American families for the first time.

Why is Henry Ford considered a symbol of the American "rags-to-riches" story?

A: Ford rose from modest beginnings as a farm boy to become one of the wealthiest and most influential industrialists in the country through his innovations in automobile manufacturing. Despite his immense success, he was admired for maintaining a public image of simplicity and everyman values. He often spoke in the common man's vernacular and disdained the sophisticated society along with their education, which he had never gotten.

What new forms of entertainment and culture emerged during the Roaring Twenties?

A: The 1920s saw the rapid spread of national media, celebrity culture, and professional sports as forms of mass entertainment. Baseball and boxing became regular evening listening for Americans as radio stations grew commonplace across the country, alongside the rise of motion pictures. This gave rise to a new kind of celebrity, as both athletes and movie stars became famous throughout society. Consumer credit also expanded, allowing more Americans to purchase goods like radios and automobiles on installment plans.

How did the 1920s also represent a period of cultural backlash or reaction?

A: The decade was a cultural revolution and a reaction at once. Greenwich Village saw a revolution in manners and morals, while nativist sentiment resurged: the Ku Klux Klan was revived and rebranded as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish organization with a national following stretching from Oregon to Maine. Progressivism had become pervasive in the churches, and conservative Protestantism arose in response. Two constitutional changes marked the period: the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited alcohol and the Nineteenth gave women the vote.

How would you describe the general political climate of the 1920s?

A: The politics of the decade adopted a laissez faire attitude and were distinctly conservative, favoring limited government, lower taxes and pro-business policies. This represented a significant shift away from the reform-driven activism of the preceding Progressive Era.

Why do historians still debate the causes of the Great Depression?

A: The 1929 crash is often treated as the trigger, but the book distinguishes it from the causes of the depression that followed, and says there are basically two schools of thought about those causes. One places the principal blame on underconsumption — too much of the wealth created by modern industrial capitalism placed in too few hands, leaving the mass of potential consumers unable to buy what the economy produced, so unsold goods piled up, production paused, and layoffs deepened the spiral. The other blames bad government policy for turning an ordinary recession into a persistent depression: Federal Reserve monetary policy shrank the money supply by more than a third between 1929 and 1932, producing what is called the Great Contraction; a related view blames an overly liberal monetary policy across the 1920s for a credit-driven boom. The international dimension matters too — German reparations, American credit and American markets were bound together, so policies restricting either rebounded on the world economy and back on the United States.

How did the stock market crash of 1929 mark a turning point from the prosperity of the 1920s?

A: As Hoover took office as president in 1929, the stock market was booming and had been since 1927. Between October 24th and 29th the stock market began a gradual fall and then plummeted. The crash abruptly ended nearly a decade of industrial growth and rising consumer prosperity that had characterized the Roaring Twenties. By the spring of 1930, business activity notably declined. It ushered in a prolonged economic crisis, the Great Depression, that would last until the Second World War.

Essay Question: How did new forms of mass media and entertainment reshape American identity and everyday life in the 1920s, and in what ways do these changes still shape American culture today?

Warner Brothers releases The Jazz Singer, the first talking motion picture.
Henry Ford introduces the moving assembly line.
KDKA in Pittsburgh becomes the first radio station to broadcast.
Charles Lindbergh begins the first solo, non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, traveling from New York to Paris.
The Scopes-Monkey Trial takes place in Tennessee.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The New Deal:

A Reappraisal of Values

1930–1937 · pp. 551–586

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

The stock market crash of 1929, and the subsequent economic collapse that became known as the Great Depression, seemed an unprecedented disaster for the country, as steep losses in productivity and employment in the American economy were accompanied by the near-collapse of the banking sector. Despite the best efforts of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, whatever the federal government tried seemed futile. What began as a sharp recession in 1930 settled into a decade-long economic depression.

To revive the economy, Herbert Hoover tried numerous measures to prop up segments of the economy and signed the Hawley–Smoot Tariff in the hope of protecting American jobs and manufacturing. The economy continued to spiral downward, however, and Hoover refused to consider more ambitious ideas like direct payments to individual citizens, which he dismissed as unconstitutional. In 1932, an unpopular Hoover lost reelection to the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR ultimately remained president until his death in 1945, becoming a pivotal figure in global history for his role in World War II. He remains celebrated among many historians for the vast expansion of governmental power that he instituted in his “New Deal” with the American people.

Nonetheless, there is little evidence that Roosevelt’s policies were effective in combatting the Depression. But if the New Deal did not succeed in pulling the United States out of the Great Depression, then why is it of such significance? For one thing, unlike his predecessor, FDR was willing to push the boundaries of peacetime presidential authority to an unprecedented extent. His approach was experimental and pragmatic, involving much trial and error, as he freely discarded what did not work while embracing what did. His first term saw the institution of programs aiming variously to stabilize the banking industry (FDIC), to provide temporary government employment (WPA, CCC, CWA), to control wages and prices in industry, and to boost the agricultural sector. The early New Deal also saw the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The New Deal program with the greatest enduring significance was the Social Security Act, which lacked any clear constitutional warrant.

This flood of New Deal initiatives, despite their mixed results, created the perception that the government was doing all that it could to address the situation. This, combined with FDR’s optimistic persona and his highly effective use of radio fireside chats to restore public confidence, seemed to give much of the nation hope that better times would soon arrive. Though the country remained mired in the Depression, FDR roared to victory in 1936 with the largest margin of victory seen since James Monroe’s uncontested reelection in 1820.

But FDR faced a great deal of opposition from the Supreme Court. Much of his New Deal was struck down by the justices, and as FDR’s second term got under way challenges to other programs were making their way through the courts. Bolstered by his overwhelming electoral victory in 1936, FDR proposed legislation that would have increased the number of Supreme Court justices so that his programs could survive. This “court packing” scheme was very unpopular, though, and FDR ultimately had to scuttle it. Such pressure also had the apparent effect of intimidating the Court, which did not strike down any more programs. Still, setbacks in Congress forestalled FDR’s ability to implement additional innovative programs and policies. FDR, following in the tradition of many Progressives, had attempted to frame his administration’s battle against the Great Depression as the moral equivalent of war. Yet it would turn out that only war itself, and not its mere moral equivalent, would ultimately pull the United States out of the Great Depression.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The various efforts by the federal government to address the Great Depression, particularly through the expansion of executive power under FDR’s New Deal.

Despite his service in the laissez-faire administrations of Harding and Coolidge, Hoover was a proponent of governmental intervention in economic affairs, and in the early years of the Depression he implemented numerous measures to relieve the suffering of the American public.

The Hawley–Smoot Tariff, an effort to shore up American manufacturing, backfired due to retaliatory tariffs from abroad. Hoover also adamantly refused to implement measures that he considered extra-constitutional, contributing to his popular image as aloof and unconcerned as the Depression worsened.

The Democratic Party nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president in 1932. A governor of New York who though born to privilege had faced great personal tribulation in his bout with polio, FDR cruised to victory against the unpopular Hoover.

Confronted by bank closures and mass unemployment, FDR implemented an ambitious agenda, instituting numerous new federal agencies to create jobs, shore up agriculture, care for the elderly, and increase regulation of industry and finance.

Though the New Deal’s actual results were mixed, public perception of Roosevelt’s commitment to combatting the Depression resulted in his lasting popularity, which was further bolstered by his “fireside chat” radio addresses.

FDR did face significant opposition—from politicians like Huey Long, from cultural figures like Father Coughlin, from business interests, and above all from the Supreme Court, which struck down many New Deal measures as unconstitutional.

Bolstered by his landslide reelection, FDR attempted to increase the size of the Supreme Court in an effort to override its incumbent membership. Though ultimately unsuccessful, this effort likely contributed to the decision by certain justices to begin upholding Roosevelt’s agenda.

The economy experienced a severe downturn at the start of FDR’s second term, ultimately leading to the defeat of many pro-New Deal representatives in the elections of 1938. Stymied by the “conservative coalition” in Congress—a group of Republicans and Southern Democrats who constituted a majority in the House from 1939 to 1963—FDR ultimately had to wait for World War II to rescue the country from its lingering economic woes.

Key Persons

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964)

Long, Huey P. (1893–1935)

Key Concepts and Terms

associationalism

laissez-faire (economics)

Hawley–Smoot Tariff

Bonus Expeditionary Force

Communist Party (American)

Polio

Civilian Conservation Corps

Fireside chat

Civil Works Administration

Works Progress Administration

Federal Housing Administration

Tennessee Valley Authority

American Liberty League

National Labor Relations Board

Revenue Act of 1935

Social Security Act

Chamber of Commerce

Court packing

Nazi

Weimar Republic

New Deal

Timeline

1930, June 17 – Hoover signs the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, increasing taxes on imports

1932, July 21 – Hoover signs the Emergency Relief and Construction Act

1932, July 28 – The Bonus Expeditionary Force marches on Washington, DC

1932, November 8 – Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Hoover in the presidential election

1933, March 31 – Roosevelt signs the Emergency Conservation Work Act, creating the Civilian Conservation Corps

1933, May 12 – Roosevelt signs the Agricultural Adjustment Act, creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration

1933, May 18 – Roosevelt creates the Tennessee Valley Authority

1933, June 16 – Roosevelt signs the Banking Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act

1933, December 5 – The Twenty-First Amendment is passed, repealing Prohibition

1935, May 6 – Roosevelt establishes the Works Progress Administration to support public works

1935, May 27 – In Schechter v. United States, the Supreme Court strikes down the National Industrial Recovery Act

1935, July 5 – Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act

1935, August 14 – Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act

1935, September 8–10 – Senator Huey Long is shot in Baton Rouge on September 8 and dies there on September 10

1936, January 6 – In United States v. Butler, the Supreme Court strikes down the Agricultural Adjustment Act

1936, March 4 – The Tennessee Valley Authority completes its first hydroelectric dam

1936, November 3 – Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection by the largest margin in American history to that point

1937, January 12 – The Executive Reorganization bill is introduced

1937, February 5 – Roosevelt unveils his “court-packing plan”

1937, August – The “Roosevelt recession” begins

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

17.1 Chapter Opening – pp. 553–554 (.5 to 1 class)

Hoover’s background

Associationalism influences Hoover’s reaction to the Crash

The Beginning of the Depression; mass unemployment

17.2 A Sinking Presidency – pp. 555–560 (.5 to 1 class)

The ineffectiveness of Hoover’s response

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Emergency Relief Act

The Depression deepens

The Bonus Expeditionary Force

17.3 A New Deal for the American People – pp. 561–567 (.5 to 1 class)

Introduction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Roosevelt campaigns in 1932 on the idea of a “new deal”

Election of 1932

The Depression worsens

FDR’s First Inaugural signals his intention to expand executive power

17.4 A Bold Beginning with Mixed Results – pp. 568–576 (1 to 2 classes)

Roosevelt moves to stabilize the financial system

Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”

The FDIC insures bank deposits

The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration provide unemployment relief

The National Recovery Administration

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration

The Tennessee Valley Authority

17.5 FDR’s Challengers – pp. 577–581 (.5 to 1 class)

Hoover’s criticism of FDR in The Challenge to Liberty

Huey Long attacks FDR with the “Share Our Wealth” program

The Second New Deal; the Social Security Act of 1935

Taxes increase via the Revenue Act of 1935

Election of 1936

17.6 The New Deal Halted – pp. 582–586 (.5 to 1 class)

FDR proposes to “pack the courts”

Continued economic woes

The Executive Reorganization Act of 1937

Roosevelt alienates his allies through overreach

The midterm elections of 1938

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937 (p. 551)

Roosevelt speaks of fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world. Draw attention to the date: this is the second inaugural, not the first. Four years earlier he had taken office with the banks closed and had asked Congress for authority to wage war against an emergency. By January 1937 he had carried forty-six states, the emergency had not lifted, and the instrument he describes was already built. The sentence is therefore a claim about means rather than a promise of rescue, and it raises the question students should carry through the chapter. McClay treats the New Deal less as a set of programs that did or did not work than as a permanent enlargement of what Americans expected government to be, and the epigraph is where that reading is announced. Return to it at the end of 17.6, after the court-packing plan has failed and the conservative coalition has taken the House, and ask whether unimagined power reads as a promise or as a warning.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 17.1 · John Dewey, “The House Divided Against Itself,” Individualism Old and New, 1930 (p. 557)

Dewey was the most influential American philosopher of his generation and the intellectual architect of progressive education; by 1930 he was seventy-one and writing for a general readership rather than for philosophers. The passage argues that Americans live in a money culture whose cult and rites dominate even where its creed is denied—that the country professes one set of values and organizes its life around another. Read it before turning to Hoover’s response to the Crash. Hoover’s associationalism assumed that voluntary cooperation could reform the money culture without coercing it; Dewey is describing the culture Hoover hoped to persuade. Read together, the two make Hoover’s position intelligible rather than merely unsuccessful. The prose is abstract and the sentences are long, and students will need the central claim isolated before they meet the paragraph. Note also that this is not a response to the crash but a diagnosis the crash appeared to confirm; Dewey had been making the argument for years, and 1930 gave it an audience.

Primary Source 17.2 · Franklin D. Roosevelt, Campaign Speech at the Commonwealth Club, September 23, 1932 (p. 566)

Delivered in San Francisco during the campaign, to a business audience, at a moment when Roosevelt was still being accused of vagueness. It is the most theoretically ambitious speech he gave, and it makes the intellectual case for the New Deal more fully than the First Inaugural does. The argument is that the conditions which once justified an economy of open opportunity have closed—the frontier is gone, industry is concentrated—and that the role of government must change accordingly, from umpire to something nearer a planner. Students commonly read the speech as radical and stop there. The chapter is more careful, and lesson 17.3 asks what was conservative in it as well as what was radical: Roosevelt is arguing for the preservation of a system, not its replacement, and both halves are in the text. Pair it with the First Inaugural. The Inaugural supplies the emotion and the Commonwealth Club address supplies the argument.

Primary Source 17.3 · Rexford Tugwell, “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire,” American Economic Review, March 1932 (p. 574)

Tugwell was a Columbia economist and a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, and this essay appeared in a professional journal months before the election that brought him into government. That sequence is what makes it valuable: nothing in it is retrospective justification, because when he wrote it he had no power to attempt any of it. The argument is that the institutions of laissez faire have become so embedded that they are mistaken for nature, and that deliberate coordination of production is both possible and necessary. The audience is fellow economists, the vocabulary is technical, and teachers should expect to gloss it. Its instructional value is that it states plainly what the NRA and the AAA were attempting, and it is best read before either agency is described in 17.4, so that students judge those programs against their own stated purpose rather than against hindsight. Afterwards, ask whether the NRA’s capture by its largest firms was a failure of execution or a difficulty the theory did not anticipate.

Primary Source 17.4 · Al Smith, “Betrayal of the Democratic Party” Speech to the American Liberty League, January 25, 1936 (p. 580)

Smith was the Democratic nominee for president in 1928 and, until 1932, Roosevelt’s political patron in New York. By 1936 he was addressing the American Liberty League, an organization formed to oppose the New Deal whose leadership included Smith himself and John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic nominee, alongside prominent Republicans. This is therefore an attack on a Democratic president by two of his own party’s former standard-bearers, delivered in an election year. The charge is not that the New Deal is mistaken in its aims but that it has abandoned the party’s principles and the constitutional limits the party had defended. Students arrive expecting opposition to the New Deal to be Republican, and this document makes that assumption impossible to hold; it is the indispensable corrective to a two-sided account of the 1930s. Set it beside Huey Long in 17.5. Smith attacks from the party’s right and Long from its left within eighteen months of each other, and Roosevelt answered both with the largest electoral margin to that date.

Figures

Figure 17.1 · Charles Louis Goeller, Third Avenue, 1934 (p. 551; the chapter-opening plate)

Goeller painted this while employed by the Public Works of Art Project, a New Deal work-relief program that put professional artists on the federal payroll. The scene shows isolated figures on a city street with the Chrysler Building behind them, the tallest structure in the world at its completion at the beginning of the Depression. The painting is therefore both a depiction of the Depression and a product of the policy response to it, which is a distinction worth drawing for students before they are told anything else about it. Nobody in the picture is looking at the tower. Goeller has placed the era’s most confident piece of architecture behind people who have no relation to it, and the composition carries the chapter’s opening argument without a word of narrative. Open the chapter with the image alone: ask what year students would guess and why, then tell them a federal program paid for it.

Figure 17.3 · Webster & Stevens, Hooverville on Tideflats, 1933 (p. 556)

A makeshift settlement in Seattle, built from scrap lumber and discarded material on the lot of a former shipyard near the city’s port. The site is the detail to notice: these were working people camped beside the place that had employed them. The book is explicit that the name did political work, and that the term Hooverville served to discredit the president in the eyes of the American public. A shantytown named for a sitting president is an argument no speech can answer, and that is worth saying to students directly rather than leaving them to infer it. The photograph is also a caution. It is evidence about perception, not about policy: lessons 17.1 and 17.2 show that Hoover did a great deal, and a class that reads the image as proof he did nothing has drawn the wrong conclusion from it. Use it with the 17.1 Civic Discourse exercise, which asks what the photograph shows and what it leaves out.

Figure 17.4 · Unemployed Men Queued Outside a Depression Soup Kitchen Opened in Chicago by Al Capone, New York Times, 1931 (p. 558)

A bread line outside a soup kitchen funded by the country’s most notorious gangster. The image is useful precisely because it is uncomfortable. By 1931 private charity was reaching where public relief did not, and the chapter’s account of Hoover’s refusal to send federal funds directly to individuals explains why relief of this kind was left to private charity. Students should be asked what it means that the relief on offer came from where it did, and what a queue outside such a kitchen tells them about how many people had run out of other options. The caption’s flatness is part of its force: the paper reports the fact and lets it stand. Use it in 17.2, alongside the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, so that students can weigh the scale of federal action against the scale of the need it was meeting.

Figure 17.5 · Bonus Marchers, 1932 (p. 561)

The encampment of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, unemployed veterans who came to Washington seeking early redemption of bonuses Congress had promised for their military service. In late July 1932 Hoover sent police to clear the camps, and troops under Douglas MacArthur completed the work with tear gas, bayonets and cavalry. The chapter treats this as the low point of Hoover’s presidency and the reason is visible in the photograph: a government using force against its own former soldiers in the middle of a depression. The episode is not simple. Officials believed some marchers had violent or criminal intent, or were Communist revolutionaries, and lesson 17.2 puts to students the question of whether the treatment amounted to a violation of the First Amendment rather than settling it. Show the image before the narrative of the clearance rather than after, so that students form an impression and then test it against the chapter’s account.

Figure 17.10 · National Recovery Administration, NRA Member: We Do Our Part, circa 1933 (p. 573)

The Blue Eagle poster, which businesses working with the National Recovery Administration displayed to advertise their participation. The book explains the arrangement it advertises: firms agreed to sell their goods at prices fixed by the government and to pay wages similarly determined, and the poster let them present that agreement as a patriotic effort. The rhetoric is voluntarist and the program was in practice difficult to refuse, which is the tension students should be asked to find. A useful question is what a business displaying no eagle was communicating to its customers. This is the visual form of the argument Tugwell makes in prose in Primary Source 17.3, and the two should be read together. The poster looks like advertising and functions like regulation; ask students which it is before telling them, and then read it against the Supreme Court’s decision striking the NRA down in 1935.

Figure 17.11 · Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 (p. 576)

Taken at a pea pickers’ camp. The woman, later identified as Florence Owens Thompson, holds her infant while two children turn their faces into her shoulders. Lange was hired by the Resettlement Administration to document the poverty of migrant workers and farmers, making it the second federally commissioned image students meet. As with Figure 17.1, the government paid to have the conditions its programs addressed photographed. It became the most reproduced photograph of the Depression. The children’s faces are hidden, which is a compositional choice rather than an accident, and asking what it accomplishes is a better opening question than asking what the picture shows. Thompson was identified only decades later and did not choose her part in the image; students frequently raise the ethics of documentary photography unprompted, and the question is a legitimate one. Pair with Map 17.2, which shows where the families in the camp had come from.

Figure 17.13 · Social Security Board, A Monthly Check to You – for the Rest of Your Life, 1935 (p. 581)

Promotional material for a program nobody had experienced. The Social Security Board administered old-age insurance, unemployment compensation and public assistance, and this poster is the federal government explaining a wholly new kind of obligation to its citizens. Every other New Deal measure in the chapter is an emergency response to a condition; this one creates a permanent relationship between the government and the individual, which is why Roosevelt called it the cornerstone of the New Deal. What students should notice is the plainness of the promise and the fact that it needed explaining at all. A productive exercise is to have them write the same promise as a government would phrase it now and compare the two: the difficulty of the task is a measure of how unfamiliar the idea was in 1935. Use it in 17.5, with the Social Security Act and the Revenue Act of the same year.

Maps

Map 17.1 · The Election of 1932 (p. 564)

The map gives the electoral result that ended twelve years of Republican administrations, and the book’s caption states the cause plainly: an unprecedented economic crisis caused the American people to turn to new leadership in Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The instructive figure is not the winner, which students will already know, but the extent—how few states Hoover held and where they were. Have students count them before reading the surrounding text. The sweep is national rather than sectional, which is the point: unlike most nineteenth-century realignments this one cannot be explained by region. One caution is worth stating. A lopsided electoral map is routinely read as evidence of lopsided popular sentiment, and the Electoral College magnifies margins; a state carried narrowly looks identical here to one carried overwhelmingly. Use the map with 17.3, where Roosevelt’s emergence is treated. It is the outcome of the campaign Primary Source 17.2 belongs to.

Map 17.2 · Unemployment during the Great Depression, 1933 (p. 565)

The map shows unemployment by region at its peak, which the book gives as 25 percent nationally, together with the drought and severe dust storms that struck the Southern Great Plains—the region known at the time as the Dust Bowl. What repays attention is the unevenness. A national figure of one in four conceals areas well above it and areas below, and this is the only place in the chapter where that distribution can be seen. Ask students to name the worst-affected areas before they read the legend. Two distinct crises overlap on the map, industrial unemployment and agricultural collapse, and they are not in the same places, which is why the New Deal needed both the WPA and the AAA rather than one program. Students frequently assume the Dust Bowl caused the Depression or was caused by it; it was neither, and the map is the clearest way to establish that. It is also the book’s own source for the 25 percent figure quoted in the 17.1 Daily Recap.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Five titles from the book’s own For Additional Reading list, chosen for this chapter.

Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal. New York: HarperCollins, 1967.

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform from Bryan to FDR: Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal. New York: Knopf, 1955.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 553–554)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

For a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: pp. 553–554

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on Depression migration and Hoovervilles

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 555–560 for Lesson 17.2

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

Hoover met the Crash not with Coolidge’s restraint but with an engineer’s confidence that voluntary cooperation could hold the economy together—and the collapse outran him anyway.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

The scale of the economic fallout following the crash of 1929 and the difference between Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge’s perspectives on governmental intervention in the economy.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1930, June 17 – Hoover signs the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, increasing taxes on imports

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Hoover’s views reflected the can-do problem-solving spirit of his own profession of engineering. His activist tendencies approximated the Progressive tradition more closely than they did the laissez-faire tradition embraced by Harding and Coolidge.

Once the downward spiral of the economy gathered momentum, though, the Depression began to seem utterly intractable.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Associationalism: Championed by Herbert Hoover, this governing philosophy emphasized the utility of voluntary, cooperative associations between government and business organizations to improve economic stability and efficiency.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Seventeen.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How might Calvin Coolidge have responded to the Great Crash?

How did Hoover’s views differ from those of Coolidge?

What was “associationalism”?

How did the economy spiral downward between 1929 and 1932?

What was the scale of the economic devastation following the stock market crash?

How did the Ford Motor Company respond to the Great Depression?

What cabinet position did Herbert Hoover hold prior to becoming president?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What did the “Own Your Own Home” campaign seek to accomplish? In what ways does widespread home ownership boost the economy and improve society?

Civic Discourse: Provide students with images of those migrating within the United States in the midst of the Dust Bowl and Depression. Be sure to show at least one example of a “Hooverville.” Ask students to identify what strikes them most. What is present in the photo, but also what is absent? Who generally occupied these temporary houses?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are Calvin Coolidge observing the response of Herbert Hoover to the Great Depression. Assign them to write brief letters critiquing Hoover’s approach and formulating an alternative. Invite a few volunteers to share their work and discuss the topic as a class.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

Would more aggressive governmental intervention have alleviated the stock market crash? Why or why not?

Insight: The counterfactual is the point. Coolidge would likely have let wages and prices fall until the system found a new footing—Andrew Mellon’s “purge the rottenness out of the system.” Students should see that doing less was a considered position with an argument behind it, not simply an absence of one.

How did rising unemployment affect the average American?

Insight: Press for the specifics the chapter supplies rather than a general sense of hardship: automobile output fell from 5.3 million units to 1.3 million, more than thirteen hundred banks closed in 1930 and thirty-seven hundred more in 1931 and 1932, and national income dropped by half. Unemployment reached over eleven million by the end of 1932—nearly one in four workers.

In what sense did “associationalism” constitute a risk for society?

What was a “Hooverville” and how did it symbolize contemporary challenges?

Insight: The name did the work. A shantytown called a Hooverville attaches a national catastrophe to one man’s name every time anyone says the word, which is a kind of political argument no speech can answer.

Insight: Hoover was in many ways quite progressive. Trained as an engineer, he was a superb organizer who had successfully overseen the vast project of using surplus American food to alleviate famine in continental Europe after World War I. Organizing the American Relief Administration, he helped deliver 34 million tons of food and other supplies to residents of twenty-one countries, saving the lives of millions.

Further: The perception of Hoover as unconcerned with widespread suffering during the Depression is somewhat unjust, as he had amply demonstrated his compassion earlier. But of course in hard times people look for someone to blame, and Hoover’s political opponents were glad to capitalize on his struggles.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What did Hoover call the philosophy of voluntary cooperation between government and business?

What were “Hoovervilles,” and what did the name imply?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) associationalism. (2) makeshift shantytowns of cardboard and plywood, named derisively for the president held responsible.

Explain

Hoover was more willing to use government than Coolidge would have been. Why did that not protect him politically?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that Hoover’s activism was real but indirect—cooperation, exhortation, public works—while the suffering was immediate and personal, so the gap between what he did and what people could see him doing widened as unemployment reached nearly one in four. A partial answer says only that his measures “did not work.”

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Though far from the advocate of laissez-faire policies that his predecessors had been, Herbert Hoover was unable to alleviate the country’s economic struggles during his time in office, and by the end of his term unemployment had surged to 25 percent.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

This lesson established that the Crash met a president willing to act, not a president committed to standing aside. The next lesson tests that willingness against three years of deepening collapse, and asks what Hoover would not do even as the Depression worsened.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: crash, unemployment, relief, shantytown.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Hoover believed that ___, so he ___.” · “The economy fell because ___, and then ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: say the difference between doing nothing and doing something indirect before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: label a photograph of a Hooverville with three things it shows and one thing it does not.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.2 A Sinking Presidency (pp. 555–560)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 555–560

Exercise: the Reading Comprehension exercise on the Will Rogers excerpt

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 561–567 for Lesson 17.3

Essential Understanding

Hoover pushed federal power further than any peacetime predecessor, but his refusal to send relief directly to individuals—and the rout of the Bonus Marchers—fixed him in the public mind as a president who would not help.

Lesson Objectives

The worsening economic situation and Hoover’s failed attempts to halt the Depression during the latter half of his presidency.

Key Dates

1930, June 17 – Hoover signs the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, increasing taxes on imports

1932, July 21 – The Emergency Relief and Construction Act provides $300 million in relief to states and for public works

1932, July 28 – The Bonus Expeditionary Force marches on Washington, DC to demand early cash redemption for members’ service in World War I

Key Concepts

To stimulate the economy, Hoover sought tax reduction, public works projects to create jobs, federal aid to failing banks and distressed corporations, assistance to homeowners in danger of mortgage foreclosure, and a “limited revision” upward of the tariff to protect beleaguered farmers and other depressed American industries. Though ambitious, these measures proved insufficient to the task of reviving American commerce.

One of Hoover’s few successes was the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in an attempt to prop up key institutions—such as banks, railroads, life insurance companies, and farm-mortgage associations—that played a central role in the economy but were teetering on the brink of failure.

Hoover, although willing to resort to unprecedented lengths to use the power of government to address the economic emergency facing the country, was committed to the idea that federal funds should not be used directly for the relief of individuals. His adamant refusal to consider extra-constitutional measures, though principled, proved to be a significant political liability.

Key Terms

Hawley–Smoot Tariff: Implemented by Congress in 1930, this legislation boosted duties on a thousand different items, levying taxes of up to 49 percent on foreign imports, in the hope of protecting American producers. Over the long-term, the tariff had the counterproductive effect of cutting American imports and exports in half due to retaliatory measures from European countries.

Bonus Expeditionary Force: In June and July of 1932, some forty-three thousand marchers, many of them World War I veterans, gathered together and descended upon Washington to demand early redemption of their World War I bonuses. Ultimately unsuccessful, the BEF was a public relations nightmare for Herbert Hoover, particularly when American troops under Douglas MacArthur forcibly cleared protester encampments with tear gas, bayonets, and cavalry charges.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Seventeen, “A Sinking Presidency.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Hoover’s initial response to the beginning of the Great Depression?

What became of Hoover’s tariff initiative?

What was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation?

How did the American economy worsen in 1932?

What was the Bonus Expeditionary Force?

Which army leader charged the BEF encampment directly?

What was the Emergency Relief Act?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Reading Comprehension: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the excerpt in the text from the popular contemporary humorist Will Rogers. How does Rogers lampoon Hoover’s economic policies? How does such humor reflect public perception of Hoover at the time?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: While not the only mark against Hoover, the treatment that World War I veterans faced during the Army’s response to the Bonus Expeditionary Force sealed his political fate. Was the situation handled properly? How else could it have been addressed?

Analytical Skills: The Hawley–Smoot Tariff is often named as a cause of the stock market crash, and the crash came first—October 1929, against a tariff signed in June 1930. Have students find two or three present-day online sources on the tariff’s role in the Depression and, for each, name the author, the sponsoring organization, the date, and what evidence is actually cited. Then have them state the test they applied rather than a verdict: what would make one of these sources more reliable than another on a disputed economic question?

Civic Discourse: Ask the class whether they think Hoover should have been willing to send cash to individuals, irrespective of the constitutionality of such measures. In times of crisis, is it permissible for the government to use extralegal means to mitigate pressing social problems?

Analytical Skills: Have students begin a chart they will add to for the rest of the chapter as an ongoing exercise. Give it four columns — Measure, What problem it addressed, Who administered it, What became of it —to be filled in as the chapter proceeds and they encounter different measures and approaches to stabilize the banks, provide relief, and regulate industry and agriculture.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, and the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of July 1932, along with Hoover’s refusal to send federal funds directly to individuals.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 17.3 through 17.6.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were the consequences of the Hawley–Smoot Tariff? Was it as successful as anticipated?

Insight: Hoover opposed the tariff, called it obnoxious, and signed it out of party loyalty. It boosted duties on a thousand items by as much as 49 percent, provoked retaliation, and cut American exports and imports in half—a useful case in how a policy can fail even its own author’s expectations.

In what ways did Hoover believe the Constitution limited his actions as president with respect to addressing the economic crisis?

Insight: Hoover’s objection was not to federal action as such—he sought tax reduction, public works, aid to banks and to homeowners facing foreclosure. It was specifically to federal funds going directly to individuals, which he regarded as outside the Constitution’s grant.

In what sense did the Bonus Expeditionary Force’s treatment represent a violation of the First Amendment?

Insight: Handle this one carefully: the chapter records that troops under Douglas MacArthur cleared the encampments with tear gas, bayonets and cavalry, and that officials believed the marchers might be Communist revolutionaries. Whether that amounts to a First Amendment violation is a question students should argue rather than a fact the chapter supplies.

What steps led to the Communist Party’s gaining a foothold among the American public? How could the Party have altered the country’s trajectory if it had grown?

Insight: The Communist Party gained a hearing in these years because the ordinary explanations of how the economy worked had stopped explaining anything. Ask what conditions make a radical account persuasive, rather than whether this one was true.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation created to do?

Who were the Bonus Marchers, and what did they want?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) prop up banks, railroads, insurance companies and farm-mortgage associations central to the economy but near failure. (2) World War I veterans, some forty-three thousand strong, demanding early redemption of their service bonuses.

Explain

Hoover believed the Constitution barred direct federal relief to individuals. Was holding that line a principle or a failure?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Either verdict can be argued well. A strong answer engages both sides—that a president who exceeds his constitutional authority in an emergency sets a precedent for the next emergency, and that a principle which cannot feed anyone is a thin defense to the hungry. A partial answer picks a side without meeting the other.

Daily Recap

Though energetic in his response to the economic downturn, Hoover proved incapable of reversing the Depression’s trajectory. Indeed, the forced dispersal of the Bonus Expeditionary Force during the summer of 1932 represented a new nadir in presidential prestige, as the government seemed willing to resort to force rather than to address the hardship of its former servicemen.

Looking Ahead

Hoover’s presidency ends here, exhausted rather than defeated by argument. The next lesson introduces the man who replaced him and the phrase—“a new deal for the American people”—that he made his own before anyone knew what it would mean.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: tariff, veterans, bonus, refuse, principle.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Hoover would not ___ because he believed ___.” · “The result was ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: state Hoover’s reason in one sentence before agreeing or disagreeing with it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: sort five Hoover actions into “did” and “would not do.”

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.3 A New Deal for the American People (pp. 561–567)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 561–567

Exercise: the Writing Skills editorial on the election of 1932

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 568–576 for Lesson 17.4

Essential Understanding

Roosevelt arrived promising not a program but a posture: that the federal government would act, on a scale no peacetime president had attempted, and would keep acting until something worked.

Lesson Objectives

The emergence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the election of 1932, and FDR’s First Inaugural Address.

Key Dates

1932, Nov. 8 – Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected president

Key Concepts

Born to wealth and privilege, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inspired to follow the example of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt and pursue a life of public service.

FDR was a charismatic leader, capable of speaking to a mass following. In his campaign speeches, Roosevelt introduced the theme of a “new deal for the American people.” The term caught on and became his trademark.

First and foremost, Roosevelt was clearly not going to be bound by the limitations on federal power that Hoover had observed. If he believed that exceeding those limitations would advance the common good, he would do so.

His inaugural speech concluded with two notable statements of purpose: first, that he would not hesitate to request “broad executive power” from Congress to address the “national emergency” of the moment, and, second, that this executive power would be used “to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Key Terms

Polio: Roosevelt was stricken at thirty-nine while on vacation and left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The book is careful here: the illness was then thought to be polio and has led some later researchers to argue that his symptoms may have been more consistent with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a disorder in which the body’s own immune system attacks the nerves. Teach the qualification, not the label.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Seventeen, “A New Deal for the American People.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt? What was his background?

What illness left FDR paralyzed, and what does the book say about how that diagnosis has changed? What was his response to his disability?

What percentage of US banks had closed by the time FDR took office?

What was the “New Deal” as FDR defined it on the campaign trail?

What were the results of the 1932 election?

What was notable about FDR’s First Inaugural Address?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What accounted for the appeal of the “New Deal” as a campaign slogan? How was FDR able to exploit for political advantage both the connotations of the phrase and its vagueness?

Reading Comprehension: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the Democratic Party’s 1932 platform pledge—an immediate and drastic reduction in federal spending, useless commissions and offices abolished, departments and bureaus consolidated, and a saving of not less than twenty-five percent in the cost of the federal government (Democratic Party Platform, June 1932; supply the text from the platform itself). How do such claims contrast with the subsequent actions of FDR’s administration?

Writing Skills: Ask students to compose a roughly 200-word newspaper editorial urging readers to vote for either Roosevelt or Hoover in the election of 1932. Why is one the superior choice for the country?

Analytical Skills: Have students continue their chart on the different measures and approaches to stabilize the banks, provide relief, and regulate industry and agriculture. From this lesson, students should note a shift in authority. Hoover held "that federal funds should not be used directly for the relief of individuals," while Roosevelt "was clearly not going to be bound by the limitations on federal power that Hoover had observed," and asked Congress for "broad executive power" to "wage a war against the emergency."

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 17.4 through 17.6.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Which president did FDR more closely align with in terms of policy, Coolidge or Hoover? In what respect?

Insight: Neither, exactly. Roosevelt broke with Coolidge’s restraint outright, and he shared Hoover’s activist instinct while rejecting Hoover’s limit on it. The interesting answer traces the line from Hoover to Roosevelt rather than setting them in opposition.

What does FDR see as the proper relationship between business and government?

Insight: Roosevelt’s argument was that economic conditions had changed. Concentrated industrial and financial power meant that the older assumption of many small competing producers no longer described the economy, and he held that government therefore had to take a more active coordinating role in order to preserve the system rather than replace it. Ask students to weigh that against the older view that private enterprise is generally preferable to government-run projects except where risk or scale makes private investment impossible.

Insight: The TVA’s multi-state river system, flood-control work, regional planning, and large capital requirements made federal coordination especially well suited to the project. Ask students what features of a project make it hard for private or state-level actors to undertake alone.

Further: The TVA’s effect on the southern economy was dramatic, greatly increasing access to electricity and raising living standards for many poor southerners, black as well as white. Because Roosevelt’s coalition depended on the Solid South, however, the New Deal did little to disturb segregation.

In what ways did FDR resemble his cousin, Theodore? How did they differ? Who overcame greater setbacks in his personal life?

Insight: Both men came to public life from privilege and turned to reform; both faced a defining physical ordeal. The chapter is careful about Franklin’s: it was long thought to be polio and has led some later researchers to argue that his symptoms may have been more consistent with Guillain–Barré syndrome. The comparison question is worth resisting—students often find that ranking two lives against each other teaches them less than describing each.

Inaugural addresses are important signposts in American history. In his First Inaugural, how did FDR acknowledge the hardship of his times and inspire confidence in the American people?

Insight: The First Inaugural does two things at once, and students should separate them: it reassures, and it requests. The request is for broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, and it is made in the same breath as the reassurance.

What was radical about FDR’s analysis during his Commonwealth Club Address? What, on the other hand, was conservative about his approach?

Insight: Radical in its analysis—that concentrated economic power had changed what government must do—and conservative in its stated aim, which was to preserve a system rather than replace it. Both readings are available in the text of Primary Source 17.2.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What percentage of the nation’s banks were closed by inauguration day, March 4, 1933?

Where did the phrase “new deal for the American people” first take hold?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 40 percent. (2) in Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign speeches, where it caught on and became his trademark.

Explain

Roosevelt asked Congress for “broad executive power… to wage a war against the emergency.” What does borrowing the language of war do to a domestic crisis?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that war framing licenses speed, unity and unusual authority, and that it also suspends the ordinary objections a peacetime debate would raise—which is precisely its appeal and precisely its danger. A partial answer notes the urgency without seeing the constitutional cost.

Daily Recap

With his sunny disposition and optimistic rhetoric, FDR restored hope to the beleaguered public during the depths of the Great Depression. As he assumed office, bolstered by an emerging Democratic coalition of western farmers, urban workers, and southerners, he promised sweeping reforms to alleviate economic distress as part of his “New Deal” with the American people.

Looking Ahead

Roosevelt has the office and the mandate. The next lesson asks what he actually did with the first hundred days, and whether the flurry of new agencies amounted to a recovery or to the appearance of one.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: campaign, inaugural, emergency, executive power.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Roosevelt promised ___, which was different from Hoover because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: read one sentence of the First Inaugural aloud, then say what it asks for.

Show understanding without a paragraph: mark on Map 17.1 the states Hoover carried in 1932.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.4 A Bold Beginning with Mixed Results (pp. 568–576)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 568–576

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on the song “WPA”

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 577–581 for Lesson 17.5

Essential Understanding

The first New Deal was experiment rather than design: banking and relief measures that largely held, and industrial and agricultural schemes that the Supreme Court struck down within three years.

Lesson Objectives

The beginnings of the FDR administration, the major initiatives of the New Deal during his first term in office.

Key Dates

1933, Mar. 31 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is created

1933, May 12 – The Agricultural Adjustment Administration is formed

1933, June 16 – Roosevelt signs into law the Banking Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act

1935, May 6 – Roosevelt establishes the Works Progress Administration

Key Concepts

None of Roosevelt’s initiatives was more indicative of his political genius than his fireside chats, which bypassed Congress and his political opponents to form a direct connection with the American electorate.

By the end of FDR’s First 100 Days, in the Banking Act of 1933, Congress had created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which fully insured bank deposits up to $5,000 to reassure depositors and prevent bank runs, and had also separated investment and commercial banking as a way of increasing the financial system’s resiliency.

To stimulate the recovery of industry and agriculture was an even more complex, but vitally important, task. To that end, Roosevelt devised two principal initiatives: the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

The NRA’s work quickly became coopted by the dominant manufacturers in each industry, who used the codes to shore up their own market positions, to the detriment of many small businesses. The NRA was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.

The reasoning behind the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was simple: it sought to control agricultural prices by inducing farmers to reduce output, paying them to reduce the supply of their goods to market. The goal was to raise prices.

In 1936, the Supreme Court declared the AAA’s funding source, a tax on companies processing farm products, to be unconstitutional. After a legislative fix in 1938, though, the program resumed operation.

Key Terms

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): This federal program was created to supply jobs to three million unemployed young men, who were set to work in national parks, national forests, and soil-conservation projects around the country.

Works Progress Administration (WPA): This federal initiative built various public works, including many iconic governmental buildings, and offered work for artists, actors, and writers. It lasted until 1943 and employed over eight and a half million people over the course of its existence.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): This federal initiative was a massive and ambitious experiment in regional planning, aiming to encourage economic development in the impoverished Tennessee Valley region through agricultural improvements, flood control, and the provision of government-subsidized electrical power.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Seventeen, “A Bold Beginning with Mixed Results.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What tensions existed among the appointees of FDR’s cabinet?

How did FDR attempt to reform the financial sector?

What was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? How did it attempt to restore confidence in the banking system?

Through which initiatives did FDR aim to create jobs in order to combat unemployment?

What was the Works Progress Administration? How long did it last and how many people did it employ?

How did FDR seek to buoy the industrial and agricultural sectors?

What was the Tennessee Valley Authority?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from the song “WPA.” What do the lyrics suggest about the nature of work in New Deal programs? Is there any economic truth to such sentiments?

Analytical Skills: FDR gave 31 Fireside Chats between 1933 and 1944. Play at least one for the students to offer a sense of their format. Identify the main topic of the chat, as well as what FDR hoped to achieve through the address. How convincing does he sound?

Civic Discourse: Some historians criticize FDR for making a number of superfluous government programs that ultimately failed to solve the economic crisis of the time. Were the New Deal programs necessary for economic recovery? If they fell short, what should have been done differently?

Analytical Skills: Have students continue their chart on the different measures and approaches to stabilize the banks, provide relief, and regulate industry and agriculture.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the Banking Acts of 1933, FDIC, CCC, WPA, TVA, NIRA, NRA, AAA, fireside chats.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 17.5 and 17.6.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were FDR’s “fireside chats?” Did they live up to their purpose?

Insight: The effect of the radio on politics (and also on religion and culture generally) was considerable, as audience sizes were multiplied a thousand-fold. FDR was among the first politicians to use the radio effectively. But his “fireside chats” did something very important besides reassuring Americans that the government cared about the Depression and was trying to find solutions. The radio addresses also shifted the public’s focus away from local and state politics and toward the federal government.

Further: Before FDR, most Americans cared far more about their local and state governments than about affairs in Washington, DC: the national government was far away and (in peacetime, at least) had little direct impact on their lives. It took the crises of the Great Depression and the world wars to change that arrangement, aided by an ambitious president who, in effect, entered families’ living rooms on the radio and talked to them as though he were right there, persuading Americans to welcome the growth of federal power.

Further: The expansion of federal power during the Great War was quickly rolled back when peace came, under the slogan of “a return to normalcy.” No such reversal occurred after World War II. A powerful and active federal government became the new normal.

Was FDR’s approach to solving the economic crisis consistent with economic orthodoxy regarding the benefits of economic competition?

Insight: Not obviously. The NRA suspended price and wage competition by design, and the AAA paid farmers to produce less in order to raise prices. Whether suspending competition to end a depression is sound economics or a category error is exactly the argument of the period.

How did the Agricultural Adjustment Administration compare to the NRA? What challenges did it face? Was it successful?

Insight: Both tried to raise prices by restricting supply, and both were struck down—the NRA in 1935, the AAA in 1936. The AAA differed in that Congress found a legislative fix, and after 1938 the program resumed.

Did the Works Progress Administration (WPA) adequately address mass unemployment?

Insight: It employed over eight and a half million people across its life and built a great deal that is still standing, including work for artists, actors and writers. Whether that addressed mass unemployment or relabeled it is the question the song “WPA” puts satirically and students can put seriously.

Was the National Recovery Administration successful in its mission? What complicated its efforts?

Insight: Its mission was to set codes for wages, prices and practices across industry, and its failure was structural: the firms that knew each industry best wrote the codes, and wrote them to their own advantage. The Supreme Court ended it in 1935.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did the Banking Act of 1933 create, and up to what amount did it insure deposits?

Name the two principal initiatives Roosevelt devised to revive industry and agriculture.

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, insuring deposits up to $5,000. (2) the National Industrial Recovery Act and the National Recovery Administration for industry; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for agriculture.

Explain

The NRA’s codes were quickly turned to the advantage of the largest firms in each industry. What does that suggest about writing rules for an economy from inside it?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that whoever knows an industry best is best placed both to advise on its rules and to bend them, so expertise and capture arrive together. A partial answer says only that big business took advantage.

Daily Recap

After his inauguration, and especially during his first 100 days in office, FDR implemented an ambitious program aimed at mitigating the Great Depression. Through jobs programs like the CCC and WPA, and myriad new regulations of industry, finance, and agriculture, FDR vastly expanded federal power. Despite mixed results, these programs were welcomed by the American people as a sign of their government’s commitment to enhancing their welfare.

Looking Ahead

The programs are in place and some are already in the Court’s hands. The next lesson turns from what Roosevelt built to who opposed it—and finds the sharpest attacks coming from his own party as well as from the Right.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: agency, insure, relief, code, subsidy, strike down.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The ___ was created to ___.” · “It ended when ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: name three agencies and what each was for, aloud, before writing.

Show understanding without a paragraph: match six acronyms (FDIC, CCC, WPA, NRA, AAA, TVA) to their purposes.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.5 FDR’s Challengers (pp. 577–581)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 577–581

Exercise: the Speaking Skills exercise on Long and the American Liberty League

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 582–586 for Lesson 17.6

Essential Understanding

Opposition to the New Deal came from every direction at once—from Hoover, from the American Liberty League, from Huey Long on the Left—and Roosevelt answered all of it with the largest electoral victory in American history to that point.

Lesson Objectives

FDR’s challengers from both right and left; the Second New Deal; FDR’s reelection in 1936.

Key Dates

1935, July 5 – The National Labor Relations Act becomes law

1935, Aug. 14 – The Social Security Act is passed into law

1936, Mar. 4 – The first hydroelectric dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority begins operation

1936, Nov. 3 – Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection

Key Concepts

Whatever its tangible economic results, the Roosevelt administration’s amazing flurry of activity produced one indisputably good effect: it lifted people’s spirits, convincing Americans that their government cared about them and was determined to address the plight of vulnerable citizens.

But FDR faced significant opposition. Herbert Hoover, in his 1934 book The Challenge to Liberty, disparaged the New Deal as “the most stupendous invasion of the whole spirit of Liberty” the United States had ever seen.

Perhaps the greatest political threat to Roosevelt came from Huey P. Long, a governor and then senator from Louisiana whose populist policies and demagogic rhetoric won him a large following—and the enduring enmity of governing elites.

The most enduringly significant of FDR’s domestic programs was likely the Social Security Act of 1935, which set up a pension system for the elderly and was called by FDR himself the “cornerstone” of the New Deal.

Despite little improvement in the economy, FDR achieved the most commanding electoral triumph in American presidential history to date, defeating the decent but hapless Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, while both consolidating and adding to the coalition that had brought him victory in 1932.

Key Terms

American Liberty League: This bipartisan group was organized to protest the steady growth of executive power and extraconstitutional measures of the Roosevelt administration; its leadership featured both John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, and Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic candidate, together with many notable Republicans.

National Labor Relations Board: This federal agency was established in 1935 to enforce labor laws by certifying workers’ groups, supervising union elections, and investigating allegation of unfair employer practices.

Revenue Act of 1935: Popularly known as the soak-the-rich tax, this legislation raised tax rates on incomes above $50,000 (over $1 million in 2025 dollars) to 31 percent and raised corporate, estate, and gift taxes.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Seventeen, “FDR’s Challengers.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What effect did the New Deal have on the American national spirit?

How did Roosevelt’s party perform in the 1934 midterm elections?

What was the American Liberty League?

Who was Huey Long and what was his critique of FDR?

How can Dr. Francis E. Townsend’s pension plan be viewed as a failed attempt at Social Security?

What was the “Second New Deal”? How did it differ from the first?

What were the National Labor Relations Act and the Revenue Act of 1935?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Writing Skills: Of the various legislative acts passed under FDR, which was the most important? Ask students to address this question in a brief essay, referencing the act’s date, its main proponents and opponents, its rationale, and its outcome. Have students share their work and discuss the topic as a class.

Civic Discourse: The reelection of Roosevelt was no guaranteed matter. What had he accomplished in his first term to justify support for a second?

Speaking Skills: Ask students to formulate criticisms of Roosevelt from the perspective of either Huey Long or the American Liberty League. Invite a few students to address the class as a whole.

Analytical Skills: Have students continue their chart on the different measures and approaches to stabilize the banks, provide relief, and regulate industry and agriculture.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the Social Security Act of 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, National Labor Relations Board, the Revenue Act of 1935.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 17.6.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What impact did the Second New Deal have on the results of the 1936 election? What were those results?

Insight: The Second New Deal shifted the ground politically. Roosevelt was under pressure from the Left — Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth, Father Coughlin, Francis Townsend — and from a Right that regarded the programs as unconstitutional overreach. Measures such as Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Act answered the Left’s critique while consolidating a coalition of industrial workers, union members, farmers, urban ethnic voters, African Americans moving to the Democratic Party, and the Solid South. That coalition produced the 1936 landslide.

Insight: The chapter’s criticisms of the First New Deal’s two main programs are specific. Under the NRA, the code-writing process was dominated by the larger firms in each industry, which wrote rules favouring themselves. Under the AAA, benefits fell unevenly — landowners gained more than tenants and sharecroppers — and paying farmers to restrict production drew criticism at a time of widespread need. The Supreme Court struck down the NRA in Schechter (1935) and the AAA in United States v. Butler (1936).

Who was FDR’s strongest political opponent? Why?

Insight: Huey Long is the defensible answer, and students should say why: he attacked from the Left, where Roosevelt’s coalition lived, with a concrete program—Share Our Wealth—rather than a general objection. The American Liberty League had more money; Long had more votes available to him.

What was the Social Security Act? What did it signify in the broader trajectory of American life?

Insight: Social Security set up a pension system for the elderly and Roosevelt called it the cornerstone of the New Deal. Its significance is that it made a permanent federal obligation to individual citizens ordinary, which is a different kind of change from any emergency program.

Who was taxed by the Revenue Act of 1935? Did it have significant effects?

Insight: The Revenue Act of 1935 raised rates on incomes above $50,000 and raised corporate, estate and gift taxes. William Randolph Hearst called it communism and the Chamber of Commerce, which had endorsed Roosevelt in 1932, turned against him—so its largest effects may have been political rather than fiscal.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Share Our Wealth program, and who proposed it?

Which New Deal measure did Roosevelt himself call the “cornerstone” of the New Deal?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Huey Long’s plan to redistribute wealth to every citizen. (2) the Social Security Act of 1935.

Explain

Roosevelt was attacked from the Right for going too far and from the Left for not going far enough, and won in a landslide. How can both attacks be true at once?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the New Deal was a coalition rather than a doctrine, so it could be measured against two incompatible standards and fall short of both while satisfying most voters. A partial answer treats one critique as sincere and the other as opportunism.

Daily Recap

Despite his broad popularity with the public, FDR faced numerous and well-organized political challenges over the course of his presidency, both from conventional and radical elements. Nonetheless, after the successful implementation of his Second New Deal he won reelection in a landslide, solidifying his political dominance in Washington.

Looking Ahead

At the height of his power Roosevelt turns to the one institution that has consistently defeated him. The next lesson follows that decision—and finds that the second term costs him more than the first term won.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: oppose, redistribute, pension, landslide, coalition.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “___ attacked Roosevelt because ___.” · “He answered by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: state one criticism from the Right and one from the Left aloud.

Show understanding without a paragraph: place four critics on a line from Left to Right.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

17.6 The New Deal Halted (pp. 582–586)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 582–586

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on whether Roosevelt exceeded his office

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: Chapter Eighteen, pp. 587–595

Essential Understanding

Roosevelt’s attempt to enlarge the Supreme Court may have changed how the Court ruled, but it cost him his coalition in Congress and ended the New Deal as a program of new legislation.

Lesson Objectives

Roosevelt’s second term; his efforts to consolidate power and advance his New Deal programs; his electoral setback in 1938; and the end of the New Deal.

Key Dates

1937, Jan. 12 – The Executive Reorganization Act is introduced to Congress

1937, February 5 – Roosevelt unveils his “court-packing plan”

Key Concepts

The “Roosevelt Recession” in 1937–38 reversed the gains that had been made since 1933 and weakened public trust in Roosevelt’s economic wizardry.

FDR’s effort to enlarge the Supreme Court, which his outraged opponents labeled a “court-packing” scheme, was intensely controversial, not only among Republicans but also among many liberals, who were deeply concerned about the precedent that would be set.

Undaunted by his critics, Roosevelt responded with angry determination: he attempted to rid his party of those who had opposed him—mainly southerners—and remake the Democratic Party in the progressive image of the New Deal.

The elections of November 1938 were a debacle for FDR, in ways that went beyond the number of Democratic Party losses. The “conservative coalition” of Republicans and southern Democrats seized a lasting majority in the House, halting FDR’s momentum for new domestic programs.

Key Terms

Court packing: Roosevelt’s 1937 proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court so that additional appointments could secure majorities for New Deal legislation. Opponents named it, and the name stuck.

Conservative coalition: The bloc of Republicans and southern Democrats that took a working majority in the House after the 1938 elections and blocked further New Deal legislation.

Executive Reorganization bill: Legislation introduced in January 1937 to restructure the executive branch and expand presidential control over it; it deepened suspicion that Roosevelt was consolidating personal power.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Seventeen, “The New Deal Halted.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did FDR seek to overcome opposition from the Supreme Court?

How did the recession of 1937 impact Roosevelt’s national reputation?

What was FDR’s “court-packing” scheme? Why did it fail?

Why was the Executive Reorganization Act controversial?

What nickname did some influential newspapers give Roosevelt?

In what way was the 1938 midterm election a setback for FDR?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Writing Skills: Social Security was very controversial when first implemented, particularly since the government was seen by many as lacking the constitutional authority to institute what was effectively a pension system. Assign students to take one side of the debate and write a roughly 200-word essay either defending or opposing FDR’s program as proposed in 1935.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: While FDR won reelection decisively, his second term featured many setbacks. Why did he suffer such a resounding electoral defeat in the midterms of 1938?

Civic Discourse: Was Roosevelt excessively heavy-handed or otherwise authoritarian? How so or why not? At what point, if ever, did he exceed the legitimate authority of his office?

Analytical Skills: Have students review their comprehensive chart of the measures to stabilize the economy during the Depression. Have them use the chart to answer the following questions in writing:

What did the New Deal do that Hoover's program did not, and was the difference one of scale, of method, or of constitutional principle?

Look down the "What became of it" column. Sort the measures into three groups: those struck down, those struck down and revived, and those still operating at the end of the decade. What did the survivors have in common that the others did not?

Roosevelt unveiled his plan to enlarge the Supreme Court in February 1937. Use your chart to explain what had happened in the two years before that made him think it necessary, and say whether the chart justifies him.

Guiding Classroom Questions

In what ways had the Supreme Court thwarted FDR during his first term?

Insight: Repeatedly and on the central programs: the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, with further challenges moving through the courts as the second term opened. The pattern, not any single ruling, is what prompted the court plan.

Can the recession of 1937 justly be called the “Roosevelt Recession”? Why or why not?

Insight: The name is contested for a reason. The downturn began in 1937 and reversed gains made since 1933, and it followed policy choices Roosevelt had made—but a president who inherits a depression and is blamed for a recession within it is being held to an unusual standard. Ask students what would have to be true for the name to be fair.

How did Roosevelt’s attempt to purge conservative Democrats affect his political position?

Insight: Roosevelt intervened in the 1938 Democratic primaries against conservatives in his own party. The effort failed against most of the men he targeted, it made enemies inside the party he needed, and it damaged the aura of invincibility the 1936 landslide had given him. Taken together with the court-packing fight, it fed the perception that he was dangerously hungry for power.

Under the FDR administration, how did the relationship between government and business as well as between government and individual citizens change?

Insight: Trace three specific channels rather than generalizing: deposits insured, wages and prices set by code, and a pension paid monthly for life. Each made the federal government a party to arrangements it had previously left alone.

Does the chapter’s account of the New Deal support Andrew Mellon’s earlier argument that the economy should be allowed to purge itself, or undermine it?

Insight: Mellon’s advice was given in 1929–30, under Hoover — liquidate and let the system purge itself. Ask students to test it retrospectively against what the chapter describes: the depth and length of the downturn before 1933, the partial and uneven recovery under the New Deal, and the 1937 recession that followed a contraction in federal spending. A defensible case can be made either way, and students should be required to name the evidence they are using.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did Roosevelt propose to do to the Supreme Court in February 1937?

Which two groups formed the “conservative coalition” after the 1938 elections?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) enlarge it, so that new appointments could produce majorities favorable to his programs. (2) Republicans and southern Democrats.

Explain

The book sets Roosevelt’s court plan beside the Nazi seizure of power in the Weimar Republic. Why would contemporaries have reached for that comparison, and is it a fair one?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees why 1937 observers watching a popular leader move against a constraining court would reach for the nearest contemporary example, and also sees the disanalogies—Roosevelt proceeded by bill, lost, and accepted the loss. A partial answer either endorses or dismisses the comparison without weighing it.

Daily Recap

Having been stymied on numerous occasions by opposition from the Supreme Court, FDR proposed to increase the number of justices at the start of his second term. Though ultimately unsuccessful, this court-packing scheme may have influenced Justice Owen Roberts to begin upholding Roosevelt’s programs, and the legality of the New Deal was later consistently affirmed by FDR’s own appointees. In the meantime, having lost popular support in large part due to a sharp recession, FDR suffered a considerable defeat in the midterm elections of 1938, which limited his ability to institute new federal programs.

Looking Ahead

The New Deal ends not with repeal but with stalemate: the programs stand, the momentum is gone, and the Depression has not lifted. Chapter Eighteen supplies what Roosevelt could not—a war that does what the moral equivalent of war could not do.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: enlarge, override, precedent, midterm, stalemate.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Roosevelt wanted ___ so that ___.” · “Instead, ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain what “court packing” means in your own words before writing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: draw a two-column chart, what Roosevelt gained and what he lost in 1937–38.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

This assessment offers a model for evaluating student mastery of the chapter. Teachers may use it as written or adapt its questions to suit their own classrooms.

Timeline

Place the following events in chronological order, from earliest (1) to latest (6). Write the number in the blank.

______ 1933 — The Banking Act creates the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

______ 1937 — Roosevelt unveils his court-packing plan

______ 1930 — Hoover signs the Hawley–Smoot Tariff

______ 1936 — Roosevelt wins reelection by the largest margin to that point

______ 1932 — The Bonus Expeditionary Force marches on Washington

______ 1935 — Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Match each term to its description. Write the correct letter in the blank.

1. ______ Herbert Hoover

2. ______ Franklin D. Roosevelt

3. ______ Huey P. Long

4. ______ Al Smith

5. ______ Associationalism

6. ______ Tennessee Valley Authority

7. ______ Works Progress Administration

8. ______ Court packing

A. 1928 Democratic nominee who denounced Roosevelt before the American Liberty League

B. Federal program that built public works and employed artists and writers

C. President who met the Crash with voluntary cooperation and refused direct federal relief

D. Multi-state experiment in regional planning and public power

E. Louisiana senator whose Share Our Wealth program attacked Roosevelt from the Left

F. Proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court so new appointments could secure favorable rulings

G. Governor of New York elected president in 1932 on the promise of a new deal

H. Voluntary cooperation between government and business, championed by Hoover

Geography

Using the blank United States map provided and Map 17.1 on p. 564, shade the states carried by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the election of 1932 and label the six states carried by Herbert Hoover. Then, in one sentence beneath the map, explain what the distribution shows about the reach of the Depression.

[ART REQUIRED — CH17 Geography, STUDENT SIDE: blank United States election map based on Map 17.1, with state boundaries visible and no electoral results supplied; sized for students to shade Roosevelt’s forty-two states and label the six states carried by Hoover.]

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

What was associationalism, and how did it shape Hoover’s response to the Crash?

Why did the Hawley–Smoot Tariff worsen the Depression it was meant to relieve?

What did the Banking Act of 1933 do, and why did it matter to ordinary depositors?

Why were the NRA and the AAA both struck down, and what did each try to do?

Describe the opposition Roosevelt faced from the Right and from the Left, naming one figure on each side.

What was the court-packing plan, and what did it cost Roosevelt?

Essay

The essay should take a clear position and argue it from the chapter's evidence. Approximately 400–600 words.

Roosevelt described his administration’s fight against the Depression as the moral equivalent of war. Drawing on at least three specific New Deal measures and on the opposition the New Deal provoked, evaluate that description. Did framing an economic crisis as a war produce a response the crisis required, or a scale of executive power the crisis did not justify? Support your judgment with evidence from the chapter.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Timeline

Chronological order, as displayed: 1933 = 3 · 1937 = 6 · 1930 = 1 · 1936 = 5 · 1932 = 2 · 1935 = 4

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Matching answers: 1=C, 2=G, 3=E, 4=A, 5=H, 6=D, 7=B, 8=F.

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH17 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same United States map with Roosevelt’s forty-two states shaded and the six Hoover states—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania—clearly labeled; print at the same size as the student map.]

Roosevelt carried forty-two states. Hoover carried Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The distribution shows that the economic collapse was national rather than regional: Roosevelt carried states in every major section of the country.

Short Answer

What was associationalism, and how did it shape Hoover’s response to the Crash?

A: Associationalism was Hoover’s governing philosophy of voluntary cooperation between government officials and business leaders in place of competition or compulsion. It led him to call on businessmen to keep operating, hold wages and prices steady and avoid layoffs, and on union leaders to moderate demands and refrain from striking—an activist response that relied on persuasion rather than direct federal relief.

Why did the Hawley–Smoot Tariff worsen the Depression it was meant to relieve?

A: It raised duties on a thousand items, by as much as 49 percent, in the hope of protecting American producers. America’s trading partners retaliated, keeping American goods out of their markets; over the longer term the tariff cut American exports and imports in half and struck a further blow at a still-recovering Europe. Hoover himself opposed it and signed it out of party loyalty.

What did the Banking Act of 1933 do, and why did it matter to ordinary depositors?

A: It created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which fully insured bank deposits up to $5,000, and separated investment from commercial banking. It mattered because a depositor with an insured account has no reason to join a bank run, which removed the mechanism by which fear alone had been closing solvent banks.

Why were the NRA and the AAA both struck down, and what did each try to do?

A: The NRA set codes governing wages, prices and practices across industry and was struck down in 1935 in Schechter v. United States; the AAA paid farmers to reduce output in order to raise agricultural prices and was struck down in 1936 in United States v. Butler, when the Court held its funding tax on processors unconstitutional. Both tried to raise prices by restricting supply, and both reached beyond what the Court then held the federal commerce and taxing powers to allow. After a legislative fix in 1938 the agricultural program resumed.

Describe the opposition Roosevelt faced from the Right and from the Left, naming one figure on each side.

A: From the Right, Herbert Hoover called the New Deal the most stupendous invasion of the whole spirit of Liberty the country had seen, and the American Liberty League—led by Democrats John W. Davis and Al Smith alongside prominent Republicans—protested the growth of executive power. From the Left, Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth program proposed redistributing wealth to every citizen and drew a large following. Accept Father Coughlin or the Chamber of Commerce in place of either named figure.

What was the court-packing plan, and what did it cost Roosevelt?

A: After the Court struck down much of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed in February 1937 to enlarge the Supreme Court so that new appointments could produce majorities for his programs. The plan was intensely unpopular, including among liberals worried about the precedent, and he abandoned it. It cost him support in Congress; combined with the 1937 recession, it contributed to the 1938 elections that gave the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats a lasting House majority and ended the New Deal as a legislative program.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong essay names at least three measures accurately—candidates include the Banking Act and the FDIC, the CCC, the WPA, the NRA, the AAA, the TVA and the Social Security Act—and uses them as evidence rather than as a list. It engages the war framing directly: what it licensed, what it foreclosed, and who objected. It takes a position and defends it against the strongest objection to it.

A competent essay names three measures correctly and offers a defensible judgment, but treats the opposition as scenery rather than as argument, or asserts the war framing’s effect without showing it.

A developing essay narrates New Deal programs without reaching the question, or answers the question without evidence from the chapter.

Credit either verdict. The chapter itself is ambivalent—it records that there is little evidence the New Deal’s policies ended the Depression, and also that they lifted people’s spirits and convinced Americans their government cared. An essay that only reproduces one of those two sentences has not yet argued.

Watch for the common error of treating the Court’s rulings as proof that the programs were bad policy, or the 1936 landslide as proof that they were good policy. Both confuse verdicts with evidence.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Finest Hour:

World War II

1928–1945 · pp. 587–630

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

Throughout the 1930s, Americans remained focused on their own considerable domestic problems. Meanwhile, the situation in Europe and Asia deteriorated markedly, with the rise of brutal and aggressive dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Soon the world was once again at war. By 1941, Nazi Germany occupied or controlled almost all of Continental Europe, with only the British Isles remaining free of its grasp—for the time being. In Asia, Imperial Japan attacked and occupied much of China and parts of Southeast Asia. Despite these threats, many Americans hoped that the United States could continue to maintain its historic position of neutrality.

But such neutrality was difficult to sustain. At the insistence of President Roosevelt, the United States gradually moved toward helping to arm Britain and to protect British shipping from German submarine warfare. Americans were deeply impressed by the valor shown by British pilots in the Battle of Britain, and ancestral ties to Britain tugged at many American heartstrings. But each of Roosevelt’s steps away from neutrality was highly controversial, and opposition to American involvement in World War II coalesced into the prominent and influential American First Committee. In the end, what brought the United States fully into the war was not an emerging national consensus but instead the coordinated Japanese attacks on U.S. naval bases in Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam on December 7, 1941. Americans quickly united behind a declaration of war against Japan, which resulted in war with the other Axis powers, Germany and Italy, as well.

Though Japanese aggression was the catalyst for the American war effort, America’s leaders gave priority to defeating Hitler, reasoning that Germany posed a greater threat. With the successful D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, American troops rang the death knell for the German war machine, which capitulated within the year. In the Pacific theater, even after many American victories—and there was no doubt that the Allies would eventually defeat the Japanese—the prospect of invading the Japanese mainland was regarded with dread. The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 alone witnessed more than 250,000 deaths amid unprecedentedly numerous kamikaze attacks. Given the fierce determination of Japanese soldiers, the invasion of the mainland was certain to feature even more carnage. Some thought as many as one million Allied troops could perish in such an invasion, together with many more Japanese. The prospect of final victory could come only at a horrifying cost.

Such was the situation when President Roosevelt died in office in 1945 and his vice president, Harry Truman, succeeded him. It was not until Truman became president that he learned of the secret Manhattan Project and the production of a fearsome new weapon, the atomic bomb, which many hoped could bring the war to a less bloody conclusion than an outright invasion of Japan would entail. Truman did not hesitate to use the weapon. He made the decision to deliver an ultimatum to Japan in late July, demanding unconditional surrender in exchange for sparing the country from “prompt and utter destruction.” On August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. With no surrender forthcoming from Japan, a second bomb was dropped three days later, on Nagasaki. After the second atomic explosion, Japan surrendered. The morality of Truman’s decision, particularly whether he should have first dropped the bomb instead on an unpopulated area, has been hotly contested ever since.

With the conclusion of this devastating war, and confronted by Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the United States had no choice but to remain an international leader with a global military presence. Among the world’s surviving democracies, there was no other candidate for the job. And yet, Americans were unaccustomed to such leadership, deeply at odds as it was with much of America’s past approach to foreign policy. Would America’s rise to superpower status necessitate a complete departure from America’s past? Or would it represent its fulfillment, as the acceptance of a mission that had been implicit all along?

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The background, central events, and legacy of the Second World War, with a particular focus on the American war effort, the Allies’ strategy in defeating the Axis powers, and the transformative role the war played in American society and U.S. foreign policy.

Explain why many Americans remained reluctant to enter another foreign war despite the expansion of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Analyze how Franklin Roosevelt moved the United States from formal neutrality toward practical support of the Allies, and explain why the attack on Pearl Harbor transformed the intervention debate.

Compare the contributions of the Soviet, British, and American war efforts to the defeat of Nazi Germany, including the importance of Lend-Lease and the opening of fronts in North Africa, Italy, and France.

Explain how Germany’s defeat exposed the scale of the Holocaust and left Europe divided between a liberal-democratic West and a Soviet-dominated communist East.

Trace the American advance across the Pacific and explain why the increasing cost of Japanese resistance, especially at Okinawa, shaped planning for the war’s end.

Assess the military and moral arguments surrounding President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.

Explain how World War II transformed American society, accelerated migration and technological change, and left the United States with unprecedented global power and responsibilities.

Key Concepts and Terms

Good Neighbor Policy

Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

Axis powers

Fascism

Meiji Restoration (1868)

Rape of Nanking (1937-1938)

Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Appeasement

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Nye Committee

America First Committee

Committee to Defend America

Four Freedoms

Lend-Lease Bill

Soviet Union

Bracero Program

Code talkers

Japanese-American internment camps

D-Day

Yalta Conference (1945)

V-E Day

Manhattan Project

Key Persons

Francisco Franco

Adolf Hitler

Benito Mussolini

Joseph P. Kennedy

Wendell Willkie

Henry J. Kaiser

Earl Warren

Mark Clark

Dwight Eisenhower

Ronald Reagan

George Patton

Chester Nimitz

Omar Bradley

Albert Einstein

Harry S. Truman

Timeline

1928 Sixty-two nations sign the Kellogg–Briand Pact, seeking to outlaw war (August 27)

1933 Adolf Hitler is appointed German chancellor (January 30)

1937 Japan invades China (July 7)

1939 Germany’s invasion of Poland begins World War II (September 1)

1939 Britain and France declare war on Germany (September 3)

1940 Italy enters the war on German side (June 10)

1940 Germany begins aerial campaign known as the “Battle of Britain” (July 10)

1940 Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection for a third term (November 5)

1941 Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act (March 11)

1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union (June)

1941 Japan launches an attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7)

1941 The United States declares war on Japan (December 8)

1941 Germany and Italy declare war on the United States; Congress responds in kind (December 11)

1942 The United States War Production Board is established (January)

1944 Allied forces take Rome (June 4)

1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy (June 6)

1944 Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection for a fourth term (November 7)

1945 The “Big Three” meet in Yalta to discuss the future of postwar Europe (February 4)

1945 The Battle of Okinawa begins (April 1)

1945 Harry S. Truman is sworn in following Roosevelt’s death (April 12)

1945 Germany surrenders to the Allied forces (May 7)

1945 The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima (August 6)

1945 A second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki (August 9)

1945 Imperial Japan surrenders to the Allies, ending World War II (September 2)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

18.1 Chapter Opening – pp. 589–595 (1 to 2 classes)

Americans’ skeptical attitude toward foreign policy interventions

The modernization of Japan and the emergence of its empire

Germany under Hitler and the Nazi Party

Mussolini and the rise of Fascism in Italy

The policy of appeasement in Europe; Hitler seizes neighboring lands

The conquest of Poland; the Fall of France; Britain as the last hope of Europe

The rescue mission at Dunkirk; Churchill’s wartime leadership as Prime Minister

18.2 Overcoming Neutrality – pp. 596–600 (.5 to 1 class)

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz

America supplies ships to the British navy

The debate between interventionists and isolationists

The Election of 1940

Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech

The Lend-Lease Act

18.3 America Joins the Allies – pp. 601–604 (.5 to 1 class)

The background to Pearl Harbor

The Japanese surprise attack

Japan’s miscalculation

America’s response

Germany and Italy declare war on the United States

18.4 Mobilizing the Arsenal of Democracy – pp. 605–608 (.5 to 1 class)

America outstrips the world in manufacturing capacity

The private sector devotes itself to the war effort

Women enter the workforce as men join the military

The large northward migration of African Americans

Japanese internment

18.5 Europe First – pp. 609–616 (1 to 2 classes)

German U-Boats

Americans forces take North Africa and proceed to Italy

The enormous Soviet death toll on the Eastern Front

D-Day

The Yalta Conference

The Battle of Berlin; Eisenhower allows the Soviets’ westward advance

18.6 Defeating Imperial Japan – pp. 617–620 (.5 to 1 class)

Naval battles at Coral Sea and Midway

The Guadalcanal Campaign

Island Hopping

The Philippines Campaign; Japanese military ferocity; kamikaze attacks

The Battle of Okinawa

18.7 The Mantle of Leadership Passes to America – pp. 621–630 (1 to 2 classes)

The death of Roosevelt

The discovery of Holocaust death camps

The development of the atomic bomb

The early presidency of Harry Truman

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Japanese surrender

The legacy of World War II

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

The Finest Hour, chapter epigraph (p. 587)

The chapter opens on the claim that the democratic peoples of the world find their chief strength in their rank and file, in the resources of the common people who had made democracy what it was, and that they had always risen to meet their greatest crises. The proposition was genuinely in doubt when it was made. Through the 1930s the dictatorships had presented themselves as more efficient than the democracies, and the democracies’ own conduct at Munich had done nothing to refute them. The chapter’s title is a claim that the doubt was answered, and answered from below—by shipyard workers, by women entering factories, by farm boys in landing craft—rather than by any single leader. McClay is consistently more interested in what a war revealed about a society than in its campaigns, and this chapter gives an entire subsection to mobilization at home before it reaches Europe. Return to the epigraph after 18.4, and ask whether a claim about the strength of the common people survives what was done to some of them.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 18.1 · Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The Four Freedoms” Speech, January 6, 1941 (p. 600)

Roosevelt’s annual message to Congress, delivered eleven months before Pearl Harbor and two months before Lend-Lease, at a point when the United States was formally neutral and Britain was alone in Europe and nearly out of money. He names four freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, from fear—as universal entitlements rather than American peculiarities, and in doing so gives a country that does not want a war a reason it might accept one. Two of the four are freedoms from rather than of, which carries the New Deal’s vocabulary of economic security into foreign policy; students who have read Chapter Seventeen will recognize the move. The audience is Congress formally and the public actually. The common error is to read the speech as a statement of war aims. It predates American belligerency by almost a year, and is better understood as an argument for intervention made without the word.

Primary Source 18.2 · Company A, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, Joint Account of D-Day Events, 1944 (p. 615)

A unit account rather than a commander’s memoir, compiled from the men of a single company—one of the formations that landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach and took among the heaviest casualties of the morning. The form is what makes it valuable. Most accessible D-Day narratives are written from above, by officers with a map; this one has no map. The field of view is a few yards of sand, and events arrive in the order the writers experienced them rather than the order that later made sense of them. Use the account to show students the difference between a participant’s account and a historian’s reconstruction; that difference is visible in the prose itself. Supply a short gloss of the military abbreviations first. The account is plain about what happened to named men, and teachers should read it through before deciding how to use it. Pair with Figure 18.10, the same morning from the ramp of a landing craft.

Primary Source 18.3 · Edward R. Murrow, “Broadcast from Buchenwald,” April 15, 1945 (p. 623)

Murrow was the most trusted broadcast journalist of the war, known to Americans from his London rooftop reports during the Blitz. He entered Buchenwald days after its liberation and broadcast three days later. His habitual method was understatement, and here he abandons it while telling listeners that he is abandoning it: he says plainly that he has no adequate words and asks them to believe him anyway. The refusal to perform is the performance, and it is why the broadcast has lasted. The audience was a domestic radio public that had been told about the camps and had not seen them. This is the most difficult document in the chapter. Teachers should read it in full themselves before deciding how to use it and should tell students in advance what it describes. Use it with Figure 18.14, which shows Eisenhower at Ohrdruf: both are acts of recording undertaken against an anticipated future denial.

Primary Source 18.4 · Henry Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947 (p. 626)

Stimson was Secretary of War under Roosevelt and Truman and the senior civilian official responsible for the atomic program. He wrote this two years after the event, for a general magazine, at a point when the decision was already being questioned. It is not a record of the decision but a defense of it, composed with knowledge of the criticism it answers—which does not make it unreliable so much as make it evidence of two things at once: the reasoning as Stimson wished it understood in 1947, and the pressure that made a defense necessary. Use the distinction to teach the difference between a source that records an event and one that argues for a later interpretation of it. Read it after 18.6, because the casualty projection Stimson relies on is an extrapolation from Okinawa, and an extrapolation is an argument rather than a fact. Ask what evidence would have to exist for the question to be settled either way.

Figures

Figure 18.1 · Mitchell Jamieson, Invasion Craft – Sicily, 1943 (p. 587; the chapter-opening plate)

Jamieson worked for the U.S. Navy as a combat artist, and the painting shows American soldiers with bayonets bared preparing to land on the coast of Sicily during the 1943 invasion. It is a government-commissioned work, and the point is worth making to students: the state paid artists to record what it was doing, and the results are now among the period’s most-used images. The men are waiting rather than fighting. Jamieson has chosen the moment before, which is a decision and not a limitation, and asking students why he chose it opens the chapter better than any summary of the campaign. Show it first and ask them to describe the mood before they are told the subject, then tell them these men are minutes from a beach.

Figure 18.3 · Ernest A. Taylor, Ruins of the Coventry Cathedral after a German Air Raid, 1940 (p. 594)

The shell of Coventry Cathedral after the raid of November 1940. The building was medieval and the city was industrial, and the Luftwaffe’s target was the second while the photograph records the first—which is precisely why the image traveled. Students should be asked what a photograph of a ruined church argues that a photograph of a ruined factory does not. This is the Blitz as Americans saw it in 1940 and 1941, and the chapter’s account of the American argument over intervention depends on the fact that they were seeing it. Use it in 18.2 with the Four Freedoms speech: Roosevelt was addressing a country that had watched this happen to a democracy and had not yet decided what it owed. The question of what a neutral nation owes an attacked one is the lesson’s, and the image is where it becomes concrete.

Figure 18.6 · American Citizen: What Can You Do About This, circa 1942–45 (p. 606)

A mobilization poster quoting Admiral Yamamoto vowing to dictate peace to the United States in the White House at Washington. The book’s own caption is unusually direct about what is wrong with it: the quotation is an embellished translation of a private letter in which Yamamoto, who had personally witnessed America’s industrial might, actually warned Japanese politicians against starting a war he doubted Japan could win. The poster inverts its source. McClay also says plainly that racist propaganda posters like this one ran nationwide in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and does not soften it. This is the strongest single document in the chapter for source evaluation, because the falsification is documented rather than alleged. Ask students how they would establish what Yamamoto actually wrote, and what it costs a wartime government later to have been believed at the time. It belongs beside 18.4’s treatment of internment.

Figure 18.7 · Alfred Palmer, Women Work in a Douglas Aircraft Company Factory Preparing Nose Cones for A-20 Havoc Bombers, 1942 (p. 607)

Women doing skilled industrial work on military aircraft in a plant that had been building airliners. Mobilization was the decisive American contribution to the war, and this is what it looked like from the inside—not a recruiting poster but a shop floor. What repays attention is the scale of the components and the ordinariness of the scene: nothing in the composition suggests that anything unusual is happening, which is itself the historical claim. Students often assume that women’s wartime work was universally welcomed and straightforwardly temporary; the chapter is more careful than that, and the postwar reversal belongs to Chapter Nineteen. Use the image in 18.4 with Figure 18.9, so that the lesson’s treatment of who worked and who served is carried by two pictures rather than one.

Figure 18.9 · Navajo Corporal Lloyd Oliver Operates a Field Radio While Attached to a Marine Artillery Regiment in the South Pacific, 1943 (p. 608)

One of the Navajo code talkers at work. The book supplies the detail: in early 1942 Oliver and twenty-eight other Navajo men were recruited by the Marine Corps for their command of a complex and uncommon language, and the code they built on it was indecipherable even to other native speakers and was never broken. The chapter names the code talkers among its Key Concepts and this is the only image of them. A good opening question is why an unwritten language made a better cipher than any machine of the period, which turns the photograph into a problem rather than an illustration. Students frequently raise the tension between this recruitment and federal policy toward Native languages in the preceding decades; the question is legitimate and the chapter leaves room for it. Use it in 18.4.

Figure 18.10 · Robert F. Sargent, Into the Jaws of Death, 1944 (p. 615)

American soldiers leaving a landing craft at Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944, facing artillery, mines, barbed wire and machine guns. The book gives two numbers that should be in front of students while they look at it: casualties exceeded ten thousand by the end of the day, and 155,000 Allied soldiers reached the shore and took control of the French coast. The photograph is taken from inside the craft, so the viewer stands where the men are standing and sees what they see, which is why it has lasted and why it is worth previewing before showing. Use it immediately after Primary Source 18.2, which is the same morning in words. Read the account first: the image will then confirm an impression students have already formed rather than supply one.

Figure 18.14 · General Dwight Eisenhower and Other High-Ranking U.S. Army Officers View the Bodies of Prisoners Killed During the Evacuation of Ohrdruf, 1945 (p. 622)

The Allied command at a subcamp of Buchenwald, days after its capture. Eisenhower went deliberately and ordered the camps photographed and filmed and local civilians brought through them, on the stated expectation that the facts would later be denied. That intention is the reason the image exists, and it is the reason to use it: the photograph is not incidental documentation but an act taken against an anticipated future. Preview it before showing and tell students what they will see. Pair it with Murrow’s broadcast in Primary Source 18.3, made the same month. Together they let a class ask what it means to gather evidence against a disbelief that has not happened yet, which is a question that reaches well past this chapter.

Figure 18.17 · American Cemetery in Normandy, 1955 (p. 629)

The cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, whose 9,389 gravestones mark those who died on D-Day and in the operations that followed. The site began as a temporary American burial ground, became the first American Second World War cemetery in Europe, and was later granted permanently to the United States by the French government. The date is the thing to notice: 1955, a decade after the war, and the only object in the chapter that looks back rather than records. Everything else here was made during the events it shows. Use it to close 18.7, and set it against Figure 18.1, the men waiting in the landing craft at the chapter’s opening. Set the two images side by side and ask students what happened between them; it makes a better closing exercise than a summary.

Maps

Map 18.1 · Pearl Harbor and Invasions of Southeast Asia, December 1941–June 1942 (p. 604)

The map places Pearl Harbor inside the wider Japanese offensive of the winter of 1941–42, reaching into the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. What it corrects is the almost universal assumption that Pearl Harbor was an isolated surprise raid. It is one arrow among many, launched within hours of the others, and the targets are resources and sea lanes—oil, rubber, tin—rather than territory for its own sake, which is what makes an otherwise reckless strategy legible. Have students trace the simultaneity before they read the narrative. Use it with 18.3 to show students how a well-executed attack produced the opposite of what it was meant to produce because it was flank protection for an offensive aimed elsewhere, and it converted a divided country into a united one while leaving American industrial capacity untouched.

Map 18.2 · The Second World War, European Theater, 1942–45 (p. 610)

The book’s caption states the starting condition plainly: before American entry most of continental Europe was controlled by Hitler and the Axis powers, and only the British Isles held out. Two things repay attention. The extent of Axis control at its height, which students consistently underestimate, and the direction of the arrows—pressure comes from the east long before it comes from the west. The Eastern Front dwarfs everything else on the map in scale, and that fact makes the Soviet position at Yalta comprehensible without any argument about diplomacy. An American-centred account leaves students surprised by the size of the Soviet contribution, and the map is a better correction than a paragraph because they draw the conclusion themselves. Use it in 18.5 to have students examine the scale of Soviet losses and what that cost meant for Stalin’s position among the Allies.

Map 18.3 · D-Day Landings and Allied Advance, June 6–12, 1944 (p. 612)

The first week of the largest amphibious assault in history. The book gives the figures: 133,000 American, Canadian and British troops landed on the Normandy beaches while another 24,000 paratroopers were dropped behind the lines, and the operations opened a second Western Front and laid the groundwork for the Allied victory in Europe eleven months later. What students should measure is how little ground is taken in seven days relative to the size of the force, and how separated the beaches are. D-Day is commonly taught as the turning point of the war; the chapter’s own chronology places the turn earlier and further east, and the dates on this map make that arguable rather than assertable.

Map 18.4 · The Second World War, Pacific Theater, 1941–45 (p. 620)

The Japanese Empire at its 1942 height, stretching from Manchuria and Burma to the isolated islands of the central Pacific, and the island-hopping campaign that reduced it. The distances are the lesson. The Pacific war’s defining problem is measured in ocean, and a student who has not looked closely at this map will not understand why particular islands mattered or why the campaign took the shape it did. The Allied advance deliberately bypasses garrisons rather than reducing each in turn, and the map shows which were taken and which were left—the pattern is the strategy. The common misreading is that island hopping meant fighting for every island; it meant the opposite, and the map is the fastest way to establish that. Use it in 18.6.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Ambrose, Stephen E. D-Day: June 6, 1944 – The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Hanson, Victor Davis. The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Herman, Arthur. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. New York: Random House, 2013.

Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1989.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 589–595)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

For a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: pp. 589–595

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on appeasement

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 596–600 for Lesson 18.2

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The aggressive dictatorships exploited the democracies’ understandable fear of another general war, while many Americans interpreted the failure of World War I as a warning against renewed intervention. The lesson asks when prudence becomes appeasement—and when nonintervention becomes untenable.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

Trace the rise of aggressive regimes in Japan, Germany and Italy through the 1930s.

Explain why the democracies met that rise with appeasement rather than resistance.

Describe how the war in Europe began and how its first year went.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1928, Aug. 27 – Sixty-two nations sign the Kellogg–Briand Pact, seeking to outlaw war

1933, Jan. 30 – Adolf Hitler is appointed German chancellor

1937, July 7 – Japan invades China

1939, Sept. 1 – Germany’s invasion of Poland begins World War II

1939, Sept. 3 – Britain and France declare war on Germany

1940, June 10 – Italy enters the war on the German side

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Following World War I, the American public was largely sympathetic to “isolationism,” in the sense that it regretted U.S. involvement in the previous war and preferred for the federal government’s focus to be on domestic matters.

Meanwhile, many European countries fell into the grips of extremist political movements, starting in 1920s Italy with the rise of Fascism, a cultish form of highly centralized and authoritarian nationalism devised by Benito Mussolini.

FDR’s determination to develop good will and cooperation with Central and South American countries, articulated in his non-interventionist “Good Neighbor Policy,” dovetailed with Americans’ tendency toward isolationism. Such neutrality would prove difficult to sustain, however, in light of coming global events.

Japan’s 1931 invasion and occupation of Manchuria was the first of a series of aggressive acts that led to its participation in World War II. Japan then occupied the important port of Shanghai and, in 1937, formally declared war against China. Japan’s brutal campaign to capture the Chinese capital city was followed by what became known as the Rape of Nanking, the massacre and torture of as many as three hundred thousand Chinese and the rape of tens of thousands of women.

Meanwhile, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler adopted increasingly aggressive tactics as well. The European powers, fearing another world war, pursued a policy of appeasement, tolerating Germany’s regional expansion to avoid large-scale open warfare.

Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 triggered the Second World War. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, Britain and France had warned that they would go to war with Germany if it invaded Poland. They carried through on this promise.

After the fall of Poland and then France to Nazi Germany, nearly 350,000 Allied troops were evacuated from the French seaport of Dunkirk, crossing the English Channel in a makeshift fleet of naval vessels and civilian crafts. In response, Roosevelt with the cooperation of Congress initiated a military buildup and began supplying aid to the British.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Blitzkrieg: German for “lightning war,” this military strategy involved the concentration of an attacking force against enemy positions, spearheaded by dense and rapidly moving columns of tanks and backed by air support. It was practiced with astonishing success by German armies during World War II, most notably in their invasion of France, as armored German units would focus their destructive power on a narrow front to puncture their opponents’ lines of defense, capturing key targets and throwing enemy lines into disarray.

Ludlow Amendment: This constitutional amendment, which was proposed several times between 1935 and 1940, would have required a national referendum on any declaration of war by Congress, unless the United States had been attacked first.

Meiji Restoration: After this return in 1868 to direct imperial rule, Japan transformed itself into an impressive industrial power, laying the groundwork for its eventual expansion in East Asia.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: This nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union laid the groundwork for Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the eastern portion of which was subsequently occupied by the Red Army.

Nye Committee: This 1930s-era congressional committee found convincing evidence that during World War I bankers and munitions manufacturers had made fortunes off of the American war effort. Its findings contributed to the initially widespread public opposition against U.S. involvement in World War II.

Remilitarization of the Rhineland: The crucial industrial area of the Rhineland in northwestern Germany had been demilitarized by the terms of the Versailles Treaty and was occupied by Entente troops from 1918 to 1930. In 1936, Hitler ordered the movement of German soldiers into the region, nearly provoking war with France.

Spanish Civil War: This brutal civil war from 1936 to 1939 featured mass atrocities and resulted in the establishment of a military dictatorship in Spain under Francisco Franco, whose “Nationalist” faction triumphed with German support over Soviet-backed “Republicans.”

Sudetenland: This ethnically German area along the western border of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Hitler in October 1938 as a result of the Munich Conference between Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Eighteen.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Americans feel about the prospect of going to war again after their experiences during World War I?

Did the United States’ relationship with Latin American countries improve or deteriorate in the period after World War I? How so?

What were the respective political situations of Japan, Italy, and Germany during the 1930s?

What happened to the Chinese city of Nanking?

What military actions did Japan, Germany, and Italy take during the mid-1930s? How did western democracies respond?

What triggered war in Europe in 1939?

What was Blitzkrieg and how did it operate?

How did the first year of the war proceed?

What happened at Dunkirk?

What place did the British under Winston Churchill’s leadership occupy on the world stage by mid-1940?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What, according to the text, motivated American “isolationism” in the interwar period? What had more influence on the American public: the country’s tradition of non-interventionism in European affairs or its experience of World War I? Discuss these questions as a class.

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are members of British Parliament asked to deliver a short speech expressing their opinion on the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Have students articulate their thoughts in small groups, and then invite several volunteers to address the entire class, either condemning the Munich agreement as an ineffective compromise with an evil regime or to support it by arguing that it sensibly accommodates understandable German grievances.

Writing Skills: Ask students to write a brief letter, addressed to President Roosevelt after the Fall of France, arguing that the United States should increase their support of Great Britain’s war effort. Students may decide whether they write from the perspective of Winston Churchill, an administration official, a concerned citizen, or whomever else they might choose.

Analytical Skills: Have students begin a chart they will add to for the rest of the chapter as an ongoing exercise. Give it four columns — Action, Date, What it did, Neutral or a step toward war? — to be filled in as the chapter proceeds.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, the Nye Committee's findings, the proposed Ludlow Amendment, and the Neutrality Acts, along with Roosevelt's decision after Dunkirk to begin a military buildup and supply aid to the British.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 18.2 and 18.3.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

Why is it misleading to call American foreign policy “isolationist” in the interwar years?

Insight: It is more accurate to say that after intervening in World War I, the United States reverted to a more traditional foreign policy of George Washington and John Quincy Adams. This policy was not “isolationist” because the United States was a party to several international initiatives, including the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. America’s trading relationships with other nations continued to expand as well.

What was the “Good Neighbor Policy”?

Insight: Building on more than a decade of improving relations with Latin America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which committed the United States to noninterference and nonintervention towards the Latin American countries.

How did the United States and other world powers use treaties, agreements, and conferences to try to prevent another war?

Insight: The United States played a leading role in promoting the cause of general disarmament — sponsoring the Washington Naval Conference of 1921, which sought to limit the naval arms race among the major powers, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, which sought to eliminate war as an instrument of national policy and attracted sixty-two nations as signatories. Many world powers joined the League of Nations, an international security organization—though the United States did not join.

What was appeasement, and how effective was it in preventing another world war?

Insight: Appeasement was not simply passivity. Britain and France were constrained by military unreadiness, memories of the slaughter of 1914–18, doubts about some provisions of the Versailles settlement, and fear of another general European war. Some German demands also appeared at first to concern populations and borders unsettled after World War I. The policy failed because Hitler’s aims were not limited enough to be satisfied by concessions: each success strengthened Germany and encouraged further demands. Students should distinguish why appeasement could look prudent in 1938 from why it proved disastrous in retrospect.

What led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the Far East?

Insight: The primary cause was the agenda of national aggrandizement by Germany and Japan. Both nations captured large amounts of territory, and for the most part the democracies of the West engaged in a policy of appeasement that sought to avoid war. Finally, Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 after Britain and France warned Germany not to, and they declared war on Germany in fulfillment of their mutual defense treaties with Poland.

How did the United States react to outbreak of World War II?

Insight: American public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of staying out of the war by remaining neutral. There was even a constitutional amendment proposed (the Ludlow Amendment) that would have required congressional declarations of war to be voted on in a national referendum. Neutrality acts were passed that prohibited the United States from trading with the combatants.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What happened to the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937?

What was Blitzkrieg, and how did it work?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Japanese forces took the city and committed mass atrocities against its population. (2) a fast combined-arms assault—armor and air power concentrated to break a line and drive through it rather than grind against it.

Explain

Appeasement looks indefensible in hindsight. What made it look reasonable in 1938?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer takes the position seriously—a generation that had buried its sons in 1914–18 had every reason to exhaust negotiation first—and then identifies what the policy misread, which was that Hitler’s demands were not a list to be satisfied. A partial answer condemns appeasement without reconstructing it.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

The American public remained largely indifferent to foreign affairs well into World War II, even as Hitler’s armies conquered much of continental Europe. Scarred by the country’s experience in the Great War, and still recovering from the Great Depression, Americans resisted the prospect of breaking with historical precedent to involve themselves again in a costly foreign conflict.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

Europe is at war and America is not. The next lesson follows the argument inside the United States over whether that could last.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: appeasement, aggression, neutrality, authoritarian, nonintervention.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Appeasement seemed reasonable to some leaders because ___, but it failed because ___.” · “American nonintervention differed from complete isolation because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain why a policy can appear prudent at one moment and prove mistaken later.

Show understanding without a paragraph: sort six events into aggression, diplomatic response, and military response, then mark the point at which war began.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.2 Overcoming Neutrality (pp. 596–600)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 596–600

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on intervention

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 601–604 for Lesson 18.3

Essential Understanding

Britain’s survival in 1940 changed the American intervention debate, while Roosevelt used reelection, rhetoric, and material aid to move the United States from formal neutrality toward practical support of the Allies without yet entering the war.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

Contrast the interventionist and isolationist cases in America.

Explain how Lend-Lease moved the United States toward belligerency without a declaration.

Key Dates

1940, July 10 – Germany begins the aerial campaign known as the “Battle of Britain”

1940, Nov. 5 – Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection for a third term

1941, Mar. 11 – Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act

Key Concepts

During the Battle of Britain, the Royal Air Force defeated the German Luftwaffe’s effort to gain control of British skies, which Hitler needed before any amphibious assault could be attempted. This success prevented a German invasion of Great Britain and contributed to shifting public opinion toward support for Britain in the United States.

In a December 1940 fireside chat, FDR described the United States’s role in the war as being an “Arsenal of Democracy,” supplying Great Britain with the planes, tanks, ships, and munitions that it would need to win—so that, Roosevelt said at the time, Americans would not have to take part in the fighting.

FDR identified “Four Freedoms” in his January 6, 1941 message to Congress, justifying American involvement in World War II to counter the rise of totalitarian regimes that threatened: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

In September 1941, Roosevelt announced a “shoot on sight” order for American naval vessels against any German or Italian raiders after the Germans’ sinking of the USS Greer, which—unbeknownst to the American public—had been shadowing a German U-boat and reporting its location to the British.

Key Terms

America First Committee: Founded at Yale Law School, this influential noninterventionist group included more than 800,000 members at its peak and was led by General Robert E. Wood and its spokesman Charles Lindbergh.

Blitz: In this eight-month bombing campaign that began in September 1940, the German Luftwaffe attempted to terrorize the British population into submission after its failure to secure air supremacy during the Battle of Britain. In a single raid during May 1941, German bombers dropped 711 tons of explosives on London, causing nearly 1,500 deaths and widespread destruction.

Cash and carry: The policy that required belligerent nations to pay in full and transport war materiel in their own ships. Lend-Lease set the requirement aside, allowing Britain to receive supplies without immediate payment.

Lend Lease Act: The act, proposed by FDR and passed by Congress in March 1941, enabled the President to lend or lease any war supplies to Britain—or any other country whose defense he considered important to the national interest.

Luftwaffe: Founded in 1935, the German Luftwaffe became the most advanced air force in the world by 1940.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Eighteen, “Overcoming Neutrality.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What were the stakes of World War II, according to Winston Churchill?

What would Hitler need in order to stage an amphibious invasion of Britain?

What was the strategic aim of the Blitz and why did Hitler resort to it?

What effect did Britain’s victory in the Battle for Britain have on the isolationism vs. interventionism debate in the United States?

In what way was Roosevelt’s 1940 campaign for president unconventional?

What were Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”?

What was the Lend Lease Act?

How was the Greer incident an example of the United States’ “walking on a knife’s edge”?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: Consider the extended excerpt in the text from Winston Churchill’s celebrated 1940 address to Parliament. Ask a student volunteer to read the quotation aloud and then discuss the following questions: what are Churchill’s aims at the time of this speech? How did his rhetoric help achieve them?

Argumentation: Ask students to reconstruct the 1940 third-term debate. What arguments could Roosevelt’s supporters make for breaking the two-term tradition, and what arguments could opponents make against it? Which argument depends most heavily on the international emergency?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Was FDR justified in concealing the exact circumstances of the Greer incident, such that he made it seem like the U.S. destroyer had been attacked without due cause?

Civic Discourse: The chapter names the two organizations that carried the interventionist and noninterventionist causes 1940: the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, led by the Kansas journalist William Allen White, and the America First Committee, led by General Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck and Charles Lindbergh. Divide the class between them and stage a debate. Close by having each student write which side they would have joined in 1940, and what the strongest point on the other side was.

Insight: The interventionist side should build its case from Roosevelt's "Arsenal of Democracy" fireside chat, the Four Freedoms, Lend-Lease, and Churchill's appeal to "give us the tools, and we will finish the job." The noninterventionist side should build its case from the Nye Committee's finding, the proposed Ludlow Amendment, and the fear of being drawn into war.

Analytical Skills: Have students add to the chart they began in Lesson 18.1. From this lesson they should add the destroyer transaction Roosevelt cast as a "trade" for the use of eight British naval bases, the "Arsenal of Democracy" fireside chat of December 1940, the Four Freedoms message of January 6, 1941, the Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941, and the "shoot on sight" order of September 1941 following the sinking of the USS Greer, and the America First Committee.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lesson 18.3.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did Britain’s victory over Germany in the Battle of Britain change American policy?

Insight: President Roosevelt was able to supply Britain with destroyer ships to aid Britain in the sea battle against German submarines. Roosevelt accomplished this under the guise of a “trade” with Britain rather than direct assistance in order to get around the neutrality acts and American public opinion, which was still heavily against getting involved in the war. In 1940, Roosevelt won an unprecedented third presidential term, and this victory emboldened him to make the “great arsenal of democracy” speech advocating for more direct support for the Allies against the Axis.

What was the Lend-Lease Act?

Insight: The Act gave the president the power to lend or lease war supplies to any country he deemed important to the national interest. Britain received massive aid under this law. This law thus removed any pretense of American neutrality, and it was the primary example of how America was getting more and more involved in the war on the side of the Allies. In addition, the U.S. Navy was helping Britain’s fight against Germany on an undeclared basis.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What were Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”?

What did the Lend-Lease Act allow the United States to do?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. (2) supply war materiel to Britain and other Allies without immediate payment, and so without the cash-and-carry constraint.

Explain

Was Lend-Lease consistent with neutrality? Argue it either way, and say what your answer turns on.

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the question turns on whether neutrality is a legal status or a practical posture: legally the United States was not a belligerent, practically it had chosen a side and was arming it. A partial answer asserts one and ignores the other.

Daily Recap

President Roosevelt gradually introduced the American public to the idea of intervening in World War II. Bolstered by his election to an unprecedented third term, he instituted the policy of Lend Lease, which gave him as president an unprecedented amount of discretionary power, effectively allowing him to bypass Congress in making resource-allocation decisions. His domestic strategy mirrored that of Churchill, in the sense that they both made use of powerful rhetoric and culturally significant themes to convince their people of the need to defeat Nazi Germany.

Looking Ahead

The argument over intervention ends in a single morning. The next lesson is Pearl Harbor.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: intervention, neutrality, belligerent, Lend-Lease, Four Freedoms.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Legally the United States remained neutral, but practically it ___.” · “Roosevelt justified aid to Britain by arguing ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: state the strongest interventionist argument and the strongest noninterventionist argument before choosing between them.

Show understanding without a paragraph: place destroyers-for-bases, Four Freedoms, Lend-Lease, and shoot-on-sight on a continuum from neutrality to belligerency.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.3 America Joins the Allies (pp. 601–604)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 601–604

Exercise: the Analytical Skills exercise on the attack’s aims

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 605–608 for Lesson 18.4

Essential Understanding

The background, events, and aftermath of Pearl Harbor; Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Lesson Objectives

Explain Imperial Japan’s strategic aims in East Asia.

Describe the attack on Pearl Harbor and its immediate results.

Explain why Japan’s calculation failed.

Key Dates

1941, June - Germany invades the Soviet Union

1941, Dec. 7 – Japan launches an attack on Pearl Harbor

1941, Dec. 8 – The United States declares war on Japan

1941, Dec. 11 – Germany and Italy declare war on the United States; Congress responds in kind

Key Concepts

When the Japanese occupied French Indochina in July 1941, Roosevelt responded by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and embargoing shipments of U.S. oil to Japan. Since Japan lacked oil fields of its own, this embargo put great pressure on Japan’s war effort against China.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, though U.S. intelligence services knew that an attack was coming somewhere. On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese warplanes battered the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor for two hours, leaving it in shambles with eight battleships sunk or damaged, 188 planes destroyed, and twenty-four hundred servicemen killed.

The United States officially entered World War II the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, by an act of Congress. Following declarations of war on the U.S. by Germany and Italy, Congress declared war against those countries on December 11, 1941.

Several months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a German-led coalition of European countries went to war against the Soviet Union. Hitler renounced his nonaggression pact with the Soviets without warning and turned his military machine eastward in June 1941, aiming to conquer the western Soviet Union and seize the oil reserves of the Caucasus. The book calls the German invasion of Soviet Russia a colossal mistake and the single most important turning point leading to the failure of Hitler’s war effort.

Key Terms

“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”: Japan formulated this vision of a pan-Asian federation that would be firmly under Japanese Imperial leadership, promoting the larger cause of independence from Western powers throughout Southeast Asia, including in French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Eighteen, “America Joins the Allies.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Imperial Japan’s proposed vision for East Asia?

How did Roosevelt respond to Japanese expansion in 1941, and why did Japanese leaders regard that response as an intolerable threat to their war effort?

What were the immediate results of Pearl Harbor?

What was the major event in the European theater in 1941?

Was Josef Stalin a natural ally for Great Britain and America?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are congressmen in August 1941. Have them prepare a speech either supporting or opposing President Roosevelt’s embargo on U.S. oil shipments, to deliver in small groups. Then invite a few volunteers to address the entire class and discuss the theme.

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a 150 word letter, from the perspective of a Japanese general, opposing the proposed attack on Pearl Harbor.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What may have motivated Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States in December 1941. Was this decision the greatest mistake of the entire war?

Analytical Skills: Have students complete the chart they began in Lesson 18.1. From this lesson they should add the freezing of Japanese assets and the oil embargo of July 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the declaration of war on Japan on December 8, and the declarations against Germany and Italy on December 11.

Further: Then have them use the completed chart to answer the following question in writing: at which entry did the United States stop being neutral — and did the American public know it at the time?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941?

Insight: Japan expanded its war beyond China into French Indochina and other parts of Southeast Asia. Roosevelt responded by freezing Japanese assets and cutting off American oil exports. Because Japan depended heavily on imported oil, its leaders saw the embargo as a threat to their ability to continue the war and imperial expansion. They chose to strike Pearl Harbor in an effort to disable the U.S. Pacific Fleet while Japan seized resource-rich territories farther south.

Insight: Japan began to expand beyond its invasion of China into French Indochina and other parts of Southeast Asia. In response, Roosevelt embargoed American oil shipments to Japan, which Japan treated as an act of war because it depended heavily on American oil. Japan then perpetrated a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in an attempt to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

What were the effects of the Pearl Harbor attack?

Insight: The attack united a previously divided United States in support for declaring war on Japan. When the U.S. declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy responded by declaring war on the U.S., which caused the U.S. to also declare war on them.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

On what date did Japan attack Pearl Harbor, and when did the United States declare war?

Which two Axis powers then declared war on the United States?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) December 7, 1941; the declaration followed on December 8. (2) Germany and Italy, on December 11.

Japan’s planners were not fools. Why did a well-executed attack produce the opposite of what it was meant to produce?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer distinguishes the tactical from the strategic: the raid succeeded at what it aimed at and failed at what it was for, because it converted a divided country into a united one and left American industrial capacity untouched. A partial answer says only that it “awoke a sleeping giant.”

Daily Recap

Dependence on oil imports, together with a U.S. oil embargo, led to Japan’s decision to launch a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Though effective in the short-term, the attack ultimately proved disastrous for Japan, which had effectively begun a war it could not hope to win. In the same year, Hitler made a similar mistake with his invasion of the Soviet Union, which like the United States showed far greater resilience than its adversaries expected.

Looking Ahead

America is in the war on two oceans at once. The next lesson asks how a country still climbing out of the Depression armed itself for both.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: embargo, strategic, tactical, fleet, declaration of war.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Pearl Harbor succeeded tactically because ___, but failed strategically because ___.” · “Japan considered the oil embargo dangerous because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: distinguish the immediate military results of Pearl Harbor from its political and strategic consequences.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a two-column chart labeled Tactical Success / Strategic Failure with evidence from the lesson.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.4 Mobilizing the Arsenal of Democracy (pp. 605–608)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 605–608

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on internment

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 609–616 for Lesson 18.5

Essential Understanding

The enormous scale and ingenuity of America’s mobilization in 1942 and the social changes that occurred domestically during the war years.

Lesson Objectives

Describe how American industry was converted to war production.

Explain how the war changed who worked and where they lived.

Assess the internment of Japanese Americans against the country’s stated war aims.

Key Dates

1942, January – The United States War Production Board is established

Key Concepts

The United States’ wartime industrial transformation spearheaded the Allies’ drive to victory. By the end of the war, the United States had produced two thirds of the equipment used by the Allies, including 280,000 airplanes, 86,000 tanks, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. To coordinate military and economic resources, the federal government organized special agencies, including the War Production Board and the Office of War Mobilization. The Office of Price Administration regulated most aspects of civilian life, freezing prices and rents and handling the rationing of scarce commodities, such as meat, gasoline, and tires.

Economic opportunities associated with labor shortages drew African Americans out of the South, following in the steps of their forebears who prior to the Great Depression had been attracted by jobs in busy northern factories. A million African American men also joined the armed forces.

President Roosevelt authorized the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast amid wartime fears of espionage and invasion, despite the absence of individualized evidence against the vast majority of those detained. More than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, lost homes, businesses, and freedom while confined under armed guard.

Key Terms

Code Talkers: These Native Americans helped ensure the security of tactical telephone and radio communications by devising ingenious forms of coding based on their native languages.

Double V: This slogan was adopted by civil rights leaders, as a reflection of the discrimination African American veterans would face at home after fighting for liberty and equality abroad. One V stood for victory in Europe, and the other for victory in the struggle for legal equality.

War Production Board: Established by executive order in 1942, this governmental agency coordinated the production of military supplies by directing critical resources to prioritized industries and by overseeing the conversion of manufacturing facilities to meet wartime needs. Led by Donald Nelson, a former Sears, Roebuck & Co. executive, the WPB oversaw the production of astounding quantities of military equipment, such as over 12 million rifles.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Eighteen, “Mobilizing the Arsenal of Democracy.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How was the war mobilization effort administered?

What items were rationed during the war?

Did small or large companies account for most of the government’s contracting work?

Who was Henry J. Kaiser?

Which groups found fresh opportunities in the wartime workforce and the armed forces?

What did the "double-V" slogan mean, and what experience gave rise to it?

In what particular ways were Japanese Americans disadvantaged by internment?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Is the claim that World War II lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression accurate?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: After America’s entry into World War II, the government instituted freezes on rent and food prices and rationed scarce commodities. What tradeoffs are involved in such measures?

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a 150 word letter, from the perspective of a contemporary journalist, attacking the idea of Japanese internment. What arguments might sway wartime public opinion, particularly given the rampant anti-Japanese sentiment at the time?

Civic Discourse: Have students examine Figures 18.7, 18.8, and 18.9 and use them, along with the text, to construct an argument about how rights of women, Native Americans, and African Americans were expanded and contracted during the war. Have students debate which group gained the most from the war.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students write down some predictions about whether these expansions and contractions will stick for African Americans in particular when the war ends. Which things will stay? Which will shift back? Why? Have students revisit their answers in Lesson 19.9.

Analytical Skills: Have students begin a chart tracking the course of the war. Give it four columns — Date, Description, Theater or front, Turning Point? Why or Why Not?

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the establishment of the War Production Board; the scale of American war production by 1945; the wartime migration of African Americans out of the South; the million African American men who joined the armed forces; and the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans. All four belong to the home front.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 18.5, 18.6, and 18.7.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What effect did American entry into the war have on the economy?

Insight: The economy got a massive boost because of government spending and the mobilization of industries to produce military equipment. Unemployment rates were very low, and women and racial minorities entered the workforce in greater numbers than ever before.

What was Henry J. Kaiser’s contribution to the war effort?

Insight: Kaiser pioneered the mass production of commercial and naval ships, opening an important shipyard in Richmond, CA. Kaiser was able to produce a cargo ship known as the Liberty ship using prefabricated materials in record time.

How did Japanese-Americans fare during the war?

Insight: Although Japanese-Americans served honorably in the U.S. armed forces, the federal government believed that Japanese-Americans on the west coast were a potential security risk. These people were forced to sell their homes and businesses, and they were relocated to internment camps.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Who was Henry J. Kaiser, and what was he known for?

Name two groups whose working lives the war changed.

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the shipbuilder whose yards produced merchant vessels at unprecedented speed. (2) any two of: women entering industrial work; African Americans migrating north for war jobs; Mexican workers under the Bracero Program.

Explain

The United States fought a war for the Four Freedoms while interning citizens by ancestry. How should a teacher hold both facts at once?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer refuses to resolve the tension by dropping one half—the war aims were real and the internment was real, and the second is a judgment on the country that held the first. A partial answer treats internment as an unfortunate detail, or treats the war aims as pretext.

Daily Recap

American society transformed as the country went to war. Millions of young men joined the military, resulting in increased economic involvement for women and others on the home front. Under the guidance of the federal government, industrial production surged, and the United States truly became an “arsenal of democracy” in its global struggle to defeat the Axis powers.

Looking Ahead

The arsenal is built. The next two lessons spend it — first in Europe, then in the Pacific.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: mobilization, rationing, internment, migration, war production.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Mobilization expanded opportunity for ___ by ___, while restricting liberty for ___ through ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain one way wartime mobilization expanded opportunity and one way it restricted freedom.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a gains-and-costs chart for women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.5 Europe First (pp. 609–616)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 609–616

Exercise: the Analytical Skills exercise on the D-Day account

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 617–620 for Lesson 18.6

Essential Understanding

The Allies defeated Nazi Germany through converging pressure from the Soviet advance in the east and the Anglo-American campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe; the military geography of victory also shaped the political settlement that followed.

Lesson Objectives

Explain the Europe First strategy and the U-boat problem.

Trace the Allied advance from North Africa through Italy to Normandy.

Describe what was decided at Yalta and why it mattered afterward.

Key Dates

1944, June 4 – Allied forces take Rome

1944, June 6 – D-Day invasion of Normandy

1944, Nov. 7 – Franklin Roosevelt wins reelection for a fourth term

1945, Feb. 4 – The “Big Three” meet in Yalta to discuss the future of postwar Europe

Key Concepts

A military campaign is a planned effort to achieve a specific objective, often involving a series of battles. For example, Operation Torch was the name of the Allies’ campaign in North Africa, which expelled the Germans and cleared the way for the Allied invasion of Italy.

At D-Day on June 6, 1944, American-led Allied forces launched the largest amphibious invasion in human history, landing 326,000 men, 50,000 vehicles and 100,000 tons of supplies in a single week. Overcoming German defenses, the operation opened up a western front in the European Theater, marking the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

In the winter of 1944-1945, the Germans launched a desperate counter-offensive on the Western Front, hoping to recapture the vital supply port of Antwerp and to force a negotiated peace with the Americans and British. Though initially somewhat successful for the Germans, this Battle of the Bulge ultimately ended in an Allied victory, and the German war effort collapsed soon thereafter.

Key Terms

Radar and sonar technologies: Radar uses radio waves—while sonar uses sound waves—to observe objects in the air and sea. The development of these technologies improved both air defenses and the detection of submarines during World War II.

Strategic bombing: This term refers to the sustained aerial assault of strategic targets in enemy territory, such as railways, harbors, and industrial areas. Generally carried out by fleets of heavy, long-range bombers, these attacks are controversial because they almost always entail civilian deaths and collateral damage.

Yalta Conference: The second “Big Three” summit meeting—featuring Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin—was held in early February 1945 at the Soviet resort town of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. (The Tehran Conference had come earlier, and the Potsdam Conference, with Truman in place of Roosevelt, would come later). At Yalta, it was decided that postwar Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, one for each of the Allies (including France), with the capital of Berlin similarly divided and jointly occupied.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Eighteen, “Europe First.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Did the Allies prioritize the European or the Pacific Theater?

How was the German U-Boat menace neutralized?

How did the Allied invasion of Italy proceed?

When was D-Day?

What was decided at Yalta?

Why did Churchill think it was essential for the Americans on the Western Front to push as far east as possible?

What was Eisenhower’s response to Churchill’s advice regarding Berlin?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Ask the class to consider the morality of strategic bombing. In what cases might such bombing be legitimate?

Close Reading: Ask a volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from President Reagan’s Pointe du Hoc address. How does Reagan memorialize the Rangers’ tenacity and self-sacrifice? What is the significance of the excerpt’s closing line?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The text mentions the Germans’ counteroffensive in Belgium during the winter of 1944, an effort now known as the Battle of the Bulge. What strategic aims might Germany have had with such an offensive? Why did they counter-attack against the western Allies rather than the Soviets?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are Secretary of War Henry Stimson, asked by President Roosevelt for advice on whether to prioritize capturing Berlin. Have them write a short letter, arguing either for or against Eisenhower’s recommendation that Berlin be left to the Soviets.

Analytical Skills: Have students continue the chart they began in Lesson 18.4.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add Operation Torch and the campaign in North Africa; the fall of Rome; D-Day; the Battle of the Bulge; and the Yalta Conference. All five belong to the European Theater.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lessons 18.6 and 18.7.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why was D-Day such a crucial turning point in the war?

Insight: The Allied invasion of France drew German troops to the West, taking pressure off of the Soviets on the Eastern Front. The successful establishment of a beachhead in Normandy meant that the Allies had a staging ground to make rapid gains across France and the rest of Central Europe. There was then a “race to Berlin” between the western Allies and the Soviet Union.

Why did Churchill want the Western Allies to push farther east toward Berlin, and why did Eisenhower resist making Berlin the primary military objective?

Insight: Churchill feared that the Red Army’s westward advance would strengthen Soviet political leverage after the war. Eisenhower, responsible for defeating Germany at the lowest feasible Allied cost, judged Berlin a costly objective and focused on destroying remaining German forces. The occupation zones had already been negotiated, so taking Berlin first would not by itself have determined the postwar settlement; nevertheless, Churchill believed that military position on the ground could still matter politically.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

On what date did the Normandy landings take place?

Which three leaders met at Yalta, and what did they discuss?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) June 6, 1944. (2) Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin; the future of postwar Europe, including the division of Germany.

Explain

Why did the Soviet death toll on the Eastern Front give Stalin leverage at Yalta?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer connects the military fact to the diplomatic one: the Red Army had done most of the dying and by 1945 occupied most of the ground in dispute, so the question at Yalta was less what to allow than what could be refused. A partial answer notes the casualties without reaching the leverage.

Daily Recap

Overwhelming German positions in North Africa, Italy, and France, a U.S.-led coalition set the stage for the defeat of fascism in Europe. Meanwhile, the Soviet Red Army, supported in part by American Lend-Lease aid, achieved decisive victories on the Eastern Front and in the early months of 1945 rushed westward toward Berlin.

Looking Ahead

Germany is finished but Japan is not. The next lesson crosses to the Pacific.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: theater, campaign, front, occupation, alliance.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Germany was pressured from the east by ___ and from the west by ___.” · “Military position mattered politically because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain how the Eastern and Western fronts worked together to defeat Germany.

Show understanding without a paragraph: annotate Map 18.2 with one Soviet advance, one Western Allied advance, and the location of Berlin.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.6 Defeating Imperial Japan (pp. 617–620)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 617–620

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on the Okinawa campaign

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: pp. 621–630 for Lesson 18.7

Essential Understanding

After Midway shifted the strategic initiative, the United States advanced toward Japan by taking selected positions and bypassing others; the mounting cost of Japanese resistance, culminating at Okinawa, shaped the choices facing American leaders at the war’s end.

Lesson Objectives

Explain the significance of Coral Sea and Midway.

Describe the island-hopping campaign and the fighting on Okinawa.

Explain why the projected invasion of Japan shaped every decision that followed.

Key Dates

1942, June 4 – The Battle of Midway begins

1945, Apr. 1 – The Battle of Okinawa begins

Key Concepts

At the Battle of Midway in 1942, the US navy prevented the Japanese from mounting another attack on Hawaii and crippled Japan’s ability to contest American air superiority, sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers.

The Allies’ island-hopping strategy in the Pacific following the Battle of Midway meant that they progressed west from the Gilbert and Marshall islands through the Marianas and on to the Philippines by neutralizing Japanese strongholds, cutting them off from resupply and then invading smaller, less well-defended islands.

Japanese military culture drew on a modern, state-promoted interpretation of bushidō that exalted sacrifice for the emperor and stigmatized surrender. Together with military indoctrination and intense social pressure, these ideals shaped kamikaze operations late in the war. At Okinawa, military and civilian deaths together reached into the hundreds of thousands, and the scale of the fighting deeply influenced American estimates of what an invasion of the home islands might cost.

Key Terms

Kamikaze: This Japanese word means “divine wind.” In the context of World War II, it connotes the suicidal attacks of Japanese pilots who crashed explosives-laden planes into American ships, primarily aircraft carriers.

Battle of Leyte Gulf: This fight for control of the Philippines, which took place across several distinct naval battles in October 1944, was the largest naval engagement in history. The Japanese were soundly defeated and their navy rendered practically nonoperational.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Eighteen, “Defeating Imperial Japan.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was the military situation in East and Southeast Asia during the first half of 1942?

What was the result and significance of the Battle of Midway?

What was “island hopping” and how did it feature in U.S. strategy?

What was the result and significance of the Battle of Leyte Gulf?

What does “kamikaze” mean in Japanese? What were kamikaze attacks?

What was the result and significance of the Battle of Okinawa?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: As the map in the text shows, U.S. forces advanced through the Pacific and refrained from contesting Japanese control over parts of mainland Asia. Why was that the case? Was the Americans’ more direct approach prudent?

Civic Discourse: Ask the class to evaluate the morality of kamikaze attacks in the context of just war theory.

Civic Discourse: Have the class debate whether, irrespective of just war theory, fighting to the last man can ever be justified. What about specifically in the context of a war that seems inevitably lost?

Analytical Skills: Have students continue the chart they began in Lesson 18.4.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the Battle of Midway; the Guadalcanal campaign; the island-hopping advance from the Gilberts and Marshalls through the Marianas to the Philippines; the Battle of Leyte Gulf; and the Battle of Okinawa. All five belong to the Pacific Theater.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students continue to fill out this chart in Lesson 18.7.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were some important engagements in the Pacific theater of World War II?

Insight: The Battle of Midway, in which the Allies decisively defeated a Japanese attempt to take the island of Midway to use as a launching pad against Hawaii. This Allied victory severely depleted the Japanese air force. The Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major American combat operation of the war that expelled the Japanese from the Solomon Islands. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in the Philippines, almost completely annihilated the Japanese navy, and rendered the ultimate Allied victory a matter of when, not if. The Battle of Okinawa was another Allied victory, but led to numerous casualties and showed that conquering the main Japanese islands would be a tall order. The Japanese employed kamikaze attacks (suicide plane attacks).

Why did the cost of taking Okinawa change what came next?

Insight: Okinawa gave planners a casualty rate to extrapolate from for a projected invasion of the Japanese home islands, and that extrapolation became the central argument for using the atomic bomb. Students should see that the estimate was an argument built on a real battle, not a fact read off one.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the result and significance of the Battle of Midway?

What was island hopping?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) a decisive American victory that destroyed much of Japan’s carrier strength and ended its offensive initiative. (2) taking selected islands and bypassing others, to move air and naval power toward Japan without reducing every garrison in between.

Explain

Okinawa is often described as the reason for what came next. What did it show?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that Okinawa gave planners a casualty rate to extrapolate from, and that an extrapolation is an argument, not a fact. A partial answer reports the battle without reaching its use.

Daily Recap

In early 1942, Imperial Japan occupied a dominant position in East Asia and the western Pacific Ocean, even seeming to threaten Australia. U.S. forces regained the initiative through their successes at Midway and in the Guadalcanal Campaign, however. Embarking on a lengthy advance across the region’s various island chains, American soldiers began to approach mainland Japan, prompting increasingly fierce Japanese resistance.

Looking Ahead

The Pacific war has one more decision in it, and the man who has to make it has been president for four months.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: island hopping, carrier, kamikaze, invasion, casualty projection.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Island hopping worked by ___ rather than ___.” · “Okinawa mattered for later planning because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain why bypassing a Japanese position could be more useful than capturing it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: trace the Pacific advance on Map 18.4 and circle two positions that illustrate the logic of island hopping.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

18.7 The Mantle of Leadership Passes to America (pp. 621–630)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 621–630

Exercise: the Argumentation exercise on the decision to use the bomb

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: Chapter Nineteen, pp. 631–637

Essential Understanding

The defeat of Nazi Germany exposed the full scale of the Holocaust, while the atomic bombings, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and Japan’s surrender ended the conflict and left the United States with unprecedented global power and responsibility.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the end of the war in Europe and the discovery of the camps.

Explain the Manhattan Project and the decision to use the atomic bomb.

Assess what the war left the United States responsible for.

Key Dates

1945, Apr. 12 – Harry S. Truman is sworn in following Roosevelt’s death

1945, May 7 – Germany surrenders to the Allied forces

1945, Aug. 6 – The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

1945, Aug. 9 – A second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki

1945, Sept. 2 – Imperial Japan surrenders to the Allies, ending World War II

Key Concepts

Students should analyze and engage with these key ideas to ensure deep understanding:

In 1940, the U.S. government began the Manhattan Project, a secret initiative to develop atomic weaponry. The fission of uranium atoms in a nuclear chain reaction releases more energy than tens of thousands of tons of TNT, accounting for the atomic bombs’ devastating impact when dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The first bomb killed tens of thousands of people almost immediately and devastated Hiroshima; the second, three days later, did similar damage at Nagasaki. Figure 18.15 shows what remained. The atomic bombings were among the decisive shocks that brought Japan to surrender. Their effect must be understood alongside the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Manchuria, which destroyed Japanese hopes that Moscow might help mediate a negotiated settlement.

The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews. The Nazi regime also persecuted and killed millions of other people, including Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, homosexuals, political opponents, and others it classified as racial, political, or social enemies. Allied liberation of the camps in 1945 exposed the scale and machinery of these crimes to soldiers, journalists, and the wider public.

In the aftermath of World War II’s devastation, the United States and Soviet Union stood as the world’s foremost powers, with Europe divided down the middle by their respective spheres of influence.

Key Terms

Concentration camps: These were the ultimate sites of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe, where Nazi soldiers imprisoned, put to forced labor, and brutally exterminated millions of Jewish people and other non-combatants.

V-E Day: V-E Day was celebrated on May 8, the day after the Germans’ unconditional surrender to the Allies in 1945.

V-J Day: V-J day in the United States was celebrated on September 2, the day in 1945 when General MacArthur received the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh section of Chapter Eighteen, “The Mantle of Leadership Passes to America.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did the war end in the European theater?

What did the Allies discover when Central and Eastern Europe was recovered from German occupation?

What was the Manhattan Project?

Why did President Truman make the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan?

How many days separated the two atomic blasts?

What effect did the atomic bombs have, both on the sites of their detonations and on Japanese morale?

What events does the author cite as evidence of the war's "immense brutality," and how much of the war's course do they span?

What were the differences in the United States’ position in the world in 1945 versus that of 1939? And how did it compare to the Soviet Union’s?

What was the balance of power in Europe after the war, and how did it differ from the balance that existed in 1939?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analytical Skills: Whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end the war has been argued about since 1945. Primary Source 18.4 presents one side of that argument, written two years later by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a senior official involved in the decision and its defense. Have students find two or three present-day online sources on the question and, for each, name the author, the sponsoring organization, the date, and what evidence is actually cited. Ask them to state the test they applied—not to settle the question, which the sources themselves do not.

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt at the end of the chapter from Reagan’s Pointe du Hoc address. How does Reagan frame the Rangers’ bravery? How does he describe the cause for which they fought? Was his characterization of contemporary events accurate or shaped by hindsight?

Civic Discourse: Ask the class whether they think the first atomic bomb should have been dropped on an uninhabited area of Japan rather than on Hiroshima. What were the relevant factors to be considered?

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a short essay assessing whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were consistent with just war theory. Invite students to share their work in small groups and then discuss the topic as a class.

Civic Discourse: Ask students to identify the pivotal moment of World War II, the event that most helped to secure the Allies’ ultimate victory. Was it Churchill’s refusal to surrender, Pearl Harbor, the German declaration of war against the United States, the Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day, or some other event? Have students form groups, develop their arguments, and then elect one or two representatives to present their case before the entire class. Then vote on the matter at the end of the debate to assess whether any opinions were changed.

Analytical Skills: Have students complete the chart they began in Lesson 18.4.

Insight: From this lesson, students should add the liberation of the camps and Murrow's broadcast from Buchenwald; Truman's swearing-in; the German surrender; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Japanese surrender.

Further: Have students place this chart alongside the one they began in Lesson 18.1, so that the causes and the course of the war sit together in one place. Ask them to review the whole and identify the most pivotal cause of American entry into the war, together with the most pivotal turning point in each of the three arenas: the home front, the European Theater, and the Pacific Theater. Have students form groups, develop their arguments, and elect one or two representatives to present the group's case before the class. Close with a vote to assess whether the debate changed anyone's mind.

Ongoing Exercise: Have students save their tables for one final exercise on the consequences of the war in Chapter 19.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Briefly discuss some reasons that President Truman decided to use the atomic bomb against Japan.

Insight: The Battle of Okinawa had shown that the Japanese were prepared to fight for every inch of ground, and intelligence indicated that they were arming the civilian population to fight against an invasion. Casualty figures for an invasion were estimated to be in the millions. Truman decided not to use a “demonstration bombing” against an uninhabited island for fear that the bomb would not work and that the Japanese would not surrender anyway. Also there were only two bombs available.

What consequence of the war “stands out above all the others” according to the author?

Insight: The United States had become one of the preeminent world powers. No longer could it retreat to isolationism. Massive international responsibilities had been thrust upon it, even though the country may not have asked for these responsibilities. The United States was now “a self-conscious leader for the world,” according to the author.

Insight: Okinawa had shown that Japanese forces could impose severe casualties even when defeat was inevitable, and American planners expected an invasion of the home islands to be extremely costly. Contemporary projections varied widely, and later defenders of the bombing sometimes cited very high estimates. Truman and his advisers also considered the uncertainty of a demonstration, the limited number of bombs available, and whether Japan would surrender without their use. Students should distinguish the fact of expected heavy losses from later claims about any single casualty number.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Manhattan Project?

How many days separated the bombing of Hiroshima and the bombing of Nagasaki?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the top-secret government program that developed the atomic bomb. (2) three—August 6 and August 9, 1945.

Explain

Stimson defended the decision two years later. What does a defense written after the fact let a reader see that one written before it could not?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees both edges: retrospect supplies consequences the decision-maker did not have, and it also supplies the motive to justify. A partial answer treats the source as simply reliable or simply self-serving.

Daily Recap

As the German war effort collapsed in the early months of 1945, the full scale of the Nazis’ atrocities against civilians became apparent. Meanwhile, eager to end the war without further loss of American life, President Truman resorted to the use of atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender. In the aftermath of the most destructive conflict in human history, with its armies stationed throughout Western Europe and the Pacific, the United States had to confront the question of what its newfound superpower status would mean for its identity as a democratic republic.

Looking Ahead

The war is over and the alliance that won it is already coming apart. Chapter Nineteen opens on the peace that turned into the Cold War.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Holocaust, genocide, concentration camp, atomic bomb, surrender, superpower.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Japan’s surrender followed several shocks, including ___ and ___.” · “The war changed America’s world role because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: distinguish evidence available to decision-makers in 1945 from arguments made later about the atomic bomb.

Show understanding without a paragraph: make a three-part evidence chart labeled End of War in Europe / End of War in Pacific / Postwar Consequences.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

This assessment offers a model for evaluating student mastery of the chapter. Teachers may use it as written or adapt its questions to suit their own classrooms.

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order, earliest to latest.

______ Germany invades Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany

______ D-Day invasion of Normandy

______ President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act

______ The atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

______ Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

In a speech to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt stated that the Allied powers were fighting for “________________________”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

At the ________________________, the leaders of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union agreed that postwar Germany would be divided into four occupation zones.

The ________________________ was the name of the top-secret government project that created an atomic bomb.

________________________ and ________________________ were the two leading American military commanders in the Pacific theater of World War II.

The ________________________ was a military engagement in Belgium in which Germany counterattacked the invading Allied forces. This effort only delayed the Allied advance towards Berlin.

Geography

Using the World War II maps in the chapter, label each of the following locations on the map or maps provided: Germany; Italy; Great Britain; France; Poland; Normandy; Japan; Hawaii; Midway; Okinawa; Philippines; U.S.S.R.

[ART REQUIRED — CH18 Geography, STUDENT SIDE: a coordinated pair of blank outline maps — one of Europe and the North Atlantic, one of the Pacific and East Asia — with national and coastal boundaries visible and no place names supplied, sized so that students can legibly label Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France, Poland, Normandy and the U.S.S.R. on the European map and Japan, Hawaii, Midway, Okinawa and the Philippines on the Pacific map.]

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

Why were the people of the United States overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality at the beginning of World War II?

Provide examples of how the United States was providing support for the Allied powers prior to the official entry of the United States into the war.

Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor in 1941?

Discuss the effects of American entry into the war on the American economy.

Provide some examples of the contributions of women, African Americans, and Native Americans to the war effort.

Explain the significance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy for the ultimate outcome of the war.

What was the “island hopping” strategy that the U.S. military employed in the Pacific Theater?

Why did President Truman decide against using the atomic bomb in a “demonstration bombing” against an uninhabited island?

How did General Dwight Eisenhower and other American leaders respond to the discovery of German concentration camps?

What consequence of the war “stands out above all the others” according to the author?

Essay

The essay should take a clear position and argue it from the chapter's evidence. Approximately 400–600 words.

Making specific reference to President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech (PS 18.1), write an essay that explains how Roosevelt’s account of America’s responsibility to defend democracy abroad represented a departure from the noninterventionist and isolationist tendencies of the interwar years.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Timeline

Answers as ordered below; the pairings are one-to-one.

1. A A. Germany invades Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany

2. C B. D-Day invasion of Normandy

3. E C. President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act

4. B D. The atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

5. D E. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

1. Four Freedoms

2. Yalta Conference

3. Manhattan Project

4. Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz

5. Battle of the Bulge

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH18 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same coordinated pair of maps with all twelve locations clearly labeled — Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France, Poland, Normandy and the U.S.S.R. on the European map; Japan, Hawaii, Midway, Okinawa and the Philippines on the Pacific map; print at the same size as the student maps.]

All twelve locations should be correctly labeled: Germany; Italy; Great Britain; France; Poland; Normandy; Japan; Hawaii; Midway; Okinawa; Philippines; U.S.S.R.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

Why were the people of the United States overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality at the beginning of World War II?

A: American involvement in World War I (the Great War) was seen as a costly effort that did not benefit the American people in general, and they did not want to be sucked into another European conflict. The Nye Committee had reported that World War I made banks and manufacturers rich, which furthered the opposition to foreign involvement. Congress nearly passed the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum for declarations of war.

Provide examples of how the United States was providing support for the Allied powers prior to the official entry of the United States into the war.

A: President Roosevelt provided Britain with destroyer ships, claiming that this assistance was a “trade” to get around the neutrality acts that prohibited the United States from supporting the combatants. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act that gave the president the authority to lend or lease military supplies to any country the president deemed important to the national interest. The U.S. Navy was assisting Britain’s fight against German submarines on an undeclared basis.

Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor in 1941?

A: President Roosevelt embargoed American oil shipments to Japan in response to Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia. Japan saw the embargo as an act of war because it was dependent on American oil. Japan then perpetrated the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, attempting to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Discuss the effects of American entry into the war on the American economy.

A: The government engaged in massive deficit spending in order to mobilize the armed forces. The demand for military equipment gave a boost to factory production. This economic stimulus brought the country out of the Depression and dramatically reduced unemployment levels. Because much of the male population was serving in the armed forces, jobs opened up for women in factories and other industries.

Provide some examples of the contributions of women, African Americans, and Native Americans to the war effort.

A: Women increasingly filled factory jobs. The war effort accelerated the migration of African Americans to the North to fill factory jobs. One million African Americans served in the armed forces. Native Americans served as “code talkers,” using Native languages to create secret communication codes for the military.

Explain the significance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy for the ultimate outcome of the war.

A: In the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, the United States and its allies landed hundreds of thousands of men and huge numbers of vehicles and equipment on the beaches of Normandy, France. The Allies were able to establish a beachhead, which served as the essential staging ground for retaking Europe from the Germans. The invasion took pressure off of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, and it was the beginning of the end for Germany’s domination of Europe.

What was the “island hopping” strategy that the U.S. military employed in the Pacific Theater?

A: The overall goal of the U.S. in the Pacific was to cut the Japanese supply lines in the Pacific, thus rendering the Japanese navy and air force impotent. The U.S. employed an “island hopping” strategy, in which U.S. forces took control of uninhabited or lightly defended islands, and then used those islands to stage attacks that cut off supply lines to larger Japanese-controlled islands and territories. Eventually, the Japanese lost control of the islands and the seas outside of the main Japanese islands, and the Allies debated whether to conduct a full-scale invasion of Japan itself.

Why did President Truman decide against using the atomic bomb in a “demonstration bombing” against an uninhabited island?

A: There were only two atomic bombs available at the time, and there was a concern that they would not work. Using one of the bombs in a demonstration bombing carried the risk of wasting the bomb in an attack that might not prompt Japanese surrender anyway.

How did General Dwight Eisenhower and other American leaders respond to the discovery of German concentration camps?

A: Eisenhower and other generals toured the camp. Eisenhower urged that American units be brought through, so that soldiers would understand what they were fighting against.

What consequence of the war “stands out above all the others” according to the author?

A: The United States had become one of the preeminent world powers. No longer could it retreat to isolationism. Massive international responsibilities had been thrust upon it, even though the country may not have asked for these responsibilities. The United States was now “a self-conscious leader for the world,” according to the author.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong response states a clear position and supports it from the chapter. It should use Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as the statement of what the United States claimed to be defending; set that against the noninterventionist posture of the interwar years; and cite concrete prewar steps toward involvement — aid to Britain, Lend-Lease, the convoying and “shoot on sight” order — to show the distance between legal neutrality and practical alignment. A competent response identifies the shift and names at least two concrete measures but treats neutrality as a simple on/off condition. A developing response asserts a position without evidence from the chapter. Either conclusion is acceptable where the argument is historically supported.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

All Thoughts and Things Were Split:

The Cold War

1944–1959 · pp. 631–676

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

Postwar America was a land of prosperity but also racked with anxiety about the state of the world. Hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States exacerbated these concerns, leading to a protracted geopolitical struggle that became known as the Cold War.

The presidencies of both Truman and Eisenhower were preoccupied with foreign affairs. The American–Soviet rivalry took precedence above all else. After the war, the Soviet Union consolidated its dominance over Eastern Europe, setting up puppet dictatorships in violation of agreements made with the United States and England during the war. The spread of Communism, expedited by the aggressive tactics of the Soviet Union, came to be seen as a lethal threat to liberal democracy worldwide. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States sought to bolster the war-torn counties of Europe and countered Soviet aggression during the Berlin Airlift. In 1949 the United States formally organized a defensive alliance with 11 other Western democracies, known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to coordinate a response against potential Soviet invasion.

By 1949, the Soviet Union had developed atomic weapons of its own. Because of the unprecedented destruction that would result from open conflict between two nuclear powers, the United States increasingly chose to follow a policy known as containment—an approach that favored stopping the expansion of Communism but without waging open warfare to defeat Communist-controlled governments or overthrow Communist domination where it already existed. An era of limited warfare, stalemates, and wars-by-proxies ensued, most notably in Korea and Vietnam.

America’s role in the world was now dramatically and irrevocably different from what it had been prior to World War II. The undisputed leader of the free world, the United States had much influence on the foreign policy of its allies. It stood at the center of a huge web of entangling alliances and was rapidly developing a national-security apparatus that had both the capacity and the willingness to engage in covert operations all over the world. How could the republican values on which the United States was founded survive this vast expansion of power?

On the domestic front, the war gave added impetus to the Civil Rights Movement, whose momentum had been building for some time. As the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal noted, “America is continually struggling for its soul”—and a protracted struggle has always been necessary to live out more fully the American creed of equality, freedom, and opportunity. The movement toward full civil liberties for African Americans would be the next great step in that struggle.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The economic, social, and geopolitical transformation that the United States underwent following World War II, with a particular focus on the central events of the early Cold War.

Fears of a sharp postwar recession proved unfounded, as the United States instead embarked on a period of rising prosperity amid a burgeoning middle class and a surge in birth rates known as the “baby boom.”

Despite elevated living standards, anxiety was rampant at the dawn of the atomic age, when technological advance seemed to threaten the future of human existence itself.

Elevated to the Presidency by FDR’s sudden death, Truman quickly gained a reputation for plucky bluster and decisive decision-making. He faced numerous setbacks on domestic policy after Republicans retook a majority in Congress, though he achieved an upset election victory over Thomas Dewey due to his dogged campaigning and folksy persona.

The Truman administration set numerous lasting precedents for U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era, centered on the containment of Communism, the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, and commitment to multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and NATO.

Convinced of the need for a Jewish state after the horrors of the Holocaust, Truman also played a pivotal role in the founding of Israel, as the United States became the first country to recognize its legitimacy.

Though largely successful in his European initiatives, Truman had a mixed record in Asia. Following the triumph of Communism in the Chinese Civil War and the stalemate of hostilities in the Korean War, Truman fired General MacArthur in April 1951 for insubordination, decimating his own approval ratings.

Dwight Eisenhower decisively won the election of 1952, assisted by his popularity as the former Supreme Commander of Allied forces and by public dissatisfaction with the Truman administration. Eisenhower proved to be a steadying force in office, maintaining the Truman administration’s policy of containment while nonetheless expanding U.S. overseas involvement in countries as far flung as Vietnam, Iran, and Cuba.

Eisenhower also struck a difficult balance in cultivating friendly relations with both Israel and the oil-rich Arab states of the Middle East. To that end, he backed Egyptian interests in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which signaled the end of Great Britain as a first-rate power.

The postwar era also set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement, as African American servicemen who had sacrificed for the country abroad increasingly came to demand legal equality at home.

Key Concepts and Terms

GI Bill (1944)

Shell shock

United Nations

Truman Committee

Taft-Hartley Act

German Democratic Republic

Marxist-Leninism

Containment (foreign policy)

Totalitarianism

Marshall Plan

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Jewish Agency

Pogroms

Sunni Muslim

Truman Doctrine

Gallup (company)

Limited war

Brinksmanship

Mutual assured destruction

Geneva accords (1954)

Suez crisis

Key Persons

George F. Kennan (1904–2005)

Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

George Marshall (1880–1959)

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1976)

Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975)

Mao Zedong (1893–1976)

Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957)

Klaus Fuchs (1911–1988)

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1918–1953; 1915–1953)

Dean Acheson (1893–1971)

John Foster Dulles (1888–1959)

Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–1963)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970)

Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973)

Fidel Castro (1926–2016)

Timeline

1944 Franklin Roosevelt signs the GI Bill (June 22)

1946 The first meeting of the United Nations opens (January 10)

1946 Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri (March 5)

1947 President Truman delivers speech declaring the Truman Doctrine (March 12)

1947 Congress sends $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey (May 22)

1948 Truman signs the Marshall Plan into law (April 3)

1948 The State of Israel is established (May 14)

1948 The Soviets blockade the Allies’ access into Berlin (June 24)

1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is formed (April 4)

1949 The USSR detonates its first atomic bomb (August)

1949 Mao Zedong officially declares the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (October 1)

1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly claims he has a list of Communists working for the State Department (February 9)

1950 Stalin and Mao sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance (February 14)

1950 The Korean War begins (June 25)

1952 The U.S. tests the first hydrogen bomb (November 1)

1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president (November 4)

1955 The Warsaw Pact is established (May 14)

1955 The USSR tests its first hydrogen bomb (November 22)

1956 A Hungarian uprising triggers the Soviet invasion (October–November)

1956 The Suez Crisis begins (October 29)

1956 Eisenhower is reelected (November 6)

1959 Fidel Castro overthrows Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (January 1)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

19.1 Chapter Opening – pp. 633–637 (.5 to 1 class)

Victory celebrations

The recovery and expansion of the postwar American economy

The GI Bill

The Baby Boom

19.2 Times of Promise and Peril – pp. 638–640 (.5 to 1 class)

The dawn of the atomic age

The challenge of reintegrating veterans to peacetime society

The ambiguity of postwar sentiment: relief combined with worry for the future

19.3 Truman’s Challenges – pp. 641–645 (.5 to 1 class)

Truman’s background

Republicans reclaim a majority in Congress

The emerging threat of the Soviet Union

19.4 Containment and the Truman Doctrine – pp. 646–652 (1 to 2 classes)

Containment as the principal policy for managing the Soviet Union

The Marshall Plan

American-Soviet relations deteriorate

The Berlin Airlift

The establishment of NATO

19.5 Israel – pp. 653–656 (.5 to 1 class)

Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine

Truman recognizes Israeli statehood in 1948

Truman’s reasons for supporting Israel

19.6 The Cold War Hardens – pp. 657–662 (.5 to 1 class)

The Election of 1948

Mao Zedong takes power during the Chinese Civil War

The second “Red Scare” and McCarthyism

The Rosenbergs

19.7 Hot War in Korea – pp. 663–667 (1 to 2 classes)

North Korea invades South Korea in June 1950

The Americans intervene, then the Chinese join the fray

MacArthur and Truman

No peace arrangement is made between North and South Korea

19.8 A Hero Becomes President – pp. 668–672 (.5 to 1 class)

Eisenhower becomes president

Eisenhower brings a different approach while maintaining significant continuity

The formation of the CIA and its activities abroad

Foreign policy challenges in Vietnam, Israel, and Cuba

19.9 A Civil Rights Movement at Home – pp. 673–676 (.5 to 1 class)

The realities of segregation

African American servicemen face discrimination during World War II

The long-standing tension between American ideals and American practices

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

All Thoughts and Things Were Split, chapter epigraph (p. 631)

The epigraph presents the postwar moment as one in which primacy in power is joined to an awe-inspiring accountability. The United States emerged from the Second World War prosperous, briefly the world’s sole atomic power, and one of two global superpowers. Victory brought expanded influence, but also new military, political, and moral responsibilities. Ask students to focus on accountability rather than triumph, and to watch how responsibility falls on somebody in each part of the chapter, from Truman at Potsdam to containment in Europe to the decision in Korea, and finally, in 19.9, at home. Rather than writing a story about American ascendancy, the author tells one but about the costs of primacy, including the cost of being watched, which is why the chapter’s account of foreign policy ends with segregation. Return to the epigraph at the end of the chapter and ask students whether the accountability it mentions had been met.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 19.1 · George Kennan, “Long Telegram,” February 22, 1946 (p. 648)

Kennan was the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, a career diplomat, and he sent this in answer to a routine Treasury question about Soviet behavior. It circulated at the highest levels of the American government within weeks. The argument is that Soviet hostility is not a response to Western policy and cannot be removed by concession, because it arises from the internal requirements of a regime that needs a hostile outside world to justify itself. The practical conclusion—patient, firm resistance at every point of pressure—is what became containment, though the word does not appear here. This is an internal document written by an official to persuade his superiors, not a public argument, and the candor follows from that. Read it before the Truman Doctrine rather than after: containment is a policy built on a diagnosis, and a student who encounters the policy first will take it for an instinct.

Primary Source 19.2 · Harry Truman, Memoirs, Volume Two: Years of Trial and Hope, 1956 (p. 656)

Truman writes this eight years after leaving office, on his decision to recognize the State of Israel within minutes of its declaration in 1948 against the advice of his own State Department. Remind students that this is a memoir: an account of a decision by the man who made it, composed with knowledge of everything that followed. The passage gives reasons that are moral before they are strategic, and whether those were the operative reasons in 1948 or the ones that looked best in 1956 cannot be settled from the document itself. That uncertainty is itself worth teaching. Set it against Primary Source 19.1, written at the moment and not for publication, and ask which kind of source answers which kind of question.

Primary Source 19.3 · Whittaker Chambers, Testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, August 3, 1948 (p. 662)

Chambers was a senior editor at Time and a former Soviet agent who had broken with the party a decade earlier. His testimony named Alger Hiss, a former senior State Department official, and the case ran for years. The chapter accounts two conclusions of the domestic search for Soviet agents —that some accusations were substantiated and that the reputations many people against whom nothing was proven were damaged. Chambers stands where the two meet: his central allegation was ultimately supported while the atmosphere his testimony helped create was discriminating. Relate the source to its setting: a congressional committee, in public, with the press present. Figures

Figure 19.1 · Newell Convers Wyeth, The Homecoming, 1945 (p. 631; the chapter-opening plate)

Published as the cover of the November 1945 issue of Woman’s Day. A returning soldier stands at the top of a path looking down at his family farm while his dog runs up to meet him. The magazine and the month are the point: this is a mass-circulation image of the peace, made for a domestic readership two months after the surrender, and it is the postwar as Americans wished to picture it. Notice that the soldier has not arrived. He is above the farm and the reunion is still ahead of him, which is a compositional choice worth asking students about before anything else is said. Then set the cover against the chapter that follows it—atomic weapons, a new adversary, a decade of anxiety. Ask students to hold the two together: how can a country be prosperous and anxious at the same time?

Figure 19.3 · Aerial View of Levittown, circa 1959 (p. 637)

The second of the Levittowns, outside Philadelphia, photographed from above—the only vantage from which its logic is visible. Mass-produced housing built on an assembly-line method for buyers using GI Bill loans, and the repetition that looks monotonous from the air is what made the houses affordable. What students should take from it is that this is a new kind of place rather than a larger version of an old one, with consequences for how Americans lived, commuted and voted that run through the rest of the book. The common assumption is that suburbanization was simply a market outcome; the GI Bill and federal mortgage policy are part of the story, and both are in the chapter’s Key Terms. Use it in 19.1 alongside the interstate highway system.

Figure 19.4 · Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick, And Now the Super-Duper?, 1950 (p. 639)

An editorial cartoon in which the figure of Death tallies the Hiroshima dead under “A-Bomb” and stands ready to open a column for “H-Bomb.” The book supplies the chronology that makes it sharp: the first American hydrogen bomb was tested in 1952 and the Soviet Union followed in 1955, so the cartoon anticipates by two years a weapon that did not yet exist. The cartoon provides the opportunity for students to analyze a visual argument, because the claim is explicit, and the date is checkable against the events it predicts. Use it in 19.2, alongside the Soviet atomic test and its effect on American thinking.

Figure 19.8 · Manual Laborers in front of a Marshall Plan Billboard in West Berlin, 1949 (p. 650)

German workers passing an advertisement for American aid. The image is worth more than an illustration of the Marshall Plan because it raises a question the narrative does not: why did aid need advertising at all? Note that the men in the foreground are doing the rebuilding that the Marshall plans funded. The program was attempting to persuade the public of its offering, with the reasoning that prosperous societies do not turn to communism, which in turn requires the beneficiaries to understand the source of their prosperity. Return to this figure in Lesson 19.4 when discussing the Truman Doctrine.

Figure 19.9 · Berliners Watching the Arrival of the American Rosinenbomber from the S-Bahn Station, Tempelhof, 1948 (p. 652)

Berliners watching a supply aircraft come in during the airlift—a Rosinenbomber, or raisin bomber, as the city called them. The subject of the photograph is not the aircraft but the watchers, and their attention is what makes it useful. A city of two million was supplied by air for nearly a year without a shot being fired at the blockade, which put every decision to escalate on the other side. That is containment working exactly as Kennan’s analysis proposed. Ask students to explain the airlift as an application of the doctrine rather than an exception to it. Use it with Map 19.1, which shows why an airlift was the only option that did not require crossing Soviet-held ground.

Figure 19.11 · Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, 1967 (p. 659)

A Chinese poster reading “Long live the invincible Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought,” showing the five men in a row. Ask students who is included, in what sequence, and who is absent. The order relates the poster’s intended meaning: Mao is placed at the end of a line running back to Marx, which is a claim about legitimate succession rather than a group portrait. Call students’ attention to the date of the poster, which reads eighteen years after the revolution. Due to the date, students can infer that the poster relates how the regimes presented themselves later on rather than the events of 1949. Use it in 19.6, where the Chinese revolution is one of the two shocks that turned containment from a European policy into a global one.

Figure 19.16 · A Grief-Stricken American Infantryman Whose Buddy Has Been Killed in Action Is Comforted by Another Soldier, 1950 (p. 665)

Figure 19.22 · Negro Drinking at “Colored” Water Cooler in Streetcar Terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939 (p. 675)

Segregation in an ordinary public place, photographed in an ordinary week. Set this image against the chapter’s foreign policy: a country making the case that free societies treat people better was segregating its own citizens. The date is worth telling students. The photograph is from 1939, earlier than the chapter’s period, and the condition it records was not new in 1950—what was new was that the world was now watching. Use it to close 19.9 and return to the chapter epigraph while showing the photo to the class.

Maps

Map 19.1 · The Partition of Germany, 1945 (p. 651)

Defeated Germany divided into four occupation zones, one for each Allied victor, and—the detail that matters most—Berlin likewise divided into four sectors while sitting entirely inside the Soviet zone. Have students find Berlin before reading anything else. The city’s position is the whole of the Berlin problem, and no verbal explanation substitutes for seeing it. Western access ran overland through Soviet-held territory, which is exactly what the blockade of 1948 closed and what the airlift went over. Students commonly assume Berlin sat on the boundary between the zones; once they see that it did not, the airlift stops looking like an eccentric choice and starts looking like the only one available short of forcing a road. Use it with 19.4 and with Figure 19.9.

Map 19.2 · Cold War Military Alliances, 1949–91 (p. 654)

NATO and the Warsaw Pact across four decades. Two things repay attention: that the blocs are contiguous, so the line between them runs through Europe rather than around it, and how few states are in neither. The alliance system converts a political disagreement into a fortified border, which is what made local incidents dangerous for forty years. The date range is a trap. It covers 1949 to 1991 and membership changed within it, so the map is a summary rather than a snapshot; ask which states joined when. Keep it for comparison with Chapter Twenty-Two’s Map 22.3, which shows the same alliance larger still after the state it was built against has ceased to exist.

Map 19.3 · The Korean War, 1950–53 (p. 666)

The front line moving twice down the peninsula and twice back. The book’s caption is explicit that five years after the Second World War the ideological battle lines that would define the rest of the century were drawn here. The single most instructive fact on the map is where the line finished relative to where it started, which shows what containment achieved and what it did not. The peninsula’s narrowness at the waist explains both the Inchon landing and the vulnerability that followed the Chinese intervention. Students often assume the war was a stalemate throughout; it was extremely mobile for a year and then static for two, and both phases are on the map. Students can trace the whole course of the war from the map alone.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 633–637)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

For a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: pp. 633–637

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on postwar unease

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

Postwar prosperity grew out of wartime savings, federal policy, demographic change, and pent-up demand, but its benefits were unevenly distributed—and prosperity itself coexisted with profound anxiety about what the war had unleashed.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

Describe the prosperity and the anxiety that ran together in postwar America.

Explain what returning veterans found and what the GI Bill did for them.

Identify the sources of unease beneath the boom.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1944, June 22 – Franklin Roosevelt signs the GI Bill

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

With the demobilization of over ten million servicemen, many feared that the economy would return to its prewar struggles.

Afforded novel educational and housing opportunities by the GI Bill, however, returning veterans generally enjoyed improved material conditions. The postwar era witnessed a sustained economic expansion — due to full employment and the pent-up consumer demand and savings which was built up during wartime rationing—leading to rising living standards, the rapid growth of suburbs, and a decades-long “baby boom” that had profound sociocultural implications.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Interstate highway system: The interstate highway system, the construction of which began in 1956, created a network of high-speed highways that became the largest road construction project in American history and made long-distance automobile travel a staple of American transportation and commerce.

Levittowns: These suburban developments, first built by William Levitt on Long Island, featured small, mass produced, and highly affordable houses offering lawns and other modest amenities designed to accommodate young families, particularly those of World War II veterans.

GI Bill: The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill (GI, meaning “government issue,” was a slang term for military personnel), provided millions of veterans with a wide array of benefits, including the opportunity to attend college or job-training school at the government’s expense. The GI Bill also provided low-cost mortgages to veterans too financially strapped to afford down payments.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Nineteen.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Americans celebrate their victory in World War II?

How did the economy adjust to the end of the war?

What factors led to the sustained economic boom in the decades after World War II?

How did the federal interstate system contribute to economic growth?

What were Levittowns?

What did the GI Bill do?

What was the “baby boom” and why did it happen when it did?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Civic Discourse: Why was there no recession following World War II? How did economic conditions in the late 1940s differ from those of 1920?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Chapter Twelve addresses some of the cultural trade-offs of improved efficiency, specifically in the context of the growth of railways. What have been some of the cultural costs of the interstate highway system? How might the country be different if a high-speed rail network rather than a highway system was the predominant means of intercity travel?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are a marketing agent for Levittowns. Have them write an advertisement of no more than 150 words, appealing to middle-class families to leave urban neighborhoods for the abundant space of suburbia. Ask a few students to share their work and discuss the topic as a class.

Civic Discourse: Introduce students to the Nuremberg Trials. Provide them with sitting Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson’s opening statement for the United States before the International Military Tribunal. Have them use the statement as a jumping off point to research the trials and answer the following questions: describe what the Nuremberg tribunal was, who was tried and on what charges, and explain how trying leaders before an international court represented an attempt to promote international justice rather than impose summary punishment. Students should compile a page of notes, drawing on at least two sources.

Further: Point students to Jackson’s statement: "That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason." Ask the class whether Jackson was right. Then introduce the two objections raised at the time: that the tribunal convicted men on retroactive laws— crimes against peace, crimes against humanity — that were not offenses in international law when the acts were committed; and that a court constituted by the victors alone, with no Allied conduct before it, is not a court. Have them weigh the objections in light of their research. Do they agree with either or both claims? Why? Why not? Ask them to discuss in groups.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What were some concerns that Americans faced at the end of World War II?

Insight: Would returning military veterans be able to reintegrate into civilian life? Would there be jobs and housing available to them? When price controls were removed, would Americans be able to afford basic goods? Would the economic recovery spurred by the war continue in peacetime?

What were some examples of the increasing standard of living of Americans in the postwar period? Did this differ between social classes or ethnicities?

Insight: A variety of new consumer goods, such as washing machines, televisions, and freezers, became widely available for the first time. Automobiles became more available, and the creation of the interstate highway system increased the use and demand for cars. Starting with Levittown, developers constructed housing in numerous suburbs that offered more land and amenities than city housing could offer. The GI Bill offered returning veterans educational and housing benefits from the government.

Insight: These routes to prosperity were not open to all Americans. Levittown’s original leases restricted occupancy to white buyers, excluding Black families from one of the era’s most prominent avenues to homeownership and wealth accumulation (see figure 19.3). And though the GI Bill itself did not discriminate by race, its benefits were administered locally, and Black veterans, particularly in the South, were often denied the same access to home loans and college admissions that white veterans received.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What did the GI Bill provide to returning veterans?

What were the Levittowns?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) education, training and home-loan support that moved millions of veterans into college and into houses. (2) mass-produced suburban developments, the first of them outside New York and Philadelphia.

Explain

How can a country be prosperous and anxious at the same time?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer connects the two rather than listing them: the same war that produced full employment and pent-up savings also produced the atomic bomb and a rival superpower, so the prosperity arrived with a reason to doubt it would last.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Though elation over America’s victory in World War II was also accompanied by anxiety about the country’s economic future, the postwar years ushered in an era of unprecedented material prosperity, with rising living standards for an increasingly middle-class society.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

The prosperity is real and so is the unease. The next lesson names what the unease was about.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: GI Bill; veteran; suburb; pent-up demand; unequal access.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Prosperity grew because ___, but access differed because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud how one postwar policy created opportunity and one limitation on that opportunity.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Complete a two-column chart: prosperity / anxiety.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.2 Times of Promise and Peril (pp. 638–640)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 638–640

Exercise: Close reading exercise on veterans’ postwar experience

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Peace brought relief without security: veterans struggled to reconcile wartime experience with civilian prosperity just as atomic weapons and the collapsing Soviet-American alliance made the postwar world itself feel unsettled.

Lesson Objectives

Explain what the United Nations was created to do.

Describe the effect of the Soviet atomic test on American thinking.

Assess how far wartime cooperation survived the peace.

Key Dates

1946, Jan. 10 – The first meeting of the United Nations opens

Key Concepts

The transition from the mayhem of modern warfare to smooth and orderly civilian life proved disorienting to many returning servicemen, particularly those who suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which was then known as “shell shock.”

The Cold War refers to the decades-long struggle following World War II for geopolitical supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union, which resulted in continual peril of a nuclear confrontation.

Key Terms

United Nations: Initially a diplomatic forum for 50 nations that had joined together to oppose the Axis powers, the United Nations has expanded since its founding to include 193 member states as of February 2025.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Nineteen, “Times of Promise and Peril.”

Assign the following reading questions:

What fears did the atomic bomb inspire among some Americans?

When, where, and by whom was the United Nations founded?

What was the central theme of the popular 1956 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the excerpt in the text from James Agee’s article in Time. Is there some truth to Agee’s analysis, or is it merely sensationalistic?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the excerpt in the text from Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. How does Wilson’s writing articulate the tension between veterans’ wartime experience and the concerns of postwar society? How does the excerpt reflect what one historian referred to as the “troubled feast” of postwar American prosperity?

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, preparing the inaugural keynote address for the UN’s first assembly in 1946. Assign them to write a few paragraphs articulating their hopes for the organization, given the recent carnage of World War II. What reason is there to think that the UN will be more successful than the League of Nations had been?

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did the experience of returning veterans represent the feeling that “all thoughts and things were split”?

Insight: Veterans often found it difficult to reconcile their experiences of combat and loss overseas with the expectation to be peaceful fathers, employees, and citizens at home. Many suffered from shell-shock (posttraumatic stress disorder) and lingering anxiety. The novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit represents this experience of being split apart.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the United Nations founded to do?

What changed in 1949 that altered American strategic thinking?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) provide a standing forum for collective security and the settlement of disputes among nations. (2) the Soviet Union tested an atomic weapon, ending the American monopoly.

Explain

Why did an alliance that had just won a world war come apart so quickly?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the alliance was against something rather than for something, so its purpose expired with Germany’s surrender, and that the two remaining powers wanted incompatible things in the same territory.

Daily Recap

Even amid postwar prosperity, unease and anxiety lingered, as returning servicemen grappled with their wartime trauma and the general population feared the prospect of nuclear war. While the United Nations offered a novel forum for global diplomacy, worsening relations between the United States and the Soviet Union renewed the prospect for another calamitous war.

Looking Ahead

The disagreement is now open. The next lesson follows Truman into it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: readjustment; shell shock; atomic age; alliance; collective security.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Peace brought ___, but it also brought ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud why victory did not produce a secure peace.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Sort evidence into personal unease / geopolitical unease.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.3 Truman’s Challenges (pp. 641–645)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 641–645

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on Potsdam

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Truman inherited a victorious but unsettled nation and had to decide how the United States should respond as wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union gave way to competing visions for postwar Europe.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the challenges Truman inherited in 1945.

Explain how Soviet satellite states were established in Eastern Europe.

Assess Truman’s early handling of Stalin.

Key Dates

1946, Mar. 5 – Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri

Key Concepts

Rising from modest origins to achieve some, albeit limited, renown in the U.S. Senate, Harry Truman was thrust into the limelight just one month after his inauguration as vice president due to the sudden death of FDR.

Even after the conclusion of World War II, Truman faced challenges both domestically, from emboldened Republicans in Congress, and abroad, as the Soviet Union established satellite states throughout Eastern Europe.

During a speech at Missouri’s Westminster College in 1946, Winston Churchill famously declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent“ of Europe, on one side of which lay ”the Soviet sphere,“ where ”all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

Key Terms

Truman Committee: This bipartisan Senate special committee investigated waste and fraud in military spending and was chaired by Harry S. Truman before he became president. Truman drove ten thousand miles to uncover cases of well-connected military contractors’ receiving federal funds under lucrative cost-plus contracts without procedures to ensure quality.

Taft-Hartley Act: This legislative act, which was passed over Truman’s veto, pared back the power of labor unions by outlawing the “closed shop” (whereby union membership is a precondition for hiring), by permitting states to pass “right to work” laws outlawing mandatory union membership, and by inhibiting unions’ ability to strike. It also sought to counteract the infiltration of labor unions by Communists and other radicals.

German Democratic Republic: Otherwise known as East Germany, the German Democratic Republic was the communist country established in the Soviet zone of postwar Germany.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Nineteen, “Truman’s Challenges.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Harry S. Truman’s background?

How had Truman ascended the political ladder prior to becoming Vice President?

Was Truman able to implement his domestic policy priorities during his time as president?

What major challenges did Truman face in foreign policy?

Did the Soviets fulfill the commitments they made at the Yalta Conference regarding Eastern Europe?

What was implied by Churchill’s image of the “iron curtain”?

What grievances did the Soviets have about the Western Allies’ conduct during World War II?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: The text claims that Harry S. Truman was “a product of the great unpedigreed tradition of Jackson and Lincoln.” To what extent is this true? How did Truman both resemble and differ from Jackson and Lincoln, particularly with respect to his attitude toward contemporary elites in American society?

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a roughly 200-word pamphlet, arguing either for or against the Taft-Hartley Act. What was the appropriate place of labor unions in postwar American society?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech. What was controversial about Churchill’s claims at the time? In what ways were his words prophetic?

Guiding Classroom Questions

How does the author describe Harry S. Truman’s public image?

Insight: Truman was a down-to-earth Midwesterner who stood up for the interests of the little guy. He did not attend college. He made a name for himself by investigating waste and fraud by military contractors. He personally visited military bases across the country using his own car.

What actions of the Soviet Union following World War II caused concern among the Western Allies (the United States and Britain)?

Insight: In violation of the agreement reached at the Yalta conference, the USSR occupied large parts of Eastern Europe and placed puppet Soviet governments in those countries. Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe dividing the free West from the communist East. This included the establishment of the communist East Germany (German Democratic Republic), thus dividing a previously united Germany. Finally, the USSR was on the verge of toppling the existing governments of Greece and Turkey, turning them into communist satellite states and giving the USSR control over crucial shipping lanes in the Mediterranean.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What were the Soviet “satellite states”?

Which conference brought the new Big Three together for the first time?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the Eastern European countries brought under Soviet control after the war, with governments answerable to Moscow. (2) Potsdam, in 1945.

Explain

Stalin had agreed at Yalta to free elections in Eastern Europe. What does it tell a student that the agreement was kept on paper and not in fact?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer reaches the general point: an agreement is only as good as the means of enforcing it, and in 1945 the Red Army was in occupation of the territory in question. A partial answer records the broken promise without asking what would have made it binding.

Daily Recap

The early years of Truman’s presidency were fraught with geopolitical tension, as an iron curtain descended across Europe, separating the Soviet sphere of influence from the liberal democracies of the West.

Looking Ahead

Truman now needs a policy rather than a reaction. The next lesson is where he finds one.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: satellite state; Iron Curtain; self-determination; occupation; enforcement.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The agreement promised ___, but power on the ground meant ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud why an agreement may fail without a means of enforcement.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Label a Europe map: Soviet sphere / Western democracies.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.4 Containment and the Truman Doctrine (pp. 646–652)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 646–652

Exercise: the Analytical Skills exercise on the Long Telegram

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Containment transformed Kennan’s diagnosis of Soviet behavior into a durable American strategy: resist expansion without seeking immediate rollback, using economic aid, alliances, and calibrated pressure to make Soviet advances costly without producing another world war.

Lesson Objectives

Explain containment as Kennan formulated it.

Describe the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

Explain how the Berlin Airlift applied containment in practice.

Key Dates

1947, Mar. 12 – President Truman delivers his speech declaring the Truman Doctrine

1947, May 22 – Congress sends $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey

1948, Apr. 3 – Truman signs the Marshall Plan into law

1948, June 24 – The Soviets blockade the Allies’ access into Berlin

1949, Apr. 4 – The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is formed

Key Concepts

George F. Kennan argued that containment was the best policy for dealing with the Soviet Union; this meant preventing communism from spreading, and providing economic and other forms of aid to countries at risk of becoming communist, instead of directly confronting communist regimes and risking armed conflict with the Soviets.

Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States showed an unprecedented willingness to offer foreign assistance to European countries. Measures like the Marshall Plan and aid to Greece and Turkey were justified as measures both to stop the spread of Communism and to create export markets for American manufacturers.

When the Soviet Union attempted to starve West Berlin into submission, Truman even ordered the months-long Berlin Airlift to ensure that the city was supplied, which required flying in five thousand tons of supplies daily. Meanwhile, North American and European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual-defense pact that became a durable check against Soviet aggression and a central institution for implementing containment.

Key Terms

Containment: The policy, formulated from George Kennan’s 1946 analysis, of resisting Soviet expansion at every point of pressure rather than seeking either war or accommodation.

Marshall Plan: The American program of economic aid to rebuild Western Europe after the war, on the reasoning that prosperous societies do not turn to communism.

Berlin Airlift: The supply of West Berlin by air for nearly a year after the Soviets closed land access, keeping the city fed without firing on the blockade.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Nineteen, “Containment and the Truman Doctrine.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Who was George Kennan and what was his analysis of the Soviet regime?

What was the idea behind the strategy of containment?

What was the state of Western and Central Europe after the war?

What was the Marshall Plan?

When was NATO founded? What was its original purpose?

What alliance did the Soviet Union and the other socialist republics form in response to NATO?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: The text notes that Kennan found the Soviet Union “permeated with internal instability and insecurity, which in turn helped to fuel a ceaseless drive toward expansion, even as it tended to make for a certain cautiousness in pursuing those ends.” Which parts of Kennan’s diagnosis appear to have been borne out by later events, and which parts require qualification? What evidence would students need before calling the analysis vindicated?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from Harry Truman’s address to Congress. Evaluate the Truman Doctrine in the context of Washington’s Farewell Address. Do Truman’s principles contradict Washington’s advice?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Encourage the class to consider the following questions and then discuss their response: why did U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorate so quickly in the aftermath of World War II? Was the Cold War inevitable?

Critical Thinking: Ask students to examine Map 19.2. and trace where the NATO and Warsaw alliances meet, then name the countries that belong to neither. What information can be gleaned from the dates on the map about the motivation behind each alliance? What, if any, threats to the U.S.S.R. can be interpreted from the dates and colors on the map?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What was George Kennan’s proposed policy of containment of the USSR?

Insight: Kennan argued that the USSR was beset by internal instability, and Soviet leaders attempted to tamp down that instability by seeking to expand their empire abroad. He proposed that the US prevent the USSR from expanding its sphere of communist influence while not attempting to roll back the Soviet empire’s current borders. Eventually, the internal flaws of the USSR would destroy the state. This was the policy of containment.

What was the Truman Doctrine?

Insight: Applying the policy of containment to threats to the independence of Greece and Turkey, Truman declared that the United States would support, primarily through economic aid, those countries who were threatened by Soviet influence. He believed that fighting poverty and instability would prevent nations from adopting totalitarian ideologies like communism.

How was the Marshall Plan an application of the Truman Doctrine?

Insight: The Marshall Plan proposed to give economic aid to all of Europe in an effort to restore them to prosperity and prevent them from falling to communism, thus furthering the policy of containment. This was mostly a success; Western Europe quickly regained its economic footing.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Who wrote the analysis from which containment was drawn?

What did the Marshall Plan do?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) George Kennan, in the 1946 Long Telegram. (2) supplied American economic aid to rebuild Western Europe.

Explain

Explain how the Berlin Airlift was an application of containment rather than an exception to it.

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the airlift resisted a Soviet advance without producing a war—which is containment’s whole design—and that it put the choice to escalate on the other side. A partial answer describes the airlift without connecting it to the doctrine.

Daily Recap

The Truman Doctrine committed U.S. foreign policy to the long-term containment of Communist expansion and extensive overseas commitments, through initiatives like the Marshall Plan and multilateral alliances like NATO.

Looking Ahead

Containment now has a doctrine, a budget and a first success. The next lesson takes it somewhere it fits less easily.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: containment; rollback; doctrine; economic aid; alliance.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Containment resisted ___ without trying to ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud how the Berlin Airlift applied containment.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Match Truman Doctrine / Marshall Plan / Airlift / NATO to the tool each used.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.5 Israel (pp. 653–656)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 653–656

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on recognition

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The end of the British Mandate forced competing Jewish and Arab national claims into open conflict; Truman’s recognition of Israel joined humanitarian, political, and strategic considerations at a moment when no settlement commanded the consent of both communities.

Lesson Objectives

Explain the end of the British Mandate in Palestine.

Describe Truman’s decision to recognize Israel.

Assess the reasoning he gave for it.

Key Dates

1948, May 14 – The State of Israel is established

Key Concepts

The Zionist movement, which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, sought a national homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of diaspora and persecution. Jewish migration to Ottoman and later British-ruled Palestine increased substantially in the first half of the twentieth century, especially as persecution intensified in Europe. The same land was also home to an Arab population with its own political and national claims, and British rule increasingly struggled to reconcile the two movements.

Key Terms

British Mandate: Following World War I, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a mandate to assume the governance of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. During the time of British rule, which lasted until Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, Palestine was known as “Mandatory Palestine.”

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Nineteen, “Israel.”

Assign the following reading questions:

What is Zionism?

Which political entities existed in the region of Palestine prior to the founding of Israel?

When did Israel declare independence?

What were Truman’s reasons for immediately recognizing the new state of Israel?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Trace how British policy toward Zionism changed from the Balfour Declaration through the end of the Mandate. What competing commitments did British officials make or inherit, and why did governing Palestine become increasingly difficult? Require students to distinguish policy at different moments rather than describe “the British” as holding one fixed position.

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read the excerpt in the text that articulates Truman’s reasoning for supporting Israel. Do his sentiments reflect the Truman Doctrine in any way? How compelling were Truman’s reasons for supporting Israel?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are a White House aide tasked in 1948 with writing a letter advising Truman on whether to recognize the imminent declaration of Israeli independence. What course of action would best promote American interests?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why did Truman strongly support the creation of the state of Israel?

Insight: Truman thought it was crucial for the United States to support the creation of a Jewish state so that the Jews would have a geographic homeland to protect them after the disaster of the Holocaust. He recognized Israel soon after its independence despite concerns from his own advisors that such a move would anger the Arab states of the Middle East.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the British Mandate?

In what year was the State of Israel declared?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) British administration of Palestine, established after the First World War and relinquished in 1948. (2) 1948.

Explain

Truman’s Memoirs give his reasons a decade later. What should a student weigh when a decision is explained in retrospect?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that retrospect supplies both clarity and motive to justify, and that Primary Source 19.2 is evidence about Truman in 1956 as much as about Truman in 1948.

Daily Recap

Zionist migration, Arab opposition, British withdrawal, the UN partition proposal, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust converged in 1947–48. Jewish leaders accepted partition and declared the State of Israel as the British Mandate ended; Arab leaders rejected the partition plan, and civil conflict was followed by war with neighboring Arab states. Truman quickly recognized Israel, while the war also displaced a large Palestinian Arab population and left the competing national claims unresolved.

Looking Ahead

The Cold War so far has been fought with money and airlift. The next lesson is where it hardens.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Zionism; Mandate; partition; recognition; national claim.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “One claim rested on ___; the competing claim rested on ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud why Truman’s memoir must be read as a retrospective source.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Build a 1917–1948 timeline with four turning points.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.6 The Cold War Hardens (pp. 657–662)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 657–662

Exercise: Guiding Classroom question on containment policy in China and Analyzing Figures exercise

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The Soviet atomic test, the Chinese Communist victory, and evidence of genuine Soviet espionage broadened American fears of communism, while the methods used to pursue suspected subversion created serious costs for civil liberties and public trust.

Lesson Objectives

Explain the effect of the Soviet nuclear test and the Chinese revolution.

Describe NSC-68 and how it broke with American tradition.

Assess the domestic search for Soviet agents and its costs.

Key Dates

1949, August - The USSR detonates its first atomic bomb

1949, Oct. 1 – Mao Zedong officially declares the establishment of the People’s Republic of China

1950, Feb. 9 – Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly claims he has a list of Communists working for the State Department

1950, Feb. 14 – Stalin and Mao sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance

Key Concepts

Students should analyze and engage with these key ideas to ensure deep understanding:

During the Chinese Civil War, Chinese Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek tried to fend off Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The United States supported the Nationalists, but the Communists were seen as a patriotic anticolonial force and their plans for large-scale land reforms won over the peasantry.

The Communists secured victory by the end of 1949, and the Nationalists were exiled to the island of Formosa (now called Taiwan). In the following year, Mao and Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, which stoked fears that Communist countries would eventually come to dominate Eurasia and perhaps the rest of the world as well.

The Cold War “Red Scare” grew from both genuine Soviet espionage and broader fears of communist subversion. The Truman administration instituted a federal loyalty program; the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated alleged communist influence in Hollywood and government; and the Hiss case and Rosenberg prosecution supplied evidence that espionage was real. Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a separate, highly publicized campaign from the Senate, often making accusations he could not substantiate. His fall after the Army-McCarthy hearings damaged his own credibility but did not erase evidence of Soviet intelligence operations uncovered in other cases.

Key Terms

“Dixiecrat”: This group of breakaway southern Democrats nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president in 1948 to protest Harry Truman’s support of civil rights; the term also refers generally to conservative southern Democrats, particularly during the era of Jim Crow.

Espionage: This form of spying usually involves the illicit obtaining of secret or classified material from governments or other organizations.

NSC-68: This Cold War strategy produced by the National Security Council proposed to increase defense spending and to strengthen commitments to non-communist countries, both of which represented dramatic changes in American foreign policy doctrine as part of a general shift toward militarized containment.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Nineteen, “The Cold War Hardens.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Truman win in 1948?

What took place in China in 1949?

Who was Mao Zedong?

How did Chinese communism differ from Soviet communism?

What foreign policy challenges were created by the Communists’ victory in China?

Who was Joseph McCarthy and what was the “Red Scare”?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Should the United States have more actively intervened in the Chinese Civil War? If the Communists had been defeated, how might history have been different?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: In what ways might McCarthy’s tactics have proven counter-productive? All things considered, did he contribute toward or undermine the effort to combat domestic Communists.

Speaking Skills: Assign students to write and deliver a Harry Truman speech as part of his “whistle stop” campaign tour in 1948. The speeches should address why Truman merits a full term and be delivered in the pluckiest manner possible.

Analyzing Figures: Have students recall the Nullification cartoon from Chapter 6 (Figure 6.16) and place it alongside Figure 19.11. Repeat the exercise listed in Lesson 6.8, now that the students have studied characteristics of key dictators. Use the following questions to guide the students:

Who does the poster depict? Why would the artist choose to group these four men together?

How do the regimes of the four men each compare with the labeled steps in the Nullification cartoon?

Bring the cartoon forward to the America of the 1960’s, where the country has now experienced the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes abroad and adopted the method of containment. How might Americans in the 1960s have interpreted the cartoon differently from Americans in the 1830’s?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Was the Chinese Communist victory a failure of containment—or evidence that containment was being transformed from a strategy aimed chiefly at Soviet expansion into a doctrine applied to communism everywhere?

Insight: The Chinese Civil War was not simply a Soviet invasion of an independent state. Mao’s movement had indigenous roots, drew substantial support from peasants, and defeated the Nationalists in a domestic struggle in which the United States had limited leverage. The result therefore raised a larger question: was containment meant to resist Soviet expansion specifically, or to prevent communist victories everywhere? American policy increasingly moved toward the second interpretation after 1949.

How did NSC-68 represent a radical break with American foreign policy going back to George Washington?

Insight: This National Security Council memo advised the president that the United States should significantly increase military spending and form alliances with non-communist governments in order to fight the spread of communism around the world. These policies contrasted with the historical American skepticism of standing armies and the fear of entangling alliances.

How did “McCarthyism” become a byword for reckless accusations that damaged reputations?

Insight: Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a crusade against communist infiltration in American institutions, including the government. Many of his accusations were baseless, and several innocent people were unfairly declared traitors. However, the later opening of the Soviet archives provided extensive evidence that communists had indeed conducted espionage and influence operations on behalf of the Soviet government.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did NSC-68 recommend?

Who was Whittaker Chambers?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) a very large and sustained increase in military spending, and the treatment of communist advance anywhere as a threat everywhere. (2) a Time editor and former Soviet agent whose 1948 testimony accused a senior State Department official.

Explain

The Soviet archives opened after 1991. How did that change what can be said about this period?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer holds two findings together: some accusations were substantiated, and the method by which they were pursued damaged many people against whom nothing was. A partial answer uses the archives to vindicate or to dismiss, and drops the other half.

Daily Recap

Despite fractures in the Democratic Party and his own poor polling, Harry Truman achieved a come-from-behind victory in the Presidential Election of 1948. His first full term in office was dominated by concerns regarding the spread of communism, both abroad following the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists and at home due to concerns about domestic communist infiltration.

Looking Ahead

Containment has become global and expensive. The next lesson is the first place it is tested by force.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: espionage; allegation; evidence; loyalty; NSC-68.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Evidence established ___, but it did not establish ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud the difference between a substantiated espionage case and an unsupported accusation.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Sort examples into evidence / allegation / policy response.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.7 Hot War in Korea (pp. 663–667)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 663–667

Exercise: the Compare and Contrast exercise on Korea and the Second World War

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Korea tested containment by force: the United States and its allies prevented the conquest of South Korea but discovered that limited war could preserve a boundary without delivering decisive victory.

Lesson Objectives

Explain how the Korean War began and how the United States entered it.

Describe the course of the war and MacArthur’s relief.

Assess why the outcome satisfied nobody.

Key Dates

1950, June 25 – The Korean War begins

Key Concepts

The Korean War was a classic case of proxy conflict, as the Soviet Union encouraged the invasion of South Korea by the communist government of North Korea. UN peacekeeping forces under the command of American General Douglas MacArthur intervened and in turn almost routed the communist forces, before the involvement of Chinese troops resulted in an ultimate stalemate.

After MacArthur publicly criticized Truman for insufficient commitment to victory, he was relieved of his command, a controversial decision that damaged Truman’s approval ratings. Truman rejected escalating the conflict in Korea, opting instead for a strategy of limited war to contain the spread of communism without provoking the Soviet Union.

Key Terms

Insubordination: MacArthur’s willful refusal to defer to his legitimate superior constituted the cause of his firing by Truman.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh section of Chapter Nineteen, “Hot War in Korea.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What drew the United States into the Korean War?

How did General Douglas MacArthur retake the Korean peninsula?

How did MacArthur want to respond to Chinese intervention?

Why did Truman want to avoid a confrontation with China?

What happened to Truman’s popularity after he dismissed MacArthur?

How did the Korean War end?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Why did President Truman commit to defending South Korea? What were the stakes of the Korean War?

Civic Discourse: Who was right in the argument between Truman and MacArthur? Should the United States have gone to war with China over their intervention in Korea? Was it necessary to relieve MacArthur of his command?

Writing Skills: Ask students to write a roughly 200-word essay answering the following question: what was the most important legacy of Truman’s presidency? Have them share their work in small groups and discuss the topic as a class.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why was Korea divided in the first place, and why did that division not hold?

Insight: Japan had annexed the peninsula in 1910 and lost it with its defeat in 1945, and that defeat created a vacuum. Soviet troops occupied the northern portion and American forces the southern; there had never been any plan for a permanent division. What was happening in postwar Germany was soon repeated in Korea — the Soviets established a communist government in the north and the Americans a Western-style democracy in the south, and the dividing line between them became the thirty-eighth parallel, with no plan for unification in sight. On June 25, 1950, eighty thousand North Korean troops swept south.

How did the war move from near-defeat to stalemate?

Insight: North Korean troops drove their enemy the length of the peninsula to Busan at its southern tip, taking Seoul on the way. On September 15, MacArthur countered with an amphibious invasion at Inchon, Seoul's port city, well behind the North Korean lines; he cut off the invaders, retook Seoul, and began pushing north — now seeking, with UN approval, to reunify the country by force. He proceeded almost to the Chinese border, ignoring Chinese warnings. On November 25, more than a quarter million Chinese troops swept across it, overwhelming the UN forces and pushing them back into South Korea, where the line stabilized near the thirty-eighth parallel.

What was the outcome of the Korean War?

Insight: The United States prevented South Korea from falling to the communists but did not roll back communism overall. There was never a final peace conference capped by a settlement and a treaty. In effect, there was never really an end to this undeclared war, only a cessation of hostilities. This all came at the price of more than thirty-three thousand Americans, several million Koreans, and an unknown number of Chinese who died to preserve that separation.

How did the Korean War test the purpose for which the United Nations had been founded? Did it work as intended?

Insight: Recall Lesson 19.2: the UN was founded to provide a standing forum for collective security and settle disputes among nations before they became wars. Korea was the first real test of that purpose. Truman did not treat the invasion as an American matter; he took it to the UN Security Council, which approved a peacekeeping force that would be characterized as UN police action rather than an act of war by the U.S. The test cut both ways. The UN did act collectively, as it had been founded to do — but the effort was primarily American, under an American commander, and the war ended where it began, at the 38th parallel.

Mary McLeod Bethune went to the UN's founding conference to argue for an end to colonial rule, among other things. Provide students with her “San Francisco Conference” essay from Mary McLoed Bethune: Building a Better World, Essays and Selected Documents. Then have them answer: What would she have thought of the UN intervention in Korea?

Insight: Bethune attended the UN founding conference in April 1945 as an associate consultant to the American delegation. She was the founder of the National Council of Negro Women and the first Black woman to head a division of a federal agency. She pressed the delegates for an end to colonial rule.

Insight: Japan had annexed Korea in 1910 and lost it in 1945, but the peninsula did not immediately emerge as a unified independent state. Soviet troops occupied the north and American troops the south, and the thirty-eighth parallel became a dividing line without Korean consent. Students should distinguish that earlier great-power division from the UN decision in 1950 to resist North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. Bethune’s anticolonial commitments create a useful question precisely because the two issues—Korean self-determination and collective resistance to invasion—do not yield the same answer.

How did Truman respond to General Douglas MacArthur’s advocacy of invading China following China’s reinforcement of North Korean forces?

Insight: Truman flatly refused MacArthur’s request to go after China. Invading China would have likely resulted in another world war, and Truman saw the temptation to invade China as a trap.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

In what year did the Korean War begin?

Why was General MacArthur relieved of command?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1950. (2) insubordination—he publicly opposed the president’s limits on the war.

Explain

Why was Korea a deeply unsatisfying victory for containment?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that containment’s aim is restoration of a line rather than the defeat of an enemy, so success looks like a stalemate and costs like a war. A partial answer calls the outcome a draw without reaching why the policy made it one.

Daily Recap

The Soviet-backed invasion of South Korea launched the first “hot” conflict of the Cold War. Though his decision to relieve the popular and effective war hero Douglas MacArthur from his command was abhorred by many, Truman managed to defend the territorial integrity of South Korea without drastic escalation of the conflict.

Looking Ahead

Truman leaves office with the war unfinished. The next lesson brings in the general who ends it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: limited war; escalation; armistice; insubordination; collective security.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Containment succeeded by ___ but failed to ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud why MacArthur and Truman disagreed about what victory meant.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Trace the front line on Map 19.3 at four moments.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.8 A Hero Becomes President (pp. 668–672)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 668–672

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on Suez

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Eisenhower preserved containment while relying more heavily on nuclear deterrence, alliances, and covert action; as European empires receded, Cold War competition increasingly moved into newly independent states where American strategic aims could conflict with commitments to self-government.

Lesson Objectives

Describe Eisenhower’s approach to the Cold War.

Explain the Suez Crisis and the American response.

Assess Eisenhower’s handling of allies and adversaries.

Key Dates

1952, Nov. 1 – The U.S. tests the first hydrogen bomb

1952, Nov. 4 – Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president

1955, May 14 – The Warsaw Pact is established

1955, Nov. 22 – The USSR tests its first hydrogen bomb

1956, Oct.–Nov. - A Hungarian uprising triggers the Soviet invasion

1956, Oct. 29 – The Suez Crisis begins

1956, Nov. 6 – Eisenhower is reelected

1959, Jan. 1 – Fidel Castro overthrows Fulgencio Batista in Cuba

Key Concepts

Students should analyze and engage with these key ideas to ensure deep understanding:

President Dwight Eisenhower had a more discrete leadership style than some of his predecessors. His often indirect approach to governing led political scientist Fred Greenstein to refer to his time in office as the “hidden hand” presidency.

During the Cold War nuclear arms race, the threat of “mutual assured destruction”—that, if one country were to launch nuclear weapons at the other, the other would launch its nuclear weapons in return, absolutely devastating both countries—was a deterrent against nuclear war. However, what deterrence prevented in one place it displaced to another. Because a direct nuclear confrontation was unthinkable, the contest moved into "brushfire" wars in the developing world, whose new nations became pawns and proxies of the two superpowers, and into covert operations which produced lasting resentment and distrust of the United States.

Notably, the 1950s witnessed the beginning of the end of European colonial empires. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been previously controlled by a Franco-British company. Following military intervention, British, French, and Israeli forces were ultimately forced to withdraw as a result of pressure from the United States and Soviet Union, resulting in Egyptian control of the canal and signaling the decline of British imperial influence.

Following France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the 1954 Geneva settlement recognized the independence of Cambodia and Laos and established a temporary military demarcation in Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, with communist forces regrouping in the north and French-backed forces in the south. The final declaration anticipated nationwide elections in 1956, but neither the United States nor the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem accepted that provision as binding, and the elections were never held. The temporary division hardened into rival states and eventually into a war that drew the United States ever more deeply into Vietnam.

Key Terms

Third World: This term originally referred to unaligned nations during the Cold War that were neither Western capitalist democracies nor Communist bloc dictatorships. The United States and Soviet Union competed for influence in such countries, often through aid initiatives and military intervention.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the eighth section of Chapter Nineteen, “A Hero Becomes President.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Dwight Eisenhower’s background?

How did Eisenhower govern?

How did the concept of mutual assured destruction change the course of the Cold War?

How did Vietnam become independent of French control?

What was the Suez Crisis?

Who was Fidel Castro?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Geography

The chapter records that after Castro declared himself a communist, exiles “streamed out of the country into Southern Florida.” Have students locate Cuba and southern Florida on a map and estimate or measure the distance between them. Ask how proximity can turn a foreign-policy problem into an immediate domestic concern, and how a population arriving in one region can affect national politics.

Analytical Skills: The chapter says the opening of the Soviet archives after 1991 changed what could be said about the search for Soviet agents: some accusations were substantiated, and many people against whom nothing was proven were damaged. Have students find two or three present-day online sources on this question and, for each, name the author, the sponsoring organization, the date, and the evidence actually cited. Ask them to name the test they applied rather than to reach a verdict.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The text stresses the continuity that Eisenhower maintained between his own foreign policy and that of his predecessors. What challenges would he have faced in revising Truman’s Cold War policies? Was his actual approach the right course?

Civic Discourse: Was the CIA’s intervention in Iran during the Eisenhower administration consistent with American ideals? Did the country’s commitment to self-governance need to be tempered due to the geopolitical realities of the Cold War?

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a policy brief, advising President Eisenhower regarding the best course of action in response to the military intervention of the French, British, and Israelis during the Suez Crisis. What important political considerations are relevant for the United States?

Guiding Classroom Questions

The author states that President Dwight Eisenhower pursued an agenda of “consolidation.” What does this mean?

Insight: Eisenhower did not seek to undo or overturn the actions of his Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office. Instead, he attempted to place the dramatic changes of the early twentieth century on a sounder footing. As examples, he brokered peace that ended the Korean War, he continued the Truman policy of containment of communism without actively rolling back communist regimes, and he did not roll back the New Deal programs in the federal government.

Provide examples of foreign-policy challenges that the Eisenhower Administration faced.

Insight: The partition of Vietnam into North and South, with the South being ruled by the unreliable Ngo Dinh Diem and the North controlled by the communist Ho Chi Minh. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and Eisenhower’s demand that British and French forces protecting their rights to the canal withdraw. Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba and the imposition of a communist dictatorship.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Which three countries acted militarily against Egypt in 1956?

What did Eisenhower require of them?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Britain, France and Israel. (2) that they withdraw.

Explain

What did opposing his own allies at Suez gain the United States, and what did it cost?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer weighs both: it separated the United States from European colonialism in the eyes of newly independent countries, and it strained the alliance that containment depended on.

Daily Recap

While Eisenhower’s approach to foreign policy featured much continuity with that of the Truman administration, U.S. covert operations abroad became increasingly aggressive during his presidency. Meanwhile, the establishment of a communist regime in North Vietnam and Fidel Castro’s rise in Cuba marked significant escalations in the Cold War.

Looking Ahead

Abroad, the line holds. The last lesson turns to a contradiction at home the Cold War made impossible to ignore.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: deterrence; proxy war; covert action; decolonization; demarcation.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Deterrence reduced ___ but shifted competition toward ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud how Suez revealed both American power and alliance tension.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Classify cases as deterrence / covert action / proxy conflict / decolonization.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

19.9 A Civil Rights Movement at Home (pp. 673–676)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 673–676

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on segregation and foreign policy

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

World War II and the Cold War sharpened the contradiction between America’s democratic creed and segregation at home, helping make civil rights both a domestic constitutional question and an international test of American claims.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the early Civil Rights Movement and its legal strategy.

Explain how segregation complicated American claims abroad.

Assess what had and had not changed by 1959.

Key Dates

1954, May 17 – The Supreme Court decides Brown v. Board of Education

1955, December 1 – Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama

Key Concepts

The legal entitlements of members of a society to receive equal legal protections and not to be discriminated against on the basis of attributes like race, sex, or religion are called civil rights.

The “American Creed,” as defined by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, is a set of informal but binding affirmations that held Americans together and defined their social and political order, which was based on a belief in universal human equality, freedom, and opportunity. When Myrdal wrote, the condition of American race relations stood in glaring contradiction to that belief.

Key Terms

Segregation: The forcible separation of one group of people from others, segregation in the context of the American South meant that many black people were forced to live in separate towns, to use separate railway cars, to attend separate schools, and even to drink from separate water fountains.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the ninth section of Chapter Nineteen, “A Civil Rights Movement at Home.”

Assign the following reading questions:

What was the state of race relations in America in the wake of World War II?

How did the war impact race relations?

What, in Gunnar Myrdal’s view, was the American Creed?

What contradiction existed between American ideals and American practices, according to Gunnar Myrdal?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: The text claims that the Civil Rights Movement was “the logical successor to abolition.” How should this claim be understood?

Writing Skills: Assign students to evaluate in a 200-word essay the plausibility of Gunnar Myrdal’s concept of the American Creed. Irrespective of Myrdal’s views, what tensions have existed in American history between theoretical commitments to equality and the practical reality of race relations in the country?

Civic Discourse: Pass back student’s predictions about African American rights from lesson 18.4. Have them discuss in groups what they got wrong and what they got right. Which rights gained in the war were retained? Which were lost?

Writing Skills: Have students reflect over the whole of Chapter 19 as a catalogue of the many consequences of World War II. Have them return to their Cause and Course charts and choose one strand to trace from cause through wartime development to postwar consequence. Then have students develop a five-paragraph essay showing the strand across all three stages. Encourage students, where the evidence permits, to trace a complete Cause → Course → Consequence chain.

Insight: Some examples of threads to choose:

Nazi persecution of Jews through liberation of camps through Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948.

Double V African American service in the war through servicemen coming home to face segregation and demand equality.

The Manhattan Project begins in 1940 through the dropping of the bomb and then through the nuclear arms race.

The War Production Board and US production of most of Allied equipment through no postwar recession, the baby boom, and Levittowns.

Lend-Lease abandoning Washington’s warning against no permanent Alliances through NATO through the Truman Doctrine.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why did the civil rights movement gain momentum following World War II?

Insight: World War II highlighted the glaring contradiction between fighting for liberty abroad while tolerating discrimination and racial oppression at home. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal expanded on this gap between American ideals and American practices in his famous study An American Dilemma.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did the Supreme Court decide in Brown v. Board of Education?

What does segregation mean?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, overturning the doctrine of separate but equal. (2) the enforced separation of people by race in public life.

Explain

Why did segregation at home weaken the American case abroad?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the Cold War was an argument about which system treated people better, and that the argument was being made by a country whose own treatment of its citizens contradicted it. A partial answer notes the hypocrisy without connecting it to the contest the chapter is about.

Daily Recap

Black GIs who had risked their lives for the United States abroad returned home to face the entrenched realities of racial discrimination. As the Cold War began to unfold, the urgency of addressing the discrepancy between American ideals and the actual social treatment of African Americans correspondingly increased.

Looking Ahead

The Cold War is now permanent and the contradiction at home is now public. Chapter Twenty opens on the decade in which both come to a head.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: segregation; civil rights; American Creed; contradiction; equality.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The United States claimed ___ abroad while ___ at home.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: Explain aloud why segregation became a Cold War liability.

Show understanding without a paragraph: Create a claim/evidence pair using Brown or the water-cooler photograph.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

This assessment offers a model for evaluating student mastery of the chapter. Teachers may use it as written or adapt its questions to suit their own classrooms.

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest to latest. Number one is the earliest; number five is the latest.

______

______

______

______

______

President Truman signs the Marshall Plan into law

The Korean War begins

President Truman declares the Truman Doctrine

Dwight Eisenhower is elected president

Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

In China, a civil war that pitted the Nationalists, led by ________________________, against the Communists, led by ________________________, ended in a Communist victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

The ________________________ was the name of the legislation that provided veterans with funds for education and with government-backed mortgages.

The United States and several other Western nations formed the ________________________, a mutual-defense pact that sought to counter Soviet aggression.

Senator ________________________ of Wisconsin conducted a crusade against alleged communist subversion in American government.

General ________________________ was the commander of American forces in the Korean War. He advocated for expanding the war to China, but President Truman refused.

Geography

Using the map below, answer the following questions:

[ART REQUIRED — CH19 Geography, STUDENT SIDE: a clear, legible adaptation of Map 19.2, Cold War Military Alliances, 1949–91, preserving country boundaries, country names, alliance categories, membership dates, and the legend needed to answer the three questions below.]

Who were the founding members of NATO in 1949? Which two founding countries are not shown on the map?

Who were the founding members of the Warsaw Pact in 1955? Who joined in 1956?

The text states that between 1946 and 1948, Soviet-controlled Communist regimes had already come into power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, nearly a decade before the Warsaw Pact was founded. What does this gap suggest about the cause of the Warsaw Pact’s founding?

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

What factors led to a booming economy in the post-World War II period?

How did the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit reflect the uneasiness and anxiety of the postwar period?

How did the creation of Soviet “satellite states” in Eastern Europe set the conditions for the Cold War?

Explain how President Truman’s Berlin Airlift was an application of his policy of containment.

What reasons did Truman give for his support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine?

How did NSC-68 represent a significant break from the foreign policy traditions of the United States?

How did the opening of the Soviet archives following the end of the Cold War change the understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States during the Cold War?

Why was the Korean War a deeply unsatisfying victory for the policy of containment?

How did the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons affect the prosecution of the Cold War?

How did Eisenhower’s opposition to Britain, France, and Israel’s military response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal represent a change in American foreign policy?

Essay

The essay should take a clear position and argue it from the chapter's evidence. Approximately 400–600 words.

The author titles this chapter “All Thoughts and Things Were Split.” Write an essay that discusses how the history of the postwar period reflects this title. You should draw on the text of the chapter and at least three of the following:

Newell Convers Wyeth, The Homecoming (Figure 19.1)

George Kennan, “Long Telegram” (PS 19.1)

The Partition of Germany, 1945 (Map 19.1)

Excerpt from Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech (p. 645)

Excerpt from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (pp. 639–40)

Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick, And Now the Super-Duper? (Figure 19.4)

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Timeline

Answers as ordered below; the pairings are one-to-one.

E

C

A

B

D

President Truman signs the Marshall Plan into law

The Korean War begins

President Truman declares the Truman Doctrine

Dwight Eisenhower is elected president

Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

1. Chiang Kai-shek

2. GI Bill (of Rights)

3. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

4. Joseph McCarthy

5. Douglas MacArthur

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH19 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same adapted Map 19.2 used on the student side, printed at the same size, with NATO and Warsaw Pact membership distinctions and dates clearly legible.]

Who were the founding members of NATO in 1949? Which two founding countries are not shown on the map?

A: Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom. Canada and the United States are not depicted on the map.

Who were the founding members of the Warsaw Pact in 1955? Who joined in 1956?

A: Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania. East Germany joined in 1956.

The text states that between 1946 and 1948, Soviet-controlled Communist regimes had already come into power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, nearly a decade before the Warsaw Pact was founded. What does this gap suggest about the cause of the Warsaw Pact’s founding?

A: The Communist regimes predated the pact, so the Warsaw Pact did not create Soviet control of Eastern Europe; it formalized the existing Soviet bloc as a military alliance. The chapter presents the pact’s formation as a response to NATO.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

What factors led to a booming economy in the post-World War II period?

A: Many possible answers. During the Depression and the war, Americans had accumulated considerable savings that they now spent on consumer goods and housing. Returning veterans quickly married and had children, leading to large population growth. The GI Bill enabled many veterans to go to college and own homes, leading to increased standards of living.

How did the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit reflect the uneasiness and anxiety of the postwar period?

A: The main character of the novel was a veteran who returned to work and his wife following the war. He had difficulty reconciling his seemingly peaceful life with his killing of enemy soldiers and his affair with an Italian woman during his service. The character’s experience of a split existence reflected larger developments in this period, as the world was split between democracy and communism, and scientists had successfully split the atom, resulting in extraordinary power that could be very beneficial but could also be extremely destructive.

How did the creation of Soviet “satellite states” in Eastern Europe set the conditions for the Cold War?

A: Despite apparent agreements to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, Stalin and Soviet leaders proceeded to install communist governments in Eastern Europe that were ultimately under the control of the USSR. This created an “Iron Curtain” across Europe that divided the democratic West from the communist East. Soviet expansion convinced President Truman and other Western leaders that the USSR and communism needed to be contained.

Explain how President Truman’s Berlin Airlift was an application of his policy of containment.

A: When the Western Allies moved to unite their occupation zones into a West German state, the USSR blockaded land access to West Berlin, which was administered by the Western Allies but located inside the Soviet occupation zone. East Germany was established afterward. Truman responded by airlifting tons of food and medical supplies to West Berlin, and the Soviets eventually ended the blockade. The Berlin Airlift was a success of Truman’s containment policy because he was able to prevent the conquest of West Berlin while avoiding armed conflict between the United States and the USSR.

What reasons did Truman give for his support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine?

A: Truman’s Memoirs (PS 19.2) stated that a partition creating a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine would promote the economic development of an underutilized region. This would benefit both Jews and Arabs. Also, he believed a Jewish state was essential to protect the Jewish people following the horrors of the Holocaust.

How did NSC-68 represent a significant break from the foreign policy traditions of the United States?

A: The NSC-68 memorandum advocated for (1) massively increased military spending and (2) the formation of alliances with non-Communist regimes around the world. This was all to combat Soviet expansionism and the spread of communism. These policies broke from traditional American preferences that distrusted large standing armies and sought to avoid entangling alliances.

How did the opening of the Soviet archives following the end of the Cold War change the understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States during the Cold War?

A: Although figures like Joseph McCarthy accused some individuals of being Soviet agents without cause, the Soviet archives revealed that there were many Americans engaged in espionage on behalf of the USSR. Examples include Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets.

Why was the Korean War a deeply unsatisfying victory for the policy of containment?

A: The United States and its allies successfully prevented communist North Korea from taking over non-Communist South Korea. But the end of the war saw the reinstitution of the division of Korea at the 38th parallel, restoring the status quo. The U.S. had spent much blood and treasure while failing to roll back communism. Truman’s popularity declined significantly, and he decided not to run for a second full term.

How did the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons affect the prosecution of the Cold War?

A: Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. now possessed weapons capable of producing catastrophic mutual destruction if the two sides engaged in a “hot war.” This concept of “mutual assured destruction” meant that the two main combatants attempted to avoid open war between them. Instead, the Cold War resulted in smaller “brushfire” conflicts in which both sides attempted to win “Third World” countries to their side. An example was the American support for nominally democratic South Vietnam against communist North Vietnam.

How did Eisenhower’s opposition to Britain, France, and Israel’s military response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal represent a change in American foreign policy?

A: Eisenhower’s insistence that Britain and France withdraw from the Suez Canal even though it was owned by a joint British and French company was a clear example of how the United States was now the preeminent Western power, and it had the ability to compel its allies to follow its lead.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong essay takes the chapter’s title as a claim and tests it: the Cold War split not only Europe and Korea but American domestic politics, science, culture and self-understanding. It names at least three specific splits and shows how each followed from the same contest.

A competent essay names three splits accurately but treats them as a list rather than as consequences of one division.

A developing essay narrates Cold War events without reaching the title’s claim.

Credit either verdict on whether the title is apt. An essay arguing that the phrase overstates—that much of American life went on undivided—is doing the harder and better work if it is evidenced.

Watch for the common error of treating the split as purely foreign. The chapter’s last lesson is domestic, and an essay that stops at the Iron Curtain has read half of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Out of Balance

The Turbulent Sixties

1957–1969 · pp. 677–716

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

Delivered in January 1961, President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address raised profound questions that continue to be relevant today. The aftermath of World War II had created unprecedented conditions in the United States—a large standing military force and a vast array of manufacturers and technocrats servicing an ever-expanding federal government. This arrangement was a far cry from the American republic as founded. Could the United States continue to adhere to its original principles and yet meet the requirements of changed circumstances? For Eisenhower, the best way forward required striking a balance between the demands of liberty and the exigencies of the Cold War. By the end of the following decade, however, much in America seemed out of balance.

The presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson resulted in dramatic legislative changes, as well as significant progress for the Civil Rights Movement, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

John F. Kennedy’s life and presidency were shockingly and tragically cut short by an assassin. Young, vibrant, and enduringly popular, Kennedy left a mixed legacy in both domestic and foreign affairs. His fiscal policies were highly successful in promoting economic growth, and he energetically promoted America’s space program. Many of his domestic policy priorities, though, particularly those pertaining to civil rights, were languishing in Congress at the time of his death. In foreign policy, he generally maintained his predecessors’ commitment to containment. Kennedy was responsible for a major failure in the Bay of Pigs Invasion yet managed to counter Soviet aims during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, though lacking Kennedy’s inspirational qualities, proved more effective politically. Johnson pushed through a transformational series of domestic welfare and civil rights policies, many of which remain an integral part of America’s political landscape. Johnson also vastly escalated American involvement in Vietnam and presided over a major expansion of conscription of young men for military service as the Vietnam War escalated, which proved highly controversial.

As the decade wore on, many signs emerged of cultural unraveling. The peaceful and dignified civil rights movement under Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership lost its former unity, as a series of violent urban riots broke out across major American cities. Opposition to the Vietnam War grew, particularly on college campuses, and influential fringe elements were present in various protest movements. The year 1968 saw the assassinations of both King and Robert F. Kennedy.

Johnson faced so much opposition in 1968 that he decided against running for reelection. The 1968 Democratic Convention was itself a scene of violent conflict as antiwar protesters fought with Chicago police officers, and these chaotic confrontations played out on millions of television sets across the country. The tranquil days of President Eisenhower’s administration seemed very distant indeed. Promising a return to stability, Eisenhower’s former vice president, Richard Nixon, ultimately won the Presidential Election of 1968, in one of the most stunning career comebacks in American history.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The main political and social developments of the Sixties, from Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the election of Richard Nixon.

In his weighty and prescient farewell address, President Eisenhower warned the American people to remain both conscious of the needs of future generations and committed to the spirit of liberty.

In the Presidential Election of 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the fresh-faced and dynamic scion of a wealthy Irish-American family, defeated Vice President Nixon. JFK’s lofty rhetoric and popular presidency marked a generational change among America’s leadership, as a rising class of young technocrats increasingly rose to prominence in business and politics.

The inexperienced Kennedy mishandled the CIA’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion, though he showed greater prudence in forcing a withdrawal of Soviet armaments from Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On the domestic front, Kennedy proposed tax cuts that Congress enacted under Johnson after his death and that the book credits with stimulating growth; in response to feats of Soviet technological dominance, he greatly expanded the American space program and committed the nation to landing a man on the moon before the decade’s end—a goal achieved in 1969.

The Civil Rights Movement crested during the 1960s. Aided by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. aimed to achieve social integration and legal equality for African Americans through nonviolent protests.

Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 led to the inauguration of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The consummate politician, LBJ shepherded an ambitious legislative program through Congress, securing passage of the Civil Rights Act and organizing numerous social welfare initiatives to fight a “war on poverty” and build a “Great Society.”

After LBJ’s landslide defeat of the conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater in the Election of 1964, American society convulsed with recurrent unrest over the following four years, which were marred by race riots, the rise of hippie counterculture, and protests against America’s increasing involvement in the Vietnam War.

1968 was a pivotal year in U.S. history: the Tet Offensive weakened public support for the war effort in Vietnam; LBJ, facing significant opposition in the Democratic primaries, withdrew from the presidential race; civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and the Democratic frontrunner Senator Robert Kennedy were both assassinated; and former Vice President Richard Nixon completed a remarkable political comeback by winning election to the Presidency.

The Election of 1968 was a chaotic affair, with LBJ’s withdrawal, RFK’s assassination, and street fighting between police and protesters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Despite not winning any primaries, Vice President Hubert Humphrey received the Democrats’ nomination and lost a surprisingly close race to Richard Nixon, with many southerners and blue-collar workers supporting the third-party candidacy of former Alabama Governor George Wallace.

Key Persons

Alger Hiss (1904–1996)

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963)

Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971)

Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994)

Allen Dulles (1893–1969)

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)

Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948)

Nelson B. Rockefeller (1908–1979)

Malcolm X (1925–1965)

Betty Friedan (1921–2006)

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968)

Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005)

George C. Wallace (1919–1998)

Key Concepts and Terms

Military-industrial complex

Cold War

Keynesian economics

Sputnik (1957)

Apollo 11

Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961)

Berlin Wall

Cuban Missile Crisis

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956)

Civil Rights Bill

March on Washington (1963)

Voting Rights Act (1965)

Great Society

Libertarian

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)

Vietnam War (1955-1975)

Communitarian

War on Poverty

Young Americans for Freedom

Tet Offensive (1968)

Six-Day War (June 5–10, 1967)

Timeline

1957 The Soviets launch Sputnik into space (October 4)

1960 John F. Kennedy is elected president (November 8)

1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Farewell Address (January 17)

1961 The Soviets send the first man into space (April 12)

1961 The CIA launches an unsuccessful invasion to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs (April 17)

1961 The Berlin Wall goes up (August)

1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis begins (October 16)

1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech (August 28)

1963 Kennedy is assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in (November 22)

1964 Johnson announces his “Great Society” plan (May 22)

1964 Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act (July 2)

1964 Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7)

1964 Lyndon Johnson is elected president (November 3)

1965 U.S. ground troops land in Vietnam (March 8)

1965 Johnson signs Medicare and Medicaid bills into law (July 30)

1965 President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act (August 6)

1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles (August 11–16)

1967 In the Six-Day War, Israel defeats Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (June 5–10)

1967 March on the Pentagon in protest of Vietnam War (October 21)

1968 The North Vietnamese launch the Tet Offensive (January 31)

1968 Johnson withdraws from presidential race (March 31)

1968 Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated (April 4)

1968 Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated (June 5)

1968 Richard Nixon is elected president (November 5)

1969 The Apollo 11 mission lands the first man on the moon (July 20)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

20.1 Chapter Opening – pp. 679–682 (.5 to 1 class)

The model of the two-term presidency is restored

Eisenhower warns about the “military-industrial complex”

Eisenhower urges “balance” to navigate contemporary challenges

20.2 A New Frontier – pp. 683–689 (.5 to 1 class)

The Election of 1960

The first televised presidential debates: Kennedy vs. Nixon

Kennedy’s electoral victory and Inaugural Address

The Kennedy administration’s approach and personnel

Kennedy and the space race

20.3 Stumbles Abroad – pp. 690–693 (.5 to 1 class)

Trouble in Cuba: Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Escalation in Vietnam

Kennedy’s assassination

20.4 A Rising Tide for Civil Rights – pp. 694–698 (.5 to 1 class)

The nascent Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King Jr.; Brown v. Board of Education

Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956

Lunch counter sit-ins; freedom riders

1963: Civil Rights protests in Birmingham, AL; the March on Washington

MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act

20.5 The Age of Johnson – pp. 699–702 (.5 to 1 class)

Lyndon Baines Johnson

The idea of the “Great Society”

The Election of 1964

20.6 The Great Society – pp. 703–710 (1 to 2 classes)

LBJ’s ambitious legislative agenda

The mixed success of “Great Society” initiatives

The Watts Riots trigger unrest in other cities

The black power movement; Malcolm X

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Reinstitution of the draft

The antiwar movement, feminism, and the New Left

The rise of hippie counterculture

20.7 The Democrats Collapse – pp. 711–716 (.5 to 1 class)

The pivotal year of 1968: the Tet Offensive; LBJ’s withdrawal; the assassinations of MLK and RFK; the Democratic Convention devolves into a debacle; George Wallace runs as an independent candidate

The election of Richard Nixon

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Out of Balance, chapter epigraph (p. 677)

The decade moved from New Frontier confidence to questioning and uncertainty at home and a divisive war abroad, producing a deep crisis of confidence—in leadership, in each other, and in the nation itself. The language belongs to the end of the period the chapter covers rather than its beginning, which is the first thing to say to a class: the decade opens with a president promising a New Frontier and closes with this. McClay’s title names what lost its balance, and it is not the economy, which grew, or American power, which was unmatched, but the country’s confidence in its own arrangements. He resists treating the 1960s as either a liberation or a catastrophe, and the epigraph lets him state the cost without pronouncing on the causes. Return at 20.7, after Tet, two assassinations and Grant Park, and ask which of the three losses the chapter has best evidenced. Students will disagree, which is the point.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 20.1 · Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961 (p. 682)

Eisenhower delivered his Farewell Address three days before Kennedy’s inauguration. His military command and eight years as president gave unusual weight to his warning that a permanent arms industry and a large standing military establishment—new features of peacetime American life—could acquire economic, political, and even spiritual influence. Nearly nine in ten American households then owned a television, giving the address an immense potential audience.

Primary Source 20.2 · John F. Kennedy, Acceptance Speech for the Democratic Nomination for President, July 15, 1960 (p. 687)

Delivered in Los Angeles on accepting the nomination, four months before the closest election in modern memory. Two visions of the same country, six months apart: one warning that American power has grown into something that needs watching, the other asking Americans to do more with it. Ask which speech the decade vindicated, and expect the class to divide.

Primary Source 20.3 · Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963 (p. 696)

Written in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper while King was jailed for demonstrating in Birmingham, and addressed—this is the crucial fact—not to segregationists but to eight white clergymen who supported his goals and had publicly urged him to wait. King distinguishes just from unjust laws, citing Augustine’s claim that an unjust law is no law at all, and argues that a moral responsibility to obey the first entails a moral responsibility to disobey the second. The deeper argument is about timing: an ally counseling delay concedes the principle while withholding the act. The sentences are long and the allusions run through scripture, classical philosophy and law, so the structure needs signposting.

Figures

Figure 20.1 · John O. Wehrle, Landing Zone, 1966 (p. 677; the chapter-opening plate)

Painted under the U.S. Army’s Combat Artist Team program. A solitary soldier stands in tall grass at a Vietnamese landing zone, and the book’s own caption states what the picture is doing: conveying the disorientation of a guerrilla war with no fixed front lines and no clear path to victory. Like the opening plates of Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen this is a government-commissioned work. What a battle painting normally contains—an enemy, a line, a direction—has been left out, and asking students what a painter claims by omitting all of it opens the chapter better than a summary of the war.

Figure 20.5 · Nixon and Kennedy Debate in Chicago, 1960 (p. 685)

The first televised presidential debate, watched by about seventy million Americans. What repays attention is the staging: two men standing, no audience reaction, and cameras deciding what the country sees and for how long. This was the moment appearance and manner became evidence about fitness for office, rewarding qualities not obviously connected to governing. The familiar claim that television simply favored the better-looking candidate is less interesting than the real question, which is what the medium made relevant.

Figure 20.7 · Astronaut Edwin Aldrin Poses for a Photograph Beside the Deployed U.S. Flag on the Moon, 1969 (p. 689)

Aldrin on the lunar surface in July 1969, photographed by Neil Armstrong—who is visible in the reflection of the visor, a detail students enjoy finding for themselves. The commitment Kennedy made at the start of the decade is fulfilled in the same year as the aftermath of Tet and the collapse of the Democratic coalition, and the two belong together. Set the image against Figure 20.6, the Sputnik preparations of 1957: twelve years separate a Soviet satellite that shocked Americans from an American on the moon.

Figure 20.11 · Bill Hudson, Civil Rights Demonstration in Birmingham, 1963 (p. 695)

Walter Gadsden, a fifteen-year-old African American high school student, attacked by police dogs during the Birmingham Campaign. The book states that Hudson’s photograph helped turn the country against Southern segregation—a strong claim about a single image, and one worth putting to students as a claim to be tested rather than a fact to be absorbed. The age of the subject is the first thing to establish, and the second is that the photographer was standing close enough to be in danger himself. Ask what a photograph can do that an argument cannot, and then what it cannot do.

Figure 20.13 · Yoichi Okamoto, Signing of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 (p. 698)

Johnson signing the Act. Demonstration, march and legislation appear in that order, which is the chapter’s account of how the movement converted visibility into law. Who is in the room repays attention, and so does who is not. The Act removed the devices—literacy tests and their like—used to keep Black citizens from registering, and supplied federal enforcement, which is the part that made it work where earlier legislation had not.

Figure 20.15 · U.S. Information Agency, Come South, 1954 (p. 705)

An American propaganda poster distributed in Vietnam to urge migration southward, reading “Go South to Avoid Communism” at the top and, at the bottom, that South Vietnamese compatriots open their arms to welcome North Vietnamese compatriots. Two things make it unusually valuable. It is dated 1954, eleven years before American ground troops, so it establishes how long involvement preceded the war students think of as the war. And it is American material made for a foreign audience, which students almost never see—propaganda is generally taught as something other countries produce. Ask who is being addressed, in what language, and what the poster assumes about its reader.

Figure 20.19 · Protestors and Chicago Police Officers in Grant Park, 1968 (p. 715)

Protesters and police clashing on August 28, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention. The book adds that the events were televised, further dividing a fractured nation, and the medium is part of the event rather than a way of reporting it: a party nominating a president and a crowd being beaten appeared on the same broadcast, minutes apart.

Maps

Map 20.1 · The Election of 1960 (p. 686)

One of the closest results in American history. The instructive thing about this map is what it cannot show: several states turned on fractions of a percentage point and appear identical here to states carried overwhelmingly. In an election this close any single factor can be called decisive—the debates, Illinois, Texas, the Catholic vote—and that is itself worth interrogating, because a decisive factor in a race decided by a tenth of a point is a rhetorical category rather than a causal one.

Map 20.2 · The Election of 1964 (p. 702)

Johnson’s landslide and the handful of states that went the other way. Where the Goldwater states are is the important detail, because the pattern is regional and does not match the Democratic map of 1960. The chapter treats 1964 as a majority assembled out of shock and a weak opponent rather than agreement on a program, and the exceptions on this map are the beginning of a realignment that Chapter Twenty-One completes.

Map 20.3 · The Vietnam War, 1963–1975 (p. 708)

The theater of the war, including the Ho Chi Minh Trail running through Laos and Cambodia. The single fact that explains most of the strategic difficulty the chapter describes is that the supply route lies outside the country being defended. Bombing concentrates on the North and on the trail rather than on a front, because there is no front, and students who arrive expecting a line between two sides will need that corrected before anything else makes sense.

Map 20.4 · The Election of 1968 (p. 714)

A three-way result and a fractured map. The Wallace states are the thing to find, and then the comparison with Map 20.2 four years earlier: the same region, the opposite column. The New Deal coalition that had won seven of nine elections since 1932 comes apart here, in public, and the map records it clearly.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 679–682)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: pp. 679–682

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on the Farewell Address

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

The decade opened with a warning from the man least likely to give it: a five-star general telling the country that a permanent arms industry could come to shape the policy it was built to serve.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

Explain what Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell Address.

Describe the confidence and the unease with which the decade opened.

Identify what the phrase “military-industrial complex” was meant to name.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1961, Jan. 17 – Eisenhower delivers his Farewell Address

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

In his farewell address, President Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex,” by which he meant the combination of the military establishment and the armaments industry that supplies it, which after World War II was a novel feature in peacetime American life.

The national debt is the total amount of money that the federal government owes. When the federal government spends more through programs and on purchases than it receives from taxes and other forms of revenue, the national debt grows. Eisenhower warned the American public against the temptation of excessive spending that would saddle future generations with unsustainable levels of debt.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Technocracy: A technocratic government or society is one that is controlled by experts.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Twenty.

Assign the following reading questions:

How did Eisenhower end his second term?

What was the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution?

What did Eisenhower mean by the term “military-industrial complex”?

Regarding which particular challenges did Eisenhower hope to provide advice and insight in his farewell address?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from Eisenhower’s farewell address. What was timely about Eisenhower’s warnings? Were they heeded by his audience?

Civic Discourse: Was Eisenhower’s concern regarding the corrupting effects of a large military build-up prophetic? How so or why not?

Writing Skills: Assign students to write roughly 200-word essays that evaluate the legacy of Eisenhower’s farewell address. What were the most important challenges facing American society at the time? Did Eisenhower offer helpful guidance in his speech?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

What was Eisenhower’s warning against the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex”?

Insight: Eisenhower warned that the military buildup necessitated by the Cold War could result in a powerful combination of the military and the defense industry that would exercise undue power in American government. This combination could endanger American liberties and the democratic control of the government. He made similar warnings about government funding of science and the potential rise of technocratic elites.

How was the concept of “balance” important to Eisenhower’s farewell address?

Insight: The author argues that the speech explored the need to find a middle ground (or a balance) between foundational American principles and the particular problems and needs of the present age.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What did Eisenhower name as a potential threat in his Farewell Address?

What office had Eisenhower held before the presidency?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the military-industrial complex—the combination of a large standing arms industry and a large military establishment. (2) Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the Second World War.

Explain

Why does the warning carry more weight coming from Eisenhower than it would from a critic of the military?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the speaker had built and commanded the thing he was warning about, so the warning cannot be dismissed as hostility or ignorance. A partial answer notes his rank without reaching why it matters to the argument.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the internal dangers that the American people faced in the early years of the Cold War, as an expanding governmental bureaucracy and military establishment threatened to dampen the spirit of liberty and self-rule that were fundamental to the American character.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

Eisenhower leaves with a warning. The next lesson brings in the man who replaced him, and a very different account of what the country should be doing.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: military-industrial complex, deterrence, containment, federal power, and civil rights. Distinguish a warning about concentrated influence from an argument against national defense itself.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Eisenhower believed the United States needed ___, but warned that ___.” “A Cold War policy could protect freedom abroad while creating the risk of ___ at home.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: in pairs, students explain Eisenhower’s warning in two parts—what had become necessary and what danger necessity created.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a two-column chart labeled Cold War necessities / dangers Eisenhower identified.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.2 A New Frontier (pp. 683–689)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 683–689

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on the two 1960 campaign posters

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Kennedy won the closest election in modern memory by an argument about vigor and motion, and spent his presidency being measured against it.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the 1960 election and the role of television in it.

Explain what Kennedy meant by the New Frontier.

Describe the origins and aims of the space race.

Key Dates

1957, Oct. 4 – The Soviets launch Sputnik into space

1960, Nov. 8 – John F. Kennedy is elected president

1961, Apr. 12 – The Soviets send the first man into space

1969, July 20 – The Apollo 11 mission lands the first man on the moon

Key Concepts

The New Frontier, John F. Kennedy’s political platform when he ran for president against Richard Nixon, was meant to recall Frederick Jackson Turner’s assertion of the frontier’s central importance to American life as a place of exploration and renewal. Kennedy extended that vision of “frontier” to apply to space exploration and efforts to overcome poverty and disease.

Though Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, the U.S. space capsule Apollo 11 brought U.S. astronauts to the moon for the first time ever on July 20, 1969.

Key Terms

“Kitchen debate”: As vice president under Eisenhower, Richard Nixon engaged in this impromptu debate with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative economic merits of capitalism and communism while visiting a model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Twenty, “A New Frontier.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Why was the 1960 campaign noteworthy?

Whom did JFK recruit to run his administration?

How effective was JFK in getting his programs enacted by Congress?

What was the economic effect of the tax cuts Kennedy proposed?

Why was JFK so committed to the exploration of space?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Geography:

The chapter follows the space race from Sputnik through NASA’s creation to Aldrin and Armstrong on the moon, Have students identify Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Atlantic coast and place them on a map of Florida alongside the state’s other federal installations of the period. Ask what a launch complex brings to the place that hosts it—workers, contractors, schools, roads—and how a national program becomes a regional economy.

Context: The book does not name a launch site. For the teacher: the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights the chapter describes were launched from Cape Canaveral on Florida’s Atlantic coast, and the adjacent Kennedy Space Center became the program’s launch headquarters during the 1960s. Because the Student Book does not develop the launch site, treat this as optional enrichment rather than required chapter mastery. If assigning additional research, provide or approve a reliable reference in advance.

Close Reading: The following excerpts from JFK’s Inaugural Address are quoted in the text: “Let the word go forth from this time and place that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans… Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more… In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it… And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Ask a student volunteer to read these passages aloud from the text, and discuss the following questions in class: what tone did JFK’s Inaugural set for his presidency? Why does it remain such a memorable speech?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: How did the Peace Corps advance American aims during the Cold War?

Civic Discourse: What was the cultural and political importance of the space program during the 1960s? Was its ultimate success the greatest legacy of Kennedy’s presidency?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Provide some examples of important policies enacted during John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Insight: Kennedy proposed a large tax cut, which languished during his presidency and was enacted under Johnson; the book credits the policy with stimulating the economy. He made space exploration a priority, and his efforts eventually resulted in the moon landing in 1969. He also created programs for foreign assistance, including the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

How many Americans watched the first televised presidential debate?

What was Sputnik, and why did it alarm the United States?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) about seventy million. (2) the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957; it showed the Soviets could put an object into orbit, and therefore reach anywhere.

Explain

What did television change about how a presidential candidate had to campaign?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that television made appearance and manner into evidence about fitness for office, and that this rewarded qualities not obviously connected to governing. A partial answer says only that Kennedy looked better.

Daily Recap

JFK’s presidency offered the American people a burst of hope amid the height of the Cold War, as the country’s fresh-faced and forward-looking young leader championed tax cuts at home while championing American leadership abroad.

Looking Ahead

The New Frontier is announced. The next lesson is where it meets the world.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: New Frontier, televised debate, Sputnik, space race, and Peace Corps. Connect frontier language to exploration, competition, and national renewal.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Kennedy presented ___ as a new frontier because ___.” “Television changed campaigning by making ___ visible to voters.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain the sequence Sputnik → American anxiety → federal investment → moon goal before writing.

Show understanding without a paragraph: build a four-step sequence from Sputnik to Apollo 11 and label the political meaning of each step.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.3 Stumbles Abroad (pp. 690–693)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 690–693

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on the missile crisis

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Kennedy’s foreign policy began in failure at the Bay of Pigs and reached its height thirteen months later, when the same caution that had looked like weakness prevented a nuclear war. The chapter also treats difficulties in Central Europe and Southeast Asia.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Explain how the crisis was resolved.

Assess Kennedy’s foreign policy record.

Key Dates

1961, Apr. 17 – The CIA launches an unsuccessful invasion to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs

1961, August - The Berlin Wall goes up

1962, Oct. 16 – The Cuban Missile Crisis begins

1963, Nov. 22 – Kennedy is assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in

Key Concepts

After JFK took office, a CIA-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast of Cuba planned during the Eisenhower administration was handicapped, in that the United States refused to provide the promised air cover. The invading forces of Cuban exiles had hoped to overthrow the communist regime of Fidel Castro, though they were instead soundly defeated in only three days.

Hoping to take advantage of Kennedy’s apparent inexperience, the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev escalated the Cold War in an attempt to gain concessions from the United States. In 1961, Communist East Germany constructed the “Berlin Wall,” encircling West Berlin and further militarizing the border with West Germany.

In the following year’s Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet attempt to station ballistic missiles on Cuba led JFK to order a naval quarantine of the island, bringing the two superpowers to the brink of direct confrontation before the Soviets agreed to withdraw their armaments.

Key Terms

Reconnaissance planes: The U.S. spy planes that alerted the government to the construction of nuclear weapons facilities by the Soviet Union in Cuba were U-2s, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. During the Cold War they were used to collect samples of the atmosphere to determine whether other countries were testing nuclear weapons.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Twenty, “Stumbles Abroad.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How effective was JFK’s Cuban policy?

What happened when JFK met Soviet leader Khrushchev two months after the Bay of Pigs Invasion?

What was the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

What other foreign policy challenges confronted JFK?

What was the cultural effect of Kennedy’s assassination?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Why might Kennedy have reneged on the promise of air support to the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs?

Civic Discourse: How did JFK’s conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrate his personal growth since the Bay of Pigs fiasco?

Debate: Ask students to consider whether JFK was more important as a cultural symbol or a historical actor. Stage a debate on this topic and poll the class at the end to see how many students changed their mind over the course of the discussion.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What foreign-policy challenges did Kennedy face?

Insight: Kennedy approved the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt by U.S.-backed Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. In Berlin, Khrushchev’s government erected the wall amid the continuing confrontation over the divided city. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy combined military pressure with restraint and negotiation to secure removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. In Vietnam, his administration increased American advisers and support for South Vietnam and acquiesced in the 1963 coup against Ngo Dinh Diem; historians debate how far Kennedy would have escalated the war had he lived.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Why was the Soviet Union installing missiles in Cuba?

Where had the United States deployed missiles that prompted the Soviet response?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) in response to American missile deployments near Soviet territory, and to protect a communist government ninety miles from Florida. (2) in Turkey, within range of the Soviet Union.

Explain

The crisis ended without a war. What in Kennedy’s handling made that possible?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer identifies specific choices—a quarantine rather than a strike, time allowed for a response, a concession made quietly—and sees that each left the other side a way to stop. A partial answer credits restraint without naming what it consisted of.

Daily Recap

Kennedy’s foreign-policy record mixed conspicuous failure with successful crisis management. The Bay of Pigs failed to remove Castro, while the Cuban Missile Crisis ended through a combination of pressure, restraint, and negotiated concessions. In Vietnam, Kennedy expanded the American advisory commitment and supported the South Vietnamese government while his administration acquiesced in the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem; the scale of the later American war developed under Johnson.

Looking Ahead

The Cold War is survived abroad. The next lesson turns to the conflict at home that would not wait.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, quarantine, and Vietnam. Distinguish invasion, quarantine, coup, and military advisory support.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Kennedy chose ___ instead of ___ because ___.” “The missile crisis ended without war because both sides ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students narrate the missile crisis in four moves—threat, options, decision, settlement—and identify one concession by each side.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a decision tree showing the major options Kennedy considered during the missile crisis and the risks attached to each.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.4 A Rising Tide for Civil Rights (pp. 694–698)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 694–698

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on the Letter from Birmingham Jail

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The movement’s power was that it made segregation visible to people who had been able not to see it, and then converted that visibility into law.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington.

Explain King’s argument for nonviolent direct action.

Describe the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Key Dates

1963, Aug. 28 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech

1964, July 2 – Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act

1965, Aug. 6 – President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act

Key Concepts

Integration is the opposite of segregation; it means bringing seemingly disparate parts into a whole. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, it meant bringing black and white people into the same settings in mainstream America, especially in public schools.

A form of social protest pioneered by Indian reformer Mohandas Gandhi and adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. and the early Civil Rights Movement, nonviolent resistance is intended to be dignified and peaceful yet also provocative, exposing the injustice of aggressors and wrongdoers. Examples of nonviolent resistance in the United States include the Montgomery Bus Boycott; sit-ins; freedom riders; protestors’ nonviolent responses to police brutality following demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama; and the 1963 March on Washington. Alternative movements and opposing figures, such as Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, arose later, favoring separatism and self-determination over King’s nonviolent methods (Lesson 20.6).

Ultimately, the Civil Rights Movement won important legal concessions, particularly during the Johnson administration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — significant steps toward ensuring equal social and political standing for African Americans — passed where earlier efforts had failed. This success was due in part to white supporters, labor unions, and religious groups joining the marches and lobbying Congress alongside Black activists.

Key Terms

“Tokenism”: This behavior consists in offering minimal representation or advantages to a small number of a disadvantaged group to create the appearance of inclusivity or fairness.

Brown v. Board of Education: In this unanimous 1954 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against the constitutionality of school segregation, reasoning that, “in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place.” The decision was an important victory for groups like the NAACP that sought to use the judiciary to desegregate schools, but enforcement of it proved extremely difficult, especially in the Deep South.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Twenty, “A Rising Tide for Civil Rights.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Why was JFK initially hesitant to act on civil rights for African Americans?

What were the consequences of Brown v. Board of Education?

What happened during the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

What was the background of Martin Luther King Jr.?

What forms of protest did the Civil Rights Movement use to advance its cause?

What was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how did civil rights activists push for its passage into law?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Why might nonviolent protest be more effective than rioting in achieving political change in a democratic society?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: How did the growth of television viewership contribute to the ultimate success of the Civil Rights Movement?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. How does his rhetoric frame the Civil Rights Movement within the broader context of American history?

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did legal challenges beginning in the 1930s set the stage for the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s?

Insight: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) successfully sued to end the segregation of schools and colleges. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Although civil rights reformers had won the legal battle, many southern states refused to abide by court decisions, thus necessitating more direct activist tactics.

What sequence of movements and leaders followed those court rulings, and how did the approach to civil rights change along the way?

Insight: King advocated for nonviolent resistance to unjust and discriminatory laws, seeking to hold up a mirror to the injustice of segregation. He linked the civil rights struggle with “the American Dream, the Christian moral tradition, and the great American political heritage of the Declaration and the Constitution.” Looking ahead, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement judged King's approach too slow and too accommodating and argued that separatism offered African Americans a faster and more secure path forward. They encouraged Black communities to build their own institutions and control their own future rather than seeking integration into a system they saw as unwilling to change.

What two major anti-discrimination laws passed Congress following the March on Washington in 1963?

Insight: The March on Washington, during which King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech, helped to galvanize support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

On whose teaching did King draw for the method of nonviolent protest?

What did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 do?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Mohandas Gandhi. (2) removed the devices—literacy tests and their like—used to keep Black citizens from registering and voting, and provided federal enforcement.

Explain

King wrote from jail to clergymen who agreed with his goal and objected to his timing. Why did he treat that objection as the more serious one?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that an opponent can be argued with while an ally counseling delay concedes the principle and withholds the action, and that “wait” had by then meant a century. A partial answer summarizes the letter without reaching the argument about timing.

Daily Recap

Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement successfully protested against racial segregation in the American South, securing important legal and social advances under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr.

Looking Ahead

Kennedy does not live to sign the laws his presidency made possible. The next lesson belongs to the man who does.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: segregation, integration, nonviolent direct action, civil disobedience, Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act. Distinguish protest strategy from the legal changes it sought.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Nonviolent protest exposed ___ by ___.” “Federal law changed ___, but enforcement still required ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain how Birmingham or Selma moved from local protest to national attention to federal action.

Show understanding without a paragraph: make a three-column chart—protest/action, injustice made visible, legal or political result.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.5 The Age of Johnson (pp. 699–702)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 699–702

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on the swearing-in photograph

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Johnson converted grief and a landslide into the largest burst of domestic legislation since the New Deal, in less time than anyone expected it to last.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the assassination of Kennedy and Johnson’s succession.

Explain Johnson’s legislative method.

Describe the 1964 election and what Goldwater represented.

Key Dates

1964, May 22 – Johnson announces his “Great Society” plan

1964, Nov. 3 – Lyndon Johnson is elected president

Key Concepts

In his 1964 State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Baines Johnson framed his legislative effort to improve social welfare as the moral equivalent of war. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” he proclaimed, and then he proceeded to explain the need to coordinate all levels of government to launch initiatives in education, health care, housing, and job training.

Johnson’s “Great Society” program contrasted starkly with the libertarian leanings of his opponent in 1964, Barry Goldwater, who wished to downsize the federal government and to reduce the number of laws and regulations that restrained individual choice and market forces.

The Republican party was split in the election by its ascendant conservative wing and the moderate Northeastern establishment, known as Rockefeller Republicans, many of whom ultimately voted for Johnson.

The segregation Johnson moved against had been the settled legal order of the South for nearly seventy years. Since the 1890s, Jim Crow laws passed by Southern “Redeemer” governments (Lesson 11.5) had enforced racial segregation and stripped Black Americans of political and economic rights, a system the courts had upheld and Congress had left untouched for generations. After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public places and businesses as well as discriminatory employment practices, Johnson romped to one of the most decisive electoral victories on the presidential level in American history.

Key Terms

Great Society: Johnson’s program of domestic legislation on poverty, health care, education and civil rights, enacted largely in 1964–66.

War on Poverty: The declared aim of raising the condition of the poorest Americans through federal programs rather than relief alone.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Twenty, “The Age of Johnson.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Johnson’s background contrast with Kennedy’s?

How did Johnson stress continuity between his early administration with that of his predecessor?

How did the Republican Party split in 1964?

What promising political signs were evident for Republicans, even in their landslide defeat?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: Despite his landslide defeat, Senator Goldwater uttered one of the most famous lines in convention history as he accepted the Republican nomination: “I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” What did he intend to convey to the American public in this statement? How might it have played with the general electorate at the time?

Civic Discourse: What was the political and historical legacy of the elections of 1964? How did the elections pave the way for Johnson’s legislative program? What did they promise for the future of the Republican Party?

Writing Skills: Ask students to choose one of the nominees for president in 1964 and to write a brief essay arguing in support of one of them. Have them share their work in small groups and then invite a few volunteers to share their essays with the entire class as discussion prompts.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did Lyndon Johnson compare to Kennedy?

Insight: Johnson had a rougher personality than Kennedy, and he also had grander policy ambitions when compared to Kennedy. As examples, Johnson was much more aggressive in endorsing civil rights reforms, and he was also a more enthusiastic New Dealer who wanted to use the government to fight poverty and lack of opportunity through his “Great Society” programs.

Further: Their foreign policies differed as well: Kennedy’s was defined by direct crises with the Soviet Union, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Looking ahead, Johnson’s administration would be in large part defined by a strategy of limited war in Vietnam, calibrated to avoid a wider war with China or the Soviet Union but ultimately unable to produce a decisive victory (Lesson 20.6.) Both followed Eisenhower, whose own approach to the Cold War was one of steady consolidation rather than direct confrontation.

Although Barry Goldwater was soundly defeated by Johnson in the presidential election of 1964, what was the significance of Goldwater’s campaign for the future of American politics?

Insight: Goldwater’s winning of the “Sunbelt” states presaged a shift in which the Republican Party would gain momentum in the South and the West, states that had previously been Democratic strongholds. Goldwater also argued for several positions (reducing the size of government, reducing government spending) that would become key tenets of a rising conservative movement.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Where was Johnson sworn in as president?

Whom did Johnson defeat in the 1964 election, and what did that candidate represent?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) aboard Air Force One, in Dallas. (2) Barry Goldwater, representing a more conservative and libertarian wing of the Republican Party.

Explain

Why did a landslide in 1964 turn out to be a poor predictor of the rest of the decade?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the majority was assembled out of shock and a weak opponent rather than agreement on a program, and that Vietnam and the reaction to the Great Society pulled it apart within four years.

Daily Recap

Stressing the need for continuity, LBJ surged to victory in 1964, not only decisively defeating Barry Goldwater but decimating congressional Republicans. Nonetheless, the seeds of future victory had been planted in Goldwater’s campaign, as Republicans began to shift their base of support to the fast-growing Sunbelt and the former actor Ronald Reagan emerged as an effective spokesman for conservative ideals.

Looking Ahead

Johnson has the majority he needs. The next lesson is what he does with it—and the war that consumes it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: landslide, mandate, Great Society, War on Poverty, and Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Distinguish an electoral mandate from agreement on every policy.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Johnson’s 1964 victory gave him ___, but it did not guarantee ___.” “The coalition weakened when ___ and ___ pulled in different directions.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain why Johnson could pass major legislation in 1964–65 and why that political position proved difficult to sustain.

Show understanding without a paragraph: place Johnson’s 1964 victory, major domestic legislation, Vietnam escalation, and coalition fracture on one cause-and-effect chain.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.6 The Great Society (pp. 703–710)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 703–710

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on guns and butter

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Johnson tried to fight poverty at home and communism in Asia at once, and the war took the money, the attention and finally the presidency. The lesson also covers the counterculture movement.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Great Society and the War on Poverty.

Explain the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Describe the rise of the New Left and the antiwar movement.

Key Dates

1964, Aug. 7 – Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

1965, Mar. 8 – U.S. ground troops land in Vietnam

1965, July 30 – Johnson signs Medicare and Medicaid bills into law

1965, Aug. 11–16 – Watts riots break out in Los Angeles

1967, June 5–10 – In the Six-Day War, Israel defeats Egypt, Jordan, and Syria

1967, Oct. 21 – March on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War

Key Concepts

Black Power emerged from dissatisfaction with the pace and limits of integrationist reform and emphasized Black self-determination, political power, community control, cultural pride, and economic independence. Some advocates also embraced separatism, but the movement contained multiple strands and should not be reduced to a single program.

Separatist strands within Black Power rejected integration as the primary goal and argued that African Americans should build autonomous institutions and exercise greater control over their own communities. This differed fundamentally from segregation imposed by law and coercion by white governments, even though both positions rejected integration as an immediate social arrangement.

The Black power movement became increasingly unpopular, and even resented, as American cities broke out in race riots during the second half of the Sixties, particularly during the long, hot summer of 1967, when large portions of Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit were destroyed.

It was clear from the beginning that American involvement in Vietnam would have to take the form of a limited war, a war that by design was not going to end in a “victory” in any traditional sense of the term but that would aim instead at forcing a negotiated settlement. As American involvement escalated, and especially once a military draft was reinstituted, the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular, leading to widespread protests on college campuses.

President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” meanwhile, had mixed results. While the national poverty rate dropped seven points between 1964 and 1973, from 20 percent to 13 percent, costs soared. Welfare programs addressed the needs of the poor but sometimes promoted dependency on cash supports rather than movement into productive work. In some cases, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the book argues that the net effect was to weaken families by disincentivizing marriage and family intactness.

Key Terms

Watts Riots: In the summer of 1965, a black motorist’s roadside confrontation with police precipitated six days of rioting in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles, California. Over the next two years, riots broke out in major cities across the country, notably in Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, Newark, Detroit, Washington, DC, and Baltimore.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: This congressional resolution gave President Johnson considerable discretionary power to wage war in Vietnam, as a result of a naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin between an American destroyer and three North Vietnamese torpedo boats.

Counterculture: Expressing dissatisfaction with middle class norms, the counterculture manifested a relatively apolitical form of rebellion. Known as “hippies,” its participants embraced long hair, colorful clothing, rock music, the use of mind-altering drugs, and experimental living arrangements, including communes and rural homesteading.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Twenty, “The Great Society.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How successful was the Great Society?

How did the emerging Black power movement contrast with King’s emphasis on nonviolence?

What was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?

To what extent was U.S. involvement in Vietnam a product of the doctrine of containment?

Why did popular support for the Vietnam War decline?

When and what was the Fourth Great Awakening?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: The chapter prints a passage from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) ending in the question “Is this all?” Read it aloud, then work it slowly. Who is the “each suburban wife” of the passage, and who is not in it? Friedan calls the problem “unspoken”—what does a writer gain by naming something her readers already felt?

Further: How has the status of women changed since Friedan wrote this passage? Provide students with one modern-day primary source on feminism as a starting point for discussion.

Civic Discourse: The chapter says the revived feminist movement took its cues, and in some cases its methods, from the success of the civil rights movement: having read King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail in Lesson 20.4, ask students what those shared methods might have been, and where the two movements’ situations differed.

Civic Discourse: How did the specific wording of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution lead to the escalation of the Vietnam War? What historical lessons can be drawn from this episode?

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are President Johnson and have them draft and deliver a televised speech to the American public in 1967 seeking to justify American involvement in Vietnam. Ensure that they address what ultimate victory will look like, and how American troops are progressing toward that aim.

Writing Skills: Assign students to write a roughly 200-word essay that charts how American society increasingly unraveled as the Sixties progressed. What were some of the causes of contemporary social unrest?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Name some examples of Great Society programs enacted during Johnson’s presidency.

Insight: Expansion of food stamps, establishment of the National Endowments, Medicare, Medicaid, federal education acts, increased funding for transportation and public housing. As lesson 20.5 explains, this was the largest burst of domestic legislation since the New Deal—though, as that same lesson notes, it lasted a shorter time than anyone expected.

How successful were the Great Society programs?

Insight: Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs produced outcomes that remain contested. The national poverty rate fell substantially during the 1960s, while programs such as Medicare and Medicaid created durable forms of social provision. The chapter emphasizes the programs’ fiscal costs and argues that some welfare rules could weaken incentives for work, marriage, or family formation; teachers should present those causal claims as part of the book’s interpretation and distinguish them from measured changes in poverty, health coverage, and program participation.

Further: Have students recall the New Deal. To what effect were the Great Society programs an extension of that legislation? How did the tone of movements for African Americans shift in the 1960s?

Insight: The latter half of the 1960s brought urban unrest, intensified conflict over policing and poverty, and the rise of Black Power. Figures including Malcolm X criticized the pace and assumptions of integrationism and emphasized Black self-determination, community control, and cultural pride; some strands also advocated separatism. The movement therefore represented a challenge to King’s integrationist strategy, but it was not reducible to separatism or to the urban riots with which it overlapped.

How did the Vietnam War become a frustrating campaign opposed by many Americans?

Insight: Johnson expanded American commitment to defend South Vietnam from communist incursion after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Despite a massive troop buildup involving a large contingent of drafted troops, Johnson did not want to risk an aggressive campaign that would potentially draw China and the Soviet Union into the war. This resulted in a frustrating stalemate because the U.S. did not seek to defeat North Vietnam; the U.S. simply wanted the North Vietnamese to quit fighting, which they appeared unlikely to do. A large antiwar movement gained steam from American opposition to this unsatisfying campaign.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What did Johnson call his domestic program, and what did it aim to do?

What was the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the Great Society, including a declared war on poverty aimed at raising the condition of the poorest Americans. (2) the supply route connecting North to South Vietnam, running partly through Laos.

Explain

Could the Great Society and the Vietnam War have been afforded together? What does the question turn on?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the question is political as much as fiscal—what a country will tax for and what attention a president has to spend—and that the war consumed both. A partial answer treats it as arithmetic alone.

Daily Recap

Emboldened by his electoral victory, LBJ shepherded an ambitious legislative agenda through Congress, though his war on poverty ultimately had mixed results. Meanwhile, American society became increasingly tumultuous, with the rise of the counterculture, of opposition against the Vietnam War, and of Black separatist movements that imperiled the largely peaceful character of the Civil Rights Movement.

Looking Ahead

The programs are enacted and the war is not going well. The last lesson is the year both facts arrive at once.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Great Society, War on Poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Black Power, and separatism. Distinguish program goals, measured outcomes, and interpretations of unintended effects.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The program sought to ___; evidence of success includes ___; critics argue that ___.” “Black Power differed from King’s integrationism by emphasizing ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students choose one Great Society program and state its goal, one measurable result, and one criticism before evaluating it.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a matrix with columns Program / intended goal / evidence of effect / major criticism, then add a separate comparison of integration and Black Power.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

20.7 The Democrats Collapse (pp. 711–716)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 711–716

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on the Grant Park photograph

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

1968 broke the coalition that had governed since 1932, and it did so in public: a war reported as won and visibly not, two assassinations, and a convention that ended in the street. It ends with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Tet Offensive and its effect on American opinion.

Describe the assassinations and unrest of 1968.

Explain the 1968 election result.

Key Dates

1968, Jan. 31 – The North Vietnamese launch the Tet Offensive

1968, Mar. 31 – Johnson withdraws from the presidential race

1968, Apr. 4 – MLK is assassinated in Memphis

1968, June 5 – Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles

1968, Nov. 5 – Richard Nixon is elected president

Key Concepts

Richard Nixon saw himself as a spokesman for the values of orderly and law-abiding “Middle Americans,” the ordinary, mainstream citizens who were threatened by special interests and disparaged by the counterculture.

Nixon promised to bring the Vietnam War to an end, achieving “peace with honor.” His message resonated with voters, in contrast to Hubert Humphrey’s shifting stance on the war and George Wallace, whose vice-presidential pick Curtis Lemay notoriously proposed bombing North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.”

Key Terms

Tet Offensive: This large, coordinated 1968 offensive struck American and South Vietnamese positions across South Vietnam. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces suffered heavy losses and failed to hold most of their objectives, but the scale and reach of the attacks shocked Americans who had been told that progress was being made. The offensive therefore became a political and psychological turning point even though it did not produce a North Vietnamese battlefield victory.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh section of Chapter Twenty, “The Democrats Collapse.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Why did LBJ not run again?

In what ways did America seem to be falling apart in 1968?

Who was the third-party candidate in 1968? What were the election results?

What did Nixon’s victory (and Wallace’s showing) indicate about public opinion?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analytical Skills: The chapter makes an unusual claim: the impression that the Tet Offensive showed the war going badly “was the product of inaccurate media reporting,” and Tet was “actually a military failure” for North Vietnam. Ask students what has to be true for both halves of that sentence to hold at once. How does a country come to believe something about a battle that the battle did not show?

Further: Have students find three present-day online sources about Tet and evaluate each one before reading its argument—who wrote it, who publishes or sponsors it, when it was written, and what evidence it actually cites. Then ask which of the three they would trust on a disputed point, and why. The aim is the method, not a verdict on Tet.

Geography:

The two 1968 conventions met in Chicago and in Miami, and the chapter describes them very differently—one ending in Grant Park, the other nominating a candidate who presented himself as a figure of orderly stability. Locate both cities. Ask students what a party chooses when it chooses a convention city, and what the contrast between these two gatherings told voters in 1968.

Civic Discourse: Play a video of Senator Robert Kennedy’s address to a largely Black audience in Indianapolis on the night of MLK’s assassination. Note that Indianapolis was the largest American city to remain peaceful in the event’s aftermath. What about RFK’s speech made it so effective in calming tensions during this fraught time?

Speaking Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are Vice President Hubert Humphrey, preparing to address the Democratic Convention to accept its nomination for the Presidency in 1968. Why should Democrats support the Humphrey ticket, despite his lack of support during the primaries and the state of the country? Ask students to deliver their work in small groups before having a few volunteers address the entire class.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: By 1968, growing social protest—including the antiwar movement, the farmworkers’ movement, the American Indian Movement, and the women’s movement—had reshaped the country Nixon hoped to lead again after his political career seemed over in 1962. Using accounts of these movements provided by your teacher, have students compare the antiwar movement's methods, such as the 1967 March on the Pentagon, to one other movement's methods and goals. Then have students discuss how that same unrest may have helped, rather than hurt, a candidate promising to restore order.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The Vietnam War, which was plaguing Johnson’s presidency, had begun years earlier in 1954, when Vietnam was split at the seventeenth parallel and occupied in the North by Communists in the South by anti-communists. Have students return to the beginning of the conflict in Lesson 19.8 and, using the text, the Chapter 20 Timeline, and Map 20.3, have students trace the chain of events the book sets out in order in the form of a timeline, from the splitting of Vietnam in 1954 through the Tet Offensive. Have students place each event on a timeline, and next to it write a description of the event.

Ongoing Exercise: Students will complete their timeline in lesson 21.4, filling out the final events of the war, as well as its consequences.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What events occurred in the year 1968 that seemed to reveal a fraying of American society?

Insight: Johnson decided not to seek reelection after a steep decline in support because of the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King was assassinated, leading to riots in many cities. Robert Kennedy, Democratic candidate for president, was assassinated. At the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago, opponents of the party’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, clashed with police.

What did the election of 1968 reveal about American attitudes?

Insight: Democrat Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly in the popular vote to Republican Richard Nixon. However, an independent segregationist and populist candidate, George Wallace, won five Deep South states. The results suggest that Americans desired a decisive change from the ruling Democratic Party.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Tet Offensive?

Who won the 1968 presidential election, and by what kind of margin?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) a large coordinated North Vietnamese attack on American and South Vietnamese positions in early 1968. (2) Richard Nixon, over Hubert Humphrey, by a narrow popular margin.

Explain

Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnam. Using the timeline developed on the causes and course of the war in the critical thinking exercise above, answer: Why is Tet remembered as a turning point against the war?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer separates the battlefield from the argument: an enemy able to mount an offensive of that scale contradicted what the American public had been told, and the contradiction mattered more than the outcome. A partial answer reports the offensive without reaching the credibility question.

Daily Recap

Though helped by the third-party run of George Wallace, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was not able to overcome the political headwinds of 1968; in a tumultuous time, the American electorate opted for a longtime national figure, Richard Nixon, who promised to restore stability and confidence to American society.

Looking Ahead

The decade ends with the New Deal coalition broken and the war unresolved. Chapter Twenty-One opens on the presidency that inherits both.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Tet Offensive, credibility gap, antiwar movement, Democratic Convention, George Wallace, and election of 1968. Distinguish battlefield outcome from political effect.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Tet was militarily ___, but politically ___ because ___.” “The Democratic coalition fractured over ___, ___, and ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain Tet twice—first as a military event, then as a political and media event—and identify why the two accounts differ.

Show understanding without a paragraph: create a 1968 timeline linking Tet, Johnson’s withdrawal, the assassinations, Chicago, Wallace’s campaign, and Nixon’s victory.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

The questions and answers that follow offer a range of ways to assess students’ understanding of the chapter. Teachers may use the assessment as written or select and adapt questions to suit their students and course of study. Reproducible map exercises are provided in the Geography Assessments appendix for photocopying or printing.

Timeline

Correct chronological order: C, B, A, E, D.

A. John F. Kennedy is assassinated

B. The Berlin Wall goes up

C. John F. Kennedy is elected president

D. The Apollo 11 mission lands the first man on the moon

E. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

1. Malcolm X

2. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

3. Tet Offensive

4. Bay of Pigs Invasion

5. Barry Goldwater

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH20 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same adapted Map 20.3 used on the student side, printed at the same size, with national boundaries, North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bombing areas, and the legend clearly legible.]

Use the map to answer the following questions.

What patterns do you notice in the U.S. bombing campaigns? What do those patterns suggest about U.S. military strategy?

Model response: According to the map, the U.S. bombing campaigns took place in North Vietnam, including locations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. This suggests that the United States used airpower to weaken North Vietnam as one of its tactics to avoid a full-scale invasion. It demonstrates Johnson’s strategy of waging a limited war in Vietnam, in which the United States would apply controlled amounts of force—enough to prevent a North Vietnam victory and pressure the enemy into a negotiated settlement, but not so much as to allow China or the Soviets to intervene directly.

Why was the Ho Chi Minh Trail important because of its location? Based on the map, why was movement along the trail difficult to stop?

Model response: The Ho Chi Minh Trail was an important route because it connected North and South Vietnam and allowed North Vietnamese troops and supplies to travel into South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia. It would have been difficult to control movement because it covered a large area and passed through multiple countries, including Laos and Cambodia.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

What did President Eisenhower warn Americans about in his farewell speech?

Model response: Eisenhower identified the “military-industrial complex”—the combination of a large permanent military establishment and the arms industry that supplied it—as a potential threat to democratic institutions. He acknowledged the need for defense during the Cold War but warned that this combination could acquire unwarranted influence, weaken civilian control, and allow its own interests to override those of the public.

How did the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960 represent a “passing of the torch”?

Model response: At 43 years old, Kennedy was very young compared to previous presidents, and he brought an attractive young family with him to the White House. He staffed his administration with leading academics and businessmen who sought to manage the economy on the basis of dispassionate, scientific principles. His campaign emphasized the “New Frontier” of problem solving and exploration, including space exploration. Thus, his administration represented the rise of a new generation of leadership.

What did the Cuban Missile Crisis reveal about the prosecution of the Cold War?

Model response: The USSR was installing missiles in Cuba in response to the U.S. deploying missiles in Turkey and Italy. Kennedy and American leaders saw this action by the USSR as a major provocation because the missiles would be only ninety miles from the United States. Kennedy imposed a blockade, and after thirteen tense days the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles. Although the crisis ended without a major disaster, the world had come very close to an all-out war between the two superpowers. Following the incident, the U.S. and USSR created a “hotline” for direct communication between the two countries.

Why did Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders employ a strategy of nonviolent resistance?

Model response: Drawing on the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, King advocated for nonviolent protests that sought to reveal the injustice of segregation for all the world to see. This strategy was employed in protest actions like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, and sit-ins at lunch counters. King thought that when Americans saw the injustice of segregation, it would buttress his argument that segregation was contrary to American ideals and Christian morality, increasing support for important federal and state reforms. This strategy also succeeded in showing the cruelty and violence of the segregationists.

How did the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 reveal divisions within the Republican Party?

Model response: Goldwater represented a more conservative and libertarian wing of the Republican Party based in the “Sunbelt” states of the South and West. These Republicans contrasted with the “Rockefeller Republicans” of the Northeast who tended to be more liberal and more tolerant of federal government programs established in the New Deal. Goldwater and his supporters argued that the Rockefeller Republicans were too accommodating to the Democrats and were out of step with the emerging conservative Republicans.

What were the goals of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs?

Model response: Johnson declared a “war on poverty” that sought to raise the condition of the underprivileged by enacting a slew of new government programs and expanding existing programs. Examples include expanding food stamps, expanding federal support for higher education, Medicare, Medicaid, and more.

What factors led to the rise of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other movements associated with the New Left?

Model response: For a variety of reasons, New Left figures were dissatisfied with what they saw as the injustice and conformity of American society. Opposition to the war in Vietnam was a major factor, as was dissatisfaction with university bureaucracies that were unresponsive to students. SDS, for example, wanted to introduce more participatory democratic institutions into governance. A variety of groups organized around feminism, gay rights, and Hispanic rights arose.

What effects did the Tet Offensive in 1968 have on American politics?

Model response: In the Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces conducted a massive coordinated attack on American and South Vietnamese positions. They suffered heavy losses and failed to hold most objectives, but the offensive’s scale contradicted optimistic official claims about progress and received intense television and press coverage. Public support for the war declined further, Johnson’s political position weakened, and he soon withdrew from the presidential race. Students should distinguish the offensive’s military outcome from its political and psychological effect rather than attributing that effect simply to inaccurate reporting.

How does the author interpret the presidential election results of 1968?

Model response: Although Republican Richard Nixon only defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey by about 500,000 votes, independent candidate George Wallace, a segregationist running on a populist platform, received a significant number of votes and won five states in the Deep South. The combined votes for Nixon and Wallace constituted 57 percent of the total votes cast. The author argues that this result indicated that a majority of Americans desired a return to normalcy and a step back from rapid changes in government and society.

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong essay treats the three documents as arguments rather than as sources of quotations: it states what each was trying to persuade its audience of, identifies the audience, and shows how the three together describe a decade arguing with itself about what America owed its citizens and the world.

A competent essay handles all three documents accurately but treats them in sequence rather than in relation.

A developing essay summarizes the documents without reaching the question of what each was attempting.

Credit any defensible reading of the relation among the three. An essay arguing that Eisenhower and King are closer to each other than either is to Kennedy is doing hard work and should be rewarded if it is evidenced.

Watch for the common error of treating King’s letter as a speech. It is a reply, written to named clergymen, and its form is part of its argument.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fall and Restoration:

From Nixon to Reagan

1971–1988 · pp. 717–756

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

The Presidency suffered a tremendous decline in prestige and authority after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Not until Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 did the office once again enjoy a renewal of power and potential, which only an energetic and “transformational” president could deliver.

Despite its humiliating conclusion, Nixon’s presidency was not entirely unsuccessful. In foreign affairs, President Nixon significantly improved U.S. relations with China and the Soviet Union. He also withdrew American troops from Vietnam in an orderly fashion, although Congress’s decision to cut assistance to South Vietnam led to its eventual collapse and conquest by communist forces.

Domestically, the Watergate scandal and subsequent resignation of Richard Nixon brought both the country and the Presidency to a low point. Yet even before these events, the U.S. economy was hobbled by inflation and high unemployment. Nixon, Ford, and Carter tried various policies, but the economy remained sluggish throughout the 1970s.

In the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, questions emerged about the nature of the Presidency and whether it had strayed too far from its proper constitutional role. Some claimed that the office had begun to assume “imperial” aspects, out of keeping with America’s republican norms. Many urged a return to the traditional form of the office, as one of limited and strictly defined powers. Yet perhaps what was needed were simply leaders of great vision—transformational presidents who could inspire and elevate the American people.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 seemed to many Americans to usher in just such a leader. The economy recovered strongly after the severe 1981–82 recession as inflation fell, tax rates were reduced, and Federal Reserve policy changed the monetary environment. In foreign affairs, Reagan adopted a more confrontational posture toward the Soviet Union and later negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev as the Cold War entered its final phase. McClay presents Reagan as the first truly transformational president since FDR; students should distinguish that interpretation from the evidence used to support it.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The course of U.S. politics from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan, with particular attention to presidential authority, public confidence, economic change, and the closing phase of the Cold War.

Explain Nixon’s realist foreign policy and how Vietnamization and the opening to China differed from earlier applications of containment.

Assess Nixon’s domestic record, including New Federalism, regulation, and economic intervention, alongside his conservative political reputation.

Explain how Watergate transformed a campaign burglary and cover-up into a constitutional crisis that ended Nixon’s presidency.

Analyze how Watergate and Vietnam renewed arguments about the constitutional limits of presidential power and strengthened Congress’s willingness to check the executive branch.

Explain the political and economic difficulties Gerald Ford inherited, and assess the competing arguments surrounding his pardon of Nixon.

Explain why Jimmy Carter’s outsider identity appealed to voters after Watergate and how he sought to distinguish his presidency from the “imperial presidency.”

Assess Carter’s presidency by weighing durable achievements, including the Camp David Accords, against persistent inflation, energy anxiety, and foreign-policy crises that weakened public confidence in his leadership.

Explain Reagan’s political rise and compare his diagnosis of American decline with Carter’s earlier “crisis of confidence.”

Analyze Reagan’s economic program while distinguishing the effects of tax policy, Federal Reserve monetary policy, spending, economic recovery, inflation, and federal debt.

Assess competing explanations for the Cold War’s end, including Reagan’s military and ideological pressure, Gorbachev’s reforms, long-term Soviet economic weakness, the war in Afghanistan, and political change within Eastern Europe.

Key Persons

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023)

Lê Đức Thọ (1911–1990)

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007)

Gerald R. Ford (1913–2006)

Jimmy Carter (1924–2024)

Bob Dole (1923–2021)

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018)

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022)

Key Concepts and Terms

Nixon Doctrine

People’s Republic of China

Watergate scandal

New Federalism

War Powers Act

Khmer Rouge

Camp David Accords (1978)

Shi’ite Islam

Tehran hostage crisis (1979–1981)

Solidarity labor movement

Glasnost

Perestroika

Timeline

1971 Nixon establishes the dollar as a “fiat” currency (August 15)

1972 Nixon visits China (February 21)

1972 Five burglars are arrested inside the DNC headquarters at the Watergate office building (June 17)

1972 Nixon wins reelection (November 7)

1973 Roe v. Wade is decided (January 22)

1973 The Paris Peace Accords are signed (January 27)

1973 The last American unit is withdrawn from Vietnam (March 29)

1973 The Senate Watergate Committee begins televised hearings (May 17)

1973 The OPEC oil embargo causes global prices to surge (October)

1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns amid financial scandal (October 10)

1974 Nixon resigns from office and Gerald Ford is sworn in (August 9)

1974 President Ford pardons Nixon (September 8)

1975 Saigon falls to North Vietnam (April 30)

1976 Jimmy Carter is elected president (November 2)

1978 Carter brokers the Camp David Accords (September 17)

1979 The Iranian Hostage Crisis begins (November 4)

1979 The Soviets invade Afghanistan (December 24)

1980 Ronald Reagan is elected president (November 4)

1981 Iran releases hostages (January 20)

1981 Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act (August 13)

1983 Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative (March 23)

1983 NATO deploys ballistic missiles in western Europe (November 22)

1984 Reagan wins reelection by a landslide (November 6)

1985 Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (March 11)

1988 The Soviets begin withdrawal from Afghanistan (May 15)

1988 Gorbachev renounces the Brezhnev Doctrine at the UN (December)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

21.1 Chapter Opening – pp. 719–723 (.5 to 1 class)

Nixon’s background and politics

De-escalation in Vietnam and the Paris Peace Accords

Nixon, Kissinger, and China

21.2 The Domestic Nixon – pp. 724–725 (.5 to 1 class)

Nixon’s legislative program

Nixon’s economic policy and suspension of the gold standard

Stagflation

21.3 Nixon’s Victory… and Defeat – pp. 726–728 (.5 to 1 class)

The Election of 1972

The Watergate scandal

Nixon resigns

21.4 The Diminishing Presidency – pp. 729–732 (.5 to 1 class)

The evolution of presidential authority

Gerald Ford takes office

South Vietnam collapses

The Khmer Rouge seizes power in Cambodia

21.5 A Bicentennial Hope – pp. 733–734 (.5 to 1 class)

The nation’s 200th birthday

Operation Sail

A harbinger of hope

21.6 An Overwhelmed Presidency – pp. 735–741 (1 to 2 classes)

The Election of 1976

Jimmy Carter’s background

Inflation skyrockets

The Camp David Accords

The Islamic Revolution in Iran

The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan

21.7 The Rise of Ronald Reagan – pp. 742–748 (1 to 2 classes)

Reagan’s background and defeat of Carter in 1980

Reagan’s First Inaugural Address

Reaganomics: tax cuts and inflation controls

Increases in military spending expand the deficit

21.8 The Presidency Restored – pp. 749–756 (.5 to 1 class)

Reagan’s foreign policy

The “Euromissile crisis”

Glasnost and perestroika

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan

BACKGROUNDS

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

Chapter Epigraph

Fall and Restoration, chapter epigraph (p. 717)

The epigraph emphasizes the greatness of the American people and their capacity to undertake ambitious projects. Set that confidence against a decade marked by presidential resignation, military defeat, party revolt, double-digit inflation, and the long captivity of American diplomats. Introduce the epigraph briefly at the opening, then return to it after Watergate and again at the end of the chapter. Ask students what, if anything, was restored by the 1980s: national capacity, public confidence, or both.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 21.1 · Richard Nixon, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1969 (p. 721)

Delivered five months after the convention in Grant Park that closes Chapter Twenty. Nixon had lost the presidency in 1960 and the California governorship in 1962 and was widely considered finished, so this is a return as much as an inauguration. The theme is reconciliation: he offers to lower voices in a country that had spent a year shouting, and presents himself as the figure of orderly stability he had campaigned as. Read it before Watergate rather than after, because a class that already knows the ending cannot hear the promise. Pair it with Primary Source 21.3 at the chapter’s other end—two inaugurals twelve years apart, both promising to restore something, delivered by men of the same party in very different circumstances.

Primary Source 21.2 · Jimmy Carter, “Malaise” Speech, July 15, 1979 (p. 739)

Begin with the familiar title. Carter never used the word “malaise”; he described a “crisis of confidence.” Ask students to compare the speech’s actual language with later accounts that use the label and to identify each account’s author, publisher, date, quotations, and evidence. Carter argued that the country’s problems were not merely technical and that a nation increasingly defined by consumption had lost a shared sense of purpose. Ask students why a president’s decision to describe national problems in moral as well as economic or political terms might produce a difficult public response.

Primary Source 21.3 · Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981 (p. 747)

Delivered as the American hostages in Tehran were being released, after an election in which Reagan carried forty-four states. Reagan argued that the country’s decline was reversible, that government had become part of the problem, and that recovery depended on public will as well as policy. Ask students to compare this diagnosis with Carter’s in Primary Source 21.2: the two speeches describe a crisis of confidence but propose sharply different sources and remedies. Use it in 21.7 with Map 21.1.

Primary Source 21.4 · Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire” Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 8, 1983 (p. 752)

Delivered in Orlando to a religious rather than a diplomatic audience, in the middle of the missile deployments that raised European temperatures. Reagan casts the Cold War in explicitly moral terms to listeners for whom moral terms are the natural register, and the same claim made at the United Nations would have been a different act—so ask students who is being spoken to before asking what is being said. The phrase was widely condemned at the time as reckless and is now often cited as prescient, and both judgments remain available; both readings are defensible. Use it in 21.8 to ask how this speech and the Gorbachev negotiations can be parts of one strategy rather than a change of mind, and pair it with Figure 21.18.

Figures

Figure 21.4 · President Richard Nixon with Premier Zhou Enlai Inside the Great Hall of the People, 1972 (p. 728)

The opening to China. Nixon’s record was larger than the scandal that ended him, and the photograph offers a useful example: rapprochement with a communist power undertaken by a president known for strong anticommunism. Have students examine the formality of the staging and consider why this diplomatic achievement is often less prominent in public memory than Watergate. Ask how differences between the narrative form of a scandal and the long-term consequences of diplomacy may shape historical memory.

Figure 21.5 · Senate Watergate Hearings, 1973 (p. 730)

The Senate committee in session. The hearings were televised, allowing Americans to follow the scandal as it was uncovered. The photograph shows the legislative branch investigating possible abuses by the executive branch. Use it in 21.3 to ask why the cover-up was graver than the break-in: the burglary was committed by subordinates, while the concealment implicated the powers of the presidency.

Figure 21.7 · Associated Press, Saigon Evacuation, April 29, 1975 (p. 733)

South Vietnamese civilians and American personnel evacuating as Saigon falls, two years after the last American forces left. Preview the image before showing it. Set it beside Figure 21.8, taken fourteen months later during the Bicentennial, and ask students what the juxtaposition suggests about a country moving quickly from military defeat to national celebration.

Figure 21.8 · Operation Sail, 1976 (p. 734)

A tall ship on the Hudson on July 3, 1976, during the Bicentennial. The scale of the public turnout is the first thing to establish and the date is the second, because a national celebration falls fourteen months after a national defeat. The Bicentennial mood was real, but it was a mood rather than a recovery: inflation, the energy crisis and the hostage seizure are all still ahead. Use it in 21.5 with Figure 21.7. Ask what the two images together say about 1976, and the two defensible readings—resilience, or avoidance—are both worth crediting when they are argued.

Figure 21.11 · A Blindfolded American Hostage Is Brought Out of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, 1979 (p. 741)

One of the fifty-two Americans held for four hundred and forty-four days. The crisis ran through the last fourteen months of Carter’s presidency and was counted publicly, night after night, on American television; a president cannot govern past a number that rises every evening. The photograph is staged by the captors for an audience, and asking students who that audience is turns an image of suffering into a question about propaganda without diminishing the suffering. Preview before showing. Use it in 21.6, and tell students that Primary Source 21.2 was delivered three months before the embassy was seized—otherwise they will read the speech as a response to this, which inverts the chronology.

Figure 21.15 · President Ronald Reagan with Pope John Paul II at Miami International Airport in Florida, 1987 (p. 750)

Reagan meeting John Paul II during the pope’s 1987 visit to North America. The caption connects the first Polish pope’s 1979 pilgrimage with the growth of Poland’s Solidarity movement. Ask students what each figure contributed to the pressures facing the Soviet bloc and why the meeting’s setting at Miami International Airport may be worth investigating. Use the location as optional geographic inquiry rather than as evidence of a causal claim the Student Book does not make.

Figure 21.17 · President Ronald Reagan Making His Berlin Wall Speech at Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, 1987 (p. 753)

Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in the same year as Figure 21.15. The wall is behind him and the gate is closed, so the demand and its object appear in the same frame. The wall opened two years later, but temporal sequence alone does not establish causation. Ask students what evidence would be needed to argue that the speech contributed to the wall’s opening. Use the photograph in 21.8 with Primary Source 21.4 and Figure 21.18.

Figure 21.18 · President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev Toast in the State Dining Room (p. 755)

Reagan and Gorbachev raising glasses in the State Dining Room. The domestic and social setting contrasts with a formal summit table. Ask students whether pressure and negotiation formed a coherent sequence in Reagan’s policy or reflected a change of approach, and require evidence for either interpretation. Return to the epigraph with this image before the class.

Maps

Map 21.1 · The Election of 1980 (p. 745)

Reagan’s victory over an incumbent president was broad: Carter carried few states, and those states did not form a single region. Have students compare the 1980 map with the electoral patterns examined in Chapter Twenty and identify where Republican support had expanded. Then ask whether the landslide primarily reflected enthusiasm for Reagan, rejection of the incumbent administration, or some combination of the two, and what evidence would help distinguish among those explanations.

Map 21.2 · The Election of 1984 (p. 748)

Place Map 21.2 beside Map 21.1 and ask students which states changed and which did not. Then compare Reagan’s 1984 victory with Johnson’s 1964 electoral map from Chapter Twenty. Both were overwhelming victories, but electoral scale alone does not predict the course of the next administration. Ask students what additional evidence is needed to interpret a landslide.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.1 Chapter Opening (pp. 719–723)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

For a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: pp. 719–723

Exercise: the Close Reading exercise on the First Inaugural

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

Nixon took office promising to lower voices in a country that had spent 1968 shouting. The lesson examines that promise through his policies in Vietnam and China.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

Describe the country Nixon inherited in 1969.

Explain what Nixon promised in his First Inaugural.

Identify the sources of division he set out to close.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1972, Feb. 21 – Nixon visits China

1973, Jan. 27 – The Paris Peace Accords are signed

1973, Mar. 29 – The last American unit is withdrawn from Vietnam

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Leveraging his support among the “Silent Majority” of Americans perplexed by the tumult of Sixties, President Nixon aimed to restore stability domestically and to advance U.S. interests abroad.

In international affairs, Nixon was a noted realist, prioritizing American interests over ideological principle. Following Johnson’s debacle in Vietnam, he devised an approach to foreign policy known as the Nixon doctrine, according to which the U.S. would assist allies abroad in the struggle against Communism but not to the extent of committing its own forces.

Nixon's realism marked a departure. Truman and Eisenhower had built containment on the premise that Communist advance anywhere threatened American security — the Truman Doctrine, NATO, Korea, and covert action in Iran and Indochina all followed from it. Kennedy and Johnson inherited that premise and applied it in Vietnam, where Johnson committed American forces on a scale that made the war America's own. Nixon kept the objective and changed the method: allies would be helped against Communism, but not to the point of committing American troops — and an opening to Communist China, unthinkable under the earlier doctrine, became possible as a result.

To that end, Nixon instituted a policy of Vietnamization, which involved phasing out American troops with well-trained South Vietnamese forces. Over the course of his first term, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam decreased from around 500,000 to less than 25,000.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Paris Peace Accords: Signed by the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam in January 1973, this peace agreement resulted in an immediate ceasefire throughout Vietnam, together with the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat troops shortly thereafter.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read the introductory section of Chapter Twenty-One.

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Richard Nixon’s background? How did he enter politics?

How did Nixon reconcile longstanding divisions within the Republican Party?

What were Nixon’s policies regarding Vietnam? What role did Henry Kissinger play in the Nixon administration?

What were the terms of the Paris Peace Accords?

What was Nixon’s approach to China?

How was Nixon a “realist,” as opposed to an idealist, in his foreign policy?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Civic Discourse: Even before his resignation, why was Nixon such a controversial figure? What about his personality and politics made him unpopular among American elites?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: How was the Nixon doctrine informed by America’s experience in Vietnam?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the excerpt in the text from Nixon’s First Inaugural Address. To what extent was he a peacemaker during his presidency?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

How did Richard Nixon manage the divides in the Republican Party?

Insight: Although Nixon was a tough-nosed politician, he had a talent for building coalitions and managing differences. He was able to work with both the liberal wing of the Republican Party, represented by Nelson Rockefeller, and the conservative wing, represented by Barry Goldwater. In general, Nixon was a strong anticommunist with moderate social and economic policies, reflecting the influence of both wings of the party.

How did Nixon bring American involvement in Vietnam to an end?

Insight: Nixon pursued “Vietnamization,” the gradual replacement of American troops with loyal South Vietnamese troops, while he sent Henry Kissinger to engage in aggressive diplomacy with North Vietnam. In the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the U.S. agreed to withdraw from South Vietnam and received 500 prisoners of war.

How did Nixon’s relations with China serve his broader foreign policy strategy, and how effective was it?

Insight: Nixon sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and improve the American strategic position relative to Moscow. His 1972 visit began a major rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China while leaving the status of Taiwan unresolved; formal diplomatic relations followed under Carter in 1979. The opening also gave Moscow an additional reason to pursue détente with Washington.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

In what year did Nixon take office?

What did Nixon promise about the Vietnam War as a candidate?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1969. (2) to end it, achieving “peace with honor,” without saying how.

Explain

Why would a candidate be deliberately unspecific about the most urgent question facing the country?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that specificity divides a coalition assembled out of exhaustion, and that vagueness let voters supply their own preferred ending. A partial answer calls it evasion without asking what it bought.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

Nixon proved himself a successful president on the international stage, deescalating American involvement in Vietnam while cultivating friendlier relations with China and the Soviet Union.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

Nixon has the office and a promise to keep. The next lesson looks at what he did at home while the war continued.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: realism, Vietnamization, détente, rapprochement, coalition

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Nixon’s policy was realist because ___.” · “Vietnamization changed the method of containment by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain how opening China could strengthen the U.S. position against the Soviet Union.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a three-part chart: Vietnam / China / Soviet Union, with Nixon’s goal and method for each.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.2 The Domestic Nixon (pp. 724–725)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 724–725

Exercise: the Critical Thinking exercise on wage and price controls

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Nixon governed more pragmatically at home than his conservative reputation suggests, expanding federal regulation and revenue sharing while abandoning economic orthodoxy when inflation and international monetary pressures intensified.

Lesson Objectives

Describe Nixon’s domestic record.

Explain New Federalism and Nixon’s expansion of federal regulation.

Analyze the Nixon shock, the end of dollar convertibility into gold, and the emergence of stagflation.

Key Dates

1971, Aug. 15 – Nixon establishes the dollar as a “fiat” currency

1973, October - The OPEC oil embargo causes global prices to surge

Key Concepts

Over the course of his presidency, Nixon transitioned the U.S. dollar from the gold standard to become “fiat” currency, without backing from a precious metal or any other commodity.

In 1971, Nixon imposed temporary wage and price controls on the economy, abandoning free-market orthodoxy during the so-called Nixon shock. While these measures temporarily curbed inflation, the effect was fleeting, and ultimately both unemployment and price levels rose throughout the decade, a phenomenon economists termed “stagflation.”

Key Terms

New Federalism: Under this Nixon administration policy, the federal government gave approximately $30 billion in federal funds to states and municipalities to use for their own purposes. The revenue sharing effort was intended to reduce the centralization of government that had occurred since the New Deal by increasing the power of local authorities.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Twenty-One, “The Domestic Nixon.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What were Nixon’s economic policies? Were they effective?

How did Nixon deal with opposition in Congress?

What was the “gold standard”? Why did Nixon transition the dollar away from it?

What is the meaning of the term “stagflation”? Why did it emerge as a commonly used term during Nixon’s presidency?

What “revenue sharing” initiative did Nixon introduce?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Why are wage and price controls often ineffective? What are their economic consequences?

Civic Discourse: Why did Nixon suspend the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971? What problem was the administration trying to solve, and what changed when the Bretton Woods monetary system came apart?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are economists writing an op-ed in the early 1970s, during the economic struggles of the Nixon administration. Assign them to write a brief essay critiquing the administration’s economic policies and recommending alternatives. Invite a few volunteers to share their work with the whole class as prompts for group discussion.

Guiding Classroom Questions

What is “realism” in foreign policy?

Insight: Kissinger and Nixon were foreign-policy “realists” in that they argued that the national interest of the United States, and not ideological or moral goals, should come first. Thus, the U.S. should not be “the world’s policeman,” interfering wherever there was trouble in the world. Furthermore, Nixon was less willing than previous presidents to commit American troops to ensure the containment of communism, preferring to support allied nations in other ways.

Describe Nixon’s economic policies.

Insight: Nixon surprised many of his supporters by intervening aggressively in the economy. First, he attempted to get the federal budget under control by raising taxes and cutting spending, but was opposed by the Democrats, who controlled Congress. Then, he imposed temporary wage and price controls in an attempt to get inflation under control. He also ended the option of converting dollars into gold, thus making the dollar a “fiat” currency not tied to precious metals. These policies resulted in “stagflation”: high inflation coupled with increasing unemployment.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Which country did Nixon open relations with in 1972?

Name one domestic initiative of the Nixon years.

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the People’s Republic of China. (2) any supported example, such as environmental regulation, wage and price controls, revenue sharing, or expansion of federal agencies.

Explain

Why is the opening to China remembered less than Watergate?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that a scandal has a story and a foreign-policy shift has a consequence, and that stories travel further. A partial answer says only that scandal is more interesting.

Daily Recap

Nixon faced mounting economic challenges over the course of his presidency. While he proved capable of compromising with congressional Democrats, his efforts to halt rising prices ultimately proved counterproductive, contributing to the troublesome stagflation that raged throughout the 1970s.

Looking Ahead

The record is real. The next lesson is the landslide, and what was already under way beneath it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: fiat currency, convertibility, wage controls, price controls, stagflation

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Nixon intervened in the economy by ___.” · “Stagflation combined ___ with ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain why a conservative president might adopt wage and price controls.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a cause-and-response chain linking inflation, the Nixon shock, controls, and stagflation.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.3 Nixon’s Victory… and Defeat (pp. 726–728)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 726–728

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on the Watergate hearings

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Nixon won forty-nine states and resigned twenty-one months later, and the two facts have the same cause: a conviction that the ends of his presidency justified its methods. It covers the 1972 election, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the 1972 election.

Explain what the Watergate break-in was.

Trace how a burglary reached the presidency.

Key Dates

1972, June 17 – Five burglars are arrested inside the DNC headquarters at the Watergate office building

1972, Nov. 7 – Nixon wins reelection

1973, May 17 – The Senate Watergate Committee begins televised hearings

1974, Aug. 9 – Nixon resigns from office and Gerald Ford is sworn in

Key Concepts

Nixon’s attempt to cover up his administration’s involvement in the attempted burglary of National Democratic Committee offices in Washington led to the Watergate scandal and his decision to become the first—and so far the only—president in American history to resign from office.

Key Terms

Watergate: The 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and, more consequentially, the administration’s attempt to conceal its connection to it.

Cover-up: The use of the powers of an office to conceal wrongdoing, which in this case reached the presidency itself.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Twenty-One, “Nixon’s Victory… and Defeat.”

Assign the following reading questions:

What were the results of the 1972 presidential election? To what extent had a political “realignment” taken place since 1964?

What was the Watergate scandal?

Which events led to Nixon’s resignation? What would have happened if he had refused to resign?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Compare the results from the 1964 presidential election to those of 1972. What does such a drastic change indicate about the country during this period?

Debate: Ask students to decide whether they think Nixon, if he had refused to resign, deserved to be impeached over his role in the Watergate scandal. Poll the class at the end to determine whether any opinions changed in response to students’ arguments.

Writing Skills: Ask students to consider whether Nixon’s presidency, all things considered, was positive or negative for the country. Assign them to identify the single most important legacy of his presidency and to justify their choice in 200-word essays. Have them share their work in small groups and then discuss the topic as a class.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did the election of 1972 show the continuing realignment of the American electorate?

Insight: Nixon won handily against the very liberal George McGovern for the Democrats. The Democrats won control of Congress again. However, the results showed that the Sunbelt and the suburbs were trending toward the Republicans, and the party was close to finally overtaking the Democrats as the majority party.

How did the Watergate scandal end Nixon’s presidency?

Insight: Nixon’s campaign had engaged in a number of “dirty tricks” to undermine his political opponents. Associates of Nixon had broken into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee and had planted listening devices. The Nixon Administration’s attempted coverup of this burglary eventually revealed Nixon’s practice of wiretapping journalists and government employees. Finally, the Supreme Court forced Nixon to hand over the tape recordings he had made in the White House, and he resigned.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

How decisive was Nixon’s 1972 reelection?

What was Watergate?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) overwhelming—he carried forty-nine states. (2) a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the attempt to conceal the administration’s connection to it.

Explain

What made the cover-up more damaging than the break-in?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer distinguishes a crime from an abuse of office: the burglary was a crime by subordinates, the concealment used the powers of the presidency itself. A partial answer says only that lying made it worse.

Daily Recap

Though he won reelection by one of the largest margins in American history, Nixon spent his second term battling allegations of illegality. Nixon’s fall from power stunned the American electorate, and his resignation marked the nadir of the presidency in the twentieth century.

Looking Ahead

The hearings begin. The next lesson is what they do to the office itself.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Watergate, break-in, cover-up, subpoena, resignation

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The break-in became a constitutional crisis when ___.” · “The cover-up was more serious because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students distinguish between the burglary and the abuse of presidential power.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a four-step sequence from break-in to hearings to tapes to resignation.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.4 The Diminishing Presidency (pp. 729–732)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 729–732

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on the pardon

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Ford inherited an office weakened by the man who left it, and spent his presidency proving the office could still function while being punished for saying so.

Lesson Objectives

Describe Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s succession.

Explain the pardon and its reception.

Assess the standing of the presidency after 1974.

Key Dates

1974, August 9 – Richard Nixon resigns the presidency

1975, April 30 – Saigon falls to North Vietnamese forces

Key Concepts

In his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued that the authority of the president had grown out of control, having long ago exceeded its constitutional limits—particularly in the realm of foreign policy, where presidents regularly initiated “indiscriminate global intervention.” According to Schlesinger, these developments threatened to destroy the very foundation of constitutional democracy.

Schlesinger’s theory gained a receptive readership after Nixon’s resignation tarnished the Presidency and raised concerns about presidents’ ability to abuse their vast discretionary power.

Key Terms

Pardon: The constitutional power of a president to set aside criminal liability; Ford used it for Nixon in 1974.

Fall of Saigon: The capture of the South Vietnamese capital by North Vietnamese forces in April 1975, ending the war two years after American forces left.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Twenty-One, “The Diminishing Presidency.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What effect did Watergate have on the Presidency?

How did the state of the Presidency by the 1970s compare to the original vision of executive power laid out in the Constitution?

Who was Gerald Ford? What problems did he inherit as president?

Why did Ford pardon Nixon? What effect did this decision have on his presidency?

How did the Vietnam War end in 1975? What took place in Cambodia in the same year?

What was the War Powers Act, and how did it influence Vietnam?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: What was Schlesinger’s central thesis in The Imperial Presidency? Was his critique of the Presidency’s supposedly excessive powers valid at the time? How might his argument still be relevant today?

Written Skills: Ask students to address the following question in brief 200-word essays: in what ways did the 1970s witness rollbacks to presidential power? Have students share their work in small groups and then discuss the topic as a class.

Debate: Stage a debate in class over whether Ford was right to pardon Nixon. What was in the country’s best interest at the time?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Have students recall the social unrest in the country stemming from a widespread opposition to the Vietnam War (Chapter 20). Would this reframing of executive power plausibly settle or heighten the unrest? Ask students to defend their answers. Then, have them reflect on the significance of Vietnam on the American government and people thus far.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Have students complete the Vietnam timeline they began in Lesson 20.7. Then, using their timeline, have them answer in one paragraph: What was the cost of U.S. troops leaving Vietnam? What had staying already cost? Have students debate whether or not the war was worth it and whether the U.S. should have continued to support the South Vietnamese financially.

Insight: Students should add the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973; the withdrawal of the last American unit on March 29, 1973; the War Powers Act of 1973; the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975; and the Khmer Rouge's seizure of power in Cambodia the same year.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did the Watergate scandal prompt a reconsideration of presidential power?

Insight: Many Americans, including liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, argued that the executive branch had grown too large and that too much power had been vested in it. “The imperial presidency,” as Schlesinger called it, threatened the constitutional system of checks and balances designed to restrain the power of all three branches. The Constitution had come under criticism since the Progressive Era for putting stumbling blocks in the way of decisive government action. Now, many Americans called for restoring constitutional checks on the presidency. For example, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 that restricted the president’s ability to send troops to foreign countries.

What occurred in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during Ford’s presidency?

Insight: South Vietnam collapsed after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, declining American military and financial support, renewed North Vietnamese offensives, and the inability of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces to withstand them. In Cambodia, years of war and political collapse helped create the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and then murdered well over a million Cambodians.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Who succeeded Nixon, and how had he reached the vice presidency?

What did Ford do that damaged him politically?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Gerald Ford, appointed rather than elected to the vice presidency. (2) pardoned Nixon.

Explain

Ford said the pardon was meant to end the national ordeal. Was ending it worth what it cost him?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. Either verdict works if it engages the other. A strong answer weighs a trial’s value in establishing accountability against the cost of years more of it.

Daily Recap

Elevated to the Presidency after the previous resignations of both President Nixon and Vice President Agnew, Gerald Ford faced a daunting task in establishing himself as the country’s leader. Complicating matters, the economy remained sluggish, and 1975 witnessed both the collapse of South Vietnam and the rise to power of the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Looking Ahead

The office is diminished and the war is finally over. The next lesson is the year the country tried to feel better about itself.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: pardon, War Powers Act, executive power, Saigon, Khmer Rouge

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Ford defended the pardon as ___, while critics argued ___.” · “Congress checked presidential power by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students state the strongest argument for and against Ford’s pardon.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a two-column chart: diminished presidency at home / consequences of withdrawal in Southeast Asia.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.5 A Bicentennial Hope (pp. 733–734)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 733–734

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on Operation Sail

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The Bicentennial gave a bruised country a year of genuine celebration, but it was a mood rather than a recovery.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Bicentennial.

Explain what it offered a country recovering from Watergate and Vietnam.

Assess how durable that mood proved.

Key Dates

1976, July 4 – The United States marks its Bicentennial

Key Concepts

The Bicentennial offered a country bruised by Watergate and Vietnam a year of genuine national celebration.

The mood of 1976 was real but did not resolve the economic and institutional problems underneath it.

Key Terms

Bicentennial: The two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, marked in 1976 by celebrations including Operation Sail in New York harbor.

Operation Sail: The gathering of tall ships in New York harbor on July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial’s most widely seen event.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Twenty-One, “A Bicentennial Hope.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did America celebrate her Bicentennial anniversary in 1976?

What was Operation Sail? What did it symbolize?

What was the social and financial condition of New York City at the time?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the excerpt in the text from John Dos Passos’ writing. How are his claims relevant to the context of America’s Bicentennial?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What would Jefferson and other founders have thought of American society and government in the summer of 1776? To what extent did—and does—the United States still embody its founding ideals?

Civic Discourse: What factors accounted for the symbolic power and popular appeal of Operation Sail? Why might a procession of ships—from many countries and historical periods—across New York Harbor help lift Americans “out of the ordinariness of everyday life,” as the text claims?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What was the Parade of Ships?

Insight: In celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, Operation Sail organized a parade of tall ships from around the world in New York harbor. The author argues that this parade, watched by an estimated six million people, gave Americans hope for the future by connecting them to their glorious past.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was the Bicentennial?

What was Operation Sail?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in 1976. (2) the tall-ship gathering in New York harbor that was its most visible celebration.

Explain

Figure 21.7 shows the Saigon evacuation and Figure 21.8 the Bicentennial eleven months later. What do the two images together say about 1976?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer holds both: a country capable of celebrating itself a year after a defeat it had not processed, which can be read as resilience or as avoidance, and the better answer allows both readings.

Daily Recap

America’s celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence represented a reprieve from the gloominess and malaise that enveloped the country during the 1970s, as the glories of the past kindled hope of renewed greatness in the years to come.

Looking Ahead

The celebration ends and the problems remain. The next lesson belongs to the president who tried to name them.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Bicentennial, Operation Sail, commemoration, resilience, symbolism

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The Bicentennial offered Americans ___ after ___.” · “The celebration can be read as resilience because ___ or avoidance because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students explain both readings of the Saigon/Operation Sail image pair.

Show understanding without a paragraph: two image captions, one labeled resilience and one avoidance, each supported by one detail.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.6 An Overwhelmed Presidency (pp. 735–741)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 735–741

Exercise: the Analytical Skills exercise on the “Malaise” speech

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Carter identified a genuine crisis of confidence and achieved important diplomatic successes, but persistent inflation, energy anxiety, and the Iran hostage crisis overwhelmed his ability to persuade Americans that his administration had mastered the country’s problems.

Lesson Objectives

Describe stagflation and the energy crisis.

Explain Carter’s Camp David achievement.

Explain the Iran hostage crisis and its effect.

Key Dates

1976, Nov. 2 – Jimmy Carter is elected president

1978, Sept. 17 – Carter brokers the Camp David Accords

1979, Nov. 4 – The Iranian Hostage Crisis begins

1979, Dec. 24 – The Soviets invade Afghanistan

1981, Jan. 20 – Iran releases the hostages

Key Concepts

In one of his first significant moves as president, Jimmy Carter promised to relinquish control of the Panama Canal, which was originally built by the U.S. government and administered by American authorities from its opening in 1914 until 1999.

Among the few notable successes of the Carter administration were the Camp David Accords, a treaty between Israel and Egypt that was brokered by President Carter in 1978. The agreement normalized relations between Egypt and Israel and led to an eventual peace treaty between the two countries. Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat was later assassinated for his role in the negotiations.

On November 4, 1979, a group of armed Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage, demanding that the Shah return to Iran to be executed and that the United States unfreeze the country’s assets and apologize for interfering in its internal affairs. The Iranian hostage crisis became a potent symbol of the Carter administration’s dysfunction. The hostages were held for 444 days and were released on January 20, 1981, the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, following the signing of the Algiers Accords.

Key Terms

Amnesty: Carter granted amnesty—the pardoning of a group of individuals who have committed a crime and could be justly prosecuted for it—to all U.S. citizens who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Twenty-One, “An Overwhelmed Presidency.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Who was Jimmy Carter? What was his background?

What were the results of the 1976 election?

What was Carter’s approach to the Presidency? Was he effective in connecting with the American people?

What were Carter’s signature policy proposals?

Was Carter able to combat inflation during his term?

What were the Camp David Accords?

What happened in Iran in 1979?

Why did the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan in 1979? How did Carter respond?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analytical Skills: Primary Source 21.2 appears as Carter’s “Malaise” Speech, in quotation marks, and the word malaise appears nowhere in it—Carter calls it a crisis of confidence. Have students search for the speech online and evaluate the first three sources they find before reading any argument: who wrote it, who publishes it, when, and what it quotes. How many use the word Carter did not? Ask what it takes for a label applied by others to replace what was actually said.

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are newspaper opinion writers, authoring an op-ed on the eve of the 1976 presidential election. Assign them to write a brief editorial advocating for their favored candidate.

Civic Discourse: How did Carter handle the various challenges that confronted him during his presidency? Why were his responses thought by many to be insufficient?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What was the distinction James MacGregor Burns posited between “transactional” and “transforming” leaders in his 1978 book Leadership? Is it fair to consider Carter a transactional leader? If so, what other presidents can be considered similar?

Guiding Classroom Questions

What were some priorities of President Jimmy Carter?

Insight: Answers could include energy legislation emphasizing conservation and diversification; a deliberately less ceremonial presidential style after Watergate, symbolized by walking down Pennsylvania Avenue after his inauguration; and an effort to make human rights a more explicit consideration in American foreign policy.

How did the Iran hostage crisis hobble Carter’s presidency?

Insight: In 1979, a theocratic revolution led by Shi’ite Muslim clerics took over Iran, deposing the American-backed Shah. The revolutionaries captured American embassy personnel, holding them hostage for 444 days. Carter tried a variety of strategies, including appeal to the UN, but was unable to bring the hostages home. The crisis reinforced the public’s view that Carter was out of his depth.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What was stagflation?

What was agreed at Camp David?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the combination of stagnant growth and high inflation, which existing economic theory held should not occur together. (2) a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, brokered by Carter.

Explain

Carter’s speech appears under the title “Malaise” in quotation marks, and the word appears nowhere in it. What does that tell a student about how a speech is remembered?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that a label supplied by others can outlast and overwrite what was actually said, and that the quotation marks are the book flagging exactly that. A partial answer notices the absence without reaching what it means.

Daily Recap

Carter struggled to reduce inflation and to reassure Americans amid energy and foreign-policy crises. Camp David and other initiatives proved durable, but the hostage crisis and continuing economic distress left many voters unconvinced that his administration had restored national confidence.

Looking Ahead

Carter’s presidency ends with inflation high and the hostages held. The next lesson brings the man who ran against all of it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: stagflation, energy crisis, Camp David Accords, hostage crisis, crisis of confidence

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Carter diagnosed the problem as ___, but voters also judged him by ___.” · “Camp David mattered because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students distinguish one durable Carter achievement from one crisis he failed to resolve politically.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a balance sheet: Achievements / Unresolved Problems / Effect on Public Confidence.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.7 The Rise of Ronald Reagan (pp. 742–748)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 742–748

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on Map 21.1

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Reagan won by promising that the decline was a choice rather than a condition, and his first term was the attempt to prove it. It covers the 1980 election and his administration’s domestic policies.

Lesson Objectives

Describe Reagan’s rise and the 1980 election.

Explain the economic program of 1981.

Describe the military build-up.

Key Dates

1980, Nov. 4 – Ronald Reagan is elected president

1981, Aug. 13 – Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act

1984, Nov. 6 – Reagan wins reelection by a landslide

Key Concepts

Libertarians, who formed an important part of Reagan’s governing coalition, believe that the utmost human value is personal liberty understood largely as autonomy. Consequently, they believe that government exists primarily to protect individual liberty.

The conservative consensus of the mid-to-late twentieth century referred to the agreement among libertarians and social conservatives that the federal government should lower taxes, reduce economic regulation, and vigilantly oppose Communism.

Implementing an economic program that became known as “Reaganomics,” the Reagan administration cut taxes drastically. Though a sharp recession followed, by early 1983 the economy had improved, inflation was diminishing, interest rates were decreasing, and federal revenues were increasing. The downside was that the national debt grew enormously during this time, largely due to military spending.

Key Terms

Economic Recovery Tax Act: The 1981 legislation cutting federal income tax rates substantially, the center of Reagan’s economic program.

Military build-up: The expansion of American forces and weapons systems in the early 1980s, including the B-1B bomber, the MX Peacekeeper missile, the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Abrams tank.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh section of Chapter Twenty-One, “The Rise of Ronald Reagan.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

By the end of the 1970s, a conservative coalition had emerged to counter the liberal orthodoxy of the 1960s. What was its platform?

How was Reagan suited to become the leader of the new conservative coalition?

How did Reagan attain success in both the Republican primary and the presidential campaign of 1980?

What were the results of the 1980 presidential election?

How was the Iranian hostage crisis resolved?

What were the core tenets of Reaganomics?

How did the economy respond to Reagan’s policies?

What were the results of the 1984 presidential election?

How did the national debt change under the Reagan administration?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Geography: Figure 21.15 shows President Reagan meeting Pope John Paul II at Miami International Airport in 1987. Have students research how Florida's geographic location, harbors, and international airports made the state an important gateway to the Caribbean and Latin America and contributed to its strategic importance during the Cold War. Then have students explain why Miami was a fitting setting for Reagan and the Pope to discuss issues involving Central America and Latin America.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: In the lone official presidential debate of 1980, Reagan famously asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Why was this such an effective question?

Civic Discourse: To what extent can Reagan’s economic policies be considered successful when their contribution to the federal debt is included? What evidence would be needed to assess their longer-term fiscal effects?

Close Reading: Ask students to evaluate Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan, “It’s morning in America.” To what extent had the country passed through the night of the 1960s and 1970s into a new dawn of hope during the 1980s?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Have students consider the nicknames “The Roosevelt Right” and “Reaganomics” in relation to Reagan’s Inaugural Address (Primary Source 21.3). Does his philosophy of limited government and America’s power support the meaning behind these nicknames?

Further: Ask students what this speech, combined with his commitment to vigilantly oppose communism, would suggest about the foreign policy this president would plausibly exact.

Insight: Students should not aim to produce factual, close-ended statements as answers. Rather, encourage them to articulate the connections they see between Reagan’s personality, his campaigning, and his philosophy on government. This will support their considerations of the result of Reagan’s foreign policy with the Soviets, covered in the next lesson.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Discuss some aspects of Ronald Reagan that made him an effective spokesperson for conservatism.

Insight: Reagan was a movie actor who was an excellent speaker, able to present conservative ideas in a sunny, optimistic manner. He was able to navigate a conservative coalition of diverse ideologies and goals.

What were President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, and what effects did they have?

Insight: Reagan cut taxes sharply while increasing defense spending. After a recession in 1982, the economy rebounded and inflation fell. Federal revenues increased, but the national debt also grew substantially because spending was not reduced enough to offset the higher defense expenditures. Ask students to distinguish the effects of tax policy, Federal Reserve anti-inflation policy, economic recovery, spending, and debt rather than treating them as a single outcome.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What foreign-policy experiences shaped the electorate Reagan addressed in 1980? Distinguish Vietnam, détente, the fall of South Vietnam, Soviet expansion in the late 1970s, and the Iran hostage crisis. Which of these could a new president plausibly promise to reverse, and which lay largely beyond presidential control?

Insight: Return to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s quote from “Dictatorships and Double Standards”: “Since the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as president there has occurred a dramatic Soviet military buildup...and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas.” Carter had also given up direct American control closer to home, promising early in his presidency to relinquish the Panama canal. By the time Reagan took office, American foreign policy had absorbed a string of setbacks and evolutions: Castro’s communist dictatorship and the Suez crisis forced Eisenhower to deal with the question of confronting communism abroad; Vietnam ultimately became communist despite Nixon’s efforts at a negotiated peace; the Watergate scandal diminished the presidency’s standing at home and abroad; and the Iranian hostage crisis became a stain on Carter’s administration.

Insight: Looking ahead, Reagan’s dealings with Africa provide a good starting point to return to this question once students move onto lesson 21.8. His administration opposed economic sanctions against South Africa’s government, preferring diplomatic engagement instead. Congress ultimately overrode his executive power, imposing the sanctions.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

In what year was Reagan first elected president?

What did the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act do?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 1980. (2) cut federal income tax rates substantially, the center of the administration’s economic program.

Explain

Reagan argued the country’s decline was reversible. What would count as evidence either way?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer proposes testable evidence—inflation, employment, the Soviet position—and notes that different measures give different verdicts over different spans. A partial answer asserts a verdict without proposing a test.

Daily Recap

Reagan paired an optimistic public style with tax cuts, deregulation, and a major defense buildup. Economic recovery and falling inflation strengthened his political position, while rising deficits complicated the fiscal record; in 1984 voters rewarded him with one of the most decisive reelections in American history.

Looking Ahead

The program is enacted and the build-up is under way. The last lesson is what it amounted to.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Reaganomics, tax rate, monetary policy, inflation, federal debt

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Inflation fell partly because ___, while Reagan’s tax policy aimed to ___.” · “Economic recovery and rising debt can both be true because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students separate the roles of the Federal Reserve, tax policy, and federal spending.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a three-column chart: policy / intended effect / observed result, including one uncertainty about causation.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

21.8 The Presidency Restored (pp. 749–756)

For a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 749–756

Exercise: the Compare and Contrast exercise on the two Reagan speeches

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The president who called the Soviet Union an evil empire spent his second term negotiating with its last leader, and the two belong together as one strategy rather than a reversal.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the later Reagan–Gorbachev relationship.

Explain the Berlin Wall speech and its reception.

Assess the state of the Cold War by 1988.

Key Dates

1983, Mar. 23 – Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative

1983, Nov. 22 – NATO deploys ballistic missiles in western Europe

1985, Mar. 11 – Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1988, May 15 – The Soviets begin withdrawal from Afghanistan

1988, December - Gorbachev renounces the Brezhnev Doctrine at the UN

Key Concepts

Reagan substantially increased American defense spending and adopted a more confrontational public posture toward the Soviet Union, while pursuing programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Supporters argue that this pressure intensified strains on an already troubled Soviet economy; historians continue to debate how much it contributed to Soviet policy changes and the eventual end of the Cold War.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise as General Secretary in 1985 transformed U.S.-Soviet relations. His policies of glasnost and perestroika sought greater openness and economic restructuring in response to deep problems within the Soviet system. His willingness to negotiate arms reductions and, eventually, to refrain from using force to preserve communist governments in Eastern Europe was crucial to the Cold War’s peaceful end.

Key Terms

Solidarity movement: Solidarity was a trade union founded in September 1980 in communist Poland, following a strike at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk that soon sparked unrest among much of Poland’s workforce. It was suppressed between 1981 and 1989. In June 1989, Solidarity candidates dominated national elections, leading to the fall of communism in Poland. In 1990, Solidarity’s chairman Lech Wałęsa was elected President of Poland.

Euromissile crisis: In 1983, against significant opposition, President Reagan argued for NATO’s deployment of American cruise missiles in Western Europe to counter an earlier Soviet deployment of SS-20 ballistic missiles, leading to this Cold War standoff between NATO and the Soviet Union.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the eighth section of Chapter Twenty-One, “The Presidency Restored.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was Reagan’s overarching foreign policy goal?

How did Reagan depart from establishment orthodoxy regarding the Soviet Union?

What measures did Reagan take to confront the Soviet Union and hasten its decline?

What was the “Euromissile crisis” and how did Reagan handle it?

How did Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev react to Reagan’s foreign policy?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What did the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev mean for U.S.-Soviet relations? How might history have been different if the Soviet Union were ruled by a hardline communist?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the extended excerpt in the text from Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate Speech. How does Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev epitomize his overall approach to Soviet communism?

Civic Discourse: To what extent can Reagan be credited with contributing toward the eventual fall of the Soviet Union?

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did Reagan’s attitude toward the Soviet Union differ from Carter and many of his predecessors?

Insight: Reagan believed that the goal should be to defeat the USSR, not just contain it or find accommodation with it. He believed that communism was an utterly failed experiment, and he took aggressive steps as president to challenge the Soviets. These steps include massively increasing defense spending, developing new defense technologies like the “Star Wars” missile defense system, and supporting democratic movements and governments in places like Poland and Central America. He also placed American missiles in Europe as a deterrent to Soviet aggression.

How should historians weigh Reagan’s pressure against Gorbachev’s agency and the Soviet Union’s internal weaknesses when explaining the Cold War’s end?

Insight: A strong answer should resist a single-cause explanation. Reagan increased military and ideological pressure and negotiated major arms reductions with Gorbachev; Gorbachev pursued reforms because of deep Soviet economic and political problems and chose not to preserve communist rule in Eastern Europe by force. Afghanistan, Solidarity and other dissident movements, and long-term structural weaknesses also mattered. Students should rank these causes using evidence rather than treating chronology as proof of causation.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

To whom did Reagan deliver the “Evil Empire” speech?

Who was the Soviet leader Reagan negotiated with?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the National Association of Evangelicals, a religious rather than diplomatic audience. (2) Mikhail Gorbachev.

Explain

How can the “Evil Empire” speech and the Gorbachev negotiations be parts of one strategy rather than a change of mind?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that pressure and negotiation can be sequenced deliberately—that the first was intended to create the conditions for the second. A partial answer treats the shift as simple inconsistency, which is also arguable but must be argued.

Daily Recap

Reagan left office as the Cold War was rapidly changing. His military buildup, ideological challenge, and later negotiations formed part of the story, alongside Gorbachev’s reforms, Soviet economic weakness, the war in Afghanistan, and political movements across Eastern Europe. The relative weight of those causes remains a historical question rather than a settled formula.

Looking Ahead

The Cold War is ending and nobody yet says so aloud. Chapter Twenty-Two opens on the world that follows it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Strategic Defense Initiative, Euromissile crisis, glasnost, perestroika, Solidarity

Frames that carry the reasoning: “One explanation for the Cold War’s end emphasizes ___; another emphasizes ___.” · “Chronology alone does not prove causation because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: students rank Reagan, Gorbachev, Soviet weakness, Afghanistan, and Eastern European movements, then defend their top choice.

Show understanding without a paragraph: a causal web connecting pressure, reform, internal weakness, negotiation, and Eastern European political change.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest to latest. Number one is the earliest; number five is the latest.

______

______

______

______

______

Nixon visits China

Reagan is elected president

The Iranian Hostage Crisis begins

Gerald Ford is sworn in as president

Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”)

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

One of President Nixon’s key initiatives involved providing block grants to the states to use for their own programs. This initiative was labeled the ________________________.

An advocate of realism in foreign policy, ________________________ conducted important diplomacy with Vietnam and China as President Nixon’s national-security advisor.

President Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel known as the ________________________.

________________________ was the Soviet leader who instituted the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic reform).

Following American withdrawal from Vietnam, a Maoist group called the ________________________ took power in Cambodia and massacred more than a million Cambodians.

Geography

Use the maps to answer the following prompt:

[ART REQUIRED — CH21 Geography, STUDENT SIDE: a coordinated, equally sized pair of clear and legible adaptations of Map 21.1, The Election of 1980, and Map 21.2, The Election of 1984, preserving state boundaries, electoral-vote results, candidate and party labels, map legends, and the information needed to compare Reagan’s regional support across the two elections.]

Using the 1980 and 1984 electoral maps, describe how regional voting patterns and support for Ronald Reagan changed between the two elections. Use at least two examples from the maps to support your answer.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

How did President Nixon’s opening of relations with China represent the practice of “realism” in foreign policy?

How did Nixon’s management of economic policy contrast with his foreign policy?

How did the Watergate scandal affect American views of the institution of the presidency?

What did Jimmy Carter do to signal that he was rejecting “the imperial presidency”?

What effect did the Iran Hostage Crisis have on Carter’s presidency?

What were the important elements of “Reaganomics”?

How did Reagan approach the prosecution of the Cold War and relations with the Soviet Union?

According to the author, how did Reagan change the diminished view of the presidency?

What changes did Mikhail Gorbachev institute for the USSR?

In what ways did Reagan represent a conservative shift from the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s?

Essay

With specific references to the following documents, discuss how Americans experienced the period from 1971–88 as a spiritual crisis of confidence in American institutions and ideals:

Richard Nixon, First Inaugural Address (Primary Source 21.1)

Jimmy Carter, “Malaise” Speech (Primary Source 21.2)

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (Primary Source 21.3)

Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire” Speech (Primary Source 21.4)

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Timeline

Place the following into chronological order from earliest to latest. Number one is the earliest; number five is the latest.

A

D

C

B

E

Nixon visits China

Reagan is elected president

The Iranian Hostage Crisis begins

Gerald Ford is sworn in as president

Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”)

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

1. New Federalism

2. Henry Kissinger

3. Camp David Accords

4. Mikhail Gorbachev

5. Khmer Rouge

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH21 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same coordinated 1980 and 1984 electoral-map pair used on the student side, printed at the same size, with all state results, candidate totals, party labels, and legends clearly legible.]

Use the maps to answer the following prompt:

Using the 1980 and 1984 electoral maps, describe how regional voting patterns and support for Ronald Reagan changed between the two elections. Use at least two examples from the maps to support your answer.

A: In 1980, Reagan carried forty-four states and won broadly across the West, Midwest, South, and Northeast. Carter carried Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In 1984, Reagan expanded his support to forty-nine states and a record 525 electoral votes; Mondale carried only Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The comparison shows that Reagan’s already broad 1980 coalition became nearly national by 1984.

Short Answer

How did President Nixon’s opening of relations with China represent the practice of “realism” in foreign policy?

A: Foreign-policy realists such as Henry Kissinger argued that nations should pursue their interests rather than make ideological agreement a prerequisite for diplomacy. Nixon used the Sino-Soviet split to open relations with China and improve the American strategic position relative to the USSR. Although China remained communist, improved relations served the United States’ immediate geopolitical interests.

How did Nixon’s management of economic policy contrast with his foreign policy?

A: The author argues that although Nixon’s foreign policy was steady and mostly successful (withdrawal from Vietnam, opening of China), his economic policy was often shaky and much less successful. After he tried to raise interest rates, a recession occurred, and he proceeded to impose wage and price controls and establish “fiat” currency not tied to precious metals. These actions led to “stagflation”: high inflation coupled with rising unemployment.

How did the Watergate scandal affect American views of the institution of the presidency?

A: The scandal led Americans to question whether the executive branch had grown too large and powerful. The Watergate scandal had revealed that the Nixon Administration had used the law-enforcement apparatus (wiretaps, etc.) to spy on political opponents. Many Americans, including liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, called for restoring constitutional checks on executive power.

What did Jimmy Carter do to signal that he was rejecting “the imperial presidency”?

A: In the election of 1976, Carter defeated Gerald Ford, who had ascended to the presidency following Nixon’s resignation. Seeking to restore trust after Watergate, Carter cultivated a deliberately less ceremonial presidential style. Most visibly, he and his family walked part of the inaugural route down Pennsylvania Avenue rather than remaining inside the presidential limousine; his informal public manner likewise emphasized distance from the trappings associated with the “imperial presidency.”

What effect did the Iran Hostage Crisis have on Carter’s presidency?

A: After revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days. Carter pursued diplomatic, economic, and military efforts to secure their release, but none succeeded during his presidency. The unresolved crisis reinforced perceptions of ineffectiveness and contributed substantially to his defeat in 1980.

What were the important elements of “Reaganomics”?

A: Reagan sought to cut taxes and government spending to encourage economic growth. He secured a large tax cut in his first year, reduced some domestic spending, and sharply increased defense spending. After the 1982 recession, the economy grew and inflation fell; federal revenues also rose substantially. At the same time, the national debt nearly tripled, so the revenue increase and the continuing deficit problem must be considered together.

How did Reagan approach the prosecution of the Cold War and relations with the Soviet Union?

A: Unlike several of his predecessors, Reagan indicated that he wanted to defeat the USSR instead of simply containing communism. He saw communism as an utterly failed ideology. He initiated a massive defense buildup, leading to the manufacture of many new weapons systems. He advocated for the Strategic Defense Initiative, called “Star Wars,” which was a missile defense system designed to make intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete. He also supported anticommunist movements in Poland and Central America, and he placed missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet missiles placed in Europe.

According to the author, how did Reagan change the diminished view of the presidency?

A: The overall success that Reagan enjoyed on both the domestic and foreign-policy fronts restored “the dignity and élan of the office of the presidency,” according to the author. The Watergate scandal during Nixon’s presidency had raised Americans’ cynicism toward the presidency, and Carter’s struggles, especially in foreign policy, had raised doubts about the ability of a single person to handle the modern presidency. Reagan’s presidency restored a general confidence in the presidency and recharged American optimism.

What changes did Mikhail Gorbachev institute for the USSR?

A: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signaled a willingness to make significant reforms to the USSR through his policies of glasnost (greater freedom and openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring to introduce market forces into the Soviet economy). The author argues that Gorbachev pursued these changes in part because of Reagan’s aggressive posture; Gorbachev saw the need to cooperate with the U.S. rather than attempt to defeat the U.S.

In what ways did Reagan represent a conservative shift from the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s?

A: Reagan sharply shifted economic policy, favoring tax cuts rather than increased spending on social programs. He broke with the Rockefeller Republicans by favoring libertarianism and a smaller federal government. He also had a sunny, optimistic demeanor that was a change from the less confident rhetoric of Carter and Nixon. The author calls Reagan a “transformational” leader who addressed the “deeper needs of people,” in contrast with a “transactional” leader who works within the existing rules of the game.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong essay directly answers whether and how Americans experienced a spiritual crisis of confidence during the period. It uses specific evidence from all four listed documents, compares Nixon’s, Carter’s, and Reagan’s diagnoses and proposed restorations, and distinguishes institutional and political confidence from spiritual or moral confidence.

A competent essay uses all four documents accurately and addresses the crisis-of-confidence question, but develops the relationships among the documents or the different forms of confidence only partially.

A developing essay primarily summarizes the documents or narrates the presidencies, omits one or more required documents, or does not explain what kind of confidence was in crisis.

Credit a defensible challenge to the prompt—for example, an argument that the crisis was primarily political or institutional rather than spiritual—when the student addresses all four documents and supports the interpretation with specific evidence.

Do not reward an essay that merely narrates the presidencies without analyzing the documents or answering the crisis-of-confidence question.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The World Since the Cold War:

The Search for a New Order

1988–2024 · pp. 757–792

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Summary

This chapter opens with the observation that the closer we get to the present, the more difficult it is to arrive at historical assessments. And so this chapter considers the era since the end of the Cold War in more general terms, with less detailed emphasis on a political narrative and greater focus on larger themes and questions facing Americans in the days to come.

The end of the Cold War left the United States without the rival that had organized much of its foreign policy and domestic life for nearly half a century. The decades that followed brought new geopolitical questions and persistent domestic strains, including polarization, declining confidence in institutions, and a rapidly growing federal debt. The administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump confronted these problems with mixed results.

The period began with George H. W. Bush’s careful management of the Soviet collapse and the coalition victory that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The hoped-for peaceful, lawful, and democratic post–Cold War order did not settle into place. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crisis, and deepening conflict at home tested successive presidents and competing interpretations of the new era.

The election of 2008 was epochal in bringing into the presidency the first African American to hold that office: Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. But his campaign of hope hit hard ground against the pervasive partisanship and distrust that had spawned from the trials of the preceding decade, most especially the Great Recession of 2008.

The 2016 presidential race produced one of the most unexpected electoral victories in American history, with the election of businessman and television celebrity Donald J. Trump. Trump challenged a bipartisan post-Cold War consensus on trade, immigration, and globalization, arguing that its costs had fallen heavily on working-class communities. The COVID-19 pandemic then disrupted the economy, schools, churches, and ordinary social life while making public-health policy itself a source of intense political conflict. Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020; four years later, after Biden withdrew from the race and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump returned to office. The rapid reversals underscore the chapter’s warning that the meaning of very recent events remains unsettled.

The chapter closes without pretending to know whether the political combat of the past quarter-century will persist. It does identify a reciprocal relationship between polarization and declining confidence in political institutions: distrust can intensify conflict, while repeated conflict can deepen distrust. Even as the nation-state has regained political salience, Americans remain divided over what national solidarity requires and over the legitimacy and performance of major institutions. The historical question is therefore not simply whether institutions are trusted, but what conduct, reforms, and civic habits might make them worthy of trust.

Chapter Learning Objectives

What students should understand and be able to explain by the chapter's end:

The central problems of U.S. history since the end of the Cold War: how Americans understood a world without the Soviet rival, why political polarization and institutional distrust deepened, and how citizens should judge a period whose historical meaning remains unsettled.

Explain why recent history requires greater caution than a settled historical period and distinguish observation, interpretation, and prediction when evaluating contemporary events.

Explain how George H. W. Bush’s experience and restraint shaped the American response to the collapse of Soviet power and assess both the achievements and limits of Operation Desert Storm.

Explain why George H. W. Bush lost the 1992 election despite his foreign-policy successes and analyze how Bill Clinton adapted to divided government, including the roles of economic growth, fiscal policy, and bipartisan legislation in the balanced budgets of the late 1990s.

Trace how the disputed election of 2000, the September 11 attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq first produced national unity and then intensified arguments over presidential power, security, and American leadership abroad.

Explain the historical significance of Barack Obama’s election, the domestic and economic circumstances in which he governed, and why the Republican victory in the 2010 midterms constrained the remainder of his legislative agenda.

Analyze the political and economic grievances that contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and explain how his “America First” program challenged elements of the post-Cold War consensus on trade, immigration, and globalization.

Assess competing explanations for contemporary polarization and institutional distrust, identify the chapter’s concerns about the federal debt, and evaluate the historical and civic grounds the author offers for hope without treating them as predictions.

Key Persons

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018)

Michael Dukakis (b. 1933)

Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952)

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006)

Samuel Phillips Huntington (1927–2008)

Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)

Bill Clinton (b. 1946)

George W. Bush (b. 1946)

Albert Gore (b. 1948)

Barack Obama (b. 1961)

Hillary Clinton (b. 1947)

John McCain (1936–2018)

Joe Biden (b. 1942)

Donald J. Trump (b. 1946)

Key Concepts and Terms

Tiananmen Square Massacre

Warsaw Pact

Operation Desert Storm (1990–1991)

“Age of fracture”

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Independent (political affiliation)

Timeline

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1989 The Berlin Wall falls (November 9)

1991 The U.S. launches Operation Desert Storm against Iraq (January 17)

1991 The Soviet Union dissolves (December 26)

1992 Bill Clinton is elected president (November 3)

1993 Al-Qaeda terrorists bomb the World Trade Center in Manhattan (February 26)

1994 The North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect (January 1)

1996 Clinton wins reelection (November 5)

1998 Clinton is impeached (December 19)

1999 Clinton is acquitted (February 12)

2000 George W. Bush is elected president (November 7)

2001 Al-Qaeda terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (September 11)

2001 The U.S. invades Afghanistan (October 7)

2003 The U.S. invades Iraq (March 20)

2008 Lehman Brothers collapses, triggering a financial crisis (September)

2008 Barack Obama is elected president (November 4)

2010 Obama signs the Affordable Care Act (March 23)

2011 U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq (December 18)

2012 Obama is reelected (November 6)

2016 Donald Trump is elected president (November 8)

2019 Trump is impeached (December 18)

2019 The COVID-19 virus is first detected in Wuhan, China (December)

2020 Trump is acquitted from his first impeachment (February 5)

2020 Joe Biden is elected president (November 3)

2021 Trump is impeached for a second time (January 13)

2021 Trump is acquitted (February 13)

2021 The U.S. withdraws troops from Afghanistan (August 30)

2024 Trump is reelected (November 5)

THE PLANNER

Suggested pacing for the chapter. The class-period estimates are recommendations; teach at the pace your students' progress warrants.

22.1 Chapter Opening – p. 759 (.5 to 1 class)

The difficulty of understanding recent events

The need for detachment in writing history

Focusing on the overarching themes of the post-Cold War era rather than the succession of events

22.2 Bush and the End of the Cold War – pp. 759–763 (.5 to 1 class)

Background of George H. W. Bush

The Election of 1988

The collapse of the Soviet Union

Bush remains cautious as Eastern Europe reshapes itself

22.3 America After the Cold War – pp. 763–770 (1 to 2 classes)

The geopolitical situation after the Soviets’ collapse

Operation Desert Storm

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History

Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”

Does America need an enemy?

22.4 The Clinton Presidency – pp. 771–774 (.5 to 1 class)

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing

Clinton defeats Bush in 1992

Clinton: the first baby boomer president

Clinton’s ambitious agenda falters, but NAFTA passes

After Democrats’ midterm losses, Clinton works with Republicans

Election of 1996

Clinton’s fiscal success

The Lewinsky scandal and Clinton’s impeachment

22.5 A Time of Polarization – pp. 774–777 (.5 to 1 class)

The Election of 2000: the Florida recount and the Supreme Court’s intervention

September 11, 2001 and the resulting War on Terror

The invasion of Iraq

The Great Recession

22.6 Obama, Trump, and Beyond – pp. 777–788 (1 to 2 classes)

Barack Obama as a symbol of racial reconciliation

Obama’s economic stimulus; Obamacare

The rise of the Tea Party

Obama’s agenda falters after Republicans regain the House

Donald Trump revolutionizes American politics

Trump’s economic success and polarizing presence

The federal debt grows ever higher

22.7 Reasons for Hope – pp. 788–791 (1 to 2 classes)

The author’s patriotic motivation

American identity: the twin strands of universalism and particularity

Hope amid the uncertainty of our time

Context for the chapter's epigraph, primary sources, figures, and maps.

BACKGROUNDS

Chapter Epigraph

Arthur Schlesinger, quoted as the chapter epigraph (p. 757)

Schlesinger’s warning is especially apt for a chapter reaching the recent past: historians cannot yet know which events will prove decisive or which confident interpretations will endure. Read the epigraph alongside Primary Sources 22.1 and 22.2, both efforts to interpret the emerging post–Cold War world. Return to it in Lesson 22.7 when students consider why the author offers grounds for hope without pretending to predict the future.

Primary Sources

Primary Source 22.1 · Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, 1989 (p. 767)

Begin with the question mark, which is often omitted when the essay is cited. Fukuyama published the essay in the summer of 1989, before the Berlin Wall fell, so students should read it as an argument about an emerging order rather than as hindsight. Isolate the central proposition: the defeat of Communism appeared to leave Western liberal democracy without a universal ideological rival. Compare the essay directly with Primary Source 22.2 and ask what evidence each author uses and what each predicts.

Primary Source 22.2 · Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, 1993 (p. 769)

Huntington published his argument four years after Fukuyama and after the Soviet Union had dissolved. He argued that the most important divisions of the emerging era would be cultural rather than ideological or economic. Read the two sources as competing interpretations: ask students how each defines the principal source of political conflict, what evidence each emphasizes, and which later developments appear to support or complicate each argument.

Primary Source 22.3 · Barack Obama, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009 (p. 780)

This speech was delivered in the worst months of the financial crisis, with unemployment rising and the banking system recently near collapse, by the first African American president. Have students note that Obama was elected forty-four years after the Voting Rights Act of Chapter Twenty. An inaugural address is normally a statement of intent; this one had to be a statement of reassurance first, and the tone is sober rather than triumphal, of work to be done by a country that has faced worse. Use it in 22.6 with Figure 22.13, the trading floor months earlier, and Figure 22.14, the election night: circumstance, result and response in one lesson.

Primary Source 22.4 · Donald Trump, Remarks to the People of Poland, Krasiński Square, Warsaw, July 6, 2017 (p. 786)

Begin with the audience and setting: Trump delivered the speech in Warsaw, in a square associated with the 1944 uprising, and addressed the survival of Western civilization. Ask students how the speech defines the West, what it identifies as the sources of Western strength, and what threats it describes. Then compare those claims with Fukuyama’s emphasis on liberal democracy and Huntington’s emphasis on cultural identity, allowing students to debate where the speech fits.

Figures

Figure 22.3 · Jacques Langevin, Chinese Army Crushes Tiananmen Square Protest, 1989 (p. 761)

The photograph records the Chinese government’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989, five months before the Berlin Wall fell. Place it beside Figure 22.4 and ask students how the two events complicate a simple claim that Communism “fell” in 1989.

Figure 22.15 · Presidential Candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Hold Second Presidential Debate, 2016 (p. 781)

Compare the staging of the 2016 debate with Chapter Twenty’s Figure 20.5, showing the first televised presidential debate in 1960. Ask students how television’s role in presidential campaigns changed over those fifty-six years and what evidence the two photographs can provide about that change. Use the image with Map 22.2 when discussing the 2016 election.

Figure 22.16 · Lionel Hahn, People in front of Los Angeles’ City Hall Protest the State’s COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Orders in a “Fully Open California” Protest, 2020 (p. 785)

The photograph shows a protest against California’s COVID-19 stay-at-home order. Ask students first to describe only what the image and caption establish about the COVID-19 period and policies. Because students may remember the period directly, require claims about the larger political conflict to be supported by the chapter’s text rather than by memory alone.

Maps

Map 22.1 · The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1991 (p. 763)

The map shows the fifteen independent republics that emerged from the Soviet Union. Have students identify them and compare the new international borders with the former Soviet territory. Use the map with the chronology of 1989–1991 so students understand that the collapse was a sequence culminating in the Soviet Union’s formal dissolution in December 1991.

Map 22.2 · The Election of 2016 (p. 782)

The state-by-state map shows the Electoral College result but not the distribution of the popular vote within each state. Ask students to identify the regions in which Trump won electoral votes and use knowledge of those geographic areas from the text to explain why. Compare the map with Chapter Twenty’s Map 20.4 and require students to distinguish the Electoral College result from the national popular vote.

Map 22.3 · NATO States, 2025 (p. 784)

Compare Map 22.3 with Chapter Nineteen’s Map 19.2. Have students identify which former Warsaw Pact states later joined NATO and ask how the alliance’s survival and expansion complicate the question of what replaced the Cold War order. Use the map in Lesson 22.2 when discussing the Soviet collapse and in Lesson 22.6 when considering the post-Cold War world.

BACKGROUND READING FOR EDUCATORS

Books on the chapter's subjects, selected for the teacher who wants to go deeper. Background rather than required reading.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.1 Chapter Opening (p. 759)

Each lesson corresponds to a subsection of the chapter and follows the same structure.

In a Single Class Period

One workable path through the lesson’s materials — a suggestion, not a requirement. Teachers are encouraged to adapt or replace it as they see fit.

Read: p. 759

Exercise: the Critical Thinking Exercise on history

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The central idea students should grasp by the end of the lesson.

Recent events are difficult to interpret because historians lack distance, settled outcomes, and freedom from contemporary passions; the chapter therefore emphasizes open questions rather than definitive judgments.

Lesson Objectives

What students should be able to do once the lesson is complete.

Explain what Schlesinger’s epigraph warns against.

Identify what the post-Cold War order was expected to be.

Key Dates

Dates and the sequence of events students should learn.

1989, November 9 – The Berlin Wall is opened

Key Concepts

Ideas students should analyze and engage with during the lesson.

Attempting to form historical narratives to explain recent events is challenging, due to both the influence of our own partisan sympathies and the need for time before trends can be adequately contextualized.

Key Terms

Terms students should be able to define by the end of the lesson.

Post-Cold War order: The arrangement of world politics after 1991, which no settled name or theory has yet described to general agreement.

Classroom Experience

Homework and in-class activities for the lesson. Both lists are suggestions; select according to time and need.

Suggested Homework Assignments

Reading and written work to assign before the lesson.

Assign students to read p. 759 before class.

Why is it difficult to tell, discuss, and analyze recent history?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

In-class activities, each named for the skill it develops.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Why is a certain degree of detachment helpful in evaluating the significance of historical events? Is it possible to be dispassionate when considering recent history?

Civic Discourse: Which chapters of U.S. history required decades to pass before they could be understood fully? Was this the case, for example, for the New Deal, the Civil War, Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise, the World Wars, etc.? Pick two examples from the book and argue how so or why not?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Questions to pose to the class. Those in bold most directly advance the Essential Understanding; prioritize them if time is short.

Why is it difficult to write a history of the recent past?

Insight: It is difficult to disregard our own interests and opinions in current events in order to write a disinterested history of the recent past. Also, it is almost impossible to know what events will end up being extremely important, and what events will only be passing distractions.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

A two-level check to gauge understanding. Recall items confirm the building blocks; the Explain item asks whether students can use them, and its answers may vary.

Recall

What does the chapter’s epigraph say history is an antidote to?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) delusions of omnipotence and omniscience.

Explain

Why open a chapter about recent history with a warning about certainty?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the closer history comes to the present the less settled it is, and that a chapter reaching 2024 cannot offer the verdicts an earlier one could.

Daily Recap

A closing summary for the teacher to deliver, drawing the lesson's threads together.

In deference to the difficulty of grasping the meaning of recent events, the final chapter’s narrative focuses on the open-ended questions that have confronted the United States since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Looking Ahead

A bridge to the next lesson, and to what topics the chapter takes up next.

The Cold War is ending. The next lesson focuses on the president who had to manage that ending.

Language Support

For students still building academic English—words for what they can already grasp, drawn from the lesson’s central ideas.

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: recent past, detachment, historical perspective, and post–Cold War order.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Recent history is difficult to interpret because ___.” “The chapter avoids certainty by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain why the passage of time helps historians distinguish lasting events from passing controversies.

Show understanding without a paragraph: sort four statements into observation, interpretation, and prediction.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.2 Bush and the End of the Cold War (pp. 759–762)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 759–763

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

George H. W. Bush’s foreign-policy experience and restraint helped him manage the peaceful collapse of Soviet power, even though his understated political style left him vulnerable at home.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Explain the American response to 1989.

Explain how the Soviet Union dissolved between 1989 and 1991.

Key Dates

1988, Nov. 8 – George H. W. Bush is elected president

1989, Nov. 9 – The Berlin Wall falls

1991, Dec. 26 – The Soviet Union dissolves

Key Concepts

George H. W. Bush’s impressive background well prepared him to steer U.S. foreign policy through the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. However, his understated nature and stilted diction did not play as well with the electorate as the jocular wit of Ronald Reagan, who overshadowed Bush’s presidency much as FDR had Truman’s.

Key Terms

Tiananmen Square: The 1989 protest in Beijing crushed by the Chinese army, in the same year the Berlin Wall opened.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the second section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “Bush and the End of the Cold War.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

Who was George H. W. Bush? What was his background?

What positions did Bush hold prior to becoming president?

What were the results of the 1988 presidential election?

What took place at Tiananmen Square in 1989?

What events led to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

What was George H. W. Bush’s response to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: What might have motivated the coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991? What could have happened if it had been successful?

Civic Discourse: Did the collapse of the Soviet Union render George H. W. Bush’s expertise less relevant? Considering his eventual electoral defeat, can Bush be considered a victim of his own success?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are a political aide to President Bush in 1989. Assign them to author a 200-word memo, arguing why he should visit Berlin to make a speech in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. How did this event represent an opportunity, both for Bush personally and American leadership more generally?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why was George H. W. Bush unusually well prepared to manage the foreign-policy challenges of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and why was he nevertheless often underestimated?

Insight: Bush had extensive experience as vice president, UN ambassador, CIA director, and envoy to China, giving him a strong command of foreign affairs. However, he lacked Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical gifts and magnetic public style, and his discomfort with what he called “the vision thing” led many observers to underestimate him.

What events between 1989 and 1991 brought about the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union?

Insight: Communist governments lost power across the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and East and West Germany reunited. The Baltic states declared independence, a hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev failed, and the Soviet republics formally dissolved the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Why did President Bush respond cautiously rather than triumphantly to the collapse of the Soviet bloc?

Insight: Bush believed public gloating could provoke a backlash from Communist hard-liners and make the transition more dangerous. He stayed in the background, supported Gorbachev and West German leader Helmut Kohl, negotiated nuclear-arms reductions, and tried to guide the change peacefully.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989?

What happened to the Soviet Union in December 1991?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the Chinese army crushed a mass protest. (2) the Soviet republics formally dissolved the Soviet Union.

Explain

Figures 22.3 and 22.4 are from the same year and point opposite ways. What does holding both at once do to the story of 1989?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer resists the single narrative: 1989 opened one system and closed another, and a history that keeps only the Berlin Wall has kept half of it.

Daily Recap

Often operating from behind-the-scenes, President Bush helped usher the Soviet Union toward its eventual dissolution, as market democracies abruptly replaced communist regimes across Eastern Europe.

Looking Ahead

The Soviet Union is gone. The next lesson asks what anyone thought would replace it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: Tiananmen Square, Warsaw Pact, Berlin Wall, reunification, and Soviet Union.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “In ___, Communist rule ___, while in ___ it ___.” “Bush responded cautiously because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: narrate the sequence from the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 to the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

Show understanding without a paragraph: place the major events of 1989–1991 on a timeline and mark Bush’s principal responses.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.3 America After the Cold War (pp. 763–770)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 763–770

Exercise: the Compare and Contrast exercise on Primary Sources 22.1 and 22.2

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The end of the Cold War opened competing possibilities rather than a settled order: Operation Desert Storm tested Bush’s hope for collective security, while Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington offered rival explanations of the conflicts that might define the new era.

Lesson Objectives

Explain the goals and limits of Operation Desert Storm.

Compare Francis Fukuyama’s and Samuel Huntington’s interpretations of the post–Cold War world.

Assess how later events supported or complicated both interpretations.

Key Dates

1991, Jan. 17 – The U.S. launches Operation Desert Storm against Iraq

Key Concepts

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait represented an important first test of the U.S.-led international order as the Cold War approached its end. Demonstrating both skillful diplomacy and prudent restraint, President Bush organized a global coalition to liberate Kuwait through Operation Desert Storm, which dealt a swift and decisive defeat to the Iraqis.

Meanwhile, theorists in the United States argued about what the collapse of the Soviet Union would mean for geopolitics. Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy no longer faced a universal ideological rival capable of presenting itself as a superior endpoint of political development. Samuel Huntington countered that the most important future conflicts would be organized increasingly around cultural and civilizational differences rather than the ideological division that had structured the Cold War.

Key Terms

Clash of Civilizations: In a 1993 essay and 1996 book, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington predicted that geopolitics in the twenty-first century would be characterized by conflict among various cultural blocs, such as those of the West and the Islamic world.

Liberal democracy: Widely regarded as the primary ideological legacy of the European Enlightenment, this form of government is characterized by democratic political institutions and civil liberties based on individual rights.

Gulf War: The 1991 coalition campaign that reversed Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the third section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “America after the Cold War.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

How did Operation Desert Storm begin?

What factors restrained American force in the Persian Gulf War?

What was Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” thesis?

What was Samuel Huntington’s argument in “The Clash of Civilizations”?

Why were Huntington’s arguments considered controversial?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: Why was the success of Operation Desert Storm so important for the United States, considering the legacy of Vietnam?

Debate: Whose theory of post-Cold War geopolitics was more compelling, Fukuyama’s or Huntington’s? Which has received more support from recent historical events?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: In what ways did the end of the Cold War challenge Americans’ self-understanding? How did the collapse of the Soviet Union paradoxically result in greater internal tension within the United States?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why did the end of the Cold War create uncertainty about America’s role in the world and the future of the national-security state?

Insight: The Cold War had organized American foreign policy, defense spending, and even the nation’s understanding of itself for nearly half a century. Once the Soviet threat disappeared, Americans had to decide whether the United States should lead a liberal-democratic world order, rely more heavily on international institutions, return to traditional nation-state politics, or prepare for new threats such as terrorism and rogue states.

Why did George H. W. Bush view Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as a test of his proposed “new world order,” and why did he stop the war short of occupying Baghdad?

Insight: Iraq’s invasion violated the rule-based international order Bush hoped to establish, so the United States organized a broad coalition, gained congressional approval, and used overwhelming force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Bush stopped short of Baghdad because the authorized and publicly stated goal was to liberate Kuwait, not overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government.

How did Francis Fukuyama’s and Samuel Huntington’s predictions about the post-Cold War world differ?

Insight: Fukuyama argued that the defeat of Communism suggested Western liberal democracy and capitalism had exhausted their major ideological rivals, producing an “end of history” in an ideological sense. Huntington predicted that future conflicts would be driven less by ideology or economics than by cultural and religious differences among civilizations.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Who wrote “The End of History?” and in what year?

What did Huntington propose instead?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Francis Fukuyama, 1989. (2) that future conflict would run along the lines between civilizations rather than between ideologies or states.

Explain

Both titles end in a question mark. What difference does that make to how each should be read?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that a question mark proposes rather than concludes, and that both arguments are usually reported without it—which is a fact about their reception rather than about their content.

Daily Recap

Operation Desert Storm achieved its limited military objective of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but it did not settle the larger question of what rules, institutions, or balances of power would organize the post-Cold War world.

Looking Ahead

The theories are on the table. The next lesson is the decade that ran while everyone argued about them.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: new world order, Operation Desert Storm, liberal democracy, end of history, and clash of civilizations.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Fukuyama argued ___, whereas Huntington argued ___.” “Desert Storm tested the new world order by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain the goal and limits of Operation Desert Storm before comparing the two theories.

Show understanding without a paragraph: complete a comparison chart for Fukuyama, Huntington, and Bush’s new world order.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.4 The Clinton Presidency (pp. 771–773)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 771–773

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on divided government

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Bill Clinton adjusted to divided government by adopting Republican-backed policies, and economic growth combined with spending discipline produced the first balanced federal budget since 1969 even as partisan conflict intensified.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the Clinton presidency’s domestic record.

Explain the 1994 midterms and divided government.

Assess the economic conditions of the 1990s.

Key Dates

1992, Nov. 3 – Bill Clinton is elected president

1993, Feb. 26 – Al-Qaeda terrorists bomb the World Trade Center in Manhattan

1994, Jan. 1 – The North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect

1996, Nov. 5 – Clinton wins reelection

1998, Dec. 19 – Clinton is impeached

1999, Feb. 12 – Clinton is acquitted

Key Concepts

The inauguration of Bill Clinton represented a generational change in American leadership not unlike that of the Kennedy administration. The first baby boomer president, Clinton exhibited a mastery of mass media and rhetorical ingenuity that helped him maintain popularity with the public, despite several scandals throughout his time in office.

Clinton’s central policy initiatives, from the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement to Welfare Reform, often benefited from significant Republican support, and under his leadership the federal government had the first balanced budget in nearly three decades.

Key Terms

Triangulation: This political approach involves adopting the most popular policies of differing political ideologies, so as to appear moderate and reasonable relative to competing extremes. Bill Clinton was considered a master practitioner of triangulation, particularly in his dealings with Congress while in office.

Divided government: An arrangement in which the presidency and at least one chamber of Congress are held by different parties.

Impeachment: The constitutional process by which the House charges a federal officer; conviction and removal require the Senate.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fourth section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “The Clinton Presidency.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was the high-water mark of Bush’s approval rating?

What was Clinton’s home state?

What were Clinton’s initial legislative goals?

Did NAFTA receive more support from Democrats or Republicans?

How did President Clinton reform welfare?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Civic Discourse: How did Clinton cash in on the “peace dividend” that the end of the Cold War enabled? In what ways did his presidency differ from those of his predecessors?

Writing Skills: Ask students to imagine that they are political aides, tasked with authoring a recommendation to House Speaker Newt Gingrich regarding whether to pursue impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Based on political considerations alone, what would be the best course of action to take?

Debate: Stage a debate in class regarding whether Clinton’s presidency, all things considered, was a success.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing an important warning, and why did foreign policy receive relatively little attention during the Clinton years?

Insight: The bombing showed that jihadists could strike a major symbol of American economic power on U.S. soil. Yet President Bill Clinton and much of the public were focused on domestic issues and hoped to enjoy a “peace dividend” after the Cold War by reducing attention to overseas commitments.

How did Bill Clinton defeat George H. W. Bush in 1992 despite Bush’s foreign-policy successes?

Insight: Bush’s popularity after Desert Storm was weakened by a recession and by his decision to raise taxes after promising not to do so. Clinton ran as a younger, energetic candidate focused on the economy, while H. Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy reshaped the contest and helped Clinton win.

How did Clinton adjust after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994?

Insight: After Newt Gingrich and the Republicans won Congress with the “Contract with America,” Clinton adopted a strategy called triangulation. He portrayed Republicans as extreme while embracing popular parts of their agenda, including welfare reform, and benefited politically from budget standoffs and the eventual achievement of a balanced federal budget.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Which party took Congress in the 1994 midterm elections?

What is impeachment?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) the Republicans. (2) the House’s power to bring charges against a federal officer; removal requires a Senate conviction.

Explain

What can divided government accomplish that unified government cannot, and what does it cost?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer names both—agreements that survive a change of party, against the cost of stalemate and of conflict conducted by other means.

Daily Recap

Clinton’s presidency marked a stark contrast, in both style and substance, with those of his predecessors, as he achieved a federal budget surplus by limiting spending as the economy expanded.

Looking Ahead

The decade ends prosperous and bitter. The next lesson opens on an election that settled nothing and a morning that changed everything.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: recession, peace dividend, NAFTA, divided government, triangulation, and impeachment.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Clinton recovered politically by ___.” “Divided government produced ___ but also ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain the sequence from Clinton’s 1992 victory through the Republican takeover, triangulation, and the balanced budget.

Show understanding without a paragraph: sort major Clinton-era developments into election, policy, economy, and scandal.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.5 A Time of Polarization (pp. 774–776)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 774–776

Exercise: the Geography exercise on the Florida recount

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The disputed election of 2000 and the wars following September 11 briefly united and then further divided the country.

Lesson Objectives

Describe the 2000 election and its resolution.

Explain the events of September 11, 2001.

Explain why the Iraq War weakened the national unity that followed September 11.

Key Dates

2000, Nov. 7 – George W. Bush is elected president

2001, Sept. 11 – Al-Qaeda terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

2001, Oct. 7 – The U.S. invades Afghanistan

2003, Mar. 20 – The U.S. invades Iraq

Key Concepts

Controversy surrounded the election of George W. Bush to the presidency, as litigation over Florida’s decisive electoral votes culminated in a Supreme Court decision that ended the recount. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks then produced a brief period of national unity and led directly to the war in Afghanistan and a broader War on Terror. The administration later made a separate case for invading Iraq in 2003, a decision that became increasingly divisive as the war continued.

Though he won reelection, Bush ended his time in office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history, with America mired in unpopular wars abroad and threatened by a devastating financial crisis at home.

Key Terms

Recount: The retabulation of ballots in a close election; the 2000 count in Florida was ended by the U.S. Supreme Court.

September 11, 2001: The attacks on New York and Washington that reoriented American foreign policy for two decades.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the fifth section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “A Time of Polarization.”

Assign several of the following reading questions:

What was the margin in the electoral college in 2000? Who won the popular vote?

Which terrorist organization planned the 9/11 attacks?

What happened to the fourth plane that was hijacked on 9/11?

What was the justification for the invasion of Iraq?

Why did George W. Bush’s approval ratings fall after the invasion of Iraq?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Geography: Locate Florida and identify why its electoral votes were decisive in the exceptionally close 2000 election. Ask students to distinguish Florida’s electoral importance from the much smaller disputed vote margin and to explain how the Supreme Court’s intervention affected perceptions of legitimacy.

Analytical Skills: Have students compare two or three accounts of the 2000 recount. For each, identify the author, publisher, date, evidence cited, and account of the Supreme Court’s role. Students should explain which evidence they find most reliable and why without being required to decide which candidate “should” have won.

Civic Discourse: To what extent should a president be held responsible when a war initially supported by much of the public becomes prolonged and divisive? Use the Iraq War and at least one earlier American conflict as evidence.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Does the War on Terror corroborate Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis? What motivated al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States? Why were they interested in destroying the World Trade Center in particular?

Writing Skills: The American people rallied behind George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but such harmony did not last. Will occasions for unity continue to become less frequent? What other events besides an external attack would be capable of reuniting the country? Ask students to address these questions in writing, with reference to specific chapters in American history.

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why did the presidential election of 2000 deepen partisan polarization?

Insight: George W. Bush and Al Gore finished in a virtual tie, with the outcome depending on disputed vote counts in Florida. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Bush left many Democrats angry, viewing his election as illegitimate.

How did the September 11 attacks briefly unite the country, and why did that unity later erode?

Insight: Americans rallied behind President Bush after al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United States invaded Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and stop harboring al-Qaeda. Unity faded as the Bush administration adopted a doctrine of preemptive action and the 2003 Iraq War, justified partly by suspected weapons of mass destruction, became prolonged and divisive.

Did domestic terrorism prior to 9/11 have the same response? Why or why not?

Insight: In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, an American citizen, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. The response was markedly different from 9/11: McVeigh was arrested, tried, and executed through the ordinary criminal justice system, and Congress responded with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996—tightening domestic security measures, but nothing resembling a war footing. 9/11 shifted the nation, marking the first time the country was publicly, centrally under attack by a stateless, terrorist network. The sheer unfamiliarity with this sort of war shocked the American people, producing the initial uniting effect mentioned above.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

Which state’s recount decided the 2000 presidential election?

Which court ended it?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) Florida. (2) the U.S. Supreme Court.

Explain

The chapter says the 2000 denouement reminded observers of the 1876 election. What does a comparison to 1876 claim?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer explains that both elections became associated with an extraordinarily close result resolved through institutional intervention rather than an uncontested electoral outcome, producing lasting disputes about legitimacy. A partial answer notes that both outcomes were contested without explaining the comparison’s significance.

Daily Recap

The disputed election of 2000 deepened partisan mistrust, while the September 11 attacks briefly united the country. That unity eroded as the Bush administration adopted a doctrine of preemptive action and the Iraq War became prolonged and divisive.

Looking Ahead

The wars are under way and the politics has hardened. The next lesson carries both into the present.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: recount, Electoral College, September 11, Taliban, preemptive action, and Iraq War.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The country united after ___ but divided over ___.” “The 2000 election increased polarization because ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain how the disputed election, the September 11 attacks, and the Iraq War changed public trust.

Show understanding without a paragraph: create a cause-and-effect chain from the Florida recount through the erosion of post-September 11 unity.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.6 Obama, Trump, and Beyond (pp. 777–787)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 777–787

Exercise: the Analyzing Figures exercise on Map 22.2

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

The period from the financial crisis of 2008 through the 2024 election reveals repeated demands for political change but no settled replacement for the post-Cold War consensus. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump’s return to office reflected different coalitions and diagnoses of economic insecurity, globalization, immigration, institutional trust, and national identity.

Lesson Objectives

Explain how the financial crisis shaped Obama’s election and identify the principal achievements and constraints of his presidency.

Explain the coalition and issues that produced Trump’s 2016 victory and distinguish his “America First” program from the post-Cold War consensus it challenged.

Analyze how the pandemic reshaped the 2020 election and identify the political developments the chapter connects to Trump’s return to office in 2024, while distinguishing the chapter’s interpretation from settled historical judgment.

Key Dates

2008, September - Lehman Brothers collapses, triggering a financial crisis

2008, Nov. 4 – Barack Obama is elected president

2010, Mar. 23 – Obama signs the Affordable Care Act

2011, Dec. 18 – U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq

2012, Nov. 6 – Obama is reelected

2016, Nov. 8 – Donald Trump is elected president

2019, Dec. 18 – Trump is impeached

2019, December - The COVID-19 virus is first detected in Wuhan, China

2020, Feb. 5 – Trump is acquitted from his first impeachment

2020, Nov. 3 – Joe Biden is elected president

2021, Jan. 13 – Trump is impeached for a second time

2021, Feb. 13 – Trump is acquitted

2021, Aug. 30 – The U.S. withdraws troops from Afghanistan

2024, Nov. 5 – Trump is reelected

Key Concepts

Barack Obama’s election carried enormous symbolic importance as the election of the first African American president and came amid the financial crisis. His administration enacted a large economic stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, among other measures. The Tea Party movement mobilized opposition to spending, debt, bailouts, and the health-care law, helping Republicans win the House in 2010 and sharply limiting Obama’s ability to enact the remainder of his domestic agenda.

In a momentous political and cultural development, businessman and entertainer Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 and then upset former first lady Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the economy, altered voting practices, and transformed the political environment of the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won. Trump contested the result, intensifying disputes over electoral legitimacy. During Biden’s presidency, voters expressed concerns about issues including inflation and federal spending, immigration and the border, foreign policy, and the president’s age. After Biden withdrew from the 2024 race and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump won a second, nonconsecutive term.

Key Terms

Financial crisis of 2008: The collapse in credit and asset values that began in 2007–09, the circumstance in which Primary Source 22.3 was delivered.

Polarization: A condition in which political opponents increasingly regard one another’s victories as illegitimate rather than merely wrong.

Pandemic: The COVID-19 outbreak and the public-health measures adopted in response, which became subjects of intense political conflict.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the sixth section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “Obama, Trump, and Beyond.”

Assign the following reading questions:

What was Barack Obama’s background prior to his presidency?

How many legislative achievements did Obama have in the latter six years of his time in office?

What was Donald Trump’s campaign platform in 2016?

What was Donald Trump’s campaign slogan in 2016? How did it compare to Obama’s from 2008?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Compare George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump in background, governing philosophy, political coalition, and public style. Which differences reflect the individuals themselves, and which reflect changes in the electorate and the problems each inherited? Identify at least one meaningful continuity across the three administrations.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: In 1994, the United States entered NAFTA, creating a free-trade zone with Canada and Mexico, a policy that passed with strong Republican support, over the objections of organized labor. Have students weigh who gained from that choice against who bore its cost. Twenty-two years later, opposition to free trade helped carry Donald Trump to the presidency, as he challenged a bipartisan political consensus that had embraced free trade as a means of strengthening the American economy. How could opposing a policy that had once been celebrated as a major achievement of the Republican Party eventually gain appeal with that same party?

Civic Discourse: Consider the various presidencies of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. How aware does each seem to have been of the new range of “characteristic problems and issues that have emerged” since the end of the Cold War, and how effective was each in dealing with them?

Analyzing Figures: Have students examine Figure 22.16.

Who does it depict? What makes this photograph culturally significant?

What can we infer from the photo about the time period or the event that they are protesting?

Analytical Skills: Working from the photo above (Figure 22.16), have students consider the role that news sources played in this debate — the one capturing the protests, as well as those advocating for stay-at-home lockdowns. Have students engage in a research project regarding the validity of sources. Ask them to select current news story connected to a topic from this lesson and find two present-day online sources on it, naming for each:

The author and sponsoring organization, to test for bias.

The date, to test for reliability.

The evidence actually cited, to test for validity.

Since the story is recent and contested, there may be no clear answer for which source is right—so have students explain and defend the method they used to judge the sources, rather than which one they picked.

Writing Skills: Did the immigration debate during the 2016 election look the same throughout history? Ask students to research policy changes / societal attitudes towards immigration throughout America’s history and compile their data into a timeline. Provide them with a list of resources as a starting point.

Guiding Classroom Questions

How did the Great Recession help Barack Obama win the presidency, and why did the Tea Party emerge during his administration?

Insight: The financial crisis damaged President Bush and increased distrust of both government and economic elites, while Obama’s message of hope and change helped make him the first African American president. Opposition to bank bailouts, the stimulus, rising debt, and the Affordable Care Act contributed to the loosely organized Tea Party movement and the Republican House victory in 2010. Recall that a sitting president losing control of Congress in this way was not new — Bill Clinton faced a similar reversal in 1994, when Newt Gingrich led Republicans to a Congressional takeover under the banner of the “Contract with America.”

Why did Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and what did his “America First” program represent?

Insight: Trump appealed to voters who believed both parties had ignored the effects of free trade, factory closures, and high immigration on working-class communities, especially in the industrial Midwest. Those same communities were also hit hard by the opioid epidemic, a social crisis that deepened the sense of decline which in turn deepened support for Trump’s message.“America First” marked a renewed emphasis on nationalism, deregulation, tariffs, border control, and skepticism toward the post-Cold War consensus favoring globalization and free trade.

How did COVID-19 reshape the political environment of the 2020 election, and what developments does the chapter identify as contributing to Trump’s return to office in 2024?

Insight: The pandemic disrupted much of normal life, damaged the economy, complicated the federal and state public-health response, and greatly expanded the use of mail voting, which became a focus of post-election controversy. The chapter connects Trump’s 2024 return to persistent support for his political program and to voter dissatisfaction with aspects of the Biden presidency, including inflation and spending, immigration and the border, foreign policy, and concerns about Biden’s age, followed by his withdrawal and replacement by Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Because these events are recent, teachers should present this as the chapter’s interpretation rather than as a settled historical verdict.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

In what year was Obama first elected?

What does Map 22.2 show?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) 2008. (2) the result of the 2016 presidential election.

Explain

Figure 22.16 shows a protest against a public health order. What does it show about how the pandemic was experienced in the United States?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that a measure presented as technical was received as political, and that the reception is itself the historical fact. A partial answer treats the protest as simply mistaken or simply justified.

Daily Recap

The presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump featured increasing cultural and political division, as the major parties’ willingness to cooperate has broken down amid growing disillusion with America’s established institutions.

Looking Ahead

The chapter has reached the present. The last lesson asks what a historian can honestly say about it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: financial crisis, Affordable Care Act, Tea Party, America First, polarization, and pandemic.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “Obama’s election represented ___, but his administration faced ___.” “Trump appealed to voters who believed ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: explain how the elections of 2008, 2016, 2020, and 2024 reflected changing public concerns.

Show understanding without a paragraph: compare the principal issues and constituencies associated with Obama’s rise and Trump’s rise.

DAILY LESSON PLAN

22.7 Reasons for Hope (pp. 788–792)

In a Single Class Period

Read: pp. 788–792

Exercise: the Civic Discourse exercise on the chapter’s closing argument

Discuss: this lesson’s emphasized Guiding Classroom Questions

Close: the Formative Assessment

Homework: the next lesson’s reading

Essential Understanding

Historical perspective supplies grounds for hope without pretending to predict the future: the country has survived grave crises before, but preserving self-government requires informed and responsible civic stewardship.

Lesson Objectives

State the grounds the chapter gives for hope.

Explain why recent history resists judgment.

Assess what the whole book has argued.

Key Dates

2024 – The period the book’s narrative reaches

Key Concepts

Historical perspective provides grounds for hope without offering a prediction: earlier episodes of polarization and institutional failure were grave, yet the country survived or overcame them.

Civic stewardship requires citizens to understand the past, attend to unresolved problems such as institutional distrust and the national debt, and preserve institutions inherited at great cost.

Key Terms

Historical perspective: The recognition that recent events cannot be assessed with the confidence available to a historian of a settled period.

Classroom Experience

Suggested Homework Assignments

Assign students to read the seventh section of Chapter Twenty-Two, “Reasons for Hope.”

Assign the following reading questions:

By 2017, what percentage of registered voters identified with neither major party?

What was the federal debt in 1981? In 2024?

What earlier periods of polarization or crisis does the author identify as evidence that the country has overcome severe divisions before?

Suggested Exercises & Foundational Skills Opportunities

Analytical Skills: Using current figures from a reputable statistical source supplied by the teacher (for example, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund), have students compare the United States to one other developed nation and one developing nation across three measures: output per person, the share of the workforce employed in manufacturing, and one measure of living standards (such as life expectancy or median household income).

Further: Have students tabulate all three comparisons in a single chart, then return to Francis Fukuyama’s argument (Primary Source 22.1). Which of these economic measures actually bears on his claim about liberal democracy’s ideological position, and which do not? Does the federal debt test Fukuyama’s thesis directly, or does it raise a different question about the capacity of democratic governments to make long-term fiscal choices? Require students to distinguish evidence relevant to an argument from evidence that merely concerns the same country.

Civic Discourse: Do citizens need to understand the government that governs their daily lives, at every level, to see America as a “Land of Hope,” as well as be an active participant in its success?

Further: Have students name one local official or employee whose work affects their daily life, one state official or employee, and one national official or employee, and describe what each one actually does. Afterward, lead a class discussion: which level of government do students encounter most often, and why? How would the level of government we encounter influence the way we see America as a whole?

Close Reading: Ask a student volunteer to read aloud the text’s opening epigraph from John Dos Passos. In what sense do we now live in “times of danger”? How does the meaning of Dos Passos’ writing correspond to the lessons that the text attempts to impart?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: The chapter identifies institutional distrust and the national debt as major problems but refuses despair. Ask students to identify the evidence offered for each problem and the historical grounds the author gives for hope. Which claims are descriptive, which are interpretive, and which ask citizens to act?

Guiding Classroom Questions

Why does the author warn against making confident historical judgments about the most recent events?

Insight: The closer historians are to an event, the harder it is to separate lasting significance from the passions and assumptions of the moment. The chapter therefore ends “in the middle of things” and avoids pretending that the future course or historical meaning of a new administration can already be known.

What evidence does the chapter offer that Americans’ confidence in political institutions has declined?

Insight: The chapter cites Gallup findings showing falling confidence in major institutions and a rising share of voters who identify as Independents rather than Republicans or Democrats. It also points to persistent polarization, disputes over elections, and Washington’s failure to address long-term problems such as the national debt.

Why does the author believe Americans still have reasons for hope despite polarization and institutional distrust?

Insight: American history includes crises and periods of severe division that the nation eventually survived or overcame. Under American democracy, politicians remain answerable to their constituents, and citizens retain the capacity for self-government when they are informed, united, and willing to act as stewards of institutions inherited from earlier generations.

CLOSING THE LESSON

Formative Assessment

Recall

What does the chapter offer in place of a prediction?

What does the book’s title, Land of Hope, claim?

Acceptable responses: determinate. (1) grounds for hope drawn from the country’s history rather than a forecast. (2) that hope, rather than achievement or innocence, is the through-line of the American story.

Explain

Why is the last chapter of a history book the hardest one to write?

Acceptable responses: a defensible range. A strong answer sees that the author shares the period with the reader, lacks the outcomes that make earlier chapters tractable, and cannot know which of today’s arguments will look important. A partial answer says only that it is too recent.

Daily Recap

Confronted with an enormous debt burden and increasing cultural division, the American people have a proud heritage of forbearance, resolve, and ambition to draw upon as they reckon with these considerable challenges. America’s citizens would do well to arm themselves with knowledge of the past so as to understand in their context the difficulties of the present and to appreciate in its fullness the considerable promise of our young country.

Looking Ahead

This is the end of the chapter sequence. The Epilogue turns from the story to what a citizen should make of it.

Language Support

Establish the terms first, supply frames that carry the reasoning, rehearse aloud before writing, and offer a way to show understanding without a paragraph.

Establish first: institutional confidence, Independent, national debt, historical perspective, and stewardship.

Frames that carry the reasoning: “The author finds reason for concern in ___ but reason for hope in ___.” “Historical knowledge can help citizens by ___.”

Rehearse aloud, then write: state the chapter’s closing claim and support it with one example of danger and one ground for hope.

Show understanding without a paragraph: make a two-column chart labeled “Present challenges” and “Historical grounds for hope.”

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

This assessment offers a model for evaluating student mastery of the chapter. Teachers may use it as written or adapt its questions to suit their own classrooms.

Timeline

Place the following events in chronological order from earliest to latest. Number one is the earliest; number five is the latest.

1. ______

2. ______

3. ______

4. ______

5. ______

A. The Berlin Wall falls, and Communist governments across Eastern Europe begin to collapse

B. A financial crisis on Wall Street triggers the Great Recession

C. Al-Qaeda terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

D. The Soviet Union is formally dissolved, bringing the Cold War to an end

E. The COVID-19 pandemic reaches the United States and shuts down much of American life

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

Fill in the blank.

The last leader of the Soviet Union was ________________________, whose reform policies helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end.

________________________ was the Speaker of the House who led the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 under the banner of the “Contract with America.”

The political scientist ________________________ argued that the defeat of Communism represented an “end of history,” leaving liberal democracy without a serious ideological rival.

President Bill Clinton adopted a strategy of ________________________ by embracing popular parts of the Republican agenda while portraying Republicans as extreme.

The political scientist ________________________ predicted that future conflicts would be driven by cultural and religious differences.

Geography

Use the map to answer the following questions.

[ART REQUIRED — CH22 Geography, STUDENT SIDE: a clear, legible adaptation of Map 22.1, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1991, preserving the boundaries, country names, and legend needed to identify the fifteen successor republics and answer the two questions below.]

What countries became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

How did the collapse of the Soviet Union reshape Europe and Asia?

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

Why was George H. W. Bush unusually well prepared to assume the presidency? Why did many observers nevertheless underestimate him?

Describe the chain of events between 1989 and 1991 that brought the Cold War to an end.

Why did President Bush deliberately avoid celebrating in public as the Soviet bloc collapsed? What did he do instead?

What did President Bush mean by a “new world order,” and how did the Persian Gulf War serve as its first test?

Why did the United States stop the Gulf War without removing Saddam Hussein from power?

How did Bill Clinton manage to defeat George H. W. Bush in 1992, only a year after Bush’s triumph in the Gulf War?

What was “triangulation,” and how did it help Clinton recover after the Republicans captured Congress in 1994?

Why did the presidential election of 2000 deepen partisan polarization in America?

How did the September 11 attacks briefly unite the country, and why did that unity later erode?

Why did Donald Trump’s “America First” message appeal to many voters in 2016? What did his election represent?

Essay

The essay should take a clear position and argue it from the chapter's evidence. Approximately 400–600 words.

This chapter opens with the triumphant, peaceful end of the Cold War and closes with an America marked by polarization and declining trust in its institutions — and yet the author still insists that Americans have “reasons for hope.” In your view, how well did the decades after 1991 fulfill the hopes Americans held at the end of the Cold War? Reference three of the following in your essay:

President George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “new world order.”

Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis.

Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The controversy of the 2000 presidential election.

The September 11 attacks and the wars that followed.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama and 2016 election of Donald Trump.

The Gallup findings on Americans’ declining confidence in their institutions.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT — ANSWER KEY

Timeline

Answers as ordered below; the pairings are one-to-one.

1. A

2. D

3. C

4. B

5. E

A. The Berlin Wall falls, and Communist governments across Eastern Europe begin to collapse

B. A financial crisis on Wall Street triggers the Great Recession

C. Al-Qaeda terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

D. The Soviet Union is formally dissolved, bringing the Cold War to an end

E. The COVID-19 pandemic reaches the United States and shuts down much of American life

Key Concepts, Key Terms, and Key Persons

1. Mikhail Gorbachev

2. Newt Gingrich

3. Francis Fukuyama

4. triangulation

5. Samuel Huntington

Geography

[ART REQUIRED — CH22 Geography, ANSWER KEY: the same adapted Map 22.1 used on the student side, printed at the same size, with all fifteen successor republics and relevant regional boundaries clearly legible.]

What countries became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

A: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

How did the collapse of the Soviet Union reshape Europe and Asia?

A: The Soviet Union’s dissolution created fifteen independent republics and transformed internal Soviet boundaries into international borders across Europe and Asia.

Short Answer

Each question should be answered with around 2–4 complete sentences. Some questions may require more sentences than others. Points will be awarded for accuracy, historical detail, and clarity of writing.

Why was George H. W. Bush unusually well prepared to assume the presidency? Why did many observers nevertheless underestimate him?

A: Bush had served as a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, director of the CIA, and vice president for eight years under Ronald Reagan. But he lacked Reagan’s rhetorical gifts and magnetic public style, and he admitted his discomfort with what he called “the vision thing.” As a result, critics often mistook his prudence and caution for weakness.

Describe the chain of events between 1989 and 1991 that brought the Cold War to an end.

A: In 1989, Communist governments across Eastern Europe lost power, and the Berlin Wall fell in November of that year. East and West Germany reunited, and the Baltic states declared their independence from the Soviet Union. After a failed hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the Soviet republics formally dissolved the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Why did President Bush deliberately avoid celebrating in public as the Soviet bloc collapsed? What did he do instead?

A: Bush believed that public gloating could provoke a backlash from Communist hard-liners and make a peaceful transition more dangerous. Instead, he stayed in the background, supported Gorbachev and West German leader Helmut Kohl, and negotiated reductions in nuclear arms. His caution was intended to keep the transition peaceful and avoid strengthening Soviet hard-liners.

What did President Bush mean by a “new world order,” and how did the Persian Gulf War serve as its first test?

A: Bush envisioned a rule-based international order in which acts of aggression would be answered by the collective action of many nations. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bush declared that the invasion “will not stand,” organized a broad international coalition, secured congressional approval, and used overwhelming force to expel Iraq from Kuwait in early 1991.

Why did the United States stop the Gulf War without removing Saddam Hussein from power?

A: The war’s limited and publicly stated goal was to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait, not overthrow the Iraqi government. Bush therefore stopped short of occupying Baghdad, a decision consistent with the containment approach that had guided U.S. policy during the Cold War.

How did Bill Clinton manage to defeat George H. W. Bush in 1992, only a year after Bush’s triumph in the Gulf War?

A: Bush’s popularity was weakened by an economic recession and by his decision to raise taxes after famously promising not to do so. Clinton ran as a younger, energetic candidate who focused relentlessly on the economy, while H. Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy reshaped the contest. Clinton won with a plurality of the popular vote.

What was “triangulation,” and how did it help Clinton recover after the Republicans captured Congress in 1994?

A: Triangulation was Clinton’s strategy of positioning himself between the two parties: he portrayed the Republicans as extreme while embracing popular parts of their agenda, such as welfare reform. He also benefited politically from budget standoffs with Newt Gingrich’s Congress and from the eventual achievement of a balanced federal budget, and he won reelection in 1996.

Why did the presidential election of 2000 deepen partisan polarization in America?

A: George W. Bush and Al Gore finished in a virtual tie, with the outcome hanging on disputed vote counts in Florida. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush’s favor ended the recounts, and Bush won the presidency while losing the national popular vote. Many Democrats came away viewing his presidency as illegitimate, which deepened partisan bitterness.

How did the September 11 attacks briefly unite the country, and why did that unity later erode?

A: Americans rallied behind President George W. Bush after al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United States invaded Afghanistan when the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. The unity faded as the administration adopted a doctrine of preemptive action and launched the 2003 Iraq War, justified partly by suspected weapons of mass destruction. When the war became prolonged and divisive, the sense of national common purpose dissolved.

Why did Donald Trump’s “America First” message appeal to many voters in 2016? What did his election represent?

A: Trump appealed to voters who believed both parties had ignored the effects of free trade, factory closures, and high levels of immigration on working-class communities, especially in the industrial Midwest. His “America First” program emphasized nationalism, tariffs, deregulation, and border control. His election represented a rejection of the post-Cold War consensus favoring globalization and free trade.

Essay

Essay — Scoring Guidance

A strong essay directly answers how well the decades after 1991 fulfilled the hopes associated with the Cold War’s end. It uses specific evidence from at least three listed topics, explains both fulfillment and disappointment, and connects its evidence to the chapter’s final claim that Americans retain reasons for hope.

A competent essay uses at least three listed topics accurately and answers the central question, but treats the evidence largely in sequence or develops the relationship between post-Cold War hopes and later events only partially.

A developing essay primarily summarizes recent presidencies or events, uses fewer than three listed topics, or does not evaluate the hopes associated with the Cold War’s end.

Credit a defensible argument that the period substantially fulfilled, substantially disappointed, or produced a mixed realization of those hopes when the student supports the position with accurate evidence from the chapter.

Do not reward an essay that merely narrates events without evaluating the post-Cold War expectations or addressing the chapter’s stated reasons for hope.

Student Map Appendix

Student-facing geography exercises · Volume II · Chapters 12–22

Editorial extraction only. Student-facing directions and questions are preserved from the supplied chapter files. Teacher answer-key material has been excluded. Assessment map art supplied for Chapters 12–16 and 18–22 is placed below each exercise. Chapter 17 retains an ART REQUIRED note because its current summative exercise calls for a blank 1932 election map, while the supplied Chapter 17 image is the 1933 unemployment map.

Chapter 12

Geography

Use Map 12.2 to answer the following questions.

1. Using the map, what is the difference when you add numbers for Japan and China and compare them with Latin American immigrants during this time period?

2. Which states fall into the highest settlement percentage category (34 percent and over)? What do these states have in common—consider geography, industry or proximity to entry points.

Chapter 12 assessment map

Chapter 13

Geography

Using the map (Map 13.1) answer the following questions.

1. This map shows fighting in two theaters thousands of miles apart—the Philippines and the Caribbean. What does this tell you about the scale of American naval power by 1898?

2. Based on the map, was the Spanish–American War primarily a land war, a naval war, or a combination of both? Support your answer with at least two specific details from the map.

Chapter 13 assessment map

Chapter 14

Geography

Using the map (14.3), write the answers to the questions using complete sentences.

Based on the map, does national forest land appear more heavily concentrated in the interior mountain states or along the Pacific coast? Explain what this suggests about the kind of terrain Roosevelt’s administration prioritized for conservation.

Using the map, why did President Roosevelt use the lands west of the Mississippi for National forests and not more back east?

Chapter 14 assessment map

Chapter 15

Geography

Using the maps (15.2), answer the questions below.

The AEF’s seaport supply lines ran through nine French cities. Name them.

Of those nine ports, which four had supply lines running directly to AEF supply headquarters?

Using the map scale bar, estimate the length of the front line in miles.

The Western Front ran through which two countries?

Chapter 15 assessment map

Chapter 16

Geography

Identify the location according to the map (16.2).

In the election of 1928, list the states won by Al Smith.

In 1928, which state had the largest population, as told by the largest number of electoral votes?

Which states had the smallest population, as told by the smallest number of electoral votes?

Determine the percentage of electoral votes for each candidate.

Chapter 16 assessment map

Chapter 17

Geography

Using the blank United States map provided and Map 17.1 on p. 564, shade the states carried by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the election of 1932 and label the six states carried by Herbert Hoover. Then, in one sentence beneath the map, explain what the distribution shows about the reach of the Depression.

[ART REQUIRED — CH17 Geography: current assessment requires a blank Map 17.1 election map. The supplied Chapter 17 image is Map 17.2 (Unemployment during the Great Depression, 1933) and does not answer the current assessment prompt.]

Chapter 18

Geography

Using the World War II maps in the chapter, label each of the following locations on the map or maps provided: Germany; Italy; Great Britain; France; Poland; Normandy; Japan; Hawaii; Midway; Okinawa; Philippines; U.S.S.R.

Chapter 18 assessment map 1

Chapter 18 assessment map 2

Chapter 19

Geography

Using the map below, answer the following questions:

Who were the founding members of NATO in 1949? Which two founding countries are not shown on the map?

Who were the founding members of the Warsaw Pact in 1955? Who joined in 1956?

The text states that between 1946 and 1948, Soviet-controlled Communist regimes had already come into power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, nearly a decade before the Warsaw Pact was founded. What does this gap suggest about the cause of the Warsaw Pact’s founding?

Chapter 19 assessment map

Chapter 20

Geography

Use the map to answer the following questions.

What patterns do you notice in the U.S. bombing campaigns? What do those patterns suggest about U.S. military strategy?

Why was the Ho Chi Minh Trail important because of its location? Based on the map, why was movement along the trail difficult to stop?

Chapter 20 assessment map

Chapter 21

Geography

Use the maps to answer the following prompt:

Using the 1980 and 1984 electoral maps, describe how regional voting patterns and support for Ronald Reagan changed between the two elections. Use at least two examples from the maps to support your answer.

Chapter 21 assessment map 1

Chapter 21 assessment map 2

Chapter 22

Geography

Use the map to answer the following questions.

What countries became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

How did the collapse of the Soviet Union reshape Europe and Asia?

Chapter 22 assessment map

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Signers of the Declaration

Georgia

Button Gwinnett

Lyman Hall

George Walton

North Carolina

William Hooper

Joseph Hewes

John Penn

South Carolina

Edward Rutledge

Thomas Heyward, Jr.

Thomas Lynch, Jr.

Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts

John Hancock

Maryland

Samuel Chase

William Paca

Thomas Stone

Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia

George Wythe

Richard Henry Lee

Thomas Jefferson

Benjamin Harrison

Thomas Nelson, Jr.

Francis Lightfoot Lee

Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania

Robert Morris

Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Franklin

John Morton

George Clymer

James Smith

George Taylor

James Wilson

George Ross

Delaware

Caesar Rodney

George Read

Thomas McKean

New York

William Floyd

Philip Livingston

Francis Lewis

Lewis Morris

New Jersey

Richard Stockton

John Witherspoon

Francis Hopkinson

John Hart

Abraham Clark

New Hampshire

Josiah Bartlett

William Whipple

Massachusetts

Samuel Adams

John Adams

Robert Treat Paine

Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island

Stephen Hopkins

William Ellery

Connecticut

Roger Sherman

Samuel Huntington

William Williams

Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire

Matthew Thornton

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article I

Section 1

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section 2

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Section 3

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

Section 4

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.

Section 5

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Section 6

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Section 7

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

Section 8

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;—And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Section 9

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Section 10

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article II

Section 1

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Section 2

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Section 3

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

Section 4

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Article III

Section 1

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

Section 2

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State,—between Citizens of different States,—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

Section 3

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Article IV

Section 1

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

Section 2

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Section 3

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.

Section 4

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Article V

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Article VI

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Article VII

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

The Word, “the,” being interlined between the seventh and eighth Lines of the first Page, The Word “Thirty” being partly written on an Erazure in the fifteenth Line of the first Page, The Words “is tried” being interlined between the thirty second and thirty third Lines of the first Page and the Word “the” being interlined between the forty third and forty fourth Lines of the second Page.

Attest William Jackson Secretary

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,

Signatories

G°. Washington — Presidt and deputy from Virginia

Delaware

Geo: Read

Gunning Bedford jun

John Dickinson

Richard Bassett

Jaco: Broom

Maryland

James McHenry

Dan of St Thos. Jenifer

Danl. Carroll

Virginia

John Blair

James Madison Jr.

North Carolina

Wm. Blount

Richd. Dobbs Spaight

Hu Williamson

South Carolina

J. Rutledge

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

Charles Pinckney

Pierce Butler

Georgia

William Few

Abr Baldwin

New Hampshire

John Langdon

Nicholas Gilman

Massachusetts

Nathaniel Gorham

Rufus King

Connecticut

Wm. Saml. Johnson

Roger Sherman

New York

Alexander Hamilton

New Jersey

Wil: Livingston

David Brearley

Wm. Paterson

Jona: Dayton

Pennsylvania

B Franklin

Thomas Mifflin

Robt. Morris

Geo. Clymer

Thos. FitzSimons

Jared Ingersoll

James Wilson

Gouv Morris

Amendments I–X, ratified December 15, 1791, are known as the Bill of Rights.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Amendment XI

Passed by Congress March 4, 1794. Ratified February 7, 1795.

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

Amendment XII

Passed by Congress December 9, 1803. Ratified June 15, 1804.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;—the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.—The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Amendment XIII

Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.

Section 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Amendment XV

Passed by Congress February 26, 1869. Ratified February 3, 1870.

Section 1

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—

Section 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XVI

Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Amendment XVII

Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

Amendment XVIII

Passed by Congress December 18, 1917. Ratified January 16, 1919. Repealed by amendment 21.

Section 1

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2

The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Amendment XIX

Passed by Congress June 4, 1919. Ratified August 18, 1920.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XX

Passed by Congress March 2, 1932. Ratified January 23, 1933.

Section 1

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

Section 2

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.

Section 3

If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

Section 4

The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.

Section 5

Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.

Section 6

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.

Amendment XXI

Passed by Congress February 20, 1933. Ratified December 5, 1933.

Section 1

The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2

The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Amendment XXII

Passed by Congress March 21, 1947. Ratified February 27, 1951.

Section 1

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.

Amendment XXIII

Passed by Congress June 16, 1960. Ratified March 29, 1961.

Section 1

The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

Section 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXIV

Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964.

Section 1

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXV

Passed by Congress July 6, 1965. Ratified February 10, 1967.

Section 1

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3

Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Amendment XXVI

Passed by Congress March 23, 1971. Ratified July 1, 1971.

Section 1

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXVII

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Florida United States History Honors Standards, Volume I & II

This Teacher's Edition is published in two volumes: Volume I (Chapters 1–11) and Volume II (Chapters 12–22). The table below lists every Florida Social Studies benchmark addressed across both volumes of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, 2nd Edition, and which volume(s) contain it. This summary is for reference only and does not link to instructional content — for clickable links to the exact lesson location, see the Standards Index in Volume II (for benchmarks marked "Volume II") or in Volume I (for benchmarks marked "Volume I").

Benchmark | Standard | Volume
SS.912.A.1.1 | Describe the importance of historiography, which includes how historical knowledge is obtained and transmitted, when interpreting events in history. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.1.2 | Utilize a variety of primary and secondary sources to identify author, historical significance, audience, and authenticity to understand a historical period. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.1.3 | Utilize timelines to identify the time sequence of historical data. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.1.4 | Analyze how images, symbols, objects, cartoons, graphs, charts, maps, and artwork may be used to interpret the significance of time periods and events from the past. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.1.5 | Evaluate the validity, reliability, bias and authenticity of current events, and Internet resources. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.1.6 | Use case studies to explore social, political, legal, and economic relationships in history. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.1.7 | Describe various socio-cultural aspects of American life including arts, artifacts, literature, education, and publications. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.1 | Review causes and consequences of the Civil War. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.2 | Assess the influence of significant people or groups on Reconstruction. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.3 | Describe the issues that divided Republicans during the early Reconstruction era. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.4 | Distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.5 | Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups. | Vol. I & Vol. II
SS.912.A.2.6 | Compare the effects of the Black Codes and the Nadir on freed people and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States. | Vol. I
SS.912.A.2.7 | Review the Native American experience. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.1 | Analyze the economic challenges to American farmers and farmers' responses to these challenges in the mid to late 1800s. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.2 | Examine the social, political, and economic causes, course, and consequences of the second Industrial Revolution that began in the late 19th century. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.3 | Compare the first and second Industrial Revolutions in the United States. | Vol. I & Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.4 | Determine how the development of steel, oil, transportation, communication, and business practices affected the United States economy. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.5 | Identify significant inventors of the Industrial Revolution including African Americans and women. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.6 | Analyze changes that occurred as the United States shifted from agrarian to an industrial society. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.7 | Compare the experience of European immigrants in the east to that of Asian immigrants in the west (the Chinese Exclusion Act, Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.8 | Examine the importance of social change and reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., class system, migration from farms to cities, Social Gospel movement, role of settlement houses and churches in providing services to the poor). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.9 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.10 | Review different economic and philosophic ideologies. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.11 | Analyze the impact of political machines in United States cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.12 | Compare how different nongovernmental organizations and progressives worked to shape public policy, restore economic opportunities, and correct injustices in American life. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.3.13 | Examine key events and peoples in Florida history as they relate to United States history. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.1 | Analyze the major factors that drove United States imperialism. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.2 | Explain the motives of the United States acquisition of the territories. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.3 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of the Spanish American War. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.4 | Analyze the economic, military, and security motivations of the United States to complete the Panama Canal as well as major obstacles involved in its construction. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.5 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of United States involvement in World War I. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.6 | Examine how the United States government prepared the nation for war with war measures (i.e., Selective Service Act, War Industries Board, war bonds, Espionage Act, Sedition Act, Committee of Public Information). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.7 | Examine the impact of airplanes, battleships, new weaponry, and chemical warfare in creating new war strategies (e.g., trench warfare, convoys). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.8 | Compare the experiences Americans (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women, conscientious objectors) had while serving in Europe. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.9 | Compare how the war impacted European Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, women, and dissenters in the United States. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.4.10 | Examine the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the United States to support the League of Nations. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.1 | Discuss the economic outcomes of demobilization. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.2 | Explain the causes of the public reaction (e.g., Sacco and Vanzetti, labor, racial unrest) associated with the Red Scare. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.3 | Examine the impact of United States foreign economic policy during the 1920s. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.4 | Evaluate how the economic boom during the Roaring Twenties changed consumers, businesses, manufacturing, and marketing practices. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.5 | Describe efforts by the United States and other world powers to avoid future wars. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.6 | Analyze the influence that Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, the Fundamentalist movement, and prohibition had in changing American society in the 1920s. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.7 | Examine the freedom movements that advocated civil rights for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.8 | Compare the views of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey relating to the African American experience. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.9 | Explain why support for the Ku Klux Klan varied in the 1920s with respect to issues such as anti-immigration, anti-African American, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti- women, and anti-union ideas. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.10 | Analyze support for and resistance to civil rights for women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other minority groups. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.5.11 | Examine causes, course and consequences of the Great Depression and the New Deal. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.1 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of World War II on the United States and the world. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.2 | Describe the United States’ response in the early years of World War II (e.g., Neutrality Acts, Cash and Carry, Lend Lease Act). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.3 | Analyze the impact of the Holocaust during World War II on Jews as well as other groups. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.4 | Examine efforts to expand or contract rights for various populations during World War II. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.5 | Explain the impact of World War II on domestic government policy including, but not limited to, rationing and the forced internment of Japanese Americans. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.6 | Analyze the use of atomic weapons during World War II and the aftermath of the bombings. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.7 | Describe the attempts to promote international justice through the Nuremberg Trials. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.8 | Analyze the effects of the Red Scare on domestic United States policy. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.9 | Describe the rationale for the formation of the United Nations, including the contribution of Mary McLeod Bethune. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.10 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of the early years of the Cold War (i.e., Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, Warsaw Pact). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.11 | Examine the controversy surrounding the proliferation of nuclear technology in the United States and the world. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.12 | Examine causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.13 | Analyze significant foreign policy events during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.6.14 | Analyze causes, course, and consequences of the Vietnam War. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.1 | Identify causes for Post-World War II prosperity and its effects on American society. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.2 | Compare the relative prosperity between different ethnic groups and social classes in the post-World War II period. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.3 | Examine the changing status of women in the United States from post-World War II to present. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.4 | Evaluate the success of 1960s era presidents' foreign and domestic policies. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.5 | Compare nonviolent and violent approaches utilized by groups (e.g., African Americans, women, Native Americans, Hispanics) to achieve civil rights. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.6 | Assess key figures and organizations in shaping the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.7 | Assess the building of coalitions between African Americans, whites, and other groups in achieving integration and equal rights. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.8 | Analyze significant Supreme Court decisions relating to integration, busing, affirmative action, the rights of the accused and reproductive rights. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.9 | Examine the similarities of social movements (e.g., Native Americans, Hispanics, women, anti-war protesters) of the 1960s and 1970s. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.10 | Analyze the significance of Vietnam and Watergate on the government and people of the United States. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.11 | Analyze the foreign policy of the United States as it relates to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.12 | Analyze political, economic, and social concerns that emerged at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.13 | Analyze the attempts to extend New Deal legislation through the Great Society and the successes and failures of these programs to promote social and economic stability. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.14 | Review the role of the United States as a participant in the global economy (e.g., trade agreements, international competition, impact on American labor, environmental concerns). | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.15 | Analyze the effects of foreign and domestic terrorism on the American people. | Vol. II
SS.912.A.7.16 | Examine changes in immigration policy and attitudes toward immigration since 1950. | Vol. II
SS.912.CG.1.1 | Examine how intellectual influences in primary documents contributed to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.1.2 | Explain the influence of Enlightenment ideas on the Declaration of Independence. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.1.3 | Explain arguments presented in the Federalist Papers in support of ratifying the U.S. Constitution and a republican form of government. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.1.4 | Analyze how the ideals and principles expressed in the founding documents shape America as a constitutional republic. | Vol. I

SS.912.CG.1.5
Explain how the U.S. Constitution and its amendments uphold the following political principles: checks and balances, consent of the governed, democracy, due process of law, federalism, individual rights, limited government, representative government, republicanism, rule of law and separation of powers.
Vol. I

SS.912.CG.2.1 | Explain the constitutional provisions that establish and affect citizenship. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.2.2 | Explain the importance of political and civic participation to the success of the United States’ constitutional republic. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.2.3 | Explain the responsibilities of citizens at the local, state, and national levels. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.2.7 | Analyze the impact of civic engagement as a means of preserving or reforming institutions. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.3.1 | Analyze how certain political ideologies conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.3.12 | Analyze the concept of federalism in the United States and its role in establishing the relationship between the state and national governments. | Vol. I
SS.912.CG.3.15 | Explain how citizens are affected by the local, state, and national governments. | Vol. II
SS.912.CG.4.1 | Analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States. | Vol. I
SS.912.E.2.3 | Research contributions of entrepreneurs, inventors, and other key individuals from various demographic backgrounds in the development of the United States. | Vol. II
SS.912.E.3.5 | Compare the current United States economy with other developed and developing nations. | Vol. II
SS.912.G.1.2 | Use spatial perspective and appropriate geographic terms and tools, including the Six Essential Elements, as organizational schema to describe any given place. | Vol. I
SS.912.G.1.3 | Employ applicable units of measurement and scale to solve simple locational problems using maps, and globes. | Vol. I
SS.912.G.2.1 | Identify the physical characteristics and the human characteristics that define and differentiate regions. | Vol. I
SS.912.G.4.2 | Use geographic terms and tools to analyze the push, and pull factors contributing to human migration within and among places. | Vol. I
SS.912.G.4.3 | Use geographic terms and tools to analyze the effects of migration both on the place of origin and destination, including border areas. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.1.1 | Actively participate in effortful learning both individually and collectively. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.2.1 | Demonstrate understanding by representing problems in multiple ways. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.3.1 | Complete tasks with mathematical fluency. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.4.1 | Engage in discussions that reflect on the mathematical thinking of self and others. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.5.1 | Use patterns and structure to help understand and connect mathematical concepts. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.6.1 | Assess the reasonableness of solutions. | Vol. I
MA.K12.MTR.7.1 | Apply mathematics to real-world contexts. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.1.1 | Cite evidence to explain and justify reasoning. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.2.1 | Read and comprehend grade-level complex texts proficiently. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.3.1 | Make inferences to support comprehension. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.4.1 | Use appropriate collaborative techniques and active listening skills when engaging in discussions in a variety of situations. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.5.1 | Use the accepted rules governing a specific format to create quality work. | Vol. I
ELA.K12.EE.6.1 | Use appropriate voice and tone when speaking or writing. | Vol. I
ELD.K12.ELL.SI.1 | English language learners communicate for social and instructional purposes within the school setting. | Vol. I
ELD.K12.ELL.SS.1 | English language learners communicate information, ideas and concepts necessary for academic success in the content area of Social Studies. | Vol. I

Florida United States History Honors Standards Found in This Volume

This index lists Florida Social Studies benchmarks addressed in Volume II (Chapters 12–22) of Land of Hope, 2nd Edition, Teacher's Edition. Teacher's Edition references below link directly to the corresponding location within this volume. Where a benchmark is also addressed in Volume I, that reference is noted but not linked. Student Edition page references are listed for manual lookup.

SS.912.A.1.5

Evaluate the validity, reliability, bias and authenticity of current events, and Internet resources.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.6 → Analytical Skills: Students select a current news story connected to the chapter's material and locate two Internet accounts of it. For each they identify the author and their position to test for bias, the intended audience and purpose to test authenticity, and what can be independently verified to test validity, then judge which account is more reliable and defend the judgment. Develops the ability to evaluate the validity, reliability, bias and authenticity of current events and Internet resources.

SS.912.A.2.5

Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups.

Student Edition: Jim Crow Laws and Plessy v. Ferguson, Ch. 11, p. 368.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 11 → Lesson 11.4 → Compare and Contrast: (see Volume I Standards Index) Students compare the Black Codes with sharecropping, drawing on Primary Source 11.4, Henry Blake's 1941 interview, and assess the constraints each placed on freed people. Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.5 → Key Concepts: Students examine segregation as the settled legal order the Civil Rights Movement confronted, and what dismantling it required. Develops the ability to assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups.

SS.912.A.2.7

Review the Native American experience.

Student Edition: Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears, Ch. 6, p. 199–203; Tocqueville on Indian removal, Ch.6, p. 204; The Plains Indian Wars and the Dawes Severalty Act, Ch. 12, p. 406-407.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.9 → Formative Assessment: Students recall what the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 did—broke up reservation lands into individual family allotments—and the roughly 250,000 Plains Indians the book counts, then explain what the 1890 Census Bulletin declared and why it mattered. Develops the ability to review the Native American experience.

SS.912.A.3.1

Analyze the economic challenges to American farmers and farmers' responses to these challenges in the mid to late 1800s.

Student Edition: Farmers' Economic Crisis and the Populist Party, Ch. 14, p. 446; William Jennings Bryan and the Free Silver/Gold Standard Debate, Ch. 14, p. 446, 448-449.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.1 → Classroom Experience: Students examine whether the movement for economic reform in the late nineteenth century was urban, rural, or both, identify the platform of the People's Party, and account for Bryan's monetary position and why it drew support and opposition. Develops the ability to analyze the economic challenges to American farmers and farmers' responses to these challenges in the mid to late 1800s.

SS.912.A.3.2

Examine the social, political, and economic causes, course, and consequences of the second Industrial Revolution that began in the late 19th century.

Student Edition: The Rise of Big Business (new technologies, patents, railroads), Ch. 12, p. 376–380; Rockefeller, Carnegie (Bessemer Process), and Morgan ("Three Titans"), Ch. 12, p. 381–385; National Markets, Standard Time, and the Rise of Mail-Order Retail, Ch. 12, p. 385–386; The Conditions of Industrial Labor, Ch. 12, p. 387–389, 392–393; Socialism vs. Capitalism (Debs, Carnegie), Ch. 12, p. 390–391; The Sherman Antitrust Act and Interstate Commerce Act, Ch. 14, p. 458–459.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.4 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students trace Rockefeller's Standard Oil to 90 percent of national refining capacity by 1879, Morgan's consolidation of U.S. Steel and General Electric, and Carnegie's use of the Bessemer process, examining how technology, finance and business practice together produced the second Industrial Revolution. Develops the ability to examine the social, political, and economic causes, course, and consequences of the second Industrial Revolution.

SS.912.A.3.3

Compare the first and second Industrial Revolutions in the United States.

Student Edition: Early Industrialization, Ch. 6, p. 187-188; The Rise of Big Business and Three Titans, Ch. 12, p. 376–387.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 6 → Lesson 6.6 → Classroom Experience: (see Volume I Standards Index) Students examine the early industrial economy of mills and textile manufacture. Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.4 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students trace Rockefeller's control of ninety percent of refining capacity, Morgan's consolidation of U.S. Steel, and Carnegie's use of the Bessemer process, then set the scale, financing and organizational form of this economy against the earlier one. Develops the ability to compare the first and second Industrial Revolutions in the United States.

SS.912.A.3.4

Determine how the development of steel, oil, transportation, communication, and business practices affected the United States economy.

Student Edition: Transportation (Railroads, National Markets, Standard Time Zones), Ch. 12, p. 376–381; Business Practices (Corporate Form, Trusts, Monopoly Formation, Mail-Order Retail, Chain Stores), Ch. 12, p. 378, 383, 385–387; Communication (Morse's Telegraph), Ch. 12, p. 381-382; Steel (Carnegie, Bessemer Process), Ch. 12, p. 382, 384; Oil (Rockefeller, Standard Oil, Vertical Integration), Ch. 12, p. 382-384.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.4 → Key Concepts: Students examine how steel manufacturing and oil refining expedited industrial expansion alongside the railroads, and how Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan achieved market dominance through consolidation and novel financial structures such as trusts and holding companies. Develops the ability to determine how the development of steel, oil, transportation, communication, and business practices affected the United States economy.

SS.912.A.3.5

Identify significant inventors of the Industrial Revolution including African Americans and women.

Student Edition: George Westinghouse and the Air Brake, Ch. 12, p. 381; Henry Ford and Mass Automobile Production, Ch. 16, p. 524.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.4 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Beyond Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla, students use a teacher-provided reference source to identify two further inventors of the period, one African American and one woman, recording each invention, its date and one concrete way it changed how Americans worked or lived, and to research one entrepreneur whose enterprise this economy made possible. Develops the ability to identify significant inventors of the Industrial Revolution including African Americans and women.

SS.912.A.3.6

Analyze changes that occurred as the United States shifted from agrarian to an industrial society.

Student Edition: The Rise of Big Business, Ch. 12, p. 376–381; Urbanization Statistics and the "Walking City," Ch. 12, p. 393–397.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.1 → Civic Discourse: Students recall Jefferson's vision of a republic of self-sufficient farmers and evaluate what an industrial, urban society had made of it. Develops the ability to analyze changes that occurred as the United States shifted from an agrarian to an industrial society.

SS.912.A.3.7

Compare the experience of European immigrants in the east to that of Asian immigrants in the west (the Chinese Exclusion Act, Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan).

Student Edition: European Immigration, Ch. 12, p. 395, p. bottom of 397–403; Chinese and Japanese Immigration, Ch. 12, p. 398, Map 12.2, p. 400; Samuel Gompers's Anti-Chinese Rhetoric, Ch. 13, p. 430; The Chinese Exclusion Act, Ch. 12 Timeline.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.7 → Formative Assessment: Students recall what the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 did, then explain how immigration after the Civil War differed from what came before — the shift from northern and western European Protestants to southern and eastern Europeans in the east, and toward East Asia on the Pacific coast. Develops the ability to compare the experience of European immigrants in the east to that of Asian immigrants in the west.

SS.912.A.3.8

Examine the importance of social change and reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., class system, migration from farms to cities, Social Gospel movement, role of settlement houses and churches in providing services to the poor).

Student Edition: Urbanization and Farm-to-City Migration, Ch. 12, p. 393–394; The Social Gospel, Ch. 13, Primary Source 13.1, p. 422; The Social Gospel (Gladden, Rauschenbusch) and Jane Addams's Settlement Houses, Ch. 14, p. 445–447.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.2 → Argumentation: Students argue whether the tenets of Progressivism were compatible with its religious roots, supporting the position from the chapter. Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.2 → Civic Discourse: Students evaluate the tensions between Progressivism and the principles of the American Founding. Develops the ability to examine the importance of social change and reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

SS.912.A.3.9

Examine causes, course, and consequences of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Student Edition: The Conditions of Industrial Labor, Ch. 12, p. 387–389; Haymarket, the Homestead Strike, and the Pullman Strike, Ch. 12, p. 392-393; Eugene Debs, the American Railway Union, and the Socialist Party's Electoral Rise, Ch. 12, p. 393.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.6 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine factory and coal-mine working conditions, then trace the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894 alongside Gompers's founding of the American Federation of Labor, evaluating what organized labor achieved and what it cost. Develops the ability to examine causes, course, and consequences of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

SS.912.A.3.10

Review different economic and philosophic ideologies.

Student Edition: Monopolistic Power, Ch. 12, p. 385; Socialism vs. Capitalism (Debs, Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth"), Ch. 12, p. 390–391; Hoover on Rugged Individualism, Ch. 16, p. 545.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.5 → Formative Assessment → Explain: Students explain how the New Nationalism and the New Freedom answered the same problem differently, working from Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech (Primary Source 14.3) and Wilson's The New Freedom (Primary Source 14.4). Develops the ability to review different economic and philosophic ideologies.

SS.912.A.3.11

Analyze the impact of political machines in United States cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Student Edition: Tammany Hall, "Boss" Tweed, and Urban Political Machines, Ch. 12, p. 396–397; George Washington Plunkitt's "Honest Graft," Ch. 12, p. 397.Counterracting the Effects of Political Machines, Ch. 14, p. 454-455.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.7 → Key Concepts: Students examine how the destitution of urban immigrants gave rise to machine politics, in which informal networks controlled by bosses dominated municipal government through patronage, and how machines such as Tammany Hall traded votes for city services in a way that made a mockery of the Founders' hope for civic virtue. Develops the ability to analyze the impact of political machines in United States cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

SS.912.A.3.12

Compare how different nongovernmental organizations and progressives worked to shape public policy, restore economic opportunities, and correct injustices in American life.

Student Edition: Henry George and Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, Ch. 14, p. 445–447; The Muckrakers (Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis), Ch. 14, p. 451; Municipal Reformers (Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones, Tom Johnson), Ch. 14, p. 451; Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" and Stewardship Theory (the 1902 coal strike), Ch. 14, p. 462-466; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Ch. 14, p. 463; Wilson's New Freedom and the Federal Reserve, Ch. 14, p. 469–471, 474.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 14 → Lesson 14.2 → Analytical Skills: Students identify the author, audience, and purpose of Jane Addams's “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (Primary Source 14.1) and assess how the settlement movement sought to shape public policy. Develops the ability to compare how nongovernmental organizations and progressives worked to shape public policy.

SS.912.A.3.13

Examine key events and peoples in Florida history as they relate to United States history.

Student Edition: No developed Florida-specific content found anywhere in the reviewed chapters.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 21 → Lesson 21.7 → Classroom Experience: Students locate Miami and analyze Figure 21.15, Reagan meeting Pope John Paul II at Miami International Airport in 1987, asking why a meeting central to the chapter's Cold War argument took place in Florida and what the state's airports, harbors and Caribbean and Latin American ties made possible. Develops the ability to examine key events and peoples in Florida history as they relate to United States history.

SS.912.A.4.1

Analyze the major factors that drove United States imperialism.

Student Edition: Adams's Anti-Interventionist Warning, Ch. 13, p. 415–416; Monroe Doctrine Hegemony vs. Anti-Interventionism, p. 417–418; Manifest Destiny's Extension Overseas, p. 418–419; Economic Need for New Markets and Raw Materials, p. 418; Global Imperial Competition, p. 419; Press Jingoism (Fig. 13.3), p. 420; Technology Enabling Distant Rule, p. 420; "Paternalistic Imperial Rule" as a Civilizing Mission, p. 421; Alfred Thayer Mahan and Naval Expansion, p. 421; Social Darwinism and Anglo-Saxon Racial Theology (Josiah Strong, Primary Source 13.1), p. 422.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 13 → Lesson 13.2 → Classroom Experience: Students examine what drove the nineteenth-century trend of imperialism, distinguish imperialism from colonialism, and weigh Strong's providential case against Mahan's strategic one as competing accounts of why a continental republic turned outward. Develops the ability to analyze the major factors that drove United States imperialism.

SS.912.A.4.2

Explain the motives of the United States acquisition of the territories.

Student Edition: Alaska's Purchase ("Seward's Folly"), Ch. 13, p. 423; Samoa's Naval Base, Ch. 13, p. 423; Hawaii Annexation (Queen Lili'uokalani's Quote), p. 423–424; The Philippines Annexation Debate, p. 429–433; The Platt Amendment and Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), p. 435–436; The Roosevelt Corollary and the Dominican Republic, p. 436; The Open Door Policy in China, p. 437, 441.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 13 → Lesson 13.4 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine what the United States acquired from the Spanish-American War—the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam—and reconstruct the anti-imperialist arguments against annexation, weighing the motives advanced on each side. Develops the ability to explain the motives of the United States acquisition of the territories.

SS.912.A.4.3

Examine causes, course, and consequences of the Spanish American War.

Student Edition: Cuban War of Independence, Spanish Atrocities, and Yellow Journalism, Ch. 13, p. 424-425; The Maine, p. 425-427; The War's Course (Manila Bay, Santiago), Ch. 13, p. 428-429; The Philippines Annexation Debate, Ch. 13, p. 429-433.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 13 → Lesson 13.3 → Formative Assessment: Students recall the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor on 15 February 1898, then explain how yellow journalism shaped opinion before the war—mass-circulation papers treating the explosion as an attack before any cause was established, producing a public demand for war the government did not create and could not resist. Develops the ability to examine causes, course, and consequences of the Spanish American War.

SS.912.A.4.4

Analyze the economic, military, and security motivations of the United States to complete the Panama Canal as well as major obstacles involved in its construction.

Student Edition: The Political and Economic Advantages of the Panama Canal, p. 438–439.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 13 → Lesson 13.4 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Students analyze the economic, military and security motivations for the canal from Mahan's argument that commerce requires a navy and a navy requires bases, then use a teacher-provided account to analyze the major obstacles construction had to overcome — disease among the workforce, the engineering of the locks and the Culebra Cut, and the scale of labor required — and judge which obstacle most nearly stopped the project. Develops the ability to analyze the economic, military, and security motivations of the United States to complete the Panama Canal as well as major obstacles involved in its construction.

SS.912.A.4.5

Examine causes, course, and consequences of United States involvement in World War I.

Student Edition: The Alliance System and Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Ch. 15, p. 480; Wilson's Neutrality Proclamation, p. 481; The Lusitania, Primary Source 15.1, p. 483-484; Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram, p. 486; Wilson's Request for War, Primary Source 15.2, p. 486-490; The AEF, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and the Armistice, p. 496-499; Final Casualty Figures, p. 499.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.1 → Reading Comprehension: Students build a graphic organizer identifying and describing the motives of the major initial belligerents. Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.3 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Students compare how the war affected each participating country. Develops the ability to examine the causes, course, and consequences of United States involvement in World War I.

SS.912.A.4.6

Examine how the United States government prepared the nation for war with war measures (i.e., Selective Service Act, War Industries Board, war bonds, Espionage Act, Sedition Act, Committee of Public Information).

Student Edition: Conscription and the War Industries Board (Bernard Baruch), Ch. 15, p. 491; The Food Administration (Hoover), Fuel Administration (Daylight Saving Time), Railroad Administration, and National War Labor Board (William Howard Taft), p. 491; The Committee on Public Information (George Creel) and Liberty Bonds, p. 492; The Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918), Eugene Debs's Conviction and Schenck v. United States, p. 492-493.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.2 → Key Terms: Students examine the War Industries Board, which coordinated economic activity for the war effort and under which industrial production rose twenty percent, alongside the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, establishing how the government prepared and disciplined the nation for war. Develops the ability to examine how the United States government prepared the nation for war with war measures.

SS.912.A.4.7

Examine the impact of airplanes, battleships, new weaponry, and chemical warfare in creating new war strategies (e.g., trench warfare, convoys).

Student Edition: New Weapons of Total War, Fig. 15.3, p. 481-482; Submarine tactics, p. 483, Mustard Gas ("Gassed," Sargent, Fig. 15.5), p. 488-489; The Convoy Escort System, p. 495.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.1 → Key Concepts: Students examine the character of the war that opened in 1914 — the trench stalemate, poison gas, the submarine campaign and the convoy response — together with the aircraft and naval power that reshaped strategy, and explain how each new weapon forced a new way of fighting. Develops the ability to examine the impact of airplanes, battleships, new weaponry, and chemical warfare in creating new war strategies.

SS.912.A.4.8

Compare the experiences Americans (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women, conscientious objectors) had while serving in Europe.

Student Edition: The 369th Infantry Regiment "Harlem Hellfighters" (Fig. 15.10), Ch. 15, p. 502.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.3 → Compare and Contrast: Working from Figure 15.10, 369th Infantry Troops Return Home, and teacher-provided excerpts, students compare the experiences of African American, Hispanic and Asian American servicemen, women in war service and conscientious objectors, recording for each what the war asked of them and what it granted in return. Develops the ability to compare the experiences Americans had while serving in Europe.

SS.912.A.4.9

Compare how the war impacted European Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, women, and dissenters in the United States.

Student Edition: Fig. 15.7, Women's Wartime Factory Labor, p. 491-492; African American Wartime Migration, p. 492; Persecution of German Americans, p. 492; Dissenters (Eugene Debs, Schenck v. U.S.), p. 492-493.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.3 → Compare and Contrast: Extending the comparison from service in Europe to the home front, students examine how the war bore on European, Asian, African, Hispanic, Jewish and Native Americans, on women and on dissenters, using the Espionage and Sedition Acts as the measure of what dissent then cost. Develops the ability to compare how the war impacted different groups in the United States.

SS.912.A.4.10

Examine the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the United States to support the League of Nations.

Student Edition: The Fourteen Points, Ch. 15, p. 504-505; The Paris Peace Conference and the Big Four, p. 505-506; Article 231 (the War Guilt Clause) and Reparations, p. 507; The League of Nations Debate - Wilson For (Primary Source 15.4) vs. Lodge Against, Article X (Primary Source 15.5), p. 508-510; The Senate's Rejection and the 1920 Election as Referendum (Harding's "Return to Normalcy"), p. 510-511.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.4 → Reading Comprehension: Students read Wilson's Fourteen Points in full and identify the political order he envisioned. Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.4 → Speaking Skills: Students take the part of a senator approached by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1920 and argue the case for or against ratification. Develops the ability to examine the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the United States to support the League of Nations.

SS.912.A.5.1

Discuss the economic outcomes of demobilization.

Student Edition: Rapid Army Demobilization and Veteran Unemployment, Ch. 16, p. 516-517; The End of Wartime Economic Controls (WIB Dissolution, Railroads Returned to Private Owners), Ch. 16, p. 517; Postwar Inflation and Labor Unrest (Seattle General Strike, U.S. Steel Strike), Ch. 16, p. 517; Housing Market Shortage, Ch. 16, p. 517; Rising Commodity Prices and Unemployment, Ch. 16, p. 520; Reduction of Wartime Taxes, Ch. 16, p. 520-521; Mellon Economic Policies for Growth, Ch 16, P. 520-521; The 1920-21 Depression, Ch. 16, p. 546-549.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.1 → Classroom Experience: Students examine what Harding meant by a return to normalcy and what Keynes predicted for the postwar economy, situating demobilization against the war and pandemic the country had just come through. Develops the ability to discuss the economic outcomes of demobilization.

SS.912.A.5.2

Explain the causes of the public reaction (e.g., Sacco and Vanzetti, labor, racial unrest) associated with the Red Scare.

Student Edition: Fear of Bolshevik Revolution and the 1919 Mail Bombings, Ch. 16, p. 518-519; The Palmer Raids (6,000 Arrests), Ch. 16, p. 519, Association of Communism with Immigrants, Ch. 16, p. 519, Race Riote, Ch. 16, p. 517.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.1 → Formative Assessment: Students recall that the Palmer Raids began in November 1919 and explain the postwar reaction that produced them—the association of radicalism with unassimilated immigrant populations after a bomber proved to be an Italian American radical, and Palmer's machinery for rapidly deporting radical aliens. Develops the ability to explain the causes of the public reaction associated with the Red Scare.

SS.912.A.5.3

Examine the impact of United States foreign economic policy during the 1920s.

Student Edition: Raised Tariff's Following the 1921-21 Recession, Ch. 16, 520; Growth of the U.S. as a World Power, Ch.16, 520-521; Mellon Economic Policies, Ch. 16, P. 520-521; Federal Reserve Keeping Interest Rates Low, Ch. 16, 521; Ford's Model-T, Assembly Line, and Mass Production, Ch. 16, p. 522-526; Economic Growth Under Coolidge's Economic Policy, Ch. 16, p. 541-542; U.S. Unwilingness to Extend Credit to Germany, Ch. 16, p. 547; Hawley-Smoot Tarrif, Ch. 17, p. 555; U.S. Global Commercial Interests, Ch 18, p. 589; Acquired Rights to Panama Canal, Ch 18, p. 590.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.2 → Key Concepts: Students examine the Republican governing philosophy that displaced Progressive direction of the economy—Coolidge's claim that the chief business of the American people is business—and Mellon's argument that inherently excessive taxes are not paid but drive capital out of productive business. Develops the ability to examine the impact of United States foreign economic policy during the 1920s.

SS.912.A.5.4

Evaluate how the economic boom during the Roaring Twenties changed consumers, businesses, manufacturing, and marketing practices.

Student Edition: Consumer Culture, Consumer Credit, Advertizing, and Women's Purchasing Power (Fig. 16.1, "Vogue Magazine Cover," p.512-513, Fig. 16.7 Frigidair Ad, p. 526, and Fig. 16.8 Record Ad, p.527), 526-527, 533; Ford's Assembly Line and Cheaper, Mass Produced Goods, Ch. 16, p. 522-525; Ford's Moving Assembly Line (Fig. 16.5), p. 522-523; The Automobile Industry as an Economic Multiplier, p. 523; Ford's Higher Wages and the Advent of Weekends Drive Consumption, Ch. 16, p. 524.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.4 → Key Concepts: Students examine the 1920s as the first great era of national advertising, tied to mass media and a national consumer economy, and weigh Allen's claim in Only Yesterday that the decade witnessed a revolution in manners and morals. Develops the ability to evaluate how the economic boom during the Roaring Twenties changed consumers, businesses, manufacturing, and marketing practices.

SS.912.A.5.5

Describe efforts by the United States and other world powers to avoid future wars.

Student Edition: Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, Ch. 15, p. 504-511; The Washington Naval Conference and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Ch. 18, p. 589-590. U.S. Improved Relations with Latin America, Ch. 18, p. 590; 1935 Neutrality Acts, Ch. 18, p. 593.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.1 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine why it is misleading to call interwar American foreign policy isolationist, identifying the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 as international initiatives to which the United States was a party. Develops the ability to describe efforts by the United States and other world powers to avoid future wars.

SS.912.A.5.6

Analyze the influence that Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, the Fundamentalist movement, and prohibition had in changing American society in the 1920s.

Student Edition: The Harlem Renaissance Ch. 16, p. 527, 530-531; Hollywood and Film, Ch. 16, p. 528, 531; The Scopes Trial and Fundamentalism, Ch. 16, p. 537-538; Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment, p. 538-540.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.4 → Classroom Experience: Students examine Prohibition, the Scopes Trial and immigration restriction as the decade's countercurrents, set against Hollywood, the radio and the recorded music of lesson 16.3, and assess how each changed American society. Develops the ability to analyze the influence that Hollywood, the Fundamentalist movement, and prohibition had in changing American society in the 1920s.

SS.912.A.5.7

Examine the freedom movements that advocated civil rights for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women.

Student Edition: Nineteenth Amendment, Ch. 16, p. 514, 538-539. Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance, Ch. 16, p. 527; Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolent Civil Rights movement, Ch. 20, p. 694-699; Civil Rights and Voting Acts, Ch.20, p. 703; Immigration Act of 1965, Ch. 20, p. 703; Black Power Movement, Ch. 20, p. 704-705; Feminist Movement, Ch. 20, p. 709.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.4 → Civic Discourse: Beginning from the Nineteenth Amendment and the League of Women Voters, students use teacher-provided sources to examine four freedom movements active in this period — for African Americans, for Latinos, for Asian Americans and for women — identifying for each what rights it claimed, what methods it used, and what resistance it met. Develops the ability to examine the freedom movements that advocated civil rights for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women.

SS.912.A.5.8

Compare the views of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey relating to the African American experience.

Student Edition: Booker T. Washington, Ch. 14, p. 475; W.E.B. Du Bois, Ch. 15, p. 475.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 15 → Lesson 15.2 → Compare and Contrast: Beginning from Du Bois's “Close Ranks” chapter epigraph and the chapter's account of Booker T. Washington, students use teacher-provided excerpts to build a three-column comparison of Washington's, Du Bois's and Marcus Garvey's answers to how African Americans should pursue advancement, recording for each what he asked of African Americans and what he asked of white America. Develops the ability to compare the views of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey relating to the African American experience.

SS.912.A.5.9

Explain why support for the Ku Klux Klan varied in the 1920s with respect to issues such as anti-immigration, anti-African American, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti- women, and anti-union ideas.

Student Edition: Anti Immigrant, Catholic, Jewish, and Black, Ch. 16, p. 536-537.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.4 → Classroom Experience: Students analyze Figure 16.17, thirty thousand Klan members at a midnight rite in Illinois, and examine the book's account of the revived Klan as anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish in addition to its antiblack agenda, with a following reaching from Oregon to Maine. Develops the ability to explain why support for the Ku Klux Klan varied in the 1920s with respect to anti-immigration, anti-African American, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish ideas.

SS.912.A.5.10

Analyze support for and resistance to civil rights for women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other minority groups.

Student Edition: Harding’s Pro African American Sentiment, Ch. 16, P. 521; KKK Resistance to Black, Immigrant, Catholic, and Jewish Rights, Ch. 16, p. 536-537; Democratic Party’s Failure to Condemn KKK, Ch. 16, p. 542; Gunnar Myrdal on Civil Rights, Ch. 20, p. 674; Jim Crow Laws and Plessy v. Ferguson, Ch. 20, p. 675; The Civil Rights Movement and Voting Rights Act, Ch. 20, p. 695-704; Police Dogs and Firehoses at Birmingham, Ch. 20, p. 697.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 16 → Lesson 16.4 → Classroom Experience: Students place the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the Johnson-Reed Act and the Scopes Trial on a line and mark which expanded liberty and which restricted it. Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.4 → Key Concepts: Students examine support for and resistance to civil rights across the movement's legal and popular fronts. Develops the ability to analyze support for and resistance to civil rights for women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other minority groups.

SS.912.A.5.11

Examine causes, course and consequences of the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 17 → Lesson 17.2 → Classroom Experience: Students examine Hoover's initial response to the Depression and what became of it, then trace the New Deal's bank stabilization, relief programs and regulatory apparatus across Chapter Seventeen, assessing causes, course and consequences together. Develops the ability to examine causes, course and consequences of the Great Depression and the New Deal.

SS.912.A.6.1

Examine causes, course, and consequences of World War II on the United States and the world.

Student Edition: Versailles Treaty, Ch. 15, 506-507, Ch. 18, 590-591, 595; Rise of Authoritarian and Expansionist Regimes and Appeasement, Ch.18, p. 590-593; Beginning of the War (Poland, France, Britain), Ch. 18, p. 593-598; U.S. Battles with Neutrality, Ch. 18, p. 598-601; Pearl Harbor, Ch. 18, p. 601-605; U.S. Mobilization, Ch. 18, p. 605-609; War in the European Theater, Ch. 18, p. 609-617; War in the Pacific Theater, Ch. 18, p. 617-621, 624-628; Holocaust Analysis, Ch. 18, p. 621-623; The Atom Bomb, Deliberations and Consequences, Ch. 18, p. 624-627; Death Toll, Ch. 18, p. 628-629; Post-War Boom, Ch. 19, p. 635-638; Nuclear Anxiety and the Beginning of the Cold War, Ch. 18, p. 638-641.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.7 → Classroom Experience: Students examine how the war ended in the European theater, what the Allies discovered as Central Europe was liberated, and how the war's conclusion left the United States and Soviet Union as the world's foremost powers with Europe divided between them. Develops the ability to examine causes, course, and consequences of World War II on the United States and the world.

SS.912.A.6.2

Describe the United States’ response in the early years of World War II (e.g., Neutrality Acts, Cash and Carry, Lend Lease Act).

Student Edition: The 1935 Neutrality Acts, Ch. 18, p. 593; The Destroyers-for-Bases Deal, America First Committee, and Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, Ch. 18, p. 597-598; The Lend-Lease Act and Isolationist Opposition Ch. 18, p. 597-601; Four Freedom’s Speech, Ch. 18, p. 600; Greer and “Shoot on sight” Command, Ch. 18, p. 601; Embargos and Freezes on Japan, Ch. 18, p. 601-602.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.2 → Classroom Experience: Students examine the stakes of the war as Churchill described them and what Hitler would have needed to prevail, tracing the American movement from neutrality legislation toward material support for Britain. Develops the ability to describe the United States' response in the early years of World War II.

SS.912.A.6.3

Analyze the impact of the Holocaust during World War II on Jews as well as other groups.

Student Edition: The Horrors of the Camps, Ch. 18, p. 621-623; Einstein as Emblematic of Jewish Flight from Germany, Ch. 18, p. 624; Holocaust as a Failure of Mankind, Ch. 18, p. 628.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.7 → Key Concepts: Students examine the book's account that the Nazi government systematically killed millions of unarmed Jewish civilians—men, women and children—as well as many others, and the origin of the term Holocaust from the Greek for a burnt offering. Develops the ability to analyze the impact of the Holocaust during World War II on Jews as well as other groups.

SS.912.A.6.4

Examine efforts to expand or contract rights for various populations during World War II.

Student Edition: Women in Military and Labor Force, Ch. 18, p. 606-609; African Americans in Military and the "Double V" Campaign, Ch. 18, p. 608-609; Navajo “Code Talkers,” Ch. 18, p. 608-609; Mexican Military and Bracero Program, Ch. 18, p. 609; The Internment of Japanese Americans, Ch. 18, p. 609.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.4 → Classroom Experience: Students examine in what particular ways Japanese Americans were disadvantaged by internment, set against the wartime industrial mobilization that opened economic opportunity to groups previously excluded, assessing rights contracted and expanded in the same war. Develops the ability to examine efforts to expand or contract rights for various populations during World War II.

SS.912.A.6.5

Explain the impact of World War II on domestic government policy including, but not limited to, rationing and the forced internment of Japanese Americans.

Student Edition: War Management Agencies, Ch. 18, p. 606-607; Rationing of Scarce Commodities, Ch. 18, p. 606; The Internment of Japanese Americans, p. 609; Mexican Braceros, Ch. 18, p. 609.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.4 → Key Concepts: Students examine the wartime industrial transformation that produced two thirds of Allied equipment—280,000 airplanes, 86,000 tanks and 41 billion rounds of ammunition—and the domestic policies that accompanied it, including rationing and the forced internment of Japanese Americans. Develops the ability to explain the impact of World War II on domestic government policy including rationing and the forced internment of Japanese Americans.

SS.912.A.6.6

Analyze the use of atomic weapons during World War II and the aftermath of the bombings.

Student Edition: The Manhattan Project and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Ch. 18, p. 624-628; Nuclear Fear and the Beginning of the Cold War, Ch. 19, p. 638-641; The USSR's First Atomic Bomb Test, Ch. 19, p. 660.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 18 → Lesson 18.7 → Key Concepts: Students examine the Manhattan Project begun in 1940, the physics of a uranium chain reaction releasing more energy than tens of thousands of tons of TNT, and the effect of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Develops the ability to analyze the use of atomic weapons during World War II and the aftermath of the bombings.

SS.912.A.6.7

Describe the attempts to promote international justice through the Nuremberg Trials.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.1 → Civic Discourse: Working from a teacher-provided account, students describe what the Nuremberg tribunal was, who was tried and on what charges, and explain how trying leaders before an international court represented an attempt to promote international justice rather than impose summary punishment. Students then take up the contemporary objection that the court applied retroactive law and was staffed by the victors. Develops the ability to describe the attempts to promote international justice through the Nuremberg Trials.

SS.912.A.6.8

Analyze the effects of the Red Scare on domestic United States policy.

Student Edition: First Red Scare, Ch. 16, p. 518-519; McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, Ch. 19, p. 661-662; Loyalty Program in the Federal Government, Ch. 19, p. 661; Smith Act of 1940, Ch. 19, p. 661; House Committee on Un-American Activities, Ch. 19, p. 661; Whittaker Chambers's HUAC Testimony and the Alger Hiss Case, Ch. 19, p. 662-663; The Rosenberg Spy Case, Ch. 19, p. 663.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.6 → Key Concepts: Students examine the domestic consequences of the postwar communist advance, including the loyalty apparatus and congressional investigations that followed, and assess how the second Red Scare shaped American policy and public life. Develops the ability to analyze the effects of the Red Scare on domestic United States policy.

SS.912.A.6.9

Describe the rationale for the formation of the United Nations, including the contribution of Mary McLeod Bethune.

Student Edition: The UN Charter's Founding and Purpose, Ch. 19, p. 640, U.N. as Peacekeeper, Ch. 19, p. 655, 664.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.7 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine the postwar settlement and the rationale for founding the United Nations as a body intended to prevent a recurrence of the war, and, working from a teacher-provided source, describe Mary McLeod Bethune's contribution as a consultant to the founding conference and what her presence signified about whose voices the new organization would include. Develops the ability to describe the rationale for the formation of the United Nations, including the contribution of Mary McLeod Bethune.

SS.912.A.6.10

Examine causes, course, and consequences of the early years of the Cold War (i.e., Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, Warsaw Pact).

Student Edition: Nuclear Fear and the Beginning of the Cold War, Ch. 19, p. 638-641; George Kennan's Containment Doctrine, Ch. 19, p. 646, 648-649; The Truman Doctrine, p. 646-647; The Marshall Plan, Ch. 19, 650-651; The Berlin Blockade and Airlift, Ch. 19, p. 652-653; NATO's Formation, Ch. 19, p. 653; The Warsaw Pact, Ch. 19, p. 655.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.4 → Classroom Experience: Students read Kennan's analysis of a Soviet regime permeated with internal instability that fuelled a ceaseless drive toward expansion, then evaluate the Truman Doctrine against Washington's Farewell Address, working through containment, the Marshall Plan and the founding purpose of NATO. Develops the ability to examine causes, course, and consequences of the early years of the Cold War.

SS.912.A.6.11

Examine the controversy surrounding the proliferation of nuclear technology in the United States and the world.

Student Edition: The USSR's First Atomic Bomb Test, Ch. 19, p. 660; Nuclear Deterrence and Mutual Assured Destruction, Ch. 19, p. 669-670; Resulting Proxy Wars, Ch. 19, p. 670; The Cuban Missile Crisis, Ch. 20, p. 675, 691; Nixon and Kissinger’s Nuclear Talks with China, Ch. 21, p. 724; The Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") and the INF Treaty, Ch. 21, p. 751, 754.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.8 → Key Concepts: Students examine the nuclear arms race under Eisenhower and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, assessing the controversy that attended the spread of nuclear technology. Develops the ability to examine the controversy surrounding the proliferation of nuclear technology in the United States and the world.

SS.912.A.6.12

Examine causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War.

Student Edition: Power Vacuum, (Soviet) North Korean Invasion, and Truman's Response, Ch. 19, p. 663-664, 666; The Inchon Landing and Chinese Intervention Ch. 19, p. 664-665; The MacArthur-Truman Dispute and MacArthur's Firing, p. 665-667; The Armistice and Stalemate, Ch. 19, p. 666-667.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.7 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine the outcome of the Korean War—Soviet-supported North Korea's invasion of American-supported South Korea and the American and allied response—and assess what the war settled and what it left unresolved. Develops the ability to examine causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War.

SS.912.A.6.13

Analyze significant foreign policy events during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

Student Edition: Truman's Containment Doctrine, Ch. 19, p. 646-653; Truman’s Israel Doctrine, Ch. 19, p. 653-657; Truman and Korean War, Ch. 19, P. 663-228; Eisenhower’s Intervention in Iran, Ch. 19, p.670; Eisenhower’s Intervention in Indochina, Ch. 19, p. 670-671; Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis, Ch. 19, p. 671; Eisenhower’s Recognition of Castro in Cuba, Ch. 19, p. 672; Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Ch. 20, p. 690; Kennedy and the Vienna Summit and Berlin Wall, Ch. 20, p. 690; Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ch. 20. p. 691; Kennedy in Vietnam, Ch. 20, p. 692; Johnson in Vietnam, Ch. 20, p. 705-711; Nixon Ends Vietnam War, Ch. 21, 722-723; Nixon and China, Ch. 21, p. 723-724; Nixon’s Détente with Soviets, Ch. 21, P. 724.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 21 → Lesson 21.1 → Key Concepts: Students examine Nixon as a foreign-policy realist prioritizing American interests over ideological commitment, and set that against the approaches of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson treated in Chapters 19 and 20. Develops the ability to analyze significant foreign policy events during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

SS.912.A.6.14

Analyze causes, course, and consequences of the Vietnam War.

Student Edition: Power Vacuum after French Defeat and Soviet Incursion, Ch. 19, p. 670-671; Kennedy Increases Involvement, Supports Coup, Ch. 20, p. 692; Gulf of Tonkin and U.S. Escalation, Ch. 20, p. 705, 708; Anti-War Sentiment, Ch. 20, p. 707, 710; Tet Offensive, Ch. 20, p. 711; Nixon's Vietnamization and the Paris Peace Accords, Ch. 21, p. 722-723; The Fall of Saigon, Ch. 21, p. 733.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.7 → Formative Assessment: Students recall what the Tet Offensive was and who won the 1968 presidential election and by what margin, then explain how a military engagement that failed on its own terms nonetheless changed the American position on the war. Develops the ability to analyze causes, course, and consequences of the Vietnam War.

SS.912.A.7.1

Identify causes for Post-World War II prosperity and its effects on American society.

Student Edition: Postwar Economic Recovery and Causes of the Boom, Ch. 19, p. 634–636; Consumer Spending, the Auto Industry, and Highway Construction, Ch. 19, p. 635–636; Suburbanization and the GI Bill, Ch. 19, p. 636–637; The Baby Boom, Ch. 19, p. 637–638.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.1 → Key Concepts: Students examine the fear that demobilizing over ten million servicemen would return the economy to its prewar struggles, and the educational and housing opportunities of the GI Bill that instead produced improved material conditions for returning veterans. Develops the ability to identify causes for Post-World War II prosperity and its effects on American society.

SS.912.A.7.2

Compare the relative prosperity between different ethnic groups and social classes in the post-World War II period.

Student Edition: Prosperity's Limits: African Americans Excluded from the Boom, Ch. 19, p. 673–675.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 19 → Lesson 19.1 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine the concerns Americans carried out of the war — jobs, housing, affordability — and the evidence of rising living standards that followed, including the GI Bill and suburban expansion, then assess who shared in that prosperity and who did not. Develops the ability to compare the relative prosperity between different ethnic groups and social classes in the post-World War II period.

SS.912.A.7.3

Examine the changing status of women in the United States from post-World War II to present.

Student Edition: The Revived Feminist Movement (Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique), Ch. 20, p. 709.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.6 → Classroom Experience: Students read aloud the passage the chapter prints from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, ending in the question “Is this all?”, and examine what it claimed about the position of women in postwar America and what followed from it. Develops the ability to examine the changing status of women in the United States from post-World War II to present.

SS.912.A.7.4

Evaluate the success of 1960s era presidents' foreign and domestic policies.

Student Edition: Eisenhower's Legacy, Ch. 20, p. 679; Kennedy's Domestic and Foreign Policy, Ch. 20, p. 686–694; Johnson's Domestic and Foreign Policy, Ch. 20, p. 699–712.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.5 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students compare Johnson with Kennedy in personality and policy ambition, then evaluate the domestic and foreign record of each against what they set out to achieve. Develops the ability to evaluate the success of 1960s era presidents' foreign and domestic policies.

SS.912.A.7.5

Compare nonviolent and violent approaches utilized by groups (e.g., African Americans, women, Native Americans, Hispanics) to achieve civil rights.

Student Edition: Montgomery Bus Boycott and Nonviolent Resistance Strategy, Ch. 20, p. 695; "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Ch. 20, p. 696; Birmingham Campaign — Nonviolent Protest Met with Police Violence, Ch. 20, p. 697; The March on Washington and "I Have a Dream," Ch. 20, p. 698; The Watts Riots and the Black Power Movement, Ch. 20, p. 704–705; Feminist, Hispanic, and Native American Rights Movements, Ch. 20, p. 709; 1968 Assassination Riots and the Chicago Convention Clashes, Ch. 20, p. 712-713.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.4 → Key Concepts: Students examine nonviolent resistance as pioneered by Gandhi and adopted by King—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sit-ins, freedom riders, the response to police violence in Birmingham and the 1963 March on Washington—and weigh it against the movement's more confrontational currents. Develops the ability to compare nonviolent and violent approaches utilized by groups to achieve civil rights.

SS.912.A.7.6

Assess key figures and organizations in shaping the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.

Student Edition: Gunnar and "An American Dilemma," Ch. 19, p. 674–675; The NAACP and Brown v. Board of Education, Ch. 20, p. 694; Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Ch. 20, p. 695; Gandhi's Influence on King's Nonviolent Philosophy, Ch. 20, p. 695; The Greensboro Sit-Ins and Freedom Riders, Ch. 20, p. 695; Robert Kennedy and Federal Protection of the Freedom Riders, Ch. 20, p. 697; John F. Kennedy and the Civil Rights Act, Ch. 20, p. 697–698; Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Ch. 20, p. 699; Signing of the Voting Rights Act (Figure 20.13 — King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Ralph Abernathy), Ch. 20, p. 704; Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement, Ch. 20, p. 704–705.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.4 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students trace how legal challenges beginning in the 1930s, led by the NAACP, set the stage for the activism of the 1950s and 1960s, assessing the organizations and figures who shaped the movement and the Black Power current that followed. Develops the ability to assess key figures and organizations in shaping the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.

SS.912.A.7.7

Assess the building of coalitions between African Americans, whites, and other groups in achieving integration and equal rights.

Student Edition: Federal Government Support — Brown v. Board, Robert Kennedy, and the Civil Rights/Voting Rights Acts, Ch. 20, p. 694, 697–699, 703; King Links the Movement to the American Dream and Christian Tradition, Ch. 20, p. 695; "I Have a Dream" and the Vision of Interracial Unity, Ch. 20, p. 698; Other Groups Adopt the Civil Rights Movement's Methods, Ch. 20, p. 709.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.4 → Key Concepts: Students assess the coalitions that carried the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, examining what integration required of African Americans, of white allies and of other groups, and judging what made the coalition effective where earlier efforts had failed. Develops the ability to assess the building of coalitions between African Americans, whites, and other groups in achieving integration and equal rights.

SS.912.A.7.8

Analyze significant Supreme Court decisions relating to integration, busing, affirmative action, the rights of the accused and reproductive rights.

Student Edition: Dennis v. United States / Smith Act Convictions, Ch. 19, p. 661; Plessy v. Ferguson, Ch. 19, p. 675; Brown v. Board of Education, Ch. 20, p. 694; Roe v. Wade, Ch. 21, p. 718.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.4 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine the sequence of legal challenges from the 1930s through Brown and after, analyzing how Supreme Court decisions on integration reshaped what the law required and what remained contested. Develops the ability to analyze significant Supreme Court decisions relating to integration.

SS.912.A.7.9

Examine the similarities of social movements (e.g., Native Americans, Hispanics, women, anti-war protesters) of the 1960s and 1970s.

Student Edition: Social Movements of the 1960s and Shared Origins in Civil Rights, Ch. 20, p. 709; March on the Pentagon (Figure 20.16), Ch. 20, p. 710.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.7 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Alongside the anti-war movement the chapter teaches, students use teacher-provided accounts of the farm workers' movement, the American Indian Movement and the women's movement to identify what the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s shared in method — organization, publicity, non-violent confrontation — and where their aims diverged. Develops the ability to examine the similarities of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

SS.912.A.7.10

Analyze the significance of Vietnam and Watergate on the government and people of the United States.

Student Edition: Vietnam Impact and Ending Ch. 20, p. 705–707, 709–713; Vietnamization and the Paris Peace Accords, Ch. 21, p. 722–723; Watergate and its Impact, Ch. 21, p. 727–732; Figure 21.7, p. 733; Lingering Effects, Ch. 21, p. 735.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 21 → Lesson 21.4 → Classroom Experience: Students examine what Watergate did to the presidency and how executive power by the 1970s compared with the original constitutional vision, working through Schlesinger's Imperial Presidency thesis, Ford's pardon of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Develops the ability to analyze the significance of Vietnam and Watergate on the government and people of the United States.

SS.912.A.7.11

Analyze the foreign policy of the United States as it relates to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Student Edition: Latin America - The Good Neighbor Policy, Ch. 18, p. 590; The Middle East — Israel, Suez, Camp David, and Iran, Ch. 19, p. 653–657, 669–671; Ch. 21, p. 736–739; Containment in Asia — China, Korea, and Vietnam, Ch. 19, p. 657–667; Ch. 20, p. 692, 705–712; Ch. 21, p. 722–725, 732; The Caribbean and Latin America — Cuba, the Cold War, and Reagan's Interventions, Ch. 19, p. 669–672; Ch. 20, p. 688–691; Ch. 21, p. 741, 751; Post-Cold War Realignment — Tiananmen, the Gulf War, and 9/11, Ch. 22, p. 761, 764–768, 774–777, 787.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 21 → Lesson 21.1 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine Nixon's opening to China and his realist prioritization of American interests in Asia. Ch. 21 → Lesson 21.7 → Classroom Experience: Students analyze Reagan-era policy in the Caribbean and Latin America and the Cold War's closing phase. Develops the ability to analyze the foreign policy of the United States as it relates to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

SS.912.A.7.12

Analyze political, economic, and social concerns that emerged at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Student Edition: Political Polarization, Ch. 22, p. 774, 789–791; The Great Recession and Institutional Distrust, Ch. 22, p. 777–779; Globalization and Trump's Political Rise, Ch. 22, p. 781–782; Declining Institutional Trust, Ch. 22, p. 789.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.6 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine how the Great Recession shaped the 2008 election and why the Tea Party emerged, assessing the political, economic and social concerns carried from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Develops the ability to analyze political, economic, and social concerns that emerged at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

SS.912.A.7.13

Analyze the attempts to extend New Deal legislation through the Great Society and the successes and failures of these programs to promote social and economic stability.

Student Edition: Truman's Fair Deal, Ch. 19, p. 643; The Great Society's Successes and Failures, Ch. 20, p. 703–704; Nixon and Reagan's Rollback of Great Society Programs, Ch. 21, p. 726, 746–748; Clinton's 1996 Welfare Reform, Ch. 22, p. 773–774.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 20 → Lesson 20.6 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students name Great Society programs enacted under Johnson—the expansion of food stamps, the National Endowments, Medicare and Medicaid—and assess them as an attempt to extend New Deal legislation, weighing successes against failures. Develops the ability to analyze the attempts to extend New Deal legislation through the Great Society and the successes and failures of these programs.

SS.912.A.7.14

Review the role of the United States as a participant in the global economy (e.g., trade agreements, international competition, impact on American labor, environmental concerns).

Student Edition: The Marshall Plan and Postwar Trade Policy, Ch. 19, p. 650–652; The Nixon Shock and 1970s Environmental Legislation, Ch. 21, p. 725; Globalization and Free Trade in the Post-Cold War Era (NAFTA, Manufacturing Decline, Trump's Tariffs), Ch. 22, p. 768-770, 772–773, 782–783.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.6 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Students review the American role in the global economy through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a free-trade zone with Canada and Mexico and passed chiefly on Republican votes, and the later argument that such agreements sent factory jobs abroad, weighing who gained and who bore the cost, then explain how one policy could be a president's proudest achievement and, twenty-two years later, a winning argument against the establishment. Develops the ability to review the role of the United States as a participant in the global economy including trade agreements, international competition and the impact on American labor.

SS.912.A.7.15

Analyze the effects of foreign and domestic terrorism on the American people.

Student Edition: Middle East Terrorism and Political Fallout (Sadat, Iran Hostage Crisis), Ch. 21, p. 737–739; Anticipating Global Terrorism, Ch. 22, p. 764; 9/11 and Its Aftermath, Ch. 22, p. 774–777; 9/11's Effect on American Identity and Patriotism, Epilogue, p. 798, 801.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.5 → Classroom Experience: Students identify which organization planned the September 11 attacks, what happened to the fourth hijacked plane, and the justification given for the invasion of Iraq, then analyze how those events reshaped American public life and politics. Develops the ability to analyze the effects of foreign and domestic terrorism on the American people.

SS.912.A.7.16

Examine changes in immigration policy and attitudes toward immigration since 1950.

Student Edition: Cold War Refugee Waves (Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia), Ch. 19, p. 672; Ch. 21, p. 732; The Immigration Act of 1965, Ch. 20, p. 703; 21st-Century Immigration and Border Politics, Ch. 22, p. 781–782, 787.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.6 → Guiding Classroom Questions: Students examine immigration as a driver of political realignment from the Great Recession forward, assessing how policy and public attitudes toward immigration shifted across the period. Develops the ability to examine changes in immigration policy and attitudes toward immigration since 1950.

SS.912.CG.3.15

Explain how citizens are affected by the local, state, and national governments.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.7 → Civic Discourse: Students identify one local official, one state official and one national official or employee whose work affects daily life, describe the role of each, and explain how government at all three levels reaches the ordinary citizen — then assess which level they encounter most often and why. Develops the ability to explain how citizens are affected by the local, state, and national governments.

SS.912.E.2.3

Research contributions of entrepreneurs, inventors, and other key individuals from various demographic backgrounds in the development of the United States.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 12 → Lesson 12.4 → Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Students examine how Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan achieved market dominance through consolidation, trusts and holding companies, then research two further inventors of the period, one African American and one woman, and one entrepreneur whose enterprise this economy made possible, recording each contribution and its effect on American life. Develops the ability to research contributions of entrepreneurs, inventors, and other key individuals from various demographic backgrounds in the development of the United States.

SS.912.E.3.5

Compare the current United States economy with other developed and developing nations.

Teacher's Edition: Ch. 22 → Lesson 22.7 → Analytical Skills: In the chapter's closing lesson on America's present condition, students use current figures from a reputable statistical source supplied by the teacher to compare the United States with one other developed nation and one developing nation across output per person, share of employment in manufacturing and one measure of living standards, tabulate the three comparisons, and explain what the differences show about where the American economy now sits in the world. Develops the ability to compare the current United States economy with other developed and developing nations.