United States History I Content Standards

Building on knowledge from previous years, students should be able to:

Topic 1: Colonial Foundations 

Compelling Question: How did multicultural contact in America cause conflict and exchange?

1. Contact between Native American groups and Europeans occurred through cultural exchanges, resistance efforts, and conflict.  Students will trace European contact with Native Americans, including the Dutch, the English, the French and the Spanish. Students will examine the impacts of European colonization on Native Americans, who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict. 

2. A number of factors influenced colonial economic development, social structures, and labor systems, causing variation by region. Students will examine the impacts of geographic factors on patterns of settlement and the development of colonial economic systems. Students will examine the factors influencing variations in colonial social structures and labor systems. Students will explore emerging gender norms in the colonial context and as they relate to conditions of race and class.  Students will analyze slavery as a deeply established component of the colonial economic system and social structure, indentured servitude vs. slavery, the increased concentration of enslaved people in the South, and the development of slavery as a racial institution. 

3. Colonial political developments were influenced by British political traditions, Enlightenment ideas, and the colonial experience. Self-governing structures were common, and yet varied across the colonies.  Students will examine colonial political institutions to determine how they were influenced by Enlightenment ideas, British traditions such as coverture, the Magna Carta, and the colonial experience.  Students will examine colonial democratic principles by studying documents such as the Mayflower Compact and the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, colonial governmental structures such as New England town meetings and the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the practice of the right of petition in New Netherland. 

Topic 2. Origins of the Revolution and the Constitution

Compelling Question: How did events of the Revolutionary period inform the ideas in the Constitution?

1. Analyze the economic, intellectual, and cultural forces that contributed to the American Revolution.

2. Explain the reasons for the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the North American component of the global Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France (1756-1763), and analyze how the war affected colonists and Native Peoples.

3. Explain Britain’s policies in the North American colonies (e.g., the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townsend Duties, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts) and compare the perspectives of the British Parliament, British colonists, and Native Peoples in North America on these policies. 

4. Describe Patriots’ responses to increased British taxation (e.g., the slogan, “no taxation without representation,” the actions of the Stamp Act Congress, the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party, the Suffolk Resolves) and the role of Massachusetts people (e.g., Samuel Adams, Crispus Attucks, John Hancock, James Otis, Paul Revere, John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Phillis Wheatley, Peter Salem, Prince Estabrook). 

5. Explain the main argument of the Declaration of Independence, the rationale for seeking independence, and its key ideas on equality, liberty, natural rights, and the rule of law.

6. Describe the key battles of the Revolution (e.g., Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, Yorktown); the winter encampment at Valley Forge; and key leaders, spies, and participants of the Continental Army.

7. Explain the reasons for the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in 1781 and evaluate the weaknesses of the Articles as a plan for government, the reasons for their failure and how events such as Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-1787 led to the Constitutional Convention.  

8. Describe the Constitutional Convention, the roles of specific individuals (e.g. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Washington, Nicholas Gilman, John Langdon, Mercy Otis Warren), and the conflicts and compromises (e.g., compromises over representation, slavery, the executive branch, and ratification).

Clarification Statement: Students studied the debates between the Federalists and anti-Federalists in grade 8; these arguments may be briefly reviewed.

Key Primary Sources for Topic 1 in Appendix D

An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province (1740) (Slave Codes of South Carolina)

Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams 31 March-5 April 1776

The Declaration of Independence (1776)

The Constitution of the United States (1787)

The Federalist, Number 10 (1787) 

The United States Bill of Rights (1791) 

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 2 in Appendix D

The Case for Ending Slavery (document collections 1620s-1865, Massachusetts Historical Society)

The Suffolk Resolves (1774)

Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

The Northwest Ordinance (1787) 

Selected Federalist Papers Numbers 1, 9, 39, 51, 78

Selected responses by Anti-Federalists (1787-1789) writing under the names “The Federal Farmer “(Richard Henry Lee) and “Centinel” Pairings to contrast arguments: Federalist 1 and Anti-Federalist 1, Federalist 10 and Anti-Federalist 9, Federalist 51 and Anti-Federalist 46, Federalist 84 and Anti-Federalist 84

William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip as Pronounced at the Odeon in Federal Street, Boston (1836)

Topic 3. Democratization and expansion

Compelling Question: How was the balance of Federal and state authority tested in the early Republic?

1. Evaluate the major policies and political developments of the presidencies of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, and their implications for the expansion of Federal power and foreign policy (e.g., the emerging role of the First Lady, the origins of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties in the conflicting ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on topics such as foreign policy, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the National Bank; the establishment of the concept of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison). 

2. Evaluate the presidency of Andrew Jackson, including the spoils system, the Peggy Eaton Affair, the National Bank veto, and the policy of Indian removal and resistance (e.g. Nanyehi or Nancy Ward, Catherine Beecher “Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the United States”), and the Nullification Crisis. 

3. Analyze the causes and long and short term consequences of America’s westward expansion from 1800 to 1854 (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, growing diplomatic assertiveness after the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; the concept of Manifest Destiny and pan-Indian resistance, the establishment of slave states and free states in the West, the acquisition of Texas and the Southwestern territories as a consequence of the Mexican-American War in 1846-48, the California Gold Rush, and the rapid rise of Chinese immigration in California). 

4. Evaluate the exclusion and involvement of women, minorities, and non landowning men from political involvement. Examine the extent of democratic expansion based on the practice of coverture, limits on women’s speech, juries by their peers, and political representation in the early republic. 

Key Primary Sources for Topic 2 in Appendix D 

George Washington, Farewell Address (1796) 

Tecumseh, Call for Pan-Indian Resistance (1810)

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 2 in Appendix D 

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801)

John Adams, Outrage Over Impressment ( 1807)

Alexander Amderson, 1807 Embargo Cartoon ( 1807)

J.C. Jones, Dissent Against the War of 1812 ( 1812)

Calvin, Munn, The Folly of Joining The Army. ( 1812) 

Clay, Henry,  Declaration of The War of 1812. ( 1812) 

 James Madison,  They Call It a War for Commerce!. (1812) 

Excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1839)

Norman Asing, “To His Excellency, Governor Bigler: We Are Not the Degraded Race You Would Make Us” (1852)

Topic 4. Economic growth in the North, South, and West

Compelling Question: How were the North, South, and West interdependent in the antebellum period?

1. Explain the importance of the Transportation Revolution of the 19^th century (e.g., the introduction of steamboats, canals, roads, bridges, turnpikes, and railroad networks; the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and its stimulus to east/west trade, the growth of Midwestern towns and cities, and the strengthening of a market economy). 

2. Analyze the effects of industrial growth throughout antebellum America, and in New England, the growth of the textile and machinery industries and maritime commerce.

3. the technological improvements and inventions that contributed to industrial growth and maritime commerce 

4. the impact of the cotton gin on the economics of Southern agriculture and slavery and the connection between cotton production by slave labor in the South and the economic success of Northern textile industries

5. the causes and impact of the wave of immigration from Northern Europe to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s (e.g., the impact of the English occupation of Ireland, the Irish famine, and industrial development in the U.S.) 

6. the rise of a business class of merchants and manufacturers

7. the classification of work as respectable, paid, and unpaid labor and the segregation of different types of work by race, class, and gender

8. the role of women as the primary workforce in New England textile factories and female workers’ activism in advocating for reform of working conditions, yet their exclusion from male dominated unions 

9. Describe the role of slavery in the economies of the industrialized North and the agricultural South, the transition from productive to reproductive value of enslaved women, explain reasons for the rapid growth of slavery in southern states, the Caribbean islands, and South America after 1800, and analyze how banks, insurance companies, and other institutions profited directly or indirectly from the slave trade and slave labor. 

10. Research primary sources such as antebellum newspapers, slave narratives, accounts of slave auctions, and the Fugitive Slave Act, to analyze one of the following aspects of slave life and resistance (e.g., the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the rebellion of Denmark Vesey of 1822, the rebellion of Nat Turner in 1831; the role of the Underground Railroad (e.g. Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs); the development of ideas of racial superiority; the African American Colonization Society movement to deport and resettle freed African Americans in a colony in West Africa).

Key Primary Sources for Topic 3 in Appendix D 

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) 

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 3 in Appendix D 

David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (1829)

Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Call to Rebellion (1843) 

Factory Tracts: Factory Life as It Is by an Operative, Lowell, Massachusetts (1845)

Topic 5. Social, political, and religious change

Compelling Question: How did religious and ethical beliefs shape American reform movements?

1. Describe important religious and social trends that shaped America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries (e.g., the First and Second Great Awakenings; the increase in the number of Protestant denominations; the concept of “Republican Motherhood;” hostility to Catholic immigration and the rise of the Native American Party, also known as the “Know-Nothing” Party). 

2. Using primary sources, research the reform movements in the United States in the early to mid-19^th century, concentrating on one of the following and considering its connections to other aspects of reform:

3. the Abolitionist movement, the reasons individual men and women (e.g., Frederick Douglass, Abbey Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Charles Lennox Remond, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Theodore Weld, Harriet Jacobs) fought for their cause, and the responses of southern and northern white men and women to abolitionism.

4. the women’s rights and suffrage movements, their connections with abolitionism, and the expansion of women’s educational opportunities (e.g., Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Fuller, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Mary Lyon and the founding of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, later Mt. Holyoke College).

5. Horace Mann’s campaign for free compulsory public education, increased literacy rates, and the growth of newspaper and magazine publishing.

6. the movement to provide support for people with disabilities, such as the founding of schools for students with cognitive, hearing, or vision disabilities; and the establishment of asylums for people with mental illness (e.g. Dorthea Dix).

7. the Transcendentalist movement (e.g., the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, and the concepts of materialism, liberty, appreciation of the natural world, self-reliance, abolitionism, and civil disobedience).

Key Primary Source for Topic 4 in Appendix D 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, primary author: The Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Conference (1848)

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 4 in Appendix D

Dorothea Dix, “Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature” (1843)

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” (1849) 

Topic 6. The Civil War and Reconstruction: causes and consequences 

Compelling Question: How did sectional differences over slavery in the North, South, Midwest, and West contribute to the Civil War?

1. Describe how the expansion of the United States to the Midwest contributed to the growing importance of sectional politics in the early 19^th century and significantly influenced the balance of power in the federal government.

2. Analyze critical policies and events leading to the Civil War and connections among them (e.g., 1820: the Missouri Compromise; 1831-2: the South Carolina Nullification Crisis 1840s: the Wilmot Proviso; the Mexican-American War; 1850s: the Compromise of 1850; the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Supreme Court decision in Dred (& Harriet) Scott v. Sandford; the Lincoln-Douglas debates; John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, the election of Abraham Lincoln). 

3. Analyze Abraham Lincoln’s presidency (e.g., the effects on the South of the Union’s naval blockade of trade with other countries, the Emancipation Proclamation, his views on slavery and national unity, and the political obstacles he encountered). 

4. Analyze the roles and policies of Civil War leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant and evaluate the short- and long-term impact of important Civil War battles (e.g., the Massachusetts 54^th Regiment at the Battle at Ft. Wagner, and the Battles of Bull Run, Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Appomattox).

5. Using primary sources such as diaries, reports in newspapers and periodicals, photographs, and cartoons/illustrations, document the roles of men and women who fought or served troops in the Civil War.

6. Analyze the consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction (e.g., the physical and economic destruction of the South and the loss of life of both Southern and Northern troops; the politicization of southern white women, the increased role of the federal government; the impeachment of President Johnson; failure of universal suffrage and the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments; the expansion of the industrial capacity of the Northern U.S.; the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau and organizations such as the American League of Colored Laborers, the National Negro Labor Council, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union; the accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction; the presidential election of 1876; and the end of Reconstruction).

7. Analyze the long term consequences of one aspect of the Jim Crow era (1870s-1960s) that limited educational and economic opportunities for African Americans (e.g., segregated public schools, white supremacist beliefs, the threat of violence from extra-legal groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the statues erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka).

8. Evaluate the impact of educational and literary responses to emancipation and Reconstruction (e.g., founding of black colleges to educate teachers for African American schools, the U.S. publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens in 1885, and the development of African American literature in the early 20^th century). 

Key Primary Sources for Topic 5 in Appendix D 

Frederick Douglass, Independence Day speech (1852), “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” at Rochester, New York 

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863) 

Second Inaugural Address (1865) 

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 5 in Appendix D 

Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” (1838)

“A House Divided” speech (1858)

Topic 7. Rebuilding the United States: industry and immigration

Compelling Question: Industrialists have been called “Captains of Industry” and “Robber Barons.” Which title is more appropriate for them and why?

1. Explain the various causes of the Industrial Revolution (e.g., the economic impetus provided by the Civil War; important technological and scientific advances, such as the expansion of the railroad system; unpaid labors of women; the role of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt).

2. Make connections among the important consequences of the Industrial Revolution (e.g., economic growth and the rise of big business; environmental impact of industries; the expansion of cities; the emergence of labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers; sexism within the labor unions that created pay gaps; workers’ distrust of monopolies; the rise of the Populist Party under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan or the rise of the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs). 

3. Evaluate the effects of the entry of women into the workforce after the Civil War and analyze women’s political organizations, researching one of the following topics: the opening of teaching and nursing professions to women; growing employment opportunities in clothing manufacture as a result of the invention of the sewing machine; Comstock laws; in office work as the result of the invention of the typewriter, and in retail sales as the result of the creation of department stores; the formation of the Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874.

4. Using primary source images, data, and documents, describe the causes of the immigration of Germans, the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese to America in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the major roles of these immigrants in industrialization and the building of railroads. 

5. Analyze the consequences of the continuing westward expansion of the American people after the Civil War and evaluate the impact of the 14^th Amendment on Native Peoples and Asian and European immigrant men and women. Examples of research materials:  the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), the Navajo Treaty (1868), the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Dawes Act (1887), cartoons by Thomas Nast on immigration, Native Peoples, and politics for Harper’s Weekly Magazine in the 1870s-1880s.

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 7 in Appendix D 

Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” poem (1883)

Luther Standing Bear, Lakota, “Life in the Carlisle Boarding School” account of life in an Indian Boarding School in 1879, from his memoir Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933)

Topic 8. Progressivism and World War I

1. Explain what Progressivism meant in the early 20^th century and analyze a text or images by a Progressive leader (e.g., Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan, John Dewey, Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, Lewis Hine, William H. Taft, Ida Tarbell, Woodrow Wilson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett).

2. Research and analyze one of the following governmental policies of the Progressive Period, determine the problem it was designed to solve, and assess its long and short-term effectiveness: bans against child labor, the development of Indian boarding schools, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), the Meat Packing Act (1906), the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914), the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). 

3. Analyze the campaign for, and the opposition to, women’s suffrage in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries; describe the role of leaders and organizations in achieving the passage of the 19^th Amendment (e.g., Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett the National Woman Suffrage Association, National Women’s Party, League of Women Voters, National Association of Colored Women's Clubs).

4. Analyze the strategies of African Americans to achieve basic civil rights in the early 20^th century, and determine the extent to which they met their goals by researching leaders and organizations (e.g., Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Booker T, Washington, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and National Association of Colored Women's Clubs).

5. Analyze the causes and course of growing role of the United States in world affairs from the Civil War to World War I, researching and reporting on one of the following ideas, policies, or events, and, where appropriate, including maps, timelines, and other visual resources to clarify connections among nations and events,

6. the use of missionaries and teachers to Americanize and Christianize foreign lands

7. the purchase of Alaska from Russia (1867)

8. the influence of the United States in Hawaii leading to annexation and the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani (1898)

9. the Spanish-American War (1898) and resulting changes in sovereignty for Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines; the Philippine-American War (1899-1902)

10. U.S. expansion into Asia beginning in 1899 under the Open Door policy

11. Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) and his “big stick” diplomacy in the Caribbean

12. The Platt Amendment describing the role of the United States in Cuba (1901) and the subsequent occupation of Cuba (1903, 1906-1909)

13. the role of the United States in the building of the Panama Canal (1904-1914)

14. William Howard Taft’s foreign policy of Dollar Diplomacy

15. United States involvement in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)

16. Explain the rationale and events leading to the entry of the U.S. into World War I (e.g., unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of the Lusitania, the Zimmerman telegram, the concept of “making the world safe for democracy.”)

17. Analyze the role played by the U.S. in support of the Allies and in the conduct of the war

18. Explain the course and significance of Woodrow Wilson’s wartime diplomacy, including his Fourteen Points, the League of Nations, and the failure of the Versailles Treaty. For example, students take on the roles of legislators and debate whether or not the United States should join the League of Nations. This is an opportunity for students to engage with the concept of “making the world safe for democracy” that they will encounter in United States History II and World History II. 

Key Primary Sources for Topic 8 in Appendix D

Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism” speech (1910) 

Woodrow Wilson, “Fourteen Points” speech (1918)

Suggested Primary Sources for Topic 8 in Appendix D

Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address” speech (1895) 

W. E. B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter, primary authors, “The Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles” (1905)

Jane Addams collection (1860-1935)

Lewis Hine, Photographs of child laborers (1908-1909)

The Indian Citizenship Act (1924)