Dustin Leochner
Blue Valley Southwest High School
Overland Park Kansas
Course Outline – Semester 2
Unit 1: The Rise of Big Business and Labor (4 weeks)
Readings:
The American Pageant
Speaking of America
Chapter 23,24,25,26,28
Chapter 13, The Rise of Modern America
Chapter 14, Old Americans, New Americans
Chapter 15, Protestors and Imperialists
Chapter 16, The Progressive Era
Unit Objectives: At the end of this unit, each student will be able to:
1.
Understand the major events and contributing factors of Industrialization and the rise of Industrial Capitalism.
 Investigate the Industrial growth: railroads, iron, coal, electricity, steel, oil, banks; corporate mergers that
produced trusts and cartels and the economic and political policies of industrial leaders.
 Understand Laissez-faire conservatism, Gospel of Wealth, myth of "self-made man," Social Darwinism;
survival of the fittest: the similarities and differences between the ideologies of Social Darwinism and Social
Gospel (e.g., biographies of William Graham Summer, Billy Sunday, Dwight L. Moody), social critics and
dissenters.
 Evaluate how business use of technology, natural resources, redesigned financial management structures,
advances in marketing, and a growing labor force to dramatically increase production of goods and profit.
 Compare the effects of industrial capitalism on worker/work-place.
 Understand the impact of mechanized agriculture, dependence on rail transportation, and consolidation of
agricultural markets on the American farmer and the socio-political movements this led to.
 Research the union movement, the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor and Haymarket,
Homestead, and Pullman.
2. Analyze the major components of the Urban Society.
 Understand the lure of the city; the changing landscape, including the growth of cities linked by industry and
trade; the development of cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class.
 Analyze the role of immigration in American industrial society and economics..
 Explain city problems, slums, machine politics; the effect of urban political machines and responses by
immigrants and middle-class reforms.
 Contextualize the growth of political machines and corruption in the urban setting.
 Identify factors contributing to a growing middle class
3. Analyze National Politics, 1877-1896: The Gilded Age inspired political debates over citizenship, corruption, and the
proper relationship between business and government.
 Contextualize the development, and goals of the Populist Party within the environment of agrarian economic
instability.
 Understand issues of tariff controversy, currency, railroad regulation, and trusts.
 Evaluate the role of economic greed and self-interest on the corruption of the political system.
 Analyze the evolution of female equality in regard to suffrage, education, voluntary organizations, and
social/political reform.
4. Analyze the Progressive Era.
 Read and discuss the Origins of Progressivism, progressive attitudes and motives, muckrakers, social Gospel.
 Understand municipal, state, and national reforms, Political: suffrage, Social and economic: regulation, the
effect of political programs and activities of the Progressives
 Discuss the role of government regulation in free market capitalism.
 Compare Women’s role: family, work, education, unionization, and suffrage.
 Understand Roosevelt’s Square Deal, managing the trusts, and conservation.
 Read and discuss Wilson’s New Freedom, tariffs, banking reform, and the Antitrust Act of 1914.
Dustin Leochner
Blue Valley Southwest High School
Overland Park Kansas
4. Identify the plight of African Americans and American Indians in the United States during the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era.
 Analyze the differing philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
 Understand the work of African American reformers in the struggle for political and social equality
 Evaluate the impact of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow laws on African Americans
 Summarize the events leading to the conquest of western Indian tribes and the implementation of the
reservation system
 Analyze the impact of the Dawes Severalty Act on Native American culture and societies.
Unit 1, Major Assignments and Assessments:
Bigness Simulation
DBQ
Unit Exam
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Unit 2: War and Peace; Prosperity and Depression (6 weeks)
Readings:
The American Pageant
Speaking of America
Chapters 27,29,30,31,32,33,34
Chapter 15, Protestors and Imperialists
Chapter 17, World War 1
Chapter 18, The Roaring Twenties
Chapter 19, The Great Depression, The New Deal
Chapter 20, World War II
Unit Objectives: At the end of this unit, each student will be able to:
1. Understand Foreign Policy, 1865-1914.
 Understand motivations for imperialism; economic opportunities, racial theories, competition with European
empires, and the perception in the 1890s that the Western frontier was “closed”. Influence of Manifest Destiny
 Understand the arguments made by anti-imperialists: self-determination, racial theories, tradition of
isolationism.
 Review the Far East: John Hay, the Open Door and the purpose and effects of the policy.
 Analyze Theodore Roosevelt’s Big Stick diplomacy including: the Panama Canal, Roosevelt Corollary, and the
Far East.
 Analyze the Taft and Dollar Diplomacy.
 Analyze the Wilson and Moral Diplomacy.
 Analyze the cause/effect nature of the Spanish-American War.
2. Analyze the significant events of The First World War.
 Analyze the problems of neutrality, submarines, economic ties, psychological and ethnic ties.
 Understand preparedness and pacifism.
 Research mobilization, fighting the war, financing the war, war boards, propaganda, public opinion, civil
liberties, and the political, economic and social ramifications of World War I on the home-front.
 Understand Wilson’s Fourteen Points, The Treaty of Versailles, and the Ratification fight.
 Explain the Postwar demobilization, Red scare, and the Labor strife.
3. Understand the New Era: The 1920’s.
 Explore the Republican governments, business creed, and the Harding scandals.
 Understand Economic development, prosperity and wealth, farm and labor problems, the monetary issues of the
late 19th and early 20th century that gave rise to the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the weaknesses in
key sectors of the economy in the late 1920s.
 Understand new culture, consumerism: automobile, radio, movies, women, the family; the passage of the 19th
Amendment and the changing role of women in society, modern religion, literature of alienation, Jazz age,
Harlem Renaissance: the Harlem Renaissance and new trends in literature, music, and art, with special attention
to the work of writers (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes).
Dustin Leochner
Blue Valley Southwest High School
Overland Park Kansas


Compare the conflict of cultures, prohibition, bootlegging, Nativism, Ku Klux Klan, Religious fundamentalism
versus modernists.
Analyze myth of isolation, replacing the League of Nations, business and diplomacy.
4. Understand the impact of the Depression, 1929-1933.
 Understand the causes for and significance of the Wall Street crash.
 Analyze the Depression economy.
 Read and discuss the moods of despair, agrarian unrest, and the Bonus march.
 Research Hoover-Stimson diplomacy in Japan.
5. Analyze the New Deal.
 Research Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR Library), background, ideas, and philosophy of New Deal.
 Understand 100 Days; "alphabet agencies."
 Discuss the Second New Deal.
 Analyze critics, left and right.
 Discuss the effects and controversies of New Deal economic policies and the expanded role of the federal
government in society and the economy since the 1930’s (e.g. Works Progress Administration, Social Security,
National Labor Relations Board, farm programs, regional development policies and energy development such
as the Tennessee Valley Authority, California Central Valley Project, Bonneville Dam).
 Understand the rise of CIO; labor strikes: the advances and retreats of organized labor, from the creation of the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization to current issues of a post-industrial
multinational economy, including the United Farmworkers in California.
 Research the Supreme Court fight.
 Study the Recession of 1938.
 Compare American people in the Depression, social values, women, ethnic groups, Indian Reorganization Act,
Mexican-American deportation, and the racial issue.
6. Understand Diplomacy in the 1930s.
 Understand Good Neighbor Policy: Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
 Read and discuss the role of the London Economic Conference.
 Discuss the role of Disarmament.
 Understand Isolationism: neutrality legislation.
 Discuss Aggressors: Japan, Italy, and Germany.
 Research Appeasement.
 Review Rearmament; Blitzkrieg and Lend-Lease.
 Analyze the Atlantic Charter.
 Read and discuss the impact of Pearl Harbor.
7. Understand the significant events of the Second World War.
 Understand organizing for war, mobilizing production, propaganda, and the internment of Japanese Americans.
 Research the war in Europe, Africa, Mediterranean, and D-Day.
 Discuss the war in the Pacific: Hiroshima, Nagasaki; the decision to drop atomic bombs and the consequences.
 Understand the role and sacrifices of individual American soldiers, as well as the unique contributions of the
special fighting forces (e.g. the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442 Regimental Combat team, and the Navajo
Codetalkers).(See AHS World War II Links)
 Review the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home-front, including the internment of
Japanese Americans (e.g.Fred Korematsu v. United States of America) and the restrictions on German and
Italian resident aliens; the response of the administration to Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups; the
role of women in military production; the role and growing political demands of African Americans.
 Discuss diplomacy, war aims, wartime conferences: Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam.
 Investigate the Postwar atmosphere; the United Nations.
Unit 2, Major Assignments and Assessments:
DBQ
Negro Leauges Museum Field Trip
Dustin Leochner
Blue Valley Southwest High School
Overland Park Kansas
Unit Exam
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Unit 3: America in the Cold War Era: (4 weeks)
Readings:
The American Pageant
Speaking of America
Chapters 35-39
Chapter 23, Postwar America
Chapter 24, The Tumultuous ‘60’s
Chapter 25, Conservative Resurgence
Unit Objectives: At the end of this unit, each student will be able to:
1. Understand the role of Truman.
 Research the Postwar domestic adjustments.
 Understand the Taft-Hartley Act.
 Read and discuss the Civil rights and the election of 1948.
2. Analyze Eisenhower and Modern Republicanism.
 Discuss domestic frustrations; McCarthyism
 Research the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery bus boycott, and
the Greensboro sit-in.
 Discuss American People: homogenized society, prosperity: economic consolidation, consumer culture, and
consensus of values.
 Research the Space race.
3. Understand Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society.
 Explain the new domestic programs, tax cut, war on poverty, and affirmative action.
 Understand civil rights and civil liberties, African Americans: political, cultural, and economic roles, the role of civil
rights advocates (e.g. biographies of A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, Thurgood Marshall,
James Farmer, Rosa Parks), including the significance of Martin Luther King’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and
"I Have a Dream" Speech, resurgence of feminism: the women’s rights movement from the era of Elizabeth Stanton
and Susan Anthony and the passage of the 19th Amendment to the movement launched in the 1960’s, including
differing perspectives on the role of women, the New Left and the Counterculture, emergence of the Republican
party in the South, the Supreme Court and theMiranda decision.
4. Analyze the Nixon presidency.
 Read and discuss the Election of 1968.
 Understand New Federalism.
 Understand the Supreme Court and major court decisions of the era.
 Explain the Watergate crisis and Nixon’s resignation.
 Understand Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, Vietnam: escalation and pullout, China: restoring relations, Soviet
Union: détente.
Unit 3, Major Assignments and Assessments:
Create a DBQ
Unit Test
Dustin Leochner
Blue Valley Southwest High School
Overland Park Kansas
Unit 4: Contemporary America (3 weeks)
Readings:
The American Pageant
Chapters 40-41
Unit Objectives:
1.
Understand the role of the United States since 1980.
 Summarize Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.
 Review the role of George H.W. Bush and the end of the Cold War.
 Analyze Clinton as a New Democrat.
 Understand technology and economic bubbles and recessions, race relations, and the role of women.
 Discuss society, old and new urban problems, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, resurgent fundamentalism, African
Americans and local, state, and national politics.
 Understand the prison industrial complex and the War on Drugs.
 Analyze 9/11/2001 and the domestic and foreign policies that followed.
 Obama: change or continuity?
Unit 4, Major Assignments and Assessments:
DBQ
Take Home Final
AP Exam Review Sessions