Month: August 2009
AP USH IDs
98 Pages of terms and definitions complied by my beloved 2009-2010 APUSH class
A list of 1,600 terms from apstudent.com
AP USH Course Description
Here is the 174 page course manual for APUSH. It offers a course description as well as a truncated sample exam. You need not read the whole thing. But peruse the sample exam, pages 140-170. Maybe even take it as a pretest.
Here is the truncated version (2 pages). Please read this carefully and come to class with at least two questions, two comments, and one concern, all written one sheet of paper.
Zinn: Columbus, The Indians and Human Progress
Columbus, Indians, and Human Progress
Zinn was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn. He flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. In 1956, he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where he soon became involved in the Civil Rights Movement, which he participated in as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination related to his protest work, he moved to Boston University, where he became a leading critic of the Vietnam War.
He is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he feels are outside of the political and economic establishment.
Here is an autobiographical clip from YouTube
In his autobiography, You Can’t Stay Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn said, “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.” RIP.
Why We Must Ration Health Care
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
Read Singers’ take on the rationing debate
Retreat from Reconstruction: the Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an “end” to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of “Carpetbag rule” in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South.
How Is America Going To End? Five steps to totalitarian rule.
As Hitler and Mussolini prepared to storm Europe, fascism began to generate interest in the United States. In Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, an American president uses an economic crisis as a pretense to take over the media, imprison dissenters, and build his own private army (the Minute Men) into an indomitable force.
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.