1. Frontier Encounters 1865-1896

Essay Question:

Explain the expansion to and settling of the trans-Mississippi West. Describe the backgrounds and motives of male and female settlers of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, the economics of the frontier, ideologies about expansion, and the incentives that the federal government provided to encourage settlement.

Identify the methods the United States utilized to address the existence of Native Americans in the West. Explain the strategies of removal, treaty making, violence, and assimilation; consider the motives for each strategy and its benefits and drawbacks for settlers, Native Americans, and the United States.

Considerations:

• Indian Wars on the Plains
• Religious Refugees and Immigrants
• Homesteaders and Exodusters
• Legislation passed to limit tribal entities.

2. American Industry in the Age of Organization 1877-1900

Discuss the positive and negative social consequences of the "American Industrial Revolution." What benefits accrued from the rapid rise in the economic status of the United States, what were its social costs, and how do you weigh the balance between them?

Explain Gilded Age theories of labor and the development of the middle class, with an emphasis on the new lifestyles that emerged out of industrialization. Describe how this shift led to new anxieties about gender, race, and sexuality, and identify the ways Americans handled these anxieties.

Considerations:

• the interrelationship of the rise of heavy industry, rapid urbanization, immigration, and the expansion of the industrial workforce
• widening economic disparity between classes in American society
• worker unrest and the rise of labor unions
• Social Darwinism's emphasis on individualism and competition

3. Workers and Farmers in the Age of Organization 1877-1900

Explain the effects of industrialization on both skilled and unskilled workers. Describe the impact of mechanization on the daily work, leisure time, and economic well-being of workers. Identify the key labor organizations that emerged in the age of industrialization. Analyze the different styles and goals of each union, and explain the challenges from businessmen and the government that each union encountered.

Considerations:

• Growth of the labor organizations
• People's Party
• Farmers unite
• Labor uprisings

4. Cities, Immigrants, and the Nation 1880-1914

Explain the origins, patterns, and circumstances that fueled the wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Describe what immigrants expected to find upon their arrival and what they actually found.

Analyze the reactions of native-born Americans to the influx of immigrants. Assess the efforts they made to understand and address the social problems that accompanied that influx.

Considerations:

• The character of the city: transportation systems, neighborhoods, and the environment
• The dynamics of urban politics: political machines, party bosses, and graft
• The city and the reformist movement
• New v. Old Immigrants

5. Progressivism and the Search for Order 1900-1917

What assumptions and goals characterized progressivism as a philosophy, and how did it influence American society and politics domestically and internationally? How did progressive reformers confront the social, political, economic, and moral problems of their age, and to what extent were they successful?

Define the concepts of social justice and social control, and explain how both trends functioned in the Progressive Era. Identify the core issues within these trends, including the settlement house movement, women's suffrage, support for immigrants and labor, prohibition, segregation and desegregation, education reform, and antivice activism.

Considerations:

• broad areas of progressive reform: social justice, government efficiency and activism, inclusive democracy, regulation of big business
• the influence of middle-class values and assumptions in progressive thought
• tensions and contradictions within progressivism
• the goal of exporting American conceptions of democracy and freedom to the world
• Jim Crow and the nature of racist segregation

6. An Anxious Affluence 1919-1929

Describe the competing cultural trends in the 1920s, including nativism, modernism, fundamentalism, black nationalism, and racism. Identify the reasons for the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the origins of the black cultural renaissance, and the religious and social debates
that led to the Scopes trial in Tennessee.

Analyze the influence of popular culture on social norms and morals. State the innovations that allowed for the spread of mass culture and explain their impact.

Considerations:

• Challenges in social change
• Harlem Renaissance
• KKK, Nativism, Marcus Garvey and Fundamentalists
• Racial Violence
• Cultural wars