us history questions

us history questions

Exploring Key Questions in US History

1. Introduction to the Study of US History

The issues and institutions addressed in this study of history are often controversial, and interest and passion regarding them are high. This is the power and the majesty of the study of US history – learning about our beliefs and actions and those of other members of our communal society. No semester of history can answer all of our students’ questions. The students presented in this study of history will only touch the surface. The discipline of history, however, is a continuing education about people, teaching us how men and women from different generations have struggled with their choices. With that understanding, students will be better and more secure leaders in an uncertain world.

For over 200 years, the United States, an English-speaking republic founded on Enlightenment thought and energized by an idea that liberty is applied to all human situations, has been a beacon of hope and example to the world. As the United States emerged and quickly became one of the world’s leading nations, it became a society where many of humanity’s grand questions and values would become defined. What is the ideal society? What is freedom and what limits are appropriate for human action? What is the role of religious faith in government and social life? What ideals should our family structures uphold? These questions have never had, nor will they ever have, a lack of serious devotees to one set of answers or another. Fundamental political questions are present in everyday life.

2. Impact of Colonialism and Settlement on Native American Communities

Before the arrival of non-Indians, the population of what is now the United States is estimated to have been between 5 and 10 million people. A census taken 150 years later found that fewer than 1 million remained. If this statistic is not secret, it is not well known. The millions of non-Indians who now live in the United States did not learn it in their history books. Indeed, they may ask, is this information true? How did it happen? What can account for such a dramatic decline in—or virtual elimination of—so many people? According to the pretty lies tradition, the blame is on diseases, primarily smallpox, which devastated Native American communities, especially those living along the coast and in the lands of the present-day South and southwestern regions of the country. According to the brutal truths tradition, this explanation is unacceptably incomplete because it occurred after the Europeans had done so much to help the problem along, and it downplays the impact of patterns of colonization on the survival of American Indian societies.

Key Questions: How did the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere lead to the demise of native populations, and how did it affect the survivors? If Europeans had never reached the Western Hemisphere, would native societies have continued to develop along traditional paths or would they have evolved as a result of their own interactions among themselves? Would a new center of civilization and world power have developed in the Western Hemisphere among Indian societies that scientists tell us have been at least as innovative and as intelligent as the societies of other continents? These questions are much harder to answer than the questions we have already asked about colonialism’s impact on Europe and about the origins of ideas about American Indians. There is much less consensus on the answers, and the consequences of these new questions may mean more to matters of justice and policy. Indeed, because of the impact of these key questions, historians have been reshaping their collective view of the meaning of the history of the Western Hemisphere.

3. Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution

The American Revolution was a unique event in human history in that it marked the first time democratic principles and philosophical ideas about freedom and liberty went from being mere abstractions discussed in elite intellectual circles to guiding the daily political and economic lives of ordinary people. However, the event of the Revolution was long in coming and involved numerous social, political, and economic changes and stresses that caused even its most elite and well-educated proponents to set out on the road to revolution with personal misgivings and an understandable reluctance to completely break with the established order. The period before and after the Declaration of Independence thus offers a fertile field for speculation on several key questions in United States history: under what circumstances and for what purposes should individuals be justified in opting for revolution; why did the case of British North America in the late 18th century meet these criteria; how did revolution change the character of Americans’ political and economic lives; and how has the American experience shaped other countries’ ideas about and struggles for democratic government and representative institutions.

4. Slavery and the Civil War: Examining the Roots of Division

The South thought it could not grow and prosper without new states and territories allowing slavery and attempted to leave the USA. This attempt led to a terrible war, which destroyed huge areas and killed thousands upon thousands of people. In its passage to destruction, it killed any feeling of the superiority of the United States as compared to the individual states in the minds of many people. The “old boy” or “elite” system began to crumple with the loss of life of many scions of the elite and the loss of wealth of others, who had owned the land that was destroyed, and who needed to find another means to become wealthy. The slaves were set free, to seek their fortune too, and they would change the nature of the product which had been their former base – cotton. The entire social order was about to be changed. After four long years, President Lincoln was killed, and the South had been very roughly defeated. Large areas were destroyed, and their wealth was depleted. They had no other choice – they asked to be allowed to re-enter the USA with their former status and privileges.

Slavery was an important social, moral, and political issue. Economically, the entire southeastern half of the USA was based on cotton and tobacco plantations, with thousands of small and large slave owners. People lived in small houses along the side of the plantation and in barns – sometimes even stables – in the center of the fields. They were the workers that raised the crop, from planting to gathering, and worked processing it in the plantation building near the home. These people had been kidnapped in Africa, and their rights generally did not exist in law. Efforts to restrict or eliminate slavery had been made several times over the years, until, as new areas of the USA were established, politicians argued about whether slavery should exist in those new areas or not. Finally, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president running on a platform which said that slavery should not exist in newly chartered lands.

5. The Civil Rights Movement and its Legacy in Modern America

The civil rights movement by 1963: segregation was illegal; voter registration had opened; lynching was drastically reduced. This legislation is important because it was the first time the federal government played an active role in desegregating private establishments. The Civil Rights Act prohibited the unequal application of voter laws, notably by southern states that used both legal and extralegal means to deny black citizens their right to vote. The act had the effect of making voter discrimination more difficult, and thus enabling the election of blacks to office. The act quickly made a difference. Within months, 250,000 new black voters had been registered. For the first time, black voters in Alabama cast their ballots for a black candidate for governor. In 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the most comprehensive voting rights bill in the history of the United States.

The Civil Rights Movement and its Legacy in Modern America Helpdesk. Answer: The Civil Rights Movement, or the American Civil Rights Movement, was the political, social, and legal struggle of black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement was supported, notably in the South and northern border states, by the great African-American migration, rich black literature and culture, and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the SCLC, and the SNCC.