ap us history textbook

ap us history textbook

A Comprehensive Guide to American History: From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present

1. Introduction: The Importance of Studying American History

Retrospect provides the only magic by which to extract broader meanings from events. By some lights, the first task of all history is to seek the enactment of the American past as the first national republic of systems, manifest destiny. We have a simple faith that the process of history can provide a great deal of understanding of where we have been and indicate where we are more likely to be going in the complex pattern of self-interest, idealism, and wishful thinking which must shape the particular public issues which will sooner or later be joined. This close examination of particular public issues will suggest some apparent truisms, but explaining the rationalization of responses may be more complicated. However, some social returns exist propositions that are susceptible to such empirical analysis.

A grasp of the themes of American history can be all but elusive without studying the past, because we are the heirs to that past. Our material civilization is largely built upon colonial settlements in the South Atlantic, French and Spanish conquests in the Gulf and West, the expansion of our nation across the Mississippi to the West Coast and beyond, and the intersections of many races, religions, and ideologies in the years that followed. Our political institutions have usually been shaped in the construction of an empire, and later in an artificial revolution concluded with a treaty recognized by the British. Moreover, our outlook on moral and political controversy has been determined by an exceptionally complex pattern of self-interest, idealism, and wishful thinking which ten generations of an expanding American republic have stitched across the heart of the American body politic, partly for the better, partly in ways that were not necessarily beneficial.

2. Chapter 1: The Indigenous Peoples of North America

Most scholars agree that the earliest residents, the people who became the Americas’ first human inhabitants, crossed a land bridge that then connected Russia and Alaska. This land bridge was created as a result of the most recent ice age, when at least a fifth of the earth’s water was covered in thick layers of ice and snow. These first Americans lived a relatively peaceful life for thousands of years, hunting, fishing, and moving about according to the seasons and the availability of food. Small bands lived and traveled on a seasonal cycle used most food sources. They didn’t need to develop a system of trading goods because they were able to find everything they needed close to home.

The story of North America begins long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Human beings were living in the western hemisphere tens of thousands of years before Columbus stumbled on the shores of the Caribbean. These people, who are known today as American Indians, Montagnais, or First Nations, lived in many different cultures spread over the area that is now Canada, the United States, and Latin America. It was a diverse and complex society that is only now being fully understood.

3. Chapter 2: The Age of Exploration and Colonization

Once the Spanish filled their labor needs with African slaves and native people working in forced labor, they lived geographically apart from their native labor force. In contrast, the French and Dutch colonists lived further north in the mainland colonies for extended periods of time, surviving by their wits and the fruits of the land. The English were always known for their business acumen and knowledge of overland trading with various tribes. Using this information, they settled where their profits and trade could be protected. The three main groups were the Puritans settled in the New England colonies and were known for their desire to make a “New England” that reflected their religious convictions. Those living in the Middle colonies were a combination of all religions and a mixture of the English and Dutch ways of life. The southern colonies were built by the labor of both black and white indentured servants. The latter were people who exchanged four to seven years of hard labor for the privilege of living in a new world.

The period from 1492, when Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, to 1607, when the first successful English colony was founded at Jamestown, is generally considered to be the initial period of European colonization in the Americas. While other countries sent exploratory missions in and around North and South America, it was the English, French, and Spanish who successfully crossed the Atlantic and established permanent settlements. After Columbus’s arrival, Spain was the first to set up colonies, or permanent settlements, in the West Indies, bringing with them people from the Spanish mainland that we now know as Spain.

4. Chapter 3: The American Revolution and the Birth of a Nation

The experience of membership in a global empire had, paradoxically but in fact, stimulated the provincial imperial loyalties of the members. That those loyalties first began to lapse when some British imperial actions appeared to be undermining what Americans believed to be their chartered rights within the imperial system may have been particularly galling.

The confrontation between colonists and empire that gradually emerged after 1763, and that exploded into war in 1775, followed a well-worn path. It had begun with arguments over the costs of empire and the empire’s way of making the colonies contribute to those costs. But the Americans also recognized that being part of a world empire had meant that they were not only more correctly enmeshed in global power politics, but that their world view was necessarily artificially constricted by the fact that they lived within an almost uniquely isolated part of the European imperial system. Those like William Pitt, whose vision extended to the possibility of the colonies’ outgrowing their proud and celebrated parent in the fullness of time, appeared merely absurd to most Americans.

5. Chapter 4: Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny

The idea of America’s rapidly moving west to stretch beliefs and practices of representative government into the interior was not a new one, but issuing the responsibility for manifesting destinies to a particular place and time seemed unusual. It is important to note that “Manifest Destiny” was not an American idea. The French had developed a similar idea in the 1760s, but instead of moving west, the French called their very distant territory the destin des États-Unis, the destiny of the United States. Utopian communities and others in America had proposed traveling west, but they did not express their desire in terms of fulfilling the nation’s destiny. Because the term “Manifest Destiny” is so singular to the political culture of the United States and can be carried to a certain point in U.S. history and no further, most discussion of its meaning takes place after its first appearance in print. Seldom does this discussion take the form of a search for who first used the idea of “Manifest Destiny,” but the idea of pronouncing destinies and manifesting them may indeed have had an earlier appearance in American public life on the eve of the Texas rebellion of 1836.

The term “Manifest Destiny” first appeared in a July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, published in New York City. In the article, editor John L. O’Sullivan spoke expansively of what it meant for the United States to fulfill its “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” Despite widespread contemporary use, the precise origin and significance of the idea are much debated. There is little doubt, however, about the practical meaning of the term in the years following its first appearance in print. As American citizens moved west, they increasingly spoke of manifesting their destiny in terms of the sure triumph of republican institutions. This meant the early fulfillment of republicanism rather than the probable fulfillment of democracy.