Our FIRST WEEK back will be to REVIEW the CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR itself.   

In addition, HYPERLINK the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR QUIZ BUTTON [below] and complete the QUIZ [worth 66 points].   You may download and write on the QUIZ itself, but only turn in the SCAN TRON [button] on the assigned deadline which will appear on GOOGLE CALENDAR.

CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR

What led to the outbreak of the bloodiest conflict in the history of North America?

A common explanation is that the Civil War was fought over the moral issue of slavery.

In fact, it was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict.

A key issue was states' rights.

The Southern states wanted to assert their authority over the federal government so they could abolish federal laws they didn't support, especially laws interfering with the South's right to keep slaves and take them wherever they wished.
Another factor was territorial expansion.

The South wished to take slavery into the western territories, while the North was committed to keeping them open to white labor alone.

Meanwhile, the newly formed Republican party, whose members were strongly opposed to the westward expansion of slavery into new states, was gaining prominence.

The election of a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, as President in 1860 sealed the deal. His victory, without a single Southern electoral vote, was a clear signal to the Southern states that they had lost all influence.
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Feeling excluded from the political system, they turned to the only alternative they believed was left to them: secession, a political decision that led directly to war.
[BELOW] you will find a familar looking RUBRIC, but designed especially for the DOCUMENT BASED QUESTION essay.  Please HYPERLINK on the APUSH DBQ RUBRIC and familiarize yourself with this rubric. 

In addition, there is a 27-minute VIDEO on tackling an APUSH DBQ which we will watch in class.

[KHAN ACADEMY] APUSH PERIOD 5 OVERVIEW

         AMERICAN CIVIL WAR             IN 10-MINUTES

The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be.

The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slave-holding country in the world.
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Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the institution of slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined.

​The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914.
HYPERLINK [ABOVE] and VIEW RECONSTRUCTION
Reconstruction, in U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil Warand during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war.

Long portrayed by many historians as a time when vindictive Radical Republicans fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy, Reconstruction has since the late 20th century been viewed more sympathetically as a laudable experiment in interracial democracy.

Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life.

​At the national level, new laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system and the definition of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government.

SHORT-ANSWER QUESTION

So the video [above] is about the short answer section on the AP U.S. history exam. This is a real practice problem from the AP exam and I'd like to go through it step-by-step with you to give you an idea of how to approach these problems really well. Each of the short answer problems are three questions long and they all discuss one facet of American history.

The APUSH student's job in these questions is not to try to write an essay, but merely to just answer A, B, and C, which will be related to each other, and you have about the front of one blue book page to do this, so really no more than 200 words.

And what's great about these is that there are many right answers. They're asking you to display your knowledge about a topic in the past, but what parts of that knowledge you display is up to you. So that means you can really play to your strengths. Bring up the thing that you know. You don't have to worry about knowing everything. Just enough to answer a few questions.

Let's read this question and we're gonna read it really carefully, which you'll see is important for a number of reasons.

So answer A. B, and C. A,

"Briefly explain one example of how contact "between Native Americans and Europeans "brought changes to Native American societies "in the period 1492 to 1700."

Now this is really important. Making sure that you know the date range that you're being asked to write about is really key to giving a good answer because we could talk about Native American history in American society really right up to the present, so 1700 is our end date.

B, "Briefly explain a second example of how contact "between Native Americans and Europeans "brought changes to Native American societies "in the same period."

And C, "Briefly explain one example of how "Native American societies resisted change "brought by contact with Europeans in the same period."

Basically, what you're being asked here is to give two examples of change and one example of resistance to that change. Now the way one can see it, we have one really important structure like was mentioned already, which is that we can only talk about the period in-between European contact and the year 1700.

So that means a lot of things that you might want to be talking about from the 1800s and 1900s you can't here, because you won't get credit for it. Then we're talking about the period long before the American Revolution, long before even the French and Indian War, Seven Years' War.

So this is really early contact. But the question actually doesn't give any strictures about societies, so we could talk about Native Americans in North America at large, we could talk about Native Americans in Jamestown, or we could talk about Native Americans in Mexico. We could talk about Native Americans and the French in the Northwest Territories, so our geography is really broad here. It's our timeline that's relatively short. So you want to brainstorm what we could talk about for answers A or B. Well, we could mention, I think an excellent example would be disease. Native Americans experienced an epidemic of disease related to pathogens brought over by Europeans, so you could talk about disease really reshaped society, particularly there were morning wars in the Northeast, where Native Americans would raid New England settlements trying to find replacements for the people who had died in disease. You could also talk about trade and for example horses might be a good example of this. The Spanish brought horses to the New World, which completely changed the form of transportation and wealth for a lot of Native American societies on the Great Plains.

What else could we talk about? Well, we could also mention labor. The Spanish tried to implement a system of encomienda labor, which would grant land to the Spanish for Native Americans to labor upon in a system of slavery. You might also talk about gender roles and intermarriage between Native Americans and Europeans which changed racial patterns and created new racial caste systems and also changed the way that women were often viewed in Native American societies, often resulting in them having less power than they did before the Europeans arrived. When you're thinking about how to answer these types of questions, one of the most useful things you can do is think about race, class and gender.

These are things that historians think about all the time, and what they mean by these things is to say how does a certain issue affect say white people differently than it might affect black people? Or Native American people differently than it might affect Europeans? Or does this affect rich people more than it affects poor people? And that might also include people who own a factory, for example, versus the people who work in a factory or labor in a factory.

And lastly, if you're stuck on what to write, take some time to think about how a certain event may have affected anyone in these three groups differently than another group.

All right, so we answered the first two questions, and you'll see that any one of these is a perfectly appropriate answer and you only have to talk about one for each. And for each of these I would really only just write one sentence. Make sure that that sentence gets at the heart of what it is that you're trying to say. For example, don't just write, "Disease," but rather write a sentence that says, "The introduction of pathogens brought "from the Old World to the New affected "Native American societies by drastically "reducing their populations and their settlement patterns."