🦅 American History

Essential vocabulary and analytical tools for studying history

How ideological frameworks shape historical interpretation

Slavery's Central Role in Shaping Global Capitalism

Religion as a system of control and a source of spiritual resistance

Print, Literacy, and the New Public

The Second Great Awakening and the Remaking of American Society

Arts, Entertainment, and Cultural Expression in Early America

The Era of Good Feelings and its aftermath

Democracy, class, and the common man

Indian Removal and its lasting consequences

Antebellum Reform and the Art of Association

Prisons, Asylums, and Schools — Reformers as Architects of the Human Soul

Moral Reform, Women's Activism, and the Politics of Alcohol

From the Moral Family to Civil Society

How the United States Transformed from a Young Republic to a Continental Power

How Manifest Destiny functioned as discourse to naturalize American expansion as divine and inevitable.

Art, Photography, and the Myth of the Vanishing Indian, 1840–1910

Self-guided reading deck with pop-ups, definitions, and quick checks

Political conflict and moral crisis in the 1850s — Kansas-Nebraska, Dred Scott, and the coming war

Phrenology, Mesmerism, and Monster Shows in Antebellum America

Comprehensive visual overview of the Civil War from OpenStax U.S. History

Why the Union Won and What the War Did to America

Overview of the war's causes, course, and consequences

Civil War Photography and the Making of Modern Memory

How postwar memory recast the war and why it still shapes public memory

Violence, Redemption, and Black Response — Why paramilitary terror succeeded and how Black Americans responded

How the Myth Was Made — Memory, Monuments, and the Rewriting of History

The wars of Western expansion and the destruction of Native sovereignty

How popular culture invented the frontier and erased its violence

Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier in American identity

The explosive growth of American cities and the transformation of urban life

Immigration, nativism, and the boundaries of American identity

How overcrowding and epidemics reshaped urban reform

Settlement houses, social work, and visions of urban democracy

Jacob Riis, photography, and exposing urban poverty

Settlement houses, machine politics, and reshaping urban democracy

Prostitution, birth control, and the politics of bodily control

Scientific racism, hereditary theory, and the politics of human improvement

Sterilization laws, institutional power, and the legal enforcement of eugenics

Yellow journalism, Cuba as moral theater, and how media manufactured a war

From Cuba to the Philippines, the insurgency that exposed the costs of empire

The Philippines, the Panama Canal, the Roosevelt Corollary, and the Open Door — four expressions of a single imperial strategy

Pre-screening slides: context, wartime laws, Espionage Act, Sedition Act, Schenck, CPI

Download & print before class — four parts including viewing lens prompts

Interactive guide: check predictions, evidence from film, knowledge check, bridge forward

Total war mobilization, the great epidemic, structural inequality and the cost of silence

Communist propaganda, the birth of the modern Left, and how a murder trial became a global cause

Jazz, film, radio, photography, and the new visual and sonic culture that made modernity feel like a feeling before it became an argument

How a law that could not be enforced learned to perform enforcement for the camera — staged raids, criminal celebrity, selective targeting, and what ordinary Americans learned from watching it all

The Great Migration as deliberate agency, the New Negro movement, Garvey vs. Du Bois, Hughes and Hurston on the vernacular as serious art — and Tulsa 1921: what Black Wall Street built, how it was destroyed, and why the decision to rebuild was itself an argument

Independent study: the Douglass portrait tradition and the visual economy of the 1920s, Van Der Zee and the portrait as political argument, Aaron Douglas and the Black press, jazz as community infrastructure and heroic resistance inside the Cotton Club, Du Bois's "Criteria of Negro Art" in full — typed responses save automatically for PDF submission