American History, 1877 – Present
Expectations for Learning – Ohio’s New Learning Standards (2010)
1. Analyze a historical decision and predict the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.
2. Analyze and evaluate the credibility of primary and secondary sources.
3. Develop a thesis and use evidence to support or refute a position.
4a. Identify examples of multiple causation and long- and short- term causal relationships with respect to historical events.
4b. Analyze the relationship between historical events taking into consideration cause, effect, sequence and correlation.
5. Explain a grievance listed in the Declaration of Independence in terms of its relationship to Enlightenment ideas of natural rights and the social contract.
6. Show how the Northwest Ordinance, in providing government for the Northwest Territory, established a precedent for governing the United States.
7a. Develop an argument that a particular provision of the Constitution of the United States would help address a problem facing the United States in the 1780s.
7b. Explain a provision of the Constitution of the United States in terms of how it reflects Enlightenment thinking.
8. Compare the arguments of the Federalists and Anti- Federalists on a common topic related to the ratification of the Constitution of the United States and hypothesize why the winning argument was more persuasive.
9. Cite evidence for historical precedents to the rights incorporated in the Bill of Rights.
10. Analyze how the rise of corporations, heavy industry, mechanized farming and technological innovations transformed the American economy from an agrarian to an increasingly urban industrial society.
11. Explain the major social and economic effects of industrialization and the influence of the growth of organized labor following Reconstruction in the United States.
12. Analyze and evaluate how immigration, internal migration and urbanization transformed American life.
13a. Analyze the post-Reconstruction political and social developments that led to institutionalized racism in the United States.
13b. Describe institutionalized racist practices in post- Reconstruction America.
14. Analyze and evaluate the success of progressive reforms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in addressing problems associated with industrial capitalism, urbanization and political corruption.
15. Analyze the circumstances which enabled the United States to emerge as a world power in the early 1900s.
16. Explain why and how the United States moved to a policy of isolationism following World War I.
17. Describe how racial intolerance, anti-immigrant attitudes and the Red Scare contributed to social unrest after World War I.
18. Describe how an improved standard of living for many, combined with technological innovations in communication, transportation and industry, resulted in social and cultural changes and tensions.
19. Describe social changes that came from the Harlem Renaissance, African-American migration, women’s suffrage and Prohibition.
20a. Describe how the federal governments monetary policies, stock market speculation and increasing consumer debt led to the Great Depression.
20b. Explain how the efforts to combat the Great Depression led to an expanded role for the federal government.
21. Analyze the reasons for American isolationist sentiment in the interwar period.
22. Identify and explain changes American society experienced with the mobilization of its economic and military resources during World War II.
23. Summarize how atomic weapons have changed the nature of war, altered the balance of power and started the nuclear age.
24. Analyze the policy of containment the United States followed during the Cold War in response to the spread of communism.
25. Explain how the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism reflected Cold War fears in American society.
26. Analyze how the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and international politics between the end of World War II and 1992.
27. Explain how the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the USSR brought an end to the Cold War era.
28. Summarize the struggle for racial and gender equality and the extension of civil rights that occurred in the United States in the postwar period.
29. Describe how American life in the postwar period was impacted by the postwar economic boom and by advances in science.
30. Analyze the social and political effects of the continuing population flow from cities to suburbs, the internal migrations from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, and the increase in immigration resulting from passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.
31. Explain the government’s role in the economy, environmental protection, social welfare and national security became the topic of political debates between 1945 and 1994.
32. Analyze how the American economy has been impacted by improved global communications, international trade, transnational business organizations, overseas competition and the shift from manufacturing to service industries.
33. Describe political, national security and economic challenges the United States faced in the post-Cold War period and following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.