The focus of 8th Grade Social Studies is the story of the American people from the period of the Mesoamerican civilizations to the present day – a span that includes the early Native Americans, the establishment of various European colonies, the creation of the United States as a new nation during the American Revolution, the territorial expansion to the West, the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the industrialization and immigration of the late nineteenth century, and the nation’s developing role in world affairs in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries