Grade 9 - American Studies

Course Description

American Studies begins with exploration and colonial settlement and why people move around. Students will study the conflicts with Britain as the colonies expanded, which led to the American Revolution and the development of our nation’s political system. Students will study the progress of the new United States and how sectionalism led to conflict over slavery, industrialization, westward expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Students will read, analyze, evaluate, and debate a variety of historical, legal, and societal documents, literature, and art that influences the values and beliefs of the United States. Students will also in engage in integrated project designed to exhibit their understanding of the essential questions, enduring understandings, and the learning expectations. 

Essential Questions

• Essential questions may be different each year. There are no unit-specific essential questions. The year-long essential question guides each unit of study. 

• 2018-2018

• What is the purpose of memorials and monuments? What is historical memory? How do governments and citizens shape historical memory? 

• 2018-2019 

• Is American history a history of progress? How is progress defined and from whose perspective? 

• 2019-2020 

• How do we grow, change, and influence our community, government, and each other? How does cultural behavior shape identity? (9th grade Language Arts is structured by the same essential question) 

Units

Unit 1: Introduction to Historical Thinking

Essential Questions or Enduring Understandings:

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society.

Major Concepts:

•  Foundations of historical thinking: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, close reading of source materials

• Essay structure and writing

Major Content:

•  Early settlement of Jamestown, Virginia

Unit Assessments:

• Stanford History Education Group: Pocahontas: What is the true story? Analytical Essay using primary source documents

Unit 2: Colonial America  1600-1763

Essential Questions/Enduring Understandings:

• In order for a community to sustain itself, it must organize into political, economic, and social systems. 

• People explore, migrate, emigrate for varying social, political, and economic reasons. 

• When cultures meet there is an exchange and/or clash which has intentional and unintentional consequences. 

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society. 

Major Concepts

• Clash of cultures, why people move around, how governments are formed, slavery, race, social class, geography, economics

• Primary source close reading, contextualization, and corroboration

Major Content:

• Native peoples in North America

• Settlement of the English colonies in America, Jamestown, Plymouth, New France

• Origins of colonial government

• Origins of slavery, the slave trade, and the New England slave trade

• Social class in the colonies

• French & Indian war

• Colonial economies

Unit Assessments:

• Unit Test

Unit 3: The American Revolution  1763-1783

Essential Questions or Enduring Understandings:

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society. 

• In order for a community to sustain itself, it must organize into political, economic, and social systems. 

• Across time and place, people have held differing assumptions regarding power, authority, governance, law, civic values, principles, and views of the roles and rights of citizens. 

Major Concepts: 

•  representation, self-government, justifiable protest, ownership of slaves while fighting for freedom and independence from the British

• Primary source close reading, contextualization, and corroboration skills

Major Content:

•  Proclamation of 1763

• British taxation of the colonies

• Quartering Act

• Boston Massacre

• Boston Tea Party

• Lexington & Concord

• Declaration of Independence

• The Revolutionary War

• Treaty of Paris of 1783

Unit Assessments:

• Revolutionary diary project; American Revolution test

Major Texts:

• Never Caught, The Story of Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve

Unit 4: The Structure of Government

Essential Questions or Enduring Understandings:

• In order for a community to sustain itself, it must organize into political, economic, and social systems. 

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society. 

Major Concepts: 

• Checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, individual rights, powers of each branch of government

• Primary source close reading, contextualization, and corroboration skills

Major Content:

•   Shay’s Rebellion

• Articles of Confederation

• Constitutional Convention

• The Constitution

• The Bill of Rights

• Federalists and Anti-Federalists

• Impeachment

• State of the Union

• Insurrection at the Capital

Unit Assessments:

• US Citizenship Test – all 100 questions; structure and powers of government infographic

• Impeachment process infographic

• Formal letter to the President of the United States in response to the State of the Union Address (or the Inaugural Address depending on the year) 

Unit 5: North, South, & West 1790-1861

Essential Questions or Enduring Understandings:

• In order for a community to sustain itself, it must organize into political, economic, and social systems. 

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society. 

• People explore, migrate, emigrate for varying social, political, and economic reasons. 

• When cultures meet there is an exchange and/or clash which has intentional and unintentional consequences. 

• Across time and place, people have held differing assumptions regarding power, authority, governance, law, civic values, principles, and views of the roles and rights of citizens. 

Major Concepts: 

•  emergence of the American nation, slavery, role of slavery in the social, economic, and political development of the new United States, Native American assimilation and removal, federalism vs states rights

• Primary source close reading, contextualization, and corroboration skills

Major Content:

• Cotton kingdom

• Second middle passage

• Industrial revolution

• Abolitionist movement

• Women’s rights movement

• Native American removal, Trail of Tears

• Gold rush, Oregon Trail

• Missouri Compromise

• Fugitive Slave Act

• Compromise of 1850

• Kansas-Nebraska Act

• War with Mexico

• Manifest Destiny

• Technological advancements

• John Brown and Harpers Ferry

• Causes of the Civil War

• Election of Lincoln

• Secession

Unit Assessments:

• Unit assessment has taken different forms in different years. Assessments have included:  progress and power press conference, progress alphabet book, project-based learning: 19th century progress mini-golf project.

Unit 6: The Civil War

Essential Questions or Enduring Understandings:

• Across time and place, people have held differing assumptions regarding power, authority, governance, law, civic values, principles, and views of the roles and rights of citizens. 

• In order for a community to sustain itself, it must organize into political, economic, and social systems. 

• Legal, political, and historic documents define the values, beliefs, and principles of a society. 

• People explore, migrate, emigrate for varying social, political, and economic reasons. 

• When cultures meet there is an exchange and/or clash which has intentional and unintentional consequences. 

Major Concepts: 

•  Slavery, states rights, federalism, equality, secession, loyalty, rebuilding the social, economic, political systems following the Civil War

Major Content:

• Election of Lincoln

• Fort Sumter

• First Bull Run

• Gettysburg

• Vicksburg

• Sherman’s March

• surrender, fighting styles, conditions of war

• Emancipation Proclamation

• 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

• Assassination of Lincoln

• Reconstruction plans

• Sharecropping

• Compromise of 1876

Project-Based Learning and Exhibitions

2019-2020 Humanities Integrated Project-Based Learning:  Where I am From poem and film with an exhibition night of students' short films planned (it was not done due to school shutdown from March - June 2020 COVID19).

2018-2019 Humanities and Physics Integrated Project-Based Learning: research, design, build, and exhibit a mini-golf course that integrates different 19th century technologies at each hole (repeating rifles, cotton gin, telegraph, spinning jenny, railroads, steam power, etc). 

2018-2019 Humanities Integrated Project-Based Learning: Human Nature Project & Exhibition  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ej3rsMaSzpU134RRRtgXSJyDVr2ixzie/view?usp=sharing  

2017-2018 Humanities Integrated Project-Based Learning:  The Monument Project  https://sites.google.com/rivendellschool.org/project-makerspace/monument-project-kirsten-surprenant-grade-9 

Critical Exploration https://sites.google.com/rivendellschool.org/ces/how-do-monuments-and-memorials-reflect-our-history