HSS Framework - Connecting with Past Studies: The Nation’s Beginnings

Connecting with Past Studies: The Nation’s Beginnings

· What are key tenets of American democracy?

· How did the country change because of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the nineteenth century?

The course begins with a selective review of United States history, with an emphasis on two major topics—the nation’s beginnings, linked to the tenth-grade retrospective on the Enlightenment and the rise of democratic ideas; and the industrial transformation of the new nation, linked to the students’ tenth-grade studies of the global spread of industrialism during the nineteenth century. Special attention is given to the ideological origins of the American Revolution and its grounding in the democratic political tradition and the natural rights philosophy of the Founding Fathers with an emphasis on ideas including liberty, equality, and individual pursuit of happiness. This framing of the Constitution provides a background for understanding the contemporary constitutional issues raised throughout this course. Students may wish to participate in any number of Constitution Day activities on September 17. Students can address the question: What are key tenets of American democracy? Teachers may want to highlight the emergence of a free democratic system of government alongside an entrenched system of chattel slavery that lasted for nearly a century. The question How have American freedom and slavery co-existed in the nation’s past? reminds students of the parallel – and seemingly paradoxical – relationship.

Students can continue with a selective review of American government by considering this question: How did the country change because of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the nineteenth century? The events leading up to the Civil War, the successes and failures of Reconstruction, and informal and formal segregation brought on by Jim Crow laws also provides context for understanding racial inequities in late-nineteenth-century America. To help students understand the history of the Constitution after 1787, teachers pay particular attention to the post-Civil War amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth), which laid the foundation for the legal phase of the twentieth-century civil rights movement. The amended Constitution gave the federal government increased power over the states, especially for the extension of equal rights and an inclusive definition of citizenship. Focusing on these topics allows later on in the course for a comparative study of the civil rights movement over time as ethnic and racial minorities experienced it. In addition to the civil rights groundwork laid by the Reconstruction-era Constitutional Amendments, students should read closely the 14th Amendment as it is has been continually reinterpreted and applied to different contexts by the courts; for example, sometimes it has been employed as a protection for workers and other times as a protection for corporations. In the context of the late nineteenth century, civil right advocates such as Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute and author of the 1895 Atlanta Exposition address, and W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP and author of The Souls of Black Folk, had different perspectives on the means of achieving greater progress and equality for African Americans. Racial violence, discrimination, and segregation inhibited African Americans’ economic mobility, opportunity, and political participation. As background for their later studies about challenges to Jim Crow segregation, students understand the meaning of “separate but equal,” both as a legal term and as a reality that effectively limited the life chances of African Americans by denying them equal opportunity for jobs, housing, education, health care, and voting rights.