Part A: Reading and  Note-taking 

In this year-long course, we will be studying nine eras of United States history, divided up into nine parts or "Periods." Each period is represented by a "Module" or unit in the textbook.  For the summer assignment, you will begin by reading the Introduction sections on this page. Then, to gain a strong understanding of Periods 1 and 2, please thoroughly complete the assigned reading for each  (a total of about 100 pages). Please be mindful to pace yourself through the reading this summer.  Thorough reading and note-taking takes time.

As you read, please take careful notes, utilizing one of the two methods outlined in the document titled "Guidelines for Note-Taking", which is located at the bottom of this page.  Either note-taking approach described on page 2 of the document is acceptable, but it is important that you write out your notes (not type them). On page one of the document, you can read a brief explanation of the benefits of writing notes, rather than typing them.

Period One Assigned Modules: Module 1.3 and 1.4 only

Period Two Assigned Modules: Modules 2.1-2.9

Over 25,000 years ago, Asian peoples started migrating to the Americas by land and sea. Major migrations occurred 12,000–14,000 years ago. Over time these peoples developed an astonishing array of cultures and societies, from small hunting-and-gathering bands to complex empires. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the common era, extensive commercial and political networks existed among the Mississippians, the Aztecs, and the Incas, although only the latter two continued to thrive by the late 1400s.

In southern Europe, too, during the fifteenth century, economic, cultural, and political advances fueled interest in long-distance trade and exploration. Italy and Portugal led these efforts, and their complete control of trade routes across the Mediterranean and around Africa to Asia led Spain to look west in hopes of gaining access to China and the Indies. In doing so, the Spanish unexpectedly came into contact with the Americas.

When Spanish explorers happened upon Caribbean islands and the nearby mainland, they created contacts between European and American populations whose lives would be dramatically transformed in a matter of decades. While native residents of the Americas were sometimes eager to trade with the newcomers and to form alliances against their traditional enemies, they fought against those they considered invaders. Yet some of the most significant invaders — plants, pigs, and especially germs — were impossible to defend against. Even Europeans whose primary goal was conversion to Christianity brought diseases that devastated local populations, and plants and animals that transformed their landscape, diet, and traditional ways of life.

From the 1490s to the 1590s, the most dramatic and devastating changes for native peoples occurred in Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, and parts of South America. But events there also foreshadowed what would happen throughout the Americas. As Spanish conquistadors and European competitors explored, they carried sufficient germs, seeds, and animals to transform native societies even before Europeans established permanent settlements in North America. As American Indian populations died out in some regions and fended off conquest in others, the Spanish and Portuguese turned increasingly to the trade in enslaved Africans to provide the labor to produce enormously profitable items like sugar, coffee, and tobacco.

England and France began to challenge Spanish dominance of the Western Hemisphere in the early seventeenth century. As these three kingdoms struggled with one another militarily, economically, and socially, each also consolidated power on the North American continent.

These nations engaged in shifting patterns of cooperation and competition with native populations in ways that reflected their cultural, social, religious, and economic interests. The French steadily established trade networks with native peoples in Canada, while the Spanish in the Southwest sought to convert American Indians to Catholicism while at the same time exploiting their labor. The English colony at Jamestown tried to replicate the success of the Spanish, hoping to find easy profits in gold and silver mines, but the climate and geography of Virginia were radically different from the Central American regions that the Spanish had begun to exploit nearly a hundred years before. Thus, the early Jamestown settlers built a colony that differed from the ordered and authoritarian encomienda system of the Spanish, where native peoples worked under close Spanish supervision. Instead, a labor system in which English-born indentured servants agreed to a set time of labor in return for passage to the English colony provided much of the labor in the colony during the early seventeenth century. However, this arrangement gave way to a racial caste system in which enslaved Africans made up the bulk of the labor force on large cash-crop plantations by the turn of the eighteenth century. In the western backcountry regions of Virginia, the majority of the population was made up of independent farmers, many of whom were former servants themselves. These backcountry settlers negotiated — and often violated — a shifting borderland of conflict and trade with American Indians.

As the seventeenth century progressed, growing European settlements in the New World led to the development of a transatlantic world in which Europeans, American Indians, and Africans traded, competed, interacted, and exploited each other along networks that stretched from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the cities of London, Paris, and Madrid to the villages of West Africa and back to the islands of the Caribbean.

Great Britain’s colonies in North America formed an integral part of this transatlantic world. Beginning in the early 1650s, Britain pursued economic policies designed to monopolize trade with its colonies and protect British economic interests, and the strategy proved successful. Starting in the late seventeenth century, the British fought a series of colonial wars with other European powers, most often the French, to establish English cultural, ideological, and economic dominance in the North Atlantic and the North American interior. While these wars were costly on many levels, repeated victories cemented Great Britain’s dominance of the North American Atlantic seaboard from the late 1600s and well into the 1700s. Despite the consolidation of British power in North America, colonists used European models to shape a distinctly British North American culture. For example, the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement that embraced science and reason as the hallmarks of human progress, gained popularity among elites. Likewise, the Great Awakening, a wave of renewed religious enthusiasm, swept North America during the 1740s with a spiritual intensity that touched all classes and challenged England’s tradition of strict class differentiation.

Colonial society also underwent immense shifts as these religious and political awakenings transformed colonists’ sense of their relation to both spiritual and secular authorities. Over time, the colonial elite had developed a strong belief in the rights of the colonies to control their own destinies. As this belief grew more popular, local communities began to take steps to defend those rights, and many colonial assemblies grew accustomed to control over local government.

Yet even as aspects of a distinctly American identity began to emerge, the diversity and divisions among colonists increased as class, racial, religious, and regional differences multiplied across the colonies. Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Scotland created their own communities; economic inequality deepened in cities; conflicts between American Indians and settlers intensified along the frontier; and growing reliance on the labor of enslaved Africans reshaped economic and social relations in British North America, particularly in the southern colonies.