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US History: from the colonies to now, through the evidence
This course covers the standard high school US History survey: colonial settlement, the Revolution, the Constitution, slavery and the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization, the World Wars, the Cold War, civil rights, and up through the early 21st century. Along the way it builds the historical thinking skills from the C3 Framework: sourcing a document, corroborating accounts, explaining causation, tracking change and continuity, and arguing from evidence rather than opinion.
Instead of reading a chapter and answering review questions, the student works through short exchanges with a tutor that asks about a document, a decision, or a cause, and responds to what the student actually says. A question about why colonists resisted the Stamp Act turns into a question about who wrote a given pamphlet and why that matters, then into a question about what evidence would support or complicate the student's claim. The course ends with a capstone where the student builds and defends a full argument about a major question in US history, citing sources they've chosen themselves.
Who it is for
- High school students taking or supplementing a US History course
- Homeschooling families wanting a full year of US History with primary sources
- Students preparing for an AP US History or state end-of-course exam who want practice reasoning, not just facts
- Teachers looking for a tool to give students extra Socratic practice between classes
- Adults filling gaps in their US History knowledge before college or citizenship exams
What you will be able to do
- Source a primary document by its author, date, audience, and purpose, and say what it can and can't tell you
- Explain the causes of major events like the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression, and rank which causes mattered most
- Compare competing historical interpretations of the same event, such as Reconstruction or the New Deal, and say where they disagree and why
- Trace a theme such as slavery, labor, or civil rights across multiple periods and describe what changed and what stayed the same
- Write a short argument about a historical question that states a claim, uses specific evidence, and addresses a counterargument
- Recognize how a historian's own time and perspective can shape which questions get asked and which sources get used
A taste of a lesson on The Civil War and its causes
The tutor asks, you answer, and it works from what you actually said. No videos to sit through.
The 25 topics in US History
Each topic builds on the ones before it. The tutor checks what you already know and starts there.
Historical thinking: evidence, sourcing, and context
Teach the basic habits of historians: distinguishing primary from secondary sources; sourcing a document by its maker, date, place of origin, intended audience, and purpose; and contextualizing it by asking what was happening at the time and place. Students practice evaluating a short source for usefulness and limitations, and generating questions that a source raises. Real understanding means explaining why the same document can be useful for one question and weak for another.
Limits of evidence and the relation between sources and interpretations
Teach that every historical source has gaps: some voices are silent, records are survived selectively, and sources reflect the interests of their makers. Teach that secondary interpretations are built from selected sources, so an interpretation can be no better than its sources. Students learn to detect limitations in both primary evidence and a historian's use of it, and to judge whether a secondary work's sources suit its claims. Include an example of how enslaved people's perspectives were underrepresented in plantation records and how historians recovered them through narratives and archaeology.
Builds on Historical thinking: evidence, sourcing, and context
Building a reasoned historical argument (foundations)
Teach students to frame a historical question, select and integrate several primary sources, distinguish a claim about causation or significance from a description, weigh evidence, and acknowledge counterevidence. Students practice writing a short argument that integrates at least three sources and generating new questions that call for further sources. This skill is introduced early and then applied to every later period, so students practice it on each unit's sources and secondary readings.
Builds on Limits of evidence and the relation between sources and interpretations
Colonial origins and the Atlantic world
Cover the founding of English colonies in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and the Middle and Southern colonies; the Atlantic economy of tobacco, sugar, fur, and the slave trade; the growth of slavery in law and practice; and the Indigenous and European interactions and conflicts that shaped settlement. Students analyze how different colonies developed different labor systems and religious and political institutions because of their particular place and circumstances.
Builds on Building a reasoned historical argument (foundations)
Colonial society, religion, and emerging identity
Cover the Great Awakening, the growth of colonial self-government such as colonial assemblies, the development of a colonial press and literacy, and the emergence of a shared colonial identity. Students examine how the perspectives of colonists, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous peoples differed and how these differences were shaped by their circumstances.
Builds on Colonial origins and the Atlantic world
Imperial crisis and the road to revolution
Cover the Seven Years' War and its debt, the Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, Boston Massacre, Tea Act, Coercive Acts, and the Continental Congress. Distinguish long-term causes (imperial tensions, colonial self-government, debates over representation) from the triggering events of 1774-1775. Students weigh the Parliamentary view of taxation and defense against colonial arguments about rights and representation.
Builds on Colonial society, religion, and emerging identity
The Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence
Cover the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence (1776) and its ideas of natural rights and grievances, key military turning points such as Saratoga and the alliance with France, and the Treaty of Paris (1783). Students analyze the Declaration as a primary source, noting its audience and purpose, and weigh how the war's outcome depended on circumstances of time and place, including foreign aid and Loyalist and enslaved participation.
Builds on Imperial crisis and the road to revolution
Constitution, Federalism, and the early republic
Cover the Articles of Confederation's weaknesses, the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the compromises on representation and slavery (Three-Fifths Clause, Fugitive Slave Clause, slave trade clause), ratification debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights, and the early party conflict under Hamilton and Jefferson. Students weigh the competing interpretations of the Constitution's purpose and of federal power.
Builds on The Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence
Louisiana, the War of 1812, the market revolution, and Jacksonian democracy
Cover the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the first national fight over slavery's expansion, the transportation and market revolution (canals, railroads, factories), Indian removal including the Indian Removal Act (1830) and the Trail of Tears, and Jacksonian democracy's expansion of white male suffrage alongside its limits. Students analyze how the same events affected different groups and how historians debate Jackson's legacy.
Builds on Constitution, Federalism, and the early republic
Slavery, reform, and sectional conflict
Cover the expansion of cotton slavery, the abolition and women's rights movements, the Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Dred Scott decision, and the rise of the Republican Party, building on the Missouri Compromise of 1820 covered earlier. Students distinguish long-term causes of the Civil War (economic and political differences over slavery's expansion) from triggering events such as Lincoln's election and Fort Sumter, and they examine enslaved people's own accounts such as Frederick Douglass's writings.
Builds on Louisiana, the War of 1812, the market revolution, and Jacksonian democracy
The Civil War and its causes
Cover the secession crisis of 1860-1861, the course of the war from Fort Sumter through Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Sherman's march, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the role of Black soldiers. Students analyze multiple causes and effects, distinguishing the long-term causes from triggering events, and evaluate how the war's outcome depended on time and place.
Builds on Slavery, reform, and sectional conflict
Reconstruction and its contested legacy
Cover Presidential and Congressional Reconstruction, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Black political participation and the Freedmen's Bureau, the rise of Black Codes and Ku Klux Klan violence, the Compromise of 1877, and the Lost Cause interpretation versus the revisionist scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and later historians. Students analyze how historians' perspectives shape interpretations of Reconstruction.
Builds on The Civil War and its causes
Industrialization, the Gilded Age, and its workers
Cover the rise of big business and railroads, immigration from Europe and Asia, urbanization, Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), labor unions and strikes such as the Haymarket affair and Pullman strike, the political machines, and the debate over laissez-faire versus reform. Students analyze complex causes of industrial growth and of labor conflict and weigh different perspectives on the era's inequality.
Builds on Reconstruction and its contested legacy
Westward expansion, the Indian wars, and the closing frontier
Cover the settlement of the Great Plains and West after the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad, the destruction of the buffalo economy, the Indian wars including the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee massacre (1890), reservation policy, the Dawes Act (1887) and its effect on Native land holdings, and the Homestead Act's uneven results. Students analyze how the same policies affected settlers, Native nations, and Mexican and Chinese workers differently, and weigh the 1893 Turner thesis about the closing frontier against critiques that emphasize conquest and dispossession.
Builds on Reconstruction and its contested legacy
Progressivism and reform at home and abroad
Cover the muckrakers, the Progressive reforms of city and state government, the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts, the regulation of railroads, child labor and food and drug laws, women's suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment, and Progressive foreign policy including the Spanish-American War and imperialism. Students consider the different goals of reformers and the limits of their vision, including Jim Crow and the exclusion of many groups from reform.
Builds on Industrialization, the Gilded Age, and its workers, Westward expansion, the Indian wars, and the closing frontier
World War I and its aftermath
Cover the causes of the war (alliances, militarism, imperialism, nationalism) and the triggering assassination at Sarajevo, US neutrality and the path to entry in 1917, the home front and civil liberties under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Fourteen Points and Treaty of Versailles, and the Senate's rejection of the League of Nations. Students distinguish long-term causes from the trigger and weigh debates over why the US entered and why it turned inward afterward.
Builds on Progressivism and reform at home and abroad
The 1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
Cover postwar prosperity, consumer culture, the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan's revival, immigration restriction (1924), the stock market crash of 1929, bank failures, Hoover's response, and the New Deal programs such as the WPA, Social Security, and the NLRA. Students analyze the multiple causes of the Depression and weigh historians' debates about whether the New Deal ended or prolonged the crisis and about its limits for Black Americans and other excluded groups.
Builds on World War I and its aftermath
World War II and the home front
Cover the path from isolationism and the Neutrality Acts to Lend-Lease and Pearl Harbor, the two-front war in Europe and the Pacific, the Holocaust as known to Americans, wartime mobilization and the economy, Rosie the Riveter and women's wartime work, the Great Migration's wartime continuation, and the internment of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. Students analyze how the war's circumstances shaped rights and opportunities, and they examine the atomic bomb decision and its historiographical debate.
Builds on The 1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
The Cold War: containment and its conflicts
Cover the origins of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War's escalation. Students distinguish the perspectives of revisionist and traditional historians on who was responsible for the Cold War, and they examine how contexts of fear shaped domestic policy.
Builds on World War II and the home front
The Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s
Cover Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, SNCC and SCLC, the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the shift toward Black Power, and the Great Society. Students analyze how Black Americans' perspectives on strategy (nonviolence versus self-defense, integration versus Black nationalism) were shaped by their experiences, and how historians interpret the movement's goals and achievements.
Builds on World War II and the home front, The Cold War: containment and its conflicts
Vietnam, protest, and the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s
Cover the escalation of the Vietnam War under Johnson and Nixon, the Tet Offensive, the antiwar movement, the Pentagon Papers, the Kent State shootings, Nixon's Watergate scandal and resignation, and the women's and environmental movements of the period. Students distinguish long-term causes such as Cold War commitments from triggers such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and weigh competing views of the war's justification and of the era's legacy in public memory.
Builds on The Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s
Economic change, conservatism, and the late 20th century
Cover the stagflation of the 1970s, the oil shocks, the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution, deregulation and tax cuts, the decline of manufacturing and union membership, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Clinton-era economy. Students analyze the complex and interacting causes of economic change and weigh the debate over whether these policies produced prosperity or widened inequality.
Builds on Vietnam, protest, and the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s
America in the 21st century
Cover the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Patriot Act), the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, the Obama and Trump presidencies' contrasting approaches, the expansion of social movements such as the LGBTQ rights movement (Obergefell v. Hodges), debates over immigration and technology, and the 2020 pandemic. Students analyze how present-day perspectives shape the way recent events are interpreted and recognize that interpretations of recent history are still contested.
Builds on Economic change, conservatism, and the late 20th century
Historical interpretation, public memory, and media
Teach how historians' perspectives and the present shape the history they write and how public memory is contested in monuments, textbooks, films, and museums. Students critique the central arguments of a secondary work or documentary on a US topic for historical accuracy, check its sources and evidence, and assess how current interpretations are limited by which voices the surviving sources represent.
Builds on Building a reasoned historical argument (foundations), America in the 21st century
Building a reasoned argument across US history
Capstone practice in which students build a sustained argument about a major question in US history, such as the causes of the Civil War or the significance of the New Deal. Students select and integrate multiple primary sources and secondary interpretations from across periods, weigh causes and their relative importance, acknowledge counterevidence, and produce a short argument that integrates at least three sources with a clear claim about causation or significance.
Builds on Historical interpretation, public memory, and media
Practice questions in US History
A few of the kinds of questions you will work through, with answers.
A 1776 letter from a British general to his commanders and a 2020 textbook paragraph both describe the Battle of Bunker Hill. Which one is the primary source, and why?
See the answer
The 1776 letter
A primary source is created by someone with direct involvement in or firsthand knowledge of the event at the time; the textbook is a later, secondary account built from such sources.
Name one long-term cause and one short-term trigger of the American Revolution.
See the answer
Long-term: decades of salutary neglect and growing colonial self-government; short-term: the Coercive Acts of 1774
Long-term causes set the underlying conditions over years, while short-term triggers are the immediate events that set off the conflict; other valid pairs are also acceptable.
What did the Three-Fifths Clause do?
See the answer
It counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation
This compromise increased the political power of slaveholding states in Congress and the Electoral College without granting enslaved people any rights.
What did the Fourteenth Amendment establish regarding citizenship?
See the answer
That all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including former slaves, are citizens with equal protection under the law
This overturned the Dred Scott decision's denial of citizenship to Black Americans and became the basis for later civil rights litigation.
How did the policy of containment, as applied in Korea, differ from the earlier goal of defeating an enemy outright, as in World War II?
See the answer
Containment aimed to stop the spread of communism to new areas rather than to achieve total victory or unconditional surrender
The Korean War ended in an armistice near the original border rather than the conquest of North Korea, reflecting containment's more limited aim.
Why might two documentaries made fifty years apart about the same civil rights event reach different conclusions about its significance?
See the answer
Because each was shaped by the concerns, available sources, and historical distance of the time it was made
Historical interpretation is influenced by the present moment of the historian, including what questions seem urgent and what evidence has since come to light.
Questions about this subject
Does this follow a specific textbook or state standard?
It follows the common high school US History scope and sequence used by most state standards and the C3 Framework for historical thinking skills, not a specific textbook, so it works alongside most courses.
Is this enough preparation for an AP US History exam?
It covers the same events, causes, and periodization as AP US History and builds the sourcing and argument skills the exam tests, but it does not simulate timed AP essay formats or multiple-choice drills on its own.
Does the course take a side on controversial topics like the causes of the Civil War or Reconstruction's legacy?
The tutor presents the major interpretations historians actually hold, asks the student to weigh primary sources, and expects the student to form and defend their own argument rather than just accept one view.
Do I need to have taken a US History class before starting?
No prior high school history is required, just middle school reading and writing skills and a general sense of the Revolution, Civil War, and Constitution from earlier grades.
How much reading of original documents is involved?
Most lessons center on short excerpts, a paragraph of a letter, speech, law, or declaration, rather than full documents, so the reading load stays manageable while still working directly with primary sources.
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