1. American History II Honors
Syllabus-Spring 2016
Heritage High School
Mr. Edwards

2. Introduction-American History II
Edwards
Syllabus
-Join Edmodo group
-Unit Folder
Weebly
-Weebly Activity
What would you do? Activity
-Historical Skills and Understanding
APPARTS

3. Weebly Activity
Access the class weebly site at dedwardsushistory.weebly.com
Answer the following questions using the weebly site:
According to Historian Peter Sterns what’s one reason that students should study history?
What are two ways that you can access the American History II class? Be specific
Access the curriculum resource links. Which site would you think could best support your understanding of American History? Why?
How many units of study do we have in American History II? How do you know?
On the American History II home page, there are four people displayed. Which of these people do you know something about? What is it that you know abouth them? How do you know it?
On the American History II home page, what learning tools are linked? Which one of these learning tools have you seen before? Which ones have you not? What are their purposes?
Find the landing page for Unit 1. What information is displayed on this page?
Find the resource page for Unit 1. What information can you find displayed on this page?

4. What would you do? Activity
It is the first day of school at Heritage High School. Two of your peers have gotten into a dispute in the hallway. You do not know the two students, nor do you know the reasons for their current disagreement. However, you have been selected by the school staff to mediate the problem. Your mission is to meet with the two students involved, and help them to resolve their current dispute. You also want to help prevent this situation from arising again in the future.

5. What would you do? Activity
Where are you going to start? Remember, you do not know either of the two students involved, nor do you know what the dispute is all about. You do not know if it is something that just started today, or if the two students have had previous confrontations. You are going to have to ask some questions.
Write at least five questions that you would ask in order to help you to begin to understand the dispute and resolve it.

6. What would you do? Activity
Report out
How is this situation and activity possibly reflective of how we study and learn about American History?
History-”Change over time”
Historians are in the business of using historical evidence and skills to study “change over time”
Historical Inquiry
Historical Perspective
Historical Analysis
Detecting Bias
Determining Relevance

7. Historical Inquiry the research or investigation of past events
often begins with a historical question. Historical questions typically address “how” and/or “why” past decisions were made, past actions were taken, or past events occurred.
requires the acquisition and analysis of historical data and documents beyond the classroom textbook.
allows an analysis of preexisting interpretations, to raise new questions about an historical event

8. Historical Perspective
judging the past in consideration of the historical context in which the events unfolded and not solely in terms of personal and/or contemporary norms and values.
Helps develop historical empathy
How then did the social, political, cultural, or economic world of certain individuals and groups possibly influence their motives and intentions, their values and ideas, their hopes, doubts, fears, strengths, and weaknesses?

9. Historical Analysis
Involves a variety of historical documents and artifacts that present different voices and interpretations or perspectives on the past.
The study of history is subject to an individual’s interpretation of past events, issues, and problems.
There is usually no one right answer, one essential fact, or one authoritative interpretation that can be used to explain the past.
Historians may differ on the facts they incorporate in the development of their narratives and disagree on how those facts are to be interpreted.
Written history is a “dialogue” among historians, not only about what happened but about the historical interpretation of why and how events unfolded.

10. Detecting Bias
Students of history should differentiate between historical facts and historical interpretations but acknowledge that the two are related;
Facts that historians report are selected and reflect the historian's judgment of what is most significant about the past.
How can historical evidence be biased?

11. Historical Relevance
Students of history should use specific criteria to judge the relevance of the past to contemporary events
Historical issues are frequently value-laden and subsequently create opportunities to consider the moral convictions that possibly contributed to those actions taken by individuals and groups in the past.
The past inevitably has a degree of relevance to one’s own times
How can the past have relevance to the present?

12. What would you do?
In what ways did this activity reflect the following historical understandings/skills?
Historical inquiry
Historical Perspective
Historical Analysis
Detecting Bias
Determining Relevance

13. Analyzing a Primary Source
APPARTS

14. Migrant Mother. Nipono, California 1936.

15. “Migrant Mother”
The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.
These photographs would have been taken at the height of the Great Depression.
Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration.
This government agency would later become the Farm Security Administration, a program that was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

18. Dorothea Lange Interviewed
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

19. Child in Mississippi Delta

21. Cotton sharecropper family near Cleveland, Ohio

22. Possible Essential Question
How did the Great Depression impact American families between 1929 and 1940?
What type of evidence did you just analyze to help answer that question?
How can you better answer the essential question?
What other sources/evidence can you analyze to better answer the essential question?

23. Settlement of the West Historical Perspective
“…the settlement of the West beyond the Mississippi River constitutes a colorful drama of determined pioneers and two-fisted gunslingers overcoming all obstacles to secure their visions of freedom and opportunity amid the region’s awesome vastness.”
Perspective #2
“…the colonization of the Far West was a tragedy of shortsighted greed and irresponsible behavior, a story of reckless exploitation that scarred the land, decimated its wildlife, and nearly exterminated the culture of Native Americans”.
Tindall, George B. & Shi, David E., America-A Narrative History, 2004