AP U.S. History

Instructor: Jeff Donnelly

Curriculum Map, Class Page, Course Guidelines

AP U.S. History is designed to provide a college-level experience and preparation for the AP U.S. History Exam. An emphasis is placed on interpreting documents, mastering a significant body of factual information, and writing critical essays. 

Topics include life and thought in colonial America, revolutionary ideology, constitutional development, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, nineteenth-century reform movements, and Manifest Destiny. Other topics include the Civil War and Reconstruction, immigration, industrialism, Populism, Progressivism, World War I, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the post-Cold War era, and the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

AP U.S. History is designed to provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in U.S. history. The course prepares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by making demands upon them equivalent to those made by full-year introductory college courses. Students learn to assess historical materials-their relevance to a given interpretive problem, reliability, and importance- and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. Students develop the skills necessary to arrive at conclusions on the basis of informed judgment and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively in essay format.

In addition to exposing students to the historical content, this course expects students to analyze and interpret primary documents, including documentary materials, maps, statistical tables, and political and graphic evidence of historical events. Students will develop an awareness of the multiple interpretations of historical issues in secondary sources.

Students will be asked to consider the following questions:

• How do we define what is "American"?
• What is the "American Dream" and how has it changed over time?
• What is the frontier and how has it shaped U.S. history?