APUSH American National Identity

Colonial Society and Culture

Time Period:

Growing divisions between European leaders and colonists

• colonists wanted frontier defense, self rule and trade

Enlightenment Ideas

Time Period

colonists believed in enlightenment ideas when shaping their political thought and critiqued the political corruption of the imperial system.

Foundations of American Revolution

Time Period:

• colonists believed that republican government was better than imperial

• Wanted government with natural rights

• Thomas Paine’s common sense

• Declaration of independence

• Believed that the Americans were people with liberty

Compromise of 1850

Time Period:

Mexican secession caused controversies over whether to allow slavery or not

• Proposed by Clay:

• California = free state

• Utah and New Mexico = popular sovereignty

• stronger fugitive slave act

• no slave trade in Washington DC

Emancipation proclamation

Time Period:

Freed all slaves in rebelling states

reframed the purpose of the war to ending slavery, and prevented the confederacy from getting full diplomatic support from Europeans.

Gettysburg Address

Time Period

wanted to unify the country and portray the struggle against slavery as Ameirca’s founding ideals.

Reconstruction

Time Period

Continuities:

• Southenr plantation owners continued to own majority of the land

Formerly enslaved people fell into sharecropping system which limited their access to land

New Things:

• Segregation - separate but equal

• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• Violence - KKK

“New South”

Time Period:

• Some industrialization of areas of the south

• leaders wanted a new south were they were industrialized like the north

• agricultural economy based on sharecropping

• Blacks still faced segregation - Jim Crow Era

The Red Scare

Time Period:

Americans debated different policies and methods that would expose suspected communists

McCarthyism: senator’s speech that claimed that there were communists working in the state department.