Welcome Letter

Dear Students,

Welcome to United States History II. I would like to tell you a little about my classroom so you know what to expect each day. First, I like to provide a safe classroom environment where each student can express his or her opinion without fear of sarcastic comments being made. I will always try to respect you and your opinions and I expect the same from you.

I am a very patient person but I will not tolerate any behavior that affects the learning of the students in my classroom. It is your responsibility to control your impulses and monitor your behavior. If I speak to you about an inappropriate behavior, you will have an opportunity to correct/change the behavior. However, if the behavior persist, I will give you an after school detention, call your parents, and if necessary, send you to the office. In addition, your classroom behavior and participation will count towards your quarter grade so it is imperative that you use appropriate behavior in class at all times. I do not anticipate these problems, but would just like you to know that I like things in my class to run smoothly.

It is essential that you complete all assigned readings in their entirety. Please bring to class with you any questions you have about anything covered in the assignment that you do not understand or will need clarified. It is your responsibility to seek assistance if there is something you do not understand. There will be quizzes, tests, projects, papers, homework, and class work on a regular basis. Plan on doing a significant amount of reading, writing and discussing.

Please come to class prepared to do important work, which means bringing all necessary materials to class with you each day including your chromebook, earbuds, a writing utensil, an assignment notebook, any handouts you received, your homework, and any other materials you may need. It is your responsibility to be prepared for class.

I do allow eating and drinking in my class during FIRST PERIOD as long as the trash is disposed of properly. That does not mean throwing it into the trash can from across the room. If students abuse this privilege by leaving behind water bottles, coffee cups, wrappers, etc this privilege will be revoked for all students, so please do not ruin it for everyone else.

Also, attendance is extremely important. We cover a lot of material during class and your presence and participation are essential components of passing this course. If you are absent it is your responsibility to bring in an absence note to Mrs. White the school attendance person. Once your absence is confirmed as excused she will issue you a pink make up slip. This slip will allow you to make up any assignments that you missed while you were absent. It will also tell you exactly how long you have to make up your assignment. (One day per day absent.) Assignments turned in after the make-up date will not receive any credit. It is your responsibility to speak to me either before or after (not during) class to obtain any work that you missed while out. Any outstanding make up work not submitted will be entered in my rank book as a zero.

Finally, try to stay organized. It is your responsibility to bring your charged working chromebook, with you to class every single day. If you develop good organization skills it will help you throughout high school and college. I hope that you enjoy my class and I look forward to getting to know each of you this year.
Sincerely,
Ms. White

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse them of frugality. In 1923 the young couple (he was twenty-seven, she was twenty-three) set sail for France. Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, they rented an enormous stone villa that rested 2.5 kilometers above St. Raphäel, “a red little town built close to the sea,” Scott explained to a friend, “with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it.” Their villa was studded with balconies of blue and white Moorish tiles and surrounded by a fragrant orchard of lemon, olive, and palm trees that gave way to a long gravel road—the only passageway out of their Mediterranean castle. Ironically, it was there—some thousand miles away from home, in his comfortable perch in the French Mediterranean—that Scott wrote what was arguably the most important American novel of the age: The Great Gatsby.

A tale of love and betrayal, Fitzgerald’s novel told the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor boy of obscure origins who rises to great wealth and prestige. In many ways, the novel was emblematic of its time. For as the book’s narrator, Nick Caraway, discovers, Gatsby’s money and fame were built on a lie. (If you want to know what that lie was, read the novel!) In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald exposed the excesses of the 1920s—a prosperous age in which many Americans came to enjoy the blessings of consumerism and excess, only to see it all crash around them with the Great Depression that arrived in 1929. Caraway described the opulence of Gatsby’s beachside mansion on Long Island and the extravagance of the parties he threw. “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights,” he confides. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach . . . On week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city . . . And on Mondays eight servants, including a extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.” Much like the Roaring Twenties, life in the shadow of Jay Gatsby was a wonder.

Consider the context in which Fitzgerald was writing: America in the 1920s was undergoing dynamic changes. Between 1921 and 1924 the country’s gross national product jumped from $69 billion to $93 billion while aggregate wages rose from roughly $36.4 billion to $51.5 billion. The United States had entered World War I a debtor nation and emerged as Europe’s largest creditor, to the tune of $12.5 billion. From a relative standpoint, America was rich, and it showed. When a prominent Philadelphia banking family raised eyebrows for installing gold fixtures in its bathrooms, a spokesman for the clan shrugged off the criticism, explaining simply that “[y]ou don’t have to polish them you know.”

To be sure, most Americans didn’t have gold faucets, and very few enjoyed anything approximating Jay Gatsby’s wealth, but ordinary Americans still shared in the general prosperity. Whereas only 16 percent of American households were electrified in 1912, by the mid-twenties almost two-thirds had electricity. This meant that the average family could replace hours of manual toil and primitive housekeeping with the satisfying hum of the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine, all of which came into wide use during the twenties. By the end of the 1920s over 12 million American households acquired radio sets. All the while, the number of telephone lines almost doubled, from to 10.5 million in 1915 to 20 million by 1930.

Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took over one hundred years for the US Patent Office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within fifteen years it issued its two millionth. Scores of new factory products flooded the burgeoning consumer market, bearing soon-familiar brand names like Scotch tape, Welch’s grape juice, Listerine mouthwash, Wheaties cereal, Kleenex tissue paper, the Schick electric razor, and the lemonade Popsicle.

If most people couldn’t travel to the south of France for repose and inspiration, they did come to enjoy a new range of public amusements that were scarcely imaginable twenty years before: dance halls; movie palaces like Chicago’s Oriental Theater and New York’s Rialto; amusement parks like Luna and Steeplechase at Coney Island, each magnificently lit by as many as 250,000 electric bulbs; inner-city baseball stadiums like Ebbets Field and Shibe Park, easily accessible by public transportation.

Americans were also able to buy vast quantities of mass-produced glassware, jewelry, clothing, household items, and durable goods, which blurred the distinctions between rich and poor. Just as Nick Caraway could not discern the lie behind Gatsby’s wealth and upbringing, many wealthier Americans now had trouble discerning between social classes. “I used to be able to tell something about the background of a girl applying for a job as stenographer by her clothes,” remarked a businessman in Muncie, Indiana, “but today I often have to wait till she speaks, shows a gold tooth, or otherwise gives me a second clue.”

Americans in the 1920s were also obsessed with a new cult of celebrity. The decade gave rise to sports legends like Babe Ruth, who was just as renowned for his voracious appetite as for his homerun record, and Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion who by the mid-1920s appeared in almost as many films as he did title fights. Whereas the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers combined published an average of thirty-six biographical profiles each year between 1901 and 1914, in the decade after World War I that figure climbed to about sixty-six profiles annually. Before 1920 almost three-quarters of these articles featured political and business leaders; now, over half concerned key figures in entertainment and sports. The genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald was his ability to cultivate his own image in the media. The genius of his signature character, Jay Gatsby, was his ability to create a veil of celebrity that masked his true origins.

But for all the dynamism of the age, Americans did not unqualifiedly embrace the Jazz Age. If they enjoyed its prosperity, they also feared its social consequences. The rise of premarital sex, the entry of women into the workplace, the breakdown of traditional religious mores, and the influx of millions of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe gave rise to a powerful backlash. Thus, the same decade that gave rise to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald also witnessed a powerful backlash. In towns and cities throughout America, a revitalized Ku Klux Klan railed against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and “loose women.” Supporters of prohibition drove through a restrictive law that banned the sale or production of liquor (judging by Fitzgerald’s novel, that ban was of limited effect). Conservative Christians formed Fundamentalist churches and sought to restore God to his traditional place in homes and schools. There was, in short, a deep and pervasive contradiction—and many Americans sensed it.

Fitzgerald was a perfect chronicler of his time. He was both an avid participant in, and a stringent critic of, the culture of prosperity that marked the 1920s. In Gatsby, his alter ego, Nick Caraway, recalls wistfully the America of his youth. In Nick’s mind, the Middle West embodied a lost age—a simpler time before telephones and movie palaces and department stores. Setting out by train from Chicago, “when we pulled into our winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild embrace came suddenly into the air.” This was “my Middle West,” he explains in the closing pages of the novel, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows. I am part of that . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

But if the West represented for Fitzgerald an older America, it was clear from his novel that the country’s train was moving eastward. By 1920, a majority of Americans lived in cities. The world was quickly changing and becoming modern, and the prairies of Nick Caraway’s youth were slowly but surely becoming the stuff of national memory.

The world that Fitzgerald chronicled came crashing down on October 29, 1929. That was Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed. The boom economy went bust. And America’s Jazz Age was officially over.

Actually, the stock market crash had very little to do with the onset of the Great Depression. Very few Americans in the 1920s owned stocks or securities. In reality, the nation’s most prosperous decade had been built on a house of cards. Low wages, high rates of seasonal unemployment, chronic stagnation in the agricultural sector, and a hopelessly unequal distribution of wealth were the darker story that lurked behind 1920s-era prosperity.

There was a price to pay for so lopsided a concentration of the nation’s riches. Good times relied on good sales, after all. The same farmers and workers who fueled economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny new cars and electric washing machines had reached their limit. By the late twenties, when advertisers told them that their cars and washing machines were outdated and needed to be replaced, the working class simply couldn’t afford to buy new ones. Unpurchased consumer items languished on the shelves. Factories cut their production. Workers were laid off by the millions. The good times were over.

Time Rime timeline

Thursday December 4, 2013

—Click on Time Rime timeline and identify 3 instances when the U.S. appeared to engage in imperialistic actions.

—http://www.timerime.com/en/timeline/1203060/US+and+the+World+Expressions+of+Power+Past+and+Present/

—“Was the United States an empire in the 20th century?”

—What were possible motivations behind American actions?

Ch 18 American Imperialism

Chapter 18 American Imperialism

Day 1: Key Question: What is an empire?

            Warm Up: In your opinion, which statement best characterizes the

motivations behind American foreign policy in the 20^th century?

Activity: Defining Empire Quotes PPT & Notes

Exit Ticket: Did the US engage in imperialistic actions in the 20^th century?

Day 2: Key Question: What are the arguments in favor of and against American expansion?

Activity: Imperialist Reasoning Guide & Class Discussion

Exit Ticket: Which arguments are most persuasive for you?

Day 3: Key Question: What factors motivated American expansion?

Activity: Imperialist Motives: Pear Soap Advertisement Analysis (primary source)

Exit Ticket: What are 3 motives for American expansion illustrated in the Pear’s Soap Ad?

Day 4: Key Question: When should the United States intervene in the affairs of another country?

Activity: History of American Foreign Policy PPT & Notes

Exit Ticket: Write a speech for the President in which you justify American invasion of a foreign country *

Day 5: Key Question: Was American annexation of Hawaii justified?

Activity: Annexation of Alaska & Hawaii PPT

Exit Ticket: Social Studies Print Guide

Day 6: Key Question: Was American annexation of Hawaii justified?

Activity: Read Excerpt from James Michener novel, “Hawaii”

Exit Ticket: Write a report to the President in which you summarize the role Americans played in the annexation of Hawaii and reasons whether or not the annexation was justified. *

Day 7: Key Question: What caused the Spanish-American War?

Activity: Spanish-American War Political Cartoons PPT & Time Frame Mapping Notes

Exit Ticket: What were 3 causes of American intervention in Cuba?

Day 8: Key Question: What caused the sinking of the USS Maine?

Activity: Create your own newspaper headline & story

            Exit Ticket: Share Newspaper headline & story

Day 9: Key Question: The Mystery of the Maine, Who Did It?

Activity: Compare conflicting historical accounts (primary sources) Fishbowl Discussion Activity

Exit Ticket: What really caused the explosion of the USS Maine?

Day 10: Key Question: Should the United States Annex the Philippines? 

Activity: Read Background Essay and Analyze Hook and Documents A-D

Exit Ticket: Write a speech citing 3 reasons why the U.S. should or should not annex the Philippines using evidence from the documents to support your answer*

Day 11: Key Question: What actions did American military take during wartime?

Activity: Philippine-American War Soldiers Letters (primary source)

Exit Ticket: Were American military actions justified/necessary? Creative art or dialog*

Day 12: Key Question: How did American annexation impact the Philippines?

            Activity: Philippine-American War outcomes

Exit Ticket: Evaluate McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines, was it worth it?

Day 13: Key Question: How did other countries perceive American foreign policy interventions?

Activity: Create Visual Metaphors

Exit Ticket: Share Visual Metaphor *

Day 14: Visual Metaphors Presentations

Day 15: Chapter 18 Test

Dialog with Female Reformer Resources

Susan B. Anthony 

http://www.biography.com/people/susan-b-anthony-194905
2 minute and 17 second video and 2 page summary

http://susanbanthonyhouse.org/her-story/biography.php
Biography of Susan B. Anthony National Museum & House

http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture/susan-b-anthony.htm
Susan B. Anthony Biography National Parks Service


Elizabeth Cady Stanton

http://www.biography.com/people/elizabeth-cady-stanton-9492182
1 minute and 14 second video and 2 page summary

http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture/elizabeth-cady-stanton.htm
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Biography Biography National Parks Service

http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00640.html
Elizabeth Cady Stanton American National Biography Online

Dorothea Dix

http://www.biography.com/people/dorothea-dix-9275710

http://www.history.com/topics/dorothea-lynde-dix

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470530/

Carry Nation

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900/peopleevents/pande4.html

http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/Biography-Carry-Nation.html

http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/n/na006.html

Francis Willard

http://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/frances-elizabeth-caroline-willard/

http://www.wctu.org/frances_willard.html

http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/wireader/WER0105.html

Alice Paul

http://www.alicepaul.org/alicepaul.htm

http://www.biography.com/people/alice-paul-9435021

http://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/alice-paul/

Carry Chapman Catt

http://www.biography.com/people/carrie-chapman-catt-9241831

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/peopleevents/p_catt.html

http://cattcenter.las.iastate.edu/about-us/carrie-chapman-catt/

Florence Kelly

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/kelley.html

http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/Themes/Capitalism-and-Labor/Florence-Kelley.aspx

http://florencekelley.northwestern.edu/florence/

Chapter 17 Progressivism

Key Questions:

1. What are the 4 goals of the progressive movement and what are some examples of each goal?

2. How do Progressive reforms improve the lives of ordinary Americans?

3. What were the arguments in favor of and against women's suffrage?

4. What strategies or techniques did women use to win the right to vote?

5. What was problematic about food production in America during this time period?

6. How did Theodore Roosevelt set the precedent for the modern presidency?

7. How did the federal government try to regulate the economy?

Terms & Names:
Progressive Movement
Florence Kelley
Carry Nation
WCTU
Temperance
Prohibition
Muckraker
Capitalism
Socialism
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Initiative
Referendum
Recall
17th Amendment
NACW
NAWSA
Suffrage
Susan B. Anthony
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Upton Sinclair
The Jungle
Pure Food & Drug Act
Meat Inspection Act
Conservation

Chapter 15 Immigration, Urbanization, & Political Corruption

Key Questions:

1. How do political, economic, and social factors influence immigration policy?

2. What factors forced immigrants out of their homelands and lured them to America?

3. What challenges did immigrants face on their journey to America?

4. What problems resulted from urbanization?

5. How did political machines gain and maintain power and control?

Terms & Names:

Ellis Island
Angel Island
Melting pot
Nativism
Chinese Exclusion Act
Gentlemen's Agreement
Urbanization
Americanization
tenement
Settlement house
Guilded Age
Political machine
Graft
Patronage
Kickback
Bribe
Pendeleton Civil Service Act
Jane Adams
Boss William Tweed
Thomas Nast