Crash Course Us History 8 Worksheet

[Priamo Gregory]

JohnGreen teaches you about the (English) colonies in what is now the United States. He covers the first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the various theocracies in Massachusetts, the feudal kingdom in Maryland, and even a bit about the spooky lost colony at Roanoke Island. What were the English doing in America, anyway? Lots of stuff. In Virginia, the colonists were largely there to make money. In Maryland, the idea was to create a a colony for Catholics who wanted to be serfs of the Lords Baltimore. In Massachusetts, the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America to find a place where they could freely persecute those who didn\'t share their beliefs. But there was a healthy profit motive in Massachusetts as well. Profits were thin at first, and so were the colonists. Trouble growing food and trouble with the natives kept the early colonies from success.

John Green teaches you about founding father and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is a somewhat controversial figure in American history, largely because he, like pretty much all humans, was a big bundle of contradictions. Jefferson was a slave-owner who couldn\'t decide if he liked slavery. He advocated for small government, but expanded federal power more than either of his presidential predecessors. John explores Jefferson\'s election, his policies, and some of the new nation\'s (literally and figuratively) formative events that took place during Jefferson\'s presidency. In addition to all this, Napoleon drops in to sell Louisiana, John Marshall sets the course of the Supreme Court, and John Adams gets called a tiny tyrant.

John Green teaches you about the War of 1812. The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and its former colonial overlord England. John will take you through the causes of the war, tell you a little bit about the fighting itself, and get into just why the US Army couldn\'t manage to make any progress invading Canada. The upshot: no territory changed hands, and most of the other bones of contention were solved prior to the actual war. Although nothing much changed for the US and England, the Native Americans were the big losers. Tecumseh was killed, and the Indian tribes lost a lot of territory. Watch as John lays it all out for you.

John Green teaches you about the Market Revolution. In the first half of the 19th century, the way people lived and worked in the United States changed drastically. At play was the classic American struggle between the Jeffersonian ideal of individuals sustaining themselves on small farms vs. the Hamiltonian vision of an economy based on manufacturing and trade. In the early 19th century, new technologies in transportation and communication helped remake the economic system of the country. Railroads and telegraphs changed the way people moved goods and information around. The Market Revolution meant that people now went somewhere to work rather than working at home. Often, that somewhere was a factory where they worked for an hourly wage rather than getting paid for the volume of goods they manufactured. This shift in the way people work has repercussions in our daily lives right down to today. Watch as John teaches you how the Market Revolution sowed the seeds of change in the way Americans thought about the roles of women, slavery, and labor rights.

John Green teaches you about America\'s \\"peculiar institution,\\" slavery. John will talk about what life was like for a slave in the 19th century United States, and how slaves resisted oppression, to the degree that was possible. We\'ll hear about cotton plantations, violent punishment of slaves, day to day slave life, and slave rebellions. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Whipped Peter all make an appearance. Slavery as an institution is arguably the darkest part of America\'s history, and we\'re still dealing with its aftermath 150 years after it ended.

John Green teaches you about the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson\'s election was more democratic than any previous presidential election. More people were able to vote, and they picked a doozie. Jackson was a well-known war hero, and he was elected over his longtime political enemy, John Quincy Adams. Once Jackson was in office, he did more to expand executive power than any of the previous occupants of the White House. He used armed troops to collect taxes, refused to enforce legislation and supreme court legislation, and hired and fired his staff based on support in elections. He was also the first president to regularly wield the presidential veto as a political tool. Was he a good president? Watch this video and draw your own conclusions.

In which John Green teaches you about various reform movements in the 19th century United States. From Utopian societies to the Second Great Awakening to the Abolition movement, American society was undergoing great changes in the first half of the 19th century. Attempts at idealized societies popped up (and universally failed) at Utopia, OH, New Harmony, IN, Modern Times, NY, and many other places around the country. These utopians had a problem with mainstream society, and their answer was to withdraw into their own little worlds. Others didn\'t like the society they saw, and decided to try to change it. Relatively new protestant denominations like the Methodists and Baptists reached out to \\"the unchurched\\" during the Second Great Awakening, and membership in evangelical sects of Christianity rose quickly. At the same time, Abolitionist societies were trying to free the slaves. Americans of the 19th century had looked at the world they were living in, and decided to change it.

In which John Green finally gets around to talking about some women\'s history. In the 19th Century, the United States was changing rapidly, as we noted in the recent Market Revolution and Reform Movements episodes. Things were also in a state of flux for women. The reform movements, which were in large part driven by women, gave these self-same women the idea that they could work on their own behalf, and radically improve the state of their own lives. So, while these women were working on prison reform, education reform, and abolition, they also started talking about equal rights, universal suffrage, temperance, and fair pay. Women like Susan B. Anthony, Carry Nation, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimkes, and Lucretia Mott strove tirelessly to improve the lot of American women, and it worked, eventually. John will teach you about the Christian Temperance Union, the Seneca Falls Convention, the Declaration of Sentiments, and a whole bunch of other stuff that made life better for women.

In which John Green teaches you about the Mexican-American War in the late 1840s and the expansion of the United States into the western end of North America. Famous Americans abound in this episode, including James K Polk (Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump), Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott. You\'ll also learn about the California Gold Rush of 1848 and California\'s admission as a state, which necessitated the Compromise of 1850.

In which John Green teaches you about the election of 1860. As you may remember from last week, things were not great at this time in US history. The tensions between the North and South were rising, ultimately due to the single issue of slavery. The North wanted to abolish slavery, and the South wanted to continue on with it. It seemed like a war was inevitable, and it turns out that it was. But first the nation had to get through this election. You\'ll learn how the bloodshed in Kansas and the truly awful Kansas-Nebraska Act led directly to the decrease in popularity of Stephen Douglas, the splitting of the Democratic party, and the unlikely victory of a relatively inexperienced politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln\'s election would lead directly to the secession of several southern states and thus to the Civil War. John will teach you about all this, plus Dred Scott, Roger Taney, and John Brown.

In which John Green lists a whole lot of the battles of the US Civil War in seven and a half minutes. We get a lot of requests for military history, so we offer a list of battle names, with some commentary about outcomes and lots of really interesting pictures.

In which John Green teaches about the Civil War. In part one of our two part look at the US Civil War, John looks into the causes of the war and the motivations of the individuals who went to war. John also looks into why the North won and whether that outcome was inevitable. The North\'s industrial and population advantages are examined, as are the problems of the Confederacy, including its need to build a nation at the same time it was fighting a war. As usual, John doesn\'t get much into the actual battle by battle breakdown. He does talk a little about the overarching strategy that won the war and Grant\'s plan to just overwhelm the South with numbers. Grant took a lot of losses in the latter days of the war, but, in the end, it did lead to the surrender of the South.

In which John Green teaches you how the Civil War played a large part in making the United States the country that it is today. He covers some of the key ways in which Abraham Lincoln influenced the outcome of the war, and how the lack of foreign intervention also helped the Union win the war. John also covers the technology that made the Civil War different than previous wars. New weapons helped to influence the outcomes of battles, but photography influenced how the public at large perceived the war. In addition, John gets into the long term effects of the war, including the federalization and unification of the United States. All this plus homesteading, land grant universities, railroads, federal currency, and taxes.

In which John Green teaches you about Reconstruction. After the divisive, destructive Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a plan to reconcile the country and make it whole again. Then he got shot; Andrew Johnson took over, and the disagreements between Johnson and Congress ensured that Reconstruction would fail. The election of 1876 made the whole thing even more of a mess, and the country called it off, leaving the nation still very divided. John will talk about the gains made by African-Americans in the years after the Civil War and how they lost those gains almost immediately when Reconstruction stopped. You\'ll learn about the Freedman\'s Bureau, the 14th and 15th amendments, and the disastrous election of 1876.

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