U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A

Modern history: so recent, you might even remember it.

  • Credit Recovery Enabled
  • Course Length: 18 weeks
  • Course Type: Basic
  • Category:
    • History and Social Science
    • High School

Schools and Districts: We offer customized programs that won't break the bank. Get a quote.

Get a Quote

Shmoop's U.S. History: 1877-Present course has been granted a-g certification, which means it has met the rigorous iNACOL Standards for Quality Online Courses and will now be honored as part of the requirements for admission into the University of California system.

This course has also been certified by Quality Matters, a trusted quality assurance organization that provides course review services to certify the quality of online and blended courses.


You know your Jamestowns from your Plymouths, you've got the Bill of Rights down pat, and you're a regular participant in your town's Civil War reenactments. But when it comes to those foggy years between Reconstruction and the Roaring Twenties you draw a blank. Who was even president then? If this sounds familiar, boy have we got the course for you. And hey, even if you don't remember the earlier stuff so well, this is still the course for you.

This U.S. history course, aligned to the Common Core standards as well the California, Florida, and Texas 11th grade Social Studies standards, has the skinny on America's awkward, in-between years, and includes a thorough refresher of the Revolutionary period through Reconstruction for the Shmoopers feeling rusty. It turns out that actually a lot was going on around the turn of the 20th century—industrialization, urbanization, immigration—and a bunch of other words ending in –tion.

With our dazzling array of creative projects, quizzes, and activities, you'll

  • review America's early history with a fast and furious recap of the independence movement through the end of Reconstruction.
  • examine America's changing economy, and never look at the Monopoly Man the same way again.
  • get cozy with some of the most controversial groups in our history, like socialists, communists, anarchists, and even—gasp!—labor unions.
  • watch in horror as traditionally marginalized groups—like Native Americans, African Americans, women, immigrants, and children—endure violence, discrimination, exploitation, and repression.
  • cheer triumphantly when you see these same groups utilize a variety of tactics to fight the powers that be.
  • learn about the conflicting perspectives on foreign policy and America's role in the world, which have been duking it out since time immemorial.
  • develop your own opinions on all these issues and weigh in on how the experiences of the past should inform our actions in the future.

P.S. U.S. History: 1877-Present is a two semester course. The second semester can be found here.


Unit Breakdown

1 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - America: The Early Years

What was that whole Constitution thing again? This unit gives a much-needed refresher on early American history, from the independence movement all the way through the Civil War. Oh, and it also stocks up your historian's toolbox with info on digital research, evaluating primary and secondary sources, and citing sources correctly.

2 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - Reconstruction and Jim Crow

You've probably heard about "Jim Crow laws" before, and maybe you've assumed Jim Crow must have been a powerful politician or a slaveowner (or both). In fact, Jim Crow was actually a really racist minstrel character, created by a white actor before the Civil War to mock and degrade Black people. The character's name was eventually used to represent the oppressive laws placed on the Black population of the South after the Civil War. This unit traces the positive and negative impacts of Reconstruction—and its abrupt end.

3 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - The Gilded Age

All that glitters is not gold, and the Gilded Age is no exception. This period of our history meant unprecedented glitz and glamor for a select few, and a rather dumpy time for most everyone else. It was an era of technological innovation, explosive industrial growth, and political corruption. We also like to think that it was the era when the monocle was popularized.

4 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - Immigration and Urbanization

This unit overlaps chronologically with unit 3, but tackles a different set of Gilded events—urbanization, immigration, and the beginning of the American labor movement. Our landscape was changing fast, both the land (oh wow, everything's hideous now) and the population. Immigration had always been a defining feature of the country, but during this period immigrants came in greater numbers and from different countries, leading to—you guessed it—anti-immigrant sentiment. Ugh.

5 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - Progress and Empire

A man, a plan, a canal—imperialism! Okay, so it ruins the palindrome, but it's probably more accurate. This unit is two-pronged: first we'll delve into the wacky world of progressive movements and their more significant social campaigns, including women's rights, temperance, and trust-busting. Then we jump over to America's early forays into foreign imperialism—which is exactly as bad as it sounds.

6 U.S. History: 1877-Present—Semester A - The First World War

They don't call it "the Great War" for nothin'—WWI wasn't great as in "awesome" (it was the opposite, really), but it was great as in "hugely impactful." This war rearranged the map of the world, spelled the end for once-powerful empires, and killed millions. America didn't get involved until the tail end of the war, but it still felt the consequences. This unit focuses on the effects of WWI on American soldiers and civilians, and includes some major foreshadowing of WWII—but you'll have to wait until Semester B for that!


Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.02: Fallacies and Flaws

Propaganda flier from WWII showing the heads of Hitler and a racist caricature of Hideki Tojo floating above a raging forest fire. The catchy slogan: 'Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon. Prevent Forest Fires.'
Turn your logical fallacy and bias detectors on, please.
(Source)

The last lesson was about what exactly U.S. history is, and what kinds of big themes we can pull out of it. This lesson is about what U.S. history is not—or, How to Write American History Really Badly. We'll discuss the problems, flaws, and fallacies that challenge everybody studying history and how we can overcome them.

Some of the problems we'll review are built into the study of history. Since the scientific community has failed to provide us with time machines (seriously, what are scientists spending their time on? Curing cancer?), we can't ever 100% know what the past was like. We have to rely on sources which are limited, often biased, and sometimes entirely made up, which makes figuring out history kind of like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.

But some of the problems historians face are a result of the way people have written the histories we read. These are problems in the historiography of the United States, and we'll give them our full attention in this lesson. They include everything from logical fallacies to racial stereotypes to political biases, and it takes some serious critical thought to unravel them all. Get ready to analyze, Shmoopers.


Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.02: Whose History Is It Anyway?

What Is Historiography?

We threw this word at you in the introduction: historiography. Historiography can generally refer to a piece of writing about history, but in this course, we'll be using the more specific definition of historiography as a history of a history. Whoa. What? You know how historians don't just know a lot about history, but they actually study it and write about it—sifting through historical sources and previous writings in order to analyze historical events and forces and get a better understanding of them? Well, a historiography refers to all the scholarly, historical work on a particular subject. So, American historiography includes every book ever written on American history.

And when dealing with any given historiography, we need to keep a few things in mind. Read all about it here. Make sure you jot down a few notes, either on our note-taking sheet or using your own method.

Bias, Prejudice, and Bad History

The writing of history is not an objective process. But how bad could it get, right? Pretty bad. Read about bias and prejudice in the study of history on this page.

Some history is just really poorly written, rather than biased. Be on the lookout for these three logical fallacies in historical writing—and unfortunately, they're super common. If we were you, we'd totally write 'em down:

  • Apples and oranges
  • Presentism
  • History repeats itself

The Historiography of the U.S.

Everything we've talked about so far could apply also to French history, or Japanese history, or the history of kingship and political power in sub-Saharan Africa. So we're going to close with some specific problems that have plagued American history specifically. Most of these problems have seriously improved over time, and most historians work really hard to avoid them:

  • Omitting folks. American history has had a problem with leaving certain groups and people out of the story completely. African Americans, women, religious minorities, immigrants, and Native Americans are pretty commonly erased.
  • Perpetuating stereotypes. And then if those kinds of people are included, we've had a problem talking about them in objective, analytical ways. History has sometimes promoted stereotypes—like the idea that Native Americans lived in chaotic savagery, or that colonial women spent all their time cooking and knitting. They didn't.
  • Sidebar history. Even if everybody is included in the history, and we've managed to avoid stereotypes, it's also pretty common for women and minorities to get smooshed over to the "sidebars" of textbooks—the rest of the narrative stays exactly the same, but there's a colorful pop-out section called "African American Inventors!" and by the end of it the only black person you've heard of is Harriet Tubman.
  • Nationalism. It's okay to get a little teary-eyed when we watch this Coke commercial or witness an awesome fireworks show on the Fourth of July. But taken to an extreme, nationalism can lead to a very narrow view of history—one that overlooks the fact that the rest of the world exists. 
  • Progress, progress, progress. This one is actually another universal historiographical problem, and it goes like this: All of history has been a steady march towards progress. Things are getting better and better. But it's not always that linear. We have a lot of backslides (like the Great Depression) and sometimes great leaps forward (like the Civil Rights Movement). History actually looks like this.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.02: Three Textbooks, Three Stories

We hope you've got your analysis suits on, because you're going to wade knee-deep into America's troubled historiography all on your own. Below, you're going to find three excerpts from three different U.S. history textbooks, published in 1841, 1911, and 2008. Each of these excerpts is about the same subject: Native American society before European contact, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

Read the excerpts, then answer the short response questions below, drawing upon the concepts you learned in the readings to compose your responses: three to five sentences for each should do it:

Passage One

Noah Webster, Early American History, 1841

"It is evident that many centuries after the old continent was well inhabited and highly civilized, the American continent remained the residence of uncivilized tribes…

The good and bad qualities of Indians are few or confined to few objects. In general a savage is governed by his passions, without much restraint from the authority of his chiefs. He is remarkably hospitable to strangers, offering them the best accommodations he has and always serving them first. He never forgets a favor or an injury but will make a grateful return for a favor and avenge an injury whenever an opportunity offers, as long as he lives; and the remembrance is hereditary, for the child and grandchild have the same passions and will repay a kindness or avenge a wrong done to their ancestor…

The tribes of Indians were under a government somewhat like a monarchy with a mixture of aristocracy. Their chiefs, called saga mores, sachems or cazekes, possessed the powers of government; but they usually consulted the old men of the tribe on all important questions.

Their religion was idolatry, for they worshipped the sun, the moon, the earth, fire, images and the like. They had an idea of the Supreme Being, whom they called the Great Spirit, and they believed in an evil spirit. They had priests, called powwows, who pretended to arts of conjuration and who acted as their physicians."

Passage Two

David Saville Muzzey, An American History, 1911

"None of the North American Indians had reached the stage of civilization characterized by an alphabet and literature, although all but some Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast tribes had passed beyond the stage of the savage hunter, housed in his flimsy tepee or skin tent, and living on the quarry of his bow and arrow. In Mexico, Central America, and South America the Spanish explorers and conquerors found a higher native development in art, industry, mythology, architecture, and agriculture than was later found among the Indians of the north…Still the natives of these regions were by no means so highly civilized a race as the exaggerated accounts of the Spanish conquerors often imply. They had not invented such simple contrivances as stairs, chimneys, and wheeled vehicles. They could neither forge iron nor build arched bridges. Their intellectual range is shown by the knotted strings which they used for mathematical calculations, and their moral degradation appears in the shocking human sacrifices of their barbarous religion…

In their leisure they repaired their bows, sharpened new arrowheads, or stretched the smooth bark of the birch tree over their canoe frames. They had a great variety of games and dances, solemn and gay; and they loved to bask idly in the sun, too, like the Mississippi negro of today."

Passage Three

UShistory.org

"Lifestyles varied greatly. Most tribes were domestic, but the Lakota followed the buffalo as nomads. Most engaged in war, but the Apache were particularly feared, while the Hopis were pacifistic. Most societies were ruled by men, but the Iroquois women chose the leaders.

Native Americans lived in wigwams, hogans, igloos, tepees, and longhouses. some relied chiefly on hunting and fishing, while others domesticated crops. The Algonkian chiefs tried to achieve consensus, but the Natchez "Sun" was an absolute monarch. The totem pole was not a universal Indian symbol. It was used by tribes such as the Chinook in the Pacific Northwest to ward off evil spirits and represent family history.

It is important that students of history explore tribal nuances. Within every continent, there is tremendous diversity. The tribal differences that caused the Apache and Navajo peoples to fight each other are not so different from the reasons Germans fought the French. Recognizing tribal diversity is an important step in understanding the history of America."

  1. Did the depiction of Native American society change between the 1840s and the 1900s? If not, why do you think that was?

  2. Using the information in the final excerpt, what are some of the issues with the excerpts from Webster and Muzzey? What is wrong with their portrayal of Native American societies?

  3. Do you think twenty-first century history textbooks have escaped the problems of bias and prejudice? Why or why not?