The U.S. story,
beautiful and complicated.

Who counts as a U.S. citizen — and on what terms — has been contested since 1787. NAT traces the shifting boundary of U.S. belonging: race, religion, gender, language, and the rights that go with each.

• Period 3 — Founding paradox — The Declaration says ‘all men created equal’ while slavery expands. The first U.S. naturalization law (1790) limits citizenship to ‘free white persons.’
• Period 5 — Reconstruction Amendments — 13th, 14th, 15th rewrite citizenship to include formerly enslaved people — reversed within a generation by Jim Crow.
• Period 7 — 1924 Immigration Act — National-origin quotas explicitly favor northern Europeans — an attempt to fix who counts as American by ancestry.
• Period 8 — Civil Rights — 1964 Civil Rights Act + 1965 Voting Rights Act force the federal government to defend Black citizenship in the South.

The U.S. as colony, hemisphere power, and global hegemon. WOR asks how U.S. foreign policy shifted from neutrality to expansion to leadership of the world order — and at what cost.

• Period 3 — Washington’s neutrality — Avoid ‘entangling alliances.’ The early republic prioritized neutrality and trade over European power politics.
• Period 7 — Imperialism — Spanish-American War (1898) hands the U.S. an overseas empire — Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines, Hawaii.
• Period 8 — Cold War leadership — Marshall Plan, NATO, Korea, Vietnam — the U.S. as architect and enforcer of the postwar Western order.
• Period 9 — Sole superpower — Soviet collapse leaves the U.S. as the sole superpower — tested by 9/11, then by China’s rise.

Land, climate, and resources as constraints and opportunities. GEO traces how U.S. geography (continental scale, two oceans, abundant resources) shaped the country — and how the people who lived here shaped that geography back.

• Period 1 — Native societies — Pacific Northwest salmon economies, Mississippian mound-builders, Pueblo agriculture — geography shapes pre-contact societies.
• Period 4 — Westward expansion — Louisiana Purchase doubles the country (1803). The Erie Canal (1825) connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic.
• Period 5 — Manifest Destiny — Texas, Oregon, the Mexican Cession (1848) round out the continental U.S. and force the slavery question.
• Period 7 — Dust Bowl — 1930s Plains farming + drought = ecological catastrophe; drives the largest internal migration in U.S. history.

Who came, who was forced, who left, and where they landed. MIG covers voluntary immigration, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigenous removal, and the internal migrations that remade U.S. cities.

• Period 2 — Slave trade — About 388,000 enslaved Africans arrive in British North America — a small fraction of the 12.5M Atlantic total.
• Period 4 — Trail of Tears — Indian Removal Act (1830) drives Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole nations west — thousands die en route.
• Period 6 — New Immigration — ~25 million immigrants 1865–1915, increasingly from southern and eastern Europe; Chinese exclusion (1882).
• Period 7 — Great Migration — ~6 million African Americans move from the South to Northern cities between 1916 and 1970 — reshaping U.S. politics.

How power was distributed, contested, and used. PCE traces constitutional development, party realignments, social movements, and the recurring U.S. argument over what government should do.

• Period 3 — Constitution — Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists — the founding compromise that produced the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
• Period 4 — Jacksonian democracy — Universal white male suffrage expands voters by 5×; Indian removal contracts political community.
• Period 7 — Progressive Era — 16th–19th Amendments, antitrust, regulatory state — federal power expands to address industrial-age problems.
• Period 9 — Reagan revolution — Tax cuts, deregulation, evangelical alliance — a conservative coalition that reshapes U.S. politics for 40 years.

Labor systems, markets, and the technologies that reshaped both. WXT traces how people in the U.S. worked, what they produced, and how the economy concentrated power and inequality.

• Period 2 — Tobacco & rice — Plantation economies in Chesapeake and Carolina shift from indentured to enslaved labor after Bacon’s Rebellion.
• Period 4 — Market Revolution — Erie Canal + railroads + Lowell mills + cotton gin produce the first integrated national market.
• Period 6 — Trusts — Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, J.P. Morgan finance — the Gilded Age corporation as the new U.S. institution.
• Period 9 — Globalization — Manufacturing employment falls from 19M to 12M; the service economy and inequality become defining features.

Class, race, gender, religion — and the lines they drew. SOC asks how people in the U.S. organized into groups and how those groups fought over status, opportunity, and the meaning of the U.S..

• Period 4 — Reform movements — Second Great Awakening sparks abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and public education.
• Period 6 — Jim Crow — Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) constitutionalizes ‘separate but equal’ — segregation as the South’s social system.
• Period 8 — Civil Rights & Liberation — Black, women’s, Chicano, AIM, gay liberation movements force American institutions to expand who has standing.
• Period 9 — Culture wars — Religion, race, gender, immigration — the defining political fault lines of the post-1980 U.S.

U.S. culture is plural — religious revivals, art, music, literature, food, and regional identity (New England, the South, the West, the borderlands) shape what “American” means. ARC tracks how creative and cultural expression both reflect and reshape U.S. society.

• Period 2 — First Great Awakening — A trans-colonial revival that creates the first shared cultural experience among the 13 colonies.
• Period 4 — Second Great Awakening & Transcendentalism — Religious revival fuels reform movements (abolition, temperance); Emerson and Thoreau forge a distinct U.S. literary voice.
• Period 7 — Harlem Renaissance — Black artistic flowering (Hughes, Hurston, Ellington) reshapes U.S. cultural identity in the Jazz Age.
• Period 9 — Culture wars — Religion, music, art, and education become contested terrain in U.S. politics from the 1980s on.