Big American Story #5 -- Prosperity

Remember that I need postings every week, so if you need to go back and pick up last week's discussion go ahead.

Prosperity was instrumental in:

Providing a motive for exploration -- Columbus was followed back to the New World because there was gold. Puritans came from England with the promise of being land owners.

Sparking the revolution -- Many of the complaints raised in the Declaration of Independence were economic. The Tea Party was in response to a corporate bailout, after all.

Bringing people out of the east and across the plains to the west coast. -- Sure they believed in Manifest Destiny, but it took the promise of wealth to get people to act on it.

Launching the gilded age. -- Robber barons, tycoons, and the advance of technology led to decades of prosperity.

The Great Depression became the formative experience for multiple generations. (What ended the Depression -- FDR, World War II, or just better weather -- became an interesting discussion.)

The American message in the Cold War was western-style prosperity for all.

After the Cold War, we entered the era of bubbles. Beanie Babies, Internet stocks, Real-estate flipping, sub-prime mortgages. American economic theory since 1989 has been that people can consume as much as they want and not have to worry about paying off the debt. (A significant number of home foreclosures have been on people who put their credit card bills on their home mortgages.)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. When has America acted against its political interests in the quest for prosperity?

2. Can an American politician get elected if he tells people not to consume so much?

3. Which is more important to Americans – personal prosperity or collective opportunity?

Technology in America

Reminder -- The Presidents test is due next week.

Highlights:

Technology advantages (steel, boats, etc.) allowed Europeans to hold a position in the New World.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery profitable, then his invention of interchangeable parts allowed for much more massive slaughter in the Civil War.

While transportation technology allowed Americans to take up more space, industrialization compressed the population into smaller and smaller areas.

America's technological and industrial might made them a deciding factor in both World Wars.

The Cold War was in a lot of ways a battle of technology -- Space Race, RAND corporation.

The advent of the Internet allows America to be an even smaller country even as more and more people fill up the available space.

EXTRA CREDIT ALERT!!!

Go to historybee.com for details on entering the National History Bee. The regionals are in Nashville in January. There will also be an event in Owensboro, date TBD.

If enough folks want to go, we can even enter a team. Let me know if you're interested.

The Five Big Stories

Link to class audio here

We talked the last couple of weeks about historical significance. Here is one way of assessing significance: How big an impact did the person or event make on one of the major stories in American history?

EXPLORATION
Christopher Columbus
Lewis & Clark
Manifest Destiny
Apollo Program

LIBERTY
Pilgrims & Puritans (vs. Roger Williams)
Declaration of Independence & First Amendment
States Rights
Fascism, Nazism, and Communism
Culture Wars & the Supreme Court, 1960-2000
God, faith, and country in the 21st Century

EQUALITY
America vs. the rest of the world
Jacksonian Democracy
Black equality (Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Post-WW2, King, & Obama)
Immigrant Assimilation

PROSPERITY
European explorers
Jamestown, Georgia, New Amsterdam
Alexander Hamilton (Bank of the US, Western empire)
Gold Rush
Gilded Age
Great Depression & Dust Bowl
“Great Society” & the Welfare State

TECHNOLOGY
Education as means to virtue
Agricultural inventions (cotton gin, reapers, tractors)
Transportation inventions (steamboat, railroad, cars, airplanes, spacecraft)
Communication inventions (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, computers, Internet)
Medical & quality of life inventions (vaccination, refrigeration, electric lights, scanners, DNA & the human genome)

Questions for Discussion:

Choose one of the five big stories and answer one of these questions about it:

Who (not a President) did the most to advance the story?
Which story had the biggest effect on a President's legacy?
What event shows the most overlap between multiple stories?

Presidents, Part 2

The Link to the audio from today's class is here in MP3 format.

Theodore Roosevelt 25th president (1901-1909)

• Tried to run for a third term (Bull Moose)
• Established national parks
• Trust-busting
• Nobel Peace Prize & Medal of Honor

Woodrow Wilson 28th President (1913-1921)

• Decisive factor in WW1
• League of Nations/14 Points/Treaty of Versailles
• Wilsonian Idealism

Franklin Roosevelt 32nd President (1933-1945)

• Four elections
• Great Depression/New Deal
• “Arsenal of Democracy”
• World War II

John Kennedy 35th President (1961-1963)

• Space Race
• Cuba (missiles, Bay of Pigs, Castro)
• Changed the objective of the Cold War
• Televised Presidency

Ronald Reagan 40th President (1981-1989)

• Finished what Kennedy started (Cold War)
• Rebuilt Republican party after Watergate
• “Patron Saint” of present-day conservatives
• Economy-based campaigning

Barack Obama 44th President (2009-present)

• First black President
• Global campaign

HOMEWORK: Post comments in the Presidents, Part 1 thread, or in this thread's comments tool.

Next Week:

The five big stories: Exploration, Equality, Liberty, Technology, & Prosperity

In Two Weeks: Ben will be out of town, so Laura will be talking about historically-significant books.

Presidents, Part 1

What we covered today

Top Ten US Presidents
LCHE Homeschool Co-Op US History

Top Ten US Presidents

• Based on historical significance
• Not an evaluation of their quality
• In the order they served, not a ranked list
  

George Washington -- First President (1789-1797)

• First President
• Established two-term tradition
• Warned about entangling alliances
• Established the “civilian Presidency.”

Thomas Jefferson -- Third President (1801-1809)

• Peaceful Transition from Adams
• Louisiana Purchase/Lewis & Clark expedition
• Strict constructionism vs. Opportunity
• Got two successors elected.

Andrew Jackson -- Seventh President (1829-1837)

• Federal government as defender of liberty
• Veto, veto, veto . . .
• First President not from MA or VA
• “Jacksonian democracy”

Abraham Lincoln -- Sixteenth President (1861-1865)

• Civil War
• Emancipation of slaves
• “National Union” Party
• First national-level Republican

NEXT WEEK: Presidents 5-10. Also, read the Constitution.

Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama.

IN TWO WEEKS: The five most historically-significant storylines running through US History.

Exploration, Equality, Liberty, Technology, & Prosperity

Discussion Questions (open for two weeks):

• Who is on the list who doesn't belong there, and who would you replace him with? Why?
• Is the significance of a Presidency defined more by circumstances or by the person?
• Can a President make a historically-significant contribution in only one term?

Notes from History Class -- September 14

We didn't cover much history today, just some basic "learning theory" material that will help make the rest of the class make sense.

Here's the link to the Presidents song:




The first quiz of the year will be the lyrics to this song. I'll provide everything but the names. You fill in the blanks. You have until Tuesday, October 19 to complete this quiz for full credit.

If you like the learning theory material, read Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris. Some of the scenes may not be suitable for little brothers and sisters, but that's what makes them so memorable, right?

For parents checking in, here's a rundown of what we did today:

The Trebekistan Method
Becoming Smarter Than You Ever Thought Possible In Eight Easy Steps

Step One:
Pay Attention to the Obvious.

If something comes up over and over again, it's probably important.

Step Two:
Let your feelings help you.

Learning is, at its core, an emotional process. We are emotional beings. Use that fact to your advantage.

Step Three:
Create a setting for remembering.

Re-creating the environment in which you will eventually have to remember will help you recall the information when you need to.

Step Four:
Better to do nothing than to do something dumb.

Consider the circumstance in which you've been asked to remember something. Know the price of being wrong.

Step Five:
Remember how little you really know.

Much of memory hinges on confidence. It's not enough just to know, but to know you know.

Step Six:
Everything connects to everything else.

Learning how the puzzle is framed helps you fill in the details.

Step Seven:
You can only see what you think you'll see.

No matter how hard we try, we can only see the world from our own point of view.

Step Eight:
Answer one question at a time.

Take learning and remembering one moment at a time. You can only do what's right in front of you, right now. The more you worry about what you can't control, the less control you'll have over what you can.

BONUS FOR WEBSITE VIEWERS: Embrace your inner weirdo.

One of my mentors growing up was a man we called Mr. Nick. He was the guy at church who always had candy in his pocket for the kids. One day I was wondering about being a preacher because I wasn't one of the popular kids. I made the comment that if the church was going to grow it needed somebody less weird representing it in the world of normal people.

I'll never forget what he told me. He said, "Ben, weird can be good." He went on to tell me that he saw a lot of his son in me, and instead of hiding my weirdness I should embrace it.

Turns out Mr. Nick knew a thing or two about cultivating weirdos into successful adults. Mr. Nick's only child was named Al.

You guessed it. Yankovic.

So let your freak flag fly, people. By the end of this class, we'll have enough freakiness for a parade.