Man, I hate doing it like this, but I'm going to have to make a rough pass through scheduling 20th Century US History, and nail down the specific books later, and tweak a little as we go. By "rough pass," I mean I'm going to have to decide how many weeks to spend on each topic, based only on my guess as to how much good literature will be available for everything.
Here's my stab. The listed topics include concepts I want, at least, to touch on in discussions, not necessarily stuff I want to read a whole book about. I can manage one to two books a week.
I hope to use some video and film clips and movies as well, now that we're into the era where video primary sources begin to appear. In a different post I'll start writing about the sources, text and multimedia, that I choose. But I may have to select a lot of stuff on the fly.
Different from previous years, my goal in this year's study is "Bridge the gap between the history they've already learned and the current events they are hearing about in the world today."
Very Rough Schedule of American History - Topical Arrangement
Weeks 1-6. American foreign relations.
● World War I
● World War II
● Manhattan Project/Nuclear proliferations
● Cold War/Alliances/Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan
● Fall of Eastern bloc
Possibly also:
● US Space program
● Foreign aid and goodwill building
● What is communism
Weeks 7-10. Economic topics
● Depression/War industries
● GI Bill/Postwar baby boom
● “War on poverty”
● Economic crises/natural disasters (using Flood: Wrestling with the Mississippi by P. Lauber, which covers Mississippi floods in the 1920s and the 1990s)
Weeks 11-13. American mobility
● Interstate highway system
● Migrants and immigrants
Possibly also:
● Air travel
Weeks 14-17. Communication technology
● Radio and popular music
● Television and cinema
● The development of computers
● Internet and social media
Weeks 18-21. Parties and ideologies
● New deal stuff, economic liberalism (FDR biography)
● Scandals such as Teapot Dome and Watergate
● The “Reagan Revolution” political realignment (Reagan biography)
● Bush v. Gore and red state, blue state
Weeks 22-26. Civil rights
● Women's suffrage
● Segregation in the South
● Brown v. Board of Education
● Philosophies/bios of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
● Continuing controversies about American racism
● Disability rights movement
● Election of first African-American president
● Important Supreme Court freedom-of-speech cases with a focus on homeschooling rights
Weeks 27-30. The American experience of childhood changes
● Children's work changes/most children attend school
● Gender and race restrictions are lifted (to be covered through the lens of “heroes and role models”)
● The American family changes
● Roe v. Wade (which we will not cover as a multifamily discussion due to its sensitive nature)
Weeks 31-34. Roots of the War on Terror
● Post-WWII partition of the Middle East
● Iran hostage crisis
● Terrorism
● First gulf war
● First attack on WTC
● Attacks of September 11, 2001
● Second Gulf War
● National security vs. civil liberties
Weeks 35-36: make-up weeks.
That sounds great! It's something I should probably look at closer just for myself even :) I didn't "get" history in school, all those discombobulated facts but we never learned the story. If fact, I am embarrassed to there are a lot of things on your list I don't even know about. So, I WILL be looking closer at your list and learning a few things on my own. Last year we studies American Railroad History and I made my own plan. I intended to spend 2 weeks on the First Transcontinental Railroad but we ended up spending 9-12 and pared down the rest. Everyone was so interested in it and it seemed everytime we discovered something else we delved into it.
Posted by: RealMom4Life | 01 July 2010 at 01:03 PM
I great book to use as a spine for US history is the new "Sea to Shining Sea" from the Catholic School Textbook Project. http://www.catholictextbookproject.com/
Posted by: Kate | 01 July 2010 at 01:57 PM
That looks good - such "modern" history is rarely ever covered in school - usually the curriculum only gets to WWII!
Posted by: karyn | 05 July 2010 at 08:19 PM