COURSE GOALS AND STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
· Students will examine past social‑cultural value systems which have formed a basis
for human beliefs, as well as challenges to those beliefs.
· A main goal of this course is to teach students how to ask and answer their own
questions about post Civil War America.
· Students will examine past social‑cultural value systems which have formed a basis
for human beliefs, as well as challenges to those beliefs.
· A main goal of this course is to teach students how to ask and answer their own
questions about post Civil War America.
- Engage students in the reading of contradictory sources, primary and secondary, enabling them to decipher arguments and evidence, as well as to defend the subsequent position they take on the debate.
- Analyze the complexities created by having inequality, discrimination, and violence in a democratic society, scrutinizing the tensions between freedom and equality.
- Provide students with rigorous opportunities to develop essential skills; the ability to critically analyze arguments about the past, the capacity to consider the perspective of all of those involved, the confidence and skill to articulate their ideas and arguments orally and in writing in an organized, convincing, engaging, and professional manner, to manage their time and resources, to lead, and to respect the work of their peers by engaging them and defending their own ideas.
- To that end, this syllabus is designed to help students learn a number of historical skills, frameworks, and methods that have been developed by historians. By the end of the course, students should be able to: analyze primary source documents (including Hollywood movies) in light of the frameworks that historians of US History have developed; identify the subject, thesis, organization, and sources used in primary and secondary source articles; assess the strengths and weaknesses of those articles.
- Write critical, analytical essays utilizing the methodologies and vocabulary of the history to express your own thoughts and ideas about the materials we have studied.
- Develop useful strategies of asking and answering your own questions about American History by using the above skills.
Creative, critical thinking is the ultimate objective!