Library Liaison
Simone Williams
Librarian
Miami Dade College, North Campus
305-237-1471 | swilli5@mdc.edu
Course Description 📝
AMH 2010: History of the U.S. to 1877
In this course, students will examine United States history from before European contact to 1877. Topics will include but are not limited to indigenous peoples, the European background, the colonial period, the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, issues within the new republic, sectionalism, manifest destiny, slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction. Student learning outcomes: Students will describe the factual details of the substantive historical episodes under study; students will identify and analyze foundational developments that shaped American history from before European contact to 1877 using critical thinking skills; students will demonstrate an understanding of the primary ideas; values, and perceptions that have shaped United States history; and students will demonstrate competency in civic literacy.
Course Competencies 🎓
Competency 1: The student will demonstrate knowledge of European exploration and colonization of the Americas.
Competency 2: The student will discuss the motivations for European exploration and colonization of the new world.
Competency 3: The student will demonstrate knowledge of the American Revolution.
Competency 4: The student will demonstrate knowledge of the early American republic.
Competency 5: The student will demonstrate knowledge of the Jacksonian Era, and the institution of slavery in the antebellum south.
Competency 6: The student will demonstrate knowledge of the origins of the Civil War.
Competency 7: The student will show a comprehension of the era of Reconstruction.
Library Databases 📄 📚 🎥
Dive into our library's subject-specific databases to discover a world of articles, eBooks, videos, essays, and more!
U.S. History Colonial History and Revolution eBooks 📚
The American Revolution 1774-1783 by
The American Revolution has been characterized politically as a united political uprising of the American colonies and militarily as a guerrilla campaign of colonists against the inflexible British military establishment. Daniel Marston argues that this belief, though widespread, is a misconception. He contends that the American Revolution, in reality, created deep political divisions in the population of the Thirteen Colonies, while militarily pitting veterans of the Seven Years' War against one another, in a conflict that combined guerrilla tactics and classic eighteenth century campaign techniques on both sides. The peace treaty of 1783 that brought an end to the war marked the formal beginning of the United States of America as an independent political entity.
The American Yawp. Volume 1, To 1877 : A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook by
Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond.
Encyclopedia of U. S. Political History: Colonial Beginnings through Revolution by
The colonial period witnessed the transformation of thirteen distinct colonies into an independent federated republic. This volume discusses the diversity of the colonial political experience-a diversity that modern scholars have found defies easy synthesis-as well as the long-term conflicts, policies, and events that led to revolution, and the ideas underlying independence."
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by
A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
U.S. History Civil War and Reconstruction eBooks 📚
The Calculus of Violence by
The Calculus of Violence demonstrates that this notoriously bloody war could have been much worse. Military forces on both sides sought to contain casualties inflicted on soldiers and civilians. In Congress, in church pews, and in letters home, Americans debated the conditions under which lethal violence was legitimate, and their arguments differentiated carefully among victims--women and men, black and white, enslaved and free. Sometimes, as Sheehan-Dean shows, these well-meaning restraints led to more carnage by implicitly justifying the killing of people who were not protected by the laws of war. As the Civil War raged on, the Union's confrontations with guerrillas and the Confederacy's confrontations with Black soldiers forced a new reckoning with traditional categories of lawful combatants and raised legal disputes that still hang over military operations around the world today. In examining the agonizing debates about the meaning of a just war in the Civil War era, Sheehan-Dean discards conventional abstractions--total, soft, limited--as too tidy to contain what actually happened on the ground.
The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War by
Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them--or how they often failed to do so.
Reconstruction: A Concise History by
The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the "black codes," would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow.
U.S. Government Web Resources for U.S. History Pre-1877 ✨