Wednesday, September 7th

Advanced American History

Today we begin our first unit, a discussion of the American Civil War.  As we begin the examination of some of the root causes of the Civil War, consider these statistics:

• 3 million served
• 620,000 were killed (2% of the population)
• it is the bloodiest conflict anywhere in the world in the 19th century
• it is the bloodiest conflict in American history
• 4 of 10 who served were killed or wounded
• One soldier killed for every 6 slaves freed

Between 1861 and 1865, in the words of David McCullough, "Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers, if only to become the kind of country that can no longer conceive how that was possible"

If absent or for review, please view the introductory piece by Ken Burns found above.

Assignment:  Read text pages 44-48  

American Studies

To finish our introduction to the study of American history, we discussed our oral history results about high school students of a generation or two ago.  After completing this, we introduced the first unit of study for the school year, The Civil War.  If absent or for review, please view the introductory piece by Ken Burns found above.