University City High School
United States History
United States History
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AP United States History Spring 2020
Remind.com access code
text 81010
@ga836e
Next Steps:
NOW - students should continue using their MyAP accounts, myap.collegeboard.org, that were created to order exams. If you need help accessing, contact your AP teacher or your site’s AP Coordinator.
March 25 - online, teacher-led courses begin in all AP subject areas - visit AP’s YouTube Channel
April 3 - home exam schedule (with two date options per exam) will be released
While students are encouraged to wait until closer to the test to decide, any student registered for an exam can cancel at no charge. To cancel your exam, contact your AP coordinator at your site. While we will process refunds quickly, please be patient as we work under unusual working conditions.
We will be covering Chapter 27 online over the next week and a half. This will be the last of our AP Exam Coverage for the year. We will spend the remaining weeks preparing for the exam by answering SAQ's and looking at LEQ's from periods 1-7 (C1-27) 1491-1950. The Cold War journal notes are required and you will be responsible for the material. Please do your best to stay caught up and connected. It is recommended that you review all material I post online. I have also made available the reviews for the AP Exam on the menu. Please read the AP CollegeBoard Update. and look for updates sent by the collegeboard. There are free live online reviews on the AP YouTube channel beginning 3/25. The Exam will be in May as planned, however, it will be accessible online and be a modified version that will likely cover period 1-7 (Chapters 1-27). I have unlocked MyAP FRQ and LEQ questions Unit 7 for practice. Use this time wisely, stay strong, committed, and create a schedule to work through the material. This will be a good experience for many of you who will most likely take a few online courses over your educational career. Please check the homework page consistently over the next few weeks to keep up with the schedule. Schedules may change depending on the district opening school. The expectation for our return is April 6th but this is likely to change so stay connected. Please pay attention to my updates on Remind. Be smart and cover all the links that I have posted.
Week 28-29 Schedule
3/23-4/3
The mutual hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union grew out of ideological incompatibility and concrete actions stretching back to World War I and before. The alliance of convenience and necessity against Germany temporarily muted the tensions, but disagreement over the timing of the second front and antagonistic visions of postwar Europe pushed the two nations into a "cold war" only a few months after the victory over the Axis. The Cold War was marked by confrontation and the fear of potential military conflict. The United States vowed to contain communism by any means available. Meanwhile, the American people, exhausted from a decade and a half of depression and war, turned away from economic reform. They were worried about the alleged Soviet threat in Europe, especially after Russia exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949. They were dismayed by the communist victory in China and perplexed by the limited war in Korea. Many Americans latched onto charges of domestic communist subversion as an explanation for the nation?s inability to control world events. No one exploited this mood more effectively than Joseph McCarthy.
THEMES
War and Diplomacy: Although the United States experienced relatively little in the way of armed conflict in the immediate post-World War II period, the nation faced a series of tense crises with the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1950. The two wartime allies had vastly different conceptions of the shape of the postwar world, and each perceived the other's actions through a lens of distrust and suspicion. The United States gradually developed a policy of containment in an effort to prevent the expansion of Soviet power. By the end of the 1940s, communism had spread to China and other parts of Asia. Between 1950 and 1953, the United States fought a costly and inconclusive war in Korea, the first armed conflict of the Cold War.
Globalization: The expansion of the containment policy, as well as the process of helping to rebuild war-torn Western Europe and Japan, transformed America's relationship with the rest of the world. The United States developed a substantial aid program to Western Europe in the form of the Marshall Plan and occupied Japan from 1945 until the 1950s. American foreign policy became heavily focused on preserving democracies throughout Europe and Asia (and later to other parts of the world) in an effort to develop reliable allies in the anticommunist struggle. At the same time, the United States sought to promote a liberal world economic order based on free trade in an effort both to maintain foreign markets and prevent the spread of economic anarchy, which American policymakers saw as having been central to the eventual outbreak of World War II.
Politics and Citizenship: America's activist foreign policy required extensive domestic mobilization and significantly increased the power of the national state. Although President Truman had sought to keep defense spending limited in the early years of the Cold War, by 1950 American leaders believed it was necessary to undertake a major increase in defense spending to combat the Soviet threat. The nation's intelligence, military, and diplomatic institutions were all reorganized to give the president greater power and authority to conduct foreign policy.
Culture: The Cold War had profound effects on virtually all aspects of American culture. Most apparent was the pervasive fear of communism that gripped much of the American public and eventually found form in the anticommunist crusade known as McCarthyism (although the phenomenon went much deeper than the Wisconsin Senator and his followers). Long accustomed to living relatively isolated from any direct threats to the nation's security, Americans had to become accustomed to a series of threats ranging from internal subversion and espionage to the potential threat of nuclear war (even if it would be years before the Soviet Union had an effective capability for attacking American soil).
5. View
Explosions and Tragedy: Droping the Bomb on Hiroshima
6. Assignment
The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb
In the fall of 1994, the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., installed in its main hall the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on Hiroshima in 1945. Originally, the airplane was to have been accompanied by an exhibit that would include discussions of the many popular and academic controversies over whether the United States should have used the bomb. But a powerful group of critics led by veterans' groups and aided by many members of Congress organized to demand that the exhibit be altered and that it reflect only the "official" explanation of the decision. In the end, the museum decided to mount no exhibit at all. The Enola Gay hangs in the Smithsonian today entirely without explanation for the millions of tourists who see it each year.
The furor that surrounded the Air and Space Museum installation reflects the passions that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to arouse among people around the world, and people in the United States and Japan in particular. It also reflects the continuing debate among historians about how to explain, and evaluate, President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb in the war against Japan.
Truman himself, both at the time and in his 1955 memoirs, insisted that the decision was a simple and straightforward one. The alternative to using atomic weapons, he claimed, NAGASAKI SURVIVORS A Japanese woman and child look grimly at a photographer as they hold pieces of bread in the aftermath of the dropping of the second American atomic bomb this one on Nagasaki.
American invasion of mainland Japan that might have cost as many as a million lives. Given that choice, he said, the decision was easy. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used." Truman's explanation of his decision has been supported by the accounts of many of his contemporaries: by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in his 1950 memoir, On Active Service in Peace and War; by Winston Churchill; by Truman's senior military advisers. It has also received considerable support from historians. Herbert Feis argued in The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (1966) that Truman had made his decision on purely military grounds to ensure a speedy American victory. David McCullough, the author of a popular biography of Truman published in 1992, also accepted Truman's own account of his actions largely uncritically, as did Alonzo L. Hamby in Man of the People (1995), an important scholarly study of Truman. "One consideration weighed most heavily on Truman," Hamby concluded. "The longer the war lasted, the more Americans killed." Robert J. Donovan, author of an extensive history of the Truman presidency, Conflict and Crisis (1977), reached the same conclusion: "The simple reason Truman made the decision to drop the bomb was to end the war quickly and save lives."
Other scholars have strongly disagreed. As early as 1948, a British physicist, P. M. S. Blackett, wrote in Fear, War, and the Bomb that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "not so much the last military act of the second World War as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia." The most important critic of Truman's decision is the historian Gar Alperovitz, the author of two influential books on the subject: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965) and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995). Alperovitz dismisses the argument that the bomb was used to shorten the war and save lives. Japan was likely to have surrendered soon even if the bomb had not been used, he claims; large numbers of American lives were not at stake in the decision. Instead, he argues, the United States used the bomb less to influence Japan than to intimidate the Soviet Union. Truman made his decision to bomb Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of a discouraging meeting with Stalin at Potsdam. He was heavily influenced, therefore, by his belief that America needed a new way to force Stalin to change his behavior, that, as Alperovitz has argued, "the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe."
Martin J. Sherwin, in A World Destroyed (1975), is more restrained in his criticism of American policymakers. But he too argues that a rapidly growing awareness of the danger Stalin posed to the peace made leaders aware that atomic weapons and their effective use could help strengthen the American hand in the nation's critical relationship with the Soviet Union. Truman, Sherwin said, "increasingly came to believe that America's possession of the atomic bomb would, by itself, convince Stalin to be more cooperative."
John W. Dower's War Without Mercy (1986) contributed, by implication at least, to another controversial explanation of the American decision: racism. Throughout World War II, most Americans considered the Germans and the Italians to be military and political adversaries. They looked at the Japanese very differently: as members of a very different and almost bestial race. They were, many Americans came to believe, almost a subhuman species. And while Dower himself stops short of saying so, other historians have suggested that this racialized image of Japan contributed to American willingness to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Even many of Truman's harshest critics, however, note that it is, as Alperovitz has written, "all but impossible to find specific evidence that racism was an important factor in the decision to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
The debate over the decision to drop the atomic bomb is an unusually emotional one driven in part by the tremendous moral questions that the destruction of so many lives raises and it has inspired bitter professional and personal attacks on advocates of almost every position. It illustrates clearly how history has often been, and remains, a powerful force in the way societies define their politics, their values, and their character.
1. Read
"Hiroshima: Was it Necessary?" by Doug Long
2. Review comments posted
The Decision (Nagasaki Exploratorium)
3. Explore
Hiroshima: Harry Truman on Trial - History News Network
Potsdam Conference 1945 Fall of China 1949 United Nations Soviets
Chaing Kai-shek NATO 1949 Hydrogen Bomb
Mao Zedong Korean War 1950-53 Hary Truman
Iron Curtain Speech Dwight D. Eisenhower George F. Kennan
Truman Doctrine Policy of Containment Marshall Plan 1947
GI Bill of Rights 1944 Alger Hiss Case Rosenberg Trial
Richard Nixon Joseph McCarthy McCarthyism
HUAC McCarran Internal Security Act National Security Act 1947
Warsaw Pact Berlin Blockade 1948 NSC-68Week 27
Thursday-Sunday 3/19-3/22
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945. The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
War and Diplomacy: World War II transformed the United States more fundamentally than any conflict since the Civil War. It revolutionized American foreign policy by causing the nation's leaders to realize that the United States must commit itself to playing a leading role in postwar collective security efforts to avoid a repeat of the events that led up to the war; it expanded the role of the federal government in myriad ways; it ended the Great Depression; and it changed the role of women and other minority groups, fueling postwar demands for greater rights among groups that helped to maintain the nation's freedom during wartime.
Economic Transformations: World War II succeeded where the New Deal failed-in ending the Great Depression. Federal spending increased more than tenfold between 1939 and 1945; at the same time, Americans saved money due to the shortage of consumer goods, helping to spark a massive postwar boom. The war also spurred economic growth in the West, where federal military and infrastructural spending helped to transform the region's economy. The war led to unprecedented government spending on research and development, which produced a host of new innovations, with both military and civilian applications. Increased taxation, including the first federal withholding taxes, helped to finance the costly war effort.
American Diversity: The struggle against Nazi ideas of racial superiority forced the United States to grapple with the issue of racial and ethnic diversity in the United States. The United States placed over 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps in the name of protecting national security, a controversial decision that evoked little popular opposition at the time. Despite this action, the federal government and the American people largely came to see the nation's ethnic diversity as a source of its strength, a major difference from World War I, when government efforts to promote national unity helped spark anti-foreign hysteria. African Americans, the nation's most prominent racial minority, demanded a greater role in the war effort and an end to discrimination in defense industries; their military efforts helped lead to the desegregation of the armed forces soon after the war's end.
Culture: Despite the natural anxiety caused by the war, the conflict also demonstrated the resilience of American culture and society. Americans came to believe that they were fighting to uphold the ideals of democracy and material prosperity. They looked forward to a postwar age in which mass consumption would be the order of the day. Families were strained as a result of the demands of military services, as working women often lacked access to child care. Marriage rates increased significantly during the war, as did births (a preview of the postwar "baby boom.".
1. Read Gilder Lehrman Article
- African Americans and the War p. 715--716
- Native Americans and the War p. 716
- Mexican American War Workers p. 716
- Women and Children at War p. 716
- The Internment of Japanese Americans p. 720
World War II
America is enveloped in total war, from mobilization on the home front to a scorching air war in Europe. Professor Miller's view of World War II is a personal essay on the morality of total war, and its effects on those who fought, died, and survived it, including members of his own family.
Key Terms
Douglas MacArthur A. Philip Randolph Harry Truman Admiral Chester Nimitz
“Rosie the Riveter” Zoot-Suit Riots Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin
Tehran Conference Holocaust Election of 1944 Yalta Conference
Japanese Internment Operation Torch Korematsu v. US Operation Overlord
Executive Oder 9066 Hiroshima and Nagasaki D-Day Code Talkers
Braceros Program Test Shot Trinity Manhattan Project V-E Day
V-Jay Day General Dwight D. Eisenhower
5. Essential Questions
Submit through Google Classroom due Sunday 3/22
During the four years of the war, American society and Americans underwent many changes. Specifically, African Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and women experienced many changes in their daily lives.
1. How did the war affect life on the home front, especially for women, organized labor, and African Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican American, Native Americans? Compare and contrast the impact of the war on the many ethnic, gender, and racial groups in America.
Discuss
a. African Americans
b. Native Americans
c. Mexican Americans
d. Japanese Americans.
e. Women
Week 26
During the 1920s, the United States tried to promote world peace through diplomatic means.In 1921, representatives from nine Asian and European nations met in Washington to discuss ways to ease tensions I n the Pacific. The conference resulted in a 10-year moratorium on the construction of battleships and an agreement that for every five naval vessels owned by the United States or Britain, Japan could have three ships, and France and Italy could own one and three-fourths ships.In 1928, the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg attempted to outlaw war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was eventually signed by 62 nations, renounced war as an instrument for resolving international disputes. The Kellogg-Briand Pact lacked an enforcement mechanism. Cynics said the treaty had all the legal force of an "international kiss."
During the Great Depression isolationist sentiment surged. In 1935, some 150,000 college students participated in a nationwide Student Strike for Peace, and half a million signed pledges saying that they would refuse to serve in the event of war. A public opinion poll indicated that 39 percent of college students would refuse to participate in any war, even if the country was invaded. Anti-war sentiment was not confined to undergraduates. Disillusionment over World War I fed opposition to foreign entanglements. "We didn't win a thing we set out for in the last war," said Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. "We merely succeeded, with tremendous loss of life, to make secure the loans of private bankers to the Allies." The overwhelming majority of Americans agreed; an opinion poll in 1935 found that 70 percent of Americans believed that intervention in World War I had been a mistake. Isolationist ideas spread through American popular culture during the mid-1930s. The Book of the Month Club featured a volume titled Merchants of Death, which contended that the United States had been drawn into the European war by international arms manufacturers who had deliberately fomented conflict in order to market their products. From 1934 to 1936, a congressional committee, chaired by Senator Nye, investigated charges that false Allied propaganda and unscrupulous Wall Street bankers had dragged Americans into the European war. In April 1935--the 18th anniversary of American entry into World War I--50,000 veterans held a peace march in Washington, D.C.
Between 1935 and 1937, Congress passed three separate neutrality laws that clamped an embargo on arms sales to belligerents, forbade American ships from entering war zones and prohibited them from being armed, and barred Americans from traveling on belligerent ships. Clearly, Congress was determined not to repeat what it regarded as the mistakes that had plunged the United States into World War I. By 1938, however, pacifist sentiment was fading. A rapidly modernizing Japan was seeking to acquire raw materials and territory on the Asian mainland; a revived Germany was rebuilding its military power and acquiring land bloodlessly on its eastern borders; and Italy was trying to restore Roman glory through military might.
2. Review Lecture Outlines
American Foreign Policy 1919-1941
The Rise of Totalitarianism 1930s
3. ReviewAdam Norris C25 Lecture
C25 Key Terms
Isolationism Loyalists Manchuria
Unilateralism Abraham Lincoln Brigade Sino-Japanese War
Internationalism Dawes Act Committee to Defend America
Fascism Neutrality Acts Poland 1939
Communism Appeasement Atlantic Charter
Totalitarianism Munich Conference 1938 Winston Churchill
Imperial Japan Non-Aggression Pact Battle of Britain
Pearl Harbor 1941 Washington Conference America First Committee
Kellogg-Briand Pact Hideki Tojo Adolph Hitler
Benito Mussolini Axis Powers. Francisco Franco
Lend Lease Stimson Doctrine Good Neighbor Policy
Spanish Civil War Collective security
Week 25
Period 7 1898-1945
Essays
The New DealEconomic Transformations: Although the New Deal failed to restore prosperity and end the Great Depression, it did create a number of important regulatory mechanisms that allowed the federal government to prevent the conditions that had led to the economic disaster of the late 1920s through the regulation of the stock market and the banking sectors. The New Deal provided a basis for post-World War II experiments in federal fiscal policy, as Roosevelt began to experiment on a limited basis with macroeconomic tools such as deficit spending to stimulate economic growth. The New Deal also promoted economic growth in the South and West, helping to improve lives in those regions and bring them to a standard of living closer to that enjoyed by people living in other parts of the country.
Politics and Citizenship: The New Deal helped to create a Democratic coalition that would shape national politics until the late 1960s. While the party had been badly divided between its urban and rural wings during the 1920s, FDR was able to shift the Democrats from a focus on divisive cultural issues to an emphasis on economic issues and thus unite a number of different constituencies. By the end of his first term in 1936, Roosevelt had brought together African Americans, organized labor, women, urban residents, southerners, and traditional liberals and progressives, creating a powerful grouping that made the Democratic Party the nation's natural majority for several decades.
Herbert Hoover The Bonus Army
Franklin Delano Roosevelt The Stock Market Crash
Tariff policy Bank failures
Charitable Organizations Social Consequences of the Great Depression
The Dust Bowl The Okies
Mexican Immigrants The 1932 Election
The New Deal The First Hundred Days
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC)
Huey Long Father Caughlin
The Second New Deal The National Labor Relations Act (The Wagner Act)
The Social Security Act Race and the New Deal
Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) Glass-Steagall Act