🌎 8th grade Social Studies: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🏗️Reconstruction

   Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 as a bridge to high school US history: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, Black officeholders, the violence that opposed them and how gains were later rolled back.

2. 🏭Industrial America

   Industry, railroads and inventors after the Civil War, big business and monopolies, new immigrants and growing cities, child labor and unions, farmers' movements, and federal Indian policy on the Plains.

3. 🗽Immigrants & the Growing City

   Why people came to America around 1900, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, life in New York City's tenements, the five boroughs, bridges, subways and skyscrapers, and conflicts over immigration and city politics.

4. 🧵Workers & Progressives

   Working conditions, unions and strikes, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the reforms it brought, muckrakers, Progressive amendments, women's suffrage in New York and the nation, and the founding of the NAACP.

5. ⚓Expansion & Empire

   Conflict with Plains nations and federal Indian policy, Pacific trade and Hawaii, the Spanish-American War and the territories it brought, the Panama Canal, and the Roosevelt Corollary in Latin America.

6. 🪖World War I

   The causes of World War I, why the United States entered in 1917, new weapons and trench warfare, the Harlem Hellfighters, wartime limits on civil liberties, and the debate over the Treaty of Versailles.

7. 🎷The Roaring Twenties

   Prosperity and new technology, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, Prohibition, new opportunities for women, and the conflicts of the decade over immigration and change.

8. 📉Depression & New Deal

   The causes of the crash and the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, how families coped, and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (begun as governor of New York) and its lasting programs.

9. ✈️World War II

   The road to war, the US entry after Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the Pacific, the Holocaust, the home front including the forced removal of Japanese Americans, and the war's results, including the United Nations in New York City.

10. 🚀The Cold War

    The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, containment from the Truman Doctrine to Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the space race and the end of the Cold War.

11. 🌐A Changing World

    The United States' role after the Cold War, the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, the responses to terrorism and the debates they raised, and globalization.

12. ✊Civil Rights

    The civil rights movement from Brown v. Board of Education to the Voting Rights Act, its leaders and methods, and the efforts it inspired by women, farm workers, Native Americans, people with disabilities and the LGBT community, with key Supreme Court cases.

13. 🏘️A Changing Population

    The baby boom, suburbs such as Levittown, the Sun Belt and Rust Belt, migration from Puerto Rico, new immigration after 1965, and environmental challenges from Love Canal to climate change.

14. ⚖️The Great Society & Beyond

    The Great Society, the Vietnam War's effect at home, Watergate, the 1970s economy and the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s, and Supreme Court cases on civil liberties, including Engel v. Vitale from New York.

15. 🗓️Timeline 1865–2001

    Putting events from Reconstruction, the growth of New York City, two world wars, the Cold War and the civil rights movement in order.