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

What each unit covers

1. 📜Founding Ideals

   The Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights and Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the debates of 1787, the Federalist Papers, and the principles of the Constitution.

2. 🗽Rights & Amendments

   What the first ten amendments protect, the Reconstruction Amendments, and why rights come with limits and responsibilities.

3. ⚙️Factories & Reformers

   The Industrial Revolution in the North, canals, roads and railroads, immigration, public schools, and the abolition and women's rights movements before 1861.

4. 🏗️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.

5. 🔔Colonies to Independence

   The key dates of US history to 1877 (1607, 1620, 1776, 1787, 1803 and 1861–1865), why Spain, France and England colonized, early representative government, the causes of the Revolution, and the people the Texas standards name, from Samuel Adams and Mercy Otis Warren to James Armistead and Bernardo de Gálvez.

6. 👩‍⚖️The Constitution & the Courts

   The strengths and weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, the compromises of 1787, how the Constitution answered colonial grievances, the principles of the Constitution, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, states' rights and nullification, and the landmark cases Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, Gibbons v. Ogden and Dred Scott v. Sandford.

7. 🦅A New Nation

   The problems facing the new republic, Hamilton's economic plan, the first political parties, the War of 1812, the Louisiana Purchase, and the foreign policies of George Washington through James Monroe, including the Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine.

8. 🐂Westward Expansion

   Jacksonian democracy, the Indian Removal Act, Worcester v. Georgia and the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny, Texas annexation, and the causes and effects of the US–Mexican War. The Cherokee Nation and other nations are described as living, self-governing nations.

9. 🧭A Nation Divided

   The effects of slavery on different regions, the lives of enslaved people and free Black Americans, the Fugitive Slave Acts, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and abolitionists. Told factually.

10. ⚔️The Civil War

    The central role of slavery in causing the Civil War, its leaders, its major battles and turning points, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln's ideas in his inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address. Told factually.