Religion, race and money.  Some of these issues are still as divisive today as they were when the nation was first founded.  Why is that?  In the beginning of the school year, I asked you to go beyond simply gathering information concerning the past.  We had to analyze it, synthesize it, and ultimately evaluate it.  [...]

Mutiny in the army, the British still on the frontier, national debt out of control, a weak national government, attacks up and down the Atlantic Ocean and lots of other issues to provide headaches to the ‘founders’.  Do you want to be in charge of this new country?  Probably not. Well, maybe.  Some of you [...]

Your text begins this section with some very important questions: “No areas of American life were more powerfully changed than politics and government. Who would have a voice in revolutionary politics, and who would be excluded? How vigorously would political equality be pursued, or how tenaciously would people cling to the traditional belief that citizens [...]

The American Revolutionary War is one of the most researched periods in American history.  Recently, A People’s History of the American Revolution was written, explaining the lives of common people and soldiers in this struggle.  It is also one of the lenses of studying history.  Your text balances its perspective in this context, as it [...]

Wow.  This is a long section.  It covers  the whole war from beginning to end.   Let’s start at the beginning, with Washington in Boston, but remember that the study of history is not the story of the movement of troops.  There is a political, economic and social context to all wars.  This is especially [...]

Now the real fun begins.  It’s showtime in the colonies, as some of the colonists formmalize their rebellion against taxes and representation and the British structure of government by arming their muskets and firing them at British soldiers.   None of the delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia could mistake their intentions now.  The British [...]

“THE TURMOIL OF A REBELLIOUS PEOPLE” (175) What a horrible movie title!  Think about it.  I could make a bunch of bad movie jokes here, but I won’t.  This will be a brief blog post tonight.  Here’s where we’ll begin: “Groups emerged—slaves, urban laboring people, backcountry farmers, evangelicals, women—whose enunciated goals were sometimes only loosely [...]

OK, I have to apologize to all of my students first, for this late post to the text blog.  I had a meeting tonight with the Curriculum Subcommittee of the School Committee to introduce and answer questions concerning our Leadership Academy proposal.  For those of you who have not heard about this, we are planning [...]

Was there a way that Great Britain could have kept the colonies as part of their empire without revolution?  Was there a middle ground, or was this merely an exercise between political radicalism on one side and monarchical stubbornness on the other?  Your text begins with sympathy for King George III.  Towards the end of [...]

In the four wars that were fought in the colonies by the great powers, the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in the colonies) was the most far-reaching with the most devastating consequences.  On a lighter note, my wife and I have a running joke that everything always comes back to the [...]