Article #1 in a Series >>>>> Essential Information, >Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< >>>>> American History

So wretched is the education in the Minneapolis Public Schools that I have been motivated to put my talents as a teacher and researcher into motion for the production of two monumental tomes:  Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education and Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.  The latter exposes the deficiencies of the Minneapolis Public Schools in factual, analytical, and philosophical detail;  the former delivers to my students the education in economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, other ethnic history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics that they do not get in the public schools of Minneapolis.


I have generated various versions of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, from very concise to the longest edition at approximately 500 single-spaced pages.    I am currently working with an exquisitely talented grade 11 student who has high capacity for information acquisition and is moving fast in quest of Advanced Placement mastery and superior ACT performance.  I have for her generated a middle range length of text in all chapters, which readers may find if they scroll on down to my blog entries of late winter and early spring in this very year of 2019.

In these next few entries I provide to my readers a list of essential terms to be understood in informational context for detail and significance, providing these for several of the chapters of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.

Please, then, peruse the first list, pertinent to my chapter on American history:

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Essential Information, Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education

American History

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

I.  First Americans, 20,000/15,000 BC (BCE)-1492 AD (CE)

Essential terms, to be understood in historical context for detail and significance:

Bering Strait

American

Native Americans (American Indians, indigenous peoples of the Americas)

II.  Columbus and the Arrival of Europeans, 1492-1763

Essential terms, to be understood in historical context for detail and significance:

Vikings

Christopher Columbus

Hernando Cortez

Francisco Pizarro

Middle Passage

plantation slave labor

III.  American Revolution, 1775-1781/1783

Essential terms, to be understood in historical context for detail and significance:

Thirteen (13) original colonies

Parliamentary taxation

Lexington and Concord

Declaration of Independence

Yorktown (1781)

Treaty of Paris (1783)

Loyalists (Tories, Redcoats)

African Americans in the American Revolution

IV.  The Establishment of the United States of America, 1781-1829

Essential terms, to be understood in historical context for detail and significance:

Articles of Confederation (1781)

United States Constitution (1789)

Treaty of Paris (1783)

judicial review

Democratic Republicans

Federalists

Federalist Papers

Monroe Doctrine (1823)

V.  The Troubled Quest for Democracy, 1829-1890

Essential terms, to be understood in historical context for detail and significance:

War of 1812

Louisiana Purchase

Lewis and Clark Expedition

Sacajawea

Mexican War of 1848

North-South regional differences and tensions

Compromise of 1850

Fugitive Slave Act (1850)

Dred Scott (1857)

Civil War (1861-1865)

Reconstruction

Compromise of 1877

vigilante groups

westward expansion (settler motivations and impact on Native Americans)

Wounded Knee (1890)

VI.  Economic Expansion and Ethnic Bigotry, 1890-1929

technological innovations

economic expansion

Titans of Industry/ Robber Barons

imperialism

Spanish American War (1898)

Theodore Roosevelt

World War I (1914/1917-1918)

Allied Powers v. Central Powers

trench warfare

Bolshevik Revolution (1917)

Treaty of Versailles (1919)

League of Nations

18^th Amendment (1919)

19^th Amendment (1920)

21^st amendment (1933)

Great Depression

Harlem Renaissance

VII.  Foundations of Contemporary Life in the United States, 1929-1972

New Deal

Keynesian economics

Social Security Act, 1935

Wagner (Fair Labor) Act, 1935

World War II (1939/1941-1945)

Allied Powers v. Axis Powers

Nazism

V-E Day (8 May 1945)

Hiroshima (6 August 1945)

Nagasaki (9 August 1945)

Cold War

NATO v. Warsaw Pact

Civil Rights Movement (1954-1965)

Women’s Movement

Great Society

Vietnam War (1965-1973)

VIII.  An Era of Great Change and Competing Ideologies, 1972-2019

Watergate

stagflation

Ayatollah Khomeini

Israeli-Egyptian Pact

Jimmy Carter

Ronald Reagan

George H. W. Bush

First Persian Gulf War (1991)

William Jefferson (Bill) Clnton

George W. Bush

World Trade Center/ Twin Tower Bombings, 9 September 2001 (9-11)

Iraq

Afghanistan

Great Recession

Barack Obama

Affordable Care Act (2009)

Donald J. Trump, 2016-2019