Advanced Placement US History and Honors English 11

“What is ‘the New History’”?

   -Essential Questions:

        -What is the geography of settlement?

        -What determines the fate of human societies?

        -Who are our ancestors?

        -Is “this land your land”?

        -What is “human progress”?  How is it measured?

        -How should history be measured, recorded?

   -Essential Skills:

        -What constitutes a primary source?

        -How do I write a DBQ essay?

   -Essential Understandings:

        -The genesis of settlement is incursion into another’s territory by probe, treaty, secession, oppression, payment, accident, epidemic,  and/or conquest. 

        -Different human societies followed widely divergent pathways of development, but there are patterns to historical development.

        -Are our ancestors consanguinary and geographic?

        -Factors that determine human progress call into question human morality.

        -Geographic differences in human societies creates different histories.

Texts:

        -Schwartz, L. Seymour.  This Land is Your Land: The Geographic

Evolution of the United States.

        -Diamond, Jared.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human

Societies.

        -Diamond, Jared.  “Harsh warnings from lost worlds.”  Time

26 Aug 2002.

        -Zinn, Howard.  The Zinn Reader.

        -Norton Anthology of American Literature.

        -Andrews, William L.  Gen. Ed.  The Literature of the South: A Norton

Anthology.

        -Film Clips: TBA

   -Vocabulary:  

        genesis of settlement

        geographic evolution

        cultural plurality

        subjugation

        colonial expansionism

        chain of  historical causation

        Ecological geographers

        global synthesis

        proximate explanations

        intellectual gap

        biogeography

        environmental geography    

        epidemiology

        linguistics

        human history as historical science

        disparate development rates