How did the country change because of the Civil War and Reconstruction into the second decade of the twentieth century?
The History-Social Science Framework is organized around an inquiry model of instruction in which students explore essential content through historically-significant open-ended questions. This unit-long question is: How did the country change because of the Civil War and Reconstruction into the second decade of the twentieth century? (Framework, P. 379) Students will learn about how Reconstruction redefined what it meant to be an American, legally with the 14th and 15th Amendments, but also in many other ways. Students then explore changes in the daily lives of African Americans in the years after the Civil War. Students end this unit of study with the ending of Reconstruction and the construction of Jim Crow laws that ushered in a new era of extreme racial violence and segregation.
11.1 Students analyze the significant events in the founding of the nation and its attempts to realize the philosophy of government described in the Declaration of Independence.
- Examine the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction and of the industrial revolution, including demographic shifts and the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the United States as a world power.
Big Idea Success Criteria
The categories and their related standards below unpack the success criteria of this big idea.
- To help students understand the history of the Constitution after 1787, teachers pay particular attention to the post–Civil War amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth), which laid the foundation for the legal phase of the twentieth-century civil rights movement. (CA HSS Framework, 380)
- The amended Constitution gave the federal government increased power over the states, especially for the extension of equal rights and an inclusive definition of citizenship. A focus on these topics later on in the course allows for a comparative study of the civil rights movement over time as ethnic and racial minorities experienced it. (CA HSS Framework, 380)
- In addition to the civil rights groundwork laid by the Reconstruction-era Constitutional Amendments, students should closely read the Fourteenth Amendment as it is has been continually reinterpreted and applied to different contexts by the courts (CA HSS Framework, 380)
Changes in Black Life
- In the context of the late nineteenth century, civil right advocates such as Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute and author of the 1895 Atlanta Exposition address, and W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and author of The Souls of Black Folk, had different perspectives on the means of achieving greater progress and equality for African Americans (CA HSS Framework, 380)
Jim Crow Segregation
- Racial violence, discrimination, and segregation inhibited African Americans’ economic mobility, opportunity, and political participation (CA HSS Framework, 380)
- As background for their later studies about challenges to Jim Crow segregation, students understand the meaning of “separate but equal,” as both a legal term and as a reality that effectively limited the life chances of African Americans by denying them equal opportunity for jobs, housing, education, health care, and voting rights. (CA HSS Framework, 380)
California Department of Education. 2016. California History-Social Science Framework. Sacramento, CA: California Department of Education
Alternative Means of Expression
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Bring Your Own Task (BYOT)
A Call to IEP Teams
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