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the-ascended.livejournal.comOkay, so today we're covering the very basics of US History, from it's colonization up to, and including, the Civil War.
First off, who can name the thirteen original colonies?
Jamestown, Virginia was originally founded in 1607 in order to gain wealth and also, to a lesser extent, to convert the natives to Christianity. It was the first permanent English settlement in the New World and it provided a source of fertile land and great wealth to England thanks to the tobacco crop. This is the one that the Pocahontas story comes from.
Most people know about the Massachusetts colony. It was created by separatist Puritans who came over on the Mayflower. Massachusetts was virtually independent of England. Its government was representative, although the franchise was restricted to church members. Non-Puritans were allowed to reside in the colony but were forbidden participation in the government.
Now, there are eleven colonies left and there are eleven of you, so I've assigned you all a colony. You've got five to ten minutes to look either in these books, or online and to come up with when the colony was founded, by whom and why. If you have any time left, then a couple of lines about any significant events which happened.
Lyra - New Hampshire
Molly - Maryland
Cameron - Connecticut
Blair - Rhode Island
Chad - Delaware
Evelyn - North Carolina
Sam - South Carolina
Jim - New Jersey
Dean -New York
Broots - Pennsylvania
Hermione - Georgia
Right, next up is the Revolutionary War, or the War of Independence. From 1775 to 1783, it was a war between Great Britain and the revolutionaries of the thirteen colonies. The casus belli – and who can tell me what that means – tend to be listed as: taxation without representation, threats of traditional rights and republican ideology. The first one of those you'll see on license plates if you go and visit DC, in order to protest their lack of representation in both the Senate and House of Representatives.
If you're interested in all the details about battles and everything, there are plenty of good books out there. For this class, we're going to skip ahead to 1781 and to Yorktown, Virginia, where General Cornwallis, an English military commander, surrendered to George Washington, which although it was not the end of the war, it was the beginning of the end. The Treat of Paris was signed on September 3rd, 1783 and Congress ratified it January 14th, 1784.
Our last stop on this whirlwind tour is the Civil War. Fought between 1861 and 1865, it was a sectional conflict between the federal government – the "Union" and eleven Southern slave states that declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America, led by President Jefferson Davis. The Union, led by President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, opposed the expansion of slavery and rejected any right of secession. Fighting commended on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces attacked a federal military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Again, we're not going to go into the details, although if you wanted to do such a thing, I'm available to talk to about it.
The North got the upper hand by September 1864, when they took control of Atlanta. The war officially ended at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th, 1865 when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Following the Civil War was a period of Reconstruction, but instead of me telling you about it, I want to hear what you have to say. Go for it.
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