1st+semester

Goodness! It's been quite some time since I updated - I will do better next semester. = =



Be a busy beaver! Study hard so that you can relax and enjoy your winter break :)

=Don't forget the spaghetti dinner and talent show on Tuesday October 26! =

[|Being an American Essay Contest] check out the specifics for the combined English - History essay contest !

[|another cool music video]

For starters, APUSH requires lots of reading, but if you keep up with it and read some (about an hour) before each class, you should be able to maintain the pace and your cool. The notebook will also work better for you if you keep up with it on a regular basis. It's like the old question goes "How do you eat an elephant?" //one bite at a time, gang, one bite at a time//

HOMEWORK
 * Read the Chapter - this is a constant; stay on top of your reading!!
 * Notebook preparation - terms, themes, 4C's, presidents, maps, notes, timeline (Political, Intellectual, Religious, Artistic, Technological, Economic, Social)

=In class=
 * Week 12:Era of Good Feelings and John Qunicy Adams
 * Week 11: War of 1812
 * Week 10: Jefferson continued
 * Week 9: Washington, Adams, & Jefferson
 * Week 8: New Nation & DBQ
 * Week 7: Constitutional Convention
 * Week 6: Revolution
 * Week 5: Coming of the Revolution
 * Week 4: Great Awakening, French & Indian War and first test!!
 * Week 3: English Colonies & patterns of colonization
 * Week 2: American Indians and early exploration
 * Week 1: Natives and early contact

=Handouts=
 * Week 11: Early 19th century map & John Marshall & terms for rest of semester
 * Week 8: Asst. Rev. Maps
 * Week 7: DBQ rubric
 * Week 3: Colonization & Explorers
 * Week 2: American Indians in North America

=UpComing=
 * Week 12: Test Washington through War of 1812 & 2nd Essay is due Week 15
 * Week 7: Test French - Indian War - Constitutional Convention
 * Week 6: 1st Essay, Colonial Food fest! & Constitution Day activities
 * Week 1: Founding Brothers questions and Vocabulary - the summer assignments are due

Notable events from or near the period we're studying that happened during this week in American History. These listed events are from the Library of Congress (a beautiful building) and their Today in History webpage [] unless other wise noted.

The Bay of Pigs invasion is underway! April 17, 1961

On March 7, 1923 //The New Republic// published Robert Frost's //Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening// (History channel)

On March 1, 1917, the Zimmerman Telegram was published in American newspapers. The discovery of this document will help bring America into WWI. {from the History Channel and archives.gov}


Also on **February 26,** 1919, Congress passed An Act to Establish the Grand Canyon National Park in the State of Arizona. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona is one of the earth's greatest natural wonders. Comprising over 1 million acres of northwestern Arizona, the park includes the most spectacular area of the 277-mile canyon cut by the Colorado River. Still inhabited by Native peoples with at least 2,000 years of history in the area, some of the tribes of Grand Canyon region are the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Paiute, Havasupai, and Hualapai.



On **February 15**, 1898, an explosion of unknown origin sank the battleship //U.S.S. Maine// in the Havana, Cuba harbor, killing 266 of the 354 crew members. The sinking of the //Maine// incited United States’ passions against Spain, eventually leading to a naval blockade of Cuba and a declaration of war. Ostensibly on a friendly visit, the //Maine// had been sent to Cuba to protect the interests of Americans there after riots broke out in Havana in January. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry reported on March 28 that the ship, one of the first American battleships and built at a cost of more than two million dollars, had been blown up by a mine without laying blame on any person or nation in particular, but public opinion in the United States blamed the Spanish military occupying Cuba anyway. Subsequent diplomatic communications failed to resolve the matter, leading to the start of the Spanish-American War by the end of April.

On **February 7**, 1867, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls, the author of the beloved semiautobiographical //Little House// series, was born in Wisconsin, the second daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. The basic facts of her life correspond to those related in her books about her family's experiences on the American frontier during the 1870s and 1880s. The image below is reminiscent of Pa Ingalls and his four girls, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and baby Grace. Laura's three sisters, her parents, "Ma" and "Pa," their good dog Jack, her school friends in the little town on the prairie, and her courtship and marriage to Almanzo Wilder are all well known to her readers. As they traveled further west by covered wagon and by the newly-laid Great Northern Railroad, the Ingalls family was enlivened by Pa's sense of fun, his twinkling blue eyes, and his cheerful fiddle music while they were steadied by Ma's gentle counsel, ladylike ways, and her provision of simple comforts. Pa and Ma always managed to create a happy, secure home wherever they lived--whether in the little log cabin in the woods near Lake Pepin, Wisconsin, on the prairie near the Verdigris River in Indian Territory, the sod dugout by Plum Creek in Minnesota, the surveyor's house on Silver Lake, the homestead shanty on the claim, or in Pa's house in the brand-new town of De Smet in Dakota Territory. The family endured many hardships. In Minnesota their farm was devastated by a plague of grasshoppers. Like many other pioneer families, the Ingalls experienced the tragic death of a young child, Laura's only brother. They survived the hard winters of frequent heavy blizzards in the Dakota Territory, including a storm which snowed-in freight trains and cut off De Smet's food supply. Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland braved the heavy snows to bring back a supply of wheat for the town. On the afternoon of **December 16**, 1864, Union troops led by General George H. Thomas devastated Confederate forces at Nashville, Tennessee. The battle had begun the day before when Thomas initiated an attack after waiting some two weeks for troop reinforcements and favorable weather.



On **November 7**, 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed by a pro-slavery mob while defending the site of his anti-slavery newspaper //The Saint Louis Observer//. His death both deeply affected many individuals who opposed slavery and greatly strengthened the cause of abolition. Lovejoy, who was born on November 9, 1802, in Albion, Maine, decided to seek his fortune in the Midwest after graduating from college. Short on funds, he walked to St. Louis, Missouri, where, over time, he became editor and part-owner of //The St. Louis Times//. His name appeared in the //Times// for the first time on August 14, 1830, and for the last time—as editor—on February 18, 1832. In 1832, caught up in the powerful religious revival movement sweeping the U.S. and its frontier territories, Lovejoy experienced a conversion, which led him to sell his interests in the paper and enroll in Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. Two years later, a group of St. Louis businessmen, who sought to start a newspaper to promote religious and moral education, recruited Lovejoy to return to the city as editor of //The St. Louis Observer//. Lovejoy, supported by abolitionist friends such as Edward Beecher (the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of //Uncle Tom's Cabin//), became ever more radical in his anti-slavery editorials. He first supported African recolonization then endorsed gradual emancipation. By 1835, he sanctioned abolition in the District of Columbia, and, by 1837, championed immediate universal emancipation. Lovejoy's editorials raised local ire while they increased national circulation. A group of local citizens, including the future Senator Thomas Hart Benton, declared that freedom of speech did not include the right to speak against slavery. As mob violence increased over the issue, Lovejoy, now a husband and father, decided to move his family to Alton, across the Mississippi River in the free state of Illinois. At the time Elijah Lovejoy moved to Alton it was "a booming town." Alton had some 2,500 residents and was considered both the rival of St. Louis and a far more important Illinois city than Chicago. Mobs had destroyed Lovejoy's presses on a number of occasions, but when a new press arrived in November 1837, the violence escalated. No sooner was the new press offloaded from the steamboat //Missouri Fulton// than a drunken mob formed and tried to set fire to the warehouse where it was stored. When Lovejoy ran out to push away a would-be-arsonist, he was shot. Throughout the North and West, membership in anti-slavery societies increased sharply following Lovejoy's death. Yet officials in Illinois, with one exception, made little comment. Twenty-eight year old State Representative Abraham Lincoln stated publicly: > //Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own, and his children's liberty…Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother…in short let it become the political religion of the nation…//

{courtesy of mpi/getty images} On **October 20**, 1803, the Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty by a vote of twenty-four to seven. The agreement, which provided for the purchase of the western half of the Mississippi River basin from France at a price of $15 million, or approximately four cents per acre, doubled the size of the country and paved the way for westward expansion beyond the Mississippi. Spain had controlled Louisiana and the strategic port of New Orleans with a relatively free hand since 1762. However, Spain signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte a secret agreement retroceding the territory of Louisiana to France. News of the agreement eventually reached the U.S. government. President Thomas Jefferson feared that if Louisiana came under French control, American settlers living in the Mississippi River Valley would lose free access to the port of New Orleans. On April 18, 1802, Jefferson wrote a letter to Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, warning that, "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans…" Napoleon, faced with a shortage of cash, a recent military defeat in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti), and the threat of a war with Great Britain, decided to cut his losses and abandon his plans for an empire in the New World. In 1803, he offered to sell the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. Robert Livingston and James Monroe, whom Jefferson had sent to Paris earlier that year, had only been authorized to spend up to $10 million to purchase New Orleans and West Florida. Although the proposal for the entire territory exceeded their official instructions, they agreed to the deal. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was dated April 30 and formally signed on May 2, 1803. The bounds of the territory, which were not clearly delineated in the treaty, were assumed to include all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, at that time known as the Stony Mountains. Just twelve days after the signing of the treaty, frontiersmen Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, younger brother of Revolutionary War officer George Rogers Clark, set out on an expedition to explore the newly acquired territory. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory and the Lewis and Clark expedition marked the beginning of a century of conquest. As explorers, speculators, adventurers, and settlers pushed the territorial boundaries of the United States westward toward the Pacific coast, the notion of America as a nation always pushing toward new frontiers took hold in art, literature, folklore, and the national psyche.

On October 2, 1780, British intelligence officer Major John André was hanged as a spy in Tappan, New York. Captured on his return to New York City by American militiamen fighting in the War of Independence, Major André was found to have papers hidden in his boot concerning Continental army Brigadier General Benedict Arnold's negotiation for the surrender of West Point. (Arnold had recently been appointed commandant of the fort at West Point.) General George Washington designated a board of officers to hear the case. André was found guilty of spying and sentenced to death. Arnold, motivated by greed, by his opposition to the French alliance of 1778, and by his resentment towards authorities who had reprimanded him for irregularities during his command in Philadelphia, had maintained a secret correspondence with Major André since May 1779. On September 21, 1780, Arnold had agreed to surrender West Point to the British in exchange for 20,000 pounds. Upon hearing of André's arrest, Arnold fled to the Vulture, a British warship on the Hudson River. That same day, he wrote to General Washington, begging mercy for his wife, Loyalist sympathizer Peggy Shippen Arnold: > I have no favor to ask for myself, I have too often experienced the ingratitude of my Country to attempt it: but from the known humanity of your Excellence I am induced to ask your protection for Mrs. Arnold from every Insult and Injury that the mistaken vengeance of my Country may expose her to. It ought to fall only on me. She is as good, and as Innocent as an Angel, and is incapable of doing wrong. > Unaware of her participation in her husband's duplicitous dealings with the British, Washington provided an escort for Mrs. Arnold back to her family home in Philadelphia. Authorities in that city forced her to flee to her husband in New York where he was shunned as a traitor by British officers. > During the remainder of the Revolutionary War, Arnold served as a brigadier general in the British army, leading raids on Virginia and Connecticut. After the surrender of the British army at Yorktown in October 1781, he and his family moved to England, where he died in 1801. In the United States, his name became synonymous with traitor. Capture of Andre Early on the morning of Sunday, **September 9**, 1739, twenty black Carolinians met near the Stono River, approximately twenty miles southwest of Charleston. At Stono's bridge, they took guns and powder from Hutcheson's store and killed the two storekeepers they found there. "With cries of 'Liberty' and beating of drums," historian Peter H. Wood writes in the //Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History,// "the rebels raised a standard and headed south toward Spanish St. Augustine…Along the road they gathered black recruits, burned houses, and killed white opponents, sparing one innkeeper who was 'kind to his slaves.'" Thus commenced the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies prior to the American Revolution. Late that afternoon, planters riding on horseback caught up with the band of sixty to one hundred slaves. More than twenty white Carolinians and nearly twice as many black Carolinians were killed before the rebellion was suppressed. As a consequence of the uprising, white lawmakers imposed a moratorium on slave imports and enacted a harsher slave code.

On **September 1**, 1773, Phillis Wheatley's //Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral// was published in London, England. Wheatley's collection was the first volume of poetry by an African-American poet to be published. Regarded as a prodigy by her contemporaries, Wheatley was approximately twenty at the time of the book's publication. Born in the Senegambia region of West Africa, she was sold into slavery and transported to Boston at age seven or eight. Purchased off the slave ship by prosperous merchant John Wheatley and his wife Susanna in 1761, the young Phillis was soon copying the English alphabet on a wall in chalk. Rather than fearing her precociousness, the Wheatleys encouraged it, allowing their daughter Mary to tutor Phillis in reading and writing. She also studied English literature, Latin, and the Bible—a strong education for any eighteenth-century woman. Wheatley's first published poem, "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," was published in Rhode Island's //Newport Mercury// newspaper on December 21, 1767. Manumitted by the Wheatley family, the poet sailed to London in 1773. Her reputation preceded her. She met many influential people, including the Lord Mayor of London who presented her with a copy of Milton's //Paradise Lost//. Her volume of poetry was published under the patronage of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Learning of Mrs. Wheatley's ill health, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston prior to the book's appearance. Arriving in Boston in September 1773, she nursed her mistress until Susanna Wheatley died the following March. Wheatley continued to write. In 1776, she sent her poem "To his Excellency General Washington," later published in the //Pennsylvania Magazine//, to the commander in chief of the Continental army. General Washington thanked her for the poem in a letter. Phillis Wheatley continued to live with various members of the Wheatley family until 1778. After the death of John Wheatley and his daughter, Phillis moved to her own home. She soon married John Peters, a free black Bostonian who held a variety of jobs before falling into debt. She bore the frequently absent Peters three children. Beset with financial problems, she sold her volume of Milton to help pay his debts. To support herself and her only surviving child, Phillis Wheatley worked in a Boston boarding house. Both the poet and her child died there on December 5, 1784.



On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set out on his first voyage to what came to be known as the New World. With three ships and a crew of ninety, Columbus hoped to find a western route to the Far East. Instead, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas Christopher Columbus set sail in an era of maritime advances, charting his route with the aid of a mariner's compass, an astrolabe, a cross-staff, and a quadrant. The most popular map for mariners at the time was Ptolemy's Geography or Cosmography, printed in 1482 but originally compiled by the Alexandrian geographer, astronomer, and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy in the second century A.D.