ILTS Social Science: History (315) cheat sheet

Neolithic Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE): independent domestication of plants and animals occurred in at least seven regions, including the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and New Guinea.

All four early river-valley civilizations - Mesopotamia (Tigris–Euphrates), Egypt (Nile), the Indus, and Shang China (Yellow River) - depended on floodplain irrigation to support dense populations.

Hammurabi's Code (c. 1754 BCE, Babylon) is the fullest surviving ancient law code; penalties varied by social class, applying lex talionis unequally to nobles, commoners, and enslaved people.

Athenian democracy: Cleisthenes' reforms (508 BCE) reorganized citizens into tribes and demes; women, enslaved people, and metics were excluded, so citizens were roughly 10–15 percent of residents.

Roman political chronology: Republic founded 509 BCE, principate under Augustus 27 BCE, third-century crisis, and the fall of the western empire in 476 CE.

Trade networks moved beliefs as well as goods: Buddhism spread along the Silk Roads into China, while Islam expanded largely through Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan commerce.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years' War and is conventionally cited for affirming territorial sovereignty and non-interference among states.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain around 1760 with coal, steam power, and cotton textiles; a second wave (c. 1870) added steel, chemicals, and electricity.

Decolonization: Indian independence 1947, Ghana 1957, and seventeen African states in 1960; the 1955 Bandung Conference framed anti-colonial non-alignment.

English colonial foundations: Jamestown (1607, Virginia Company), Plymouth (1620), and the first recorded Africans brought to Virginia in 1619.

Constitutional compromises of 1787: the Great Compromise created a bicameral legislature, the Three-Fifths Clause governed apportionment, and the slave trade was protected until 1808.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) established judicial review; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld implied powers and federal supremacy over state taxation of the Second Bank.

Civil War timeline: Fort Sumter April 1861; Emancipation Proclamation effective January 1, 1863 (rebelling states only); Lee's surrender at Appomattox April 1865.

Reconstruction amendments: 13th (1865) abolished slavery, 14th (1868) guaranteed citizenship, due process, and equal protection, 15th (1870) barred racial exclusion from voting.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) endorsed 'separate but equal'; Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held segregated public schools unconstitutional and repudiated Plessy in education.

Progressive Era amendments: 16th (income tax, 1913), 17th (direct election of senators, 1913), 18th (Prohibition, 1919), 19th (women's suffrage, 1920).

New Deal (1933–1939): deposit insurance via the FDIC (1933), the Social Security Act (1935), the Wagner Act (1935), and work relief through the WPA.

Civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act 1964 (public accommodations, employment), Voting Rights Act 1965 (federal supervision of elections), Fair Housing Act 1968.

French Illinois: Marquette and Jolliet traveled the Mississippi in 1673; Cahokia (founded 1699) and Kaskaskia became the population centers of the Illinois Country.

George Rogers Clark seized Kaskaskia and Cahokia in 1778–79, and Virginia organized the region as Illinois County, strengthening the U.S. claim settled at the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

The Northwest Ordinance (1787) created the territory that included Illinois and prohibited slavery there - a ban unevenly enforced, as at the Gallatin County salt works.

Illinois became the 21st state on December 3, 1818; its first constitution barred slavery but allowed indenture of laborers brought from slave states, and the capital moved Kaskaskia to Vandalia to Springfield (1839).

Black Hawk War (1832): Sauk and Fox resistance to removal in northern Illinois and Wisconsin; Abraham Lincoln served as a militia captain and saw no combat.

Chicago's growth: incorporated as a town in 1833 and a city in 1837, then transformed by the Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848) and its railroad network.

Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858): seven debates in the U.S. Senate race; Douglas won reelection, but his Freeport Doctrine split the Democratic Party.

Labor and reform: the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, the 1894 Pullman Strike associated with Eugene Debs, and Jane Addams's Hull House (1889).

Illinois was the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment (February 1, 1865); the 1908 Springfield race riot led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

Sourcing: establish author, date, place, audience, and purpose before drawing any claim from a document.

Corroboration: agreement among independent sources raises confidence; disagreement is itself evidence of differing perspective or circumstance.

Contextualization: read a source within its own moment; judging past actors by present norms is presentism.

Primary sources are artifacts produced in the period under study; secondary sources interpret them - the distinction depends on the research question being asked.

A source's bias does not disqualify it; bias identifies the perspective and interests that shaped the record.

Causation: distinguish long-term structural causes from proximate triggers, and treat correlation as insufficient grounds for a causal claim.

Continuity and change over time: specify what persisted, what shifted, and the criteria and boundaries used to make that judgment.

Periodization is an interpretive choice; alternative turning points (1453, 1492, 1648) reflect different historical questions.

Historiography: Rankean archival empiricism, Annales attention to long duration, social history 'from below,' and the cultural and linguistic turn.