U.S. History
What the exam tests
U.S. history from colonial settlement to the present, emphasizing constitutional development, sectional conflict, reform movements, and the expanding federal role.
Core rules and concepts
- Colonial regions differed: New England (family farms, shipping), Middle colonies (grain, diversity), Chesapeake and South (tobacco then cotton, enslaved labor).
- The Articles of Confederation could not tax or regulate interstate commerce and required unanimity for amendment; Shays's Rebellion exposed the weakness.
- Constitutional compromises: Great Compromise (bicameral), Three-Fifths, slave trade clause (1808), electoral college.
- Federal power expands by amendment and precedent: 13th–15th (Reconstruction), 16th (income tax), 17th (direct Senate election), 19th (women's suffrage).
- Reform cycles: abolition; Progressive Era (muckrakers, antitrust, 18th and 19th Amendments); New Deal (Social Security, Wagner Act, FDIC); Civil Rights (Brown 1954, Civil Rights Act 1964, Voting Rights Act 1965).
- Cold War policy: containment (Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO) and its domestic costs (McCarthyism).
Worked example
Why did Reconstruction end? Reasoning: northern economic exhaustion, the Compromise of 1877 withdrawing federal troops, Supreme Court narrowing of the 14th Amendment (Plessy, 1896), paramilitary violence, and eroding political will. A single-cause answer ("the North got tired") is incomplete because legal, military, and political factors interacted.
Traps
Confusing the 14th Amendment's due process and equal protection clauses with the 15th's voting protection; dating the Civil Rights Act to 1965 (that is the Voting Rights Act); claiming the New Deal ended the Depression - unemployment stayed high until wartime mobilization.