OSAT History (OK117) cheat sheet

Pre-Columbian societies were diverse: Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story adobe complexes at Chaco Canyon; Cahokia was a Mississippian mound city near modern St. Louis; Iroquois peoples formed confederacies governed by councils.

Columbian Exchange (after 1492) moved maize, potatoes, and tomatoes to Europe and Africa, while wheat, horses, cattle, and smallpox moved to the Americas; disease caused catastrophic Indigenous population loss.

Major colonial regions: New England (Puritan, town meetings, fishing and shipbuilding), Middle Colonies (diverse, grain-exporting), Chesapeake and Southern Colonies (tobacco, rice, indentured servitude, then racial slavery).

Key constitutional compromises: Great Compromise (bicameral Congress: population-based House, equal-state Senate), Three-Fifths Compromise (enslaved persons counted as three-fifths for representation), and the slave-trade clause deferring prohibition to 1808.

Federalists supported ratification and a strong central government (Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, Jay); Anti-Federalists demanded a Bill of Rights, ratified 1791.

Sectional crises to track: Missouri Compromise (1820, 36°30′ line), Nullification Crisis (1832), Compromise of 1850 (Fugitive Slave Act, popular sovereignty in Utah/New Mexico), Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854, repealed the Missouri line), Dred Scott (1857).

Civil War turning points: Antietam (1862, enabled the Emancipation Proclamation), Gettysburg and Vicksburg (both July 1863), Sherman's March to the Sea (1864), and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House (April 1865).

Reconstruction: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery (1865), the Fourteenth granted citizenship and equal protection (1868), and the Fifteenth protected voting rights regardless of race (1870); the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction Acts followed.

Reconstruction's end is marked by the Compromise of 1877, which withdrew federal troops from the South in exchange for Rutherford B. Hayes's presidency, enabling Jim Crow and sharecropping.

Gilded Age industrialization: vertical integration (Carnegie Steel controlling supply chains) versus horizontal integration (Rockefeller's Standard Oil trusts); railroad expansion, laissez-faire courts, and the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) as early regulation.

Populist and Progressive reform: Populist Party (1892 Omaha Platform, free silver), then muckrakers, the Seventeenth Amendment (direct Senate election, 1913), the Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage, 1920), and federal agencies such as the FDA (1906).

Progressive-era presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (Square Deal, trust-busting, conservation), Taft (dollar diplomacy), Wilson (New Freedom, Federal Reserve Act 1913, Clayton Antitrust Act 1914).

World War I and the 1920s: U.S. entry in 1917 after unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram; Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations; the decade saw the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Red Scare, and Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment, repealed 1933).

Great Depression and New Deal: stock crash of 1929, bank holiday, and programs such as the CCC, WPA, TVA, Social Security Act (1935), and the Wagner Act protecting collective bargaining.

World War II and Cold War: Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) brought U.S. entry; postwar policy of containment appears in the Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), and Korean War (1950–1953).

Civil rights milestones: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968).

Post-1960s developments: Great Society Medicare and Medicaid (1965), Vietnam and the War Powers Act (1973), Watergate and Nixon's resignation (1974), Reagan-era tax cuts and deregulation (1981–89), and post-9/11 security policy (Patriot Act, 2001).

River-valley civilizations: Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates (cuneiform, Hammurabi's Code), Egypt along the Nile (hieroglyphics, pharaohs), the Indus Valley (planned cities such as Mohenjo-daro), and Shang China along the Yellow River (oracle bones).

Classical Greece: polis organization, Athenian democracy under Cleisthenes and Pericles, Spartan militarism, and the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars; Greek philosophy, drama, and historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides).

Rome: republic with consuls and Senate, expansion via the Punic Wars, transition to empire under Augustus (27 BCE), Pax Romana, and the division and fall of the western empire in 476 CE.

Major belief systems and their founders or texts: Judaism (Torah), Hinduism (Vedas, Upanishads), Buddhism (Siddhartha Gautama, Four Noble Truths), Confucianism (Analects), Daoism (Daodejing), and Christianity (New Testament).

Islamic civilization after 610 CE spread across the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia; the Abbasid Golden Age produced algebra (al-Khwarizmi), medicine (Ibn Sina), and translation of Greek works.

Medieval Europe: feudalism and manorialism, the Catholic Church's authority, the Crusades (1096 onward), the Black Death (1347–1351), and the revival of towns and universities.

Byzantine and Slavic worlds: Justinian's Code, Hagia Sophia, the Great Schism of 1054, and the rise of Kievan Rus after conversion to Orthodox Christianity (988).

African and Asian empires: Mali and its gold trade (Mansa Musa, Timbuktu scholarship), Great Zimbabwe, Tang and Song China (printing, gunpowder, civil-service exams), and the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan.

Renaissance (14th–16th centuries): humanism, classical revival, patronage in Italian city-states; figures include Petrarch, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo; printing press of Gutenberg (c. 1450) accelerated the spread of ideas.

Reformation: Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517), Calvinism, the Counter-Reformation and Council of Trent, and the Peace of Augsburg (1555) allowing cuius regio, eius religio.

Age of Exploration and Columbian Exchange: Portuguese and Spanish voyages, Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and the global exchange of crops, animals, and diseases that reshaped economies and populations.

Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment: heliocentrism (Copernicus, Galileo), Newton's laws, and political philosophy from Locke (natural rights), Montesquieu (separation of powers), and Rousseau (popular sovereignty).

Political revolutions: American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789, Declaration of the Rights of Man), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and Latin American independence movements led by Bolívar and San Martín.

Industrial Revolution: began in Britain in the late 18th century with textile mechanization, steam power, and railroads; produced urbanization, labor movements, and Marxist critique (Communist Manifesto, 1848).

World wars: causes of World War I (alliances, militarism, nationalism, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), Treaty of Versailles (1919), and World War II causes including fascism, appeasement (Munich, 1938), and Axis expansion.

Cold War and decolonization: superpower rivalry, nuclear deterrence, proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Non-Aligned Movement, Indian independence (1947), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991).

Modern globalization: institutions such as the United Nations (1945), European Union integration, decolonization's aftermath, and technological change in communication and trade.

Primary sources are artifacts produced in the period under study (letters, laws, diaries, photographs); secondary sources interpret them (monographs, textbooks, journal articles).

Sourcing questions for any document: who made it, when, for what audience, and for what purpose; these reveal bias, perspective, and reliability.

Corroboration means comparing multiple independent sources for agreement or conflict; contextualization places a source in its political, social, and economic setting.

Chronological reasoning distinguishes cause, correlation, and contingency; periodization is an interpretive choice, not a natural fact.

Historical causation: distinguish long-term structural causes from short-term triggers; avoid presentism, the judging of the past by present standards.

Historiographical schools: Ranke's empiricism and archival emphasis, Annales attention to long-term social structures, Marxist class analysis, and social history from below.

Research skills: formulate a researchable question, locate sources through catalogs and databases, evaluate credibility, cite accurately, and distinguish evidence from interpretation.

Bias and perspective: recognize framing, omission, and selection bias; evaluate quantitative data for sample and measurement problems.

Argumentation: a historical thesis must be defensible, specific, and supported by evidence; counterarguments and limitations should be acknowledged.

Pre-Columbian societies were diverse: Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story adobe complexes at Chaco Canyon; Cahokia was a Mississippian mound city near modern St. Louis; Iroquois peoples formed confederacies governed by councils.

Columbian Exchange (after 1492) moved maize, potatoes, and tomatoes to Europe and Africa, while wheat, horses, cattle, and smallpox moved to the Americas; disease caused catastrophic Indigenous population loss.

Major colonial regions: New England (Puritan, town meetings, fishing and shipbuilding), Middle Colonies (diverse, grain-exporting), Chesapeake and Southern Colonies (tobacco, rice, indentured servitude, then racial slavery).

Key constitutional compromises: Great Compromise (bicameral Congress: population-based House, equal-state Senate), Three-Fifths Compromise (enslaved persons counted as three-fifths for representation), and the slave-trade clause deferring prohibition to 1808.

Federalists supported ratification and a strong central government (Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, Jay); Anti-Federalists demanded a Bill of Rights, ratified 1791.

Sectional crises to track: Missouri Compromise (1820, 36°30′ line), Nullification Crisis (1832), Compromise of 1850 (Fugitive Slave Act, popular sovereignty in Utah/New Mexico), Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854, repealed the Missouri line), Dred Scott (1857).

Civil War turning points: Antietam (1862, enabled the Emancipation Proclamation), Gettysburg and Vicksburg (both July 1863), Sherman's March to the Sea (1864), and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House (April 1865).

Reconstruction: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery (1865), the Fourteenth granted citizenship and equal protection (1868), and the Fifteenth protected voting rights regardless of race (1870); the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction Acts followed.

Reconstruction's end is marked by the Compromise of 1877, which withdrew federal troops from the South in exchange for Rutherford B. Hayes's presidency, enabling Jim Crow and sharecropping.

Gilded Age industrialization: vertical integration (Carnegie Steel controlling supply chains) versus horizontal integration (Rockefeller's Standard Oil trusts); railroad expansion, laissez-faire courts, and the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) as early regulation.

Populist and Progressive reform: Populist Party (1892 Omaha Platform, free silver), then muckrakers, the Seventeenth Amendment (direct Senate election, 1913), the Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage, 1920), and federal agencies such as the FDA (1906).

Progressive-era presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (Square Deal, trust-busting, conservation), Taft (dollar diplomacy), Wilson (New Freedom, Federal Reserve Act 1913, Clayton Antitrust Act 1914).

World War I and the 1920s: U.S. entry in 1917 after unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram; Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations; the decade saw the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Red Scare, and Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment, repealed 1933).

Great Depression and New Deal: stock crash of 1929, bank holiday, and programs such as the CCC, WPA, TVA, Social Security Act (1935), and the Wagner Act protecting collective bargaining.

World War II and Cold War: Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) brought U.S. entry; postwar policy of containment appears in the Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), and Korean War (1950–1953).

Civil rights milestones: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968).

Post-1960s developments: Great Society Medicare and Medicaid (1965), Vietnam and the War Powers Act (1973), Watergate and Nixon's resignation (1974), Reagan-era tax cuts and deregulation (1981–89), and post-9/11 security policy (Patriot Act, 2001).

River-valley civilizations: Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates (cuneiform, Hammurabi's Code), Egypt along the Nile (hieroglyphics, pharaohs), the Indus Valley (planned cities such as Mohenjo-daro), and Shang China along the Yellow River (oracle bones).

Classical Greece: polis organization, Athenian democracy under Cleisthenes and Pericles, Spartan militarism, and the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars; Greek philosophy, drama, and historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides).

Rome: republic with consuls and Senate, expansion via the Punic Wars, transition to empire under Augustus (27 BCE), Pax Romana, and the division and fall of the western empire in 476 CE.

Major belief systems and their founders or texts: Judaism (Torah), Hinduism (Vedas, Upanishads), Buddhism (Siddhartha Gautama, Four Noble Truths), Confucianism (Analects), Daoism (Daodejing), and Christianity (New Testament).

Islamic civilization after 610 CE spread across the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia; the Abbasid Golden Age produced algebra (al-Khwarizmi), medicine (Ibn Sina), and translation of Greek works.

Medieval Europe: feudalism and manorialism, the Catholic Church's authority, the Crusades (1096 onward), the Black Death (1347–1351), and the revival of towns and universities.

Byzantine and Slavic worlds: Justinian's Code, Hagia Sophia, the Great Schism of 1054, and the rise of Kievan Rus after conversion to Orthodox Christianity (988).

African and Asian empires: Mali and its gold trade (Mansa Musa, Timbuktu scholarship), Great Zimbabwe, Tang and Song China (printing, gunpowder, civil-service exams), and the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan.

Renaissance (14th–16th centuries): humanism, classical revival, patronage in Italian city-states; figures include Petrarch, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo; printing press of Gutenberg (c. 1450) accelerated the spread of ideas.

Reformation: Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517), Calvinism, the Counter-Reformation and Council of Trent, and the Peace of Augsburg (1555) allowing cuius regio, eius religio.

Age of Exploration and Columbian Exchange: Portuguese and Spanish voyages, Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and the global exchange of crops, animals, and diseases that reshaped economies and populations.

Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment: heliocentrism (Copernicus, Galileo), Newton's laws, and political philosophy from Locke (natural rights), Montesquieu (separation of powers), and Rousseau (popular sovereignty).

Political revolutions: American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789, Declaration of the Rights of Man), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and Latin American independence movements led by Bolívar and San Martín.

Industrial Revolution: began in Britain in the late 18th century with textile mechanization, steam power, and railroads; produced urbanization, labor movements, and Marxist critique (Communist Manifesto, 1848).

World wars: causes of World War I (alliances, militarism, nationalism, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), Treaty of Versailles (1919), and World War II causes including fascism, appeasement (Munich, 1938), and Axis expansion.

Cold War and decolonization: superpower rivalry, nuclear deterrence, proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Non-Aligned Movement, Indian independence (1947), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991).

Modern globalization: institutions such as the United Nations (1945), European Union integration, decolonization's aftermath, and technological change in communication and trade.

Primary sources are artifacts produced in the period under study (letters, laws, diaries, photographs); secondary sources interpret them (monographs, textbooks, journal articles).

Sourcing questions for any document: who made it, when, for what audience, and for what purpose; these reveal bias, perspective, and reliability.

Corroboration means comparing multiple independent sources for agreement or conflict; contextualization places a source in its political, social, and economic setting.

Chronological reasoning distinguishes cause, correlation, and contingency; periodization is an interpretive choice, not a natural fact.

Historical causation: distinguish long-term structural causes from short-term triggers; avoid presentism, the judging of the past by present standards.

Historiographical schools: Ranke's empiricism and archival emphasis, Annales attention to long-term social structures, Marxist class analysis, and social history from below.

Research skills: formulate a researchable question, locate sources through catalogs and databases, evaluate credibility, cite accurately, and distinguish evidence from interpretation.

Bias and perspective: recognize framing, omission, and selection bias; evaluate quantitative data for sample and measurement problems.

Argumentation: a historical thesis must be defensible, specific, and supported by evidence; counterarguments and limitations should be acknowledged.