Religion played a major role in the American Revolution by offering a moral sanction for opposition to the British--an assurance to the average American that revolution was justified in the sight of God. As a recent scholar has observed, "by turning colonial resistance into a righteous cause, and by crying the message to all ranks in all parts of the colonies, ministers did the work of secular radicalism and did it better."

Women's role in society was altered by the American Revolution. Women who ran households in the absence of men became more assertive. ABIGAIL ADAMS, wife of John, became an early advocate of women's rights when she prompted her husband to "REMEMBER THE LADIES" when drawing up a new government.

The Revolutionary rethinking of the rules for society also led to some reconsideration of the relationship between men and women. At this time, women were widely considered to be inferior to men, a status that was especially clear in the lack of legal rights for married women. The law did not recognize wives' independence in economic, political, or civic matters in Anglo-American society of the eighteenth century.

In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States on a political platform that opposed the expansion of slavery, South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. Six more states would follow in the ensuing months: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In February 1861, they formed the Confederate States of America, an entity considered illegal by the United States government. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This began the first battle of the deadliest conflict in US history, the American Civil War. This primary source set uses documents, illustrations, and maps to explore events and ideas that drove the formation of the Confederate States of America and the United States’ descent into civil war.

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.

This collection consists of 105 library books and manuscripts, totalling approximately 8,700 pages drawn principally from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with a few from the General Collections. The selection was guided in large part by the entries in Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases by Paul Finkelman (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985), which was based on research in the Library collections. The documents comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Most of the items date from the nineteenth century and include materials associated with the Dred Scott case and the abolitionist activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison. Eighteenth-century cases include Somerset v. Stewart, decided in England a few years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which "underscored the great tension created by slavery in Anglo-American law."

Southern railroad mileage outpaced Northern mileage in the 1850s. Virginia and Tennessee built more miles of railroad in the decade than the six state region of New England. Florida went from 21 miles of rail to 402, a 1,814 % increase. Historians have downplayed the effects of southern railroad development in these years. Richard Brown in The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (Hill and Wang, 1976) argued that southern rails were built cheaply "to bring cotton to market" and nothing more. Other historians have followed this line of argument. Scott Reynolds Nelson in Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) also considered Southern railroads limited, one-dimensional, and ineffectual before the Civil War.

Ad helium Pace Parati: prepared in peace for war. This sentiment was much on the mind of Captain Arthur L. Wagner as he contemplated the quality of military education at the Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, during the 1890s. Wagner believed that the school's curricula during the long years of peace had become too far removed from the reality of war, and he cast about for ways to make the study of conflict more real to officers who had no experience in combat. Eventually, he arrived at a concept called the "Staff Ride," which consisted of detailed classroom study of an actual campaign followed by a visit to the sites associated with that campaign. Although Wagner never lived to see the Staff Ride added to the Leavenworth curricula, an associate of his, Major Eben Swift, implemented the Staff Ride at the General Service and Staff School in 1906. In July of that year, Swift led a contingent of twelve students to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to begin a two-week study of the Atlanta campaign of 1864.

For every state there was a saturation point, a point of diminishing returns, in the development of railroad mileage and access to the network. Here too, the pattern of Southern development was impressive and consequential. Beyond a certain point each mile of railroad added to a network included an increasingly small percentage of the population.

A Journey of Injustice: Remember and commemorate the survival of the Cherokee people, forcefully removed from their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to live in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. They traveled by foot, horse, wagon, or steamboat in 1838-1839.

The US/American History I course was developed through the Ohio Department of Higher Education OER Innovation Grant. This work was completed and the course was posted in September 2019. The course is part of the Ohio Transfer Assurance Guides and is also named OHS043. For more information about credit transfer between Ohio colleges and universities, please visit: transfercredit.ohio.gov.Team LeadCraig Semsel                                     Lorain County Community College   Content ContributorsSharon Deubreau                              Rhodes State CollegeRuth Dubinsky                                   Stark State CollegePeter Manos                                      Cleveland State UniversityLibrarianTim Sandusky                                   Ohio Dominican UniversityReview TeamDavid Stebenne                                Ohio State University 

The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of Great Britain (after the union of England and Scotland in 1707) and the expansion of the British Empire. By the mid-1700s, Great Britain had developed into a commercial and military powerhouse; its economic sway ranged from India, where the British East India Company had gained control over both trade and territory, to the West African coast, where British slave traders predominated, and to the British West Indies, whose lucrative sugar plantations, especially in Barbados and Jamaica, provided windfall profits for British planters. Meanwhile, the population rose dramatically in Britain’s North American colonies. In the early 1700s the population in the colonies had reached 250,000. By 1750, however, over a million British migrants and African slaves had established a near-continuous zone of settlement on the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia. During this period, the ties between Great Britain and the American colonies only grew stronger. Anglo-American colonists considered themselves part of the British Empire in all ways: politically, militarily, religiously (as Protestants), intellectually, and racially.