- •1. The land of the us: geography, the face of the land, mountain and rivers, weather and climate.
- •2. The people of the usa: population, the society. Ellis Island - Gateway to America. Contribution of the immigrants to the national identity.
- •"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,....
- •A new era, a new mission
- •3. The regions of the us: the Northeast, the Central Basin, the Southeast, the Great Plains.
- •The Regions of the United States The Northeast
- •4. Discovery of America. American Indians - the accomplishments of the Iroquois, the Sioux, the Pueblo; great civilizations of the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas.
- •5. The History of the usa: Columbus or Vikings? Exploring and settling the New World: Spanish, Dutch and French territories in North America. Russian discovery of America.
- •French colonization of the Americas
- •6. The voyage of the Mayflower, Pylgrims and Puritans. Virginia Company with the right to colonise the South and the Plymouth Company with the right to colonise the North.
- •Pilgrims' voyage
- •Second Mayflower
- •Virginia Company
- •The Plymouth Company
- •7. Britain and the colonies. Jamestown colony, the dramatic history of Virginia.
- •8. The move to independence: the colonies in their fight to protect their liberties, the Tea Act and Boston Tea Party.
- •First Continental Congress
- •Second Continental Congress
- •10. The Founding Fathers of the nation (g. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin).
- •Collective biography of the Framers of the Constitution
- •11. Constitution of the us, structure and main principles. Bill of rights.
- •The First Constitution
- •Louisiana Purchase
- •Florida Purchase
- •Republic of Texas
- •Alaska Purchase
- •13. The Civil War - the reasons, the process, the generals, the battles the consequences. The Emancipation Proclamation. The role of a. Lincoln. The Gettysburg address.
- •The reasons of the Civil War.
- •How many Generals were there?
- •List of u.S. Army generals and chief staff officers in early 1861 Line officers
- •Staff Officers
- •Lincoln's role
- •14. Afterwar peiod (Reconstruction), the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the constitution. Carpetbaggers, Ku-Klux-Klan. What did Reconstruction fail?
- •15. America at the turn of the century: Foreign policy - the fight for new colonies: Venezuelan conflict, Cuban crisis, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Isthmus.
- •16. The Manifest Destiny, Monroe's Doctrine, Olney (or Roosevelt) Collorary.
- •17. Economic development: "captains of industry", industrialization. "The Square Deal" of Theodore Roosevelt and "The New Freedom" of w. Wilson. The us - a world leader.
- •List of businessmen who were called robber barons
- •U.S. Industrialization
- •History
- •18. America in the World War I. The League of Nations.
- •19. The roaring twenties. The rush for wealth. The movies. The bootleggers. Prohibition.
- •20. The Great Depression and the New Deal. The difference of the Roosevelt Administration from all previous administrations.
- •21. America before and at the time of the World War II. Hirishima 1945: right or wrong?
- •22. After the wwii: prodperity and problems - presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. "McCarthyism". Cold War with the Soviet Union.
- •23. Korean War, the birth of Nato, the War in Vietnam, crisis over Cuba.
- •24. The American century - the Americanization of the world. Mail Concepts of American Business.
- •27. The symbols of the us: the Statue of Liberty, the White house, the Library of Congress, the American Flag, the national Anthem.
- •28. Churches in the usa. America as a shelter for many people oppressed in their native countries for their religious beliefs. The role of religion in the us.
- •28. The main concepts of American Education.
- •30. The American Character: its origin and development. Values in the american character.
- •30. Cities of the us: Washington - planned city, New York (Big Apple) and its boroughs.
- •Economy
- •State finances
11. Constitution of the us, structure and main principles. Bill of rights.
Иванян с. 88
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.
The Constitution creates the three branches of the national government: a legislature, the bicameral Congress; an executive branch led by the President; and a judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court. The Constitution specifies the powers and duties of each branch. The Constitution reserves all unenumerated powers to the respective states and the people, thereby establishing the federal system of government.
The Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and ratified by conventions in each U.S. state in the name of "The People". The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times; the first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights.
The United States Constitution is the oldest written constitution still in use by any nation in the world, although the Statutes of 1600, the principal part of San Marino's Constitution, is older.
The Constitution holds a central place in United States law and political culture. The handwritten original document penned by Jacob Shallus is on display at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C.
The First Constitution
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were the first constitution of the United States of America. The problem with the United States government under the Articles of Confederation was, in the words of George Washington, “no money”.
Congress could print money, but by 1786, it was useless. It could borrow money, but it could not pay it back. Under the Articles, Congress requisitioned money from the states. But no state paid all of their requisition; Georgia paid nothing. A few states paid the US an amount equal to interest on the national debt owed to their citizens, but no more. Nothing was paid toward the interest on debt owed foreign governments. By 1786, the United States was about to default on its contractual obligations when the principal came due.
Most of the US troops in the 625-man US Army were deployed facing British forts on American soil. They had not been paid; they were deserting and the remainder threatened mutiny. Spain closed New Orleans to American commerce. The US protested to no effect. The Barbary Pirates began seizing American commercial ships. The US had no funds to pay their extortion demands. States such as New York and South Carolina violated the peace treaty with Britain by prosecuting Loyalists for wartime activity. The US had no more credit if another military crisis required action. In Massachusetts during Shays' Rebellion, Congress had no money; General Benjamin Lincoln had to raise funds among Boston merchants to pay for a volunteer army.
Congress was paralyzed. It could do nothing significant without nine states, and some legislative business required all thirteen. By April 1786, there had been only three days out of five months with nine states present. When nine states did show up, if there were only one member of a state on the floor, that state’s vote did not count. If a delegation were evenly divided, the division was duly noted in the Journal, but there was no vote from that state towards a nine-count. States, in violation of the Articles, laid embargoes, negotiated unilaterally abroad, provided for armies and made war. The Articles Congress had “virtually ceased trying to govern.”
The vision of a “respectable nation” among nations seemed to be fading in the eyes of such men as Virginia’s George Washington and James Madison, New York’s Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin and George Clymer, and Massachusetts’ Henry Knox and Rufus King. The dream of a republic, a nation without hereditary rulers, with power derived from the people in frequent elections, was in doubt.
Articles of the Constitution
1 Preamble: Statement of purpose
2 Article One: Legislative Power
3 Article Two: Executive power
4 Article Three: Judicial power
5 Article Four: States' powers and limits
6 Article Five: Amendments
7 Article Six: Federal power
8 Article Seven: Ratification
Amendments
Successful amendments
The Bill of Rights (Amendments 1 to 10)
The Bill of Rights is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. They were introduced by James Madison to the 1st United States Congress in 1789 as a series of legislative articles and came into effect as Constitutional Amendments on December 15, 1791, through the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States.
The Bill of Rights is a series of limitations on the power of the U.S. federal government, protecting the natural rights of liberty and property including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, a free press, free assembly, and free association, as well as the right to keep and bear arms. In federal criminal cases, it requires indictment by a grand jury for any capital or "infamous crime", guarantees a speedy, public trial with an impartial jury composed of members of the state or judicial district in which the crime occurred, and prohibits double jeopardy. In addition, the Bill of Rights reserves for the people any rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution and reserves all powers not specifically granted to the federal government to the people or the States. Most of these restrictions on the federal government were later applied to the states by a series of legal decisions applying the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. The Bill was influenced by George Mason's 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, the English Bill of Rights 1689, works of the Age of Enlightenment pertaining to natural rights, and earlier English political documents such as Magna Carta (1215).
Delegates to the Philadelphia Convention on September 12, 1787 debated whether to include a Bill of Rights in the body of the U.S. Constitution, and an agreement to create the Bill of Rights helped to secure ratification of the Constitution itself. Ideological conflict between Federalists and anti-Federalists threatened the final ratification of the new national Constitution. Thus, the Bill addressed the concerns of some of the Constitution's influential opponents, including prominent Founding Fathers, who argued that the Constitution should not be ratified because it failed to protect the fundamental principles of human liberty.
Twelve articles were proposed to the States, but only ten, corresponding to the First through Tenth Amendments, were ratified in the 18th Century. The first Article, dealing with the number and apportionment of U.S. Representatives, has never been ratified, and the second, limiting the power of Congress to increase the salaries of its members, was ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendment.
The Bill of Rights plays a key role in American law and government, and remains a vital symbol of the freedoms and culture of the nation. One of the first fourteen copies of the Bill of Rights is on public display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C..
12. Expansion of the US: Louisiana purchase, Florida, Texas, the war with Mexico, the Gold Rush, Oregon Trail and Alaska. The American Frontier. The fate of the Indian Tribes - the trek to Oklahoma or the Cherokees Trail, the Navahos.
WESTWARD EXPANSION. The original territory of the United States as acknowledged by the treaty with Great Britain, in 1783, consisted of the following thirteen States: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The boundaries of many of these States, as constituted by their charters, extended to the Pacific Ocean; but in practice they ceased at the Mississippi. Beyond that river the territory belonged, by discovery and settlement, to the King of Spain. All the territory west of the present boundaries of the States was ceded by them to the United States in the order named: Virginia, 1784; Massachusetts, 1785; Connecticut, 1786 and 1800; South Carolina, 1787; North Carolina, 1790; Georgia, 1802. This ceded territory comprised part of Minnesota, all of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio (see NORTHWEST TERRITORY), Tennessee, and a great part of Alabama and Mississippi. Vermont was admitted as a separate State in 1791; Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, in 1792; and Maine, till that time claimed by Massachusetts, in 1820.