- •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
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.
BY BRUCE B. AUSTER
Pirates attacked Columbus's ship west of Gibraltar, as he headed north to England. The young Italian crewman, his vessel ablaze, gripped an oar to keep from drowning and swam to shore. He caught the next ship to the end of the Earth.
Fifteen years before his mission to the New World, the story goes, Columbus reached Iceland, the land known in legend as Ultima Thule, the farthest possible place in the world, where "land, water, and air are all mixed together." The mysterious island boasted volcanoes, lava-black beaches, and snowy white landscapes. It may also have been the birthplace of Columbus's bold leap to America. Historians continue to search for new documentation to prove that Columbus reached Iceland and, if he did, whether his stay there, at age 25, stirred the adventurer to imagine that a passage to China lay to the west, across the Atlantic.
Some 500 years earlier, the Vikings had set sail from Iceland and ultimately reached the New World. Could Columbus have heard the stories of Leif Ericson's voyage to the place called Vinland? If the story is true, "Columbus would have learned from Icelandic sailors that there was land to the west," says William Fitzhugh, a curator of the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit "Vikings," which opened in April in Washington and will travel for two years throughout North America.
We're No.1. It is no coincidence that historians in Scandinavia are cheerleaders for the Columbus-in-Iceland saga while those in Italy turn up their noses. If the Viking backers are right, Columbus not only arrived in America after the Vikings, he borrowed their idea. The Vikings did beat Columbus to America, an accomplishment no longer in dispute. Forty years ago, archaeologists discovered evidence of a Viking set tlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. No other Viking sites have been found despite exhaustive, and sometimes ridiculous, efforts. But the ruins of buildings discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows confirmed the essential details of the Vinland Sagas, the two oral tales that describe the journeys of Eric the Red to Greenland and Leif Ericson and others to North America.
Scholars cannot be sure Columbus even reached Iceland. The case isn't ironclad because only one fragment of evidence from Columbus's day remains: The explorer's son, in his biography of his father, cites Columbus's memoirs, in which he describes the voyage of February 1477. For years, historians did not know what to make of the account. Many details were accurate: The winter that year was mild, so waters in the north were navigable. Others were wrong: Columbus badly misstates Iceland's latitude. But the errors, because they reflect the limited knowledge of the time, are now seen as proof of the memoir's authenticity. In 1484, just seven years after he is believed to have stopped in Iceland, Columbus proposed to the king of Portugal that he could reach China by crossing the Atlantic.
Small world. No single spark lighted the explorer's imagination. Before his voyage, Columbus would have known of Marco Polo's journey to China. He is also believed to have studied Ptolemy's Guide to Geography, a brilliant Roman-era work by the Greek astronomer who argued that the sun revolved around the Earth. His Geography, though influential, vastly underestimated the size of the Earth. That led Colum bus to believe a shorter route to China and India could be found to the west. Ptolemy's teachings may have only confirmed what he knew from the Viking sagas: that a westward passage was possible.
That Columbus wasn't first to America is unthinkable to many. Ken Feder, debunker and author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, gets the most hate mail from Columbus lovers. "I expect psychic archaeologists to get on my case, not the Columbus appreciation society," he says. Others suggest the Viking discovery had no lasting importance. "It is unquestionable that the Vikings got there first, if getting there is all that matters," says historian David Henige, who analyzed the journal of Columbus's first voyage. "But Columbus catalyzed settlement of the New World." Might the Vikings have the jump there, too? New evidence being gathered by archaeologists may prove that the Vikings maintained elaborate trade relations with native North Americans for some 350 years. "If the Norse were huddling in Greenland trying to survive, that's one thing,'' says the Smithsonian's Fitzhugh. "But if they were exploring, meeting natives, and trading, then that's a new chapter in American history that hasn't been explored."
Paolo Emilio Taviani entitled his biography of Columbus The Grand Design. But the adventures of Columbus and the Vikings, five centuries apart, suggest how both will and chance shape history. Columbus's design was grounded in error and miscalculation–but it succeeded brilliantly. Olafur Egilsson, a former board member of Iceland's historical society who believes that Columbus reached Iceland, thinks the visit could have been crucial. "It might have given Columbus confidence to know there were lands on the other side of the ocean," he says. Perhaps that's why, when the crew of the Santa Marнa nearly rebelled, afraid the winds would never turn and blow them home again, Columbus calmed them, then kept sailing west.