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FrançaisAP US History Unit 7: Period 7, 1890–1945
In half a century, the United States stopped being a continental republic with a thin Pacific coastline and became the most powerful nation on the planet. The closing western frontier produced an overseas empire. The Progressive Era and the New Deal built a regulatory state. Two world wars carried the country first into and then to the head of the international order. The half century from 1890 to 1945 supplies more documents, more themes, and more exam weight than any other unit in the AP US History course.
The 15 lessons in order
Contextualizing Period 7
The opening lesson. Frames the half century from 1890 to 1945 as one connected story and previews the imperial, reform, migration, cultural, economic, and global-conflict threads that drive the next fourteen lessons.
Imperialism: Debates
The argument over empire. Mahan, Beveridge, and the imperialist case for naval power and overseas markets set against the anti-imperialist coalition of Bryan, Twain, and Carnegie.
The Spanish-American War
The 1898 war that produced an overseas American empire. Yellow journalism, the Maine, McKinley's war message, the Treaty of Paris, the Platt Amendment, and the Philippine-American War that followed.
The Progressives
The Progressive reform movement. Muckraking journalism, settlement-house and women's-club activism, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Amendments, and Muller v. Oregon. Period 7's first dual-theme topic.
World War I: Military and Diplomacy
U.S. entry into the First World War. Wilsonian neutrality, the Lusitania and the Zimmermann telegram, the American Expeditionary Forces under Pershing, the Fourteen Points, and the Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles.
World War I: Home Front
The First World War inside the United States. The Espionage and Sedition Acts, the first Red Scare, the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, and the wartime expansion of federal economic management.
1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology
The consumer economy of the Roaring Twenties. The automobile, electrification, radio broadcasting, the talking picture, and the rise of mass advertising and a national consumer market.
1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies
Conflict over modern America. Prohibition, the revived Ku Klux Klan, the National Origins Act of 1924, the Scopes trial, the Harlem Renaissance, and the urban-rural argument made visible by the 1920 Census. Period 7's second dual-theme topic.
The Great Depression
The economic collapse of the 1930s. The 1929 crash and bank panics, the failure of Hoover's voluntarism, the Bonus Army, Dust Bowl migration, and the asymmetric impact on women, African Americans, and Mexican Americans.
The New Deal
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The Hundred Days, the alphabet agencies, Social Security, the Wagner Act, the court-packing fight, and the realignment of the New Deal coalition that defined American politics into the 1960s.
Interwar Foreign Policy
American foreign policy between the world wars. The Washington Naval Conference, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, and Lend-Lease as the door into the Second World War.
World War II: Mobilization
The Second World War on the home front. War production and the end of the Depression, women in war work, the Double V campaign, the Bracero Program, and the Japanese American internment.
World War II: Military
The Allied military victory. Pacific island-hopping, the European air war and D-Day, the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the moral debate that the atomic bomb opened.
Postwar Diplomacy
The postwar settlements. Yalta and Potsdam, the founding of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the occupation of Germany and Japan, and the opening moves of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Comparison in Period 7
The closing lesson. Synthesis essay, full-period DBQ practice, and a graphic comparison of the United States in 1890 with the United States in 1945, drawing the line that hands the story off to the Cold War in Period 8.