A supplement to the Texas US history textbook/9th Grade - History of the United States Since 1877

Preface
As outlined in this statement, this resource is a supplement to the 9th grade history textbook for the state of Texas. Please read the statement before contributing to this resource.

Scope
According to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies [PDF]:


 * In United States History Studies Since 1877, which is the second part of a two-year study that begins in Grade 8, students study the history of the United States from 1877 to the present.

Reading Level
The reading level for the 9th grade as defined by the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level is approx. 9 = (0.39 x Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 x Average Syllables per Word) − 15.59.

This website can be used to automatically analyze the reading level of our entries.

How to Participate
We are especially hoping to get Texas school students involved in the creation of their own textbook. If you teach a class where it might be appropriate, please consider having your students conduct research to write articles for this supplement instead of writing term papers. This article describes a similar assignment. The spirit of such an assignment would be to ask your students to learn a subject so well that they could fascinate their peers by explaining the subject to them.

Table of Contents
1886 Santa Clara Count v. Southern Pacific Railroad: Corporations Become Persons Under the Fourteenth Amendment

1920 A Great Experiment and Tragic Result: Prohibition of alcohol, motivated by noble intentions of reducing crime and corruption, leads to the creation of gang culture in America

1922 Alfred P. Sloan creates a special unit at GM tasked with replacing America's electric railways with cars, trucks and buses

1933 Albert Einstein emigrates to the United States: America benefits from an influx of artists and intellectuals driven from Europe by the Nazi's and WWII

1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor: The United States enters World War II

1945 Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz: The Allies begin to expose the full horror and scale of the Holocaust

1945 The United States uses atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Hundreds of thousands of people die in the attack which helped end WWII while inaugurating the cold war and global ethical debates about the existence and use of nuclear weapons of mass destruction

1955 Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white passenger: The Montgomery Bus Boycott launches the Civil Rights Movement

1962 Biologist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring: The environmentalist movement enters mainstream consciousness

1971 The Great Experiment Redux: President Nixon announces the War on Drugs

1973 The Supreme court rules on Roe v Wade concerning abortion rights

1989 The Berlin Wall falls marking the end of the Cold War: Francis Kukuyama declares the end of history as capitalism achieves global hegemony

1996 Fox News launches, The Daily Show premieres and The Onion goes on-line: The media landscape changes as right-wing radio moves to TV and satirical news increasingly takes on the role of informative journalism

2000 Al Gore Wins the Popular Vote, George Bush Becomes President

2001 Al-Qaeda attacks centers of American military and economic power on September 11th: A new form of global war emerges between nation-states and terrorist networks

2001 Napster is shut down, meanwhile Larry Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred found Creative Commons: Peer-to-peer sharing redefines personal property, copyright, and the economy at large