Sequence and connect the year's major events from first contact in 1492 through 1850 into one coherent timeline.
This week builds one comprehensive timeline pulling together the whole year: Columbus reaching the Americas in 1492; Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620) founded; enslaved Africans first arriving, and the House of Burgesses meeting, both in 1619; the French and Indian War (1754-1763); the Declaration of Independence (1776); the war's end (1783); the Constitution (1787) and Bill of Rights (1791); the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Indian Removal Act (1830) and Trail of Tears (1838); Texas statehood (1845); the Oregon Treaty (1846); the gold discovery and the end of the Mexican-American War (1848); and California statehood as part of the Compromise of 1850.
Underneath all these individual dates run a few larger threads worth tracing across the whole year: the steady growth of the nation's territory, from thirteen colonies to a Pacific-reaching country; the growth, and moral cost, of slavery, building toward a national divide; the changing, and often painful, place of Native nations throughout the story; and the expansion of self-government, from New England town meetings all the way to the Constitution. A strong historian can explain not just what happened on each date, but how these threads connect events across many decades.
Mastery looks like: They can sequence at least eight major events from 1492 to 1850 and explain at least one cause-and-effect connection spanning two different units.
Common stumbles: Knowing isolated facts without connecting cause and effect across units; forgetting events from earlier in the year instead of reviewing them.