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=Welcome to United States History II! = Malden High School Social Studies  Mr. Max - BR490  bmax@malden.mec.edu


 * || [[image:http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/triangle/trianglecov1.jpg width="351" height="283" align="center" caption="What the heck happened?"]] ||

The picture above is a great example of the importance of studying history. History is part of social studies, which means the study of societies. What is a society? It's a group of people living together for some reason(s). In this class we are going to study Americans living together under particular political and economic systems with diverse cultural practices - what America is like today and how it got these ways. You perform social studies every single day of your life. You walk around and observe the world around you, you learn about how the world works, you experience how the decisions of others impact your life, and you have questions about what is happening in your world.

In the picture above there is a police officer standing above a number of dead women. These women likely jumped to their deaths from the burning factory building where they had been working. This tragedy occurred in 1911 and is referred to in history as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in which 146 women died. Part of the reason that so many women died is that they were trapped on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building by doors that had been locked by their supervisors to make sure they did not take breaks. This tragedy led to both new laws about workplace safety and the formation of the Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which then fought for laws ensuring better and safer working conditions. This is just one example of an event that changed the course of history and our society today. We will take a closer look at this event and many others this year.

__Our Class__

If you do well in this class, it will help your life. You will become a better thinker, writer, reader, and speaker, a more attractive college and job applicant, and a better coworker and citizen. This class will provide you with many opportunities to learn about the world around you - how it is and how it got this way. We will study current events and how they relate to historical events - some of the same issues we are dealing with today have been around for a long time: war, economic problems, health care, racism, and more. There will be many topics we study that can directly impact your future, such as learning about how businesses operate, how the stock market works, and how America became an extremely rich and powerful nation. You will have many opportunities to form and express opinions as we study issues like immigration, racism, segregation, war, government involvement in peoples’ lives, and much more…so get ready.

The focus of this class is learning. We are here to think, to learn, to enjoy the year and finish it in a better position than we started. There are two main mottos for this class:

1. Learn something every day. 2. Get better every day.

We are all good at things and we all need to improve: What are you good at? What do you know a lot about? What are your goals? Are they big enough? What do you need to do to achieve them? What do you need to improve at?

The details of the history we will learn about: Why is that the outline of our class? The U.S. Constitution contains the laws of this country and in that document, it is allotted that schools are the responsibilities of the state governments, so the state government of Massachusetts has decided to create guidelines for what should be taught in certain courses. The Department of Education (DOE) is the state government's agency for determining education guidelines such as those frameworks for United States history II.

You may consider [|History.com] our unofficial online textbook.
Interactive Timeline of US History