When southern states turned themselves into a Confederacy – a political system in which each state is sovereign – they were attempting an arrangement that had never before been tried in United States history.  

With the Gold Rush, California’s population rapidly swelled to nearly 100,000 people in about a year.  Accordingly, California petitioned to become a formal United States territory.  That’s a normal part of the process of becoming a state.  What happened when California made this completely reasonable request and why?

What Congressional event first indicated to northerners and southerners that their respective regions were significantly and disturbingly different?

Who rules in a republic?

So many people traveled the Oregon Trail that swales (ruts) from the trail are visible to this day.

And how did the nation feel about  expansion? Who wrote that it was the “manifest design of Providence” that the United States expand as far as it could? When was this statement written? What is its significance?

The upper south hesitated to secede at first.  What action by Abraham Lincoln drove most of them out of the United States?

One question about the Alamo is why did Santa Anna attack this outpost?  It was way out on the frontier with fewer than 300 men inside.  Why bother attacking and killing the defenders?  Why not just go around it?

Plymouth, “The Errand into the Wilderness,” Pilgrims, Salem, Puritans, Charles Sumner.  These terms/people are all associated with Virginia.

What was the name of the first version of the United States – the version that rejected the idea that it needed a strong national government and instead believed virtue in the people could hold the nation together?