AP U.S History Course Outline

1.0 Credit

This course is designed to provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in U .S .history. The program prepares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by making demands upon them equivalent to those made by full-year introductory college courses. Students should learn to assess historical materials—their relevance to a given interpretive problem, reliability, and importance—and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship.

AP United States History is designed to prepare students for the rigor of scholarship and writing expected in college-level courses. Students study history as a series of interconnected events rather than as isolated dates, learning to critically analyze the cause and effect relationships of those events. As students progress through the course, they learn to find and assess primary documents as well as secondary sources. Finally, students learn to incorporate outside sources into persuasive essays that demonstrate logical reasoning and present evidence to support the author’s conclusions.