American Government is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected Module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. American Government includes updated information on the 2016 presidential election.Senior Contributing AuthorsGlen Krutz (Content Lead), University of OklahomaSylvie Waskiewicz, PhD (Lead Editor)

Allegories are similar to metaphors: in both the author uses one subject to represent another, seemingly unrelated, subject. However, unlike metaphors, which are generally short and contained within a few lines, an allegory extends its representation over the course of an entire story, novel, or poem. This lesson plan will introduce students to the concept of allegory by using George Orwell’s widely read novella, Animal Farm, which is available on Project Gutenberg.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age it started. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

This lesson highlights the changing relationship between the city center and the suburb in the postwar decades, especially in the 1950s. Students will look at the legislation leading up to and including the Federal Highway Act of 1956. They will also examine documents about the history of Levittown, the most famous and most important of the postwar suburban planned developments.

This lecture course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the international relations of the People's Republic of China. China's foreign relations during the Cold War as well as contemporary diplomatic, security and economic issues will be examined to identify and explain China's foreign policy goals and their implementation since 1949. Throughout, this course will investigate the sources of conflict and cooperation in China's behavior, assessing competing explanations for key events and policies. Readings will be drawn from political science, history, and international relations theory.

This lesson plan attempts to dissolve the artificial boundary between domestic and international affairs in the postwar period to show students how we choose to discuss history.

Most historians agree that the world has never come closer to nuclear war than it did during a thirteen-day period in October 1962, after the revelation that the Soviet Union had stationed several medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. This lesson will examine how this crisis developed, how the Kennedy administration chose to respond, and how the situation was ultimately resolved.

In this activity students analyze a timeline and official and unofficial documents that reveal the events of the Iran-Contra Affair. This activity also models the types of questions that can help students analyze foreign policy documents from other events. The activity instructions include suggestions for how to differentiate the activity for students with different reading levels.

This course covers the role of physics and physicists during the 20th century, focusing on Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Feynman. Beyond just covering the scientific developments, institutional, cultural, and political contexts will also be examined.

This course examines systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions, and candidate military interventions, into civil wars from the 1990s to the present. These civil wars did not easily fit into the traditional category of vital interest. These interventions may therefore tell us something about broad trends in international politics including the nature of unipolarity, the erosion of sovereignty, the security implications of globalization, and the nature of modern western military power.

The aim of this course is to introduce and analyze the international relations of East Asia. With four great powers, three nuclear weapons states, and two of the world's largest economies, East Asia is one of the most dynamic and consequential regions in world politics. This course will examine the sources of conflict and cooperation in both periods, assessing competing explanations for key events in East Asia's international relations. Readings will be drawn from international relations theory, political science and history.

Learn about the effects that the Second World War had on jazz music as well as the contributions that jazz musicians made to the war effort. This lesson will help students explore the role of jazz in American society and the ways that jazz functioned as an export of American culture and a means of resistance to the Nazis.

In 1950, North Korean forces, armed mainly with Soviet weapons, invaded South Korea in an effort to reunite the peninsula under communist rule. This lesson will introduce students to the conflict by having them read the most important administration documents related to it.

The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union successfully cooperated in defeating the Axis Powers did not necessarily mean that the two countries would continue to get along in the postwar world. This lesson will examine the U.S.-Soviet disagreements regarding Germany and Eastern Europe.

The hunt for Communists in the United States clearly reached the point of hysteria by the early 1950s, but what is often overlooked is that it had its origins in a very real phenomenon. This lesson will expose students to recently declassified FBI documents and transcripts of the Rosenberg trial. It will encourage them to think seriously about the extent of the Soviet espionage network in America, thus setting the stage for a proper understanding of later hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had deteriorated to the point of "cold war," while domestically the revelation that Soviet spies had infiltrated the U.S. government created a general sense of uneasiness. This lesson will examine the operations of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the late 1940s.

The unwillingness of the Soviet Union to allow the creation of independent and democratic states in Eastern Europe, and the failure of East and West to reach a compromise on Germany, left many Americans puzzled. Why were the Soviets acting as they did? Moreover, how should the United States respond? This lesson will consider containment through the use of original documents, mostly from the Truman Presidential Library. They will study what it meant in theory, and then examine the first two major instances of its application"”the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

In the spring of 1948 Stalin provoked the first serious international crisis of the Cold War by announcing a blockade of West Berlin. This lesson will trace the Berlin blockade and airlift of 1948"“49 and the establishment of NATO.