AP U.S. History

• Primary and Secondary Sources
• Reading a Source: HIPP
• Dates, Centuries and Periods
• Causes, Effects and Change Over Time
• The First Peoples of the Americas
• Native Cultures Across North America
• Cities, Confederacies and Pueblos
• Why Europeans Explored
• The Columbian Exchange
• The Spanish Empire in the Americas

Native societies before contact, European exploration, the Columbian Exchange and the Spanish empire; the historical thinking skills are taught here and used throughout.

• Jamestown and the Chesapeake
• Pilgrims and Puritans in New England
• The Middle Colonies
• The Southern Colonies
• Comparing the Colonial Regions
• Slavery in the Colonies
• Colonists and Native Nations in Conflict
• Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts
• The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment
• Colonial Self-Government

French and Dutch colonization appear in lessons on the colonial regions and conflicts rather than as topics of their own.

• The French and Indian War
• New Taxes and Colonial Protest
• The Road to Revolution
• Lexington, Concord and Common Sense
• The Declaration of Independence
• Patriots, Loyalists and Neutrals
• Winning the War
• The Treaty of Paris, 1783
• What the Revolution Changed
• The Articles of Confederation
• The Land Ordinance and the Northwest Ordinance
• Shays' Rebellion
• The Constitutional Convention
• Federalists, Anti-Federalists and Ratification
• The Bill of Rights
• Washington Sets the Pattern
• The First Political Parties
• John Adams and the Election of 1800

• Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase
• The Marshall Court
• The War of 1812
• Good Feelings, Missouri and the Monroe Doctrine
• The Market Revolution
• Jacksonian Democracy
• Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears
• Revival and Reform
• The Abolition Movement
• Seneca Falls and Women's Rights

• Manifest Destiny
• The Mexican-American War
• How the Country Grew
• Gold, Immigrants and Nativism
• The Compromise of 1850
• Kansas-Nebraska and Bleeding Kansas
• The Dred Scott Decision
• Lincoln, John Brown and the Election of 1860
• Secession and Fort Sumter
• The Union and the Confederacy
• Turning Points of the War
• Emancipation
• The Home Fronts
• The Gettysburg Address
• Lincoln's Death and Johnson's Plan
• Reconstruction Under Congress
• The Reconstruction Amendments
• The End of Reconstruction

• The Transcontinental Railroad
• Wars on the Plains
• Assimilation and the Dawes Act
• Big Business and Industry
• Workers and Unions
• New Immigrants and Growing Cities
• Gilded Age Politics and the Populists
• Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson
• Ideas of the Gilded Age

• Becoming a World Power
• The Open Door, the Big Stick and the Canal
• Muckrakers and Reformers
• The Progressive Presidents
• Progressive Amendments and Direct Democracy
• Winning Women's Suffrage
• The NAACP and the Great Migration
• The United States Enters the Great War
• The War at Home and the Peace
• The Twenties
• Conflicts of the Twenties
• The Crash of 1929
• Life in the Great Depression
• The New Deal
• The New Deal and the Supreme Court
• Judging the New Deal
• The Road to War
• Pearl Harbor
• The Home Front
• The Incarceration of Japanese Americans
• The War in Europe and the Holocaust
• The War in the Pacific
• Planning the Peace

• Containment
• The Second Red Scare
• The Korean War
• The 1950s
• Kennedy, Cuba and the Space Race
• The Vietnam War
• The Great Society
• Nixon, Detente and Watergate
• Early Victories
• Brown v. Board of Education
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Sit-ins, Freedom Rides and the March on Washington
• The Civil Rights Laws
• Debates Within the Movement
• Other Movements for Equal Rights
• The 1970s

• The Conservative Resurgence
• The End of the Cold War
• A World After the Cold War
• Computers, the Internet and a Global Economy
• Politics of the 1990s
• The Nine Periods: Putting It Together

The ladder's narrative stops at about 2000. Events after 2000 (the September 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, recent debates over immigration and technology) are not covered yet.