Big Era Seven: Landscape Unit 7.3


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People, Power, and Ideology: A whole new world
1830-1900 CE

Why This Unit?

The modern world in which students live is a complex, interrelated network of people, things, and places. Yet we ask them, through our political system, to participate in it as conscious actors. None of us possesses the tools to simply process all the information we encounter every day without a filter. Instead, we screen what we take in from family, friends, media, the classroom, or any daily conversation. We also filter information through sets of abstract ideas and values that provide a framework with which we process our world. One terms for these ideas and values is ideology.

This unit introduces students to the major political, economic, and social ideologies of the nineteenth century world. The basic aim is to help them become fluent in our modern world’s political vocabulary, and, more important, to help them develop their own ideological framework with which to navigate their world more effectively and consciously.

Unit Objectives

Upon completing this unit, students will be able to:

1.) Define the terms conservatism, feminism, imperialism, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism.

2.) Explain in a paragraph which of a series of political statements they most agree with.

3.) Prepare a one-page summation of one ideology’s major tenets, a major historical event in an ideology’s development, or a major figure in an ideology’s history, using both words and pictures.

4.) Gather information about the tenets, events, and representative individuals of the major ideologies of the modern world.

5.) Explain in a coherent, well-supported paragraph which ideology most closely aligns with their own views of the world.

Time and Materials

This unit should take 1-3 days of class time, depending on whether the teacher asks the students to complete all of the lessons or not, and how the teacher balances homework and classwork.

Table of Contents

Why this unit?	2
Unit objectives	2
Time and materials	2
The historical context	3
This unit in the Big Era time line	4
Lesson 1: Engaging the Ideas	5
Lesson 2: Making the Papers	7
Lesson 3: Reading the Papers	25
This unit and the Three Essential Questions	27
This unit and the Seven Key Themes	28
This unit and the Standards in Historical Thinking	28
Resources	29
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