The War of the Banks (Directed by Andrew Jackson)

Andrew Jackson, the 7th
president of the U.S. Image
from wikipedia.org.

This lesson centered on the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson has a reputation as “the people’s president,” but a look at some of his actions reveals that there might be more to the story. The essential question was: Is Andrew Jackson's long-standing reputation as "the people's president" deserved? We split into six groups, two for each topic. Each created a presentation to show the class about the three issues of the time, and used the evidence to indicate whether or not Jackson was the people’s president or not. Our group used Chatterpix in conjunction with Videolicious to describe the Bank Wars (part 1 and part 2).

The first issue, about the Trail of Tears, concerned the removal of Native Americans off of their land and their migration west. Jackson said that they would be safer out west rather than clash with Americans in the east, but he moved them by force, and many of them died even before they left, in concentration camps. The second issue, concerning the second national bank, became known as the bank wars. Jackson thought that the bank had too much control over the economy and only supported the rich, but vetoing its charter eventually caused an economic collapse known as the Panic of 1848. The final issue concerned what became known as the spoils system, in which people are encouraged to lean towards a political party by giving them positions of power. This eventually resulted in a million dollars being stolen by one of Jackson’s supporters.

Early America: A Somewhat-Kind-Of-A-Democracy?

This lesson centered around early American democracy. The essential question was: How should we define democracy? How democratic was the United States in the early 1800s? Using online searches and our own knowledge, our group defined democracy as a system of government in which power distributed to law-abiding citizens by giving them the right to vote for their leaders. We analyzed sources such as a painting by George Caleb Bingham, quotes and documents from people of the time about the voting system, and various charts. The analyzed sources were put on this poster to illustrate how democratic the United States was at the time. The final verdict was that American democracy was underdeveloped at the time, but was rapidly improving.

Our poster. Each of the 5 sources got their own slip to put in the ballot box for how democratic the US is. Each
ballot has the source's analysis and a rating based on the source.