The Supreme Court in American Political History

Objectives

This exercise will include several parts and is constructed so that the whole of the unit will take a great deal of the year to complete since it will reoccur on the prescribed occasions over the course of our study.

1. Students will be allowed to choose from 7 topics.
1. To be or not to be: An American Revolution.
2. Federalism and the French Revolution: the question of nullification.
3. Jackson and the Cherokee: a new democracy in action.
4. The Lincoln Douglas Debates.
5. The Voice of the people: labor unions and the courts.
6. Debs the Red Menace: Espionage and Sedition in America.
7. Civil Rights Legislation: fulfilling an American promise.
2. Within those topics, students will choose one of two sides in a given argument. For example students could either choose to be a member of the so called high federalists (Alexander Hamilton) during the Adams administration who rationalized the need for the Alien and Sedition Acts or James Madison or Thomas Jefferson who authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions which proposed to nullify the laws from topic number two above.
3. Students will then be asked to complete a series of tasks: First, students should complete a short biographical sketch of the their historical figure...it should include birth and childhood information, educational background, and pertinent information leading to said person's rise to prominence. Second, the student should outline with some detail the person's opinion with regard to the law or series of laws under consideration. Most pointedly, the student must be concerned with finding primary information that will allow them to articulate properly the argument that their chosen figure made within the context of the given situation. It is to be an accurate account, with some predictably necessary editorial, of the actual argument. In other words, for the example above the student might use the text of the Alien and Sedition Acts but also look for written information from perhaps Alexander Hamilton in which he gives support to the idea of having those laws in place. The student would then give an oral presentation reflecting the combination of all of this material in an argumentative style.
4. One pitfall in creating assignments like this one is the possibility that, since it requires work from only two students, I may exclude the rest of the class. With this in mind, I have developed a means to not only include every one in the activity but to do so in two distinct ways. Each student will be required to take notes during the debate in a separate section of their notebooks where they will compile material given to them by their classmates over the course of the year. At years' end students will be asked to use that material to answer the following essay prompt: Over the course of American History have the people of this nation been a defiant rebellious sort or a compliant and conformist group: express the validity of your position with historical evidence. Also, for each individual role play exercise I will give students a correlative assignment specific to the historical period in question. For example after the debate over English taxing policies prior to the revolutionary war I might ask students to subsequently complete an annotated timeline of 6 or 7 important events that eventually led to America's declaration of independence (see appendix D number 4). Using these methods I create some assurance for myself that the class is moving in harmony toward our disciplinary goals.