AP US History Summer Reading Assignment 2014:
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Read Gordon S. Wood’s The American Revolution: A History (ISBN-13: 978-0812970418), and
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Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Chapters 4 and 5, “Tyranny is Tyranny” and “A
Kind of Revolution” (ISBN: 0060838655).
You will begin your investigation of U.S. history with a comparative reading and writing assignment this
summer. This assignment is meant to spark your thinking about some of the big questions of American
history.
Gordon S. Wood is one of the most preeminent historians of the American Revolution and the early
American republic. He has won numerous awards, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. Critics, scholars, and
popular readers alike praised this books for his thesis: that the American Revolution was truly “radical,”
in that it fundamentally changed American social relations. Wood’s thesis challenged older historians,
who had claimed that while the Revolution created a new government, it did not change the order of
American society. Over the course of his work Wood counters this idea, advancing a strong argument that
the American Revolution “was as radical...as any revolution in history.”
Howard Zinn is a historian best remembered for his enormously popular book A People’s History of the
United States, initially published in 1980. Zinn focused on American social relations, particularly on those
groups that earlier generations of American historians had ignored in their research, such as women,
African-Americans, and Native Americans. In his two chapters on the Revolution, Zinn argues that the
American Revolution simply replaced the British king with wealthy American elites. Contrary to Wood,
Zinn argues the Revolution was conservative in nature.
Your assignment is to assess these two arguments and write an essay that answers the question:
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How revolutionary was the American Revolution? In what ways, if any, did American society
change?
How should we understand the revolution of 1776?
Was it a change in ideas and philosophy but not society, or a change in all aspects of American life
and thought?
These are just some questions that are meant to prompt you to think more deeply about the
central question of the revolutionary character of the American Revolution.
Essays should be 5 pages, double-spaced. Your essay should clearly develop for your reader your
interpretation of the Revolution. In crafting your argument, remember to address alternate
interpretations that challenge your own. You should support your argument with specific
examples and quotes from Wood and Zinn, which should be cited using the guidelines in the Writing
Manual available on the Miller website. You may email the essay to me when it is complete
(driddick@millerschool.org), or give me a hard copy in class. It is due by the first day of school.
See next page for the Non – AP Summer Reading Assignment.
United States History: (Non AP)
Free to Choose, a Personal Statement by Milton & Rose Friedman
ISBN: 0156334607
Milton Friedman was the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets.
Born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City, he attended Rutgers University,
where he earned his B.A. at the age of twenty. He went on to earn his M.A. from the
University of Chicago in 1933 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. In 1951
Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal honoring economists under age forty for
outstanding achievement. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for “his
achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for
his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Before that time he had
served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon and was president of the American
Economic Association in 1967. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977,
Friedman became a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.
His ideas spread worldwide with Free to Choose (coauthored with his wife, Rose
Friedman), the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980, written to accompany a TV series
on the Public Broadcasting System. This book made Milton Friedman a household
name.
ASSIGNMENT:
1. Read Free to Choose.
2. Answer the following questions in a file entitled “US History, Summer Reading –
(your name)”. Please use double-spaced, 12 point font, New Times Roman.
3. Submit your answers via Google Docs to the class folder that I will share with you.
4. Questions;
1. What is the significance of free international trade? Why is free trade said to be
best? How do nations benefit from free trade and the principal of comparative
advantage?
2. What is the price system? What are its important functions? Explain Adam
Smith’s invisible hand concept and how it works.
3. What is the relationship between economic freedom and human freedom?
How is this demonstrated in the kind of economic and political system that a nation
has? Use different nations as an example. Which is more important economic freedom
or political freedom? What would Milton Friedman say?
You may email the answers to me at driddick@millerschool.org when it is complete, or
give me a hard copy in class. It is due by the first day of school.