Social Studies_Grade 8
Summer Assignment_2013
Identify (Tell why they’re important)
People
Things
Events
James Monroe
Santa Fe Trail
Seneca Falls Convention
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Renaissance
Mexican-American War
Henry David Thoreau
Oregon Trail
California Gold Rush
Walt Whitman
Manifest Destiny
Harper’s Ferry
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Expansionists
Era of Good Feelings
Herman Melville
Annexation
Panic of 1819
Edgar Allen Poe
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1824 Election
Cyrus McCormick
Whig Party
Nullification Crisis
Bringham Young
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Trail of Tears
James K. Polk
Fugitive Slave Law
Zachary Taylor
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Winfield Scott
Abolitionists
Levi Strauss
Monroe Doctrine
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Missouri Compromise
John Brown
Underground Railroad
Stephen A. Douglas
Abraham Lincoln
Frederick Douglass
Alexander Cartwright
Andrew Jackson
Henry Clay
John C. Calhoun
Nat Turner
Harriet Tubman
John Qunicy Adams
Martin Van Buren
Questions
1) Explain the Compromise of 1850.
2) Explain the Dred Scott decision. Why was it so important?
3) As best you can, explain how a women’s work in the house changed in the 1840s.
4) What was the name of the first railroad in the United States? What region of the US
were most railroads built? What two cities were connected by railroads by 1855?
5) What three types of people were working in factories and mills in the mid-1800s?
Explain the conditions and work days.
6) What were the big reasons for the Mexican-American War?
7) Compare the Louisiana Purchase, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden
Purchase (in terms of land bought). Which do you think was the best?
8) What was William Henry Harrison’s campaign slogan in 1840? What was he the first
president to do? (BONUS: What word was first used during Martin Van Buren’s 1836
presidential campaign?)