SOL Preparation
for
US/VA
History
Getting ready for the SOL
There are less than 80
questions on the SOL Exam
They are multiple choice
questions
Some include maps &
graphs
You have unlimited time in
which to complete the test
Answer all questions, leave
no question unanswered
The secret is in preparation,
what is important to
know
People and events shape
our history
We will identify as many
important people and
events as possible in order
to be prepared to respond
successfully on the SOL
 Follow the slides and link
the person or event with
important knowledge
 The slides, like the test
follow a chronological
sequence
 Let’s Begin
Columbian Exchange
Diseases Disease kills
a large
segment of
the
indigenous
population of
America
Jamestown
Virgina
 1st permanent
English
settlement
 Jamestown
Colony 1607
 Tobacco
Mayflower Compact
 Compact allows
for the concept of
majority rule
 Part of today’s
political decision
making policy
Triangle
Trade
Triangle Trade
13
Colonies
Colonial Settlement
 Massachusetts & Puritans
 Rhode Island – dissenters
 Pennsylvania – Quakers
 Maryland – religious toleration
for Catholics
Plantation System
 Agricultural system in the
South. Cash crops like
tobacco & cotton fuel slavery
Proclamation of 1763 & the
Appalachian Mountains
 After French &
Indian War,
bares western
settlement
beyond
Appalachian
Mountains By
the English
Very Important Virginians
 Virginia Declaration of Rights (George Mason)
 Reiterated the notion that basic human rights should
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


not be violated by governments
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Thomas
Jefferson)
Outlawed the established church—that is, the practice
of government support for one favored church
Bill of Rights
James Madison, a Virginian, consulted the Virginia
Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom when drafting the amendments
that eventually became the United States Bill of Rights
Thomas
Paine
 Wrote critical
works Common
Sense and The
Crisis
 Inspires the
cause for the
American
Revolution
Shots heard around the World
Lexington & Concord
Declaration of Independence
July 4, 1776 - Philadelphia
Declaration of Independence
 Written by
Jefferson
 Ideas of John
Locke (Natural Rights)
 Life, liberty and
pursuit of
happiness
Taking Sides
Benjamin Franklin
 Inventor, scientist,
and statesman
 Helped to gain
funds and support
for the American
cause
Yorktown, Virginia 1781
 Last battle of the American Rev
 French fleet make the difference
Articles of Confederation
 Powers to declare war, make
peace, sign treaties, borrow
money, coin money, and establish
a postal service
 weak: no power to tax, control
interstate or foreign trade,
approval of states (no executive power to
enforce the law)
Constitutional
Convention meets
 a meeting, planned to revise
the Articles of Confederation,
turns into a opportunity to write
a new constitution
 Virginia Plan (large states)
 N. J. Plan (small states)
Federalist
 The Federalists favored a strong national
government that shared some power with
the states. They argued that the checks &
balances in the Constitution prevented
any one of the three branches from
acquiring preponderant power. They
believed that a strong national
government was necessary to facilitate
interstate commerce & to manage foreign
trade, national defense, and foreign
relations.
Constitutional Convention
 Great Compromise, a House
based on representation
determined by pop. and a
Senate with two rep. from each
state
 three-fifths compromise
Checks and Balances
 Constitution provides for
separation of powers:
Executive - veto
Legislature - impeachment
Judiciary - judicial review
George Washington
 Cabinet
 Two-Terms
 Warns against
alliances
Marbury vs. Madison
 Federal Courts
have the power
of judicial
review over the
Congress
 McCulloch v.
Maryland
Jefferson
Buys
From
France
In
1803
Lewis & Clark
The Eli Whitney & the
Cotton Gin
Robert Fulton
 The Claremont
 Invented the
steamboat
 Transportation
improves with
speed and two
way traffic
Monroe Doctrine
 President Monroe warns all
European powers not to
interfere with affairs in the
Western Hemisphere.
 directed at the French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Russians
and the English, claims in the
America’s.
Missouri Compromise of 1820
 Allows slavery south of the 36’
30’ & admits MO as a slave
state
 Sets the guidelines for the
future admission of slave states
 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 &
“Bleeding Kansas”
Seneca Fall Convention
 Women’s rights convention
held in Seneca Falls, NY
 The beginning of the women’s
suffrage movement
 Notable women: Eliz. Cady
Stanton & Susan B. Anthony
Frederick Douglas
 Black
Abolitionist
 Urged Lincoln
to recruit
former slaves
to fight in the
Union Army
Fredrick Douglas & Harriet
Tubman and The
Underground Railroad
William Lloyd Garrison
Publisher of the abolitionist
newspaper, The Liberator
Believes that slavery is a
violation of Christian
principles and must be
ended
Brigham Young and the
Mormons go west
Salt Lake City, Utah
Texas Independence and the
Alamo
 Struggle for independence in 1836
Clay’s Compromise of 1850
 Argument for
Popular
Sovereignty
in territories
 Let the
people decide
Territorial disputes and California admission
Party of Lincoln
Dred Scott
Decision
 1857 Supreme
Court Case
 Ruled to be
propriety and
cannot sue in
court
 Overturns the
Missouri
Compromise of
1820
Uncle Toms
Cabin
 Written by
Harriet Beecher
Stowe in 1852
 Sparks that
ignite the Civil
War
The Election of Lincoln causes
Southern States to withdraw
from the Union
Lincoln’s important speeches
 Emancipation
Proclamation
frees the slaves in
1862
 Ends slavery in
the United States
1863
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
Address
 “with malice
towards none,
with charity for
all…to bind up
the nations
wounds”
Civil War SOL Objectives
 Industrial development of the
North
 After the war, passage of the
th
th
th
13 , 14 , and 15
amendments. Established
freedoms for former slaves
 Homestead Act, 1862
Promontory Point, Utah
Carving up
China
 U.S. in
China
 Open Door
Policy of
free trade in
China with
out conflict
Inventions/Innovations
 Bessemer/steel process
 Edison/electric light &
phonograph…1000 patents
 Bell/telephone
 Wright Brothers/airplane
 Ford/assembly line
Henry Ford’s
Assembly Line
 Captains of Industry
 John D. Rockefeller and
Standard Oil…(Ida Tarbell)
 Andrew Carnegie & Steel
 Social Darwinism – “survival
of the fittest”…a law of nature
and a law of God
 Philanthropy grows
Progressives
 The Progressive Era the period from
1893 – 1920
 Belief, values, & reform effort
by those who have only the
publics well-being to guide
them.
 Jane Addams and Hull House
(settlement house)
Sherman Anti-Trust Act
 Prevents any business
structure that “restrains trade”
(monopolies)
 Clayton Anti-Trust Act expands
Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
outlaws price fixing, exempts
unions from Sherman Act
Unions fight for change
 Knights of Labor (Terrance Powderly)
 American Federation of Labor
founded by Samuel Gompers
 Important Strikes: Haymarket
Square, Homestead Strike, &
Pullman Strike
Threats of Immigration
 Immigration of 1880’s provides
a cheap supply of labor for
America’s Industrial Revolution
 Eastern Europeans
 Chinese Exclusion Act
 National Origins Act of 1920’s
sets quotas
Progressive Presidents
 The Progressive Movement
used government to reform
problems created by
industrialization.
 Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square
Deal” & Woodrow Wilson’s
“New Freedom”
The Big Four at  Wilson’s 14
points
the Treaty of
 League of
Versailles
Nations
 Blames
Germany for
the war (War
Guilt Clause)
 Mandate
System
Black Migration
 During the late 19th and early
20th century, African
Americans began the “Great
Migration” to Northern cities in
search of jobs and to escape
poverty and discrimination in
the South.
Hawley-Smoot Tariff
 Highest protective tariff to date
 Wildly prohibitive duty on
imported goods resulted with
25 nations passing laws to
restrict purchases American
goods
 Trade collapses…Bank Panic
Stock Market crash of 1929
 Over-speculation on stocks
using borrowed money that
could not be repaid. When the
stock market crashed in 1929,
stock prices collapsed, millions
were left unemployed
 Banks failed
The Great Depression
 Causes of the depression
 The New Deal:
This program changed the role of the
government to a more active participant
in solving problems.
Roosevelt rallied a frightened nation in
which one in four workers was
unemployed. (“We have nothing to fear,
but fear itself.”)
The New Deal
 FDR closes the banks
 Orders 4 billion dollars to
federal banks to sure up the
money supply
 Government involvement vs.
laissez-faire approach to
recovery
Wagner & Social Security Acts
 The Wagner Act said that
employers had to bargain with
their workers
 Creates the NLRB to insure fair
labor practices
 Social Security Act, 1935
provides relief to the nations
elderly
FDR & the “New Deal”
 Master politician, the fireside
chats
 Brain Trust…Frances Perkins
 Major programs: FDIC, WPA,
TVA, SEC, & NRA
 Pump priming & government
deficits
Pearl Harbor - Dec. 7, 1941
 “ A day that
will live in
infamy” FDR
 U.S. declares
war on Japan
the next day
Japanese-American Interment
Camps during WW II
th
6 ,
D-DAY
June
1944
Liberation of Europe
Manhattan Project & the
Atomic Bomb
 Project to
develop the
atomic bomb
in New
Mexico
More WW II stuff
 Term: island hopping, how the
U.S. moved across the Pacific
to defeat the Japanese
 The battle of El Alimien in North
Africa
 Midway, the turning point in the
Pacific
Nuremberg Trials
Soviet occupation of Eastern
Europe
Cold War
 The Berlin Airlift
 The Marshall Plan
 Truman Doctrine – policy of
containment
 Berlin Wall erected in 1961
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization & Collective
Security
 The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) was formed as
a defensive alliance among the United
States and western European
countries to prevent a Soviet invasion
of Western Europe. Soviet allies in
Eastern Europe formed the Warsaw
Pact and for nearly 50 years both
sides maintained large military forces
facing each other in Europe.
Mao & Communist China
 By 1949,
Communist
forces control
mainland
China
 Break from the
Soviets
1950’s
 Population shift to the suburbs
 Baby Boom
 Russia launches “Sputnik”
 Eisenhower wars of the
“military industrial complex” in
his farewell address
McCarthyism & the Red Scare
 HUAC-the House
Un-American
Committee roots
out Communist
in government
 Red Scare
 Senator Joseph McCarthy played
on American fears of communism
by recklessly accusing many
American governmental officials
and citizens of being communists
based on flimsy or no evidence.
This led to the coining of the term
McCarthyism, or the making of
false accusations based on rumor
or guilt by association.
Jonas
Salk
finds a
cure
for
polio
Brown vs. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas 1954
 Plessy vs.
Ferguson reversed
 Virginia closes
public schools
open private ones
 Thurgood Marshall
and the NAACP
Rosa Parks and the
Montgomery Bus Boycott
&
The Little Rock Nine
st
1
Televised Presidential
debates, 1960
John F. Kennedy and the
New Frontier
Americas first
Catholic
President
Peace Corps
& NASA
Dr. Martin Luther King
Non-violent protest
Gandhi
 Fidel Castro led a
Fidel
Castro
communist revolution
that took over Cuba in
the late 1950s. Many
Cubans fled to Florida
and later attempted to
invade Cuba and
overthrow Castro.
This “Bay of Pigs”
invasion failed.
 In 1962, the Soviet Union
stationed missiles in Cuba,
instigating the Cuban Missile
Crisis. President Kennedy
ordered the Soviets to remove
their missiles and for several days
the world was on the brink of
nuclear war. Eventually, the
Soviet leadership “blinked” and
removed their missiles.
 Civil Rights Act of 1964
 The act prohibited discrimination based on
race, religion, national origin, and gender.
 It also desegregated public
accommodations.
 Voting Rights Act of 1965
 The act outlawed literacy tests.
 Federal registrars were sent to the South
to register voters.
 The act resulted in an increase in African
American voters.
Vietnam War
 Gulf of Tonkin
 Tet Offensive
 Vietnamization
July, 1969
 President
Kennedy’s
dream fulfilled
 Man lands on
the moon
June 17, 1972
 Role of the
Washington Post
 Saturday Night
Massacre
 Tapes reveal cover-up
 Congress moves
toward impeachment
Roe vs. Wade 1973
Supreme Court
Case legalizes
abortion in the
United States

The Arab
The Energy
Crisis
Embargo of 1973
drove up gas
prices
 U.S. conservation
 Speed limits set
at 55
 Alaskan Oil
pipeline built
A Conservative Shift
 Tax Cuts
 Supply-side
economics
(trickle down
theory)
 Recession &
Recovery
Sandra Day O’Connor
1st Woman
appointed to the
Supreme Court of
the United States
Fall of the Soviet Union
 1989, satellite
nations forced
democratic elections
 Berlin Wall comes
down
 East & West
Germany reunited
 Pro-democracy
China, 1989
student protest
leads to a violent
crackdown on
Chinese citizens
 Human Rights at
issue
World’s Hot Spots – The Middle
East
 Persian Gulf
 Ongoing Middle
East conflict
 Oil
 OPEC (Organization
of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries)
 Operation Desert Shield
 Desert Storm…Kuwait is
liberated after Iraq invasion
 UN effort led by the United
States (Persian Gulf War, 1991)
The End
 This does not include
everything, but it does cover a
sufficient amount of material
that should insure your success
on the Virginia SOL exam
 Good Luck!!!