Course Reflection


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I definitely liked this course more than I thought that I would, and I learned a lot of new material that I hadn’t learned in APUSH.

With that being said, I really think that the role of the white elites in US History set up the rest of the country’s history as a whole. Before the revolution, the white elites wanted to be equal to the elites of the Brits. When that didn’t happen, they fought for what they thought that they deserved. In the early years of the new nation, the government was trying to figure out how to represent its people to set up national success. Luckily, for the common man, the Bill of Rights slipped into the new constitution, and the people felt like they had a say in how their government was run. The question of ‘who do we serve?’ as a government, though was still unanswered. Does the government only serve the elites, or does it serve everyone? Andrew Jackson was the first person to vehemently agree with the latter, and he won the support of the people. As crazy as he may have been, he spoke on behalf of the ‘common man’ and gave the people a sense of citizens’ rights. This idea was the beginning of a sliding slope that eventually led to greater male suffrage, emancipation of slaves, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and greater equality that we have today. This may never have taken place, or it could have taken a completely different course if the rights of the common man as described through his politics by SYSTRAUSS weren’t, at least in theory, promoted by Jackson. Jackson forever changed the course of American History because of his brand new style of politics.