The following standards have been taken from the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McRel) standards.

Students will:

• Understand and know how to analyze chronological relationships and patterns.


• Understand the following:


• The sources and character of cultural, religious, and social reform movements in the Antebellum Period.
• The historical perspective.
• How the Industrial Revolution, increasing immigration, the rapid expansion of slavery, and the westward movement changed American lives and led to regional tensions.
• How slavery influenced economic and social elements of southern society (e.g., how slavery hindered the emergence of capitalist institutions and values, the influence of slavery on the development of the middle class, the influence of slave revolts on the lives of slaves and freed slaves).
• Elements of slavery in both the North and South during the Antebellum Period (e.g., defense of chattel slavery by slaveholders, growing hostility toward free blacks in the North).
• Changing gender roles in the Antebellum Period (e.g., legal rights; social status in the North, South, and West; how gender roles were influenced by class and ethnic, racial, and religious lines).
• The effects of an author's style and complex literary devices and techniques on the overall quality of a work.
• Relationships between literature and its historical period, culture, and society.


• Gather and use information for research purposes.


• Use the following:


• General skills and strategies of the writing process.
• A variety of criteria to evaluate the validity and reliability of primary and secondary source information.
• Standard format and methodology for documenting reference sources--MLA or Turabian (up to the individual teacher).
• Reading skills and strategies to understand a variety of literary texts.
• Language and perspectives of literary criticism to evaluate literary works.
• Grammatical and mechanical conventions in written compositions.


• Synthesize information from multiple research studies to draw conclusions that go beyond those found in any of the individual studies.


• Relate personal responses or interpretation of the text with those seemingly intended by the author.