AP United States History (Updated Course)
About This Course
The AP U.S. History course focuses on developing students’ understanding of American history from approximately 1491 to the present. The course has students investigate the content of U.S. history for significant events, individuals, developments, and processes in nine historical periods, and develop and use the same thinking skills and methods (analyzing primary and secondary sources, making historical comparisons, chronological reasoning, and argumentation) employed by historians when they study the past. The course also provides seven themes (American and national identity; migration and settlement; politics and power; work, exchange, and technology; America in the world; geography and the environment; and culture and society) that students explore throughout the course in order to make connections among historical developments in different times and places.
College Course Equivalent
AP U.S. History is designed to be the equivalent of a two-semester introductory college or university U.S. history course.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for AP U.S. History. Students should be able to read a college-level textbook and write grammatically correct, complete sentences.
The AP U.S. History course focuses on developing students’ understanding of American history from approximately 1491 to the present. The course has students investigate the content of U.S. history for significant events, individuals, developments, and processes in nine historical periods, and develop and use the same thinking skills and methods (analyzing primary and secondary sources, making historical comparisons, chronological reasoning, and argumentation) employed by historians when they study the past. The course also provides seven themes (American and national identity; migration and settlement; politics and power; work, exchange, and technology; America in the world; geography and the environment; and culture and society) that students explore throughout the course in order to make connections among historical developments in different times and places.
College Course Equivalent
AP U.S. History is designed to be the equivalent of a two-semester introductory college or university U.S. history course.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for AP U.S. History. Students should be able to read a college-level textbook and write grammatically correct, complete sentences.
AP U.S. History Course Overview

ap-united-states-history-course-overview-2.pdf |
AP U.S. History Full Course and Exam Description

ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description-3.pdf |
Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History Students Section (Click Here)
Gilder Lehrman Institute AP Exam Review Videos (Click Here)
U.S. History Primary Sources
- American Labor Studies Center
- American Memory Project from the Library of Congress - thousands of documents, photos, maps, films, sound recordings, etc. from the collections of the Library of Congress, including women's suffrage, African-American pamphlets, George Washington's letter books, life histories from the WPA, American Revolution broadsides and much more.
- Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
- Cornell Making of America Digital Library
- Documents for the Study of American History
- Duke University-Special Collections
- Electronic Text Center
- Electronic Texts
- Famous Trials
- Historical Text Archive
- Internet Archive of Texts and Documents: The United States
- JSTOR
- Making of America
- New Deal Network
- Online Speech Bank
- Primary Sources Research Colloquium
- Scholarly Resources Microfilm
- Turning Points In American History: The American Founding and Reconstruction - an NHD resource provided by ConSource
- Central Intelligence Agency - Electronic Document Release Center
- Core Documents of U.S. Democracy
- FBI - Freedom of Information Act - Reading Room
- Federal Land Patent Records
- FedStats
- Foreign Relations of the United States
- National Security Archive
- Oyez: Supreme Court Multimedia Database
- Resources for the Study of International Relations and Foreign Policy
- Supreme Court Opinions
- United States Historical Census Data Browser
- Africans in America
- Documenting the American South
- Dred Scott Digital Archive
- Freedmen and Southern Society Project
- Freedom's Journal
- Race and Place: African American Community Histories
- Roanoke Island Freedmens Colony
- Southern Oral History
- Tangled Roots
- American Native Press Archives
- Kappler's Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties
- National Archives Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
- National Archives Records of the Indian Claims Commission
- Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project
- Air Force Historical Research Agency
- U.S. Army Center of Military History
- U.S. Army Military History Institute
- U.S. Navy History
- The Wars for Viet Nam
- Colonial Williamsburg History Explorer
- Plymouth Colony Archive Project
- Salem Witchcraft Trials
- Virtual Jamestown
- Abraham Lincoln Online
- Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Digital Archives
- George Washington Papers
- Project Whistlestop
- THOMAS -- Legislative Information from the U.S. Congress on the Internet
- White House Historical Association