KS3 & KS4 history curriculum

This unit uses and builds on pupils' knowledge from the previous unit which concerned American culture and society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It also builds on units in key stage 1 and key stage 3 where pupils encountered other examples of racial inequality. This unit prepares pupils for the units on the Cold War that follow, contextualising some of the foreign policy decisions made by the USA which were linked to domestic concerns.

1. Segregation in the USA
2. Direct action and the Civil Rights Movement
3. Martin Luther King and peaceful protest
4. Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement
5. Civil rights legislation in the 1960s
6. The New Frontier and Great Society
7. The US Feminist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s
8. Social and civil progress in the USA, c.1950-1973

• Pupils know that Africans had been forcibly transported to the Americas to work as enslaved people on plantations.
• Pupils know that African Americans had been emancipated at the end of the American Civil War in 1865.
• Pupils know that African American people had been discriminated against throughout the earlier 20th century.