APUSH Goes to the Movies: The Great Gatsby

APUSH Goes to the Movies: The Great Gatsby

Today on APUSH for ALL, we’re watching The Great Gatsby not just as a famous story, but as a window into the 1920s. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film gives us parties, cars, jazz, money, longing, and spectacle, but beneath the glitter is a sharper historical question: what did the American Dream look like when it was filtered through wealth, consumer culture, inequality, Prohibition, racism, and changing gender roles? Gatsby’s world is dazzling, but it is also unstable. As we watch, we’ll ask what the film reveals, what it simplifies, and what it leaves out about modern America.

APUSH for ALL Goes to the Movies: Hamilton

In this special episode of APUSH for ALL, we look at Hamilton not simply as a musical, but as a powerful act of historical memory. The show brings the founding era to life through ambition, revolution, political conflict, and questions of legacy. But it also simplifies, reshapes, and leaves out parts of the past, especially slavery, gender, class, and the lives of people pushed to the margins. As we watch Hamilton through an APUSH lens, we ask what the musical gets right, what it changes, and why Americans keep arguing over who gets to tell the founding story.

Review Episode 3 (Periods 8-9)

This episode reviews APUSH Units 8 and 9, tracing the United States from World War II’s aftermath to the present. It explains how the Cold War shaped foreign policy, domestic fear, civil rights, liberal reform, Vietnam, Watergate, and the crisis of the 1970s. Then it follows the conservative resurgence under Reagan, the end of the Cold War, globalization, technological change, immigration, culture wars, 9/11, the War on Terror, and modern debates over government power and equality. Throughout, the episode emphasizes contradiction: America expanded freedom and global influence while struggling with inequality, division, and the burdens of power.

Review Episode 2 (Periods 5-7)

Today’s episode reviews APUSH Units 5–7, a stretch where the United States is repeatedly tested. We begin with Manifest Destiny, the fight over slavery’s expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction’s unfinished struggle over freedom and equality. Then we move into the Gilded Age, where railroads, industry, immigration, cities, labor conflict, western expansion, and Jim Crow reshape American life. Finally, Unit 7 follows the rise of U.S. global power, Progressivism, World War I, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. The big theme: crisis expands federal power while exposing America’s contradictions.

Review Episode 1 (Periods 1-4)

Here’s a 100-word intro version: Today’s episode moves fast through APUSH Units 1–4, tracing the making of America from Indigenous North America to the edge of sectional crisis. We begin with diverse Native societies, European contact, the Columbian Exchange, conquest, and slavery’s Atlantic roots. Then we follow colonial regions as they develop distinct economies, labor systems, and identities. From there, imperial conflict leads to revolution, independence, the Constitution, and the first party system. Finally, Unit 4 explores Jeffersonian expansion, the Market Revolution, Jacksonian democracy, reform, Manifest Destiny, and the growing slavery crisis. The big theme: American freedom expanded unevenly and violently.