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Unit 1
15–22% of examThis unit is about the ideas and arguments behind the U.S. government: where the founders' beliefs about rights and power came from, why the Articles of Confederation failed, and how the Constitution was written and ratified. You'll also see how the Constitution splits power among three branches and between the national government and the states, which sets up everything else in the course.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
American government rests on a few big ideas: people have natural rights, government comes from a social contract, power comes from the people (popular sovereignty), and government's power must be limited. You can see these ideas in the Declaration of Independence, in how the Constitution is built, and in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which restated equality and government by the people during the Civil War.
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The U.S. is a representative democracy, but people disagree about how much ordinary citizens should steer it. Participatory democracy stresses broad involvement by everyone, pluralist democracy stresses groups competing for influence, and elite democracy stresses decisions by a smaller, better-informed few; you can see all three in the Constitution, in the debate between Federalist No. 10 and Brutus No. 1, and in politics today.
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In the fight over ratifying the Constitution, Federalists wanted a stronger central government, and James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that a large republic would best control factions. Anti-Federalists, in writings like Brutus No. 1, warned that a big, distant national government would threaten liberty and wanted more power left with the states.
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The Articles of Confederation, the first national plan of government (ratified in 1781), left most power with the states: Congress couldn't collect taxes or regulate trade between states, and there was no president to enforce laws and no national court system. Shays' Rebellion (1786–1787), which the national government had no army to stop, convinced many leaders that a stronger national government was needed.
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At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegates settled big disagreements through compromises: a House based on population and a Senate with two members per state (the Great Compromise), the Electoral College for choosing the president, and the Three-Fifths Compromise on counting enslaved people. They also made the Constitution hard but possible to change through Article V, and the promise of a Bill of Rights helped win over Anti-Federalists.
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The Constitution splits power among Congress, the president, and the courts (separation of powers) and gives each branch ways to block the others (checks and balances). Madison's Federalist No. 51 argues this design stops any one faction from abusing power; it also gives people many access points to influence policy and lets the House impeach an official and the Senate remove them.
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Federalism means power is shared between the national government and the states: some powers belong to only one level, some are shared (like taxing), and the Tenth Amendment reserves powers not given to the national government for the states. The national government also shapes what states do with grants and mandates, and Federalist No. 39 argues that the Constitution blends national and federal features.
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A few clauses decide how far national power reaches: the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Commerce Clause, the Supremacy Clause, and the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Supreme Court rulings on them have expanded national power, as in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which upheld a national bank and barred Maryland from taxing it, and limited it, as in United States v. Lopez (1995), which struck down a federal ban on guns near schools as beyond the commerce power.
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Because power is split between levels of government, people who lose at one level can try another, for example by pushing a state legislature when Congress won't act. Sharing power with the states also limits what national leaders can do on their own, which shows up in debates over things like the drinking age, marijuana laws, and disaster response.
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