American Government covers a broad range of historical, philosophical, constitutional, and political issues related to the establishment of the American system of government and the mechanisms by which individual rights are protected.  The general outline of this class was designed with the California standards in mind, so that homeschooled students can cover all required topics, but I can add specific content if your state requires something different.

We will begin with a historical analysis of pre-democratic America and will look at the inherent conflict between a monarchy and a burgeoning view that individuals should be a focus of law and governance.  We will examine the works of ancient Greek, Roman, English, and European political philosophers such as John Locke, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Niccolò Machiavelli, and William Blackstone on the development of American government, and we will add in discussions of legal philosophers, such as Francisco de Vitoria, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham.

We will then move into a discussion of the crafting of the American system of government, with analyses of important documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and specific Federalist Papers.  In this section, we will examine the debate about the relative powers of the federal and state governments and will review certain Anti-Federalist arguments.

We will move into a discussion of the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and later Amendments, and discuss their philosophical roots, their importance in the overall spectrum of individual liberty, and their status in contemporary American society.  We will examine the idea of the civil society and its relationship with the exercise of individual rights.  We will also contrast a true civil society with totalitarian regimes where individual rights are stripped in efforts to control a population.  This will take us into a brief discussion of Critical Legal Studies which allows us to see the asynchronous degree of liberty enjoyed by different groups in America.

Finally, we will cover the structure of the federal government (the three branches), the creation and review of laws, the balance of powers, the Supremacy Clause, and the tension between individual rights/interests and special interests.  We will end with a discussion of dissent, protest, and political activism (regardless of one’s political views), including ways that young people can become involved in political issues aside from voting.