The Well-Trained Mind

Topics to Explore

• Africa under European control
• the Indian mutinies
• the Crimean War
• the Victorian era
• the American Civil War
• exploration in the American West
• Euro-American conflict with the Native American tribes
• the Boxer Rebellion
• World War I
• the Russian Revolution
• the Soviet Union
• the Great Depression
• the New Deal
• civil war in Spain
• the Axis and the Allies
• World War II
• Nazi Germany/Hitler
• the Holocaust
• Zionism/the Jews’ return to Palestine
• apartheid/South African segregation
• China under Mao
• the Korean War
• the civil-rights movement
• the Vietnam War
• landing on the moon
• Chernobyl nuclear disaster
• fall of the Berlin Wall
• 9/11

Primary Sources

• Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman” (1851)
• Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address” (1863)
• Susan B. Anthony, “On Women’s Right to Vote” (1873)
• Florence Nightingale, “Rural Hygiene” (1894)
• Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Indian Home Rule” (1909)
• Proclamation of the Abdication of the Manchus (February 24, 1912)
• Private Donald Fraser, “War Diary, September 1915” (1915)
• John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields” (1915)
• Proclamation of the Irish Republic (Easter 1916)
• Tsar Nicholas II, “Abdication” (March 15, 1917)
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural” (March 4, 1933)
• Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in Our Time” (1938)
• Winston S. Churchill, “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” (June 4, 1940)
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Date Which Will Live in Infamy” (December 8, 1941)
• U.S. Declaration of War on Germany (December 11, 1941)
• Bishop Desmond Tutu, “The Question of South Africa” (1984)
• George W. Bush, “Post 9/11 Speech” (2001)

Memorization

• the dates of service for British prime ministers
  Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Stanley Baldwin,
  Nevile Chamberlain, Winston Churchill,
  Margaret Thatcher, and John Major
• the German rulers of the Weimar Republic
  (Friedrich Ebert and Paul von Hindenberg)
• the dates of the Third Reich
• the dates of Charles de Galle
  and Francois Mitterand of France
• the tsars of Russia
  from Alexander II through Nicholas II
• the "effective rulers" of the USSR
  from Vladimir Lenin through Mikhail Gorbachev
• the presidents of the United States
  from Millard Fillimore through the present
• the dates of the Crimean War,
  the American Civil War,
  World War I, World War II,
  the Six-Day War, the Korean War,
  the Vietnam War, and the Iran-Iraq war
• the dates of the first orbiting of the earth
  by a man-made satellite
  and the first moon landing
• the Gettysburg Address
• the Emancipation Proclamation
• the amendments to the Constitution
• the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill
• the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.