American Government: free lessons and course outline

California's History-Social Science standards set Principles of American Democracy as a one-semester course in grade twelve, alongside a semester of economics. The specification is unusually detailed: ten standards containing fifty-two numbered sub-standards, from the influence of Locke and Montesquieu on the Constitution through to the tensions between majority rule and individual rights. This course devotes a lesson to each of them, with unit 10 taking each of the six tensions the final standard names in turn. The ten units follow the standards in order: the founding principles, the rights and obligations of citizens, civil society, the three branches, the Supreme Court's landmark interpretations, campaigns and elections, the levels of government and how they interact, the media, political systems compared across the world, and the unresolved tensions inside a constitutional democracy. The method throughout is document analysis. The Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Tocqueville and the Supreme Court's own opinions are quoted directly, because a student who has read Federalist 51 understands checks and balances in a way that no summary of it produces.