Skills

Pray together briefly, then review: Where does human dignity come from? (From being made in the image of God.) What does the Church say about discrimination by race or condition? (It must be 'curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design,' CCC 1935.) What is solidarity? (The recognition that we are one human family, responsible for one another.) Hold these answers in mind as you study the divided map of this nation today.

All year you have learned the rules; now you become your own editor. Good writers do not get it right the first time, they revise. Professional editors use a shared set of proofreading marks: a caret (^) to insert, a line through a word to delete, three lines under a letter to capitalize, a slash to make lowercase, and a paragraph symbol to start a new paragraph. More important than the marks is the habit of reading your own work hunting for specific problems. Use this self-editing checklist, one pass per item: (1) Sentence health: any fragments, run-ons, or comma splices? (2) Agreement: does each verb agree with its subject, and each pronoun with its antecedent? (3) Punctuation: are commas, semicolons, and quotation marks used correctly? (4) Clarity: any misplaced or dangling modifiers? (5) Word choice: any confused homophones (their/there/they're, its/it's, affect/effect)? Worked example: 'Their going to the museum, its open until five.' Pass 5 catches 'Their' (should be 'They're'); pass 5 catches 'its' (should be 'it's'); pass 1 catches the comma splice (replace with a period or semicolon). Corrected: 'They're going to the museum; it's open until five.' Reading your work aloud is the single best trick, your ear catches what your eye skips.

Geography drove this week's history. As the nation pushed west, the land itself became the battleground over slavery, because whether a new state entered free or slave would tip the balance of power in Congress. Today you will map both the expansion and the rupture. First, the expansion: trace the great overland trails, the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, snaking west from Missouri, and mark the territory gained from Mexico in 1848 (the modern Southwest) and the Oregon Country settled with Britain. Then, the split: shade the Union states (the North and the loyal border states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) in one color, and the eleven Confederate states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina) in another. Mark the line that mattered most, the boundary between free and slave states, and label the river that became the western front: the Mississippi, which the Union seized at Vicksburg to cut the Confederacy in two. Finally, mark Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, the war's bloodiest turning point on Northern soil. As you draw, notice how geography shaped strategy: rivers were highways, the coastline could be blockaded, and the open West was the prize that made compromise impossible.

Write one sentence: 'How did the map of the United States help cause the Civil War?' File your completed map in your geography section.