Alabama Social Studies SS24.4.10b
The Standard
- SS24.4.10
- Explain how “Alabama fever” influenced Alabama's settlement, economic growth, and political development, leading to statehood and the 1819 constitution.
Outline political and geographic reasons for changing the location of Alabama’s state capital.
2024 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students put Alabama’s early capitals in order and locate them on a map. They explain how flooding, travel routes, population changes, and lawmakers’ choices shaped the moves.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can trace the moves from St. Stephens to Montgomery. They can give a geographic reason for leaving Cahaba and a political reason for choosing Montgomery.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think a capital moves whenever a city floods, or that lawmakers always choose the exact center of a state. Some confuse a change in the capital with a change in Alabama’s borders.
How to Assess It
- Give students a map and two facts: Cahaba flooded often, and lawmakers from growing southern counties backed Montgomery. Ask for one geographic reason and one political reason Alabama moved its capital.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs an Alabama map with five marked cities and capital name cards; have them place the cards and draw arrows in time order.
Ask: Would you keep a capital in a flood-prone town? Have students write one reason to move and one reason lawmakers might disagree.
Play a matching game with capital moves and reason cards, including Cahaba’s flooding and lawmakers’ support for Montgomery.
Compare current driving routes to Montgomery from Mobile and Huntsville, then discuss why access to a capital matters to residents.
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Related Standards
- SS24.AS.11
Outline Alabama’s participation in events leading to the Civil War and in the war itself, and explain how the war created change within the state.
- SS24.AS.9
Outline the chronology of Alabama’s path to statehood in the early nineteenth century, including the shifting of capital locations.
- SS24.4.10
Explain how “Alabama fever” influenced Alabama's settlement, economic growth, and political development, leading to statehood and the 1819 constitution.
- SS24.US1.19b
Summarize political and social motives that influenced the writing of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, and explain its effect on politics and economics in A...
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