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US government and civics
Course: US government and civics > Unit 7
Lesson 1: Why it matters- Sal Khan & John Dickerson: introduction
- Why study US history, government, and civics?
- Why do midterm congressional elections matter?
- Why does your vote matter?
- How does voter turnout in midterms compare to presidential elections?
- Does the president's party usually gain or lose seats at the midterm elections?
- Who is the Speaker of the House?
- Why is the Speaker of the House second in succession to the President?
- What was the Articles of Confederation?
- What was the Gilded Age?
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Sal Khan & John Dickerson: introduction
Sal Khan and John Dickerson kick off a series of videos focused on how current events relate to US history and civics.
John Dickerson is co-host of CBS This Morning. He was previously CBS News' Chief Washington Correspondent, Political Director and anchor of Face The Nation. Dickerson is also a contributor to Slate's Political Gabfest and to The Atlantic. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Dickerson moderated CBS News' two presidential debates. Prior to CBS, Dickerson was Slate Magazine's Chief Political correspondent and covered politics for twelve years for Time magazine.
Video transcript
- So Sal here from Khan Academy, and I'm excited to be
here with John Dickerson, co-host of CBS This Morning. - And I'm excited to be here too. (Sal laughing) - And some of you all might be wondering, what are we doing together? And we are going to be
talking about civics and government and American history. And you're gonna see a series of videos on Kahn Academy tapping
into John's expertise. - You know, when I cover
the news every single day, one of the first things I do is I go back and look at our amazing American
history for two reasons. One, what has the
standard been in the past? How have people behaved in the past? So we know whether what's
happening now is new, crazy, interesting, in keeping
with the American experience. And the other thing is when
you learn about history, when you look to the past,
you can sometimes have a clue about what's gonna happen in the future. Even though things are much
different now with technology and the pace of things, turns out, human beings
behave the same way in a lot of ways all
throughout American history. - So this is gonna be a very exciting, as you could tell, series of videos that some of 'em are
gonna be John and myself. And some of 'em are gonna be John, giving us kind of connecting
what you learn in school to what's happening in
the world around us.