For a long time, Advanced Placement and other advanced-level U.S. history courses at the high school level were modeled after the collegiate survey course. However, the last two decades or more have seen some significant changes in the teaching of U.S. history at undergraduate and high school levels. Many of these changes at the high school level have been generated in collaboration with professional historians at colleges and universities. A lot of this work advocates discipline-based training and the practice of historical thinking skills, which focuses on primary and secondary source analysis and encourages students to actively seek understanding of the past rather than to passively receive knowledge of it. As part of the internal review, senior students were extensively surveyed about their experience as students. In those surveys, students expressed satisfaction with the history program, but also a high level of stress over workload. The U.S. History Survey at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School constitutes a signature pedagogy in that it allows teachers to help students read, write, discuss, and think about history like historians do - through analysis, synthesis, and contextualization of primary and secondary sources, with a focus on historically significant guiding questions. At the same time, unlike courses in which students almost exclusively read primary sources organized around key themes in U.S. history, the authors' course uses secondary sources and the department-produced narratives to encourage chronological reasoning and to provide an overarching framework that we think improves and enriches students' understanding of those themes and questions they explore in depth over the course of the year.