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Assignment | Primary Sources for HIST 1302 Term Paper (Strohmeier): Primary Sources

HIST 1302 | Prof. J. Strohmeier (Fall 2022)

Nineteenth Century Prompts (1865-1899)

1. Identify the federal government’s major challenges in reconstructing the South after the Civil War during the period from 1865 to 1877.

2. Explain the primary factors that stimulated unprecedented industrial and agricultural growth in the late nineteenth century.

3. Describe the experience of miners, farmers, ranchers, and women in the West in the late nineteenth century.

4. Explain how and why white southerners took away African Americans’ rights to vote and adopted “Jim Crow” segregation laws at the end of the nineteenth century.

5. Describe the “new immigrants” of the late nineteenth century and how they were viewed by American society.

Early Twentieth Century Prompts (1900-1949)

6. Describe the reasons for Theodore Roosevelt’s rapid rise to the presidency and evaluate the main elements of his foreign policies.

7. Why was neutrality difficult for the United States to define and maintain? Why did Americans disagree over ratifying the Versailles Treaty?

8. Compare and contrast the New Deal era with other reform movements such as the populist and progressive movements. What characteristics of these two earlier reform movements were inherited by the New Dealers?

9. What challenges did the United States face in the Pacific and European theaters of war? How was the war in the Pacific brought to a close?

10. Compare and contrast the American internment of Japanese Americans with the Holocaust. To what extent are the two incidents similar? To what extent are they different?

Later Twentieth Century Prompts (1950+)

11. What political and military considerations influenced Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

12. How did the United States become involved in Vietnam? How did the Vietnam War finally end?

13. Assess the public’s response to the American involvement in Vietnam. Which Americans were active in their protests? What specific issues associated with the war were the targets of protests? Did these issues change over time? Demonstrate how domestic protests escalated with the escalation of the war.

14. Compare and contrast the Southern and Northern civil rights movements of the 1960s. Who led the movements? How were these leaders similar? How were they different? What were the style and agenda of the movements? How were they similar? How were they different? How effective were the two movements? To what extent did they define American race relations for the future?

15. Why did the Cold War end?  Why were presidential politics so controversial?

16. Summarize the impact of global terrorism in the United States with reference to the post-911 world. How have international relations changed, improved or worsened? How has this incident redefined racial relations and cultural perceptions domestically and internationally? How has the world view of the United States improved or declined?