Reference no: EM133202819 , Length: 3 Pages
eCampus/Blackboard
This assignment is part of the assessment criteria for the History Department and the department must have access to the papers on Blackboard.
Research Paper Topic
1. Compare and contrast the views of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois regarding strategies that would achieve social progress for African Americans.
2. What social developments reveal the emergence of a predominant middle-class culture in the United States?
3. Compare and contrast the lives of women in the working class of the industrial Northeast with the lives of pioneer women of the Great Plains.
4. How did railroads shape the development of the West? Be sure to give examples of the positive and negative effects of rail lines spreading from coast to coast.
5. What were the social and institutional factors that shaped the disorderly nature of elections in the late nineteenth century?
6. Some historians have called the presidential election of 1896 "the nation's first modern election." Evaluate the validity of this statement by analyzing the issues, conflicts, and campaign tactics of that election.
7. Compare and contrast the ideas of reform expressed by twoof the three following presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
8. In what ways was Woodrow Wilson among the most influential presidents in U.S. history?
9. Discuss the arguments for and against American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. If you lived in that era, would you have supported ratification? Why or Why not?
10. What factors contributed to the rise of modern popular culture in the 1920s?
11. Analyze the impact of mechanization, consumerism, advertising, and the boom in the auto industry on American life in the 1920s. Do you feel these impacts were for the betterment of American life?
12. What role did New Deal reforms play in the lives of women, blacks, and Indians? Did the New Deal increase discrimination or did it serve as a foundation for later civil rights reform?
13. Analyze the wartime (WWII) experiences of three of the following groups: women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans, and Native Americans. Did these experiences help or hinder progress toward equality in America?
14. What were the causes of the intense fear of Communist subversion in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Who were the key figures in the Second Red Scare? What long-term impact did the Red Scare have on American society?
15. How did the economic prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s shape social and political life in the United States?
16. Discuss the connections between the antiwar movement, hippies, the counterculture, and the Black Power movement. What were the successes and failures of the New Left?
17. Choose three of the following groups and analyze their changing roles in American society after 1965: older people, organized labor, women, religious conservatives, blue-collar workers, and educated suburbanites.