Test Info

What chapters? - 27-30
When? - Wednesday 3/9
When is the essay? First 30 minutes of class on Friday, 3/11

Essay Topics:
 1.  Compare/contrast and discuss the validity of each of the following viewpoints on the American Imperialist Era:

A “traditional” view of Imperialism (Julius Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (1951))

            “The Manifest Destiny of the 1840s had been largely a matter of emotion. Much of it had been simply one expression of a half-blind faith in the superior virility of the American race and the superior beneficence of American political institutions. In the intervening years, much had been done to provide this emotional concept with a philosophic backing…Far-fetched and fallacious as their reasoning may appear to us, it nevertheless carried conviction…The observation must be made that the rise of an expansionist philosophy in the United States owed little to economic influences…The need of American business for colonial markets and fields for investment was discovered not by businessmen but by historians and other intellectuals, by journalists and politicians.”

A “revisionist” view of imperialism (William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy(1959))

            “Men like McKinley and other national leaders thought about America’s problems and welfare in an inclusive, systematized way that emphasized economics. Wanting democracy and social peace, they argued that economic depression threatened those objectives, and concluded that overseas economic expansion provided a primary means of ending that danger. They did not war per se, let alone war in order to increase their own personal fortunes. But their conception of the world ultimately led them into war in order solve the problems in the way that they considered necessary and best.”

2. “How successful were Progressives in accomplishing their goals” and “Where the actions of the Progressives an attempt to create fundamental reforms that would benefit the majority or were they reacting against these new trends and attempting to maintain society as it once was? (basically how Progressives were the Progressives?)”

3. “Analyze the roles that women played in Progressive Era reforms from the 1880s through 1920. Focus your essay on TWO of the following. Politics //Social conditions// Labor and working conditions”.

4. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois offered different strategies for dealing with the problems of poverty and discrimination faced by Black Americans at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Using your knowledge of the period 1877-1915, assess the appropriateness of each of these strategies in the historical context in which each was developed.