Midterm: Fall 96

Stanley K. Schultz, Professor of History
William P. Tishler, Producer
Shane Hamilton, Web Editor

Midterm Review Materials

Below is a sample midterm examination, given during the Fall 1996 semester.

FALL 1996 MID-TERM EXAMINATION (sample)
"Forfeited Rights" theory
Radicals
The "Lost Cause"
"The New South" - Henry Grady
Constitutional Amendments, 13th, 14th, 15th
"Grandfather Clause" - 1898
"Jim Crow" laws
"Great American Desert"/"The Garden"
Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
"Battle" of Wounded Knee - 1890
Dawes Severalty Act - 1887
Laissez faire
Credit Mobilier
"Bloody Shirt"
Mugwumps
"Robber Barons"
The Trust - Standard Oil, 1879
Social Darwinism
Knights of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The Dillingham Commission
The Anglo-Saxon myth
Immigration Restriction League
Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. DuBois
NAACP
Marcus Garvey
The Grange
The "Agrarian myth"
Omaha Platform - 1892
Social Gospel
Social Settlements
National Municipal League
Muckraking
Alfred Thayer Mahan
"The March of the Flag" - 1898
Insular Cases
"Manifest Destiny"
"True Womanhood"
Social feminists
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Midterm Examination Essay Questions
Note: Two of these questions will be on the midterm and you will write on one of them.

1. At the beginning of the Civil War, the federal government played a very limited role in the American economy and in the lives of most Americans. By the eve of World War I, that no longer was true. Identify and discuss what you regard as the principal areas in which the role of the federal government had expanded and the major reasons for that expansion.

2. Between 1865 and 1920, the United States emerged as an increasingly influential player in world affairs. What economic, political, and moral goals drove American foreign policy during this period? In your answer be sure to discuss Western settlement, imperialism, and American involvement in World War I.

3. By the early twentieth century, many Americans felt that their political system had failed them. What were the major groups advancing critiques of the American political system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What were their plans for fixing American society and how did they compare with one another? Be sure to refer to the Populists, Progressives, and any other groups you feel appropriate to answer this question.

4. A historian recently wrote: "After the Civil War, the sense of a regional identity was heightened, for both westerners and southerners, because so many of them felt isolated from the mainstream of industrial America. Ironically, it was not their isolation from northern industry but their links to it that marginalized them." Assess this statement. If you agree with it, explain why. If you do not agree with it, explain the basis for the historian's argument and why you disagree with the argument.

5. Why did large corporations emerge so quickly after the Civil War and become dominant in the American economy by 1900? How do you assess their social impact?

6. A renowned historian once wrote that Reconstruction was "America's unfinished revolution." In what ways was Reconstruction a revolution? In other words, how had the South changed after the Civil War and how had it stayed the same? Be sure to include a discussion of law, politics, economics, and racial relations in the South between 1865 and 1900.