For the first eight questions, select the correct answer (indicate with highlight or bold or some other mechanism). Then write one full paragraph explaining how you arrived at your answer. Show me your reasoning. Say something that convinces me you know what you’re talking about. Each question comes with its own instructions as well — follow those guidelines. The last two items (#9-10) are not multiple choice. Just write the paragraph. Expect to write maybe 50-75 words for each of the ten items, more or less. Question 10 might take a little more writing than the others. Insert your paragraph immediately below each question.
1. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
a. promoted a separate Black nation and a future return to Africa
b. was associated with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee
c. worked with Ida Wells to prevent and prosecute lynching
d. worked with the NAACP for racial integration
[Look at the PowerPoint presentation on the Harlem Renaissance and make some reference to it in your paragraph.]
2. One of results of the Great War (1914 – 1918) was
a. the partition of the Ottoman Empire into English and French mandates
b. the formation of the United Nations, based in New York City
c. the creation of a stable democracy in Germany
d. the collapse of the US banking system, thus bringing on the Great Depression
[textbook should do it here. What’s wrong with the incorrect answers?]
3. Babe Ruth and Rudolph Valentino reflect what 1920s shift in the US economy?
a. the renewed centrality of New York as opposed to Chicago
b. the primacy of trade between the United States and Italy
c. the increasing importance of entertainment as a business
d. the rise of radio evangelism among religious entrepreneurs
[Look at the PowerPoint presentation on Consumer Economy/Culture and make some reference to it in your paragraph.]
4. Which of the following artists participated in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s?
a. Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer
b. Cab Calloway, Ezra Pound, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker
c. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, William Faulkner, Duke Ellington
d. Franz Boaz, Booker T. Washington, Madison Grant, Aimee Semple McPherson
[Find a relevant website and cite it. The Harlem Renaissance PP will help as well.]
5. The “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s was the result of
a. a combination of drought with intensive farming of wheat on the Great Plains
b. too much government regulation in the supply of agricultural water
c. the controversy that erupted when Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union accused Franklin Roosevelt of plotting an invasion
d. a movie starring Charlie Chaplin, in which the star led a strike against corporations that owned land in the Midwest
[Find a relevant website and cite it.]
6. During both World Wars, the United States economy
a. maintained its free-market, laissez-faire structure
b. struggled with high levels of unemployment and declining productivity
c. prospered through a Command Economy fostered by government
d. lapsed into communism, as labor unions took over the means of production
[Look at the PowerPoint presentation on the Command Economy in WWII and make some reference to it in your paragraph.]
7. Which of the following is true of the Great Depression of the 1930s?
a. it was caused by excessive governmental regulation of the free market, corporate economy
b. it reflected the isolation of the United States from the world economy, the rest of which prospered in the 1930s
c. it was a normal part of the business cycle made worse by the incompetence of the TVA and AAA
d. it was a normal part of the business cycle made worse by the collapse of the banking system
[this is an interpretive question. Use the textbook and maybe the New Deal summary sheet for help.]
8. As a result of the founding of the CIO in 1935,
a. steel workers, coal miners, and autoworkers were able to unionize by the end of the decade
b. jazz recordings were now marketed toward middle-class whites as well as working-class blacks
c. the United States and Great Britain were able to stem the expansion of Nazi Germany in Europe
d. quotas that limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe were lifted
[Find a relevant website and cite it.]
9. You all read one book in this class, either from Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, or Richard Wright. Tell me something about the book you read. Choose a theme (either something the author had in mind or that you took out of it), provide some direct support from the text (use direct quotations), and show how it plays through large chunks of the narrative (that is, convince me that you read a lot of the book.)
10. Watch the document “Mean Things Happening” on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4RRf5T-bMM). It’s the fifth volume of a Great Depression series — watch them all if you can. (ha, ha) Choose one bit from the first half and one bit from the second half (each part takes about 30 minutes). Tell me about those bits and how they fit into the larger history of the Depression, or labor, or the South, or whatever theme you come up with. This question might take you 100 words or so.
