Midterm Quiz

UW Tacoma, Winter 2015

American History II

Midterm Review Sheet

Here are the midterm questions!  For our quiz on February 11th, six questions will be selected from the following list (two from each group) .  You will answer three questions of your choice, (but you must answer one from each of the three groups) plus one additional question about Charlie Chaplin’s movie, Modern Times.  You will not be allowed to consult any notes in class.  You are welcome to share ideas with your classmates in preparation, but the content of your midterm should ultimately be your own.

The quality of an answer depends upon several factors:

• You should demonstrate a working knowledge of our material.
• Incorporate evidence and examples drawn from a diversity of sources to support your statements - readings, lecture, and discussion.
• Each answer should show focus, concision, and care.

A good answer will be show familiarity and knowledge of names and dates.  A great answer will show that you have actively thought through these subjects, synthesized them in your head, and dug a bit further.  Encyclopedias recite names and dates; historians explain why they matter.

Group One - Write one developed paragraph that draws from lecture, readings, and discussion as needed to answer the following question.

1. What year did the United States become more urban than rural (approximately)?  Explain one cause and one effect of that change.
2. America’s Chinese population was relatively small, yet they became a target of xenophobia.  What drove anti-Chinese sentiment and what is an example of its manifestation?
3. How did the United States see its role in a larger global world at the turn of the century?
4. Draw a graph representing the trajectory of black equality from 1865 to 1920.  Make sure you identify at least four data points.  Be sure to explain the overall shape of your graph.

Group Two - Write a paragraph that addresses the following question.  Each invites you to address the reading directly, but you might consider if there are other meaningful connections to be be made using lecture or other readings from class.

1. Looking back on his essay “The Composite Nation,” how would Frederick Douglass have felt about the direction of the United States between 1869 and 1920?
2. Monica Sone describes the conflict of being raised with “two heads.”  Why do you think she, and many others like her, felt this way?
3. Describing the significance of the 1924 Immigration Act, Mae Ngai argues that “the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness that made them distinct from those deemed to be not white…. The racialization of the latter groups’ national origins rendered them unalterably foreign and unassimilable to the nation.”  What does she mean by that?  Cite at least one example.
4. Billie Holiday first recorded her song “Strange Fruit” in 1939, but it was the product of more than half a century of history.  Describe the social, demographic, and economic context that made “Strange Fruit” possible.

Group Three (bigger images will appear on the blog) - Write a paragraph that explains the meaning and significance of the following image in the context of our discussions in class.  In addition to the content of the object, but also the format.

1.    2.

3. 4.