THE
MAKING OF THE AMERICAN NATION, 1783-2000 ~ HY 14120
(Above): Eisenhower-Nixon, Time, 10 November 1952; LBJ, Time, 29 November 1963
Essay Topics
Students are required to write one essays of 2000-2500 words on a topic drawn from the following list. The essay should include a full bibliography of all sources used. The deadline for the submission of essays is
Tuesday, 21 March
Students must adhere strictly to this dates. Late essays will incur a penalty, and essays submitted more than one week after the deadline will not be marked. For details of penalties see the Guide for Part One Students (p. 9).
For advice on how to approach the writing of essays consult the section on Essay Writing in the Department of History’s Guide for Students (pp. 14-21).
1. Why did the authors of the Constitution of 1787 believe that a new framework of government was necessary?
Leonard W. Levy, ed., Essays on the Making of the Constitution
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, ch. 1
Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781-1789
Richard Beeman, ed., Beyond Confederation
Francis D. Cogliano, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History
Jack Rakove, The Beginning of National Politics
Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution
2. Why were Alexander Hamilton’s economic policies so controversial?
Noble Cunningham, Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton
Peter Onuf and Leonard J. Sadosky, Jeffersonian America
John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801
Morton Borden, Parties and Politics in the Early Republic
Michael Heale, The Making of American Politics
James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion
3. "The presidency of Andrew Jackson marked a turning-point in American political history." Discuss.
Michael Heale, The Making of American Politics
Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America
John W. Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol of an Age
Robert V. Remini, The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson
Donald Cole, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson
Daniel Feller, The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840
4. "We are so young a people that we feel the want of nationality and and delight in whatever asserts our national ‘American existence.’" How successful were Americans in creating a sense of national identity during the first half of the nineteenth century?
Daniel Booorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, esp. Part Seven
Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism, ch. 1
Benjamin Spencer, The Quest for Nationality
Paul Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1861
Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest, 1790-1860
Wesley Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820
5. "Plantation slaves created a culture distinctly different from that of their masters and mistresses." Discuss.
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery
Peter Parish, Slavery: History and Historians
Edward D.C. Campbell and Kim S. Rice, eds., Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South
John Blassingame, The Slave Community
Lawrence B. Goodheart et al., eds., Slavery in American Society
Leslie H. Owens, This Species of Property
George P. Rawick: The American Slave: From Sundown to Sunup
6. Why did a movement for the abolition of slavery arise after 1830?
Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists
James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery
Gerald Sorin, Abolitionists
Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists
Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered
Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard
Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal
7. It was the conflict over the extension of slavery that “finally boiled up into secession and civil war” (Carl Degler). Discuss.
Michael Perman, ed., The Coming of the American Civil War
Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War
Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War
Brian Holden Reid, The Origins of the American Civil War
David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861
Kenneth Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War
Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
8. Did society and culture in the nineteenth-century West reflect or diverge from those of the more settled eastern states?
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
Patricia Limerick et al., eds., Trails: Towards a New Western History
William Cronon et al., eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past
George R. Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis
Margaret Walsh, The American West: Visions and Revisions
Clyde A. Milner II et al., eds., The Oxford History of the American West
Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" : A New History of the American West
8. How far, and in what ways, did industrialisation and urbanisation during the period 1865-1920 bring about a transformation in American society and culture?
Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America
Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914
Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920
C.N. Glaab and A.T. Brown, A History of Urban America
Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1910
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America
Maury Klein, The Flowering of the Third America
9. How far did the American city serve as a “melting pot” for European immigrants?
Maldwyn Jones, America Immigration
Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers, Ethnic Americans
Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses
Roger Daniels, Coming to America : A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet
Humbert S. Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism
10. Can you discern any underlying themese and principles in the various movements for progressive reform during the early twentieth century?
Glenda Gilmore, Who Were the Progressives?
Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivis
Lewis Gould, ed., The Progressive Era
Lewis Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914
George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912
John M. Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
John D. Buenker et al., Progressivism
11. With what justification might intervention in the First World War be seen as a “watershed” in the development of American foreign policy?
Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution., War and Peace
Daniel M. Smith, The Great Departure
Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I
Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Vol. 3. The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945
Robert D. Schulzinger, American Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century
Lloyd C. Garner, Imperial America
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order
12. “The first three decades of the twentieth century saw a virtual revolution in the social and political status of women.” Discuss.
Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America
William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century
S.J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945
Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century
Linda Kerber and Jane De Hart, eds., Woman's America
Nancy Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States
13. "The 1920s saw a significant reorientation of American culture." Discuss.
Paul Carter, The Twenties in America
David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s
Lynn S. Dumenil, The Modern Temper
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1917-1932
Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order
Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess
John Braeman, Robert Bremner and David Brody, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s
14. “The New Deal was a distinctly conservative response to the problems of Depression America.” Discuss.
A.J. Badger, The New Deal
Richard Polenberg, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932-1945
Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Richard S. Kirkendall, ed., The New Deal: The Historical Debate
Paul Conkin, The New Deal
John A. Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal, Vol. I
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War
15. Could different policies on the part of the U.S. government have prevented the Cold War?
Stephen Ambrose, The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1937
John F. Spanier, American Foreign Policy since World War II
John L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947
John L. Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States
Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War
Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War
David Carlton and Herbert M. Levine, eds., The Cold War Debated
Richard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War
16. Acount for the rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a prominent figure in American political life.
Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective
Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism
Michael Heale, American Anticommunism
Earl Latham, ed., The Meaning of McCarthyism
Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear
Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War
Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy
17. Why was the period between 1955 and 1965 especially favourable to the attainment of the goals of the civil rights movement?
Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980
Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000
Robert Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty
Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of the American Civil Rights Movement
Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom
Juan Williams et al., Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965
Jack E. Davis, The Civil Rights Movement
18. "The 1960s saw an extraordinary intensification of social and political conflict in America." Discuss.
David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
Douglas T. Miller, On Our Own: America in the Sixties
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974
David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America
Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam
James F. Heath, Decade of Disillusionment: The Kennedy-Johnson Years
Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 1962-1968
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Plagiarism
Students
are warned against plagiarism, which the University's Unfair Practices
Procedure defines as "using other people's work and submitting it for
examination as though it were one's own work." This includes not only the
attempt to pass over large sections of somebody else's work as if you had
written it, but also unattributed direct quotation from secondary sources.
Wherever substantial sections of text are reproduced without acknowledgement the
Unfair Practices Procedure may be invoked. Plagiarism can result in a
mark of zero being awarded for the essay concerned. You should be able to avoid
any trace of doubt by careful note-taking, making sure that you note down where
you got particular ideas or pieces of information from and clearly
distinguishing between extracts which are copied verbatim and those which
are paraphrased; by giving the sources for direct quotations (although this is
optional); and providing a full bibliography of works consulted. If you are in
any doubt at all about what constitutes good practice you should consult me or
refer to the appendix on plagiarism in the Department of History’s Guide for
Students (pp. 22-3).