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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What job does Paulson eventually get after educating himself?

2. What young officer assisted MacArthur in dispersing the Bonus Marchers?

3. Where did Blackie Gold spend his childhood?

4. What metaphor does Arthur Robinson use to describe Wall Street in the 1920's?

5. In what war did the Bonus marchers fight?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was the purpose of the Bonus March?

2. Describe E.D. Nixon's struggle to unionize sleeping car porters.

3. How did Mrs. Winston Roberts of Chicago survive the Depression?

4. How do interviewees who were young in the 1930's realize something bad happened in the country?

5. How was Dr. Lewis Andreas converted to union support in 1937?

6. Why was psychoanalysis largely ineffective in the Depression?

7. What did Arthur Robinson experience after the Wall Street Crash of 1929?

8. How did Blackie Gold end up maintaining national forests in the 1930's?

9. How did blues and alcohol play a defining role in Terkel's college years?

10. What does Peggy Terry have to say about race and the Depression?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Studs Terkel's Hard Times is an oral history, meaning that it relies entirely on the conflagration of differing ideas. By including voices that speak from different experiences of the Depression, Terkel makes the debate the central focus of the history. Write an essay on this debate in three parts:

Part 1) The topic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success as a president is among the most controversial in the book. What are the arguments for his saving the United States? What are the arguments against such an assertion? How do these arguments reveal the dueling ideologies in America both in the 1930's and in 1970?

Part 2) Terkel interviews individuals who suffered greatly in the Depression and those who did not, including some who actually prospered in the desperation. How do the two groups' perceptions of the 1930's differ? What facts existed to support both a horrific and a majestic impression of the Depression years?

Part 3) Terkel interviews not only those who lived through the Depression but also their children and grandchildren. How does he juxtapose the worldviews of those who survived the poverty with those who did not? How do the younger generations see the Depression? Can they understand the residual effects it left with those who survived?

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay on the psychological effects that the joblessness of the Great Depression has on men in America. What do interviewees recall their fathers doing to pass time and feel useful? Why did men of this era refuse to take government relief and turn so often to alcohol instead? How was America's psychiatric profession unprepared to deal with the effects of joblessness on the population? What obvious causation were psychiatrists ignoring?

Essay Topic 3

The Great Depression was a period of time during which large organized movements sought to restructure American society. In a three part essay, discuss how several organized groups went about attempting the recreation of a country:

Part 1) What hole in the union movement did the CIO fill in the 1930's? What tactics did the unions use in the rust belt in order to organize industrial workers? What opposition did they face? How much success did the CIO achieve over the course of the Depression? How did its relationship with the AFL change in this time?

Part 2) How did the American Communist movement surge in popularity during the Hoover years, and how did events in Europe destroy much of its credibility? To what extent did Roosevelt's New Deal destroy its ability to accomplish its goals in the 1930's? What members did it lose after Roosevelt built his coalition?

Part 3) How were both the Catholic Worker and the Wobblies different from the unions and the Communists? What was each group's guiding philosophy? Did either one form a coalition during the Depression? What happened to them after the Depression?

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