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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 was the Actors Union's response to The Cradle Will Rock?

2. In whose administration was David Kennedy the Secretary of the Treasury?

3. Aaron Barkham informs the reader of what strange practice of certain clans within the Appalachian Ku Klux Klan?

4. According to Buddy Blankenship in Sixteen Ton, what was the state of coal miners before the Depression?

5. What memory makes Elsa Ponselle laugh during her interview in Public Servant-The City?

Short Essay Questions

1. According to Elizabeth Wood, how did public housing develop the stigma it has today?

2. Why does Myrna Loy think she never got to meet Roosevelt in person?

3. Who was Martin Dies?

4. How did Neil Schaffner's theatre troupe have to change their business model after the Crash 1929?

5. What role did Elsa Ponselle play in the forming of the Teacher's Union?

6. How were the prisons affected by the Depression?

7. What does Dr. Martin Bickham discover about the American drive to work through his relief work in the 1930's?

8. Describe Harry Hartman's experiences repossessing belongings in the Depression.

9. How much power did coal companies have in the towns they inhabited?

10. How did The Cradle Will Rock become a lightning rod of controversy?

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 about the tactic used by union supporters in the 1930's Rust Belt. How did they effectively shut down plants, stopping the introduction of scabs and limiting the union-busting? What kind of press did these strikes get, and how was Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan leveled by these events? What effect did the passage of the Wagner Act have on the ability of workers to unionize?

Essay Topic 3

The Great Depression was a time during which the most basic and reliable of systems in the United States failed. Though full-on revolution never broke out in America, dissident movements cropped up regularly. Write an essay about three such movements. What issue or injustice gave rise to this spontaneous act of dissidence? How did the movement grow in strength? What happened that finally put an end to the movement?

Part 1) The Bonus March.

Part 2) The opening night of The Cradle Will Rock.

Part 3) The farmers of Iowa stopping corn deliveries.

(see the answer keys)

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