Unit 7: America & the World - Discussion Questions

U.S. History Skillbook

Discussion Questions

Part A

1. How did the expansionist impulse of the 1890s compare with such ideas and events in the 1840s?
2. Was the Spanish-American War inevitable? Explain your answer.
3. Was the Big Stick policy short-sighted in promoting America’s long-range interests in South America? Explain your answer.
4. How did the Philippine insurrection expose the flaws in the “New Manifest Destiny” of the 1890s?
5. Why was America’s neutrality in World War I an outdated foreign policy?
6. Why was Woodrow Wilson unable to achieve “a peace without victory” at Versailles?

Part B

1. How did the Progressive movement borrow most of its program from the Populists?
2. How did the progressive reformers try to make government more responsive to the people’s interest?
3. What strengths and weaknesses did the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois have for dealing with the Jim Crow system?
4. Why were the Progressives unable to make greater changes in American society from 1900 to 1914?
5. How did the American value system change in the 1920s?
6. How did Marcus Garvey address the needs of the “New Negro” in the 1920s?
7. What factors changed the lives of women in the 1920s?
8. How did the rise of the Ku Klux Klan reflect more than racial animosity in the 1920s?
9. How were the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Scopes Trial part of a larger societal struggle in the 1920s?

Part C

1. How was President Hoover’s approach to ending the Depression both conservative and liberal?
2. How did political extremists help shape the New Deal programs?
3. Why did the Supreme Court oppose the New Deal from 1933 to 1936? What did Roosevelt do about it?
4. How was 1937 the most difficult year of the Depression for President Roosevelt?
5. How did the New Deal ignore the neediest people in the 1930s?
6. How did Roosevelt’s New Deal fail to include African Americans and women in its program and yet gain their support?
7. How was the New Deal both a success and a failure?
8. Why was Roosevelt seen as a friend of isolationism in the 1930s?
9. Why was the alliance among the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union a fragile one?