African Americans and the Civil War
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This rich variety of primary sources allows students to evaluate the role and historical agency of African Americans. When W. E. B. DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he quoted a contemporary historian who gave no credit to African Americans for the freedom they won. These documents provide evidence of the roles African Americans played in the history of the Civil War and the larger history of their fight for freedom and equality. |
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City Problems: Poverty and Slums
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Exploring the cholera epidemic in mid-nineteenth century New York City, this selection of primary sources provides a case-study of immigration, urbanization (e.g., slums such as the Five Points), and social and moral reform that can be applied to the study of any city in the industrialized world. |
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Colonial Society and Economy
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Colonial society (Virginia in particular) changed from a society with slaves to a slave society, where slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order. This selection of primary sources allows students to understand how commerce and agricultural production caused slavery to replace indentured servitude in the southern colonies and to create new forms of wealth. |
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Democracy: Limitations and Possibilities
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During the 1960s, a series of widely disparate protest movements emerged in the United States. While the antiwar movement directed against U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War appeared to be the most salient, many others as well expressed discontent with American government and society. In this question, students are asked to look at a variety of groups—including women, African Americans, and ethnic minorities—many of whose members felt marginalized or underrepresented, became politically active, and helped to establish social movements dedicated to the advancement of their communities. Students can use these documents to determine the degree to which different groups sought to redefine American democracy and make it more inclusive.
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Discovery and Settlement: New Amsterdam
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The present-day issues of tolerance and diversity are explored in colonial society. These primary sources provide contemporary perceptions of Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, and European settlers.
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Eisenhower and the Politics of the 1950s
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This selection of primary sources gives students an opportunity to examine different layers of dissent during the Eisenhower presidency. Although President Eisenhower enjoyed great public support, his administration was challenged by problems at home and abroad. |
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Homogenized Society and Conformity
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This carefully crafted selection of primary sources will allow students to weigh the multiplicity of factors that influenced American culture in the 1950s, such as the Cold War, government policies, legislation, corporations, and television. Students can focus on the extent to which consensus and conformity dominated relations among or within various social groups. |
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Modern Republicanism and the New Right
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The development of a Republican majority is the focus of this DBQ, which explores the larger issues of modern republicanism in postwar America and the emergence of the new right. Electoral maps provide in-depth analyses of presidential elections since the 1960s.
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New Deal Liberalism and Postwar Economic Growth
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The primary sources in this DBQ help students explore the legacy of New Deal liberalism as American society is transformed during the 1940s and 50s. Economic, political, and social issues interact to simultaneously and paradoxically enhance and undermine government intervention in American society. |
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Scientific Advances and Thinking
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By the late-nineteenth century, science and scientific thought influenced American intellectual life and culture. The documents attached to this DBQ allow students to assess how the achievements of science were both admired and feared. |
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Sixties Radicalism and Conservatism
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Dissent and social protest characterize the 1960s. Enduring images of the decade recall its civil-rights marches, antiwar protests, and rallies of members of various social grouips—women, farmworkers, American Indians—calling for greater justice. The documents within the DBQ represent a variety of voices, illustrating the tensions between countercultural movements of the 1960s and conservative reactions against them. This DBQ contextualizes the debates of the 1960s within a longer-term analysis of the divisions between left and right in the United States since the beginning of the Cold War.
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Social Darwinism: Its Influence and Legacy
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Social Darwinism is usually understood as an ideology that justified survival of the fittest, that argued against government intervention or social reform to improve society. The documents in this DBQ, however, point to the complexity of social-Darwinist thought, considering how a progressive version fueled the Progressive Era and how a conservative strand exerted tremendous influence in American political thought. |
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Southern Society: Religion and Slavery
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Using this DBQ, students will examine the paradoxical role of religion in the lives of slaves in the antebellum South. Different kinds of religion are explored as students confront the ways in which religion served to liberate or to oppress slaves. |
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The American Revolution: Defeat and Victory in New York
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New York City was a center of loyalist support and trans-Atlantic trade during the revolutionary era. The documents on the Battle of Brooklyn, the British occupation, and the end of the Revolutionary war demonstrate how these events were turned into victories for New York, establishing the city's path toward national and world prominence. |
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The American Revolution and Its Legacy
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In exploring the radical and conservative aspects of the American Revolution, these documents introduce students to the principles of equality and republicanism and the arguments for independence from Great Britain (via the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine's Common Sense). |
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The American Revolution and Slavery
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The revolutionary era (1775–89) gave birth to contradictory definitions of freedom and equality. For some, freedom and equality entailed the right to property, including slave property. For others, freedom and equality implied universal entitlements that applied to all individuals, including slaves. This DBQ offers students the opportunity to debate these contradictory definitions by analyzing the definition of freedom each author uses in the provided documents. |
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The Civil-Rights Movement
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The civil-rights movement shifted from nonviolent civil disobedience to "black power." The rich selection of primary sources will help students explore the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the differences between the African American experience in the North and in the South, the role of government and political institutions, as well as global movements against imperialism. |
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The Civil War and the Expansion of Slavery
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This DBQ focuses on the decade of crisis, the 1850s, during which the question of the expansion of slavery tore the country apart. The documents selected include the classic evidence that can be used to prove that the expansion of slavery was the most important cause of the Civil War, 1861–65. |
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The Cold War: Domestic and Foreign Concerns
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These primary sources allow students to carefully examine the foreign and domestic factors that contributed to the Cold War, including the Yalta Conference, communist containment and the domino principle, domestic politics and McCarthyism, American and Soviet expansionism, and American and Soviet paranoia. |
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The Counterculture
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Although the decade of the 1950s deserves its reputation as an age of political, social, and cultural conformity, seeds of social discontent nevertheless permeated American society. This carefully crafted DBQ focuses on the intellectual and artisitic critics of the affluent society, as well as the origins of the women's and civil-rights movements. |
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The Environmental Movements
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The larger issues of western expansion, industrialization, urbanization, and progressivism are explored in this DBQ on the environmental movements that arose at the end of the nineteenth century. |
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The Master-Slave Relationship
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The recent scholarship on slavery explores the complex relationship between master and slave and re-examines the historical agency of slaves. In reading the slave narratives provided in this DBQ, students can assess how slaves tried to retain their dignity in the worst of circumstances. |
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The New World: Origins of Slavery
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The following primary sources, focusing on Bacon's Rebellion, help students understand the condition of freemen and indentured servants on the eve of the revolt and how colonial legislation helped institutionalize slavery in the southern colonies. |
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The Secession Crisis
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This selection of primary sources allows students to interpret the Civil War as an ideological battle, pitting abolitionists against slavery's apologists, and Northerners against Southerners. Students will understand why most of the Southern states chose secession over union. |
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The Vietnam War: The Home Front
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In his e-seminar Kennedy, Johnson and the Great Society, Alan Brinkley offers a measured assessment of the Great Society and, in particular, of the War on Poverty. He rejects the radical contention that the War on Poverty was a political response to social turmoil and mass pressure. He observes that, on the contrary, the Great Society was an elite initiative crafted by liberal policymakers who were confident about the future. But Professor Brinkley disputes the conservative contention that the War on Poverty was an unmitigated failure. He notes that poverty declined significantly between 1960 and 1970, particularly among the elderly, and asserts that, while the expansion of the American economy during that period contributed to that trend, Head Start, food stamps, Medicare, and other government programs also contributed much.
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Urban Society: Central Park and Social Reform
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This microhistory of Central Park in New York City provides students with a laboratory for learning how social reformers attempted to clean the city of its slums and promote the well-being of its residents. These tools can be applied to the study of any large city. |
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Vietnam and President Nixon
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This DBQ focuses on Richard Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War. The documents are drawn from the period between 1968, when Richard Nixon successfully campaigned for the U.S. presidency, and 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords, which formalized the end of U.S. involvement in the war, were signed by the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam. Students will investigate the extent to which the Nixon administration was able to achieve the "honorable peace" he promised the American public.
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Women and the Progressive Era
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The discussion of women at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century is often separated into different chapters and topics. This DBQ asks students to combine what they have learned about American society and about the changing roles and perceptions of women to evaluate the women's movement during the Progressive Era. |
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