Your final exam is scheduled for Monday, December 5, 12:00–3:00 pm, from noon to three pm. Here are two essay prompts. One will appear on your examination. You will have to answer it in great detail. It will be worth 50 percent of your grade.
Seven identifications will also appear on the exam. You will have to identify five of them in paragraphs of four or five sentences apiece. Each will be worth a maximum of ten points (for a maximum ID score of 50 points). The identifications will consist of important people, laws, or events discussed in class and/or included in your readings from weeks six through ten.
Essay prompts:
1. FDR “did prevent a naked confrontation between orthodoxy and revolution. The priceless value of that achievement, surely as much as the columns of ciphers that recorded national income and production, must be reckoned in any final accounting of what the New Deal did.” Thus does David M. Kennedy assess the New Deal (p. 380).
What do you think that Kennedy means by this? Is he right? What is your assessment of the New Deal? What do you think that it accomplished? Did it accomplish enough? Did it go too far? Did it accomplish the right or the wrong things? Defend your assertion with a detailed description of seven New Deal programs. Your descriptions should include the who, what, when, where, and why about each program. Then use each program to bolster your overall argument about the New Deal.
2. Between 1917 and 1945 the United States fought in two World Wars. Compare and contrast the domestic experience of those wars. Who gained during the wars? Who did not gain or lost ground? Be sure to talk about ethnic minorities, women, and labor. How did the government manage the economy during the two wars? How did that management differ? How did the economy change?
How did civil liberties fare during the two wars? How did the civil liberties experience differ? How did Woodrow Wilson and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt differ in the ways that they managed their wars politically? Who do you think was more successful at this? Why? How did the end of these wars leave the United States politically, socially, and economically? How did those endings differ?
PS: Bring a blue book!