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Essay Questions

Before proceeding to the list of essay questions below, please read the following warning about plagiarism.

Students should be particularly aware of using materials from the web without proper attribution: this is plagiarism. The course tutor may use special educational software to check essays and papers for unattributed material from the web.

Students should not count on recycling material used in coursework essays in their exams. Special care is taken in the setting of examination questions, to ensure minimal overlap with essay questions.

Plagiarism is defined by the University as follows [Gen.14, University Calendar]

The University's degrees and other academic awards are given in recognition of a candidate's personal achievement. Plagiarism is therefore considered as an act of academic fraudulence and as an offence against University discipline. Plagiarism is defined as the submission or presentation of work, in any form, which is not one's own, without acknowledgment of the sources. (With regard to essays, reports and dissertations, a simple rule dictates when it is necessary to acknowledge sources. If a student obtains information or ideas from an outside source, that source must be acknowledged. Another rule to follow is that any direct quotation must be placed in quotation marks, and a source immediately cited.) Where a candidate for a degree or other award uses the work of another person or persons without due acknowledgment:

1. the relevant Board of Examiners may impose a penalty in relation to the seriousness of the offence;

2. the relevant Board of Examiners may report the candidate to the Clerk of Senate, for action under the Code of Discipline, where there is prima facie evidence of an intention to deceive and where sanctions beyond those in 1. might be invoked.

Under this regulation, the Board of Examiners in History may choose to award a mark of `0' for any plagiarised piece of work, award a mark of `0' for the entire paper, lower the class of degree below the level these marks penalties might otherwise entail, or even refuse to award any degree.

Do not engage in plagiarism, the penalties are severe.

ANONYMITY: DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME ON THE ESSAYS AND SEMINAR PAPERS YOU HAND IN FOR THIS COURSE. Please record your matriculation number, and your seminar group number on the first page of all work handed in.

Essay Questions

1. Why were American Indians unable to resist first European and then American expansion and aggression?
2. To what extent did religion dominate the lives of northern colonists?
3. Why did slavery develop in the southern colonies?
4. ‘It was British policies that provoked the American Revolution, and British blunders that lost the revolutionary war.’ Discuss.
5. ‘The Jacksonian Era represented the dawning of the age of the common man.’ Discuss.
6. How successful were Southern slaves in creating an African-American culture?
7. ‘The Mexican-American War made conflict between the Northern and Southern states all but inevitable’ Discuss.
8. Was the Civil War or the New Deal more important in changing American attitudes towards the role of the government in national life?
9. ‘It was expansion westward and the existence of the frontier that defined nineteenth-century America.’ Discuss.
10. Why did the United States move from the isolationism that characterised America during the first half of the twentieth century to the interventionism that dominated the second half of the century?
11. To what extent was the 1920s a repudiation of the Progressive period?
12. How and why did the Wall Street crash of 1929 occur, and with what effects?
13. If the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression, then why did so many
Americans continue to support FDR during the 1930s?
14. Did Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X better represent the aspirations and mood of black Americans in the 1960s?

15. 'The turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s was a consequence not of a weakened presidency but of an over-assertive imperial presidency.' Discuss.
16. 'The long struggle for American Indians' independence was lost at Wounded Knee in 1890.' Discuss.
17. Did America win the Cold War?
18. How have the lives of American women changed since the 1920s, and what have been the major factors that have brought about these changes?