History 476

Devine

Spring 2013

MIDTERM EXAM STUDY QUESTIONS

 

The midterm will consist of two parts: SEVEN short essay questions and ONE long essay question. I will give you ten short essay questions; you will choose seven to answer. I will give you three long essay questions; you will answer one. The exam questions will be taken from the questions below. There will be no questions on the exam that do not appear below. Since you have the questions ahead of time, it is expected that you will be able to answer them with more than just a superficial response. Be sure to include as much specific evidence as possible to explain and support what you assert.

 

 

  1. Randolph Bourne believed that “youth” was not exclusively a function of age; it was therefore possible to live in a state of “perpetual youth.”  According to Bourne, how might one achieve “perpetual youth”?
  2. For Bourne, what is the difference between “conservative youth” and “radical youth”?  What causes young people to become conservative?  How can they stay radical?
  3. Why does D. James Romero say we are a “nation of siblings”?
  4. What were reformers in the early 1900s referring to when they spoke of the “boy problem”? How did the “problem” differ depending on whether one was talking about middle-class or lower-class boys?
  5. How does Julia Grant’s article, “A ‘Real Boy’ and not a Sissy,” demonstrate that proper gender norms are not universal and timeless, but socially constructed and subject to change?
  6. Why did advertisers begin marketing to boys in the early 1900s when consumerism had been associated with women throughout most of history? How were advertisers able to “de-sissify” boy consumerism?
  7. How did advertisers appeal to boys’ desires to be entrepreneurs as well as consumers?
  8. Many historians have argued that working-class attitudes about female sexuality were far less strict than those of middle-class Protestant reformers. What evidence does Mary Odem’s article, “Teenage Girls, Sexuality, and Working-Class Parents” introduce to refute this view?    
  9. How did the urban environment, changes in the economy, and the availability of “cheap amusements” contribute to the weakening of traditional limitations that working class families and communities had put on adolescent girls?
  10. Why could achieving social independence from one’s family be a double-edged sword for many young working-class women?
  11. According to David Nasaw, how did girls’ experiences in the early 20th century city differ from boys’? Why was this the case?
  12. Why was having money important for the children of the city?
  13. Why did the “child savers” fail to make much progress with the street children?
  14. What role did children play in the urban economy at the turn of the twentieth century? How did city children’s role in the economy shape their world view as kids and then, later, as adults?
  15. Why does Jane Addams see the prevalence of urban commercial amusements as a social problem?  How has the rise of commercial amusements undermined parents’ ability to raise their children in accordance with traditional values?
  16. According to James Wechsler in Revolt on Campus, how did the attitudes of college youth change between the beginning and the end of World War I? How did disillusionment from the war shape young people’s social rebellion during the 1920s?
  17. According to James Wechsler, how did the economic good times of the mid-1920s both fuel some forms of youthful rebellion and undermine other forms?
  18. The 1920s are often portrayed as a period of cultural liberation and growing tolerance, particularly among youth. How does Vincent Sheean’s description of the University of Chicago campus undermine this portrait?
  19. How did the image of the Gibson girl both facilitate growing public acceptance of college-educated women but also reinforce (rather than challenge) traditional gender roles?
  20. How did athletics, particularly football, enable College men to blend their “primitive” and “civilized” sides?  Why was such a combination considered “ideal” during this period?
  21. What does F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” suggest about men’s power (or lack of power) over women during the 1920s?
  22. Fitzgerald’s portrait of “flaming youth” in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is rather ambivalent. What are some of the more attractive qualities of the young people in his story? What less admirable traits undermine these qualities?
  23. According to Kevin White, why did changing sexual mores during the 1920s leave most middle class men feeling confused (and sometimes broke)?
  24. Paula Fass argues that adults of the 1920s were wrong to believe that the “wild” younger generation lived in a “state of anarchy” and did not adhere to any social standards or rules. What evidence does she cite in her article to demonstrate that this view was incorrect?
  25.  How does the film “Our Dancing Daughters” portray the wealthy young men and women of the 1920s? Are they completely liberated from the old values or do they retain some traditional attitudes regarding how men and women should relate to one another?
  26. Why does Thomas Hine argue that, initially, the New Deal did little to help youth (and even may have hurt them)?
  27. Eventually, how did New Deal programs like the CCC and NYA help young people – both financially and in shaping their world views?
  28. Why did many American adults believe they had good reason to fear young people during the 1930s?  Why did such fears prove unwarranted? What kept young people in the 1930s from becoming “revolutionaries”?
  29. What challenges did schools face during the Depression?  Why does Thomas Hine argue that middle-class educators dealt poorly with working-class students?
  30. According to Hine, why was “hanging around the filling station” a “more effective educational experience than going to high school” for many male teens? How did the “car culture” prepare teens for their future?
  31. Why did so many teens “ride the rails” during the Depression? How did the experience itself differ from what they hoped or dreamed it might be like?
  32. How did their experiences “riding the rails” during the Depression shape the worldviews of these teenagers for the rest of their lives?
  33. How did World War II affect the emotional lives of families?  In what various ways were young children in particular affected?
  34. What “coping mechanisms” did family members use to sustain themselves when their fathers and brothers went off to war? How did they keep the memory of their loved ones alive?
  35. What were “V-girls”?  How did their own self-image differ from the way that adults saw them?  Why did they attract national attention?
  36. According to Robin Kelley, why could simply wearing a zoot suit, though not intended to be a direct political statement, still be read as politically “subversive” or “oppositional”? 
  37. Who and what were the members of the zoot suit “oppositional culture” opposing?  What did they do (or not do) to show this “opposition”?
  38. Why did zoot suiters like Malcolm X avoid wage labor and the draft and turn to “hustling”?  Why was “hustling” and working for tips a double-edged sword?
  39. Why was “dressing up” important to young working-class blacks like Malcolm X and his friends?  How did it restore both a sense of individuality and community?
  40. How did press coverage of the zoot suit riots distort or oversimplify the reality of the situation? How did initial official reactions to the riots – blaming them on “fifth column” German or Japanese infiltrators – obscure their true causes and significance?
  41. Why were female zoot suiters perhaps even more threatening to mainstream American and traditional Mexican values than were their male counterparts?
  42. How does the story of the Catholic “SDS” undermine the claim that an “all-powerful marketing establishment” dictates what will be popular among young people?
  43. How did SDS enable Catholic girls to be both religiously devout and good prom dates?
  44. Why were advertisers and merchants initially reluctant to market directly to young people in the late 1940s? What convinced them to change their minds?
  45. Who was Eugene Gilbert?  What role did he and Seventeen magazine play in establishing the importance of the “youth market”?
  46. Why did World War II and the onset of the Cold War get many Americans worrying about juvenile delinquency?
  47. According to James Gilbert, why were Americans in the 1950s so concerned about the possibly adverse effects of mass culture on young people?  What social and cultural conditions of the postwar period helped fuel this concern and made mass culture a scapegoat?
  48. How were middle class parents’ fears about juvenile delinquency linked to their hostility toward working-class and minority culture and mores?
  49. What was the central argument of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham?  Why was Wertham’s argument about the “seduction of the innocent” so compelling to many parents and community leaders during the 1950s? Why was it logically flawed?
  50. How did Mark McCloskey of the Office of Community War Services (OCWS) bring a new approach to dealing with juvenile delinquency?  What did McCloskey think caused delinquency?  How did he propose to deal with the problem?
  51. Why were figures like James Dean and Marlon Brando so attractive to young people during the 1950s?  In what ways did the characters these actors played articulate what young people were feeling?
  52. How do the values of the younger and older generations contrast as they are portrayed by Jim Stark and his parents in Rebel Without a Cause?\
  53. What does Holton mean by the “folds of heterogeneity”?  Why is this an apt metaphor to describe the “cultural space” the Beats inhabited? What role did Ginsberg’s Howl play in drawing out a new subculture from the “folds of heterogeneity”?  Why was hearing the poem a “moment of recognition”?
  54.  What groups became models for alienated white men looking for alternatives to mainstream American society?  Why was their admiration of “outsiders” often naïve or even racist?