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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Alf Landon say he disliked about Roosevelt's New Deal?

2. How did some states begin paying public school teachers in the 1930's?

3. What two roles did Henry Wallace play in the Roosevelt administration?

4. What moment excited Wilbur Kane to the point of mocking his German neighbors?

5. Who played the piano for opening night of The Cradle Will Rock?

Short Essay Questions

1. In the Depression-era Midwest, how did corn prices lead to corn being burned and pigs being slaughtered?

2. What was the most controversial component of the New Deal?

3. What role did Elsa Ponselle play in the forming of the Teacher's Union?

4. What did Hiram Sherman do after The Cradle Will Rock?

5. Describe Harry Hartman's experiences repossessing belongings in the Depression.

6. How does Max Shachtman explain the decline of Communism's popularity in America?

7. How did Jack Kirkland become famous during the Depression?

8. What was Edward Burgess's experience of the 1930's?

9. According to Horace Cayton, why did black Americans not join the Communists en masse?

10. Describe the incident with the Iowa Judge in The Father Is the Man?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Studs Terkel's Hard Times is an oral history, meaning that it relies entirely on the conflagration of differing ideas. By including voices that speak from different experiences of the Depression, Terkel makes the debate the central focus of the history. Write an essay on this debate in three parts:

Part 1) The topic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success as a president is among the most controversial in the book. What are the arguments for his saving the United States? What are the arguments against such an assertion? How do these arguments reveal the dueling ideologies in America both in the 1930's and in 1970?

Part 2) Terkel interviews individuals who suffered greatly in the Depression and those who did not, including some who actually prospered in the desperation. How do the two groups' perceptions of the 1930's differ? What facts existed to support both a horrific and a majestic impression of the Depression years?

Part 3) Terkel interviews not only those who lived through the Depression but also their children and grandchildren. How does he juxtapose the worldviews of those who survived the poverty with those who did not? How do the younger generations see the Depression? Can they understand the residual effects it left with those who survived?

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay about the Appalachian mining communities' attempts to unionize. How was this group of workers facing Depression-style injustice before the Depression started? What type of power did companies wield in Appalachia, and how did they enforce this power? Discuss how normal tension between management and would-be unionizing broke into full war in the 1930's? What was the result?

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay about the Horatio Alger narrative and how the Great Depression forced individuals to reassess the legitimacy of it. Which interviewees in the text subscribed to the strive-and-succeed philosophy of Alger? Did any of them succeed? Of those who failed, what elements in the 1930's work environment proved incompatible with the rags-to-riches mythology? What did these people discover as a new philosophy?

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