3 APUSH Practice Questions The Great Depression and WW II

Practice, practice, practice. If you’ve read some of my other blog posts on preparing for the APUSH exam, you know that you have to practice with AP-style questions. This blog post will provide those APUSH practice questions (and detailed answers!) for you; keep reading! First: types of APUSH questions The APUSH exam will ask you to answer one of four types of questions: 1. The Multiple Choice Question 2. The Short Answer Question 3. The Free Response Question , 1935 â€Å"The point that I am making is that in order for a person to qualify for Social Security, taxes must be paid on behalf of this person before he turns 60. Now, for the benefit of Negroes, I want to ask, who would be left out by that rule? First, and very serious, Negro sharecroppers and cash tenants would be left out. We all know that the Negro sharecropper and the Negro cash farm tenant are at the bottom of the economic scale. He is not employed. There is no relation of master and servant by which he gets wages on which a tax could be collected. Therefore this population is left out from the old-age annuity, and that represents approximately 490,000 Negroes. Next, domestic servants are excluded from the act because the system of employing domestic servants is so loose. In addition to that, this old-age annuity does not provide for unemployed persons. I do not need to argue to the committee that Negroes have suffered from unemployment more than any other class of the community.† Excerpt from the testimony of Charles H. Houston, representing the NAACP, to the House Ways and Means Committee on the Economic Security bill, February 1, 1935. Answer (a), (b), and (c) (a) Briefly describe ONE major difference between Roosevelt’s and Houston’s response to the Social Security Act. (b) Pick ONE line from either Roosevelt’s or Houston’s speeches that represents the difference you described in part (a) and explain. (c) Briefly describe ONE major consequence of the situation described in Houston’s account regarding African-American workers in the South that is not explained by these two documents. Possible answers: (a) Roosevelt believes that the Social Security Act covers the greatest number of people that it possibly could, but Houston believes that the Act systematically excludes African Americans by leaving out the professions those individuals disproportionately occupy. (b) When Roosevelt says, â€Å"we have tried to pass a law which will give some protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age†, Houston would likely respond to this by questioning the fact that the Social Security Act does not protect the average African American citizen. (c) One major consequence of the situation described in Houston’s account was an intensification of the Great Migration to the North and West. Excerpt from this essay found on the Gilder Lehrman site. â€Å"The world the American people tried to exclude after the First World War could not, in the final analysis, be kept at bay. Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt came to power within weeks of one anotherThe challenges of the Great Depression and the accomplishments and shortcomings of the New Deal, and of FDR, cannot be understood outside of that framework. In that sense the story of the Great Depression is not simply the story of the American people in a moment pregnant with danger and opportunity; theirs is but part of a larger story of people in every part of the globe who were swept up in the enormous calamities of the Great Depression and, ultimately, World War II.† David Kennedy, Professor of History at Stanford University In this historical interpretation, Kennedy argues that A. As a result of the Great Depression, Americans were content with being isolationists in foreign policy B. World War II ended the Great Depression C. To understand the Great Depression and World War II in the United States, you need to look at the events in a global context D. The Great Depression was a time of opportunity and danger, and the people of the United States met the challenge and seized the opportunity Correct Answer: C; Kennedy argues that because certain events happened in tandem (at the same time), national history needs to be understood in the context of global events. The events from 1929-1945 (The Great Depression and World War II) are two such events.