HomeDepartmentsSocial StudiesTeachersMr. D. RiderAP US HistoryUnit 6
Unit 6 – From Isolationism to World Superpower: 1915-1945
Though this period will include smaller units of study on WWI, the prosperity of the 20's, the Depression of the 30's, and WWII, we will study the period as an interconnected period as a whole. The WWI peace settlement led to WWII. The United States decision to reject the League of Nations affected our foreign policy for a generation. Economic forces unleashed in WWI had implications for the economy of the 20's and acted as a catalyst for the depression that followed.
At the conclusion of this unit, you should be able to answer the following basic questions:
- What factors led the United States to enter WWI?
- How did America mobilize to fight WWI?
- What accounts for the Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles?
- How did the 1920's bring about a conflict of cultures and how did this conflict manifest itself?
- Why did enactment of the 19th Amendment take so long?
- What accounts for the failure of Prohibition?
- How did literature of the 1920s reflect the society of the time?
- Was the United States' isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s fact or illusion?
- In what ways did events of the 1920s lay the foundation for troublesome issues of the future?
- What caused the Great Depression?
- To what extent is it accurate to label Franklin Roosevelt a liberal and Herbert Hoover a conservative?
- To what extent did the New Deal represent a coherent economic philosophy?
- How did the Depression affect the lives of Americans?
- How did the United States become progressively involved in world affairs in the 1930s?
- Could the United State have avoided Pearl Harbor?
- To what extent did the United States' foreign policy in the late 1930s support FDR's "Quarantine" philosophy?
- To what extent were Americans sufficiently informed at the time to recognize how the internment of Japanese-Americans constituted a violation of their civil rights and posed a threat to everyone's constitutional rights?
- What factors led the United States to enter WWII
- How did America mobilize to fight WWII in Europe and Asia?
- Why didn't the United States do more to support victims of the Holocaust?
- How did wartime conferences impact diplomacy during the war and lead to a new postwar atmosphere between the U.S. and other nations?
- What accounts for the Cold War?
- How was the Korean War a manifestation of Cold War tensions?
- How was the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles a reflection of the Cold War?
AMSCO chapters 22 – 27
Norton chapters 23 – 27, 29
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