Rutgers University History Essay

General Instructions:

• NUMBER all eight responses in a document or pdf
• Present each response (Themes 2 and 3 mostly because Theme 1 relates to a table and only question 4 requires a full narrative form) following a narrative form in a ONE concise paragraph containing sentences introducing, developing, and concluding your answer. Students must quote from the attached source to support their main argument in the development sentences.
• Each concise response should have circa 250 words (never more than 300).

Please read the attached sources and concisely answer all the eight questions related to the following three main themes in your exam:

THEME 1 – Based on the Table “British Investment Abroad on the Eve of the Great War” (1913), concisely answer:

1. To which areas (at least two) did the bulk (mass) of British foreign investment flow? (10/10) – Just name the two first

2. Which areas (at least two) invested most heavily in Great Britain? (10/10) Just name the two first

3. With which areas did the British have the highest volume of trade? (10/10) Just name the two first

4. On the basis of these patterns discuss the economic and defense place of rival nations (Germany and the United States) and colonized areas – both the “White Dominions” of ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand) and the “true colonies” (e.g., India, Malaya, and sub-Saharan Africa). (20/20)

THEME 2 – Explore the attached source and your textbook for images about trench war during World War 1 (1914-18):

5. What were the trenches like? Can the expressions and poses of the soldiers be read as to suggest what war meant to them? How did life in the trenches compare with their previous lives in industrial society and with expectations in an age that had vaunted manliness and nationalism? Do these pictures raise issues of bias or staging on the part of the photographer, or is it a neutral piece of evidence? Can one move from this picture of war to some speculations about what peacetime life would be like for the veterans who returned home? (20/20)

THEME 3 – Women under Totalitarian Regimes: Nazi Germany professed divergent goals for women’s participation in society. It created ministries intended to serve woman or at least mold them into the kind of women the state wanted to see. The government’s use of women supporters and later attempts to control those supporters became models for later states. Paula Sieber served as the acting head of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) Association of German Women in 1933. She established the basic guidelines for the Party’s expectations of what the new German woman should be. In 1934, Stalin sent poet Osip Mandelstam in exile for having created a clever epigram criticizing his dictatorship. In 1938, Osip was re-arrested and died en route to a labor camp near Vlodivostok on the Pacific coast. Please read the attached documents and answer the following questions:

6. Do you believe that the Nazi party thought women to be equal in their possibilities to men? What does Ms. Sieber mean when she says that women are “the custodians of the [national] culture? (10/10)

7. According to your previous answer, please describe and discuss the image below: a 1934 poster based on a painting by Wolfgang Willrich. (10/10)

8. Why did Stalin take writers so seriously that he persecuted and executed so many of them? What does Nadeshda Mandelstam (1899-1980), Osip’s wife, say is the goal of terror?