You are to find a current news article (online or physical) and relate its content to the themes and events of our course. The article you choose must be current, published since the beginning of the semester (starting in January), and from a newspaper, or news website. The key to this assignment will be choosing the right article, so don’t necessarily write on the first article you find.

You can make the connections to any of the material we’ve covered in the course, going back to contact between Europeans and Native Americans and up to the 1980s, but you should be prepared to explain what the connection is, and how it either reflects the course material showing that the issue is ongoing and remains current, or is a unique and different version of a similar circumstance. For instance, we’ve been talking in class about political tensions between the US and Russia, so you might find an article about current tensions between those two countries. However, it is not enough to simply find an article on, for example, the economy and make the connection between the economy now and the fact there was an economy in the past. You should connect your article to a specific event, trend, or movement from class (economic events are fine, as long as it is a specific connection, and the same goes for political, social, military, or any other connections made).

The article you chose should NOT make the historical connection for you. This is meant to be your exercise in finding historical context and precedent in current events using what you have learned, not detailing on what journalists have found. Therefore, the article should not reference the connection you describe.

You should write your paper in the style of the response papers. It should start with a brief synopsis of the article and then the rest of the 2 pages should make the connections to the course material. Include a link or copy of the article, and necessary identifying information.

The article should be connected with two or three of these topics:

Reconstruction

Amendments Freedman’s Bureau Sharecropping
Ku Klux Klan
1876 Centennial Fair Chinese Exclusion Act Late-19th Century

Immigration Railroad Strikes

(1870s-1890s) Bimetallism

People’s Party Gospel of Wealth Progressivism World War I

US Food Administration The Red Scare
18th Amendment Harlem Renaissance

Marcus Garvey
New Deal
Court Packing
World War II Japanese Internment Domino Theory/

Containment Mutually Assured

Destruction McCarthyism
Korean War
GI Bill of Rights
Brown vs. Topeka Board of

Education Montgomery Bus Boycotts Martin Luther King, Jr. SNCC
Nation of Islam
The Many Civil Rights

Movements

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution Vietnam War Protests Vietnamization
Kent State Massacre The Silent Majority Religious Freedom (after

WW II) Detente

Richard Nixon
Stagflation
Iran Hostage Crisis
The Great Communicator /

Teflon President Gorbachev

Saddam Hussein Globalization
Bill Clinton Election of 2000 Al Queda

Bush Doctrine