Comparison in Period 7, 1890-1945

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Practice all three Comparison sub-skills: describe similarities and differences across historical developments (1.i), account for the meaning of those similarities and differences (1.ii), and weigh which carry the greater historical significance (1.iii).
• Compare the United States as it conceived its global role in 1898 and again in 1945, accounting for the transition from a continental republic with overseas colonies to a global hegemon at the onset of a bipolar Cold War order.
• Compare Progressive Era reform with New Deal reform, identifying continuities of federal regulatory expansion and differences in scope, beneficiaries, and underlying political philosophy.
• Compare the First World War home front with the Second World War home front along four dimensions: civil liberties, racial dynamics, the role of women, and the scale of federal mobilization.
• Compare the prosperity of the 1920s with the Great Depression of the 1930s, accounting for shifts in economic philosophy, the realignment of political coalitions, and the cultural mood of the country.
• Compare pre-1917 isolation with post-1941 globalism, accounting for how internal politics shaped foreign policy posture across the period.

Comparison is one of the four reasoning processes the AP US History CED uses to organize the course, alongside Causation, Continuity and Change, and Contextualization. The Comparison process is built from three sub-skills (1.i, 1.ii, 1.iii) that move from description to explanation to evaluation. Sub-skill 1.i asks the historian to describe similarities and differences across developments. Sub-skill 1.ii asks the historian to account for what makes those similarities or differences meaningful, rather than coincidental. Sub-skill 1.iii asks the historian to weigh which carries the greater historical weight when both similarity and difference are present. The synthesis topic that closes each AP USH unit invites students to practice all three sub-skills across the period they have just completed (KC-7.1, KC-7.2, KC-7.3).

The first natural axis is the comparison of the imperial moment of 1898 against the Cold War onset of 1945. In 1898 the United States, a continental republic of seventy-six million people, defeated Spain in a four-month war and acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and effective control of Cuba. The country joined the small club of European-style colonial powers, debated annexation through the Anti-Imperialist League and the Treaty of Paris ratification fight, and operated a navy ranked sixth in the world. By 1945 the United States had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on opposite oceans, occupied much of central Europe and the Japanese home islands, controlled roughly half of global manufacturing output, fielded the only atomic arsenal on the planet, and had taken the lead role in chartering the United Nations at San Francisco and the Bretton Woods financial order at Mount Washington. The continuities are real (a republic that conceived itself as exceptional, a country whose reach was being tested against the limits of older European empires) but the differences carry the heavier weight: the 1898 moment was an imperial debut on the European model, while the 1945 moment was the founding act of the postwar international system the United States would lead for the next half century (KC-7.3.III, LO 7.O).

A second productive axis compares Progressive Era reform with New Deal reform. The continuities are striking. Both reform waves expanded federal regulatory authority over corporations, the financial system, and working conditions. Both rested on a coalition of urban professionals, organized labor, and reform-minded politicians. Both responded to perceived failures of nineteenth-century laissez-faire and to severe economic dislocations (the Panic of 1893 in the Progressive case, the Great Depression in the New Deal case). The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, and the Clayton Antitrust Act all anticipated the federal regulatory architecture that the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act would extend in the 1930s. The breaks are larger. Progressive reform was incremental, rested on muckraking journalism and middle-class moral confidence, and largely excluded African Americans from its benefits (Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal civil service in 1913). New Deal reform operated under the political pressure of mass unemployment, was centered on direct federal intervention in the economy through agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Works Progress Administration, made organized labor a junior coalition partner through the Wagner Act, and laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state through Social Security in 1935. Progressive reform regulated the market; New Deal reform restructured it (KC-7.2.II, KC-7.3.II).

A third axis compares the First World War home front with the Second World War home front. Both home fronts mobilized the federal government on a scale unprecedented at the time, expanded the role of women in the paid labor force, and produced significant racial dynamics through internal migration. The First World War home front, which lasted nineteen months for the United States after the declaration of war in April 1917, produced sharp restrictions on civil liberties through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the Committee on Public Information that managed wartime propaganda, the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 that swept up suspected radicals, and the first wave of the Great Migration that drew roughly 500,000 African Americans from the rural South to Northern industrial cities. The Second World War home front, which lasted forty-four months between Pearl Harbor and Japanese surrender, mobilized roughly twelve million Americans into uniform and another twenty million women into the paid labor force, ended the Great Depression through deficit-financed federal spending that grew the national debt from forty billion to two hundred and sixty billion dollars, produced the unprecedented incarceration of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066, and began a hesitant federal challenge to racial discrimination through the Fair Employment Practice Committee created by Executive Order 8802. The continuities of mobilization are real; the differences in scale, duration, and racial outcome are larger (KC-7.3.II.B, KC-7.3.III.E).

A fourth axis compares the prosperity of the 1920s with the depression of the 1930s. The contrasts are familiar. The 1920s produced consumer capitalism on a mass scale: the assembly line, the automobile, electric appliances, commercial radio, Hollywood, professional sports, and the credit installment plan. Real wages rose; stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange roughly tripled between 1923 and the September 1929 peak; gross national product climbed by about 40 percent across the decade. The Republican Party held the White House through three successive administrations on a platform of low taxes, high tariffs, and limited federal regulation. The 1930s produced the deepest contraction in the country's economic history. Gross national product fell by roughly 30 percent between 1929 and 1933; unemployment reached roughly 25 percent at the trough; nine thousand banks failed; one in four farms changed hands through foreclosure or distress sale. The Democratic Party assembled the New Deal coalition (urban ethnics, organized labor, African Americans north of the Mason-Dixon Line, white Southerners, and reform-minded intellectuals) that would dominate national politics until 1968. The cultural mood shifted from the optimism of Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows to the documentary realism of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The continuities (the same mass-production technology, the same urban-majority population, the same expanding federal apparatus) are real, but the political and cultural break carries the greater weight (KC-7.2.II, KC-7.3.II.A).

A fifth and final axis compares pre-1917 isolation with post-1941 globalism. In the years between 1890 and 1917 the United States approached Europe as a remote diplomatic counterpart, intervened militarily inside the Western Hemisphere under the Roosevelt Corollary and the Open Door notes for China, and stayed out of the European alliance system. Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 on the slogan that he had kept the country out of war; the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920; the interwar Congress passed the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939 in an effort to insulate the country from another European war. By the end of 1945 the United States had reversed every one of those positions. It belonged to a permanent global alliance system, garrisoned military bases on every habitable continent, chartered and seated itself on the Security Council of the United Nations, anchored the Bretton Woods financial system, and accepted the responsibility for occupying Germany and Japan. The internal politics that produced this shift run through the period: the Progressive arguments about the country's responsibilities, the wartime expansion of federal capacity in 1917 and 1918 and again from 1941 to 1945, the realignment of the New Deal coalition that backed an internationalist foreign policy by 1944, and the Pearl Harbor attack that ended the Neutrality Acts overnight. Internal politics shaped foreign policy posture, and the change between the two endpoints is the largest single transformation Period 7 records (KC-7.3.III, LO 7.O).

Five axes carry Period 7 from one end to the other. Each row gives students the targets for sub-skill 1.i (description) and the prompts for sub-skills 1.ii and 1.iii (account for the meaning, weigh the relative significance).

A comparison closer works best when its sources sit at different points along Period 7's axes. The five excerpts below mark the imperialism debate of 1898, the high statement of Progressive reform, the high statement of New Deal reform, the executive order that incarcerated Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the founding charter of the postwar international system the United States led.

1. (Comparison 1.i) Describe two differences and two continuities between the United States in 1898 and the United States in 1945. Use the comparison axes table to keep claims about military scale, economic position, and conception of global role distinct.
2. (Comparison 1.ii) Both Progressive Era reform and New Deal reform expanded federal regulatory authority over corporations and the financial system. Account for what makes that continuity meaningful, and account for what genuinely broke between 1916 and 1933 in the scope, the beneficiaries, and the underlying political philosophy of the two reform waves.
3. (Comparison 1.iii) The First World War home front and the Second World War home front both produced civil-liberties restrictions, internal migration, and an expanded role for women in the paid labor force. Weigh which carries more historical significance: the structural similarity (federal mobilization on each home front) or the difference in scale, duration, and racial outcome between the two.
4. (Comparison 1.ii) Compare the political coalitions of the 1920s with the political coalitions of the 1930s. Account for what makes the New Deal coalition durable enough to dominate national politics until 1968, and identify which Period 7 institutions did the work of holding the coalition together.
5. (Comparison 1.iii) Some historians describe the United States' shift from pre-1917 isolation to post-1941 globalism as a single half-century arc; others describe it as a sequence of three distinct moments (1898, 1917, 1941). Weigh the evidence on both framings. Which is more historically defensible, and which Period 7 evidence carries the most weight in your judgment?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.