Problem 1: Contrast the current estimate of how many Americans lost their lives in the Civil War with those of other contemporaneous conflicts, like China's Taiping Rebellion.
Problem 2: Examine how the transcontinental railroad reflects Congress' economic agenda during the Civil War, and identify the other major policies that reflect this agenda.
Problem 3: Contrast the political rights won by the newly freed black southerners in the United States with those possessed (or not) by other freed slave populations worldwide.
Problem 4: Characterize the views of the Liberal Republicans who emerged during Reconstruction, and explain how and why those views promoted racism and anti-immigrant sentiments in the North.
Problem 5: Contrast the first influential historical study of slavery (1918) with the interpretation of slavery that challenged it (published in the mid-1950s), and assess how each of these two interpretations were in part products of the very different American social and cultural conditions in which they were produced.
Problem 6: Contrast the scholarly interpretations of the history of slavery that were produced before the 1970s with the ones that were published during and after that decade, and assess how the very different American social and cultural conditions in which these interpretations were produced influenced the forms they took.
Problem 7: Why, according to Douglass, do slaves argue among themselves as to whose master is best? How does this phenomenon reveal how slaves have internalized and accepted their own oppression, incorporating it into their own identities?