AQA A-Level History: The Making of a Superpower: USA 1865–1975

Extract A — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that the position of African Americans was transformed across the period.

The journey of African Americans between 1865 and 1975 is best understood as a story of profound, if hard-won, transformation. At the start of the period the formerly enslaved possessed neither legal personhood nor the vote; by its close, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had dismantled the legal architecture of segregation and disfranchisement. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments laid constitutional foundations that, though long ignored, were finally enforced. The triumph at Montgomery, the desegregation secured by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the rise of a confident black political class all testify to genuine, structural change. To dwell only on continuities is to discount the courage that rewrote the law of the land and reshaped what citizenship meant for millions.

Extract B — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that change for African Americans was superficial and that deep continuities of inequality persisted.

Beneath the celebrated landmarks lay a stubborn continuity of subordination. Emancipation in 1865 gave way within a decade to the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, share-cropping that tied black labour to the land, and the Jim Crow regime sanctioned by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Even the legislative breakthroughs of the 1960s left economic structures untouched: black unemployment remained roughly double that of white Americans, ghetto poverty deepened, and de facto segregation in housing and schooling endured in the urban North. The urban uprisings of the mid-1960s and the disillusion of the Black Power movement expose how little the everyday lives of the poorest had altered. Legal equality, this view insists, masked an enduring material and social caste.

Extract C — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that change was real but uneven, driven by black agency rather than benevolent federal power.

Change was neither illusory nor complete; it was uneven, and it was won from below. The decisive engine was not the goodwill of presidents or courts but the organised pressure of African Americans themselves: the wartime Great Migration, the legal campaigns of the NAACP, the boycotts, sit-ins and marches that forced reluctant federal action. Washington responded chiefly when black protest made inaction politically costly, as the events at Selma in 1965 demonstrate. The result was a patchwork: dramatic gains in voting rights and public access, slower progress on jobs and housing, and fierce regional variation. To credit federal benevolence is to misread the period; to deny all progress is to insult those who achieved it.

Question: Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments in these three extracts are in relation to how far the position of African Americans changed in the period from 1865 to 1975. [30 marks]

To what extent was the rapid industrial growth of the USA in the period from 1865 to 1900 the achievement of the great entrepreneurs?

[25 marks]

How far did the New Deal succeed in solving the economic problems of the USA in the period from 1933 to 1941?

[25 marks]

'It was the Second World War, more than any other factor, that turned the USA into a superpower.'

Assess the validity of this view with reference to the period from 1939 to 1953.

[25 marks]

How significant was the impact of the Vietnam War on the USA in the period from 1964 to 1975?

[25 marks]