HIST 100 Old-timer’s Narrative Paper
You were born in 1880 in the United States. In three to four double-spaced pages with normal margins and no more than 12-point font, tell of “your” life between 1900 and 1950. What events would your character have experienced? How might your character have been affected? How might those events have affected your character’s personal liberty? Because you were born in 1880, you would have been too old for military service in either of the wars, so describe your experiences on the home front.
The point of this paper is to research and identify the major events and movements of this period, and to think about how the changes brought by these events and movements would affect individual lives and liberty. Your text has some basic information, but you will need to go beyond it to really get a feel for this era. There are excellent sources out there [not Wikipedia]; use them.
1 – An urban wage worker
2 – A rural farmer
3 – A working class woman
4 – A business owner
5 – A “white collar” worker
6 – A woman from a well-off family; termed “middle class” at the time, since you are neither working class nor aristocracy