What motivated the actions of abolitionists in Illinois? How did abolitionists attempt to transform public opinion on the issue of slavery? How did the abolitionist movement evolve and respond to national events that shook the nation in the 1850s?
Why did British imperialism take the form it did in India? How did this change the lives of colonial servants in India? Why did individual Britons go to India? What did they expect to find there? What common experiences did they have?
How have China’s economic and diplomatic ties to the outside world shaped its modern history?
Why did France’s empire expand to so many parts of the world in the early modern period? How did its expansion shape the history of the United States, Canada, Haiti, and other modern-day countries?
What social conditions contributed to the revolution? How did the United States seek to influence events in Mexico? How did artists and writers respond to the war?
What did it mean to live in the neighborhood of the Union Stock Yard around 1900? How does Upton Sinclair’s representation of this community in The Jungle compare to the accounts of sociologists and reformers?
How did popular publications in the United States respond to World War I? How did artists, writers, publishers, and advertisers work to promote the war effort? What criticisms of the war did dissenting artists make?
What were social conditions in Mexico before and after independence from Spain? How was the struggle for independence shaped by internal conflicts between people of different social castes?
How did French people bring about—or resist—the transition from monarchy to republic during the Revolution? What did it mean to become a citizen of the new nation?
How did people interpret the events of the American Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did the meaning of the Revolution change over time? In what ways has the Revolution meant different things to different people at any given time?
