Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here’s the rub: It’s for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real “history” of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.
I’m not a history person. I know, I know “those who don’t learn from the past…” I don’t want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It’s been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?
Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.
Company towns would be a good topic. The best-known one culminated in the Pullman Strike, which happens to be one year outside your time frame.
Slave-state expansionism might be something to cover. This could be Bleeding Kansas, or the cross-border settling of Texas, or even attempts to move to Belize or Brazil.
For something particularly left-coded, you could cover the Trail of Tears, and the broader context of how some of the most compliant and friendly indigenous peoples were expropriated and mass-deported.
Or, idk, listen to a couple episodes of The Dollop to find an idea that sparks excitement.