Critical Thinking Questions About Wars in American History

Embrace the ability to reason

If “history is an argument,” build an argument on one of the following questions:

• Was the American Revolution a fight against tyranny or an attempt by the landed gentry in the colonies to maintain their economic status?

• Was the US Civil War a moral crusade by the North against slavery and racism in the recalcitrant South, or a defensive effort by Southerners for simple survival, to defend their land, their economic system, and states rights? Was it a war over slavery, or merely a struggle between the nation and the states?

• Was the Spanish-American War a valiant, humanitarian effort by the US to save Cuba and the Philippines from Spain and support independence movements, or a quest by the US to become a colonial power in its own right?

• Was WWI wicked, horrible, and inhuman, entirely England’s fault, as Oxford historian Niall Ferguson argued, due to naive assumptions of German war aims, and numerous misjudgments, or did Germany’s aggression and quest for superpower status cause it?