Wednesday, September 23, 2009

What Econ newbies are up to, coast to coast

I wish I knew the answers to all of the following questions from Brad DeLong's midterm exam:
For each of the ten events, tell us (a) when it happened (within a ten year window) and (b) what its relevance is to a course in twentieth century economic history:
  1. Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
  2. Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression
  3. Gandhi's “Salt March”
  4. “The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad
  5. George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan”
  6. Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six”
  7. The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping
  8. Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain
  9. William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R]
  10. Start of Mexican Revolution
I am confident about my answers to six, and I think I might be right about two more, but have no clue about the other two.  And these are from his freshman course!  Hmmmm .....
Across the continent, Greg Mankiw has these for freshmen :-)

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