APUSH Period 7 — Depression, New Deal and the Second World War, 1920–1945

The second half of Period 7 in AP United States History runs from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War. It is the stretch in which the federal government took on responsibilities it had never had, and exam questions return again and again to its causes, its limits and its critics. Period 7 as a whole carries between 10 and 17 percent of the exam.

The material opens with the Immigration Act of 1924 and the reasoning behind its choice of the 1890 census. It then asks why the crash of 1929 became a long depression, from unequal incomes and weak banks to buying on margin and the collapse of world trade, and how Herbert Hoover responded, with more federal action than any predecessor but far less than the crisis demanded.

The New Deal is taken through its turning points and its limits: Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural and the banking panic; the Social Security Act and the workers it left out; the Wagner Act and the rise of the industrial unions of the CIO; the court-packing plan and the political cost of the fight; and the Dust Bowl, a disaster made by farming practice as much as by drought, which sent hundreds of thousands of families west.

The last questions follow the road to war and the home front: the Four Freedoms address and Lend-Lease; A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington and Executive Order 8802; the Bracero program; and the decision to use the atomic bomb, presented as the argument its makers gave, with the debate historians have had about it explained in the feedback.

The twelve quiz questions include public-domain presidential speeches quoted in the question and ask about context, causes and effects rather than bare recall. Explanations explain why each tempting wrong answer fails, including the chronology of the Neutrality Acts, Lend-Lease and Pearl Harbor.

The nineteen flashcards run from the 1924 quotas to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with dates and significance.

The category's material on 1865 to 1945 already covers the cultural conflicts of the 1920s, a New Deal relief program, Japanese American internment and the move from neutrality to war; this material deepens the same years for Unit 7 in class or for review before the May exam.

  • Explain the purpose and effects of the Immigration Act of 1924
  • Explain the causes of the Great Depression and compare Hoover's and Roosevelt's responses
  • Evaluate the reach and the limits of the New Deal, including Social Security, labor law and the court-packing fight
  • Explain how the United States moved from neutrality to Lend-Lease before entering the war
  • Describe how the war changed opportunities for black Americans and Mexican workers, and explain the case Truman and Stimson made for using the atomic bomb

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the College Board AP U.S. History course framework (course and exam description effective fall 2026), Unit 7, Period 7: 1890–1945, topics on the 1920s, the Great Depression, the New Deal, interwar foreign policy and World War II mobilization and military. Quoted sources are Franklin D. Roosevelt's speeches of 1933 and 1941 (public domain).

Sample question

The Immigration Act of 1924 set annual quotas at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the United States as counted in the 1890 census. What was the purpose and effect of choosing that census?

See the answer

To sharply reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe while favoring northern and western Europe, and to bar almost all immigration from Asia

In 1890 relatively few Italians, Poles, Jews from eastern Europe and other 'new immigrants' lived in the United States, so an 1890 base cut their quotas drastically. The act also excluded immigrants ineligible for citizenship, which in practice meant Asians. Immigration from the Western Hemisphere, above all Mexico, was not subject to quotas.

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