What topic can I choose for my essay?

The discovery and impact of DNA is very little?

I know somebody who is able to walk because of stem cell surgery after spending years in a wheelchair with MS. I bet you can find a lot of good information.

As for another topic, how about the Rambo movies?

Or movies in general?

Edited to add: Talkies for sure are from the right time frame, I don’t know about silent films but I think they were in the right one too.

Development of the CIA and other secret services.

Drugs and Hippies are fun topics. You could discuss the history of Haight/Ashbury in San Francisco. There is also prohibition and the illegalization of marijuana (it wasn’t always illegal). There were two sexual revolutions, one in the 1960s and one in the 1920s. There is also the civil rights movement. Outside of the United States you could talk about the Russian Revolution. Best of luck.

Television.

You can write about the rise of psychology from William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Maslow and Skinner and the like.

There’s also the rise of mass media, starting with sound recording, film and radio into TV and the internet.

There’s also the the history of colonial powers being thrown off nearly all over the world, starting with the Spanish-American War (tainted, but the point was for the Philippines and Cuba to toss out Spain) through the 1970s and the emergence of new African states at the end of Western European colonial rule.

You could explore how we pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression and compare the New Deal to the Stimulus Plan. Then post your report so we can read it! I would love to see someones study of that topic.

(Mtl_zack is Canadian, by the way.)

You could write about NAFTA and it’s impact on each affected country.

They have this new fangled internet thingy, i hear.
That might have some impact on people’s lives.

Edit: I just read aprilsimnel’s idea and think that is a great set of topics!
Watch The Century of Self for some more thoughts on this topic.

The fight for power among the 3 branches of govt in the 20th century,

The evolution of the major political parties.

How the WWI armistice contrlbuted to WWII’

The century of genocide. (there were so many)

20th century repercussions of 19th century colonialism.

Or if you really want to dig back to the early part of the century, choosing things whose impact is already well understood, we have the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane in the inventions category.

{Edit] Oops, not the telephone or the automobile—they were actually invented earlier. But they did come into widespread use.

Thanks everyone for your ideas. I really like @aprilsimnel ‘s idea of the modes of communication and the media. I’m gonna keep on thinking of some more ideas though.

How about the discovery of penicillin?

How about Walt Disney and how he affected the common psyche about hunting. “Don’t kill Bambi!”

I was gonna do disney and the disney generation (1950s +), but there’s so little information I could find. We’re not allowed using websites, so that cancels out a lot of sources of information.

Penicilin is a good one, but I have to develop my own ideas on how it effected the world. It’s pretty obvious how it effected the world, but I have to think of more ways.

@Mtl_zack: are you in a library or do you plan to go to one?

I do intend to go to the library, but there’s article databases that I can access from home that the library pays for and lets students use. Also, my mom is a librarian and has access to McGill university’s databases from home.

I do intend to actually go there too.

Well, I was around to see the original Mickey Mouse Club and many of the big Disney movies in their first theatrical runs. Those who were kids at the time certainly were influenced by them (although I can’t see us as a “Disney generation”), but I think the electric washer and dryer had a much bigger impact on our collective lives.

@Mtl_zack: The trick here is how you search. You may not find something under one search term, but you might find it in another. You say you’re using the article databases at McGill, where you will be able to search a large number of academic journals. There have got to be any number of articles on the topic you choose. Some of those articles are probably also available online. I should think that using an academic journal is acceptable grounds for getting it over the internet.

As a side note, when my daughter was told to research without using the Internet, I was incensed. I was going to make a stink about it, but my daughter said she didn’t care. She did use access to the library from home to get call numbers, and then we took her to the library (first time I’d been there to look for books, lol) to find the books, and gave her a little bit of library lore (like don’t just look at the book you want, but look at the books near it on the shelf to see if any of those might be useful. Hmm, you could actually create a feature like that for internet searches).

Still, as a librarian who handles virtual collections, it just raises my hackle when people are forbidden to use the internet. What kind of research is that? You miss out on a rapidly increasing set of available information!

If you’re worried about Wikipedia responses, then teach that. If you want people to experience a library, then take them. Telling people to eschew the internet—I have no idea what that accomplishes.

How about latchkey children and the development of social media? Affect of birth control on sexual mores? My favorite—WWII propaganda and the ‘50s.