DISCUSSION: On questions like this, the correct answer will be directly stated in the passage. You should not give the answers much thought. If an answer doesn’t seem to say something you remember, you should read over the others, rather than wasting time debating the answer in your head without reference to the passage.
Thinking about the author’s attitude helps as well. The author wrote about how African-Americans felt alienated from mainstream U.S. society. And you should know from basic history that blacks were not truly full, first-class citizens at law until the Civil Rights Act in 1964. So answer A fits with those intuitions, and then it’s a simple matter of checking the second paragraph for confirmation. If you had a good map of the passage, you’d know that the second paragraph is where emigrationism was discussed.
___________
- CORRECT. See lines 10-16. These lines state that the unresolved question of citizenship for African-Americans directly led to emigrationist sentiment. (“Because of this….”)
- We don’t know anything about what scholars generally do. We only have information about two very specific groups of scholars: African-American and mainstream-American scholars in the late 19th century.
- We don’t know about most historians. We only know about African-American and mainstream American historians. We don’t know about, say, Chinese historians, or Marxist historians, or European anarchist historians, etc.
- The passage didn’t say this. Besides, this doesn’t make sense as a requirement. Nationalist history is just supposed to make a country look good. Writing about your country’s glorious relations with foreign countries could make your country look good, so there’s no reason not to do so.
- Not so. Lines 43-50 imply that though African-American historians constructed a nationalist narrative, they may well have done so by accident. Officially, these historians distrusted U.S. nationalism, and nationalism in general (See lines 34-42 as well).
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