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I need help coming up with a topic for a research paper. The theme of the class is the 1930's. The thesis also has to be arguable.

From your tags, I'm assuming you want one related to literature. The 1930s were extremely hard times in a variety of ways, particularly in economics and politics. Entertainment in such times tends to be more escapist because people want to forget about their troubles. Think about the movies of that era....lightweight musicals and such. Can you use that as a starting point for a literary paper? I think you could find examples that both support that statement, and of others that seek to deal head-on with the problems, instead.

Mermaid,

If you need a research paper about the 1930s, and it has to be literature based, one of the easiest forms to work with is to choose a novel or play and explain how the novel or play reveals the society in which it takes place. In other words, what does the work say about society at that particular time.

The 1930s was a time of great struggle and pessimism.  The Great Depression left people battered and weary and many did not know know if their lives would ever become better.

Great writers such as John Steinbeck wove "radicalism and... redemption" in The Grapes of Wrath (1939.) Zora Neale Hurston wrote about the country's first all-black town in  Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937.)

William Faulkner's modernist novels, including Light In August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom!(1936), which focused on a tiny region of Mississippi, were marked by an Americanist concern for the deep history of a place.

Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (1931) probably gave many Americans their first taste of Chinese culture, other than ordering takeout from their local Chinese restaurant.

Nobel Prize winners Pearl S. Buck, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill were rightly awarded the honors for their views not just in their characters but in the world of the 1930s and what it meant to live in that tumultuous period.

You should have no trouble coming up with a thesis such as, "In Pearl S Buck's highly acclaimed novel The Good Earth, the tumultuous society of the 1930s is revealed through Buck's highly compact diction, well-drawn-out descriptive suffering of characters, and her emotional language."