All right, so after section one is section two, and section two is the essay portion, and there's a long essay question and there's a DBQ, and the DBQ is the document-based question.
AP®︎ US History worked examples
I think you usually do the document-based question first, and that section is also an hour and 45 minutes long, they start out by giving you a 15 minute reading period just to check out the documents in the DBQ, but it's about the same amount of time for writing. Okay, so let's think about the long essay question, and then I will turn to some of your other questions about periods and just like a general review, okay. All right, so this is a long essay question, and it says, "Evaluate the extent to which the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution marked a turning point in the history of United States politics and society.
In the development of your argument, explain what changed and what stayed the same from the period immediately before the amendments to the period immediately following them. I think the first thing that I would do would just be to brainstorm some things that you can talk about. So off the top of my head, I would say, we're talking about the 14 and 15th amendments, and if you recall, the 14th is equal protection under the law and equal citizenship for African-American men.
And then the 15th was the right to vote, for African-American men. Okay so what else might we talk about, just general facts? I would say I mean, since we're already talking about the 14th and 15th amendments, we might talk about the 13th, which was the end of slavery.
We might talk about Jim Crow laws. We might talk about the KKK or black codes. We could talk about Supreme Court cases like Plessy versus Ferguson, or the Dred Scott case, all right, so what I would do then is just kind of get a sense of what these all tell me. Like is there is a theme among these, so in case you are struggling with the time period here, remember the 14th and 15th amendments were kind of right after the Civil War, so around about like The 13th was right at the end of Civil War in So our question would be, was the granting of equal citizenship and the vote for African-American men actually a turning point, or not so much?
So it seems like there are some good things to start with here, right, there's the end of slavery, there's equal citizenship, but then things start to kind of go pear-shaped, right? You have the implementation of Jim Crow laws, Plessy versus Ferguson, a court case that legalized separate but equal accommodations, legalized segregation, and the KKK, you had a group that was dedicated to terrorizing African-Americans and their white allies, terrorizing Republicans in the South.
So if I had to say whether they were a turning point, my feeling would be that I would want to say that they marked a turning point kind of on paper, turning point on paper, but none of these aspects of Civil Rights and equal voting rights were actually protected in real life. So it as on paper, but not in reality.
So I think that kind of counts as our thesis statement, and then we might want to talk about politics and society, and we want to talk about what changed and what stayed the same. So politics, and society. And remember, we're making this argument that it's a turning point on paper, but not in reality. So I think that's actually a good way of structuring your essay, where you might talk about what seemed like a turning point, or at least a turning point on paper was not really a turning point, because none of the statutes were actually enforced.
Okay, so if I started with an intro, I would say, let's see, let's see, there's a question about how we should approach writing an intro, that's a good question. I mean, being flowery never hurts, right. I would just kinda maybe give some context to the time period, and say there had been years of slavery in the United States up until this point in the Civil War, with things like the Emancipation Proclamation, and a 13th Amendment, seemed as though they were really important points in African-American citizenship, that this was gonna be the time, and it really didn't seem like that early on, there were important moves forward like the 14th amendment and the 15th Amendment but by the end of the 19th century, Jim Crow was the law of the land, and a lot of the advances that had been made on paper had very little tangible meaning for African American citizens because they still experienced relatively little change in status than before the 14th and 15th Amendment.
Okay, so if I wanted that to be my intro and my thesis statement, then I might write a paragraph about politics and one about society, where I could say something about how before the Civil War, so this is our turning point, before Civil War, decisions like Dred Scott said that African-Americans weren't citizens at all, but the 14th and 15th Amendment were a brief moment where African-Americans had the right to vote, African-American men, and they had equal protection under the law, but at the end of Reconstruction, when the Northern military forces stopped occupying the south, white Democrats, often known as the Redeemers, the Redemption Era, retook political power in the South, and that was kind of the end of the African-American political voice until the Civil Rights movement, the end of the vote.
And then we might talk about society, where say before the Civil War, slavery, you might talk about slave codes, for example, that said it was all right to kill an enslaved person, you had no legal recourse for the murder of your family member, if you were enslaved, so something that said slaves really had no status in society, and the 14th Amendment was a moment that said, "All right, you should have due protection under the law, it should matter if someone murders you, for example," but by the late 19th century, you had lynch law, for example, where African-Americans who were killed by white mobs, really there was no justice for that, or the KKK here.
And you could even say things like Plessy versus Ferguson really showed that African-Americans were still second-class citizens because it legalized separate but equal accommodations. So the last thing that you want to do in these long essays is what's called synthesis, you get a special point for this, and that means you kind of draw a parallel with some other time in the United States, some other time, some other theme, something that's a little outside your essay, that you might say, "Yeah, this is relevant," and I think a good example of that here might be something like, the Civil Rights movement.
You could say, "You know, the 14th and 15th amendments weren't much of a turning point, but you could suggest, for example, that the Montgomery bus boycott was a real turning point, because it showed that if African Americans organized together that they could affect change on the system of Jim Crow, so kind of take something from a different time period, a different idea, you could even use something from outside the history of the United States, if you know something about that, and kind of extend your argument a little bit.
So yeah, and then I would conclude, and your conclusion can really just be a restatement of what you said, it doesn't have to be anything special. The only other thing that I should mention is that your thesis statement really needs to be either in your introduction or your conclusion. So you have to put it in one of those paragraphs, and that's just to make it really obvious to the readers where it is, so they're not kind of just looking through your essay wondering, is that a thesis statement?
In fact, you could probably underline it if you want to, and that might help as well. Okay, so I'm seeing one question about this, it says, "Is there a specific formula to follow for the structure of the essay? On is your very standard five paragraph essay, where you would write an intro and a conclusion and three body paragraphs, and each of those body paragraphs might address something like differences in politics, differences in society, differences in gender roles, for example, and then you could conclude.
You can also do something more like a four paragraph essay, and that works pretty well if you're kind of comparing and contrasting something, and so you might do one paragraph were you compare and contrast something before a certain time period, and one paragraph where you compare or contrast something after a certain time period. So I wouldn't force yourself to do the five paragraph essay, if that just doesn't seem like it would work.
But if you're just feeling lost, and you think, how should I do this, a five paragraph is a good place to start. Okay, I see one question that asks, "How much does spelling and grammar and punctuation matter? Because this is something that they know is written off the top of your head, it's just supposed to be kind of a first draft.
Now, I will say that if you spell something so abominably bad that there's just no way of telling what you're saying, you're probably not gonna do yourself any favors, but you don't need to write the most beautiful essay ever here. It doesn't need to be a final draft that you've gone through multiple revisions, it really is supposed to be something that's more or less written off the top of your head, and so it does not need to be beautiful, it does not need to be perfect.
In fact, it's even okay for you to have some minor errors, as long as those factual errors aren't deeply tied to what your essay is all about, for example. And another thing that you should know is that all of the points are scored independently of each other, so even if you don't do well on the thesis and they don't wanna give a point for that, that doesn't mean that you can't still get points for all the evidence or synthesis, so it's not like you kind of have to rack up one to get the other, they're all scored on their own, cool.
All right, so we've got about 20 minutes left, I was thinking we might do a primary source analysis for a few minutes, and I wanted to do this a little bit in lieu of the DBQ 'cause the DBQ was just really big, and I think it would take up our entire hour if we tried to do the DBQ.
So, I wanted to take a look at a primary source with you, and kind of take you through how you might analyze a primary source and that kind of primary source analysis will be the thing that really gets you through the DBQ. The DBQ is an essay very similar to the long essay, except that they're going to provide you with seven primary documents and you're gonna need to work all but one of those into your answer somehow. So what you should do, I think, as you go through and you read these primary documents in preparation for the DBQ, is analyze each one as you go along.
So the primary documents that you read might be political cartoons, they might be maps, they might be quotes from individuals, they could be posters, so I was thinking it might be interesting if we did as our primary document, the Vietnam War Memorial. So I guess it's kind of a sculpture. So if we did this speaker, well that's maybe a tough one to answer.
We could say that maybe the speaker here is the architect, and if you're familiar with this at all, the architect was Maya Lin, and she was just, I think in her early 20's when she came up with the design of the Vietnam Memorial. And the occasion was, it was finished in , so it wasn't very long at all after the war ended. So the occasion I guess here is to memorialize those who fought and died in the Vietnam War. So her audience I guess would be people who came to visit, maybe veterans or folks who had lost people in the war. Her purpose, again, kind of that memorialization, to give people a place to maybe grieve or feel proud of the people who had fought in the war.
And then the subject is the war, the veterans, people who lost their lives. And then the tone I would say is kind of somber, respectful, it's even kind of quiet. I really like this memorial. If you've never actually been to see this memorial, I highly recommend it, it's beautiful, it's very long, and everything is organized by year, the people who were killed in action or missing in action, and as you can see here, it's also reflective, so you can kind of go and see the names maybe, of someone that you might have lost, but also see yourself reflected in those, and you can kind of see here that people also leave things at the memorial, so it has this sense that you can kind of interact with it, or that maybe it's like a proxy for getting to talk to your loved one.
So if I saw this on a DBQ, I would see it maybe as an example of how people tried to come to terms with the Vietnam war, which was a very unpopular war. Might be an example of some of the controversy over the war. So you might then use that in an essay that's about for example, I don't know, US involvement in overseas battles against communism, for example, and show how that was a very difficult period, coming to terms with that after the war. So for every document in the DBQ, you want to mention something I guess, at least four of the documents in the DBQ, you want to talk about the point of view of the author, their purpose for writing, the context in which they wrote, and there's one more, I'm trying to remember, and ooh, their purpose, and their point of view, context, audience, purpose.
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That's what I'm missing, audience. So kind of identify those. The answer is, I don't know. Usually the essays will cover more than one period, I believe, but neither of them, nothing on the exam will concentrate exclusively on the period before , or the period after , 'cause those are kind of less emphasized periods in US history, just 'cause we don't have quite as much about them. So I think the bulk of what you'll see on the exam is material that's after , so the start of Jamestown, and before , so end of Vietnam.
Other things, what should we focus on most when writing DBQs? Well, I think the thing that I would say you wanna focus on throughout the exam is using specific evidence and that means, instead of saying "there were some protests before the American revolution," you might wanna say something like the Boston Tea Party, so name something specific. And then describe or explain what that is, so you're not just namedropping Boston Tea Party, you're saying, "that was an event in ," I think, possibly , in which a group of the Sons of Liberty dumped tea in protest of taxes on tea.
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You don't need to know the date, I'm just hoping that I know that one. Dumped tea, and then connect it back up to your thesis, connect it up. Would say, "and that shows that there was an increasing amount of tension between the colonies and the crown. You will be handing ideals these out to all of your dates. Declaration of typed or hand-made and can be any size, though Independence, Kentucky Resolution, something small like 2 x 3 or 3 x 5 would be most Louisiana Purchase, Embargo Act practical.
Shangraw, Sarah (Social Science) / ***APUSH REVIEW HELP ***
You could wear parts of a costume hat, scarf, fake moustache, etc. This part is for extra credit, so please try to use homemade or household items. It is not necessary to spend lots of money or ask your Mom to drive all over the metroplex finding you a Jacob Riis outfit. As you date, you will fill out a chart covering all of the reformers and their reforms. This project is a formal grade, so please take it seriously and go above and beyond! Great for review, or if you miss class.