Main content
Course: AP®︎/College US History > Unit 10
Lesson 1: AP®︎ US History worked examples- AP US History periods and themes
- AP US History multiple choice example 1
- AP US History multiple choice example 2
- AP US History short answer example 1
- AP US History short answer example 2
- AP US History DBQ example 1
- AP US History DBQ example 2
- AP US History DBQ example 3
- AP US History DBQ example 4
- AP US History long essay example 1
- AP US History long essay example 2
- AP US History long essay example 3
- Preparing for the AP US History Exam (5/4/2016)
- AP US History Exam Prep Session (5/1/2017)
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AP US History Exam Prep Session (5/1/2017)
Taking AP US History? Prep for the AP exam with our free tutoring session. Kim, our history expert, shares tips and strategies for the exam.
Want to join the conversation?
- what is the irish potato famine?(4 votes)
- The Irish potato famine (1845-1852) was when the potato crop failed, and many people starved and died because they depended so much on the crop for food. During the famine, approximately one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.(8 votes)
- Is there going to be a 2019 live review??(8 votes)
- So in this video (around4:05I believe), Kim says that there are practice quizzes for all the periods. However, now I can only find practice quizzes for periods 1-3. Did something happen, or am I just missing them?(5 votes)
- I can find quizzes for only 1-3 as well, I believe there is content for every period but the quizzes end after 3.(3 votes)
- Does anyone know if there will be a 2018 AP US History review session before the exam this year?(5 votes)
- What was the Know-nothing Party??(3 votes)
- They were a political party that strongly supported the Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Catholic movement. When asked about their party, members were supposed to reply "I know nothing", hence the name "Know-Nothings".(4 votes)
- What caused the Irish Potato Famine?(2 votes)
- From the author:Great question! The potato famine was caused by a mold called Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans). Because Irish farmers mostly planted only one kind of potato, which was susceptible to the mold, their crops were destroyed.(5 votes)
- Is their going to be a 2020 live review?(2 votes)
- In which time periods did labor unions thrive?(1 vote)
- what is a easier way for me to try to understand things easier(1 vote)
- where are questions at where can i find them at this kinda new to me so(1 vote)
- Go to khan academy and look at subjects. There is us history and world history.
There are practices and videos. Be sure to take notes. Good luck(2 votes)
Video transcript
- Hey, I'm Kim, and welcome to our AP US History live study
session at Khan Academy. So, the exam is this Friday, May 5th, and I would like to
take some time with you over the next hour to talk through some of the major ideas that will kind of help you manage the exam. So I am a former US history
professor, I got my PhD in US History and then
taught at the college level for eight years. So I've kind of been on
the opposite side of this, seeing what students are like
when they come into college, having taken the AP exam. Now before this livestream
started, I looked through your chats and it seem like a
lot of you are really nervous about the exam, and so
I just wanted to share with you that I have been
a reader for the AP exam. I went to Louisville with
all the other teachers, about a thousand people go to
read these exams ever year. And I met all of the
people who grade the exams, we sit together, it
takes about eight days, everybody reads about six thousand exams, and what I want you to know
about that is the people who are reading these
exams are your teachers, they're ordinary people who teach history, and I think we have this sense
that teachers are reading these exams and thinking,
(growls) "Where can I find a place to take off
points," and it's completely the opposite of that. The teachers who are
grading these exams are rooting for you, they are giving you every
possible opportunity to score points, they're
looking for a chance to give you a point for anything. So just keep in mind
when you're writing these that you're not writing
them for grumpy people who are looking down on
you, you are writing them for your teachers, who
want you to succeed, and they're gonna help you
succeed however they can. All right, so that said,
I first wanna tell you a little bit about some
other resources that we have at Khan Academy to help
you prepare for the exam, in case you wanna do a
little bit more than just sit here with me. So one of the first things
is that at Khan Academy we've put together a
complete resource with articles and exercises
and videos from every part of US history. So what's most important
about this for you is that we have practice
quizzes for every period from Native American
societies before contact to the US after 2000, so
you'll see that I actually need to do a little
bit more studying here, I've only gone through
seven of these, myself but. If you are just wondering, how am I doing, is there something that I
could do to do a little bit of extra preparation to
make sure that I've got my ducks in a row, check out the quizzes. And the second thing is a
guide to the US history exam where I go through some
very detailed examples of how to tackle these questions. So I'm going to do that
a little bit today, but if you're hoping to
see some other examples, you're wishing you could do
this just a few more times to feel confident, check out
our exam practice section, and I will take you
through some more questions on the long essay, the DBQ, short answer, multiple choice, and
hopefully that will help you get a little bit more
confident about your skills. Okay, so what are we doing today? Here is our preview of coming events. So I'm going to take about
an hour, talking with you, and I'm gonna go pretty much step-by-step through the exam. We'll first talk about
multiple choice questions, tips, and strategies, and
then short answer questions, and we'll talk about
the long essay question, and then if we have time,
I'd like do a little primary document analysis
and try to help you use that primary document
analysis to think about how you might strategize at the DBQ. So I want to encourage
you throughout the session to ask questions that you might have, I'm gonna pause in between
each of these sections to answer some questions,
and then hopefully we'll leave a little time at
the end to answer any general questions you
might have about the exam. All right, sound good? Okay, let's start at the
multiple choice section. So I've got some practice
questions for us here, and these are official practice questions from the College Board. And, all right, so here is
a typical multiple choice question from the AP US History Exam, and what is important about this is that, every single multiple choice
question will have some kind of what they call
"stimulus material" with it, and so the stimulus material
might be something like a photograph like this, or a graph, a map, a set of quotes, so it
will be a primary document that kind of serves as the
background for the question. And I think what's really
nice about this is that unlike the old AP US
History Exam, this one is not so much just kind of
a like a laundry list of facts that you're supposed to memorize, in fact, the whole AP US
History Exam is designed to kind of reward you for
having a sense of what's going on in each historical time period, and being able to reason from that. So if you're panicking
about how you're supposed to memorize all the names
and dates and places and important people from
500 years of history, stop panicking and just
think about overall themes. So some important overall
themes might be like the Gilded Age, that was
a time when there was a lot of wealth inequality, and immigration and maybe industrialization. So if you have that kind
of sense of what the major themes and ideas
were from each time period, that's really gonna help you on the exam, because you'll be able to use
that intuition for history to help you answer questions
with reason instead of just memorization. Okay, so here is our first
question, and it's based on this stimulus material of a photograph and this photograph is by
the journalist, Jacob Riis and it's from the late 19th century, okay. So that's pretty much all
the information they give us. Now you may have heard
of Jacob Riis before, he was I think one of the
first muckraking photographers. Muckraker, there we go. And if you remember your
muckrakers, they were the journalists who tried to
expose bad working conditions or corruption in industry or politics, let's see, he's from
the late 19th century, and what is this photograph telling us? Well, I think if we just take some time to examine it, we can tell that
it's a whole lot of people. In fact if I count,
there's one, two, three, four, five, at least six
people, this might be somebody's legs, so six or seven people in a pretty small room. And you can tell that the
room's pretty dirty and dingy and it doesn't look like a nice place to hang out, basically. All right, so we've noticed
some things about our primary document, so let's look
at the questions themselves. All right, so I think one
thing that is really important about this exam all the
way through is that you need to read the questions
really carefully, 'cause the questions
tell you a lot about what time period is it, for
example, that you should be focusing on. So if it asks you a
question about what happened in the Great Depression,
you wanna make sure that you're not talking about
something from the Gilded Age, or the post-war era. So especially make sure
that you're in the right time period, but also,
read to make sure there aren't any kind of little
tricks in the questions, 'cause they can be there. All right, so it says
"Conditions like those shown in the image contributed
most directly to which of the following?" Okay, so conditions, I
think that they're talking about the dirty room, the
dirty overcrowded room. And this is where I would
kinda go through the process of elimination, so
let's read each of the answers, and decide whether we
think it's a candidate, if it's not, we'll cross it out. Right, so conditions shown
in the image contributed most directly to which of the following? All right, the passage of
laws restricting immigration to the United States, okay,
I don't know about that one, so I'm gonna leave it for now, an increase in progressive
reform activity, all right, that is a good
candidate, 'cause you remember that Jacob Riis was a
muckraker, a decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants,
I don't think that's a good choice, because I
don't think there were many declines in efforts to
Americanize immigrants, usually the melting pot was the way that people thought about that,
and then the weakening of labor unions such as the
American Federation of Labor. All right, well I assume that
these are working people, but it doesn't really say
anything about labor unions, so I'm gonna cross that one out. All right, so that leaves us with two. The passage of laws
restricting immigration to the United States or an increase in progressive reform activity. Well I think the laws are going to happen, but maybe not for a little
while, in fact, I don't think those happen until after
World War I, so I think that an increase in
progressive reform activity is our best answer here. So we know that these
are people who are in bad conditions, and Jacob
Riis is exposing them, he's a muckraker who's
trying to improve things, so I think it's a good answer with B. Cool, all right, let's try the other one. The conditions shown in
the image depict which of the following trends
in the late 19th century? All right, so we are looking
at conditions and also depicting trends, so this
shows us what something was like in the time period. So the growing gap between rich and poor, I think that is a possible, definitely. Okay, the rise of the settlement house and populist movements. Well, the settlement
houses were trying to make things nicer for immigrants,
and the populists, I believe were mostly farmers,
so I'm gonna cross that out. Increased corruption in urban politics, I don't think so, I
don't think we're looking at anything political here. And then migration of African-Americans to the North in the late 19th century. Well, I don't think
most of the men shown in this picture are
African-American, so I'm gonna take this one off, and
that leaves us with the growing gap between rich and poor. And I think that's a good answer too, because we can see that
these people are facing a great deal of poverty
and we know that from this time period there
are people kind of working in factories, trying to deal
with a growing wealth gap, so I'm gonna go with A. All right, so how do you feel
about the multiple choice? Should we do another
example of multiple choice, or do you wanna move onto
the short answer questions, what do you all think? All right, so I think
maybe let's move on to short answer, but I do wanna
give you an opportunity to ask any questions that might have about the multiple choice section. Anything? All right, let's do short answer. You might have more questions about that, 'cause I think it is a touch trickier. Okay, so here is a typical
short answer question, and you'll notice a
couple of things about it, one is that it has three
parts, so in each of these questions, you're
gonna have a sheet of paper, it'll just kind of be
the front of one side of a page, and in that
you should answer all three parts here, so part
A, part B, and part C. And you should answer them
in complete sentences, you don't have to make
it a beautiful paragraph, you can just kind of write A, B, and C, which I'm gonna do. But make sure that in this A, B, and C, you do include full sentences. All right, so using the graph
above, answer A, B, and C. So it looks like we
have a bar graph that is talking about immigration
to the United States by decade from 1820 to 1859. So this is good to know,
because this is before the Civil War and it's not
until after the Civil War that we're gonna get
the really big explosion in immigration that we see
with the new immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. And it's in millions,
so pretty good amount. So A, briefly explain how
one major historical factor contributed to the change
depicted on the graph. So it looks like the change
depicted on the graph is that there's a fairly high trend of increasing immigration. I'm not a mathematician,
but it looks like the rate is increasing over time. So we need to talk about one
factor that contributed to an increase in immigration
from the early part of the 1800s to the mid-1800s. We need to explain one
specific historical effect that resulted from the change, and another specific historical effect. So we need one factor and two effects. So what I wanna emphasize
here is that there are many right answers to this question. You could come up with probably five or 10 different things that would
count either as a factor or an effect here, and
any of those is okay. There isn't a single
right answer, so I would play to your strengths. If you remember something
about this, use it. So okay, one major historical factor. If you have any ideas, feel free to shout them out in the comments, I'm gonna say, so major factors leading
to increase in immigration before the Civil War, I
think there's a big one here that you probably would know well, and I would say that would be like the Irish potato famine, right? So what are some of the
reasons that people are coming to United States in larger numbers? The Irish potato famine was kind of a, we call that like a "push factor," something that was
pushing people from Europe to come to the United States. There were also political
revolutions, right? The revolutions of 1848 that sent a lot of German immigrants to the United States. So I'm just kind of outlining this here, but remember, you wanna
do this in full sentences. So another thing you
might talk about would be the fact that there were
a lot of jobs to be had. As US industrial production
started to ramp up, there were a lot of
opportunities for people to come from Europe or
elsewhere in the world to work in the United
States, so I think that would also be a good answer. All right, let's talk about our effects, so something that this caused. I think a big one here
would be kind of an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment
or nativist sentiment. And if you wanted to
give a specific example, you could say something
like the rise of the Know-Nothing Party, right,
those were a whole political party that was based
on nativist sentiment. Know-Nothing Party, and
then another effect, let's see, we could say,
this was one of the things that led to the early Temperance movement, there was a sense that new
immigrants to the United States like the Irish were drinking
too much and that it was important to curb drinking. See, anything else that
we could talk about, maybe, oh, I would say,
how about divisions between the North and the South? Remember, this is before the
Civil War, so all the the immigrants coming into
the North who are working in industrial jobs really
changed the system of labor, even more starkly, to say
the North was industrial, and then the South was
based on slave labor. So you could say that this
was something that led to a more divided nation
before the Civil War. All right, so I'm seeing
one question saying, "What's the difference
between a historical factor, and a historical effect,"
that's a good question. So I think what they were asking here is, a factor is kind of
something that goes before, so something that led up to an event, so what was a factor that
led up or caused something to happen, and then an effect
would be something that happened after the fact. I'm seeing another question
that says, "What wouldn't be a good example for this
question, a bad example answer?" I would say one thing that
you might be really tempted to do here is talk about something after the Civil War, because when
you think about immigration to the United States I
think we tend to focus on that 1880-1920 period
when more than a million people were coming per
year, so make sure that if you're talking about
immigration you realize this is earlier than we would think of say, many people coming from
Russia or from Italy. All right, any other questions about this? Ooh, okay, what's the
best option if you can't think of an answer? I would say that if you're
stuck for an answer, take a moment to just
kind of brainstorm what's going in this time period. All right, we know this is 1820 to 1860, so this is kind of our, what
we call antebellum period. So it's kind of before the Civil War, the time that we kind of
think of a lot of US history coming together as a political force. So just say to yourself,
"Okay, what's going on in this time period," and
you might say something like, "Oh yeah, wasn't that the time that there were lots of canals
and railroad spills, right, the market revolution. Or wasn't that the time with
the women's rights movement or it's before the Civil
War, so there's probably some kind of conflict
about slavery going on in the United States,
'cause there was pretty much always some kind of conflict going on politically about slavery." So just consider how this
might have contributed to one of the major
themes or important ideas of the era, and then maybe
you can find something that would connect up with that. Cool, all right, we
also have some questions just about form, so do you
have to restate the question in your answer, and how
long should the answer be? You do not, although
sometimes it's just helpful to do that, 'cause it
kind of gives you basis for your question. So it's not required,
but if you're nervous and you're just trying to
think about what to write, maybe you just write the
answer with the question at the beginning of it. And then how long, I would
say probably just a sentence or so for each part, so
I would say just kind of get to the meat of it, and
so you'd say for example, "One major historical factor
that led to an increase in immigration before the
Civil War were push factors from Europe, for example,
the Irish potato famine, which made it very
difficult for Irish people to continue to survive in
Ireland, so they emigrated to the United States," done. In reading these, I would
often find people who wrote an entire page but never mentioned anything specific, and
that was very frustrating, 'cause you knew that had
spend a lot of time writing, but they never mentioned
a fact, and so it was hard to give them a point. So throughout this entire
exam, I think the best thing you can do for yourself is
mention a specific example and then explain how it
relates, explain what it is and how it relates. All right, so that is one
short answer question. Should we try another
short answer, or would you like to move on to the
long essay question? All right, I'm seeing
that the consensus is to move on, so let's head to
the long essay question, if I can find it. There we go, getting close. Okay, so this is a typical
long essay question from the exam, so let me
tell you a little bit about the timing for these exams. So the first part of the exam
that we just talked about, section one, has the
multiple choice section and the short answer questions,
and for that you get an hour and 45 minutes, and
that's 55 multiple-choice questions and four short answer questions. I'm not sure if you're
allowed to move on to the short answers right away,
I honestly don't know. I might have to check
that out, but I would say budget maybe a minute or
so per multiple choice question and then move on to
the short answer questions, and maybe budget about five
minutes apiece for those, see how that gets you. 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. 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." All right, so how would we go
about answering this question? 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 1870. The 13th was right at the
end of Civil War in 1865. 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 200 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?" I wouldn't say that you
have to do it a certain way, I think there are a couple
of tried and true ways to do this sort of 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?" The answer is, not much at all. 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. So pardon me. 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. And there's a useful acronym for this, and many of you might have
seen this in your AP class, your teacher may have said this to you, and it's called SOAPSTONE, do I have any SOAPSTONE love out there? SOAPSTONE. And this is an acronym
that just kinda helps you remember what you might
look at in a primary document, and so SOAPSTONE stands
for speaker, occasion, how do you spell that, audience, purpose, subject, and tone, SOAPSTONE. 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 1982, 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. That's what I'm missing, audience. So kind of identify those. Okay, so I've got a bunch
of questions about the DBQ here, some people are
asking which period the DBQ will cover? 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 1607, or the period after
1980, '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 1607, so the start of Jamestown,
and before 1980, so end of Vietnam. Okay, and I see one question
that says, "How many documents should we include in the DBQ?" And the answer is, you
should include six of them, there'll be seven documents
on there, and you can include all but one. 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 1773," I think, possibly 1774, in which a
group of the Sons of Liberty dumped tea in protest of taxes on tea. 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." So use the names, the
specific names of things, to show that you have a
command of important events and people, then actually
say what those things are, and then connect them
back up to your thesis, and I think if you did
that across the exam, you'd be very well
placed to do quite well. All right, so other things. We've got people asking
if there are study guides, and there are. At the beginning of this
program I shared some AP review that we have on Khan
Academy, it's under the, I think it's just General
AP Strategies and Skills, and there I have more videos
where I talk about how to do these essays in
detail, but I also have a study sheet there that
outlines the major themes, important takeaways from each period. So if you wanna go take a
look at that, I think that's a really good just overall
sense of what's happening, and that's broken down
by themes or things like American national identity,
work and exchange, so just kind of a sense
of what was going on, work and exchange. All right, anything else? What should you focus on
memorizing in this week, besides the amendments? Honestly, I would go back to
the general gist of things, and that would just be
to say, "Okay, in period two, right, this was the
1607 to 1754, just a sense like, yeah, there were
some colonies happening," and the colonies had different
reasons for being founded, different ways of
organizing their societies. You might say, "Yeah, I
remember that the English were more into trying to
have religious refuge, whereas the Spanish were more
into trying to get gold." And do that for each of the
periods, just break it down into a few important things
that you wanna take away, and then stop worrying
about memorization, I think. Anything else? Okay, tips for document citation. I think you can actually just
say like, "In document one," in the DBQ. You don't need to quote
from the document at length, you might just say like,
"In document three, Barbara Erinreich talks about the
importance of good cancer treatment," that was just
something off the top of my head. So you don't need to do into
a full Chicago-style citation or put every single thing
that is included on the explanation of what that is
in the DBQ in your essay, I would just kind of a gesture
toward it, toward the author and their subject. All right, basic fallbacks
if you don't know something about a particular period. You know, I think there
are some large things that go across American
history, like things that are characteristic of
American history, perhaps, and that might be the United
States, up until about the turn of the 20th century
tended to be isolationist I their foreign policy, so before then, you could be pretty much
sure that that was all that the United States was,
they were not interested in foreign wars. And you can kinda have
a big sense, like eh, after World War II, the
United States wanted to defeat communism, so they
got into many wars abroad with the goal of containing communism. So I think there's som broad
strokes that carry across time periods, and your instinct
there is probably good. All right, oh okay, can
you go over how to get the contextualization point, and that's on the DBQ, I'm assuming. So the contextualization
point on the DBQ is I think similar to what your
introduction might be, and that is just kind
of setting the stage for what's going on, so for
example, the DBQ last year, I believe, was about the
rise of the women's rights movement, and so you could
kind of set the stage there, I think it was from 1945
to 1970, so it's after World War II, so that
would be a place where you would say for example,
"Well, during World War II, many women worked in
factories, and they had a experience to earn wages
for themselves for the first time, they found
that very liberating and then after the war,
many of them lost their jobs and white women back to the suburbs, and many African-American
women and minority women had to go back to prior
occupations that weren't as well-paid. So over the course of the 1950s more and more discontent bred." So it's kind of showing
that you know something about this period, and about this topic, outside of just what
the documents tell you. All right, anything else? General tips for time
management on the exam. I think this is something
where practice helps, and knowing yourself a bit helps. I am, I think I'm a fast
writer myself, but I'm a slow planner, so knowing
that it's not gonna take me as long to write
something down means that I can spend a little bit more time planning, but you might find that
you're the opposite, you can plan super-fast
but you know you wanna take some more time to write. So maybe use a little
bit about what you know of your own learning style. Also, you're not gonna be on your own, during the exam the proctors
will tell you how much time you have left and they'll also say, during the essay portion,
"At this point, it might be a good idea to move onto
the second essay," so given the amount of experience
that they have in this, I would trust their judgment. All right, well I think we're at about the end of our time here. I'm so glad that you
took the time to join me, and I'm really rooting
for you on the exam, let me know how it goes. And again, if you have
any questions or concerns about the AP exam, check out
our Khan Academy resources, I read the comments in those all the time, so I will probably answer
you if you leave a comment on any of those articles or videos. And I also wanted to let
you know that we'll be doing another livestream pretty soon, and it will be in a
couple of weeks with our SAT tutor, Eric. So we'll be doing a live
SAT prep on SAT material in just a couple of weeks. So thank you again so much,
good luck on the exam, and let me know how it goes.