The Document-Based Question, or DBQ, is a defining feature of all AP history exams. Of all the essays, this one tends to make students the most anxious. But much of this anxiety is misplaced. Once you understand the DBQ, you will feel less worried about it — and may even come to find it your favorite essay type. Unlike the other essays, for which you have to call on your memory to provide all the evidence, the documents in the DBQ form the basic evidence you need to use.

To do well on a DBQ, you need to go beyond the content of the documents in order to set the context, make a clear argument, and analyze the documents properly. Using documents as evidence requires the sophisticated analysis skills we discussed in the section titled “Appropriate Use of Relevant Historical Evidence.” This means that you have to consider the perspective or point of view of the documents. Every primary source — textual, visual, or statistical — was created for a specific purpose. Even if the author is an eyewitness or participant, people construct different accounts of the same event, which are shaped by their perspectives. That doesn’t necessarily mean the author intentionally wrote it to mislead or to provide only part of the story, but every document is limited and imperfect in the information it provides.

As with all essay questions, be sure your introductory paragraph includes a clear and focused thesis statement that encapsulates your argument. Use the reporter questions — Who? What? Where? When? Why? — to interrogate each document, and then consider the limitations of each document before writing your DBQ. Then be sure to incorporate these insights about document limitations into the essay itself to make your essay more analytical — and therefore stronger.

Consider the example of the photo depicting European immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century on page 801 in Chapter 24. Students tend to view a document like that as a straightforward factual record. After all, we often hear that “pictures don’t lie.” But the picture was taken for a particular purpose by someone who decided to arrange the shot so that the women in light clothing are in the center of the picture looking up at the camera. So it’s worth asking why the photographer took the picture in this way. What purpose might this picture serve? What message might it convey to someone who saw it at the time it was taken? How might it misrepresent — or represent in a limited way — the realities of the immigrant experience?

Purposes can be stated explicitly by the maker of a source, or they can be determined later by those analyzing the source, including you as you write your answer to a DBQ. Sometimes the purposes given by the maker and by later historians are different from one another. For example, during the Renaissance, European city governments issued laws limiting what people could spend on clothing or family celebrations such as weddings. The governments stated that the purpose of these laws was to restrict wasteful spending, but later historians studying these laws have determined that their purpose was also to make distinctions between social classes sharper. For many of the documents you will be using to answer a DBQ, you will need to make your best judgment about the purpose, just as historians do.

You also need to corroborate your documents. That means bringing the documents into “conversation” with each other. Since the documents in a DBQ don’t directly refer to each other, you have to use your intuition to see connections. This relates to a distinctive task about the DBQ: you need to organize the evidence from the documents into several categories or groups — usually at least three. The categories are sometimes stated or implied in the prompt, but you’ll often have to call on your knowledge of history and the content of the documents themselves to determine what categories (and how many) make sense. Note that you can use the same document multiple times, so that often gives you flexibility in coming up with categories. You might choose to group the documents according to geography, or the social status of their authors, or the type of document, or what they say about the issue discussed in the question, or according to any number of other lines of connection.

In many chapters of this book the authors have included multiple primary sources that address the same or related topics and have sometimes developed questions that allow you to bring the documents in conversation with each other just as you will for a DBQ. For example, in Chapter 12, “Primary Source 12.2: Cassandra Fedele on Humanist Learning” and “Primary Source 12.3: Pico della Mirandola, ‘On the Dignity of Man’” both discuss the human capacity for learning. They were written in the Renaissance by well-to-do Italians who were almost the same age, one of them male and the other female. Comparison is one of the historical thinking skills identified for AP history exams, and it is often a task word in essay questions. Thus, to practice the skills needed for the DBQ, you could compare these two documents, as the authors have already suggested in their questions accompanying Primary Source 12.2 on page 364. “Primary Source 18.1: Parisian Boyhood” and “Primary Source 18.2: The Catechism of Health” offer similar possibilities for comparison, as both relate to the ideas and practices of child rearing in the eighteenth century. Again, the authors have provided a comparative question to get you started in the questions accompanying Primary Source 18.2 on page 584.

Finally, you have to draw on your outside knowledge. To do well, you need to position the DBQ documents within the broader context of the period, drawing on what you’ve learned from your textbook, your teacher, and any outside reading or research you’ve done. Feel free to mention other sources you may have encountered previously, especially if they offer a perspective that is missing or if the addition of outside sources helps to support your argument. In Chapter 20, for example, many of the primary sources and illustrations depict children’s and women’s work during the Industrial Revolution. If these were the sources provided for a DBQ, you would use the information in the textbook, especially that in the section “New Patterns of Working and Living” on pages 667–673, to provide broader context for your answer.