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Dave Neumann

Director, The History Project California State University–Long Beach

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Distinguished Professor of History University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

STUDENTS AND ADULTS ALIKE often grumble that history is just a bunch of facts and dates to memorize. While it’s true that studying history requires data, information, and facts and dates, that’s not the essence of what history is. History is a way of understanding the world by learning about the past. It is an interpretive reconstruction of the past based on several skills. Advanced Placement (AP^®) European History requires students to demonstrate an understanding of these skills. This primer will help you develop the historical thinking skills needed to succeed in your AP^® European History class and exam, as well as improve the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that will be useful in college, in your future career, and in active citizenship.

Historical Thinking Skills

The AP^® European History curriculum introduces you to nine thinking skills in four categories, representing the ways historians talk about the past. These skills are sometimes described as “habits of mind.” This useful phrase should remind you that a skill needs to be practiced repeatedly until it becomes second nature. Because practice is an integral part of learning to think historically, the sections below include exercises to help you develop these “habits of mind.” Like shooting free throws, rehearsing dance moves, or playing scales, historical thinking skills need to be exercised regularly until you can use them easily and almost effortlessly.

Although we discuss each skill separately below, keep in mind that these skills overlap in many ways. For example, you can’t make a historical argument without also evaluating evidence. So as you develop one historical thinking skill, you’ll also be learning and practicing other skills at the same time.

ANALYZING HISTORICAL SOURCES AND EVIDENCE

To start, historians make arguments about the past based on evidence, which is categorized as either primary or secondary sources. A primary source is something produced in the time period you are studying. In contrast, a secondary source is a text written about that time period, usually something a historian writes long after the fact. Secondary sources result from scholarly research of primary sources. Effective historical thinking requires the ability to analyze primary sources — reading carefully for the author’s point of view and purpose, the format of the document, and its context — as well as to analyze the ways historians create interpretations (secondary sources) based on their own use of primary source evidence. Until now, you might have thought of your school textbooks as conveyors of facts and truths, but by definition, the narrative of this book is in fact a secondary source with which you might disagree. To do so, you would use historical thinking skills in order to question the authors’ interpretation of primary sources.

Analyzing Evidence: Content and Sourcing — Primary Sources

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Primary sources include written documents, but also objects, artistic works, oral accounts, landscapes that humans have modified, or even materials contained within the human body, such as DNA. For example, by using scientific and medical information, historians have come to see the historical role of diseases, such as the Black Death, which killed about one-third of the European population over just a few years in the middle of the fourteenth century. These sources become evidence once they are selected to answer a historical question.

In assessing primary sources, you need to begin with a careful examination of the source itself. But you also have to pay attention to the broader context of the source. Primary sources are creations from a particular time and place, often created for someone else, so determining the author, purpose, and audience of a source is essential to your understanding of it. It is often helpful to distinguish between primary sources that people in the past intentionally preserved (like government records) and those things that accidentally survived (such as materials in ancient trash heaps).

The following questions will help you examine primary sources:

Context How does the time and place of this document’s creation help you understand the document better?

Author How does information about the author’s position, identity, or experience help you assess his or her point of view or perspective?

Purpose and Audience Given the information above, what inference(s) can you make about the author’s purpose in creating this document?

Document How does information about the document help you assess its usefulness or limitations?

This book contains primary sources presented in a variety of ways. In each chapter there are individual written and visual sources, labeled “Evaluating the Evidence.” These have headnotes explaining something about the author and the document and providing context; they also have questions for analysis. Each chapter also has a group of primary sources designed to allow you to answer a specific historical question, labeled “Thinking Like a Historian.” This group of documents is similar to the Document-Based Question on AP^® exams (more on this below).

Interpretation — Secondary Sources

Along with primary sources, most historical inquiry is also based on secondary sources. Since no historian can be an expert in every field, he or she also relies on the work of previous historians. The narrative sections of this textbook, for example, are secondary sources, as are most published history works, biographies, and encyclopedias. Historians increasingly make use of the secondary sources produced by scholars in other fields as well, including archaeology, art history, biology, and chemistry. Sometimes a source can be both primary and secondary. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s history of World War II is a primary source, because he was directly involved in some of the events he describes, and also a secondary source, because he uses a variety of historical sources to tell the story of events during the war in which he was not directly involved.

Secondary sources are informed by the author’s knowledge about the subject and careful reading of primary and other secondary sources. But because evidence from the past is often incomplete or difficult to understand, historians inevitably make inferences to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Not all historians make the same inferences, so there are a variety of interpretations of most historical events.

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For example, all scholars agree that the growth of industry first in England and then elsewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a major historical development. It was so important, in fact, that we call it a revolution — the Industrial Revolution — and this book devotes all of Chapter 20 to its origins, spread, and impact. But historians disagree about the most significant causes for the way industry developed. Some highlight England’s river-accessible coal deposits, which provided a source of power far greater than human or animal power. Others point to the English culture of innovation, in which artisans and inventors read scientific works and looked for solutions to practical problems. Still others emphasize the role of England’s overseas colonies, which provided raw materials and markets for manufactured products.

To assess whether a secondary source presents a valid interpretation of an event or development, ask yourself how historians think they know what they know about a particular event. What evidence do they provide? What inferences do they make from this evidence? Do they use evidence that presents a range of perspectives? Do they take into account evidence that might point to alternative explanations?

MAKING HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS

The second category of historical thinking skills reflects the ways historians make sense of the past by placing details and particulars in some larger framework. For example, we understand historical events and processes by comparing them to related events and processes to see how they’re similar and different. Second, historians recognize that they can only really understand historical evidence, including artifacts, photographs, speeches, and historical narratives (secondary sources) when they know something about their context, that is, the time and place when they came into existence.

Comparison

People learn things not in isolation but in relationship. Historians are no different, for they often analyze historical events and processes by comparing them to related events and processes. Comparisons help historians understand how one development in the past was similar to or different from another development, and in this way determine what was distinctive. Evaluating change and continuity is one form of comparison — across time — but historians also make comparisons across space, social class, religion, and many other categories. For example, scholars have concluded that the countries of western Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century shared key features, as detailed in Chapter 23. First, they adopted constitutions of some sort that generally extended voting rights to a larger share of the male population, and mass politics emerged. Second, pragmatic leaders expanded the social responsibilities of government, offering education and some public health benefits, recognizing that these would make people more loyal to their governments. Third, the countries all saw growing popular nationalism, encouraged by new symbols and rituals, such as national holidays, commemorative monuments, and flags.

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But while this pattern holds true for all western European nations, each developed in a distinctive way. Through the tool of comparison we can see how leaders and ordinary people handled common problems in unique ways.

As you develop this skill, practice comparing two nations in the nineteenth century — like France and Germany — and also compare the same nation at two different points in time. For example, how was government in France during the late nineteenth century similar to that of France in the Napoleonic era of the early nineteenth century? How was it different? What had happened during the nineteenth century to lead to these differences?

Contextualization

Historians know that just as historical events make more sense when they’re studied alongside similar events, any event can only be understood in context. Context refers to the historical circumstances surrounding a particular event. Historians look for major developments in any era to help determine context. Also, in the same way that they conceptualize causation at different scales, they typically think in terms of two levels of context: an immediate (or short-term) context and a broad (or long-term) context.

The easiest way to begin thinking about context is to figure out when a particular event took place (or when a particular document was created). Then brainstorm the major developments of the era. Ask yourself, how might these larger events have shaped this event (or document)?

For example, as Chapter 13 explains, the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century was propelled by the personal religious struggle of Martin Luther, a German university professor and priest. In 1517 Luther wrote a letter to the archbishop of the territory in which he lived, protesting the sale of indulgences, pieces of paper signed by a church official that promised forgiveness of sins. Luther’s letter was printed, first in the Latin in which he wrote it and then in German translation, and widely read. This letter is often seen as the triggering event of the Protestant Reformation, but to understand why it had such dramatic effects, you need to consider the larger context. That context includes both the immediate context of the political and social situation in Germany in the early sixteenth century and the long-term context of calls for reform of the Christian Church that stretched back centuries. The context sometimes includes factors that might at first seem unrelated. In this case, the invention of the printing press with movable metal type, which had occurred in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century, allowed Luther’s ideas to be communicated far more widely and quickly than they would have been without it. Many scholars argue that the Protestant Reformation would not have had the dramatic effects it did without printing.

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Synthesis

Some complex historical developments can only be grasped by making connections with other times, places, or issues. As defined in AP^® history courses, synthesis is a historical thinking skill that challenges you to draw on a variety of evidence, themes, or patterns to achieve a coherent understanding and make connections between a given historical issue and other contexts, periods, themes, or disciplines. To synthesize, you may need to draw on evidence outside the field of history. This might come from the social sciences, such as archaeology, anthropology, economics, or sociology, or it might come from the humanities, such as art history or literary studies, or it might even come from the natural sciences, such as biology or chemistry. Or you might need to apply insights from historical evidence in one historical period to developments in another period or to a similar development in another region. This is a variation on the skill of comparison. You might link some moment in the past to a contemporary issue, such as connecting the climate change and environmental degradation discussed in Chapter 30 to the industrialization of Chapter 20. In so doing, you are using the past to shed light on the present. You will have taken a major step in historical thinking, as making connections through synthesis is a key part of what historians do.

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CHRONOLOGICAL REASONING

Our third historical thinking category, chronological reasoning, means thinking logically about how and why the world changes — or stays the same — over time. While all fields of knowledge offer arguments based on evidence or make comparisons, historians are uniquely concerned about the past and its relationship to the present. How is the world different now than it was 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? Why did the world change? Why have some aspects of the world remained relatively the same over long periods of time? On what basis do historians simplify the long and complicated past by breaking it into smaller eras?

Causation

No historical event or development occurs in a vacuum; each one has prior conditions and causes, and each one has consequences. Historical thinking involves using evidence and reasoning to draw conclusions about probable causes and effects, recognizing that these are multiple and complex. Sometimes there is an obvious connection between an event and its consequence, like a cue ball striking the eight ball and making it move. And some events are fairly straightforward: the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by the Serbian revolutionary Gavrilo Princip in June 1914 led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, which led Serbia’s ally Russia to declare war on Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany, and ultimately led to World War I. But even this seemingly simple example is more complex, as Chapter 25 explains. Why did Princip decide to kill Francis Ferdinand? What role did Austria’s 1908 annexation of territories in which substantial numbers of Serbs lived play in his decision? Did Serbian military victories against the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and 1913 enter into his decision? All of these other events took place just a few years before the assassination. If we go even further back, we’ll gain additional insight into the larger context of Princip’s decision. A longer-term analysis might lead back to Chapter 23’s discussion of the system of alliances and treaties that had divided Europe into two hostile camps, and the widespread militarism and nationalism that encouraged leaders and citizens to see war as a way of testing national power and individual honor.

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Just as there were many factors behind Princip’s action, most examples of historical causation involve multiple causes and effects. Events and processes often result from developments in many realms of life, including social, political, economic, and cultural. Historians cannot test these in laboratories the way scientists can, but they can use historical evidence and reasoning to determine which of these are probable causes and effects. Historical causation also involves large processes, multiple causes, unintended consequences, and contingency, that is, the fact that the outcome of any historical event may not be what those who engaged in it intended or predicted. Chains of cause and effect in history are not predetermined, although they sometimes seem to be when we look at developments after the fact.

You can begin to develop the skill of determining causation by asking yourself, whenever some significant change in history is described, what reasons explain the development? If the answer seems simple, keep digging, because there’s bound to be a more complicated (and longer-term) explanation.

Patterns of Continuity and Change over Time

As is probably becoming evident, historians are interested in both historical changes and persisting patterns, or continuities. Change is usually easier to see than continuities; for example, when one empire overthrows another, that event often becomes part of the historical record. But some things stay relatively the same for long periods of time. Continuity (such as a network of trade that remains in existence for hundreds of years) is typically less dramatic than change and thus often harder to spot.

What counts as continuity depends on the scale of time you’re working with. For example, if we only look at the twentieth century, the emergence of the Soviet Union represents an important political development. However, if we examine Russia’s history since the formation of Kievan Rus in the ninth century, the Soviet era looks more like a modern variation of a longer pattern of autocratic rule.

When historians talk about continuity, they’re not implying that a particular pattern applied to everyone in the world or even in a particular region. Nor are they claiming that a particular pattern included absolutely no change or variation. For example, agricultural production has been continuous for thousands of years, but there are exceptions to this broad statement: on the one hand, some people have continued to be foragers; on the other hand, methods of farming have changed substantially with technology. So the continuity of agriculture is a generalization but not a completely unchanging pattern, or a pattern that applies to everyone on the planet.

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You can develop the skill of identifying continuities by looking for places in your textbook where the authors directly indicate that a historical pattern persisted over time and explain why that pattern persisted. But even when the authors focus on change in history, you can still find continuity by inference, since few things ever change completely. When the textbook describes a new development, ask yourself what didn’t change. For example, Chapter 16 describes new ways of understanding the world that developed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which thinkers emphasized the central importance of human reason as a measure by which all things should be judged. But it also points out that many of these thinkers used reason to defend traditional stereotypes about the inferiority of women or non-Europeans that had existed for centuries.

Periodization

Periodization refers to the ways that historians break the past into separate periods of time. Historians look for major turning points in history — places where the world looked very different before some event than it did after — to decide how to break the past into chunks. They then give a label to each period to convey the key characteristics and developments of that era.

Because the past is complex, any attempt to create eras and give these eras labels can provoke disagreement. For example, as Chapter 12 explains, the word Renaissance, which means “rebirth,” was first used in the late sixteenth century by the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari to describe artists such as his contemporary Michelangelo, whom Vasari regarded as geniuses even greater than those of the ancient world. Over time, the word’s meaning was broadened to include many aspects of life, expanded geographically to include developments in many countries, and extended chronologically to include several centuries. But scholars do not agree about when exactly the Renaissance began and when it ended, and they debate whether certain artists and writers should be considered “Renaissance” figures. Many note that along with significant changes during the Renaissance, there were also striking continuities with the medieval period that preceded it. Others have questioned whether the word Renaissance should be used at all to describe an era in which many social groups saw decline rather than advance. These debates remind us that all periodization is done by people after the fact, and it all involves value judgments. No English soldier in France in the fifteenth century, for example, knew that he was fighting what would later be called “the Hundred Years’ War” or that he was living in a period of time that would later be called “the Middle Ages.”

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As you become familiar with periodization, pay attention to the labels for various periods that are used in the chapter you’re reading. Sometimes chapter titles themselves contain a period label, which can give you an idea of what the authors have decided is the main story for that era. Chapter 23, for example, is titled “The Age of Nationalism,” and Chapter 30, the final chapter in the book, is titled “Life in the Age of Globalization.”

CREATING AND SUPPORTING AN ARGUMENT

Historians make arguments about what life was like in the past, how or why things changed, and why those changes matter. By “argument” in history, we mean not an emotional pitch for an opinion, but a logical and reasoned case for your interpretation of a particular historical question or issue based on supporting evidence gathered from primary and secondary sources used in a critical and coherent manner. The final step in historical thinking is learning to formulate and communicate your own arguments. Crafting a persuasive historical argument draws on all the other historical thinking skills — making appropriate use of relevant primary and secondary sources, evaluating continuity and change, synthesis, and contextualization. It also involves creativity, because you apply insights from historical evidence to a new setting, or in a different way.

Argumentation

Argumentation is a complex, sophisticated skill that will develop with practice over the course of the school year. Your teacher will likely employ various methods to help you develop this skill, from oral discussions to writing/journaling activities to practicing AP^®-style Document-Based Questions. Argumentation includes five components. First, a historical argument is a response to a particular debate or question, so forming an argument begins with identifying and framing a question. If you are responding to a prompt or a question posed by your teacher or a textbook, you have to understand the question itself and make sure your response clearly addresses that question. Framing the question means placing it in historical or historiographic context; therefore, often you will need to determine whether the question is part of a historical debate and, if so, what the sides are and where your response fits within that debate. You will also want to explain the significance of the question — what’s at stake or why the question matters. Second, you need to articulate your argument in a clear, concise, compelling way that directly responds to the prompt. Teachers typically identify this argument as your thesis — a short, explicit statement of your interpretation that appears near the beginning of your written response. For example, you might be asked to connect the growing ethnic diversity in Europe discussed in Chapter 30 to the long history of European colonialism and imperialism described in Chapters 14, 17, 24, and 28. Your argument in this case would then begin, “The growing ethnic diversity in Europe is linked to the history of European imperialism because . . .” Third, your argument or thesis needs to be substantiated by evidence, which may include both facts and information from lecture, textbook, or secondary texts, as well as your analysis of primary sources. Fourth, you need to frame your argument through the use of one or more historical thinking skills, like causation or comparison. Often, the wording of a question or prompt will provide some direction about the appropriate historical skill(s) to employ.

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Finally, the fifth step of argumentation is to convince your reader by using multiple, divergent, and sometimes contradictory pieces of evidence. In working with evidence, particularly primary sources, you have to explain the relationship between this evidence — including corroborating facts and resolving contradictions — while clearly showing how the evidence supports your thesis. Effective historical writing balances nuance and clarity: you need to recognize the complexity of historical questions (including interpretations that diverge from your own) while still making a clear, succinct argument. “Creating and Supporting a Historical Argument” is a culminating skill that reflects your ability to analyze evidence and draw on the other historical thinking skills — comparison, contextualization, synthesis, causation, continuity and change, and periodization — to provide your own compelling understanding of key history questions.

Getting the Most out of Reading History

Active reading means reading for meaning. The big challenges of reading relate to length and detail, and history has quite a lot of both. But if you understand the “big picture,” you can read much more quickly and effectively, which helps address the challenge of length. At the same time, recognizing the main ideas allows you to see when specific information is provided to illustrate those big ideas; this helps address the challenge of detail. The three stages of reading described below will help you understand the big picture when reading this and other college-level texts.

PRE-READING

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When approaching an informational text, it is helpful to spend a few minutes pre-reading the material. During the pre-reading stage, you are simply getting prepared for what you will be reading. This involves two steps. First, try to determine chronology, theme(s), and region(s). Do this by looking at chapter dates, the part or unit that includes that chapter (keeping in mind that not all books are divided into units/parts), the chapter that came before and the one that comes next, and the chapter title. Note that the next main section of a chapter may not describe something that happened later in time, but it may instead reflect a different theme about the same time and place. Second, try to determine the major changes, comparisons, and connections discussed in the chapter by scanning the section titles, images and captions (maps, charts, photos, etc.), and any pedagogical tools included (chronologies, key terms, document headnotes, review questions, exam tips, etc.). Also, skim the introduction to the chapter — usually reading the topic sentences of this section is sufficient.

Remember, there’s no need to write down the answers to these questions. The point right now is just to get a clear idea of the “big picture” developments covered in the chapter. You haven’t read the chapter yet, and you haven’t taken a single note. But by spending five minutes pre-reading the chapter, you already have a good idea what the chapter is about. By taking this time, you’ll be able to read with a clear focus, saving yourself a lot of time as you read more efficiently. Now that you have a good idea of the “big picture,” you’re ready to begin actually reading the text.

DURING READING

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As you read chapters of this text, remember that reading is an active process — so stay focused. The meaning will only become clear as you work at it. The authors have intentionally written an organized textbook and want you to be able to follow along, so take advantage of the clues provided, especially titles and headings.

Active readers use four skills to understand texts: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting. These steps don’t have to happen in a particular order. In fact, once you become comfortable with them, they’ll pop up in your mind independently without much effort on your part, perhaps several at the same time. That’s when you know that they’ve truly become habits of mind. Use these skills along with note taking to get the most out of your reading.

Questioning

Historians look at the world in a particular way, and they usually organize their writing around the historical thinking skills discussed above: causation, comparison, interpretation, and so forth. Many of the Chapter Preview questions in each chapter involve one or more of these thinking skills. For example, the first question in Chapter 11, “How did climate change shape the late Middle Ages?” is a question about change over time and about causation. As the authors answer that question in the chapter section on pages 324–325, they utilize every other historical thinking skill as well. They craft a historical argument using many types of relevant historical evidence, including evidence gathered by scholars in other fields, such as biologists who study tree rings; present a periodization of the events they describe, which historical geographers have termed a “little ice age”; compare the consequences in different parts of Europe and the responses of different rulers to the crisis; contextualize the developments within global processes of climate change; and develop an interpretation about the impact of climate change on late medieval Europe that synthesizes information from different sources and fields of inquiry. In this section the authors do not apply insights gained from studying climate change and natural disasters in the later Middle Ages to the present, but as you read it you might be reminded of current issues and thus do some synthesis of your own.

By questioning, you can identify patterns. For every chapter of this book, you want to find out the major subject. The easiest way to do this is to ask the “reporter questions”: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

Clarifying

Are there any words you don’t understand? If they’re crucial for making sense of the passage, can you define them by referring to the list of key terms, a dictionary, or another outside source? If there are any sentences you don’t understand, do they become clearer as you reread them or as you read on in the text?

When it comes to vocabulary, use good judgment. Is the word crucial for understanding the passage? If not, read right past it. If it is a crucial word, you may need to look it up in a dictionary. Before you take the time to look it up, however, check that it hasn’t been defined already for you in the text.

When a longer passage throws you off, usually clearing up difficult vocabulary will help make the passage clearer. If it doesn’t, simply reread the sentence a few times (slowly!). If it’s still unclear, back up — usually to the beginning of the paragraph — and try again. The most common way skilled readers get clarification is simply by rereading.

Summarizing

A summary is a brief review of the “big picture” of a particular section or chapter. After reading, briefly explain what each chapter is about in one sentence, being sure your summary answers all five questions from the “Questioning” section above. If you are summarizing a section, you might think of this as answering the focus question posed in the section. For example, a summary of the first section in Chapter 11 might answer the focus question “How did climate change shape the late Middle Ages?” as follows: People and animals (who) in northern Europe (where) died from famine and became more susceptible to disease (what) during the fourteenth century (when) because the climate became colder and wetter and governments did little to help them (why).

Predicting

Based on your reading of an entire section or chapter, what do you think will come next in the text? How do you know? You may think predicting what’s coming next is a waste of time, but it’s a really good test of how well you understand the flow of the text. If you’re in a car with your family going to visit your grandmother, you probably know the route to get there. If your mother takes an unanticipated turn, it alerts you that something is different from what you were expecting — and prompts you to ask why. So if your prediction based on reading is wildly off, it may alert you to the fact that your previous idea of the “big picture” of the section was off for some reason. You might need to back up and reread a section, or you might at least move forward with a better sense of where the author is going. Again using the first section of Chapter 11 as an example, what do you imagine will happen next to people who have been made weak by famine?

Note Taking

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Of course, simply reading the text is not sufficient. You’ll never remember everything that’s important unless you take notes. Students experience many pitfalls when taking notes. You should only write notes after you understand what you have read. Actively question, clarify, summarize, and predict in your head (or out loud) as you read each chapter; then go back through the subsections and take brief notes representing the key ideas of that section.

Brief is generally better: don’t wear yourself out on the notes themselves. Find some consistent abbreviations for frequent words, and use symbols. For example, use an up arrow to indicate growth, a flat arrow to indicate cause/effect, an “=” to indicate a definition, and so on. Don’t write everything; ask yourself if a particular point is a main idea or just an example. If you own your textbook, make annotations in the margins. If not, get a stack of sticky notes and place them in the margins for your comments.

POST-READING

Reflecting on what you’ve read places information you’ve just learned into long-term memory. Post-reading involves doing the same kind of summarizing you’ve done section by section, but now for the entire chapter. In essence, it is a summary of your summaries. While it might seem enough to summarize the chapter verbally, writing down key ideas helps you remember them a week or a month later. Read through the notes that you’ve taken for the chapter, particularly the summary of each section. Then, using no more than fifty words, try to write a master summary of the entire chapter that captures the key idea of each section of the chapter, as well as the chapter as a whole.

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Writing About History

This skills primer began by introducing you to the patterns of thinking you need to really understand history. The next section pointed out ways to be smart about reading your textbook. This third and final section turns to the writing skills you need to develop for the AP^® history courses and exams. Our focus now shifts from receiving input to providing output: you will learn how to share your understanding of historical thinking skills through writing. We will begin by addressing components that apply to all the writing tasks you’ll encounter.

To successfully demonstrate what you know, you have to answer the question that has been asked. This sounds simple, but many students get in trouble on the exam by failing to address the prompt in front of them. Every prompt contains several elements, and you need to pay attention to all of them as you plan your response to the prompt:

SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS

The main issue to note about the short-answer section of the AP^® exam is how quickly you need to respond to the writing tasks. You have to answer four questions in 50 minutes, which means that you have 12½ minutes per question, on average, to understand the question, brainstorm your response, and then write your answer. This task does not require that you form a thesis or create distinct paragraphs. It is a brief response to a very focused question.

LONG-ESSAY QUESTIONS

The Long-Essay Question (LEQ) and the Document-Based Question (DBQ) share many defining features. The following notes apply to both the LEQ and the DBQ, while a separate section includes specific suggestions for the DBQ.

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First, every essay needs to have a specific, focused thesis that makes an argument addressing the prompt. It doesn’t matter how strong your content knowledge and historical skills are if you can’t communicate clearly what you know. Your thesis should be as brief as possible, while still addressing the complexity of the topic. If you explicitly respond to each of the prompt elements clearly and accurately, you will have a strong thesis — and you’ll be on your way to a persuasive essay.

Second, every essay needs to be organized into distinct paragraphs. The number of paragraphs depends on the complexity of the prompt. Typically, however, two body paragraphs won’t be sufficient to address the topic thoroughly. What’s most important is that you clearly announce the point you’re going to make in each paragraph through a topic sentence that effectively covers the subject of the paragraph. Any content in the paragraph that doesn’t support the topic sentence doesn’t belong there.

Third, every essay requires you to make use of evidence to support your claims. The type of evidence also differs depending on the type of essay. The Document-Based Question (DBQ) requires you to reference each of the documents included with the question, and both the DBQ and the Long Essay require you to draw on relevant outside knowledge of the subject. And in each case, you need to place the essay question in appropriate historical context.

Finally, you need to demonstrate your mastery of synthesis. You do this by explaining how your argument relates to one of the following: a similar development in another part of the world or in a different era, a different course theme than the theme the question addresses (for example, if the question explicitly addresses economic developments, you may want to talk about the cultural consequences of this development), or another discipline (for example, how a historical political structure relates to government and politics, how anthropology sheds light on a particular form of economic organization, or how art history explains the meaning or significance of a particular painting).

While many of these writing suggestions would apply equally to essays in other academic subjects, the essay types on the AP^® European History exam are all geared to the concerns of history. Each type of essay requires the use of the historical thinking skills discussed above, often in combination with one another. For example, every essay requires you to discuss the historical context of the subject you’re writing about and to appropriately use relevant evidence.

DOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION

The Document-Based Question, or DBQ, essay is a defining and culminating feature of the AP^® European History exam. 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 type of essay. Unlike the other two essays, in 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. You also have your “Five Steps to Argumentation” to assist in organizing your essay. You’re already more prepared than you think!

To do well on a DBQ, you need to have a coherent thesis that responds to all parts of the question, and you need to use all the documents included in the question. In addition, you must go beyond the content of the documents in order to set the context, make a clear argument, and analyze the documents properly. You need to put the documents in conversation with one another by comparing them, noting how they contradict, support, or qualify one another. This means thinking about how the documents relate to each other. Since the documents in a DBQ don’t directly refer to each other, you have to use your deductive skills to see connections. You need to place the documents within the context of broader historical developments, and you also need to refer to a specific piece of evidence not found in the documents provided to support your argument.

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Using documents as evidence requires the sophisticated analysis skills we discussed in the section titled “Analyzing Historical Sources and 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. This doesn’t mean the author had an agenda, though sometimes that is the case. But even if the author didn’t have an agenda, every document is limited and imperfect in the information it provides. Use the questions on pages HTS-2 and HTS-3 to interrogate each document, and then explain the significance of the author’s point of view, author’s purpose, historical context, and/or audience for all or most of the documents in your answer.

Consider the example of the photo depicting European immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century on page 803 in Chapter 24. Students tend to view a document like this 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.

Finally, to do well on a DBQ, as on the LEQ, you need to demonstrate synthesis by explaining how your argument relates to a similar development in another part of the world or in a different era, a different course theme than the theme the question addresses, or another discipline.

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Many students feel anxious about having to write the AP^® European History essays. But once you become familiar with the elements of each prompt and know how to address these prompts effectively, you’ll realize there’s no reason to be stressed about this. In fact, you should feel confident as you approach the writing portion of the test. The essay section gives you a lot of freedom to demonstrate what you know in an open-ended way. And if you’ve been thinking historically, reading the text with that lens, and sharing your ideas in class, you may begin to look forward to the opportunity to show how developed your historical thinking skills have become.