A Primer

DAVE NEUMANN

Director, The History Project

California State University, Long Beach

Students and adults alike often grumble that history is just a bunch of facts to memorize. While it’s true that studying history requires data, information, and facts, 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^®) World 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^® World History class and exam, as well as improve the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that will be useful in college and in your future career.

Historical Thinking Skills for World History

The AP^® World 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.

While all historians use the skills described here, world historians use them in distinctive ways. That’s because world history deals with a much larger region (often the entire globe) and a much longer period of time (thousands of years) than United States history or even European history. Thus, while the AP^® United States History and AP^® European History courses employ these very same skills, in AP^® World History you will practice historical thinking from a very broad point of view. And even though we discuss each skill separately below, 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 other skills at the same time.

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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—that is, the portions written by Drs. Robert Strayer and Eric Nelson—is in fact a secondary source with which you might disagree. To do so, you would use historical thinking skills in order to question their interpretation of primary sources.

Analyzing Evidence: Content and Sourcing—Primary Sources

Traditionally, primary sources have consisted overwhelmingly of written sources. In fact, historians used to refer to any time before the invention of writing as “prehistory.” In the last few decades, however, historians have moved well beyond relying exclusively on written primary sources. Historians now use paintings, photographs, architecture, artifacts, and so on, as well as evidence from other fields of knowledge. For example, scientific and medical information informs historians about the role that disease played throughout history. And since no historian can be an expert in every field, they also make use of the secondary-source scholarship of specialists who have studied materials such as ancient DNA or pottery shards in their own concentrated studies.

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).

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The following questions will help you examine primary sources:

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Interpretation—Secondary Sources

Historians interpret both primary and secondary sources, evaluating points of view and considering context to create their own interpretations. By analyzing different historical interpretations, you will see how historical interpretations change over time.

Formulating a historical argument requires making inferences from evidence. For example, most scholars agree that the adoption of agriculture about 11,000 years ago marked the beginning of a major world historical development. But because this development preceded writing, our only evidence comes from archeology and anthropology. Consequently, historians disagree about whether agriculture led to permanent settlement in a particular location—or vice versa.

Not surprisingly, the background of a particular historian (gender, nationality, political philosophy, time of writing, etc.) often shapes the way he or she interprets the past. In many cases, knowing something about the context of a historian can help you understand his or her argument better—in the same way that understanding the context of the author of a primary source helps you understand the primary source. Sometimes, this information can help you identify the prejudices or limitations of a particular interpretation.

For example, in the early 1960s a British historian claimed that Africa had no history until Europeans took over the continent. Subsequent scholarship has shown this conclusion to be quite false, and we can assume that this historian’s context as a citizen of an imperial nation writing during the era of decolonization influenced his outlook. About the same time, American scholars developed an influential model of modernization for “third world” countries. Later scholars have argued that this model oversimplified the world by assuming all countries would grow economically the same way the United States had.

You can’t simply assume, however, that because a scholar has a particular background he or she will make a certain argument. There are far too many exceptions for such a rule. Instead, begin by finding out what you can about a scholar’s background and then develop a hunch about how this background might shape his or her views. Then, as you read the scholar’s argument, carefully look for evidence that the author actually makes the kinds of arguments you anticipated. If you don’t find such evidence, discard your hunch.

Making Historical Connections

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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 (such as examining how patriarchy—a term you will learn well in AP^® World History—manifested in cultures). 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

Comparisons help world historians understand how one development in the past was similar to or different from another development, and in this way determine what was distinctive. For example, through comparative study, scholars have concluded that empires that developed over the last 2,000 years share key features. First, rulers have to legitimize their rule through religious or ideological traditions. Second, they have to maintain political unity by dealing with people on the peripheries of the empire. Finally, since empires develop by conquering other groups of people, their leaders have to deal with ethnic diversity among their subjects and the tensions this diversity can cause.

But while these patterns hold true for all empires, each one addresses these challenges in its own way. The Ottoman Empire justified its rule through Turkish tradition as well as Islamic belief. Its leaders rewarded loyal elites on the margins of their empire through tax breaks. And they dealt with minorities by creating the millet system (whereby Ottoman subjects were divided into religious communities, each ruled by its religious leaders). Through the tool of comparison, we understand how Ottoman rulers handled common problems in unique ways.

As you develop this skill, practice comparing two states that existed at the same time, like the Ottoman and Mughal empires. You can also compare the same state at two different points in time. For example, how was government in Song China similar to—and different from—government in Tang China? Be sure that the two things you’re comparing are relatively similar, or else comparing doesn’t make much sense.

Contextualization

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Historians know that just as historical events make more sense when they’re studied alongside similar events, any event can be understood only in context. Context refers to the historical circumstances surrounding a particular event. World historians look for major global 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, when reading the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s “Speech to the General Congress of the Republican Party”, note that it was written in 1927. What were the major immediate geopolitical developments at this point of the twentieth century? World War I had recently ended when he made this speech, which is likely to be crucial for understanding the speech. The war accelerated nationalist ideologies and calls for national self-determination, which are crucial for understanding what Atatürk is concerned about. The broad context of nationalism and liberal republicanism form the background that help explain Atatürk’s leadership.

Synthesis

Some complex historical developments can be grasped only by examining multiple elements separately, then pulling them all together. Synthesis is a complex skill that challenges you to draw a variety of evidence, themes, and/or patterns together into a coherent understanding. To synthesize, you may need to draw on evidence outside the field of history, particularly from the social sciences: archeology, anthropology, economics, sociology, and so on. 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.

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Chronological Reasoning

Our third historical thinking category, chronological reasoning, means thinking logically about how and why the world changes—or, sometimes, 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

Causation has to do with explanations about how or why changes take place in world history. Sometimes there is an obvious connection between an event and its consequence, like a cue ball striking the eight ball and making it move. Some events seem fairly straightforward: the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted President Roosevelt to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. But even this seemingly simple example is more complex. Why did Japan attack the United States? What role did the American embargo on the sale of oil have on Japan’s decision? Why did the United States enact this embargo? All of these other events took place just a few years before the Pearl Harbor attack. If we go even further back, we’ll see the ways European imperialism, the Meiji Restoration, and early-twentieth-century Japanese expansion help explain the Pearl Harbor attack.

As this example shows, you will need to pay attention to both short-term and long-term factors to understand the causes (and effects) of historical events. Also, just as there were many factors behind the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, most examples of historical causation involve multiple causes. Historical causation also involves large processes, unintended consequences, and contingencies, as the following chart describes.

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Historical causation involves …

You can begin to develop the skill of determining causation by asking yourself, what reasons explain this development? When you encounter a significant change in world history and you identify immediate causes, you should then zoom your analytical lens out to look for longer-term factors.

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 detect; 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.

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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.

To work on developing this skill, look for places in your textbook where the authors directly indicate that a historical pattern persisted over time and explain why that pattern persisted. Conversely, if the authors focus on change in world history, you can still find continuity by inference, since few things ever change completely. So when you read about a new development, ask yourself what didn’t change. For example, while Buddhism became popular after its introduction into China, Confucianism remained an important force in Chinese culture.

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 those eras labels can provoke disagreement, particularly when talking about a subject as vast as world history. Periods are, after all, constructed by historians and reflect the particular context in which they are writing. Some world historians, for example, argue for a major division at 1000 C.E., which would highlight the beginning point of the growing importance of nomadic peoples in the period between 1000 and 1450. Others prefer to maintain a single period from about 600 to 1450, since they don’t think nomadic empires significantly interrupted a larger period of Afro-Eurasian contact. These disagreements often carry over into the classroom. The AP^® World History course used to include a break at 1914, instead of the current course’s break at 1900. The older periodization made World War I a major turning point. Pushing the period back to the beginning of the twentieth century in 1900 places the war in the context of other important contemporary developments, including those less focused on Europe, such as the rise of nationalist movements among colonial peoples.

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As you become familiar with periodization, pay attention to the chapter you’re in, noting the major time period and thinking about what the different labels for that era say about the main “story” of that era. Keep in mind that these labels may differ among your teacher, your textbook, or the AP^® World History Curriculum Framework.

Creating and Supporting an Argument

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The final step in historical thinking is learning to formulate and communicate your own conclusions about the past. The word argument reminds us that any attempt to explain the past requires interpretation, since our understanding of the past is limited by distance from the events we study and the incomplete evidence that has survived. Earlier you learned about how historians make arguments; now you’ll practice making your own. Arguing means making a logical case for your interpretation of a particular historical question or controversy.

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. 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.

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, as you 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 world history questions.

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Getting the Most out of Reading World History

Active reading means reading for meaning. The big challenges of reading relate to length and detail, and the topic of world 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

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.

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Again, there’s no need to write this down. The point right now is just to get a clear idea of the “big picture” of the part where this chapter appears. Now turn to the chapter itself and answer these similar questions:

At this point, you haven’t read the chapter, 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

As you read chapters of this text, remember that reading is an active process—so stay focused. The meaning will become clear only 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.

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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 we usually organize our writing around the historical thinking skills discussed above: cause and effect, comparison, interpretation, and so forth. By questioning, you can identify these 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 using the glossary included on this text’s book companion Web site, 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.

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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 you’re 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.

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.

Note Taking

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 write notes only 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.

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Now that you know what this section is about, what brief comments are worth writing down in your notes?"

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.

Writing about World History

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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^® World History course and exam. 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 Question

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, but both the DBQ and the Long Essay require you to draw on relevant outside knowledge of the subject. And in each case, you will need to place the essay question in appropriate historical context.

Finally, you need to demonstrate your mastery of synthesis. You will 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^® World 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 Essay

The Document-Based Question, or DBQ, essay is a defining and culminating feature of the AP^® 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!

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To do well on a DBQ, you need to use all, or all but one, of 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. Using documents as evidence requires the sophisticated analysis skills we discussed in the section on “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 included on page HTS-3 in the “Analyzing Evidence: Content and Sourcing—Primary Sources” section 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.

Consider the example of a photo depicting indentured servants on a nineteenth-century sugar plantation. Students tend to view a document like this as a straightforward factual record. After all, we often hear that “pictures don’t lie.” But someone took the picture for a particular purpose and the individuals are posed. So it’s worth asking why someone wanted this picture taken. What purpose would this picture serve? Since it’s posed, what’s left out of it? How might it misrepresent—or represent in a very limited way—the realities of the indentured experience?

You also need to corroborate your documents. That 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. This requirement relates to a distinctive task of the DBQ: you need to organize the evidence from the documents into several categories, 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 world history and the content of the documents themselves to determine what categories (and how many) make sense. Please note that you can use the same document multiple times, so that often gives you flexibility in coming up with categories.

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Many students feel anxious about having to write the AP^® World 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.