Document-Based Questions

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 “Appropriate Use of Relevant Historical Evidence.” That 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 perspective. That doesn’t necessarily mean the author intentionally wrote it to mislead or 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? When? Where? 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 photo of men from the Kansas Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War on page 454 in Chapter 14. 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 soldiers would appear in uniform posed with their rifles. 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 soldier 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 sharpen distinctions between social classes. 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. Please note that because you can use the same document multiple times, you often have 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 all of the American Voices and Thinking Like a Historian features in this book, the authors have included multiple primary sources that address the same or related topics, along with questions that allow you to bring the documents in conversation with each other just as you will for a DBQ. For example, in Chapter 5, the feature Thinking Like a Historian, “Beyond the Proclamation Line” includes six brief primary sources of the types that you might encounter on a DBQ that speak to life in “Indian country” between 1763 and 1776. Voices range from the crown’s superintendent for Indian affairs in the northern colonies, to a Baptist minister’s description of the trading communities of the Ohio Valley, to a list of grievances by a Delaware headman. Comparison is one of the Historical Thinking Skills identified for AP history exams, and it is often a task word in essay questions, so use the document features and questions in this book to practice the skills needed for the DBQ.

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, from your teacher, and from any outside reading or research that you’ve done. Feel free to mention other sources that 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 the “Beyond the Proclamation Line” feature, for example, if these were the sources provided for a DBQ, you would use the information in the textbook, especially that in the section “The Problem of the West” on pages 163–166, to provide broader context for your answer.