Questions about change, or about impact or influence, are also about causation, for any good answer will go beyond what happened to why. Asking “why” is at the heart of what historians — including the AP history text makers — mean by analysis. A quick way to see whether you have provided analysis in your answer is to see whether it includes the word because. There are many other ways to analyze, but most sentences containing the word because at least attempt to analyze something.
Some question prompts might also address causation directly, asking you to explain the reasons for something or analyze the causes for something. The historical causation chart on page xxxvi will provide you with a good way to structure your answer. Take a question about the causes of Columbus’s voyages of exploration, for example. After your thesis statement that directly addresses the prompt of the question, you could begin with large-scale processes that developed over centuries. These might include trading networks through which Europeans became familiar with the products of Asia and Africa, such as spices, silk, and ivory; conflicts between Christianity and Islam, which shaped Spanish culture especially in the many centuries when Christians fought Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; improvements in ship design and navigational instruments. Then you could move to complex causes that were more immediate: the expansion of the Ottoman Empire that disrupted old trade routes and decreased the direct access of western Europeans to exotic luxuries; the aims of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to compete with Portugal in the race for direct access to spices and to continue the expansion of Christianity; the invention of the printing press, which allowed works by earlier geographers and travelers to be cheap and accessible to ship captains and merchants; Columbus’s personal ambition, desire for glory, and religious fervor.
If the question prompt is about consequences as well as causes, you can continue using the chart to discuss the many consequences of Columbus’s voyages. Among these were unintended consequences, which begin with one that seems almost too obvious: Columbus’s voyages made Europeans aware that there were other large landmasses in the world than the ones they already knew about. (This is what we mean by “discovering” — becoming aware of something that is already there.) As you probably know, at first Columbus did not recognize what he had discovered, and even after he did he spent most of his efforts trying to get around these new lands to reach Asia, his intended destination. Although Columbus claimed the lands that he explored for Spain, he (along with the Spanish monarchs who backed him) was primarily looking for trade connections, not lands to conquer. So you might even choose to argue that colonization was an unintended consequence. Beyond this is a range of changes that were truly unintended, such as the widespread exchange of animals, plants, human populations, and diseases across the Atlantic in both directions, later called the “Columbian exchange.”
Again depending on the exact question prompt, you might also want to discuss contingency, the fact that things might have turned out differently. One of the most common problems in analyzing cause and effect in the past is that we know the outcome, or at least the outcome up to now. It is thus very tempting to view developments teleologically, that is, as leading inevitably to the outcome that we know happened. Immediately after a game is over, for example, commentators often explain why the team that won was destined to win, although if the other team had won, they would have a ready explanation for that as well. Immediately after an election, the loser’s strategy is analyzed as faulty and misguided, although if the results had been different, the same strategy would have been praised as brilliant. In this example, all large-scale processes and long- and short-term causes seem to lead to Columbus. It is easy to imagine the story turning out differently, however. An Aztec conquest of Europe would not have been a possibility, but Columbus’s ships could have easily sunk on the first voyage. Or Ferdinand and Isabella could have said no. Or John Cabot — like Columbus, an Italian trying to get backing for voyages from a western European monarch — could have moved to England slightly earlier than he did and thus could have convinced Henry VII of England to support him in 1490 instead of 1496. Not every question about causation will lend itself to thinking about possible alternate scenarios so easily, but in every historical event there are some lines of causation that are coincidental.
Comparison Questions
Another historical thinking skill often involved in essay questions is comparison. Questions drawing on this skill might be phrased “Compare and contrast . . . ” or “Analyze similarities and differences . . . ” Your thesis statement should focus on major similarities and differences, but cannot simply be “There were similarities and differences in A and B.” Instead it must include some information about how A and B were similar or different. When you place two countries, two ways of thinking, or two trade patterns side by side, what do you notice? How are they similar? How are they different? One good way to structure the thesis for a comparative question is “Although A and B were different in C, they were similar in D.”
Once you move beyond the most basic level of identifying broad similarities and differences, you need to be more precise. You should begin by teasing out both categories in more detail, providing specific evidence to support your broad generalizations. For example, in broad terms the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions all included demands for liberty and equality and all of them significantly expanded citizenship rights. In all three these rights were limited to men, another similarity among them. But only in the Haitian Revolution — in which a massive slave revolt led to the end of slavery and Haiti’s independence from France — were those rights extended to men of African descent. Just as with change and continuity, it’s often worthwhile to indicate whether you think similarities are more significant than differences, or vice versa, and why.
You need to be careful about the structure of this essay. Many students fall into the trap of simply describing topic one in a body paragraph and topic two in a separate body paragraph. They assume that readers will be able to recognize the similarities and differences between the two topics on their own. But you’ll never earn a high score that way.
After your introductory paragraph and thesis statement, always begin each body paragraph with a topic sentence that introduces the category or topic you want to compare. Your comparisons need to be explicit and concrete. Be sure to use clear signal words that identify that you are shifting from similarity to difference. (“Despite these similarities in ___, the two countries differed dramatically.”) In the contrast portion of your essay be clear about the particular difference, making use of contrast words such as conversely, unlike, and however to signal your point to the reader.
In brainstorming similarities, try to step back and think in more abstract conceptual terms so you don’t miss deep similarities that seem different on the surface. For example, students sometimes say that a king is different from an emperor, because they focus on the different titles. But both are hereditary monarchs typically viewed as having divine authority to rule. That makes them very similar in deep ways, despite the different labels. They are much more similar to each other than they are to, say, a leader of a democracy or a Communist regime.
Students sometimes wonder whether the first body paragraph should focus on similarities or differences. One way to approach this is to deal with the less significant topic first, get it out of the way, and move on to the more significant topic. But that is really a matter of taste. What is important is that you provide a clear transition when you move from the compare to the contrast portion of your essay (or vice versa): “These similarities [that you’ve just discussed], however, were much less crucial than differences in x, y, and z.” If this sounds like a repeat of your thesis statement, that’s because it is. In the body of your essay, you want to echo the road map — your thesis — to help your reader know that you are making the transition that you indicated in the introductory paragraph that you would be making.
You might be thinking that the suggestions here about answering comparative questions sound quite similar to those about answering change-over-time questions, and you would be absolutely right. Embedded (and not very deeply) in change-over-time questions are comparisons, for the only way that you can identify something as a change or continuity, or assess the impact of something on something else, is to compare them. To transform these comparisons into analysis, you will need to provide relevant historical evidence, contextualize the developments you are discussing, and evaluate causes and effects. As we have said all along, all the historical thinking skills are related, which is why the final thinking skill is synthesis: “the ability to arrive at meaningful and persuasive understandings of the past by applying all of the other historical thinking skills.”*
Many students feel anxious about having to write the AP history essays. But once you become familiar with the elements of each prompt and know how to address them effectively, you’ll realize that there’s no reason to be stressed about this. In fact, you should feel confident as you approach the writing portion of the test. Unlike the multiple-choice portion of the AP exam, 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 through a historian’s lens, and sharing your ideas in class, you may begin to look forward to this opportunity to show just how developed your historical thinking skills are.
*http://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/historical-thinking