Khan Academy Live: AP US History

E hey! I'm Kim, and welcome to our AP US History live study session at Khan Academy. So, the exam is this Friday, May 5th, and I would like to take some time with you over the next hour to talk through some of the major ideas that will kind of help you manage the exam.

I am a former US History professor. I got my Ph.D. in US history and then taught at the college level for eight years. So I've kind of been on the opposite side of this, seeing what students are like when they come into college having taken the AP exam.

Now, before this live stream started, I looked through your chats, and it seems like a lot of you are really nervous about the exam. I just wanted to share with you that I have been a reader for the AP exam. I went to Louisville with all the other teachers—about a thousand people go to read these exams every year. I met all the people who grade the exams; we sit together. It takes about eight days, and everybody reads about 6,000 exams. What I want you to know about that is that the people who are reading these exams are your teachers—they're ordinary people who teach history.

I think we have this sense that teachers are reading these exams and thinking, "Where can I find a place to take off points?" but it's completely the opposite of that. The teachers who are reading these exams are rooting for you. They are giving you every possible opportunity to score points. They're looking for a chance to give you a point for anything. So just keep in mind when you're writing these that you're not writing them for grumpy people who are looking down on you; you are writing them for your teachers who want you to succeed, and they're going to help you succeed however they can.

Alright, so that said, I first want to tell you a little bit about some other resources we have at Khan Academy to help you prepare for the exam, in case you want to do a little bit more than just sit here with me. One of the first things is that at Khan Academy, we've put together a complete resource with articles and exercises and videos from every part of US history.

So what's most important about this for you is that we have practice quizzes for every period—from Native American societies before contact to the US after 2000. So, you can see that I actually need to do a little bit more studying here. I've only gone through seven of these myself. But if you are just wondering, "How am I doing? Is there something that I could do to do a little bit of extra preparation to make sure I've got my ducks in a row?" check out the quizzes.

The second thing is a guide to the US History exam where I go through some very detailed examples of how to tackle these questions. I'm going to do that a little bit today, but if you're hoping to see some other examples, or you're wishing you could do this just a few more times to feel confident, check out our exam practice section, and I will take you through some more questions on the long essay, the DBQ, short answer, multiple choice, and hopefully, that will help you get a little bit more confident about your skills.

Okay, so what are we doing today? Here is our preview of coming events. I'm going to take about an hour talking with you, and I'm going to go pretty much step by step through the exam. We'll first talk about multiple choice questions—tips and strategies—and then short answer questions, and then we'll talk about the long essay question. If we have time, I'd like to do a little primary document analysis and try to help you use that primary document analysis to think about how you might strategize at the DBQ.

I want to encourage you throughout the session to ask questions that you might have. I'm going to pause in between each of these sections to answer some questions, and then hopefully, we'll leave a little time at the end to answer any general questions you might have about the exam. Alright, sound good?

Okay, let's start at the multiple choice section. I've got some practice questions for us here, and these are official practice set questions from the College Board. Alright, so here is a typical multiple choice question from the AP US History exam. What's important about this is that every single multiple choice question will have some kind of what they call stimulus material with it. The stimulus material might be something like a photograph, like this or a graph, a map, a set of quotes—it will be a primary document that kind of serves as the background for the question.

I think what's really nice about this is that, unlike the old AP US History exam, this one is not so much just kind of like a laundry list of facts that you're supposed to memorize. In fact, the whole AP US History exam is designed to kind of reward you for having a sense of what's going on in each historical time period and being able to reason from that. So, if you're panicking about how you're supposed to memorize all the names and dates and places and important people from 500 years of history, stop panicking and just think about overall themes.

Some important overall themes might be like the Gilded Age—that was a time when there was a lot of wealth inequality, immigration, and maybe industrialization. So, if you have that kind of sense of what the major themes and ideas were from each time period, that's really going to help you on the exam because you'll be able to use that intuition for history to help you answer questions with reason instead of just memorization.

Okay, so here is our first question, and it's based on this stimulus material of a photograph. This photograph is by the journalist Jacob Riis, and it's from the late 19th century. Okay, so that’s pretty much all the information that they give us. Now, you may have heard of Jacob Riis before; he was, I think, one of the first muckraking photographers. Muckraker! There we go.

If you remember your muckrakers, they were the journalists who tried to expose bad working conditions or corruption in industry or politics. Let's see, he's from the late 19th century, and what is this photograph telling us? Well, I think if we just take some time to examine it, we can tell that it's a whole lot of people. In fact, if I count, there’s one, two, three, four, five, at least six people—this might be somebody's legs—so six or seven people in a pretty small room. You can tell the room's pretty dirty and dingy, and it doesn't look like a nice place to hang out, basically.

Alright, so we've noticed some things about our primary document, so let's look at the questions themselves. I think one thing that is really important about this exam all the way through is that you need to read the questions really carefully because the questions tell you a lot about what time period, for example, that you should be focusing on. So if it asks you a question about what happened in the Great Depression, you want to make sure that you're not talking about something from the Gilded Age or the post-war era.

So especially, make sure that you're in the right time period but also read to make sure there aren't any kind of little tricks in the questions because they can be there. Alright, so it says conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following? Right? So conditions, I think that they're talking about the dirty, overcrowded room. This is where I would kind of go through the process of elimination.

So let's read each of the answers and decide whether we think it's a candidate. If it's not, we'll cross it out, right? So conditions shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?

Alright, the passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States. Okay, I don't know about that one, so I'm going to leave it for now. An increase in Progressive reform activity. Alright, well, that is a good candidate because we remember that Jacob Riis was a muckraker. A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants. I don't think that's a good choice because I don’t think there were many declines in efforts to Americanize immigrants. Usually, the Melting Pot was the way that people thought about that, and then the weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor. Right?

Well, I assume that these are working people, but it doesn't really say anything about labor unions, so I'm going to cross that one out. Alright, so that leaves us with two: the passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States or an increase in Progressive reform activity. Well, I think the laws are going to happen, but maybe not for a little while. In fact, I don't think those happen until after World War I, so I think that an increase in Progressive reform activity is our best answer here.

We know that these are people who are in bad conditions, and Jacob Riis is exposing them. He's a muckraker who's trying to improve things. So I think it's a good answer with B. Cool! Alright, let's try the other one. The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late 19th century?

Alright, so we are looking at conditions and also depicting trends. Alright, so this shows us what something was like in the time period. Alright, so the growing gap between rich and poor. Alright, I think that is a possible, definitely. Okay, the rise of the settlement house and populist movements. Well, the settlement houses were trying to make things nicer for immigrants, and the populists, I believe, were mostly farmers, so I'm going to cross that out.

Alright, increased corruption in urban politics. I don't think so; I don't think we're looking at anything political here. And then migration of African Americans to the north in the late 19th century. Well, I don't think most of the men shown in this picture are African Americans, so I'm going to take that one off.

Alright, and that leaves us with the growing gap between rich and poor, and I think that's a good answer too because we can see that these people are facing a great deal of poverty, and we know from this time period there are people kind of working in factories trying to deal with a growing wealth gap. So I'm going to go with A.

Alright, so how do you feel about the multiple choice? Should we do another example of multiple choice, or do you want to move on to the short answer questions? What do you all think?

Alright, so I think maybe let's move on to short answer, but I do want to give you an opportunity to ask any questions you might have about the multiple choice section. Anything? Alright, let's do short answer. You might have more questions about that because I think it is a touch trickier.

Alright, okay, so here is a typical short answer question, and you'll notice a couple things about it. One is that it has three parts, so in each of these questions you're going to have a sheet of paper. It will just be kind of the front of one side of a page, and in that, you should answer all three parts here—part A, part B, and part C—and you should answer them in complete sentences. You don't have to make it a beautiful paragraph; you can just kind of write A, B, and C, which I'm going to do, but make sure that in this A, B, and C you do include full sentences.

Alright, so using the graph above, answer A, B, and C. So it looks like we have a bar graph that is talking about immigration to the United States by decade from 1820 to 1859. Alright, so this is good to know, right? Because this is before the Civil War, and it's not until after the Civil War that we're going to get the really big explosion in immigration that we see with the new immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Alright, and it's in millions. Alright, so a pretty good amount. Alright, so A: briefly explain how one major historical factor contributed to the change depicted on the graph. Alright, so it looks like the change depicted on the graph is that there's a fairly high trend of increasing immigration.

I'm not a mathematician, but it looks like the rate is increasing over time. So, we need to talk about one factor that contributed to an increase in immigration from the early part of the 1800s to the mid-1800s. We need to explain one specific historical effect that resulted from the change and another specific historical effect.

Alright, so we need one factor and two effects. So what I want to emphasize here is that there are many right answers to this question. You could come up with probably five or ten different things that would count as either a factor or an effect here, and any of those is okay. There isn't a single right answer, so I would play to your strengths. If you remember something about this, you use it.

So, okay, one major historical factor. Right? Well, if you have any ideas, feel free to shout them out in the comments. I'm going to say, alright, so a major factor leading to an increase in immigration before the Civil War would be like the Irish Potato Famine.

Right? So what are some of the reasons that people are coming to the United States in larger numbers? Well, the Irish Potato Famine was kind of a—we call that like a push factor—something that was pushing people from Europe to come to the United States. There were also political revolutions, right? The Revolutions of 1848 that sent a lot of German immigrants to the United States. So I'm just kind of outlining this here, but remember you want to do this in full sentences.

So another thing you might talk about would be the fact that there were a lot of jobs to be had. Right? As US industrial production started to ramp up, there were a lot of opportunities for people to come from Europe or elsewhere in the world to work in the United States. So I think that would also be a good answer.

Alright, um, let’s talk about our effects. Alright, so something that this caused. I think a big one here would be kind of an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment or nativist sentiment. And if you wanted to give a specific example, you could say something like the rise of the Know Nothing Party. Right? Those were a whole political party that was based on nativist sentiment—"Know Nothing Party."

Then another effect—let's see. We could say, you know, this was one of the things that led to the early temperance movement. You know, there was a sense that new immigrants to the United States, like the Irish, were drinking too much and that it was important to curb drinking.

See, anything else that we could talk about? Maybe, oh, I would say, how about divisions between the North and the South? Remember this is before the Civil War. So, all of the immigrants coming into the North who are working in industrial jobs really changed the system of labor even more starkly to say the North was industrial and then the South was based on slave labor. So, you could say that this was something that led to a more divided nation before the Civil War.

Alright, alright, so I’m seeing one question saying, "What’s the difference between a historical factor and a historical effect?" It's a good question. So I think what they're asking here is: a factor is kind of something that goes before—so something that led up to an event. So, what was a factor that led up or caused something to happen? And then, an effect would be something that happened after the fact.

I'm seeing another question that says, "What wouldn't be a good example for this question?" A bad example answer I would say one thing that you might be really tempted to do here is talk about something after the Civil War because when you think about immigration to the United States, I think we tend to focus on that 1880-1920 period when, you know, more than a million people were coming per year.

So, make sure that if you're talking about immigration, you realize that this is earlier than when we would think of, say, many people coming from Russia or from Italy. Alright, other questions about this?

Okay, what's the best option if you can't think of an answer? I would say that if you're stuck for an answer, take a moment to just kind of brainstorm what's going on in this time period. Alright, so we know this is 1820 to 1860, so this is kind of our antebellum period—so it's kind of before the Civil War. The time that we think of kind of a lot of US history coming together as a political force.

So, just say to yourself, "Okay, what’s going on in this time period?" You might say something like, "Oh yeah, wasn’t that the time that there were lots of canals and railroads built?" Right? The Market Revolution. Or wasn’t that the time with the women’s rights movement? Or it's before the Civil War, so there’s probably some kind of conflict about slavery going on in the United States because there was pretty much always some kind of conflict going on politically about slavery.

So just consider how this might have contributed to one of the major themes or important ideas of the era, and then maybe you can find something that would connect up with that. Cool?

Alright, so we also have some just questions about form. So, do you have to restate the question in your answer, and how long should the answer be? You do not, although sometimes it just helps to do that because it kind of gives you a basis for your question. So, it's not required, but if you're nervous and you're just trying to think about what to write, maybe just write the answer with the question that be of it.

Then, how long? I would say probably just a sentence or so for each part. So I would say just kind of get to the meat of it. And so you'd say, like for example, "One major historical factor that led to an increase in immigration before the Civil War was were push factors from Europe—for example, the Irish Potato Famine, which made it very difficult for Irish people to continue to survive in Ireland, so they immigrated to the United States."

Done! In reading these, I would often find people who wrote an entire page but never mentioned anything specific, and that was very frustrating because you knew that they spent a lot of time writing but they never mentioned a fact; so it was hard to give them a point.

Throughout this entire exam, I think the best thing you can do for yourself is mention a specific example and then explain how it relates—explain what it is and how it relates.

Alright, so that is one short answer question. Should we try another short answer, or would you like to move on to the long essay question?

Alright, I'm seeing that the consensus is to move on. So, let’s head to the long essay question if I can find it. Here we go! Getting close!

Okay, so this is a typical long essay question from the exam. So let me tell you a little bit about the timing for these exams. The first part of the exam that we just talked about—section one—has the multiple choice section and the short answer questions. For that, you get an hour and 45 minutes, and that's 55 multiple choice questions and four short answer questions.

I'm not sure if you're allowed to move on to the short answers right away. I honestly don't know; you might have to check that out. But I would say, you know, budget maybe a minute or so per multiple choice question and then move on to the short answer questions and maybe budget about five minutes apiece for those. See how that gets you.

Alright, so after section one is section two, and section two is the essay part. There’s a long essay question and there’s a DBQ, and the DBQ is the document-based question. You usually do the document-based question first, and that section is also an hour and 45 minutes long. They start out by giving you a 15-minute reading period just to check out the documents in the DBQ, but it's about the same amount of time for writing.

So, let’s think about the long essay question, and then I will turn to some of your other questions about periods and just like a general review. Okay, alright! So, this is a long essay question, and it says, "Evaluate the extent to which the ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution marked a turning point in the history of United States politics and society." In the development of your argument, explain what changed and what stayed the same from the period immediately before the amendments to the period immediately following them.

Alright, so how would we go about answering this question? I think the first thing that I would do would just be to brainstorm some things that you can talk about. So, off the top of my head, I would say, "Alright, we’re talking about the 14th and 15th amendments," and if you recall, the 14th is equal protection under the law and equal citizenship for African American men, and then the 15th amendment was the right to vote for African American men.

Okay, so what else might we talk about? Just general facts. I would say, I mean, since we’re already talking about the 14th and 15th amendments, we might talk about the 13th, which was the end of slavery. We might talk about Jim Crow laws. We might talk about the KKK or Black Codes. See, we could talk about Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson or the Dred Scott case.

Alright, so what I would do then is just kind of get a sense of what these all tell me. Like, is there a theme among these? So, in case you are struggling with the time period here, remember the 14th and 15th amendments were kind of right after the Civil War—around about like 1870. The 13th was right at the end of Civil War—in 1865.

So our question would be: was the granting of equal citizenship and the vote for African American men actually a turning point or not so much? So it seems like there are some good things to start with here. Right? There's the end of slavery, there's equal citizenship, but then things kind of start to go pear-shaped. Right? You have the implementation of Jim Crow laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, a court case that legalized separate but equal accommodations, legalized segregation, and the KKK— you had a group that was dedicated to terrorizing African Americans and their white allies, terrorizing Republicans in the South.

So if I had to say whether they were a turning point, my feeling would be that I would want to say that they marked a turning point, kind of on paper—a turning point on paper—but none of these aspects of civil rights and equal voting rights were actually protected in real life. So it was on paper but not in reality.

Alright, so I think that kind of counts as our thesis statement, and then we might want to talk about politics and society, and we want to talk about what changed and what stayed the same.

So, politics and society—and remember we're making this argument that it’s a turning point on paper but not in reality. So, I think that's actually a good way of structuring your essay, where you might talk about what seemed like a turning point or at least a turning point on paper, which was not really a turning point, because none of these statutes were actually enforced.

Okay, so if I started with an intro, I would say, "Let's see." I see there's a question about how we should approach writing an intro—that's a good question. I mean, being flowery never hurts, right? I would just kind of maybe give some context to the time period and say, you know, there had been 200 years of slavery in the United States up until this point, and the Civil War—with things like the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment—seemed as though they were really important points in African American citizenship.

This was going to be the time, and it really did seem like that early on there were important moves forward like the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment. But by the end of the 19th century, Jim Crow was the law of the land, and a lot of the advances that had been made on paper had very little tangible meaning for African American citizens because they still experienced relatively little change in status than before the 14th and 15th amendments.

Okay, so if I wanted that to be my intro and my thesis statement, then I might write a paragraph about politics and one about society, where I could say something about how before the Civil War—so this is our turning point—before Civil War decisions like Dred Scott said that African Americans weren't citizens at all, but the 14th and 15th amendments were a brief moment where African Americans had the right to vote—African American men—and they had equal protection under the law.

But at the end of reconstruction, when the Northern military forces stopped occupying the South, white Democrats, or often known as the Redeemers or the Redemption era, retook political power in the South, and that was kind of the end of the African American political voice until the Civil Rights Movement—the end of the vote.

Then we might talk about society, where say, before the Civil War, slavery...you might talk about slave codes, for example, that said it was alright to kill an enslaved person. You had no legal recourse for the murder of your family member if you were enslaved. So something that said that, you know, slaves really had no status in society, and the 14th amendment was a moment that said, "Alright, well, you should have due protection under the law. It should matter if someone murders you, for example."

But by the late 19th century, you had lynch law, for example, where African Americans who were killed by white mobs—really, there was no justice for that or the KKK. You could even say things like Plessy v. Ferguson really showed that African Americans were still second-class citizens because it legalized separate but equal accommodations.

So the last thing that you want to do in these long essays is what's called synthesis. You get a special point for this, and that means that you draw a... you draw a parallel with some other time in the United States, some other theme, something that's a little outside your essay that you might say. Yeah, this is relevant.

I think a good example of that here might be something like the Civil Rights Movement. You could say, you know, the 14th and 15th amendments weren't much of a turning point, but you could suggest, for example, that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a real turning point because it showed that if African Americans organized together, they could affect change on the system of Jim Crow. So kind of take something from a different time period, a different idea. You could even use something from outside the history of the United States if you know something about that, and kind of extend your argument a little bit.

Okay, so yeah! And then I would conclude, and you know, your conclusion can really just be a restatement of what you said. It doesn't have to be anything special.

Oh, and the other thing I should mention is that your thesis statement really needs to be either in your introduction or your conclusion, so it needs—you have to put it in one of those paragraphs, and that's just to make it really obvious to the readers where it is so that they're not kind of just looking through your essay wondering, "Is that a thesis statement?" In fact, you could probably underline it if you wanted to. That might help as well.

Okay, I’m seeing one question about this that says, "Is there a specific formula to follow for the structure of the essay?" I wouldn't say that you have to do it a certain way. I think there are a couple of tried and true ways to do this sort of essay. One is your very standard five-paragraph essay where you would write an intro and a conclusion and three body paragraphs and each of those body paragraphs might address something like differences in politics, differences in society, difference in gender roles, for example, and then you conclude.

You can also do something more like a four-paragraph essay, and that works pretty well if you're kind of comparing and contrasting something. You might do one paragraph where you compare and contrast something before a certain time period and one paragraph where you compare or contrast something after that time period.

So I wouldn't force yourself to do the five-paragraph essay if that just doesn't seem like it would work. But if you're just feeling lost and you think, "How should I do this?" the five-paragraph is a good place to start.

Okay, I see one question that asks, "How much does spelling and grammar and punctuation matter?" The answer is, "Not much at all!" Because this is something that they know is written off the top of your head.

It's just supposed to be kind of a first draft. Now, I will say that if you spell something so abominably bad that there's just no way of telling what you're saying, you're probably not going to do yourself any favors. But you don't need to write the most beautiful essay ever here. It doesn't need to be a final draft that you've gone through, you know, multiple revisions. It really is supposed to be something that's more or less written off the top of your head, so it does not need to be beautiful. It does not need to be perfect.

In fact, it's even okay for you to have some minor errors as long as those factual errors aren't, you know, deeply tied to what your essay is all about, for example. And another thing that you should know is that all of the points are scored independently of each other. So even if you don't do well on the thesis and they don't want to give you a point for that, that doesn't mean you can't still get points for all the evidence or synthesis.

So it's not like you have to kind of rack up one to get the other—they're all scored on their own. Cool?

Alright! So we've got about 20 minutes left. I was thinking we might do a primary source analysis for a few minutes. I wanted to do this a little bit in lieu of the DBQ because the DBQ is just really big, and I think it would take up our entire hour if we tried to do the DBQ.

So I wanted to take a look at a primary source with you and kind of take you through how you might analyze a primary source, and that kind of primary source analysis will be the thing that really gets you through the DBQ. So pardon me.

The DBQ is an essay very similar to the long essay, except that they're going to provide you with seven primary documents, and you're going to need to work all but one of those into your answer somehow. So what you should do, I think, as you go through and you read these primary documents in preparation for the DBQ, is analyze each one as you go along.

There’s a useful acronym for this, and many of you might have seen this in your AP class. Your teacher may have said this to you, and it’s called SOAPSTONE. I have any SOAPSTONE love out there? SOAPSTONE!

Alright, and this is an acronym that just kind of helps you remember what you might look at in a primary document. Soapstone stands for Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, and Tone. SOAPSTONE.

Alright, so the primary documents that you read might be political cartoons, they might be maps, they might be quotes from individuals, they could be posters. So I was thinking it might be interesting if we did as our primary document the Vietnam War Memorial. So I guess it's kind of a sculpture.

So if we did this speaker—alright, well that’s maybe a tough one to answer. We could say that maybe the speaker here is the architect, and if you're familiar with this at all, the architect was Maya Lin. She was just, I think, in her early 20s when she came up with the design of the Vietnam memorial, and the occasion was— it was finished in 1982, so it wasn't very long at all after the war ended.

So the occasion, I guess here is to memorialize those who fought and died in the Vietnam War. So her audience, I guess, would be people who come to visit—maybe veterans or folks who had lost people in the war. Her purpose, again, kind of that memorialization to give people a place to maybe grieve or feel proud of the people who had fought in the war.

Then the subject is the war, the veterans, people who lost their lives, and then the tone I would say is kind of somber, respectful—it's even kind of quiet. I really like this memorial. If you've never actually been to see this memorial, I highly recommend it. It's beautiful.

It's very long, and everything is organized by year—the people who are killed in action or missing in action. As you can see here, it's also reflective, so you can kind of go and see the names maybe of someone that you might have lost, but also see yourself reflected in those, and you can kind of see here that people also leave things at the memorial, so it has this sense that you can kind of interact with it or that maybe it's like a proxy for getting to talk to your loved one.

So if I saw this on a DBQ, I would see it maybe as an example of how people tried to come to terms with the Vietnam War, which is a very unpopular war. It might be an example of some of the controversy over the war.

So you might then use that in an essay that's about, for example, I don't know, US involvement in overseas battles against communism, for example, and show how that was a very difficult period coming to terms with that after the war.

So for every document in the DBQ, you want to mention something— I guess at least four of the documents in the DBQ you want to talk about the point of view of the author, their purpose for writing, the context in which they wrote, and there's one more I'm trying to remember.

And O! And their purpose— oh wait, and their point of view, context, audience, purpose—that's what I'm missing, audience. So kind of identify those.

Okay, alright! So I've got a bunch of questions about the DBQ here. Some people are asking which period the DBQ will cover. The answer is I don't know! Usually, the essays will cover more than one period, I believe.

But neither of them—nothing on the exam will concentrate exclusively on the period before 1607 or the period after 1980, because those are kind of less emphasized periods in US history, just because we don't have quite as much about them. So, I think the bulk of what you'll see on the exam is material that's after 1607—so the start of Jamestown—and before 1980—so the end of Vietnam.

Okay, and I see one question that says, "How many documents should we include in the DBQ?" The answer is you should include six of them. There'll be seven documents on there, and you can include all but one.

Other things—what should we focus on most when writing DBQs? Well, I think the thing that I would say you want to focus on throughout the exam is using specific evidence, and that means instead of saying there were some protests before the American Revolution, you might want to say something like the Boston Tea Party.

Right? So name something specific and then describe or explain what that is. So you're not just name-dropping "Boston Tea Party." You're saying, "That was an event in 1773, I think possibly 1774, in which a group of the Sons of Liberty dumped tea in protest of taxes on tea." You don’t need to know the date; I’m just hoping that I know that one—dumped tea—and then connect it back up to your thesis. Connect it up!

Say, "And that shows that there was an increasing amount of tension between the colonies and the crown." So use the names—the specific names of things to show that you have a command of important events and people, then actually say what those things are and then connect them back up to your thesis. I think if you did that across the exam, you'd be very well-placed to do quite well.

Alright, other things! We've got people asking if there are study guides, and there are! At the beginning of this program, I shared some AP review that we have on Khan Academy. It’s under the—I think it's just general AP strategies and skills. There, I have more videos where I talk about how to do these essays in detail, but I also have a study sheet there that outlines the major themes—important takeaways from each period.

So if you want to go take a look at that, I think that's a really good overall sense of what's happening, and that's broken down by themes—so things like American national identity, work and exchange. Just kind of like a sense of what was going on in work and exchange.

Alright, anything else? What should you focus on memorizing in this week besides the amendments? I honestly—I would go back to the like the general gist of things. And that would just be to say, okay, in Period Two, right, this is the 1607 to 1754. Just a sense like, yeah, there were some colonies happening, and the colonies had different reasons for being founded—different ways of organizing their societies.

You might say, "Yeah, I remember that the English were more into trying to have religious refuge, whereas the Spanish were more into trying to get gold." And do that for each of the periods—just break it down into a few important things that you want to take away and then stop worrying about memorization, I think.

Anything else? Oh, okay, tips for document citation? I think you can actually just say like, "In document one in the DBQ," you don't need to quote from the documents at length. You might just say like, "In document three, Barbara Aon Reich talks about the importance of good cancer treatment." That's just something off the top of my head, so you don't need to go into like a full Chicago-style citation or put every single thing that is included on the explanation of what that is in the DBQ in your essay.

I would just kind of make a gesture toward it—the author and their subject. Alright, basic fallbacks if you don't know something about a particular period.

You know, I think there are some large things that go across American history—things that are characteristic of American history, perhaps. That might be, you know, the United States up until about the turn of the 20th century tended to be isolationist in their foreign policy. So before then, you can pretty much be sure that that was all that the United States was—they were not interested in foreign wars, and you can kind of have a big sense like, "Ah, after World War II, the United States wanted to defeat communism, so they got into many wars abroad with the goal of containing communism."

So I think there are some broad strokes that carry across time periods, and your instinct there is probably good. Alright, oh, okay. Can you go over how to get the contextualization point? And that's on the DBQ I'm assuming.

The contextualization point on the DBQ is, I think, similar to what your introduction might be, and that is just kind of setting the stage for what's going on. So for example, the DBQ last year, I believe, was about the rise of the women's rights movement, and so you could kind of set the stage there. I think it was from 1945 to 1970, so it's after World War II, so that would be a place where you would say, for example, "Well, during World War II, many women worked in factories, and they had the experience to earn wages for themselves for the first time. They found that very liberating."

Then, you know, after the war, many of them lost their jobs, and white women went back to the suburbs, and many African American women and minority women had to go back to prior occupations that weren't as well-paid, and so over the course of the 1950s, more and more discontent spread.

So that’s kind of showing that you know something about this period and about this topic outside of just what the documents tell you. Alright, anything else?

General tips for time management on the exam? I think this is something where practice helps, and knowing yourself a bit helps. I think I'm a fast writer myself, but I'm a slow planner, so knowing that it's not going to take me as long to write something down means that I can spend a little bit more time planning.

But you might find that you're the opposite—you can plan super-fast, but you know you want to take some more time to write. So maybe use a little bit about what you know of your own learning style, and then also you're not going to be on your own during the exam; the proctors will tell you how much time you have left, and they'll also say during the essay portion, "At this point, it might be a good idea to move on to the second essay."

So given the amount of experience that they have in this, I would trust their judgment.

Alright! Well, I think we're at about the end of our time here. I'm so glad that you took the time to join me, and I'm really rooting for you on the exam. Let me know how it goes, and again, if you have any questions or concerns about the AP exam, check out our Khan Academy resources. I read the comments in those all the time, so I will probably answer you if you leave a comment on any of those articles or videos.

I also wanted to let you know that we'll be doing another live stream pretty soon, and it will be in a couple of weeks with our SAT tutor, Eric. So we'll be doing a live SAT prep on SAT material in just a couple of weeks.

Thank you again so much! Good luck on the exam, and let me know how it goes for ya.