AP US history multiple choice example 2 | US History | Khan Academy

All right, so in the last video, we were taking a look at this multiple choice question from the AP US History exam practice booklet and trying out some strategies for making good choices as you go through these questions. The first thing we did was really dive into the specifics of what was happening in both of these quotes.

Who is James Henry Hammond? He's a governor of South Carolina who was in favor of slavery in the mid-19th century, who was giving some religious reasons and reasons of kindness for why slavery was an institution sanctioned by God in society. And Frederick Douglass, a famous abolitionist, is saying that slavery is the great sin and shame of America.

So our first step was analyzing the documents, and then our second step was to read each of our questions really carefully. Both the questions and the possible answer choices need your full attention because you might skip over an important word that makes the meaning different than what you thought it was at first glance.

The third thing we're doing is going through each of the options and deciding whether or not it's a possible answer before eliminating it. So let's try an example of a multiple choice question related to these documents. The language used in both excerpts most directly reflects the influence of which of the following?

So they're specifically asking us about the language, that means the words that they're using, their phrases, not maybe their political positions or the ideas that they're trying to get across, but specifically the words. And we're looking for the influence of one of these four ideologies.

Okay, option A: the Second Great Awakening. Hmm, all right. Well, I'm going to say that's a religious movement of some kind, and they both talk about God and the relationship between slavery and Christianity, so I'm going to leave that as a possible answer.

All right, what about states' rights? Well, I imagine that both these people would have had very different ideas about states' rights, but I'm not sure that's what they're talking about in these examples because Hammond is talking about the duty of slave owners to be kind and maybe the religious reasons why God has made the institution of slavery in his opinion. And Douglass is talking about how slavery is against the Bible and against the idea of liberty. So neither of them is particularly concerned with the political issue of states' rights here, so I think we can cross that one out.

All right, Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was this idea that the United States had a divine mission to occupy the North American continent from Atlantic to Pacific. While they both kind of talk about ideas of divinity, I don't think they're interested in any kind of pioneering, right? This is more connected to the American West than it is to any idea about slavery, so I think we can get rid of that.

All right, option D: American nationalism. Well, I think Douglass is, if anything, he's kind of saying that slavery challenges American nationalism. Well, I guess he talks about it, then maybe a nationalist view of the idea of liberty would say that slavery is a sin and a shame. So that's possible for Douglass, but what about for Hammond? He's really making cultural and religious arguments for slavery, not any argument about how slavery enhances the American nation, so I'm going to cross that one out too.

So that leaves us with the Second Great Awakening, and I think that is a good answer because both of them are making religious arguments. They're saying that God would have liked or would not have liked slavery, so their language does reflect an interest in religion.

We'll do some other examples in other videos, but I think the big takeaway from this is: don't worry about having every idea and every fact about American history stored away in your brain somewhere. Instead, understand that what this exam is really going for is finding out whether you have a good overall idea of what happened in American history and who might have supported which idea. Trust your instincts; they're usually right.

The point is not to test you on some obscure outlier, but rather to get a sense that you know what you're talking about in each era of history and the general idea of what was going on. So use that to your advantage, understand the big underlying themes, and don't worry about the little ticky-tack details. You know what you're doing.