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Comparison in Period 2 MODULE

2.8
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AP ® Skills Workshop: Writing Historically
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Responding to a Short-Answer Question with Two Secondary Sources

Responding to a Short-Answer Question with Secondary Sources
®
As you learned in Period 1, the AP U.S. History Exam has three different types of
short-answer questions:

• secondary-source interpretation questions, which require you to understand the
claims that historians make about a specific time period, and how evidence from
specific events or developments during that time period can be used to support
those claims;
• primary-source interpretation questions, which give you a source — typically an
image — and ask you to draw connections between that source, often using the
historical reasoning process of causation, and larger historical developments; and
• questions without primary or secondary sources that require you to use your
knowledge of a time period and historical reasoning, which you encountered in
Module 1.3.

As you learned in Module 2.2, a secondary source is a secondhand account of a
historical event or development created after the fact by someone who was not there,
often a historian. Books and scholarly articles about history, written by historians,
are the most common form of secondary source you will be asked to read and write
about in this course. In fact, these types of short-answer questions will generally pro-
vide you with two short secondary sources that discuss the same topic. Most often,
you will be asked to compare two arguments in some meaningful way and cite a
piece of evidence to support each of their claims.
Let’s take a look at a typical short-answer question on a pair of secondary
sources:

Using the excerpts, answer A, B, and C.
“Small tokens of gentility [refinement] can be found scattered through all
of American society in the eighteenth century, like pottery shards in an
excavated house lot. Estate inventories of many middling people show a
teacup, a silver spoon, knives and forks, and a book or two among the
household possessions. Over the course of the century, probably a majority
of the population adopted some of the amenities associated with genteel
living. But it would be an error to conclude that by [1776] most Americans
were genteel. Gentility flecked lives without coloring them. Gentility was the
proper style of the gentry alone in the eighteenth century.”

Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America:
Persons, Houses, Cities, 1993

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