I was inspired by Trevor Packer’s Twitter teases of the AP Test results spreads to take a peek at the AP US History DBQ question. (AP United States History 2022 Free-Response Questions). It’s been years since I’ve taught APUS and am not familiar with the grading guidelines so I couldn’t write anything about it without a substantial disclaimer. Nonetheless, as a “Document” based question, it illustrates how evidence of the past is sliced, diced and served up to students to teach history in a way that doesn’t quite square with history as a discipline.
I would think that students expecting to answer this question with any confidence have to know what the College Board means by the term “National Identity” first, before they even get to the documents. But this is a high-stakes assessment administered on a national scale, a one-way street on which the College Board asks the questions and the students have to come up with answers, leaving them in this case to make their best guess. They only have 60 minutes to think about the question, analyze the documents, and write the essay. With college admissions and three expensive college credits on the table, they’re forced to ignore what their teachers taught them about critical thinking and just get to it.
Let’s pretend this wasn’t the case, that the student had a few minutes to poke around and look for some help in thinking about the term “National Identity”. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry references a “sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language”. Fair enough, that’s the Oxford Dictionary definition, but not fair, how is National Identity measured? How can we determine the “extent to which” this sense of National Identity developed without having a means to measure it?
Students shouldn’t think about the definition of “National Identity” or a means to measure it, they’re better off just pretending that the College Board is justified in assuming one exists and we all agree with them as to what it is.
But that’s not what inspired me to write this.
What motivated me to write was what I found in poking around in the documents that came with the question.
The first document is a map, a slow pitch right over the plate, easy to hit. Property qualifications for voting were removed for white males from 1800 to 1850, so the student can claim that this signifies either a greater sense of national identity through more participation in elections, or a more clear indication that there are sectional forces that will tear the country apart. It’s also a nice set up to note that roughly half of the population isn’t male, and not all males are white.
The second document is an excerpt from a report published by the Committee on Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives in 1812. This sets the student up to talk about the War of 1812’s contributions to nationalism, a prominent interpretation of the taught narrative canon of US History. Just the same, it also sets up the student to mention the Hartford Convention and threats of secession coming from Federalists in New England.
But again, if this wasn’t a test, there’s a lot the student can discover by scrolling through the complete document, not just the selected phrases chosen by the College Board. In one section of the document itself the Committee on Foreign Relations complained about the impressment of US citizens at sea by using the phrase “slavish bondage”. If this phrase were included, students could have written about the seeming incongruity of complaints about “slavish bondage” coming from people who were enslavers themselves.
A close reading student might have noticed that the United States are referred to as a collective throughout the entire document, references to the United States are plural, not singular. What does that say about national identity?
The excerpt of James Madison’s message to Congress was probably included because it mentions canals and roads – signaling to students this is the time to write about them. Teachers and textbooks talk about roads and canals a lot, they are part of the taught narrative canon of US History. Newspapers don’t get much attention, and the post office is ignored even though it was the largest component of the federal government through much of this period. The postal service employed more people and had a larger reach across the country that any other part of the federal government.
Excerpts from a speech by Maria W. Stewart put slavery on the table, as it should be for any consideration of the United States in this period. By choosing a free woman of color, the College Board weaves the complexity of the students’ essay for them – you not only talk about the enslaved people, but even those African Americans who were not enslaved were not exactly “free” in the same sense as white Americans.
We teach students to think and act like historians, but we don’t test them that way. Historians would want to learn more about this woman before writing about her. The College Board describes her as a “free African American woman”. This source at Ohio State describes her differently.
Maria Stewart was an essayist, lecturer, abolitionist and women’s rights activist. She was the earliest known American woman to lecture in public on political issues. Stewart is known for four powerful speeches she delivered in Boston in the early 1830s – a time when no woman, black or white, dared to address an audience from a public platform.
This College Board teaches students not to think, but not too much – just take their word for it – this woman is a free African American woman, and that’s all you need to know.
If we did let students learn a little more about Maria Stewart before writing about her – they would find out that she is a minority of a minority – she’s described as the black middle class. Although students that read closely will be able to use Stewart’s words here well – she is highlighting the difference between the opportunities of white and black people – even free black people. But she certainly had more opportunities than others.
Now, we get to an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” – right up there with the American standards of the taught narrative canon. One way to recognize how DBQs are a setup is to see how much the answer changes with another quote from the same author. Maybe in 1837 Emerson was happy to laud the American spirit, but after passage of an enhanced Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 he called southern slave holders devils. If given the chance to search a little, students might see how what he wrote doesn’t quite square up with what they’ve been told about him.
The Emerson document, like the Committee on Foreign Relations Report, shows what you can learn when you leave the excerpt of the primary source document you’ve been given and poke around a little, like an historian would do. The last document in the DBQ, an excerpt from Godey’s Lady’s Book is an even better example.
The clipped text serves the question’s purpose: it gives students the opportunity to write about how women fit, or don’t fit, into national identity. The excerpt presents a view that’s confident of women’s intellectual abilities, ahead of its time in describing them as “high in the scale of power as that of the father, husband, and son?” If you were trying to understand the past by exercising the disciplinary practices of history, you would go through the whole essay – which is easy enough thanks to the Internet Archive. It’s likely you’d come to a different conclusion
It’s safe to say that students will learn more by doing history than answering DBQs, but they are an interesting place to start.