Document-Based Question

Research and Essay Project

This assignment requires you to research and develop your own DBQ and then write the essay that answers the prompt. You will identify a topic of your choice from Period 6 of AP World History, c. 1900 to the present. You will unearth 10 primary documents that reveal important facts about that topic. You will then excerpt the documents, write the DBQ essay prompt and the historical background, and format the whole thing so that it looks exactly like an AP World History DBQ. All you have to do to accomplish that is to copy my Amadou Diallo DBQ (also under The Write Stuff) and delete my question, historical background and the contents of each document … and supply your own information. (You’ll also want to edit the footer to make the copyright your own.)

Choosing Your Topic

Scan through Chapters 33-38 of Traditions & Encounters to identify your topic. It should be broad enough to allow some flexibility in what the documents reveal, but not so broad that specific documents can’t capture it 10 excerpts. For example, World War II would be too broad a topic for this project. But you could narrow that down to the factors leading up to the outbreak of the war …or the social and economic effects of the war on the home front …or something similar. Try to think of topics that will lend themselves to prompts addressing one or more of our SPICE themes. We could literally identify hundreds and hundreds of potential topics. Feel free to be creative. Possible topics you could narrow down and research include:

·  either (or both) of the world wars

·  the Great Depression

·  the rise of fascism

·  the Cold War

·  the nuclear arms race

·  the space race

·  the Korean or Vietnam conflicts

·  women’s rights

·  anticolonialism/decolonization

·  Chinese or Soviet communism

·  globalization

·  terrorism

·  rock ‘n’ roll

·  the Middle East

·  human rights

·  the League of Nations and/or United Nations

·  the digital revolution

·  environmentalism

·  9/11

Researching Your Topic

Once you’ve narrowed down your topic, you should identify three aspects of it that will lend themselves to being captured by document excerpts. Does this sound familiar? You’re sort of working backward from the three-pronged thesis that you’re already formulating in your mind about this topic. You first have to attain a big picture understanding of what you’re researching, in the process identifying three major points to address with your documents. Essentially, you have to know the three-pronged answer to your prompt before you set out to locate your documents. Identify major events and people involved in your topic. Locate a book or two that covers them in some way (scan the index – you don’t have to read the whole book!). Then investigate them with a search engine like Google. Look for speeches, memoirs, press releases, official documents, laws, statistics, etc. You must include two but no more than four documents that are not the written or spoken words of a person or group. These could include photographs, illustrations, political cartoons, song lyrics (or excerpts from a poem), maps or statistics. Find and excerpt multiple documents for each of the three aspects of your topic, getting a perspective that is as well-rounded as possible in the limited space you have. Cast a wide net to get a variety of sources. You’ll gain a better understanding of POV … and be well-aware of what documents you’d like to have but don’t have space for … which you can discuss in your essay explaining the need for additional documents!

Be sure that for each document you can write a source line that includes:

·  the name of who or what created the document

·  any pertinent background about the person or group that would be beneficial to know (U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, noted economist John Maynard Keynes, etc.)

·  the context of the document (speech, letter to a friend, diary entry, press release, etc.)

·  the date the document was created (as precise as possible, but it can be a general timeframe, such as “late 1930s”)

To illustrate how you can find many sources for the DBQ in a book on your topic, I’ll take one from King Leopold’s Ghost, a book by Adam Hochschild that I used in class recently. Let’s say you were creating a DBQ with this prompt: Analyze the tactics of European powers as they colonized Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Maybe you’d want a couple of documents showing what was going on in King Leopold of Belgium’s colonial regime in the Congo. Scanning the book’s index, you might find the excerpt I read aloud in class:

How was he to be compelled? A trickle of news and rumor gradually made its way to Europe. “An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River],” the British vice consul reported in 1899. “This officer[’s] … method … was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.

That’s exactly the way it appears in the book. And here’s what it should look like in a DBQ:

Notice how I’ve edited how it appears in the book so that it conforms to what we need in the DBQ. (And note too in the directions you’ll copy from the Amadou Diallo DBQ that the documents “have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.”) This is a good document because we know who it’s from (even though we don’t have his proper name) as well as its context and date. I supplied the bit about the Anglo Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company because I could see, on the previous page of the book, that this quote was used in the context of explaining what the A.B.I.R. was up to. It’s also good because it lends itself to assessing the source’s POV (what can you make of the fact that a British official is reporting on the activities of a Belgian company … and using what might be called hearsay evidence?). And it can even be used to explain the need for an additional document. Most importantly, it provides a clear answer to the prompt (the tactics of the Europeans included violence and hostage-taking as a way to force native Africans to provide the labor needed to harvest rubber).

Don’t wait until the last minute to get started. Your DBQ and the essay response to it are both due on March 28.