APUSH
Heasman
S2 Final
AP US History Course Final:
Essay Section
There are two sections to the essay final - One document-based question and one freeresponse question. You may write them in either order, but make clear which is which
using a title.
 You will have 85 minutes to write your essays in class on Thursday, May 8th. I
will provide Blue Books for you to write them in.
 You may bring the attached documents with annotations for the DBQ, and one
sheet of binder paper with outline notes (one sheet that contains outlines for
two essays). These will be checked but not graded.
 Any outlines that are typed, or that look like pre-written essay material
(complete paragraphs) will be removed from you, and may earn you an 'F' for
both essays.
Prompts:
Free-Response Essay: To what extent and in what ways did the civil rights movement of
the 1950's and 1960's successfully address the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil
War?
Document-Based Essay: Analyze both the tensions surrounding the issue of immigration
and the United States government’s response to these tensions in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Confine your answer to the period 1870 to 1925.
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APUSH
Heasman
S2 Final
DBQ Directions: The question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrates
your interpretation of Documents A-H and your knowledge of the period referred to in
the question. High scores will be earned only by essays that both cite key pieces of
evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the period.
Document A: "The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things", Thomas Nast, Harpers magazine,
1871
Document B: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888
"A certain part of this recent immigration is transitory. Italians and Slovaks, for instance,
after they have by thrift accumulated a sum which is large for them, return to their native
villages, and carry back with them new notions and habits which set up a ferment among
the simple rustics of a Calabrian or North Hungarian Valley. For the United States the
practice has the double advantage of supplying a volume of cheap unskilled labour when
employment is brisk and of removing it when employment becomes slack, so that the
number of the unemployed, often very large when a financial crisis has brought bad
times, is rapidly reduced, and there is more work for the permanently settled part of the
laboring class. It is the easier to go backwards and forwards, because two thirds among
all the races except the Jews, are men, either unmarried youths or persons who have left
their wives behind."
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Heasman
S2 Final
Document C: National People’s Party platform, 1892, Expression of Sentiments
"Resolved, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present
system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds
out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract
labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration."
Document D: Booker T. Washington, speech in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895
"To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange
tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I
say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the
eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have
tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast
down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labour wars, tilled
your fields, cleared your forest, [built] your railroads and cities, and brought forth
treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent
representation of the progress of the South . . . .As we have proved our loyalty to you in
the past, . . . we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach . . . ."
Document E: Alzina Parsons Stephens, "Life in A Social Settlement - Hull House,
Chicago", in Self Culture - A Magazine of Knowledge, March 1899
"There are now forty-seven evening classes meeting at the House weekly, twenty-five
evening clubs for adults, seventeen afternoon clubs for children, the Hull-House Music
School, a choral society for adults, a children's chorus, a children's sewing school, a
training school for kindergartners, a trades union for young women. In daily use are the
nursery, the kindergarten, the playground, the penny provident bank, an employment
bureau, a sub-station of the Chicago post office. A trained nurse reports to the house
every morning and noon, to take charge of the sick-calls for the neighborhood; a
kindergartner visits daily sick and crippled children. The coffeehouse serves an average
of 250 meals daily, and furnishes noonday lunches to a number of women's clubs; soups
and broths and wholesome food are bought by neighbors from its kitchen, and bread from
its bakery, adorned with the label of the bakers' unions, goes out to the Lewis Institute, to
grocery stores, to neighbors' tables."
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APUSH
Heasman
S2 Final
Document F: Election flyer for the Workingman's Party of California, 1890's.
Document G: Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, 1908
"In order that the best results might follow from an enforcement of the regulations, an
understanding was reached with Japan that the existing policy of discouraging emigration
of its subjects of the laboring classes to continental United States should continue, and
should, by co-operation with the governments, be made as effective as possible."
Document H:
Family Characteristics of Major Immigrant Groups, 19091914
Group
Percentage
Returning to
Europe
Males Per 100
Females
Percent Under
14
Czechs
5
133
19 %
English
6
136
16 %
Finish
7
181
8%
Germans
Greeks
Hebrews
Hungarians
Italians
Poles
Slovaks
7
16
2
22
17
13
19
132
170
117
141
320
188
162
18 %
4%
25 %
16 %
12 %
10 %
12 %
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Heasman
S2 Final
Document I: Edward A. Ross, Century Magazine, 1914
"In 1908, on the occasion of a “homecoming” celebration in Boston, a newspaper told
how the returning sons of Boston were “greeted by Mayor Fitzgerald and the following
members of Congress: O’Connell, Kelihar, Sullivan, and McNary—following in the
footsteps of Webster, Sumner, Adams, and Hoar. They were told of the great work as
Mayor of the late beloved Patrick Collins. At the City Hall they found the sons of Irish
exiles and immigrants administering the affairs of the metropolis of New England.
Besides the Mayor, they were greeted by John J. Murphy, Chairman of the Board of
Assessors; Commissioner of Streets Doyle; Commissioner of Baths O’Brien . . . Police
Commissioner O’Meara.”
Document J: Theodore Roosevelt, Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York CityOctober 12th, 1915
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely
certain way of bringing the nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to
be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
Document K: "Come Unto Me, Ye Oppressed", 1919
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S2 Final
Document L: Speech by Senator Ellison DuRant Smith, April 9, 1924,
"We have been called the melting pot of the world. We had an experience just a few
years ago, during the great World War, when it looked as though we had allowed
influences to enter our borders that were about to melt the pot in place of us being the
melting pot. I think that we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door,
Americanize what we have, and save the resources of America for the natural increase of
our population. We all know that one of the most prolific causes of war is the desire for
increased land ownership for the overflow of a congested population. We are increasing
at such a rate that in the natural course of things in a comparatively few years the landed
resources, the natural resources of the country, shall be taken up by the natural increase
of our population . . .. Without offense, but with regard to the salvation of our own, let us
shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens and
develop our own American resources."
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