AP US HISTORY FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
UNITED STATES HISTORY
SECTION II
Total Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes
Question 1 (Document-Based Question)
Suggested Reading Period: 15 minutes
Suggested Writing Time: 40 minutes
Directions: Question 1 is based on the accompanying documents. The documents have been
edited for the purposes of this exercise.
Write your response on the lined pages.
In your response you should do the following:
 State a relevant thesis that directly addresses all parts of the question
 Support the thesis or a relevant argument with evidence from all, or all but one, of
the documents.
 Incorporate analysis of all, or all but one, of the documents into your argument.
 Focus your analysis of each document on at least one of the following: intended
audience, purpose, historical context, and/or point of view
 Support your argument with analysis of historical examples outside the documents.
 Connect historical phenomena relevant to your argument to broader events or
processes
 Synthesize the elements above into a persuasive essay that extends your argument,
connects it to a different historical context, or accounts for contradictory evidence
on the topic.
Document A:
"If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men.
I might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our
triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's
understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of
our lives--lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler--all! That last moment belongs to us--that
agony is our triumph."
Statement attributed to Bartolomeo Vanzetti by Philip D. Stong, a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance who
visited Vanzetti in prison in May of 1927 shortly before he and Sacco were executed.
Document B:
Document C:
AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other
public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the
State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof. Section 1. Be it enacted by the General
Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities,
Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public
school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as
taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
The Butler Law, PUBLIC ACTS OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE PASSED BY THE SIXTY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY,
1925
Document D:
“It seems to me the point as to this measure—and I have been so impressed for several years—is that the
time has arrived when we should shut the door. 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 shall shut the door—which I
unqualifiedly and unreservedly believe to be our duty—and develop what we have, assimilate and digest
what we have into pure Americans, with American aspirations, and thoroughly familiar with the love of
American institutions, rather than the importation of any number of men from other countries. If we may
not have that, then I am in favor of putting the quota down to the lowest possible point, with every
selective element in it that may be. ”
Speech by Ellison DuRant Smith, April 9, 1924, Congressional Record, 68th Congress, 1st Session (Washington DC: Government
Printing Office, 1924), vol. 65, 5961–5962
Document E:
“Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their
apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak
of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist
and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All
Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives
can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is
essentially illiberal and intolerant. The Fundamentalists see, and they see truly, that in this last generation
there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come
into man’s possession—new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new
knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to
think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual
experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men’s
faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere.”
Source: Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716– 722.
Document F:
Look about you. The theatre, the magazine, the current fiction, the ballroom, the night clubs and the
joyrides—all give evidence of an ever-increasing disregard for even the rudiments of decency in dress,
deportment, conventions [standards], and conduct. Little by little the bars have been lowered, leaving out
the few influences that held society in restraint. One need be neither prude nor puritan to feel that
something is passing in the hearts and in the minds of the women of today that is leaving them cold and
unwomanly. . . . We may try to deceive ourselves and close our eyes to the prevailing flapper conduct. We
may call boldness greater self-reliance, brazenness greater self-assertion, license greater freedom, and try
to pardon immodesty in dress by calling it style and fashion, but the fact remains that deep down in our
hearts we feel a sense of shame and pity.
Rev. Hugh L. McMenamin [Roman Catholic priest], “Evils of Woman’s Revolt against the Old Standards”, Current History,
October 1927
Document G:
I am fed up With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel And afraid,
Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me
And me of them.
I pick up my life
And take it away
On a one-way ticket Gone Up North
Gone Out West
Gone!
Langston Hughes, 1926
Document H:
Popular Science Monthly, March 1926
Document I:
The Klan marching on Washington, proclaiming that all Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and recent immigrants
are not true Americans, and are a problem to be confronted by the nation. The Klan's Imperial Wizard,
Hiram Wesley Evens, stated "We will not permit him (the Negro) to gain sufficient power to control our
civilization. Neither will we delude him with promises of social equality which we know can never be
realized.”
The North American Review, 1926
Document J:
"The evils of booze", Ohio prohibition campaign cartoon.