American History

The AP U.S. History Exam tests knowledge of U.S. History from the first European explorations of the Americas up through modern times. The bulk of the questions focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exam topics include political institutions and behavior, public policy, social and economic change, diplomacy and international relations, and cultural and intellectual developments.

You can find additional free-response questions and scoring guidelines on AP Central, along with grade distributions and examples of actual students' responses and commentary that explains why the responses received the scores they did.

Black history, or African-American history, is full of fascinating stories, rich culture, great art, and courageous acts that were undertaken within circumstances that we can hardly imagine in modern society. While Civil Rights events are the most common themes in our studies, we should resist equating African-American history only with Civil Rights-era history. There is so much more to explore! This list contains 50 prompts that might lead you into some interesting and little-known information about African-American history.

Note: Your first challenge in studying some of the topics below is finding resources. When conducting an Internet search, be sure to place quotation marks around your search term (try different variations) to narrow your results.

Before proceeding to the list of essay questions below, please read the following warning about plagiarism.

Students should be particularly aware of using materials from the web without proper attribution: this is plagiarism. The course tutor may use special educational software to check essays and papers for unattributed material from the web.

Students should not count on recycling material used in coursework essays in their exams. Special care is taken in the setting of examination questions, to ensure minimal overlap with essay questions.

Plagiarism is defined by the University as follows [Gen.14, University Calendar]

The University's degrees and other academic awards are given in recognition of a candidate's personal achievement. Plagiarism is therefore considered as an act of academic fraudulence and as an offence against University discipline. Plagiarism is defined as the submission or presentation of work, in any form, which is not one's own, without acknowledgment of the sources. (With regard to essays, reports and dissertations, a simple rule dictates when it is necessary to acknowledge sources. If a student obtains information or ideas from an outside source, that source must be acknowledged. Another rule to follow is that any direct quotation must be placed in quotation marks, and a source immediately cited.) Where a candidate for a degree or other award