Hey everybody, so I’ve working pretty hard to prepare for the upcoming AP World History exam and I’m really stressing about whether I’ll do good or not. I did a practice DBQ today and I was just wondering if someone on here could grade it for me just so I can know what I need to practice before the actual exam next Thursday. I did this using the revised 2020 DBQ rubric so if you’re going to grade this, please use that. If someone could do this for me, I would be super thankful. Thanks for reading!
Here’s the prompt and the documents: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-questions-world-history.pdf
Here’s my actual DBQ:
During the period of 1750-1900, imperialism was growing in practice throughout Europe as nations sought to extend their control throughout the world and increase their influence to larger areas. Areas of Africa and Asia were imperialized also due to their large containment of natural resources that the Europeans wanted for trade and to keep their infrastructure running such as with factories. As Imperialism spread and the Indigenous people of many countries began to be controlled by Western people, the reaction from each group to the invasions was very different. Although the actual response to foreign state expansion from Indigenous people differed greatly, as some groups fought back against the Westerners while others allowed them to take control out of fear, the negative sentiment for Western invaders remained consistent across all groups.
The state expansion during this period led many Indigenous groups to revolt and fight back against the Western imperialists. In West Africa for instance, the people refused the offer from the British to become a protectorate state, reflecting their defiance against the west and their need for freedom (Doc 1). Similarly, the Ethiopians fought valiantly against the Italians who had attempted to invade their homeland and managed to come out victorious in battle. In a painting depicting the battle, the Ethiopians are shown triumphantly defeating the Italians with less primitive weapons and means of combat, showing that the Ethiopians were extremely proud of their accomplishment and wanted to show other groups and people who were oppressed that the Europeans were able to be defeated. The historical period of this painting is also very important as during this time, the Europeans were believed to be unbeatable by many Indigenous people, so this victory was extremely important for the Indigenous groups in proving that the Europeans were not as strong as they claimed. (Doc 3). Another example of rebelling against foreign invasion was in Korea, where a group known as the Tonghak believers fought back against foreign domination of Korea and all of Asia for that matter. Document 2 is a letter written by them and explains their anger and defiance against the foreign domination of their country. This demonstrates further how many groups were extremely against this invasion and the imperialism movements. The historical context of this document is very important too as Japan and China had just begun to embrace western beliefs and practices in industrialization and manufacturing during this period, so the Koreans’ defiance against the west and their belief in traditional asian values is much clearer. (Doc 2)
On the other hand, the state expansion caused lots of Indigenous groups to surrender and allow the Europeans to control them. In 1898 in Hawaii, the Queen of the Hawaiian Islands, Liliuokalani, wrote a letter to the U.S. government asking them to give her land back to her and her people and for the United States government to reduce control of Hawaii. This shows that although the government of Hawaii was extremely against the control of their homeland, they were not willing to solve the problem without a peaceful manner. This furthers the claim that some groups allowed countries to take control as despite her very obvious negative sentiment against the U.S., the Queen made no actual attack or act of defiance against the U.S., only asking them to ease their control of the land. The fact that this letter was written by the Queen herself directly to the U.S. government reflects the fact that she may have been more honest in this letter on her opinions of the matter than to her own people as she would not want to cause panic or anger from the U.S.(Doc 4). In Indonesia though, the Dutch control of the area was even stronger, as the indigenous people were ridiculed and mocked by the Dutch government officials very often, which caused the negative sentiment for invaders to grow… This constant ridicule caused the people to gain a strong dislike for the Dutch people, similar to the other groups during this period. The purpose of the document that described this was to demonstrate how cruel the Europeans truly were to the Indigenous people and to cause negative sentiment within other Indigenous groups and within Westerners themselves to cause a stop to this injustice. In writing this document, the author intended to cause change within the world and to stop the control of Indigenous people peacefully, without having to fight anyone (Doc 5).