(^16) › STEP 2. Understand the Skills That Will Be Tested
Introduction
The AP European History Curriculum identifies interrelated sets of “Historical Thinking
Skills” and requires students to apply one or more of them in each section of the exam.
Your first task is to familiarize yourself with these skills and to understand how historians
use them in creating a historical understanding of change over time.
There are many ways in which one might describe and categorize the intellectual skills
employed by the historian. The simplest and clearest way for our purposes is to think of
them as making up three interrelated thought processes: (1) Reasoning chronologically,
(2) Putting information in context, and (3) Arguing from evidence.Reasoning Chronologically
Chronology is the placing of events in the order in which they occurred. Once an accurate
chronology has been constructed, reasoning based on that construction can begin.Chronology and Causation
All historians seek, in one way or another, to explain change over time. One way to begin to
do that is to create a chronology of events and then ponder cause and effect. For example,
suppose we know the order of three events that occurred during the first year of World War I
(WWI): the Russian Army invaded East Prussia (August 17, 1914); the German Army on
the Eastern Front was put under new command and launched an attack against Russian
forces (August 23–30, 1914); and Erich von Falkenhayn replaced Helmuth von Moltke as
Chief of Staff of the German Army (September 14, 1914). Because we know the chrono-
logical order of these events, certain cause-and-effect relationships suggest themselves,
whereas others are logically impossible. For example, because the change in command of
the German forces on the Eastern Front and the German attack on Russian forces there
occurred roughly a week after the Russian Army invaded East Prussia, it is a logical pos-
sibility that the Russian attack caused the Germans to react by changing command and
counterattacking. Conversely, because the German decisions came roughly a week after the
Russian attack, it is simply impossible for the German decisions to have caused the Russian
attack.
Notice that, in our example, it is both the order in which the first two events occurred
and the close proximity of the two events (both occurred in the same geographical area,
and less than a week elapsed between the two events) that make the possibility of a cause-
and-effect relationship between the two seem likely. Conversely, while it is possible that the
first two events in our example caused the third (the change in overall command of the
German Army from von Moltke to von Falkenhayn), the logical argument for a cause-and-
effect relationship is weaker because of a lack of close proximity: the general commander
was in charge of the entire war, and nearly a month had passed since those two events had
occurred on the Eastern Front.Correlation vs. Causation
Being able to show that a series of events happened in close proximity to one another (both
chronologically and geographically) is to show that those events were correlated. However,
it is important to understand that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The
fact that two events happened in close geographical or chronological proximity makes a
cause-and-effect relationship possible, but not necessary; the close proximity could have been
merely a coincidence. To establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two events, theKEY IDEA03_Bartolini_Ch03_013-022.indd 16 12/04/18 3:15 PM