356 chapTeR 15 | New Ideas aNd Old Ideas | period six 1865 –1898^357
DeLeon’s call to action (Doc. 15.8) and Jane Addams’s efforts on behalf of immi-
grants and the poor (Doc. 14.6).
Unlike contextualization, where traditional ideas about social, political, and
economic conditions influence the ways that you use evidence in your argument,
periodization provides you with greater opportunities to redefine a time period.
Refer to the Applying AP® Historical Thinking Skills exercises on evidence
that appear earlier in this book (Chapters 4, 5, 6, 9, 11) as your starting point with
your evidence and observations. In determining how optimistic this time period
was, you also can use qualifiers to acknowledge disagreement over the degree of
optimism that a labor strike, for example, reveals.
steP 1 Organize your response
Organize your response by using one of the two following outlines.
Outline using deductive organization
I. Introduction
II. Document 1: Assess the degree of optimism, organizing your evidence
chronologically.
III. Document 2: How does this agree with? disagree with? modify document 1?
In this approach, be sure to synthesize the sources following the
IV. Document 3: How does this agree with? disagree with? modify the
earlier documents?
V. Document 4: How does this agree with? disagree with? modify the
earlier documents?
VI. Conclusion—the main claim of the essay
Note: This approach also uses chronological reasoning.
Outline using a point-by-point organization
I. Introduction
II. Optimistic features of the Gilded Age (the “golden” aspects)
III. Pessimistic features of the Gilded Age
IV. Conclusion
steP 2 Write your essay
putting It all together 357
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