Documenting United States History

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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