The AP Course and Examination in

United States History

 

Course Description

The AP Program offers two separate course descriptions and examinations in history: United States History and European History.  Students may take either or both exams.

     The AP Program in United States History is designed to help you develop the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in United States history. The program prepares you for intermediate college course by demanding skills equivalent to those acquired in a full-year introductory college course.  Students learn to assess historical materials – their relevance to a given issue, their reliability, and their important – and to weight the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship.  An AP U.S. History course should thus develop the skills necessary to arrive at conclusions on the basis of informed judgment and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively in essay format.

      An AP course in United States history should provide you with a learning experience equivalent to that obtained in most college introductory U.S. history courses. In most schools the AP course is designed to give students a grounding in the subject matter of United States history and in major interpretive questions that derive from the study of selected themes. Although you are not expected to memorize names and dates on an encyclopedic basis, you must be able to draw upon a reservoir of systematic factual knowledge in order to exercise analytic skills intelligently.

     The following outline is based on the tables of contents of a representative sample of textbooks used in AP United States History courses. The outline is intended to help you prepare for the AP U.S. History Exam.   Although it is not intended to prescribe what AP teachers must teach or what AP students must study, questions on the exam will be based on the topics below. Don’t get bogged down in the memorization of names and dates on this outline; instead, concentrate on the significance – the cause and effect – of the items listed. No one is expected to have studied every topic. As you begin to review for the exam, however, look over this list and review areas that weren’t covered in your class.

Topic Outline