1. APUSH Historical Thinking Skills
Mr. Richardson, MAT
GHHS
every single solitary question on the AP U.S. History Exam is connected to a historical thinking skill

2. Historical Thinking Skills
Thinking Skills Type
Historical Thinking Skills
Crafting Historical Arguments from Historical Evidence
Historical argumentation
Appropriate use of relevant historical evidence
Chronological Reasoning
Historical causation
Patterns of continuity and change over time
Periodization
Comparison and Contextualization
Comparison
Contextualization
Historical Interpretation and Synthesis
Interpretation
Synthesis
Historical thinking skills are organized into four kinds of skills: chronological reasoning, comparison and contextualization, crafting historical arguments from historical evidence, and historical interpretation and synthesis.

3. Chronological reasoning: Historical causation
You will consider multiple causes and effects for the same event
Great students spot the difference between causes and effects that are long term and those that are short term.
AP U.S. History Exam isn't about memorizing dates. It's about making sense of the relationships among the events that happened on those dates. Did one event cause another? Did it have multiple causes? Was it part of a larger trend of change or period of similar events? This is all chronological reasoning, friend.
For example, in the short term, the Great Depression caused massive unemployment and the loss of countless citizens' savings. Later, it led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishing New Deal programs like Social Security to ease the economic pain. The effects didn't end in the 1930s, either. The role of government expanded through the New Deal, and this new role stuck.

4. Chronological reasoning: Historical causation
Tell the difference between correlation and causation
Sometimes one thing causes another, but sometimes the two things merely happen at the same time. It's just a correlation, or coincidence without significance. For example, the chart below shows that global temperatures have risen over the years, while the number of pirates in the world has (almost) steadily dropped. A student could conclude that sweating a lot reduces piracy. That student would be wrong.

5. Chronological Reasoning: Continuity and Change
Recognize and analyze periods of continuity and change, but also place them in context, relating them to historical events and themes
How and why did the '60s go from poodle skirts to nude love-ins, from conformity to protest movements, from Ricky Nelson to Hendrix? Why did segregation last for so long—and then what made the Civil Rights Movement finally take off?
When Europeans began settling the New World, for example, this set off a massive array of changes and exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as Native Americans were dying from the diseases brought over from the Old World, Europeans were surviving food shortages by learning how to cultivate New World crops like potatoes. By a few hundred years later, Ireland had become so reliant on the potato that a million people died when a potato disease caused crops to fail. There are lots of themes at work in just this one paragraph: how exchanges of new technologies and disease affect societies; the effects of migration patterns; the role of the environment in society. The entire course of human history is intertwined in similar ways.

6. Chronological Reasoning: Periodization
The way we categorize periods of history impacts how we think about and study them.
E.g.: were the 20s the jazz age of art deco and flappers?
Or Al Capone’s Era of Organized crime and no Antibiotics?
History students need to be aware that there are many different ways to describe and define a time period, though, and need to be able to evaluate these different ways.

7. Comparison and Contextualization
Comparing thematic developments across different time periods
Contextualization
Explain an event and evaluate how it connects to other local, regional, or national happenings that were going on at the same time
Wisdom regarding one event becomes deeper and more nuanced when we can stand that event up against another and see what happens. We also get smarter when we learn how to place an event in the context of other events that were happening in the same time and place.
ask how the goals of an American law from one time period compare to a different law from another time and place. Or the exam may present a speech by a president and ask where his political influences come from. Politicians have to study their history, too.

8. Historical Argumentation
A good argument is not just a catchy thesis: it's the sum of its pieces of evidence. Breaking down an argument, explaining how it was built, and identifying the historical evidence are the keys to understanding what it is that history can teach us.
Before we can dash out and blaze new intellectual trails, we need to be able to analyze historical arguments that are already out there and commonly accepted.
As a more AP-relevant example, you might be asked to make an argument about what caused World War I. That could mean analyzing such grand themes as imperialism, militarism, and nationalism, or reading the 1914 posts on the Facebook page of the We Hate Franz Ferdinand Society.

9. Appropriate Use of Relevant Historical Evidence
Historians zero in to study the authorship, point of view, purpose, content, format, and audience connected with pieces of evidence, and then they describe and evaluate the totality of it.
Without knowing the context of the evidence, it's hard to pull out useful data, make logical inferences, or draw supportable conclusions.

10. Interpretation
History is full of Rashomon effects. All historians bring different perspectives and interpretations to the table when they analyze an event.
Besides being able to create your own interpretation of a historic event, you'll need to be able to compare, contrast, analyze, and evaluate many other perspectives on the same topic. Once we toss all those perspectives into the air, we keep them balanced through a compelling and persuasive understanding of the past.
The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made a movie that inspired a whole new phrase in the English language: the Rashomon effect. His 1950 classic Rashomon is about a violent crime witnessed by four people. The catch, though, was that the crime looked completely different from each angle and depending on who was recounting the experience.

11. interpretation
Historians must analyze all these different viewpoints and evaluate how varying perspectives (and baggage) shape and affect the final interpretation
Does an essay have a cultural bias? Does it fail to see the big picture? Is there merit in trying to interpret a historical event in a way that no one's ever done before?
Historians fall prey to trends and fashions just like everyone else, too. Columbus had a lot of American streets and cities named after him for years. Now his name is often coupled with "smallpox" and "Native Americans shoved off their land."

12. synthesis
Use all these Historical Thinking Skills to create meaningful hypotheses and understandings; persuasive interpretations and arguments.
The AP Curriculum says, “drawing appropriately on ideas and methods from different fields of inquiry or disciplines, and by creatively fusing disparate, relevant, and sometimes contradictory evidence from primary sources and secondary works."