AP European History › Unit 7
Nationalism redrew the map in the later 19th century. Italy and Germany unified, leaders like Bismarck practiced realpolitik, and rising tensions set the stage for 1914. You will also study Darwin and Social Darwinism, modern science and art, mass politics, and the New Imperialism in Africa and Asia. The exam asks you to explain causes and use sources to support claims. Students often present unification as a purely popular movement, overlooking diplomacy and war. Another mistake is treating Social Darwinism as Darwin's own theory rather than a misuse of it.
These are taken from the Regular set, with the answer and explanation shown.
Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. . . .
We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; . . . In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers. . . .
Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896), English translation in the 1946 American Zionist Emergency Council edition (ed. Jacob M. Alkow), as posted in the Fordham Internet History Sourcebooks. Source
1. Which event of the 1890s most directly influenced Herzl's argument in the excerpt?
Answer: A. In 1894 the French army falsely convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, of treason. Herzl covered the case as a journalist and saw crowds shouting against Jews. He concluded that even liberal France would not protect Jews.
Common trap: The Boulanger crisis was also a French political scandal around the same years. But it was about a general who threatened the republic, not about the treatment of Jews.
... the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relative to the "light medium," suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. ... We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a postulate ... The introduction of a "luminiferous ether" will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an "absolutely stationary space" provided with special properties ...
Albert Einstein, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (1905), trans. W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffery, in The Principle of Relativity (London: Methuen, 1923), as reproduced in Benjamin Crowell, General Relativity, appendix A (LibreTexts). Source
2. Einstein's argument that nature has "no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest" most directly challenged ideas associated with
Answer: A. Newton's physics assumed absolute space and absolute time, the same for every observer. Einstein said there is no "absolutely stationary space." His theory of relativity replaced part of the Newtonian system.
Common trap: Darwin is tempting because he also overturned an old view. But Darwin changed ideas about living things, not about space, time, and motion.
For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay [the gallery's owner] ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter 79 (July 2, 1877), as quoted in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, "Ruskin attacks Whistler in Fors Clavigera," via COVE Editions. Source
3. Whistler's painting, like the work of the Impressionists in France, is best seen as part of which trend in late-19th-century art?
Answer: D. Whistler and the Impressionists painted light, color, and mood instead of polished, detailed scenes. They rejected the official rules of academies and salons, which opened the way to modern art.
Common trap: The national history option is tempting because nationalism shaped much 19th-century culture. But history painting was a favorite of the academies, which Whistler rejected.