Section #2 - DBQ Resources
DBQ Questions
Our Toolkit provides two different DBQ opportunities.
The first involves direct access to verbatim excerpts from historical texts between 1607 and 1861, along with proposed questions for students to address. For example:
Read the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Then answer this question: “How does this Amendment impact the South’s claim to States’ Rights and their defense of slavery?”
Look carefully at these two photographs:
Then answer this question: “What do the photographs tell you about living as an enslaved person?”
Examples of proposed questions come next, chunked as follows and linked to each of the actual verbatim records.
| Documents | Associated Questions |
|---|---|
| The Social Contract | 1. According to Rousseau, what causes individuals to form a social contract and how could it be broken? |
| The Declaration of Independence | 2. According to the document, what are the “self-evident” obligations that Britain owes the Colonists in order to retain their loyalty? 3. What failures by Britain to deliver on its obligations to the Colonists justify their decision to declare independence? |
| The Articles of Confederation | 4. In what ways do these Articles favor the rights of individual States over the central government? 5. In what ways do these Articles undermine the power of the central government to reach agreement between the larger and smaller states and to unite on issues such as declaring and paying for wars? 6. What vulnerabilities did George Washington see in the Articles that convinced him of the need to write a new Constitution? |
| The United States Constitution | 7. What internal conflicts led the delegates to create the Senate as a second legislative chamber? 8. Why did each state’s total population include all free persons plus 3/5th of all other persons?” 9. How did creation of the Senate resolve internal conflicts between delegates at the Convention? 10. What does this imply about the relative power the delegates sought between the House and the Senate and also the wish for “checks and balances?” 11. Why does Lincoln call the South’s secession an “insurrection” rather than asking Congress to declare war? 12. Does this limitation represent a victory for those opposed to slavery and how does it turn out after 1808? 13. Do these Articles justify Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the war, or not? 14. Why did the delegates create this Electoral College to select the President rather than simply relying on the popular vote count? 15. Why were the two Senators from each state included in the total number of Electoral Votes granted? 16. In case of a run-off for President in the House, what impact does it have that each state is given the same single vote? 17. Do you agree or disagree that the definition of impeachable offenses is clear enough, and if so, why? 18. Is this description of the Supreme Court so vague as to be meaningless, and if so, does it appear that the delegates considered it a third co-equal branch of government? 19. Why did the Southern delegates demand this section and how enforceable was it before the update in the 1850 Compromise? |
| Others | Under Construction |