In a pandemic year in which most APUSH classes were running behind content-wise, nobody expected the DBQ to be from the post-WWII era! But then, that's exactly what the AP US History Test Development Committee did this year! The 2021 APUSH DBQ topic addressed the social consequences of the prosperity that followed World War II, with a timeframe between 1940 and 1970.

You may find my APUSH DBQ rubric helpful while taking a look at this sample essay, as each of these points is specifically targeted in the sample essay.

A few days after the 2021 free-response questions were released, I solved the 2021 DBQ within the one-hour time limit. I found that while the topic was not equally easy to argue from both sides, it was very easy to craft an argument against liberalism in British India while also making a counter-argument that liberalism was present in British India to an extent. Although this did not occur to me during the first pass, there is a way to create an argument for liberalism being the driving influence of British governance in India if one would take the critical newspaper articles and point out how they show a lack of censorship.