6/6 AP United States History LEQ Essay Example #3

The thesis names three causes and ranks them in one sentence. The writer lists "the railroads and the growth of cities" and then says "neither were as important as immigration," which answers the prompt's request to evaluate relative importance. The next sentence gives the reason for the ranking. More people entering the country "caused the demand for employment to grow, making labor cheaper and easier to come by." A reader knows the whole argument before the first body paragraph starts.

The opening line handles contextualization in a single sentence. It says that up to the mid 1800s "the majority of Americans earned their living through agriculture," and that farm economy is the baseline the prompt's industrial shift is measured against.

Each body paragraph takes one cause and connects it to the next. The railroad paragraph dates the transcontinental line to 1869 and says it made it "easier and faster to travel and move products across long distances." It then notes that building the railroad "created many job opportunities for immigrants," which plants the cause the essay will rank first. The cities paragraph names Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco and brings in Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller as employers who drew on urban labor. It ends with immigrants who "flocked to these cities because they offered larger job markets," so immigration comes back again before it gets its own paragraph.

By the time the writer reaches the immigration paragraph, the first two causes have already been shown feeding into it, and that is what holds the analysis together. The last step of the chain is spelled out in full. A large labor pool meant employers "could have more tasks completed, leading to a higher production of products and creating more profit." The conclusion repeats the same ranking and the same reason, so the argument does not shift between the introduction and the end.

Several historical details in the immigration paragraph are wrong, and a reader should not copy them. Czechoslovakia did not exist until 1918, and Slovenia and Croatia were part of Austria-Hungary in this period, so they cannot sit next to it as separate countries. Italy is in southern Europe, not Eastern or Central Europe. Most of the new immigrants after 1880 left because of rural poverty and land shortages, and many Russian Jews fled the pogroms that began in 1881. Fear of a coming war is not the usual explanation. The essay also says capitalists lowered "distribution costs due to the large labor pools," but a big labor pool lowers labor costs. Carnegie cut costs by owning every stage of steel production, and Rockefeller did it by buying out rival refineries and winning railroad rebates.

The ranking would be more convincing if the writer weighed the causes against each other. The essay says immigration mattered most, but it never explains why cheap labor outweighed the national market the railroad opened up. Other major causes go unmentioned, such as protective tariffs, federal land grants to railroads, and new technology like the Bessemer process. One sentence that admits a rival cause and answers it would make the ranking hold up better.

The prose has a few rough spots. The sentence beginning "With the U.S. population tripling" runs long, and its grammar breaks partway through. The line "Most of the US had been discovered by now" is vague and does nothing for the paragraph's point about cities.