AP European History — Practice Questions flashcards
6 of 60 questions free to study here · 9 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
Multiple-choice practice questions, one best answer each, on all nine AP European History units, from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Cold War and European integration.
Practice deck · part of AP European History · written against: College Board AP European History Course and Exam Description (nine units, c. 1450–present). Updated 2026-10-10.
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A Florentine banking family paid for public buildings, commissioned paintings and sculpture, and supported scholars who collected ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts. Which development in fifteenth-century Italy does this pattern of patronage best illustrate?
A) Monarchs centralizing power by replacing nobles with salaried officials
B) Merchants organizing rural cottage industry to escape guild rules
C) Commercial wealth funding a revival of classical learning and art
D) Church reformers using art to answer Protestant attacks on imagesC) Commercial wealth funding a revival of classical learning and artRenaissance and Exploration › Renaissance
Italy's city-states were rich from Mediterranean trade and banking (the Medici of Florence), and rival patrons competed for prestige by sponsoring art and humanist scholarship. Using art against Protestant criticism belongs to the later Catholic Reformation and its Baroque style. -
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), written in the aftermath of the English Civil War, describes life without government as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Which conclusion did Hobbes draw from this view?
A) Government exists only to protect natural rights to property
B) Sovereignty lies in the general will of the whole community
C) People should submit to a sovereign with undivided power
D) Subjects may overthrow any ruler who violates their rightsC) People should submit to a sovereign with undivided powerAbsolutism and Constitutionalism › England
Because the state of nature is violent chaos, Hobbes argued that people must give up their freedom to an all-powerful sovereign. A right to overthrow a ruler who violates natural rights is Locke's argument. -
Through his telescope, Galileo observed moons orbiting Jupiter and the phases of Venus. Why were these observations significant?
A) They gave evidence against the Earth-centered cosmos of Aristotle and Ptolemy
B) They confirmed the Church's teaching that Earth lies at the center
C) They showed that a single law of gravity governs motion on Earth and in the heavens
D) They proved that the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sunA) They gave evidence against the Earth-centered cosmos of Aristotle and PtolemyScientific and Philosophical Developments › Scientific Revolution
Moons circling Jupiter showed that not everything orbits Earth, and the phases of Venus fit a heliocentric model. Elliptical orbits were Kepler's work and universal gravitation was Newton's. -
Which set of factors most delayed industrialization in much of continental Europe compared with Britain in the early 1800s?
A) Government refusal to build or subsidize railways and canals
B) Early abolition of guilds, which left workers without protection
C) Free-trade policies that exposed new industries to British competition
D) War disruption, surviving guilds and internal tolls, and scarce capitalD) War disruption, surviving guilds and internal tolls, and scarce capitalIndustrialization › Spread of Industry
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, guilds and internal tolls and scarce capital slowed the Continent; Belgium went first, then governments used railways and tariffs to catch up. State railway building sped industry rather than delaying it. -
In an 1862 speech, paraphrased here, Prussia's minister-president Otto von Bismarck said that the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority votes, which had been the mistake of 1848–49, but by iron and blood. Which approach does this reflect?
A) Romantic nationalism built on folk culture and a shared past
B) Liberal nationalism working through an elected national parliament
C) Realpolitik relying on military power and calculated diplomacy
D) Revolutionary unification led by an uprising of the working classC) Realpolitik relying on military power and calculated diplomacy19th-Century Perspectives › Nationalism and Unification
Bismarck unified Germany through realpolitik and three wars, against Denmark, Austria and France. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 had tried the liberal parliamentary path and failed. -
Why did East German authorities build the Berlin Wall in 1961?
A) To protest Western plans for a new currency in West Germany
B) To retaliate against the Western airlift of supplies to Berlin
C) To enforce the Brezhnev Doctrine after the Prague Spring
D) To stop East Germans from fleeing to the West through West BerlinD) To stop East Germans from fleeing to the West through West BerlinCold War and Contemporary Europe › Cold War
Mass flight to the West through Berlin was draining the GDR of skilled workers. The currency dispute and the airlift belong to the Berlin blockade of 1948–49.
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About these cards
Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Topic outline follows the College Board AP European History Course and Exam Description (effective Fall 2026), Units 1–9; no text copied.
- OpenStax World History, Volume 1 and OpenStax World History, Volume 2, consulted as references; no text copied.
- Facts and quoted stimuli also checked against Project Gutenberg editions of Machiavelli's The Prince (Marriott translation), Hobbes's Leviathan, Rousseau's The Social Contract (G. D. H. Cole translation), Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Kipling's The Five Nations; Internet Archive scans of the 1898 and 1906 reprints of the 1888 English translation of the Communist Manifesto; the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Waterworth translation, 1848; Hanover Historical Texts); the Bill of Rights (1689) on legislation.gov.uk (Open Government Licence v3.0); the Avalon Project's text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; Robespierre's speech of 5 February 1794 (Internet Modern History Sourcebook); the 1801 Concordat as printed in the Bulletin des lois (1802); the First Peace of Paris (1814) on napoleon-empire.org and the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna (1815) in Hertslet's The Map of Europe by Treaty, vol. 1 (1875; Internet Archive scan); German History in Documents and Images (Bismarck's 1862 speech and the Prussian October Edict of 1807); the Library of Congress's Russia: A Country Study (1996); Richard Hellie's 'Serfdom' in the Encyclopedia of Russian History; the Musée protestant; and the European Union's official history pages (CC BY 4.0). Reference only; no text copied apart from the short quoted stimuli.
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