Drill 14 · Multiple Choice · Unit 5: Revolutions
AP World History Unit 5 Drill 14 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Unit 5: Revolutions. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
This drill focuses on how nationalism became a major force shaping states and empires from c. 1750 to c. 1900, driving both independence movements and attempts at national unification. Read the passage carefully, then answer all five questions.
Adapted from a modern historian's analysis of nineteenth-century nationalism.
"Nationalism was among the most powerful and destructive forces of the nineteenth century. At its heart was a deceptively simple idea: that legitimate political authority derives from a people sharing a common identity — language, history, culture, or religion — and that such a people constitutes a 'nation' entitled to self-governance within its own state. This idea was explosive because it simultaneously justified independence movements against multinational empires and provided the ideological fuel for ethnic exclusion and conflict. Where nationalists succeeded — in Greece, in Germany, in Italy, in the Americas — they remade the political map. Where the same logic was applied to diverse empires like the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian, it was a force of dissolution rather than creation. The same idea that united could equally divide."