AP World History is designed to be the equivalent of a two-semester introductory college or university world history course. The purpose of AP World History is to develop a greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts, in interaction with different types of human societies. This understanding is advanced through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate thinking skills exercised within a framework of six chronological periods, related key concepts and course themes.
The course is a comprehensive survey from 8,000 BCE to the present in the five major geographical regions of the globe. The course focuses on developing the skills of comparison, contextualization, synthesis, causation, periodization, and the analysis of continuity and change by investigating the content of world history for significant events, individuals, developments, and processes in six distinct time periods.
COURSE THEMES
Throughout the course, students will actively interpret and analyze world history by employing overarching themes. These include:
Theme 1: Interaction between Humans and the Environment: demography and disease, migration, patterns of settlement and technology
Theme 2: Development and Interaction of Cultures: religions, belief systems, philosophies and ideologies, science and technology, and the arts and architecture
Theme 3: State Building, Expansion and Conflict: political structures and forms of governance, empires, nations and nationalism, revolts and revolutions, regional, transregional, and global structures and organizations
Theme 4: Creation, Expansion, and Interaction of Economic Systems: agricultural and pastoral production, trade and commerce, labor systems, industrialization, capitalism and socialism
Theme 5: Development and Transformation of Social Structures: gender roles and relations, family and kinship, racial and ethnic constructions, social and economic classes
The themes serve as unifying threads, and will help students put what is particular about each period or society into a larger framework. The themes also provide ways to make comparisons over time. The interaction of themes and periodization encourage cross-period questions such as “To what extent havecivilizations maintained their cultural and political distinctiveness over the time periods the course covers,” “Compare the justification of social inequality in 1450 with that at the end of the twentiethcentury,” and “Discuss the changes in international trading systems between 1300 and 1600.”