World History, High School
2017-2018 Course Outline
In this course, students will define concrete historical topics, questions, problems, time periods, and themes, and then explore them in systematic ways. The main subject will be humankind, and how humans have thought, behaved, and interacted across the ages.
Objectives
Upon completing this course the student will be able to:
Sequence of Units
1. Making Sense of History: Thinking Like A Historian
2. Prehistory
a. Humans in the Universe: 13 Billion - 200,000 Years Ago
b. Human Beings Almost Everywhere: 200,000 - 10,000 Years Ago
3. The Ancient World
a. Farming and the Emergence of Complex Societies: 10,000 - 1000 BC
b. Expanding Networks of Change and Encounter: 1200 BC - 500 AD
4. The Middle Ages
a. Patterns of Interregional Unity: 300 - 1500 AD
5. The Modern Era
a. The Great Global Convergence: 1400 -1800
b. Industrialization and Its Consequences: 1750 - 1914
c. A Half Century of Crisis: 1900 - 1950
d. Paradoxes of Global Acceleration: 1945 - Present
6. Reflecting on the Past, Thinking About the Future
2017-2018 Course Outline
In this course, students will define concrete historical topics, questions, problems, time periods, and themes, and then explore them in systematic ways. The main subject will be humankind, and how humans have thought, behaved, and interacted across the ages.
Objectives
Upon completing this course the student will be able to:
- Describe features of the world's physical and natural environment, and explain how the environment has affected and been affected by historical developments.
- Explain large-scale and long-term historical developments of regional, interregional, and global scope.
- Analyze ways in which human groups have come into contact and interacted with one another, including systems of communication, migration, commercial exchange, conquest, and cultural diffusion.
- Assess the significance of key turning points in world history.
- Describe the development and explain the significance of distinctive forms of political, social, and economic organization.
- Identify major discoveries, inventions, and scientific achievements, and assess their impact on society.
- Identify achievements in art, architecture, literature, and philosophy, and assess their impact on society.
- Compare the world we live in today with past eras such as the lower paleolithic, upper paleolithic, neolithic, agrarian, and industrial ages.
- Explain ideals, practices, and historical developments of major belief systems.
- Identify challenges that humans have faced in the ecological, economic, political, and other spheres of life, and explain how they have responded to those challenges.
- Reflect upon choices humans have made in the past and consider how choices made today may affect the future.
Sequence of Units
1. Making Sense of History: Thinking Like A Historian
2. Prehistory
a. Humans in the Universe: 13 Billion - 200,000 Years Ago
b. Human Beings Almost Everywhere: 200,000 - 10,000 Years Ago
3. The Ancient World
a. Farming and the Emergence of Complex Societies: 10,000 - 1000 BC
b. Expanding Networks of Change and Encounter: 1200 BC - 500 AD
4. The Middle Ages
a. Patterns of Interregional Unity: 300 - 1500 AD
5. The Modern Era
a. The Great Global Convergence: 1400 -1800
b. Industrialization and Its Consequences: 1750 - 1914
c. A Half Century of Crisis: 1900 - 1950
d. Paradoxes of Global Acceleration: 1945 - Present
6. Reflecting on the Past, Thinking About the Future