AP World History Course Outline

The purpose of the AP World History course is to develop the greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts in different types of human societies. This understanding is advanced through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate analytical skills. The course highlights the nature of changes in global frameworks and their causes and consequences, as well as comparisons among major societies. It emphasizes relevant factual knowledge, leading interpretive issues, and skills in analyzing types of historical evidence.

The primary intent of the AP World History course is to teach the history of the world from a truly global stance rather than from the dominant perspective of Western civilization. This approach, therefore, places emphasis on worldwide historical processes and connections among the whole gamut of human societies. In order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of these events, students need both factual knowledge and the ability to critically assess such information. This course helps them on both fronts, teaching the historical facts in the context of how progressive changes–environmental, social, scientific, and political–influenced the various societies they touched, as well as how these groups interacted with each other. Students are exposed to many primary sources in an effort to show them how historical analysis works and how they can proceed to make their own informed interpretations of world events, both past, and present. Significantly, the course is organized by five defining time periods, not by geographical areas. This concept of “periodization” is a vehicle that facilitates seeing both the continuities and changes over time that form the framework for understanding world history.