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Various terms you may need to know for your high school world history midterm. Learn with flashcards, games, and more — for free.
Jul 8, 2024 · Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like History, Social Science, Anthropology and more.
- What is World History?
- Scale
- Themes
- Details
- The questions of World History
- Studying the past in the present
When starting a World History course, you might be wondering, “How can I cover the history of the entire world in one school year?” Well, that’s a very good question! Learning the history of everything would take quite a while—certainly more than one school year. Luckily, that’s not your task, because world history is not the history of everything that has ever happened in the world. Phew!
So what is the objective of a world history class? Well, it does include history from all over the world. It also spans across vast expanses of time--from the origins of homo sapiens roughly 250,000 years ago, to the rise of civilizations, all the way to more recent events like the rise of the Ottoman Empire, World War II, and social justice movements.
But how does it all fit together? World history ties all this information together by asking certain kinds of historical and thematic questions. In a world history course you look at big patterns, similarities, differences, continuities, changes, and broad movements.
But that doesn’t mean that details don’t matter! World historians focus on specific events and details in order to better understand the patterns and connections that create a big, fascinating picture.
All historians look at details from the past. What makes something world history is the scale of analysis. World history is mostly interested in large-scale things that have effects on large numbers of people or influence multiple regions of the world. World historians also tend to look at events that occur over long periods of time.
For example, a world historian would probably not devote extended time to studying the specific details in the diary of Christopher Columbus to learn about his life or the intricate details of his voyages. However, a world historian would study the several centuries of interactions between Europe, the Americas, and Africa that resulted from Columbus’s voyages.
Of course, understanding complex world historical processes can be complicated. How do world historians organize events that occur across the globe? There are certain themes that world historians often use to guide their analysis.
Think of themes as categories, ideas, or concepts that organize how someone thinks about a subject. World historical themes are focused on comparison and connection, broad systems, and global interactions.
In AP World History, which is a specific world history course, there are some particular themes we use to find patterns, trace processes, and make comparisons. They are:
1.Interaction between humans and the environment: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the rise of agriculture, the spread of disease, changing climates, or demographic changes.
1.Development and interaction of cultures: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the emergence and spread of new religions, influence of different religions or cultural traditions on one another, and the spread of new ideas like humanism or human rights.
1.State building, expansion, and conflict: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like how different empires have risen and fallen, in which ways rulers have increased their legitimacy, and different kinds of conflicts between societies.
Themes cover some pretty big ideas--and pretty big movements across space and time! But these big ideas are all made up of details from smaller case studies, and understanding these specific historical events and processes in a bigger context is the engine that drives world historical thinking. This specific historical knowledge gives you the raw material to build understanding of bigger processes, systems, and themes.
For example, the Silk Road is a subject of world historical interest because it provides many instances of economic, cultural, and environmental interactions. By zooming in on some specific examples of these interactions, you can start to develop a wider understanding of how trade patterns developed and changed, how cultures interacted and adapted, or how diseases spread. Studying the Silk Road can reveal connections between things as diverse as the Chinese silk industry, Buddhism, and plagues!
Historians try to understand what happened in the past by asking questions. More specifically, historians ask particular kinds of questions:
World historians ask these same kinds of questions—usually just on a broader scale!
To show how the historical question you want to answer will help you determine what details you should include and what scale your analysis will be at, let’s consider two historians—a historian of England and a world historian. Let’s assume that both are interested in the Industrial Revolution. However, the different focus of each historian will lead them to ask questions about the Industrial Revolution on different scales.
The historian of England might zoom in and ask, “How did industrialization disrupt wool production in central England in the 1790s?”
The world historian, by contrast, might zoom out to ask, “How did industrialization lead to new patterns in world trade during the nineteenth century?”
Both are perfectly good historical questions. The answers to these questions might even influence one another. But, only the latter question is world historical because it focuses on how the Industrial Revolution affected multiple regions over an extended period of time.
Whatever type of historical study we are doing, it is important to remember that people who lived in the past faced different circumstances and had different values than you do.
Historical questions are not about determining whether we today are better or worse than people who lived in the past. However, differences in values or behaviors between the past and present can spark historical inquiries. For example, you might look at an event that seems surprising or controversial from our contemporary perspective. With the tools of world history, we look at those events and consider questions like, "What factors motivated different people to participate in these events?"
As the famous historian David Lowenthal once wrote, "The past is a foreign country." Studying world history is like taking a trip across the world and through time. You can't go everywhere, but if you visit enough places, you can start to see the global connections that have shaped the world we live in today!
[Notes and attributions]
Directions: Define the terms/events/people listed below in the corresponding chart and then explain the significance of each term as it relates to world history. You can use the unit Quizlet to help you fill in the definition section of the chart. Definition (Who, What, When, Where...)
world history, branch of history concerned with the study of historical phenomena that transcend national, regional, or cultural boundaries or distinctions between peoples or with the study of history from a global, comparative, or cross-cultural perspective.
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