WHAP

STRAYER – Introduction Homework

Homework #IntroA

  1. Have parents sign the syllabus.
  2. Read, “Worldview”
  3. Complete the handout, “World View”

Homework #IntroB

  1. Read, “The Myth of Continents.” by Peter Morris and answer questions 1 – 2.

Homework #IntroC

  1. Finish, “Thinking like a Historian” handout from class. (An extra copy is in the homework packet)

Homework #IntroD

  1. Complete the handout, “Textbook Scavenger Hunt.”

Homework #IntroE

  1. Read Strayer – Prologue – From Cosmic History to Human History pp. lxxii – lxxix
  2. Complete Cornell Notes, definitions, and questions.

Woodlands High SchoolWHAP

Mrs. Butler2015-2016

World History I - AP Syllabus

WHAT IS AP WORLD HISTORY?This is part I of a two year Advanced Placement World History college-level survey course that introduces students to world civilizations and cultures. The course guide for this class follows the College Board’s AP World History course description. A student’s performance on the AP World History exam determines a student’s eligibility to earn up to six hours of college credit. Students will take the AP World exam in May after completing the two year course. Course curriculum, materials, and expectations are designed to prepare students for the rigorous three-hour exam. (In addition, students are expected to pass the NY State Regents examination in Global History taken in June after completing the two year course)

World History AP (WHAP) is an opportunity to develop greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts, in interaction with different types of human societies. In other words, how did the world get where it is today. To affect this understanding, students need a combination of factual knowledge and analytical skills. The course highlights the nature of changes in the global framework and their causes and consequences, as well as comparisons among major societies. Special attention will be given to the WHAP Themes. This course is truly global in its scope, with Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe represented. Within each chapter of the textbook, the following themes will be emphasized:

THE FIVE THEMES OF WORLD HISTORY

1. Interaction between humans and the environment

a. Demography and disease

b. Migration

c. Patterns of settlement

d. Technology

2. Development and interaction of cultures

a. Religions

b. Belief systems, philosophies, and ideologies

c. Science and technology

d. The arts and architecture

3. State-building, expansion and conflict

a. Political structures and forms of governance

b. Empires

c. nations and nationalism

d. revolts and revolutions

e. regional, trans-regional, and global structures and organizations

4. Creation, expansion, and interaction of economic systems

a. agricultural and pastoral production

b. trade and commerce

c. labor systems

d. industrialization

e. capitalism and socialism

5. Development and transformation of social structures

a. gender roles and relations

b. family and kinship

c. racial and ethnic constructions

d. social and economic classes

SKILLS TAUGHT:

  1. Crafting historical arguments from historical evidence
  • Historical argumentation
  • Appropriate use of historical Evidence
  1. Chronological Reasoning
  • Historical Causation
  • Patterns of continuity and change over time
  • Periodization
  1. Comparison and Contextualization
  • Comparison
  • Contextualization
  1. Historical Interpretation and Synthesis
  • Interpretation
  • Synthesis

TEXTBOOKS:

  1. Strayer, Robert, Ways of the World, 2th Edition, Cengage Learning, 2014
  2. Primary Source Documents and supplementary readings
  3. AMSCO, World History Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination, 2015 edition

GRADING POLICY:

  1. Homework:

35% of total grade

  1. Participation:

25% of total grade

  1. Examinations, Projects, Essays and Quizzes:

40% of total grade

CLASS RULES:

1. You must be in your seat when the bell stops ringing to avoid a lateness. We will work from bell to bell and require all of the time allotted in the year to prepare.

2. Raise your hand to speak.

3. Three Strikes, You’re Out Rule: Assignments are to be turned in on the day they are due, UNLESS you prearrange with me. I understand that your lives are busy – be responsible enough to extend your deadline with my pre-approval if needed. If you turn in an assignment the day it is due, it is eligible for full credit. If you turn it in the next school day, it is eligible for ½ credit. After that, I will not take late work. Period. If you miss a test or quiz, please make it up within two weeks of the missed date, otherwise it will remain a zero in the grade book.

4. Always do your own work, to the best of your abilities!

Plagiarism—Always make sure the work you turn in is your own. Please DO NOT copy another’s work, nor “borrow” their work. Plagiarism is basically the things listed below: • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own • to use (another's production) without crediting the source • to commit literary theft • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward. Those caught plagiarizing will receive an automatic zero on the assignment. *For the purposes of this course, Wikipedia is not considered an academic source.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Please feel free to contact me at the following e-mail address with any questions or concerns:

WHSName:

Mrs. ButlerWHAP

Homework #IntroA

Date:

Please have a parent and/or guardian verify that they have read and understand the requirements outlined in the syllabus for World History AP by reading and signing below:

I have read and understand the following course syllabus and expectations. I will adhere to these expectations and will expect a phone call, note home, and/or conference with the teacher if I am failing to live up to the above list.

______

Student Name (Print)

______

Parent Signature

WHSName:

Mrs. ButlerWHAP

Homework #IntroA

Date:

Worldview

  1. What is meant by the term, “Worldview”?
  1. Read the passage below. It is from Donald James Johnson and Jean Elliot Johnson, The Human Drama: From the Beginning to 500 C.E. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publisher, 2002), 3-4.

Change Over Time

History is the story of change over time. But what is time? Does it move? If so, how? Cycles in

nature, phases of the moon; the seasons; the growth, death, and rebirth of plants – suggest

time moves in circles. Time that appears to move in circles in called cyclical time. Nature follows

cyclical time, and agricultural communities usually follow the rhythms of the seasons. Myths from

India tell of great cycles during which the world comes into being and then dissolves, over and

over again. The present universe has existed before and will come into being again. In these

stories, there is no, “In the beginning…” Where does a circle begin?

Some communities in Africa have two kinds of time: One covers what a person has experienced

or is about to experience, and the other encompasses a community’s past, most of which no one

remembers very clearly any longer. Events move backward, away from memory, into the

“graveyard of time.”

Most people in the United States assume time moves forward in a straight line from a fixed beginning into the future. This is called linear time. The study of history assumes linear time

because historians are interested in cause and effect and how things change. Some people who

believe in linear time also assume that as things change they get better. They may study the past in order to see how things have improved and progressed, how our present way of life is superior to earlier times.

To record events in linear time requires starting at some point. Logically, we should start with

creation, but when did that take place? Events are often dated with the birth of some extremely important person or the start of a ruler’s reign. The Greeks used the Olympics as the basis of their calendar. For the Muslims, year one was when the first Muslim community fled from Mecca to Medina, and they use a lunar calendar with twelve 28-day months. The birth of Jesus is at the center of the designations B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini, “in the year of the Lord”). We will follow this dating but use the more general terms B.C.E. (before the Common Era) and C.E. (of the Common Era).

Calendar / Year / New Year’s Day
Gregorian / 2015 C.E. / January 1
Islamic / 1435-1436 / October 15
Hebrew / 5776 / September 29
Chinese / 4712 (year of the horse)
4713 (year of the sheep) / February 19
  1. How might time provide insight into a society’s worldview?
  1. Does history have to be linear? What are the advantages of thinking about time as being in a straight line? What are the problems of this approach?
  1. What other factors besides time help to define a society’s worldview?
  1. Using one of the factors (for example, religion) from question 5, describe your own culture’s worldview using at least 3 pieces of evidence (one of which must be architecture or art.) (For example, for time you might mention the linear timelines in our textbooks, the year round schools that do not follow the agriculturally derived summer break, and the presence of clocks in town bell towers for all to see and hear.)

WHSName:

Mrs. ButlerWHAP

Homework # IntroB

Date:

The Myth of Continents, or How our Grade-School Teachers Distorted the Truth

Peter S. Morris

How many continents are there? It seems like a simple enough question, and most of us who grew up in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century come prepared with a pat answer to which we give little thought: “There are seven continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. Next question, please.” The official flag of the Olympic games, however, displays a famous symbol of interlocking rings, each ring intended to represent one of the five continents of the world, the two Americas treated asone and Antarctica simply forgotten. Rather than some sort of geographic maverick, this lineup of five continents, not seven, is a standard one taught throughout much of Europe. So what is the answer to our question? Is it five, or is it seven? Well, the most thoughtful answer might actually be none of the above, or better yet, “it depends.” There are few terms in geography that are more loaded with implied meanings and biased world views than continent. As a common-sense concept, the idea is simple enough: pick up a globe and one can readily observe a half-dozen distinctive (if barely connected) land masses. The exact number is debatable, depending on one’s size threshold for when an “island” becomes a “continent”. Is Australia large enough to be a continent? How about Greenland? Madagascar? Personally, I’m inclined to answer these questions Yes, No, and No, giving me a list of six: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. To my eyes at least, this half-dozen represents the world’s primary distinctive land masses, as opposed to islands. While this list is debatable, one thing clearly isn’t: Europe is not a continent—at least as long as we continue to see “continent” as more or less a synonym for land mass. Without question, Europe is a distinctive world region, both in social-cultural terms and as an environmental subcontinent of Eurasia. If we insist on calling Europe a continent, though, then consistency demands we do so for other, analogous regions around the world, such as South Asia (India and its neighbors) and Mesoamerica (Mexico and its neighbors). Our original list of five, six, or seven continents now expands to a dozen or more. The bigger lesson, though, is not that there are really six continents, rather than the usual list of five or seven. Instead, this whole subjective exercise in continental definition teaches us how fruitless the idea of dividing the world into continents really is. As a type of region, continents are intended to provide a classification scheme by which we make some sense of the world. But closer inspection reveals that continents provide us with, at best, only a limited and rather distorted sense of world geography. There are two primary problems with the concept. First, the history of the continental idea is closely tied to ideas of European superiority. As geographers Martin Lewis and KärenWigen discuss in their wonderful book, The Myth of Continents, Europeans defined Asia as a catch-all concept to hold the various non-Christian, non-“Western” peoples who didn’t live up to their notions of what modern civilization should be. Not only did the idea of Asia, or “Orientalism,” hide from view the great diversity of places, peoples, environments, © Peter S. Morris, January 2000 Page 2 of 2 landscapes, and cultures that occupy the eastern three-quarters of Eurasia, but it served to simplify Europe’s conception of itself. The idea of a continental divide between Europe and Asia became a tool for those seeking to excise Islam, Communism, Judaism, and any other ideologies and cultures that conflicted with their personal visions of what Europe was and should be. The second problem with using continents, or even a more innocent notion of land masses free of the eurocentrism described above, as an organizational framework for understanding the world, is its implied environmental determinism. A major theme of geography is how physical environments help shape the cultures and societies that inhabit them—how climate and soil and topography and natural avenues of transportation influence agricultural and other economic activity and the location of cities and other human settlements. But one of the biggest geographic fallacies is to take such thinking to the extreme, to say that environmental conditions are the single, dominant determinant of human activity—the ultimate explanation for all the cultures, landscapes, and geographies of wealth and poverty that we see today. Such simplistic thinking geographers reject as “environmental determinism”. What does this have to do with continents? It is all well and good to recognize that land and water on earth is grouped into a pattern we might identify as a geography of oceans and land masses. Even better, we might relate that geography both to the geologic process of continental drift which created it, as well as to its influence on the global-scale circulation of currents of hot and cold air and water in our oceans and skies. But that is about as far as the continental or land-mass idea can take us. There is no good reason why our attempts to understand world geography in general, particularly in its human dimensions, should be based on a framework of continents. Thus, it is no accident that college textbooks use an alternative, “world regions” scheme, identifying three or more Asia’s, two or more Europe’s, two or more Africa’s, and two or more Americas. Even more importantly, the best world geography recognizes that world regions can be more than simply subcontinental units of a single land mass. Defining a mostly-Islamic realm that covers parts of both Africa and Eurasia is common practice. Somewhat less common, but just as instructive, are regions that bridge major bodies of water; the North Atlantic World, the Pacific Rim, and the greater Mediterranean are all concepts that make sense, even though they overlap with alternative classification schemes for regionalizing the world. The bottom line: No scheme is perfect, and there is no single best way to broadly group the peoples and places of the world into geographic units. We therefore need to recognize multiple ways to group the world. Continents do make some sense as land masses, providing a visually-obvious physical ordering of land and water on earth which helps us understand processes of geomorphology and climate. Otherwise, dividing the world into continents is a meaningless and potentially distorting exercise. Further Reading · Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) · Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)

WHSName:

Mrs. ButlerWHAP

Homework #IntroB – Myth of Continents

Date:

After reading the article, please examine the map of the College Board’s division of the world’s regions (above), and answer the following questions.

  1. After considering Morris’ points, how many continents do you think there are? Why? Is Europe a continent in your scheme? Why or why not?
  1. Looking at the two maps of AP World history regions (included above), do you agree with how the College Board has divided the world? Does it make sense to you? If you were going to make your own map of the world, how would you divide up the world’s regions? Why?

Please make sure your answers are thoughtful, legible, and complete.

WHSName:

Mrs. ButlerWHAP

Homework #IntroC

Date:

ThinkinglikeAHistorian

What isHistory?What isHistoriography?

Beforewe discussprimary sources,let’slook at secondary and tertiary sources first….

Secondary Sources

Someone’sinterpretationofprimary (orsecondary)sources,so theyare one or more steps removedfromtheeventbeing

analyzed.

Examples: biographies,historical articles,literature reviews

Uses:Oftenforms the bulkofone’s research.

Limitations:Notall arereliable.The bestaresources produced bytrained experts andpublishedinscholarly journals,because

theyhave been “peer-reviewed”orvettedbyscholars trained inhistorical thinking.

See hints onhowtoreadsecondaryandtertiarysources likea historian.

TertiarySources