So… AP World History.
There’s quite a lot to say about this AP, so I’m going to put it in a series, just like I did with AP Chemistry. How should I start?
I guess like with all the other courses, I should describe the paths available in my school and why I chose what I did— As you may or may not have noticed in reading my previous Course Reviews, Humanities classes generally only have an advanced or a regular level, while STEM has all sorts of levels everywhere, which is really confusing. This trend still applies to AP World History, which gives us two options: An AP World class, or a regular world history class. Apparently the regular world class is really easy— or at least that’s what my friends tell me. They have fairly basic projects and talk about a lot of topics in depth while AP World would usually just skim over it.
One comparison between the two classes that might be quite surprising to many people is that AP World History, from what I’ve been able to see, actually is less detailed than the regular world history. The regular world history doesn’t go too far back in time— in many cases only as far back as the French Revolution, which means you have over six months to cover the events of about two hundred and thirty years of history. That’s actually quite a good amount of time, but the AP World course starts way earlier— all the way back in the year 1200, which means there’s a lot more that needs to be covered in that roughly same time period, and of course that will require some topic-skipping.
Another notable difference between the two is that our school (which uses the trimester system) puts regular world at a two tri commitment while AP World is a three tri commitment. The majority of people who put Regular World either
- Don’t like history
- Don’t want to take AP World because it’s pretty hard
And I’ll admit, the class is quite daunting to many. It requires serious commitment— the notes take hours some days, and if you’re not ready to sacrifice a lot of time for the class this may not be the right thing for you. They require these fast paced, on demand analysis essays that I’ll talk about later that require you to (in a span of just 55 minutes, sometimes shorter depending on the essay type) choose a thesis and come up with evidence, articulate that evidence, support that evidence and connect it to your thesis through commentary, and then do that all over again.
To make this class even more difficult, my school has really high standards. They require a lot more from you than what the AP Exam does, making it even more difficult to get an A. The course layout of the class is quite complex, so we’ll generally skim through it here.
First off, there’s the notes. Almost anyone who you ask will tell you that the main reason they consider AP World to be a difficult class is simply because of the insane amount of notes that they require you to take. I don’t disagree with this— it’s a pretty long amount of work, and there have been times where I’d have a really long note set keeping me up for close to two hours each night, making it difficult for me to keep my energy for other things I need to work on (looking at you, AP Chem). We use the Cornell Notes format, which you’ve likely heard of if you’ve done any sort of history notes. They usually involve vocabulary, details, answers to guiding questions, and Points of confusion. All of this is done at home, but usually in class we’ll also have to write a diagram called “interactions” which help to visualize the notes in some way.
In class, on top of doing notes interactions, we’ll also do an activity based on something related to the ongoing chapter reading. These typically will be more explicit and often times they’re really good specific pieces of evidence that you can use on your essay. We’ll do a lot of things from reading primary and secondary sources to listening to podcasts to watching videos— all of which are enjoyable and help us understand the content.
Another really interesting surprise that makes AP World History a very different class… none of the notes or interactions or worksheets ever count towards the final grade. Yep, you heard me right. There are people who don’t do any notes at all, or forget to submit part of their worksheet who can get away with it and not lose any points for that type of misconduct. But obviously that doesn’t mean that nothing counts towards the final grades.
Projects are the first thing— every unit involves one single project focusing on some aspect of the content in that unit. I’ll reveal what some of the projects are later on as I go. They each count for a pretty big chunk of your grade, and since there isn’t much going in, you’ll want to do well on these. Most projects will usually come in two parts— a research part and some sort of creation itself, but this doesn’t apply everywhere.
Another thing that does count for your grade— and this is probably the reason why you’ll want to do your notes even though you aren’t required to for the grade— are the one… two… skip a few… ten trillion… three… FOUR types of exams that they’ll make you do at some point in the course. A lot of these are more difficult than others, and here’s the kicker… if you fail one, you can only get the eligibility to retake it if and only if you can confirm you finished all of your notes on time and completely. If not… tough luck. I remember the first unit I discovered that the hard way— I did all my notes except for one small thing, which caused my entire eligibility to crumple apart, delaying myself from making any meaningful progress.
Here are the four exam types, in case you’re interested:
LEQ – Stands for “Long Essay Question”. Requires you to answer a prompt with evidence, (typically around 4 to 6) pieces to answer a thesis, but our school makes us write two theses in the span of fifty five minutes because it’ll get us the complexity point that is difficult to achieve on the AP Exam.
DBQ – Stands for “Document-based question”. Kind of like an LEQ but with sources that you can use to form a thesis and an argument. You are still required to have some outside evidence, so still be prepared to apply your other AP World knowledge to this one.
SAQ – Stands for “Short Answer Question”. There’s a very similar format between this one and the LEQ that requires you to write a response to a prompt with evidence and commentary for both, with the main difference being that your response can be shorter, and the prompts are typically far simpler than that of an LEQ.
MCQ – Stands for “Multiple Choice Question”. I think this one is fairly self explanatory, but it can be noted that our tests for the Multiple Choice usually have a 15% curve— even with that, the exam is still very difficult for a lot of people. Similarly to the SAQs and DBQs, this one can often require source analysis and also requires you to apply your existing knowledge like the LEQ.
With that out of the way, let’s discuss the material for the first unit of the AP World class… it’s a lot. Like… fifty pages of notes “a lot”. Here’s a very rough summary of everything they taught us.
So I know I said earlier that the AP World material starts at around 1200 in this course, but we did learn about some important developments before that. We spent about two weeks skimming over pretty much all the major developments that went from the beginning of man to the year 1200. So I hate to break it to you, but this does mean that there’s no Roman Empire, most of Byzantium is gone, you won’t get to see the Ancient Egyptians or Mesopotamians, there’s no Alexander the Great, no Phoenicians, no Carthage, no Etruscans, none of that… we just don’t have time for that. Sorry, but there’s enough from 1200 to 2025 to cover in the world on our own. Besides, it’s the entire world! Even here, they’re going to have to generalize everything.
They started by discussing the really early stuff at first. Basically the beginning of time — back to the time of the Paleolithic Era, which is basically the Hunter-Gatherer Phase of human society where people moved around to gather, hunt, and fish to survive. It was quite surprising to learn that each of these societies had their own unique cultures, identities, and languages. I wouldn’t have expected that for a society as far back as ten thousand years ago, but it appears that it truly did exist. Because the world is always changing, it was common for these Paleolithic societies to move around in order to adapt to whatever was going on around them. The last major characteristic was that they were actually egalitarian— unlike almost every other society, they had no genuine form of inequality, it was just… team of people working together.
Most societies around the world lived in this way until several thousand years ago, when the Agricultural Revolution which you’ve definitely heard of became prominent. It actually started in different parts of the world at separate times, meaning the time it happened in Egypt likely isn’t the same as Mesopotamia. Because people were starting to use plant and animal domestication now, societies started to advance rapidly in terms of technology and changed from their original hunter-gathered practices. This gave birth to several different society types:
- Pastoral Societies – Relied on Animal Domestication in order to get food, largely moving around to accommodate their environment.
- Village Based Agricultural Societies – Another egalitarian group that actually settled down into permanent settlements rather than moving around in a nomadic style.
- Chiefdom – The first form of inequality, which was ruled by a chief, typically one that was descended from some deity that they worshipped. There were a lot of perks to being a chief, such as the fun of collecting and distributing tribute for their tribe and leading important events like rituals and warfare, but they also had to maintain their leadership in peaceful ways, which is not like the future societies we’ll see later on…
Coming up on Inside A Wandering Mind: A lot of dictator like societies, basically.
But most people reading this article would still probably read this and think: “Hmmm! That’s not impressive at all. Okay, sure, they find new ways to get food and now they have a chief? But where’s the advanced stuff? Why do they still sound like they’re in the Caveman phase?
And to those people I say: Nope, because the complexity of history and society is about to multiply tenfold with the invention of what many call Civilization. They’re characterized according to our textbook by one thing: Cities, and you’ve got to admit: the invention of cities is absolutely game changing. They’re the political, economical, and cultural centers of many countries today— can you imagine an America without New York? A France without Paris? A Japan without Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto? Those are Revolutionary.
Another thing that Civilizations gave birth to: Authority. We’re finally getting to see the dictators, and most well known, the kings. These are the kings that you think about in any society with a lot of inequality. These are the kind of rulers that rule entirely by force, being very ruthless, and having pretty much no limit to how powerful they are.
There’s a whole bunch of other features too that come with Civilization— we see the first social classes, which means now you can make those cool pyramid charts on societies based on their social structure, as well as very rapid technological advancement. In the span of one reading chapter, we went from cavemen beating on animals with sticks to fully functioning advanced societies with progress in mathematics, medicine, and several other fields.
But not all civilizations were equal: they largely varied in how their environment affected them (or how they affected their environment). One good example of this is how the Greeks were largely independent city states due to Greece’s mountainous terrain, while the Mayan Civilization actually collapsed in the 900s due to overharvesting of their environments. A lot of civilizations were varied in how unified and large they were— I already mentioned that Greece was a very divided civilization, but it was far from the only divided one: the Swahili states (On the East Coast of Africa) as the Mesoamerican Civilization (South of Mexico) were all highly diverse, while history has also witnessed the rise of several large empires. The Romans, the Persians, the Chinese are a few examples of these. Some were also more equal than others — speaking of inequality, slavery was also far more popular in different civilizations, most notably Greece and Roman, who are known a lot for their slaves. Another inequality between civilizations regarding inequality: Patriarchies were more or less strict depending on where you were, but there was the general tendency for younger civilizations to be more relaxed towards their women (just like right now, to some extent).
And then we get to our next note set, the longest one in chapter one… this one was genuinely so long that a good percentage of people taking AP World this year actually decided to drop out after seeing how long it was. I stuck through it, and here’s a very brief summary of all of the world’s major religions, which you bet was a major part of the future chapters to come.
- Hinduism: The first South Asian Religion which is incredibly popular in India. It’s polytheistic, which means it believes in many gods, and aims to establish unity with Brahman, or the World Soul. It’s also got a set of religious texts called the Upanishads, which I’ve often seen as the “Bible of Hinduism”. A lot of the prestige that goes with Hinduism is based around what you are born as, such as through karma and caste (Social class)
- Buddhism: Another South Asian Religion which is partially based off Hinduism. As someone who was raised in a Buddhist family, I know the story: It starts with a prince living a comfortable life in a castle until he one day learned that death and suffering were a thing. His reaction to death was the same way as mine when I learned about it at the age of seven: I was super sure that there was a way to… delay death, and I told myself I’d get a medical degree in second grade and figure out how to postpone death indefinitely. Eight years later, I’ve come up with nothing. Anyway…. Yeah, he went on and learned that the way to end suffering is to cut off all our desires, which are the root of our suffering. The religion of Buddhism also began to split into Theravada and Mahayana (I am Mahayana) and the religion went on to spread into other parts of Asia, but surprisingly did not become very popular in India, where it first began due to conflicts with Hinduism, most notably the caste system.
- Confucianism and Daoism- I decided to lump these two together because they’re both Chinese philosophies which based on my reading so far, have been the two most irrelevant out of all the religions mentioned. Confucianism was started by… you guessed it, Confucius, and get this: Confucius actually believed that inequality was a good thing, and that humans should not try to fight it. He advocated, however, that whoever was in charge should be kind and generous to their subordinates, which I’m completely sure will totally happen when I write down what happens in the next chapter… Spoiler Alert: No, they’re not very generous at all. Daoism, on the other hand, was often seen as a sort of opposite to Confucianism, founded by a guy named Laozi, who wanted humans to embrace our natural tendencies and minimize government. It was also the main philosophy that based the Yellow Turban Rebellion in China, which you won’t know unless you’re either Chinese, read a lot of history, or watched a Three Kingdoms movie/game.
- The Abrahamic Religions: The three monotheistic Religions that you know for one thing: Believing in god. The main three that most people know are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which are all actually very closely connected in a multitude of ways that we don’t have time to get into. They generally began to divide as time went on: The Christians into the Orthodox and Catholic Church, and the Muslims into the Sunni and Shi’a, which was initially split based off a disagreement on who should succeed Muhammad after the Muslim religion was first founded.
Wow, okay… that’s the first chapter, but the unit for AP World isn’t over yet, which means now we’re going to enter Chapter 2, which is the part where AP World really begins, starting you off on a world tour across all the civilizations that were around in 1200, which sort of set the scene for everything that is to come.
The first area of the world that we’re traveling to is East Asia, which probably brings your mind to one place, and one place only: China. Not a big surprise, right? It’s known everywhere for a lot of things these days: Tik Tok, communism, rice, and overly strict parents who push their kids to get A-pluses on everything. There’s a lot of different things, however, that it was known for back then.
For one thing, yes, one of them actually happens to be rice! China stole the Vietnamese version of rice, called Champa Rice (Definitely Vietnamese) and used it as their main type of rice. But there’s far more to China than just the rice stereotype. The most obvious thing that most people would point out is that China is huge. It’s famous for being one of the biggest countries on the planet today, and back then was really no different. It was very stable back in the 1200 and ruled under the Song Dynasty, which was sort of the golden age for China’s history, building off the progress of previous dynasties. Just like pretty much any society, there was significant bias towards the rich and upper class citizens, who basically got the leg up in China’s examination system, which a lot of students took in order to apply for positions in their bureaucracy.
Just like today, China also produced a huge number of products and was very economically prosperous, sort of like how it is really rising in power today. It had a massive population explosion and a lot of cities, including a capital called Hangzhou which had a population in the millions. Their economic output was huge, which is once again a parallel to today,, particularly in their metallurgy industry. They also introduced a lot of new technologies to the world including navigation, Shipbuilding, printing books, and gunpowder.
And even then China’s portfolio of prosperity isn’t over yet. Their entire country was equipped with a huge aquatic network of transportation that ran through the vast majority of their country, spanning through their two major rivers (Yellow and Yangtze) as well as also inventing paper money, which is still clearly used a lot today.
The Song Dynasty was also a very patriarchal society… in other words, they very much favored men over women. There was segregation all over China between genders, and they also practiced this thing called foot binding, where Chinese women would cram their feet into these really tiny spaces in their shoes. It was supposedly a symbol of beauty, but doing this also forfeited their mobility. All of this isn’t to say that Chinese women gained nothing during this time period, however, because they certainly did— they saw improved rights when it came to property, inheritance, and education.
And as the dominant power in East Asia, of course China went around spreading their influence outside of their own borders— notably in the states such as Korea and Vietnam, which both got a lot of their cultural aspects from the Chinese, such as the Korean Patriarchy and the Vietnamese examination system (which I have relatives taking). There were also a lot of derivations from the Chinese in terms of language, which played into the Vietnamese writing system of Chu Nom and the Korean Hangul. The textbook also mentioned Japan, and it was certainly influenced by China as well, but Japan had one major advantage to Vietnam and Korea: Japan is an island, or a series of islands.
Essentially, Japan historically never had much of an obligation to actually copy Chinese cultural norms— that was more of a Korean or Vietnamese thing. Of course, they did adopt some parts of Chinese culture— today, Japan has three alphabets, one of which is borrowed from the Chinese. The mainland also introduced the Buddhist religion to the Japanese. They ended up choosing to do more of a synthesis between their native values and what the Chinese offered, keeping their usual Japanese society such as the religion of Shinto and Samurai.
Another important civilization that existed in the Period around 1200 was the Islamic Civilization. When the Islamic religion was first getting started, the leader Mohammad and his successors spread their influence far and wide. As it turned out, this wasn’t simply a religious movement. A massive empire was carved up throughout the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries known as the Arab Empire, which ended up being one of the largest empires in all of history. It passed through quite a few dynasties as time progressed, including the Rashidun and the Umayyads, but by the 1200s, the empire was ruled by the Abbasid Caliphate…. And it wasn’t doing well.
The empire was now reduced to a sort of rump state at this point, and most of the Islamic World we know today was fragmenting quickly. A group of people we know today as the Turks migrated from Central Asia during the time of the Islamic Empire and eventually converted to Islam and created their own empire called the Seljuk Turks, which largely dethroned the Arabs from their dominant position within the Middle East. The Turkic presence in the Islamic World gradually evolved into the rise of the Ottoman Empire in Asia, which would go on to play a major role in many upcoming historical events. At the same time, the Muslim religion continued to spread into newer parts of the world.
The first place it spread to was India, where yet another Muslim Empire was born, this time called the Delhi Sultanate. It was actually ruled by Turks as opposed to Indians and allowed for the religion to spread, but surprisingly only a tiny percentage of Indians actually converted, mostly those in the lower caste system who wanted a more egalitarian religion to follow. Muslim influence in India was further reduced by the Vijayanagar Empire, which controlled most of Southern India and remained Hindu, leading to a major divide in India at the time.
Islam also spread to Spain, where its story was quite different from that of India. Spain actually had a very widespread conversion to Islam during the time when the Arabs first conquered it, and there was freedom of worship throughout the country until the Christians and Muslims went to war over it, slowly managing to retake control of the country until nearly the 16th century in a long struggle that lasted… seven hundred years?! Wow, that’s a generational project if I’ve ever seen one.
Another thing that these Muslims faced in this era were the Crusades, which were a series of wars fought against the Christian community. The Christian community, though spoken as one community at times, is often anything but united. In the Year 1200, they were already split into two— the Eastern and Western side.
The Eastern Side was centered around what is today known as the Byzantine Empire, which historically was just a continuation of the Roman Empire— as you already know, it was very deeply intertwined with Christianity. In fact, it was so deeply intertwined with Christianity that they practiced this thing called caesaropapism, which is a system where the Byzantine Empire was considered to be equivalent to the pope. Their form of Eastern Orthodox Christianity ended up becoming inspiration for a future Russian state, which would go on to carry the identity of being Eastern Orthodox after the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453.
And then there’s the West, which at the time didn’t really have any significant empires. The Western European superpower nations and colonialism that we often think about when connecting to Europe was not present at the time, and in fact Western Europe at this point was sort of irrelevant to world politics. It was one of the more divided regions of the Earth politically and borrowed a lot of technologies from its neighbors. Their religious faith was mostly Roman Catholicism, which is led by the Pope, who is frequently known as the bishop of Rome. Despite Western Europe not being very influential as this point in time, the Papacy was certainly very prominent within Western Europe, quickly becoming a very rich and powerful group within the continent, sort of like a super powerful elite group in other societies.
While Europe might not have colonies (at least not yet), it was starting to extend its tentacles out and abroad through a series of Crusades. Most people are aware of the wars fought between the Catholics and Muslims over the Holy Land (the Palestine/Israel region), but lesser known are the Reconquista (The 700 year long war I mentioned earlier) and the conversion of the Baltics to Christianity during this era. Crusades were even fought against Christians, such as the Fourth Crusade, where attacks on the Byzantine Empire were made in the year 1204 and further accelerated its collapse.
The last major civilization in the 1200s were those in the Americas— two of them, actually, which everyone has heard of: The Aztecs and the Incas. The Aztecs, despite being often seen as an empire, was more of an alliance: The Triple Alliance, to be exact (Not to be confused with the 1900s Triple Alliance) which helped a few specific city-states around Mexico become the top dogs of the region, forcing tributary relationships with their new subordinates. You’ve likely heard of their Human Sacrifice practices for their gods, which turns out to be something that really did happen in the textbook. On top of all that, the Aztecs had the greatest capital city in the Americas, known as Tenochtitlan. It’s basically the Aztec version of Mexico City, which was this huge, fantastical city with massive proportions that was centered around a lake. It was so advanced, in fact, that the city even had artificial islands. Remember again, these civilizations in the Americas were not cavemen or tribes. They were fully sophisticated empires and governments that were controlling sizable populations, and it’s quite sad that they didn’t last very long…
The Incas, just like the Aztecs, were also another empire led by a minority group who ended up taking over all their opponents in the area to create the vast Inca Empire. The main characteristic I took away when first reading about them was the strict recording systems their empire employed including the Quipus, as well as their labor system called the Mita, which demanded certain amounts of labor in various fields exclusively for the state.
Unfortunately, this empire wasn’t going to last very long either due to colonialism. But first, let’s see how these empires all interacted with one another…
TO BE CONTINUED…