Dealing with the early periods of world history, particularly in the AP World History Foundations segment, involves some undeniable challenges. The materials in this collection are designed to offer various kinds of guidance toward meeting these challenges. The syllabi presented here, using different texts, offer some good examples about how this process can be accomplished. And they all maintain the task of combining coverage by making sure that students are developing other capacities essential to historical thinking and argument. Various emphases are obvious.
Some instructors spend more time on issues of social and gender structure than others.
All world historians must be selective in their teaching, and selectivity produces different specific results. But the commonalities are important as well, in addition to the attention to some geographic and definitional basics. All the syllabi, of course, are global, which means among other things that they present developments in Europe and the Mediterranean in a canvass that includes the great societies of Asia and Africa as well. Treatments of the long early phases of world history inevitably stress the emergence of a number of different societies, in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. Each society exhibits some characteristic features in religion and social structure, as well as forms of government.