Major Themes of AP World History
AP World History covers 800 years’ (and an entire planet’s worth!) of history. It help to keep track of the big-picture issues and how history has changed over time by dividing the course into some major themes. Read below to learn more.
The Importance of Themes
Themes are important tools for understanding the past. Especially in a course like AP World, too much has changed in the past 800 years for anyone to be able to state clearly what has changed and how in general terms. We need to break down the past into more specific pieces in order to analyze it more fully.
One way that historians often break down the past is either by time period or by location. Historians, for instance, might study just the Renaissance or just the Cold War. Moreover, historians often tend to look at one place, especially one country (or region, for very large countries). Historians might, therefore, study Tudor England or New England during Industrialization.
AP World defies these normal ways of categorizing history, since the course is most concerned with the big-picture outlook: how the world has changed all around the globe and across centuries.
This wider perspective is important. Sometimes only with a big view do we start to see patterns emerge. Moreover, this overview of history is useful for students who go on to take other history courses. They have a sense of the wider arc of the past, and they can fit the information from more specialized courses into the bigger picture.
To study this material, it is helpful to divide it into major themes. That way, it becomes more manageable to see how history has changed over time, without relying on usual temporal or geographic divisions.
Themes of AP World
The major themes for the AP World History course are:
International connections
Movement
Political organization
Technological developments
Society and nature
Human rights
Let’s look at these each in more detail.
International Connections
International connections is one of the major themes of AP World. These connections across borders help make this course truly about world history, as opposed to being just the sum of all national histories. This theme traces how international trade has shaped the domestic politics of countries around the world. It also shows how ideas have traveled between places and created unexpected influences. For instance, the movement of Enlightenment ideas to the British colonies in North America helped inspire the US Revolution. The US Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War in turn inspired revolutionaries around the world, from Haiti to France.
Movement
The theme of movement is also critical to AP World History. Just as ideas and goods traveled around the world, so too have people increasingly traveled and even moved to distant destinations. Especially by the 1700s, enormous numbers of people began to move around the world in search of wealth, land, stability, and notoriety. Early on, these movements were one way. Later on, individuals and families had more freedom to move back and forth and retain a connection to their places of origin. This movement encouraged the spread of new ideas. It also sparked backlashed. The test traces how both reactions affected world history.
Political Organization
The politics of the world in 1200 do not resemble much of anything in the world of politics today. On a basic level, the course traces the upheavals to the political map across centuries, with the rise and fall of countries over time. Moreover, the test is concerned with changing ideas about the type of government that would be best. When the course begins in 1200, nearly the entire world was ruled by monarchies. By the end of the 20th centuries, unlimited monarchies were the vast minority of world governments. How did attitudes and realities change? And what types of governments existed between 1200 and 2000? Moreover, this theme shines a light on the long history of imperialism around the world and the many efforts across centuries to overthrow foreign rulers and replace them with local political leaders.
Technological Developments
It is undeniable that the world of today does not very much resemble the world of 1200. One of the most apparent changes is the vast advancement in technology that has occurred in this time. How did this happen? What fueled this technological growth? And how did changing technological capacities shape governments, societies, and the lives of individuals? This theme in AP World brings out the ways in which technology has come to shape almost every aspect of our lives.
Society and Nature
The history of world history also needs to take into account the world in which this history took place. AP World History thinks carefully about the ways in which natural history has shaped human history. It also seriously considers the ways in which human history has transformed the planet itself.
Human Rights
The final theme of the exam focuses on human rights. Across the eight centuries of the course, individuals around the world have increasingly gained political and civil rights, often after periods of agitation. These rights have not been implemented evenly for all people at all times—and sometimes, these rights have even been taken away. The course traces changing access to these rights and the effects that rights (both gained and lost) have had on societies and individuals.
Final Thoughts
These themes offer a way to organize the course content more clearly. As you are learning the material, it can be difficult to know why something is important or where one event fits into the bigger picture. And there is not much time left at the end of the course to review everything. Grouping your notes around themes can help you more easily keep track of how these particular historical aspects developed in different places and time periods.
