The world has changed a lot since 1200. In this course, you’ve encountered trends such as increasing political rights, interconnected global economic systems, and new technologies that enable faster and more sustained communication. But while these revolutions have created vast wealth and opportunity for some, they have produced only limited change for others, and caused great suffering for many. The increased interconnectedness of the world allows us to identify the similarities we share, but it also reveals the dangers of the inequalities that divide us.

This video gives you an overview of the content and themes you’ll explore in Unit 9. The evidence presented in the video will help you assess the extent to which our world has changed in the era of globalization from c. 1900 to the present. You’ll also evaluate this era by examining the positive and negative impacts of globalization using all six AP^® themes.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. How does the child mortality rate from 1800 to the present show us that advances in medicine have been unequal?
2. Why is the period after 1945 sometimes referred to as “the Great Acceleration”?
3. How has globalization created a “flatter” world and how has it created a “lumpier” world?
4. How has globalization positively and negatively affected cultural developments and interactions?
5. How is climate change a shared global problem and an unequally shared problem?
6. How has globalization and climate change impacted malaria?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. John Arthur presented a few examples of the positive and negative effects of globalization. What are two additional examples of how globalization has impacted our world, either positively or negatively?

Globalization has been in the background of this course through all the units we’ve covered, but it really intensified in the past 50 years or so. The end of empires and the fall of the Soviet Union didn’t end historical change. As globalization intensifies, we are faced with many important questions, surrounding the spread and limits of citizenship, rights, identity, and sovereignty. Our global economic system seems to be increasingly unsustainable and unequal. All of this brings history to the present, and we must use it to prepare for our futures.

This article provides an introduction to Unit 9, which examines the history and future of globalization. This overview focuses on the era of intense globalization through five themes: environment, culture, rights and resistance (governance), economics, and technology. In the unit ahead, you will use these themes to understand and compare how globalization has changed life for people in different places since 1900.

This article provides an introduction to Unit 9, which examines the history and future of globalization. This overview focuses on the era of intense globalization through five themes: environment, culture, rights and resistance (governance), economics, and technology. In the unit ahead, you will use these themes to understand and compare how globalization has changed life for people in different places since 1900.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. How and when did the stories of decolonization and the Cold War end?
2. When did globalization “begin” according to the author? What does it mean to call the era after the Second World War up to today an era of “intense globalization?”
3. How has globalization affected our environment?
4. What is the Anthropocene?
5. What was the economic impact of the end of the Cold War?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. What issues raised in this article seem most important to you? Why? At this point, would you argue that globalization has been a positive or negative trend for the human species as a whole since 1945? What is the evidence?

This repeated activity should help you become familiar with a process for understanding unfamiliar words any time you encounter them in the course.

Take out your vocab tracker and be sure to record new and unfamiliar words on it according to your teacher’s instructions.

Understanding vocabulary helps you access course content and become a better reader, a better writer, and a better communicator. This word wall activity will help you begin to learn some of the key vocabulary from the unit.

In this activity, you’ll work with your class to create a word wall using the Unit 8 vocabulary.

Your teacher will assign a vocab card to each of you. Once you get yours, take a few minutes to look it up in the Vocab Guide and then examine the unit itself (click around and quickly skim the content) to see where in the unit your word might be most applicable. Then, add as many antonyms to your card for your word as possible. Be careful if you decide to use the “related words” section from the vocab guide – it doesn’t distinguish between synonyms and antonyms. Your teacher will give you a limited amount of time to write antonyms. Then, the people with the most correct antonyms at the end of the time will put their words on the word wall first.

Your teacher may add some fun twists to this assignment, so be sure to listen closely for directions!

Globalization has given us more connections and more opportunities. And it’s given those things to more people than ever before. So, it’s made the world “flat,” or leveled the playing field, right? Not so fast. Others think that it’s given more people more things but worry that it’s given a lot more of those things to a small group of people, usually wealthy people. That makes the world “spiky” or “lumpy”, not flat. This article introduces you to this complex debate through the words of some of the biggest critics and proponents of globalization.

This article directly addresses the Unit Problem: How did new global connections and innovations affect different parts of the world from c. 1900 to today? Specifically, it asks you to consider whether globalization has generally made the world more equal, or created more difference among and between regions.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article explain how the development of new technologies changed the world from 1900 to present? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What does Thomas Friedman argue in his book?
2. What are the “dynamic forces” that have driven Friedman’s described stages of globalization?
3. How did Richard Florida critique Friedman’s book?
4. How does Richard Florida use urbanization as evidence to support his argument?
5. What is Dr. Vandana Shiva’s critique of Friedman?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. To what extent does this article explain how the development of new technologies changed the world from 1900 to present?
2. The idea of a “flat” and “spiky” world can be hard to understand. So, let’s make it more local. What are some ways that the distribution of power (or authority) in your school is flat or spiky?
3. Richard Florida and Dr. Shiva both argue that globalization has made inequality worse than ever before. Do you agree or disagree and why? Can you think of any historical examples when inequality was worse?

The World History Project AP (WHP AP) curriculum asks you to visit and revisit the AP themes throughout the course. The aim of the Themes Notebook is to keep you connected to the core themes of each unit. In Part 1 of the Themes Notebook, which you’ll complete early in each unit, you will evaluate each of the statements on the worksheet based on what you currently know. In Part 2, which comes later in each unit, the statements appear as questions. You will respond to these questions as you revise and refine your initial understanding of the unit’s themes. In both parts of this activity, you should focus on concepts rather than formal writing. The primary purpose of the Themes Notebook is to help you assess how your thinking is progressing, where you’re gaining mastery, and where you might need additional instruction.

Although it might seem that you haven’t learned enough yet to respond to the prompts, that’s OK! This activity is meant to help you think about what you might already know about the ideas and concepts of the unit. You’ll revisit the prompts at the end of the unit (although this time they’ll appear as questions), and you’ll get to see how much you’ve learned! This activity will also give you a preview of what’s to come, as you’re learning which themes you should pay attention to as you learn new content.

Note: Since you’ll be revisiting this worksheet at the end of the unit, be sure you hold onto it! If your teacher offers to collect your class’s worksheets, that’s probably your best bet.

Use the Themes Notebook worksheet to respond to the Part 1 prompts as best as you can. Be prepared to talk about these ideas with your class.

Open these three charts in your internet browser:

• Chart 1 – World Population Growth, 1700–2100: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2%80%93-World-Population-Growth-1700-2100.png
• Chart 2 – Population Growth Rate, 1950–2015: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-growth-rates
• Chart 3 – Population Projection by the UN, 2015–2100: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/un-population-projection-medium-variant

There are a lot of us on this planet—more than ever. We can make educated guesses about how many people there were in the past and how many people there will be in the future, but the further we go in either direction, the less sure we are. While our population continues to increase, the rate of that increase started to slow down in the 1960s. Populations in some parts of the world are shrinking, while in others they are rising. Predicting the future of these trends is incredibly important to the future of our planet and societies. Can data help us?

If your teacher has assigned the Project X final presentation, you will be asked to make a claim about the future and to support your claim with data. This data exploration provides you with an example of what that task might look like. The attached article provides some insights into the sorts of factors that influence population growth. Because it involves making predictions—rather than just recording data about the past—this data exploration might be a little more complicated than others you’ve done. You might want to pay special attention to the attached Data Introduction article, as it will guide you through some of the more complicated stuff.

Your teacher will let you know if there is an overall question to hold in your mind as complete your three reads of the article.

Preview – What Do We Have?

Fill out the Read 1: Preview section of the Three Close Reads for Data worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – What do we know?

For this read, your goal is to understand the “story” the chart is telling by identifying its arguments and evaluating its presentation of data. You will decide what claim or claims this chart is making and what evidence is being used to support those claims. Do you think the data is reliable? Is the chart misleading in any way? By the end of this read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to Chart 1 and 2, when did the global population increase at the highest rate?
2. According to Chart 1, if we lower the global growth rate of the human population over the next century, will the global population decline?
3. Why do you think the makers of Chart 1 believe that the global population will continue to grow even if we slow the rate of growth? Do you agree?
4. According to Chart 2, in what regions has the population growth rate decreased the most since 1950? Where has it increased the most?
5. On Chart 2, if you select the Chart button at the bottom, you can see population growth rates as a line graph for individual countries and regions. Try comparing Africa and Europe. What do you notice? Do you agree with the predictions in the chart?
6. According to Chart 3, which three countries had the largest population in 2015? Which will have the largest populations by the year 2100? When compared with the information in Chart 2 on population growth rates, what does this tell you about the relationship between total population and population growth rates?
7. Do you trust the predictions in these charts? Do you think we can reliably predict what populations will look like in 100 years using data about the past? Why or why not?

Making Connections – What Does This Tell Us?

The third read is really about why the chart is important, what it can tell us about the past, and how it can help us think about the future. At the end of this read, respond to the following questions:

1. Why does this chart matter? What do these charts tell us about the future of human communities? What do they tell us about how we produce and consume resources? Can population predictions help us understand anything about global inequality in the future?
2. Using these charts and a chart from a previous data exploration, make a new prediction about how human communities will change in your lifetime. What evidence from the charts supports your prediction? What evidence challenges it?

Understanding and evaluating data is increasingly useful in everyday life. The data explorations and activities you’ve completed in Project X have prepared you for that. But now, we’re asking you to go a step further. It’s time to put all that knowledge to work. In this final presentation, you’ll make a prediction about the future of your topic using the charts and sources you collected in the research activity. This provides you an opportunity to use your data literacy skills to craft an argument rooted in historical context. This final presentation also lets you showcase all the hard work you’ve completed in Project X, and gives you the opportunity to offer a course of action for the future.

By now, you’ve had plenty of practice reading and evaluating data. In this activity, you’ll use your new skills to create a five-minute presentation as the final for Project X. Your teacher will provide you direction on the presentation format.

Here’s the good news: You’ve already done a lot of work on your final project! The data explorations introduced you to a bunch of charts on a wide range of topics. The four activities you completed before this one have given you the tools you’ll need to make your presentation. The two Making Predictions activities prepared you to make and evaluate your own predictions. You selected a topic that is meaningful to you and of world-historical significance. Finally, you conducted research and collected a set of charts and other evidence to support your predictions. You’re ready for this!

Before you begin work on your presentation, carefully review the Final Presentation Checklist to make sure you understand the requirements for the presentation. Your teacher will let you know the schedule for the Final Presentation. Be excited to show off your hard work!