World History 1200

Explore world history from 1200 to the present through four themes: networks, innovation, production and distribution, and communities. Students build historical thinking, reasoning, claim testing, and writing skills as they analyze sources and make arguments. The course uses themes instead of a standard timeline, helping students compare regions and time periods. Materials include investigations, articles, activities, assessments, teaching guides, and unit guides. It is designed for high school and can adapt to other grades.

The course explores world history through networks, innovation, production and distribution, and communities for high school learners.
Students build historical thinking, reasoning, claim testing, and writing skills to analyze sources and communicate understanding.
The curriculum uses thematic organization instead of traditional chronology to support comparisons across periods and regions.
Course materials include investigations, articles, activities, assessments, teaching guides, and unit guides covering origins to today.

You might be surprised at how much history influences our everyday lives. Past events such as the Black Death, the Columbian Exchange, political revolutions, and an era of global conflict shape our present. How? You’ll find out as you move through the course and start to think like a historian.

Unit 1 • 4 Lessons

Narratives and Frames

Everything has a history. This course begins with the history of you and expands to the history of the entire world.

Unit 2 • 9 Lessons

The Global Tapestry

Welcome to the year 1200 CE, a time of sprawling trade routes and mighty empires. A diverse collection of societies linked huge world regions across a web of interconnections.

Unit 3 • 10 Lessons

Transoceanic Connections

After 1492, transoceanic voyages linked the hemispheres in sustained connection for the first time, setting the stage for an exchange that forever changed lives in the Old World and the New.

Unit 4 • 5 Lessons

Beginning in the eighteenth century, an age of revolutions shook the foundations of global power. Enter an era of new ideas as mighty empires fell and a new era of nations was born.

Unit 5 • 8 Lessons

Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution has been the most important transformation in the last 12,000 years. Within a few short decades of its beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain, it reshaped economic, political, and social structures around the world.

Unit 6 • 4 Lessons

Industrial Empires

Industrialization offered new weapons to empires. Thanks to innovations like steamships, trains, and machine guns, industrial empires spread their borders further than ever, opening new markets and resources to fuel their factories.

Unit 7 • 8 Lessons

Global Conflict

The transformations of the long nineteenth century set the stage for an era of unprecedented warfare, atrocity, and threat to our species’ survival.

Unit 8 • 7 Lessons

Cold War and Decolonization

As the Second World War ended, new global conflicts emerged. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and decolonization movements reshaped the world order.

Unit 9 • 8 Lessons

What does it mean to live in a global world? Explore the promises and problems of global connections, and how nationalism and identity continue to shape how people experience the world.

Teaching This Course

1200 to Present

World History 1200 Course Overview

Learn about the specific periodization, unit structure and learning objectives, and frames narratives of World History 1200.

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