WHP-Origins Course Guide
WHP COURSE GUIDEORIGINS TO THE PRESENT
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE2Table of ContentsWorld History Project Origins to the Present Course Overview ................................................................................................3Course Problem and Objectives ..................................................................................................................................................3WHP Origins Course Problem.........................................................................................................................................................3WHP Course Objectives ..................................................................................................................................................................4The Frames of WHP ....................................................................................................................................................................4Background ......................................................................................................................................................................................5Scale Switching to Support, Extend, or Challenge Frame Narratives ..........................................................................................5Frame Narratives .............................................................................................................................................................................6Networks ..................................................................................................................................................................................7Production and Distribution .....................................................................................................................................................7Communities .............................................................................................................................................................................8WHP Origins Periodization Scheme ..............................................................................................................................................9Era 1: Our Big History (13.82 billion years ago to the future) ................................................................................................10Era 2: Early Humans (250,000 years ago to 3000 BCE) ......................................................................................................11Era 3: Cities, Societies, and Empires (6000 BCE to 700 CE) ...............................................................................................12Era 4: Regional Webs (200 to 1500 CE) ................................................................................................................................13Era 5: The First Global Age (1200 to 1750 CE) ......................................................................................................................14Era 6: The Long Nineteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern World (1750 to 1914 CE) ..............................................15Era 7: The Great Convergence and Divergence (1880 CE to the future) ..............................................................................16Course Content ............................................................................................................................................................................17Course Structure .............................................................................................................................................................................17Texts .................................................................................................................................................................................................18Videos ..............................................................................................................................................................................................19Course Activities .............................................................................................................................................................................21Practice Progressions and Thinking Tools .....................................................................................................................................21WHP Origins Practice Progression Placement ..............................................................................................................................21Reading .....................................................................................................................................................................................22Writing .....................................................................................................................................................................................24Claim Testing ............................................................................................................................................................................25Causation ..................................................................................................................................................................................26Comparison ..............................................................................................................................................................................27Contextualization ......................................................................................................................................................................28Continuity and Change Over Time (CCOT) ..............................................................................................................................29Sourcing ...................................................................................................................................................................................30WHP Origins Activities Placement .................................................................................................................................................32WHP Origins Activities ............................................................................................................................................................33Era Problem Notebook (EP Notebook) ....................................................................................................................................34What Is This Asking? (Question Parsing) ...............................................................................................................................35Making Claims ..........................................................................................................................................................................36Draw the Frames and Redraw the Frames .............................................................................................................................36Mapping ....................................................................................................................................................................................36Quick-Sourcing and Sourcing Collections ..............................................................................................................................37Fun ............................................................................................................................................................................................37Project X and Data Explorations ..............................................................................................................................................38Graphic Biographies .................................................................................................................................................................40DBQs ...............................................................................................................................................................................................41DBQ Writing Samples ......................................................................................................................................................................42WHP Origins Course Planning and Pacing ..................................................................................................................................43Cover image:Du Huan Graphic Biography - Story of a Chinese soldier captured in a 751 CE battle against Turkish rebels and Abbasid soldiers.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE3World History Project Origins to the Present Course Overview Welcome to the World History Project (WHP) Origins course. This is a global history course aimed at tenth-grade students that provides a cohesive approach to learning and understanding the history of the world. In this course, you and your students will explore our long human history—beginning before humans existed and ending in our present moment. This course will help students learn how to use stories about the past to orient themselves to the present and prepare for the future. We’re going to cover a lot of ground (and a lot of time), but this course is not a typical march-through-time history class covering one event after another. Rather, WHP uses a set of overarching inquiry problems and narrative frames, situated at a variety of scales, to organize and facilitate teaching and learning. As you begin your journey with WHP Origins, remember: you’re not alone. An active community of teachers and scholars is with you for the ride through our big collective history—all 13.8 billion years of it. In this guide, you will find descriptions of the course problem and objectives; the frames of WHP; the WHP Origins periodization scheme; and detailed information about the course structure and content. For an overview of OER Project and its overall approach, including our inquiry framework and philosophy and our suggested approaches to teaching, check out the OER Project Teaching Guide. In addition, if you think one of our other world history courses might be a better fit for your classroom, check out its course guide (we offer four world history courses: WHP 1200 to the Present, WHP 1750 to the Present, and WHP AP®), and the course described here—WHP Origins to the Present).Four WHP course optionsCourse Problem and ObjectivesWHP Origins Course ProblemHow have we and our human communities converged and integrated to be so similar yet remain fragmented and so different? Our students live in and experience the world in multiple communities. They live in a global community connected by networks and webs that have increasingly enabled the exchange of ideas, goods, and peoples across the world. Every part of the world is connected to and interacts with the others to varying degrees. Such linking of cultures, commodities, ideas, and peoples is unprecedented and grows more extensive every year. As we grow more connected, more of the human population shares collective understandings, which has led to remarkable
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE4similarities in systems of production, governance, social relations, ideas, technology, use of energy, and relationship to nature. In short, students live in a world where a high degree of global integration has occurred, and histories are intertwined. However, students across the globe also live in local and differentiated communities defined by such things as nationality, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Amid the similarities discussed above, people also have a local and personal sense of difference. Thus, they live simultaneously in a world of accelerating integration and proliferating differentiation. In order to address these issues, we ask, “How have the communities and peoples of the world converged and diverged over time? In short, why have we come to be so similar and yet so different?”Throughout the course, we look within and across time periods to see both how humans have grown more integrated, interconnected, and similar, and how we’ve remained fragmented, autonomous, and different from each other. WHP Course Objectives1. Understand that history is a narrative, or a combination of narratives, shaped by the sources and perspectives you use to tell that story.2. Apply the evidence from sources using multiple perspectives and scales to evaluate (support, extend, or challenge) different narratives.3. Engage in meaningful historical inquiry by analyzing primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives of gender, race, and socioeconomic status, or other hierarchies to gain a deeper understanding of human history. 4. Analyze the narrative of history using the course’s three frames: communities, networks, and production and distribution.5. Use historical thinking skills and reasoning practices such as scale, comparison, causation, continuity and change over time, sourcing, claim testing, and contextualization to understand and evaluate the historical narrative.6. Create and support arguments using historical evidence to communicate conclusions through individual or shared writing.The Frames of WHPIn WHP, we ask you and your students to examine world history through different lenses, or frames. We use the frames to help students organize the vast amount of information they will encounter in world history, giving them a framework to help make sense of all the ways in which someone could tell the history of the world. This approach highlights the idea that historical accounts are based on particular perspectives. More important, these frames provide students with big picture, historical “stories,” thus providing a cohesive backdrop against which students can construct their historical understanding. As students move through the course, they will examine how each frame has changed over our long history. The frames of WHP Origins are communities, networks, and production and distribution, and are described in detail later in this section.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE5Professor Bob Bain, describing WHP framesBackgroundWe use the frames to help students build and maintain historical coherence.1 Through the chronological narrative that accompanies each frame, we introduce students to a big, global, overgeneralized starter picture of historical events and processes. Pitched at very large scales of time and space, these provide a brief story arc to help students contextualize, organize, connect, and evaluate the historical data—names, facts, and events—they encounter at smaller scales throughout the course. While the frames are helpful for the zoomed-out view of history and for gaining an overarching understanding of what happened over a long period of time, their limitations become clear when zooming in, or examining the past from smaller scales. But these limitations also carry benefits. Through studying historical processes and events at smaller scales, students are able to use what they are learning to test the usefulness and the limits of the frames. Much like we test and modify theories, students will be able to determine if the information they are learning supports, extends, or challenges what they currently know about the frame narrative.Scale Switching to Support, Extend, or Challenge Frame NarrativesStudents use and analyze the frame narratives by “scale switching,” moving between the global ideas that the frame narratives present and the processes or events at smaller scales of time and space.2 The goal of this analysis is to determine the degree to which historical events support, extend, or challenge a frame narrative. Students will1 Constructing a usable and coherent understanding of the past has long been a problem in history courses. Students report the study of history is often “one thing after another,” while research has shown that students’ knowledge of the past is often a fragmented jumble of facts and events with few connections. For a discussion of such research, see Robert B. Bain, “Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 111–127.2 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE6consider how some human experiences reflect the transformations articulated in a frame narrative, and will also look for experiences that diverge from the frame narratives they are given. In this way, students evaluate the stories we give them, identifying areas where the narrative is in need of modification.It might be helpful to think of the frame narratives as road maps, guides that we present to students at the beginning of the course to get them started on their world-history journey. Like a road map, the frame narrative highlights historical transformations and provides information about turns and landmarks. The frames should help students see where we’ve been, where they are, and where they are going. The frame narrative they start with, therefore, will be quite different from the finished frame narrative.The frames and their narratives are woven into WHP in the following ways:• Frame videos are placed in the first lesson of each era and many other videos highlight the frames as well• Most articles attend to the frames to some degree, and the Three Close Reads tool directly addresses frames • Various “thinking tools” (the Comparison, Contextualization, CCOT, and Three Close Reads tools) address the frames We also ask students to engage in two specific activity types that directly address the frames or support scale switching (this is in addition to what they do as part of other work in the course):• Draw and Redraw the FramesIn the first era, students are asked to draw a visual representation of the frames based on the frame introduction videos. Then, throughout the course, they are asked to redraw the frames, an activity that allows students to focus on representing their understanding of the frame narrative at that point in the course. Over time, these drawings show how their thinking around frame narratives has changed and grown over time. • Graphic BiographiesGraphic biographies are used toward the end of each era to show history at a very small scale—the level of the individual. These biographies are one of the best ways for students to zoom in, and doing so helps bring nuance to their understanding of history. Although the biographies might complicate the frame narratives—the experience of an individual will not necessarily fit with the global experience—they don’t invalidate the frames; they just deepen and enrich them. Graphic biographies are explained in more depth later in this guide. Frame NarrativesSo, why select these three frames (communities, networks, and production and distribution), when there are probably an infinite number of frames through which we can view history and construct the story of the past? These particular frames allow students to understand the increasing connectedness of the human experience over time while still identifying the complexity and differences that enrich our understanding of the past. In this way, they help us get to the core of the shared human experience while still recognizing the uniqueness of each individual’s existence. Moreover, rather than pulling out and separating culture, gender, politics, technology, economics, and social organization into their own interpretive boxes, these frames help students see how they are wrapped together at different levels—in small communities, in states, and through larger networks. As students use the frames to identify and evaluate the degree to which people and cultures have grown increasingly connected over our long history, they will examine the integration and interconnection of human experiences and our increasingly common approaches to living. At the same time, by zooming in, students will
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE7identify distinctions and differences among the human community and human experiences, distinctions that extend or challenge the narrative arc, making it more complex, plausible, and useful.NetworksHow do we define networks in the course?The OER Project defines networks as the patterns of connections between and among people and their communities. Networks link populations of people, enabling people living in different communities to move and share ideas, material goods, crops, animals, pathogens, and even people. We communicate across and through our networks.In what ways are we interconnected?We are all connected to other people, some of them very close friends and relatives, whom we rely on for many things. But these connections go beyond the communities in which we live and the people we know directly. They become networks—webs of people to whom we are interconnected through the exchange of things and ideas. One way to tell the history of the world is to focus on how our connections to other people have changed over time. It is a story of how we became connected to more and more people across larger and larger parts of the Earth. Today, in many ways, we are all connected—all 7 billion of us. Early human networks were very small. Foragers rarely interacted with members of other bands. As humans started farming and labor became more specialized, humanity became more interdependent. Groups and individuals began relying more on other people in other places to get the things they needed to survive. As cities and empires emerged around the ancient world, trade routes connected merchants across long-distance networks, and portable religions connected people across political borders. But, as you will see in Era 4, these sorts of networks were not permanent, and the more complex the network, the more catastrophic the collapse. By the fifteenth century, regional webs connected people across Afro-Eurasia and across the Americas. But after 1492, the Columbian Exchange would begin to knit together both hemispheres into a single network of global exchange. In Era 6, the “long nineteenth century,” several revolutions created new economic, political, and cultural networks as the Industrial Revolution increased our ability to travel and communicate across long distances. Today, digital networks and globalization have connected the world more than ever before. As humans seek to address the challenges of the future, our relationships to one another will be crucial to finding solutions.Production and DistributionHow do we define production and distribution in the course?We refer to production as how we make things and distribution as how we share, sell, or trade them within our communities and across networks.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE8How do we make and distribute the stuff we need and use?One thing that humans share is the need and desire for stuff. Like all animals, we need food and drink to survive. Like a small subset of animals, such as the octopus, some birds, and other apes, we make physical tools to interact with our environment. Alone among all species on Earth, humans have developed a culture that makes and consumes cultural products like art, music, and video. How we make, share, and use these things is one way to view human history, and this is the theme at the core of the production and distribution frame.Humans have had many strategies for getting the stuff we need to live. We call these strategies production. Production has changed dramatically over time, becoming increasingly complex. For much of human history, we produced most of what we needed ourselves or in small family groups. But as we started to live in larger and larger groups, we learned to organize ourselves to make and harvest the stuff we need in larger quantities that could support cities and empires containing millions of people. Sometimes, this increasing production has been the result of great increases in productivity—the amount that any one person can make. At other times, people have acquired more of what they want through violence and force. With the development of money, taxation, commerce, investment, and colonialism came new ways of acquiring more stuff. By the long nineteenth century, capitalism and the plantation system had reshaped global patterns of production and distribution, laying the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution, which would forever change how we make, move, and use stuff. As our tools and organization have become more complex and our communities larger, we have had to create new methods of distributing the things we make. The processes of globalization described in Era 7 have woven the world together into huge systems of production and distribution. Where once small families shared and consumed only what they made or foraged themselves, we now purchase or download things made far away, often in many stages and by many different people who it is likely don’t know each other. Some things are distributed through very formal systems—massive corporations or governments—while others are locally produced or available for distribution through less formal systems, such as via online or social networks.CommunitiesHow do we define communities in the course?Communities are defined as the ways in which we’ve structured the societies around us, including the state and religion. There are numerous types of communities, including those on the smallest scale, such as families, and a multitude of different configurations that include neighborhoods, states, religions, and even online forums.How have we organized the communities in which we live? Humans have always lived in groups. In the beginning, those groups were very small. Today, they are quite big, with some in the billions. Once, our sense of community was quite simple, with few rules and little need to consciously think about it. Now, many of us live in very complex communities with laws and rules, and most of us belong to several communities at once. The idea of community is different from the concept of the networks that we looked at earlier, although they may overlap. Unlike networks, which are defined through exchange, communities, by definition, share a sense of identity, of being “us” or “we.” Networks often stretch between communities, connecting them to each other.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE9The kinds of communities in which we’ve lived, the ways we’ve organized them, and how we’ve understood our membership in them, is constantly changing, but throughout our existence, being a member of a community—or several communities at the same time—has remained a central feature of human existence.Communities are groups of humans tied to each other through structures and ideas. The structures are sometimes spoken about as “laws” or “politics.” When most humans lived in forager bands and small villages, these rules were often unofficial and unwritten. But as humans banded together to form complex societies, the rules had to become increasingly complex too. During Era 3, the emergence of the state required formal systems of recording and enforcing the rules that determined membership in communities, how decisions were made, who got to make them, and much more. The emergence of portable religions helped create larger and larger communities by defining shared beliefs and more rules of behavior. Complex political and religious communities enabled cooperation on even greater scales. As the world grew more interconnected, communities came into more frequent contact with each other, often violently. By the long nineteenth century, new ideas about individual and political sovereignty reimagined human communities yet again, creating the world of nation-states we still live in today. In the past century, international institutions have attempted to create a single global community, and the Internet has created digital communities.WHP Origins Periodization Scheme Students will use the three course frames and their related questions across seven eras of human history. Note that the periodization scheme used to organize the course does not always have clear beginning and ending dates for each era. Why? First, all periodization schemes are constructions made by historians to help organize and make sense of the continuous flow of the past. Historians, not the past, create historical periods or eras. Historical periods are historians’ interpretations. Second, historical processes don’t start and stop on specific dates. Indeed, some processes, such as urbanization, have had very long arcs that continue through the present and will likely continue into the near future. The overlapping of eras in WHP should facilitate a focus on historical processes in addition to historical events. We hope students will see the eras as approximations, adding circa or about to each starting and ending point. • Era 1: Our Big History (13.82 billion years ago to the future) • Era 2: Early Humans (250,000 years ago to 3000 BCE)• Era 3: Cities, Societies, and Empires (6000 BCE to 700 CE)• Era 4: Regional Webs (200 to 1500 CE)• Era 5: The First Global Age (1200 to 1750 CE)• Era 6: The Long Nineteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern World (1750 to 1914 CE)• Era 7: The Great Convergence and Divergence (1880 CE to the future)
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE10Origins periodization schemeEra Problems, Learning Objectives, and Key ConceptsIn this section, we document the learning objectives for each era. In addition, we describe the Era Problems, which students directly respond to throughout each era, a practice that enables them to see how their thinking has changed over time. Finally, each narrative gives a brief description of the history of that era. For more specific frame narratives and the historical thinking practices that are addressed in each era, along with some teaching tips, please see the relevant Era Guide, found in the ribbon at the top of each Era page of the WHP website. Era 1: Our Big History (13.82 billion years ago to the future)Era 1 Problem: Why begin a course in human history before humans existed?1. In what ways can using a “frame” help us develop a more meaningful understanding of history?2. How might physical, geographic, and biological contexts impact human lives and history?3. How do scales such as time and space help you make sense of your world?Era 1 Learning Objectives1. Examine how historians frame history by creating narratives of different scales of time and space.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE112. Understand the course frames of communities, networks, and production and distribution, and how they can be used to analyze history.3. Analyze and evaluate historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, contextualization, causation, sourcing, and historical comparison.Era 2: Early Humans (250,000 years ago to 3000 BCE)Era 2 Problem: What caused some humans to shift from foraging to farming and what were the effects of this change?1. How did our ancestors migrate across much of the Earth and figure out how to survive in new regions?2. In what ways were foraging cultures similar to each other despite differences in the environments in which they lived?3. In what ways were farming cultures similar to each other despite differences in the environments in which they lived?4. Which way of living do you think was more desirable, foraging or farming—and why? 5. What different interpretations and evidence are used to explain why farming developed?Era 2 Learning Objectives1. Analyze how humans have diverged from other species in terms of language, networks, and social interactions.2. Evaluate, create, and support arguments using historical evidence for why many early human communities made the switch from foraging to farming. 3. Understand and evaluate the positive and negative aspects of different types of human communities and how foraging, pastoral, and farming communities interacted.4. Apply historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, causation, comparison, and continuity and change over time (CCOT) to evaluate these historical events and processes.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE12Era 3: Cities, Societies,3 and Empires (6000 BCE to 700 CE)Era 3 Problem: How did complex societies develop and how did they impact humans inside and outside these communities?1. What made life in cities and agrarian societies different from life in pastoral communities, nomadic communities, or Neolithic villages? 2. How did life differ between various cities and agrarian societies?3. Why did most complex societies develop differing social classes—aristocrats, merchants, artisans, peasants, and the enslaved—when these categories had never existed earlier?4. How did the emergence of portable belief systems affect how people lived and support new types of networks among them?Era 3 Learning Objectives1. Understand, evaluate, and analyze why certain human communities began to organize into more complex societies, states, and empires.2. Analyze how networks of exchange expanded during this era.3. Explain and interpret the spread of shared belief systems and how these beliefs shaped the formation of societies.4. Understand and critique the common characteristics of societies such as social hierarchies, specialization of labor, writing, urbanization, population increases, and gender roles.5. Use historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, causation, historical comparison, contextualization, sourcing, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes.3 We’ve made a conscious decision at WHP to use the term societies instead of civilizations in order to ensure that the course is equitable and respectful of all types of communities. The word civilizations often implies that the area we’re studying is more highly evolved or better than other forms of communities, such as those composed of foragers and pastoralists, which is not the case. Societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt and Nubia, the Indus Valley, China, and those of Central and South America are not superior to others, they are simply organized differently.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE13Era 4: Regional Webs (200 to 1500 CE) Era 4 Problem: How do human systems restructure themselves after catastrophe?1. How did societal collapse affect the lives of people in different instances?2. How and why did the interconnections among human societies grow and shrink at different times, and how did these changes affect both human lives and the environment?3. In what ways can the label of the medieval “Dark Ages” be both useful and inaccurate?Era 4 Learning Objectives1. Evaluate and critique the historical narrative of the collapse, recovery, and reorganization of societies.2. Understand and analyze why networks of interaction both increased and decreased during this era.3. Evaluate how new innovations in technology and transportation affected trade networks and human communities.4. Understand the formation and spread of Islam and how this belief system influenced communities and networks, including Afro-Eurasian Silk Road connections.5. Critique the narrative of the “Dark Ages” by analyzing and using evidence from multiple sources to support historical thinking.6. Use historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, causation, historical comparison, contextualization, sourcing, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE14Era 5: The First Global Age (1200 to 1750 CE)Era 5 Problem: How did the first ongoing connections between the hemispheres promote change both globally and regionally?1. To what extent can the Columbian Exchange be considered one of the most important turning points in history?2. What were the impacts of the Columbian Exchange for people living in different regions and social classes around the world? Why and how were the impacts similar and different?3. In what ways did societies across the world develop both similarities and differences during this period of increasing global interconnectivity?4. How did changes in the environment, demographic changes, and new forms of coerced labor affect some regions of the world more than others?Era 5 Learning Objectives1. Understand and evaluate the formation of regional and global networks of interaction.2. Analyze how global interconnections positively and negatively impacted political systems, trade networks, and the environment.3. Evaluate the development of new hierarchies based upon social class and race during this era.4. Understand and critique the role of capitalism on the Columbian Exchange and transatlantic slave trade.5. Interpret primary source documents to understand and analyze multiple perspectives of the Mongol Empire, Black Death, and the transatlantic slave trade.6. Use historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as contextualization, sourcing, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE15Era 6: The Long Nineteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern World (1750 to 1914 CE) Era 6 Problem: What were the engines of change that created our “modern” world?1. What were the features of national and liberal revolutions in the Atlantic world and how widespread was their impact by 1914?2. How did the energy shift to fossil fuels accelerate the creation of a “modern” world?3. What was the short-term and longer-term impact of the Industrial Revolution and how did these differ for different groups and communities?4. What demographic, economic, political, and intellectual factors help explain the long nineteenth century’s global movement to end legalized slavery and reform the way people worked?5. This era is sometimes introduced as the birth of “modernity” and an era of “revolutions.” What made this era distinctive or different from previous eras? In what ways did the era continue trends or patterns that we saw in previous eras? What explains the changes and continuities in this era? Era 6 Learning Objectives1. Analyze how the roles of sovereignty, individualism, nationalism, and the fight for equality influenced political revolutions and the rise of the nation-state.2. Analyze the causes and consequences of industrialization. 3. Examine the ways in which colonialism and imperialism have impacted societies.4. Evaluate why people’s perceptions of labor, women’s rights, and human rights changed during this era.5. Use historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, causation, historical comparison, contextualization, sourcing, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE16Era 7: The Great Convergence and Divergence (1880 CE to the future)Era 7 Problem: What are the virtues and challenges of trying to tell one human history as opposed to manyhuman histories?1. How important have population explosion, extensive urbanization, and migration been in shaping the world in which you live?2. In what ways were the global conflicts, economic and demographic crises, and racialized actions against groups of people in the twentieth century a continuation of, or a break with, trends and movements of the previous two centuries?3. Do you think the world has generally become more democratic or less democratic, and what do you think could happen in the future?4. Globalization can be seen as a “flattening” of human experiences, yet also as something that is “lumpy” because of the way in which differences remain among communities and people. How were (and are) people living during this era similar and why? How were (and are) people living during this era different and why? 5. Over the past 250 years, we have seen increases in world population; the number of people living in cities; energy use; the world economy; the average standard of living; popular sovereignty and global transportation, communication, and interconnection. During this time, we have also seen an increase in the gap between the wealthy and impoverished as well as the deterioration of the environment. Given these patterns, what do you think will be the most important transformations in the near future?Era 7 Learning Objectives1. Assess the causes and consequences of global conflict and mass atrocities during this era.2. Evaluate how nationalism influenced political revolutions, wars, and the migration of people.3. Evaluate how the Cold War and decolonization are intertwined in the history of this period.4. Analyze and critique the positive and negative impacts of globalization on human society and the environment.5. Use historical thinking practices and reasoning skills such as claim testing, historical comparison, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE17Course ContentThe WHP course comprises three main asset types—texts, videos, and activities—and has a clear structure that will help you navigate through the course content. Course StructureThe WHP Origins course is deliberately structured, from the overall periodization scheme to the way each era and each lesson is constructed. The WHP Origins course is divided into seven units—referred to as eras—which are described in more detail below. Each era is composed of a set of lessons. Each lesson typically includes a mix of articles, videos, and activities. The first lesson in each era (that is, the “0” lesson: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on) provides a high-level overview, or a big picture, of what happens in each era, and also shows how the eras are connected to one another. This high-level overview lesson supports our big-picture narrative, while the remaining lessons tend to get into more of the details, facilitating the scale switching students will do to support, extend, or challenge their own world history narratives and the course frame narratives. The lessons themselves also have a deliberate structure, and where possible, we try to have an opening and closing activity for each lesson. These help form a cohesive structure across lessons. Our opening activities are meant to be quick and fun, activating prior knowledge, revealing student misconceptions, and preparing students for what’s coming in that lesson. Closing activities are used for formative assessment throughout the course. These activities are clearly labeled “Opening” and “Closing” (respectively and unsurprisingly), on the OER Project website when they meet the criteria described above. We have two ways to access the activities, articles, and videos within the course—the Era View and the Lesson View. There are some slight differences in what you will find in each of these views. From the Era View, you can see all the activities, articles, videos, and assessments in each lesson of the era. Click View Lesson to see the lesson.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE18From the Lesson View, click on any asset in the left-hand menu to see related lesson instructions and materials. Within the Lesson View you’ll find directions to help guide you through each activity, video, and article. In the case of activities, these are the same directions you’ll find in the associated PDF. For articles and videos, you’ll find questions aligned to the Three Close Reads approach (along with links to the related videos and articles). Note that you’ll also find teacher-facing language and sample answers in the Lesson View; on the student site, students will see student-facing language, and they will not see any sample answers or answer keys. TextsThere are three main types of texts included in the course: articles, graphic biographies, and primary source collections. • Articles: A series of essays by eminent scholars from around the world. All texts in the course are leveled, and each article has three or four Lexile level versions included to accommodate students at different reading levels. In addition, the highest Lexile level of each article has been audio recorded. • Graphic biographies: Graphic biographies of everyday people from throughout human history are included in each era. These are discussed in more detail below.• Primary source collections: Primary source collections (including image collections) have been curated and included throughout the course to include a wide variety of historical content.
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE19Examples of course texts: article (left), graphic biography (center), and primary source collection (right).VideosThe course features a variety of videos, each with a specific purpose as part of an integrated lesson. The videos provide variety alongside text and activities, giving students an opportunity to view sites and hear from scholars from around the world. They offer an engaging way for students to learn a good deal of history content in a fairly short amount of time. We provide transcripts and closed captioning for all videos. Some teachers choose to review video transcripts with their students either before or after watching the videos. And don’t forget, you can check the Pause at key concepts” box to have the video stop in places where we suggest checking student comprehension. These stopping points match up with the questions and answers found in the respective lesson view. All of our videos include these features, but there are several different video types, each playing a distinct role in the course.• Era overview videos: Era overview videos provide a high-level introduction to the main topics, themes, and events that students will encounter in each era, giving them a framework to guide their learning. They introduce students to their first pieces of evidence for responding to the overarching era problem. These videos also help students with historical contextualization, which is a hard skill to master without background knowledge. Era overview videos always appear in the first lesson of each era. • Frame videos: These videos provide an overview for each era from the perspective of the three frames in the course—communities, networks, and production and distribution. They help students begin to organize the material in the era along thematic lines. It’s expected that students will modify or test the claims made in the frame videos as they learn more content that either supports, extends, or challenges what they’ve learned in the frame video. These videos always appear in the first lesson of each era.• Topical videos: These videos, which are found throughout the course, bring expert knowledge from world historians and other scholars to discuss key questions such as: What makes history usable? What is collective learning and how did it emerge? How did farming lead to states? Why did the Armenian Genocide
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE20happen? What is fascism? Why did internationalism fail to stop the First World War? In each case, experts present on the questions and offer evidence to help students to answer these questions.• International video arcs: We’ve created five international video arcs, each made up of three videos based around a particular geographic location. Each video provides regional evidence to help students think about the era problem. However, they also work longitudinally to ask and address questions of continuity and change within a state or region such as the Caribbean, the Arabian Peninsula, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and China.• Crash Course videos: We have carefully curated a selection of Crash Course world history videos that are teacher-tested for topical coverage and that we feel are a great fit for the course. These videos often move fast, so consider having students review the transcript before or after they watch to fill in or reinforce any details they might miss. • Khan Academy videos: Khan Academy has an extensive video library, and we’ve partnered with them to provide students with more in-depth explorations of certain historical eras such as the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Japanese Middle Ages, and the Opium Wars. Excerpts from WHP videos
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE21Course ActivitiesWHP Origins lessons include a variety of activity types. Activity progressions, which focus on particular academic and historical thinking skills (reading, writing, claim testing, and contextualization, for example), take students through a series of activities that help them understand how to do the work of history, and that also organize the content of history in particular frameworks. Each activity progression includes a historical thinking tool, which can be used to support students in their learning. Additionally, lessons include standard activity types (vocabulary, for example), repeated activities, assessments, and customized “fun” activities to maximize student engagement and learning. Activities are woven into every era and are an integral part of every lesson to help students learn, experience, practice, and test concepts covered in the course. Each of these activity types are discussed in more detail in this section. Practice Progressions and Thinking ToolsPlease see the OER Project Teaching Guide for more detailed information about the rationale behind practice progressions. Here, you will see the specific activity progressions found in the WHP Origins course. We recommend you use caution if considering skipping activities that are part of a spiraling series. Doing so might leave students with an incomplete set of skills or cause confusion when students encounter less scaffolded activities. We recommend you complete each activity in the series with your students, even if you don’t do them in the exact order suggested in the outline, to ensure appropriate scaffolding is provided to support skill development.WHP Origins Practice Progression PlacementEra 1Our Big HistoryEra 2Early HumansEra 3Cities, Societies, and EmpiresEra 4Regional WebsEra 5The First Global AgeEra 6The Long Nineteenth CenturyEra 7The Great Convergence and DivergencePractice ProgressionsReading “History of Many Shapes and Sizes”Three Close Reads - IntroductionThree Close Reads for Graphic Bios - IntroductionNo specific activity sequence—release of scaffolding determined by teacher in relation to Three Close Reads recommendations.Writing Claim and Focus Part 1Claim and Focus Warm-UpClaim and Focus RevisionAnalysis and Evidence and WHP Concepts Part 1Analysis and Evidence Warm-UpAnalysis and Evidence RevisionOrganization and Language and StyleOrganization Warm-UpOrganization RevisionClaim and Focus Part 2Analysis and Evidence and WHP Concepts Part 2Self-Editi
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE22Era 1Our Big HistoryEra 2Early HumansEra 3Cities, Societies, and EmpiresEra 4Regional WebsEra 5The First Global AgeEra 6The Long Nineteenth CenturyEra 7The Great Convergence and DivergenceClaim Testing IntroductionAuthorityMaking Claims: Foraging vs. FarmingEvidence Making Claims: Expanding NetworksThe Islamic WorldMaking Claims: Pastoral EmpiresImperialism Global ConflictGlobalizationMaking Claims: FramesCausation IntroductionFrom Foraging to Complex Societies Population Growth Autopsy of an Empire Recipe for a Revolution Comparison Life in the Neolithic and TodayBelief Systems Women in Medieval Europe and Song China Egypt and Japan Rights Documents Contextualization Introduction Agrarian SocietiesMansa Musa Mongol and Comanche EmpiresChild LaborContinuity and Change Over Time (CCOT) Introduction Early Humans to EmpiresEmpires to Regional WebsRegional Webs to the First Global AgeThe First Global Age to the Long Nineteenth CenturyEra ComparisonsSourcing Introduction“The Deeds of the Divine Augustus”“An Imperial Edict Restraining Officials from Evil”Spanish Conquest of the Aztec EmpireDiffering Perspectives on Imperialism ReadingWHP seeks to improve students’ ability to analyze, evaluate, and use a range of primary and secondary sources and video, including arguments about the past in a variety of formats or genres. Specifically, WHP activities regularly ask students to read sources deeply; to evaluate the roles that evidence, context, and underlying assumptions play in constructing an interpretation; and to evaluate the consequences or significance of one interpretation over another. For students to develop the skills related to historical reading, the course provides extensive supports for what we call the Three Close Reads process, which you can learn more about in the OER Project Teaching Guide. Students are introduced to close reading strategies in the first overview reading of the course, and then continue to use the process throughout. Although reading everything in the course three times might seem like overkill, it’s a very helpful tool for getting all the information from the articles and other readings. Students will get faster and faster with each reading, and somewhere in the middle of the course they will notice that the three reads take the same amount of time that one used to take. Students will eventually internalize this process; however, they should continue to use the Three Close Reads Worksheet as a tool to help them with more complicated readings. In addition to text-based readings, we also assume that students will “read” video in the course in the same manner they use Three Close Reads to assess text-based readings. The videos used in the course are often dense and provide detailed information. Usually, watching a video once and moving on does not provide the kind of engagement needed for students to comprehend, recall, and apply the details contained in videos. We recommend
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE23that you approach video like you do reading. First, have students watch the video so that they can get the overall gist (a first watch of a video is often a great homework assignment). Then, have students watch a video more closely, using the questions provided in the accompanying lesson plan to help them focus on the key ideas. For the final viewing, ask students to apply what they learned in the videos to see if they support, extend, or challenge what they already knew about the topic at hand. You can also have students read video transcripts to cut down on the overall time it takes to use each video as part of instruction. Note: Videos are not intended to replace instruction in any way; rather, they are a resource that should be used in an interactional way. Teachers should keep an ear out for when students start to grumble about the three reads. It might mean that they’re ready for a less scaffolded experience. Teachers should use their knowledge of how their students’ reading skills are developing to decide when students need less guidance and structure. It’s unlikely this will happen in the first era, or even the first couple of eras, but eventually this process will become a habit. Until it does, it’s important to use the worksheet, and early in the course, we recommend modeling the Three Close Reads process with your students. Typically, students should use the Three Close Reads Worksheet to help them analyze an article. In addition to the worksheet, you will always be given more specific questions (with sample answers that appear only in the teaching material), that can be used to orient your students to particular concepts and rhetorical devices for the second and third reads. The questions provided as part of the activity should be used for class discussions and for checking students’ understanding of the reading. The content covered in the reading-specific questions is important for your students to learn, so make sure these questions, which are in addition to those on the Three Close Reads Worksheet, are addressed with your students in some way. Three Close Reads worksheet
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE24Our teachers have noted that sourcing is a difficult skill for students to master; therefore, we call it out as a separate historical thinking practice. While it’s tightly bound to reading, we tease it out in the WHP practices so students can spend additional time deliberately practicing their sourcing skills. While the standard Three Close Reads approach is intended for use for regular essay-type articles, we have developed additional strategies for different texts. To support the reading of graphic biographies and charts and graphs, we also have a Three Close Reads—Graphic Biographies and Three Close Reads—Data Exploration. For more information on these, refer to the Graphic Biographies and Project X Sections of this guide. Writing The WHP course is writing-intensive. Students are asked to respond in writing to a variety of essay prompts, including those related to causation, historical comparison, and continuity and change over time (CCOT). Because history teachers are not necessarily trained as writing teachers, yet must help students develop their writing skills, we have created a series of seven activities that focus specifically on developing these core writing skills so that students are prepared to construct their own historical narratives in response to these varied historical prompts. The writing progression activities start with an introduction to the WHP Writing Rubric, which is the same rubric by which students will be assessed throughout the year. Each activity is designed to help students not only understand the rubric criteria, but also learn how to identify the elements of good writing. Students will learn about how to craft a thesis statement and maintain focus throughout an essay. They’ll also identify evidence in essays and learn how the use of evidence must be coupled with analysis and then connect back to the thesis or major claim of the essay. Then, students will progress to identifying how organization and style help authors convey their arguments. And since we’re focusing on concepts and content in WHP, we teach students how to integrate these key concepts into their essays to help support the thesis.WHP Writing Rubric
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE25For the writing progression activities in the later eras of the course, we ask students to do a deeper analysis of sample essays. They will shift from simply identifying elements such as the major claim and evidence, to attempting to make suggestions for improvement in the sample essays. This will help students develop these core writing skills so that they’re prepared to construct their own historical narratives in response to historical prompts. Note these activities are the second to last activity in each era, preceding an era-culminating writing assessment in the form of a DBQ or LEQ. The DBQs and LEQs are explained in more detail in the DBQs and LEQs section of this guide. For additional support, you’ll find additional writing activities at the end of each unit that provide scaffolded writing support and allow you to make instructional decisions based on the needs of your students. These activities focus on rubric-based writing and revision strategies that address a specific aspect of the writing process: Claim and Focus, Analysis and Evidence, and Organization. Plus, they work hand-in-hand with Score, the essay-scoring platform that provides feedback for student writing. These activities are included alongside the first few Investigations in the course, and you can repeat any part to accompany any and all Investigations, making that practice available to your students whenever they need it.Claim TestingClaim testing is an important analytical process for assessing the quality and veracity of claims. It helps students “see” and evaluate people’s assertions and gives shape to one of the most important and useful historical critical thinking practices. Since history is all about making assertions, it’s important that students learn the skill of testing claims early and use it frequently as part of evaluating historical accounts and making historical interpretations. Through use of this process, students will become familiar with the language of claim testing, which they should begin to use as part of accountable talk in the classroom. The WHP course equips students with the language and practice needed to analyze claims made in many forms, including primary and secondary sources, data charts, videos, graphic biographies, and even in-class discussions. It’s very important for students to see you, their teacher, modeling claim testing by making it a regular part of classwork. You might stop a video to ask about the support John Green offers for one his claims; or you might ask students to highlight an article’s major and minor claims; or have them use claim testers to shape a discussion of a current issue in the news or in school.WHP Claim Testers
ORIGINS COURSE GUIDE26In class discussions, you might encourage students to respond to each other with questions such as:• Is the creator of this source credible? Why?• What’s the evidence for that claim?• Can you explain the logic behind your statement?• This makes logical [or intuitive] sense to me but I don’t have much evidence. Can someone suggest some evidence to support this?You might even create a poster of such phrases to scaffold the regular use of the claim testers in class. Of course, claim testing should also become evident in students’ writing as they use these same strategies to show how they arrived at or are supporting their conclusions.The claim-testing progression starts with a fun and quick activity to introduce students to the claim testers, then moves into specific activities that address the concepts of authority and evidence. For the remaining activities in the progression, students will apply what they know about authority, logic, intuition, and evidence to write supporting statements for claims they’re given that are relevant to the era they’re studying. They will analyze the quality of evidence put forth by their peers, find disconfirming evidence, and write thesis statements based on their conclusions, all of which will help them be better prepared to make and support claims in their own writing. CausationCausal reasoning can help students develop evidence-based explanations or arguments in response to a causal question that considers human actions, events, and larger structures or processes. Reasoning about cause and consequence is core to the work of a historian and therefore this practice is introduced early and repeated often. As students progress in the course, they will use their causal reasoning skills in most activities. It won’t be long before the steps they follow to analyze cause and consequence become implicit, and at that point they may not need the support of the Causation Tool. However, writing about causation may take more time, so make sure to provide the appropriate support to your students until they’ve mastered writing about cause and consequence. Students are introduced to causation in Era 1 of the course using the fictitious story of Alphonse the Camel. They are introduced to the Causation Tool at the end of this activity. In the activity that follows, which deals with foraging and farming, students learn how to draw causal maps. Then students dig into both cause and consequence, learning that their relationship is not linear. The final two activities in the causation progression are both fun. In the first, Autopsy of an Empire, students look at the causes of the downfall of empires, using a complex event to help sharpen their contextualization skills. Finally, in Recipe for a Revolution, students create a recipe that explains the causes for a particular political revolution. By the end of this progression, students should be skilled in analyzing long-, intermediate-, and short-term causes as well as their significance, role, and type.