AP U4 Guide
Unit 4 Guide
2Unit 4: Transoceanic Interconnections c. 1450 to 1750 CEIn 1491, no one living in Europe, Asia, or Africa knew that there were humans in the Americas, and no one in the Americas knew there were humans in Afro-Eurasia. There were no tomatoes in Italian food, corn in West African food, or potatoes in Irish food. European voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans launched what historian Alfred Crosby called the “Columbian Exchange.” This was a network of exchange that covered almost the entire world and moved new plants and animals to new places, transforming societies and environments around the globe. Along these new routes of exchange, European empires also began to spread across the oceans. In Afro-Eurasia, large land-based empires remained the most powerful states of this period as they competed against and traded with the new oceanic empires.
Unit 4 Learning Objectives and Unit Problem1.Explain how technological, economic, and philosophical factors contributed to changing patterns of trade and travel from 1450to1750 CE. 2.Evaluate the causes and effects of the Columbian Exchange in different regions of the world from 1450 to 1750 CE.3.Explain the continuities and changes in economic and labor systems that occurred as a result of the Columbian Exchange.4.Analyze the causes and effects of rising state power and challenges to the state during this period. 5.Describe how social categories, roles, and practices changed or stayed the same over time. 6.Assess how political, economic, and cultural factors, including the influence of belief systems, affected society during thisperiod.7.Use historical thinking skills and reasoning processes such as sourcing, claim testing, and continuity and change over time to evaluate historical events and processes. For individual lesson learning objectives, please review the lesson teaching guides.In this unit, students will consider this Unit Problem: How did economic developments and new transoceanic connections affect social structures in different parts of the world from c. 1450 to 1750 CE?
Lessons OverviewLesson 4.0 Transoceanic ConnectionsLesson 4.1 Technological Innovations from 1450 to 1750 CELesson 4.2 Exploration: Causes and Events from 1450 to 1750 CELesson 4.3 The Columbian ExchangeLesson 4.4 Maritime Empires EstablishedLesson 4.5 Maritime Empires Maintained and DevelopedFollow the links above to explore each lesson in this unit. Look for this symbol tofind the lesson guides, which provide teacher guidance, including sample answers. Lesson 4.6 Internal and External Challenges to State Power from 1450 to 1750 CELesson 4.7 Changing Social Hierarchies from 1450 to 1750 CELesson 4.8 Continuity and Change from 1450 to 1750 CE
About OER Project: World History AP®World History AP (WH AP) is a free, College-Board-approved world-history course. Precisely aligned to the AP®World History: Modern Course and Exam Description (CED), WH AP can serve as a textbook for AP®World History: Modern classrooms.College Board has approved the WH AP course materials as a college textbook, and has approved the WH AP syllabus as well. Teachers can submit the WH AP syllabus to College Board during the audit process. The OER Project team conducted a materials assessment to ensure that WH AP course materials align with the AP®World History: Modern CED. The CED identifies historical developments within each unit. WH AP has content material to address each of these topics. As a result, each article, video, and activity in the course aligns with specific historical developments, themes, and illustrative examples in the CED.
6Teaching Tips
Historical Thinking Skills and Reasoning Processes The integration of skills and content is foundational to OER Project courses. Skills development is just as important—if not more—than content knowledge for student thinking and learning in social studies classes. Throughout this course, students encounter numerous scaffolded opportunities to practice causation, comparison, continuity and change over time, contextualization, sourcing, and making and testing claims. Practice progressions are made up of three categories: progression activities, thinking tools, and feedback forms. Each step in a progression is more sophisticated than the one before, challenging students along the way but also supporting them as they do this work. In Unit 4, you’ll find the following progression activities:•Sourcing: Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire •Claim Testing: Transoceanic Empires•CCOT: Land-Based Empires to Transoceanic InterconnectionsLearn more in our Historical Thinking Skills Guideand see where all the progression activities live in the World History AP Practice Progressions Placement document.
AP®Themes in Unit 4The Unit 4 Themes Notebook focuses on the four AP®themes that are included in most of the topics in the CED: economic systems, governance, social organization and interactions, and humans and the environment. The technology and innovation theme is featured in Lesson 4.1 as students learn about the innovations that were shared among different Afro-Eurasian societies, innovations that led to the origins of oceanic connections. As new oceanic empires expanded, these empires reaped the economic benefits associated with the extraction of resources from conquered territories. These new global empires both decimated and transformed societies as Europeans conquered the Americas and took enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. While the cultural interactions and developments theme is woven throughout this unit, it is highlighted in Lesson 4.7, along with changing social organization and interactions. As people and cultures mixed, colonial governments sought to establish rigid social hierarchies in the Americas, but many individuals and groups fought against these categories and in turn, syncretic cultural practices emerged.Check out the Unit 4 Themes Notebook.
VideosWe use videos as a visually engaging approach to course material. While students are often excited to learn that they’ll be watching a video in class, video-watching is a skill, just like reading an article. Here are a couple of quick strategies to get you started:•We suggest students first read the video description and Guiding Questions, or even skim the video transcript. We’ve provided you with time stamps and sample answers, which students will not see. •We recommend chunking the videos using the Key Ideas feature, which pauses the video at the specific times of the corresponding Guiding Questions and provides an opportunity for discussion or note-taking.•You can also play the video twice: once straight through and once with pauses at key ideas.•Check out How to Watch Videos as a great way to introduce instructional videos in your classroom. For more information, see our Video Guide.
ActivitiesActivities are an important part of OER Project lessons and serve to build student understanding and engagement. Activities provide an opportunity to get students moving and “doing” history through exercises like informal writing, group work, simulations, and debates.Progression activities appear in multiple units and are based on historical thinking skills like sourcing and contextualization. Each activity in a progression is meant to be more sophisticated than the one before, challenging students but also supporting them as they do this work.For all activities in OER Project—except for some openers and closers—teachers can find directions and sample answers in the accompanying lesson guides.Click here to learn more about activities.Click here to learn more about historical thinking skills.
ReadingsOER Project includes primary sources and articles written by a diverse group of scholars and OER Project staff. Some of the reading involved in OER Project courses can be challenging, but it is vital for engaging with the course content. OER Project provides Guiding Questions alongside each reading. These questions encourage students to approach the text at three levels—first by skimming the text, next by reading to answer Key Idea questions (“While You Read”), and finally by evaluating the text through “After You Read” questions that encourage connection and synthesis. The “After You Read” questions have been aligned to those found in the AP World History Modern CED. As a reminder, you can always have students complete the Three-Step Reading worksheetto replace or supplement the Guiding Questions that are included with each reading. For more information, see our Reading Guide.
Graphic BiographiesOER Project’s graphic biographies are one-page histories of people. Whether they’re “important” or “everyday,” each of these individuals has their own story, their own history, and those stories weave in and out of the global themes of their era. Their experiences highlight, and sometimes bring into question, developments on a global scale that students are studying as part of the frame narratives presented in the course. These biographies are one of the best ways for students to zoom in, and doing so helps bring nuance to their understanding of history. In some cases, the biographies will complicate the frame narratives—the experience of an individual will not necessarily fit with the global experience—but they don’t invalidate the frames; they just deepen and enrich them.Check out How to Read Comics for an introduction to reading graphic biographies. Click here to learn more about our Graphic Biographies.
WritingAt OER Project, we encourage students to write. A lot. At times, we want them to write informally, in order to express their initial understandings. Other times, we have them write formally, to solidify their thinking and refine their arguments. They will write, review, and refine their work multiple times. This isn’t easy for most students. However, our research has shown that this hard work makes a real difference in the quality of their writing—a terribly unsurprising conclusion. Clear, consistent expectations, frequently revisited, is not a magic formula; it’s just good teaching.In each unit of this course, there are opportunities for students to participate in a formal writing activity that results in an essay. Unit 4 offers an LEQ writing opportunity in which students respond to this prompt: Develop an argument that evaluates the extent to which economic developments that occurred between 1450 and 1750 impacted social structures over time.Click here to learn more about our writing approach.Click here for informal writing routines.
SAQsThe WH AP course offers students practice in constructing concise and detailed responses to prompts that are similar to those they’ll experience on the AP®World History exam. These practice SAQs guide students to analyze the prompts, gather evidence from the primary or secondary sources or their background knowledge, and then write a two-or three-sentence response to the prompt. These practice SAQs target students’ mastery of the historical content for each WH AP unit. Some of the SAQ prompts involve historical content across several units, however. Those prompts take more of a continuity-and-change-over-time approach to world history, which is a historical-reasoning skill students will need to employ on the exam. Please note that the SAQs used in the SAQ Practice series may have been taken from previously released AP exams, meaning students can find answers online. Since the purpose of these activities is to provide practice in preparation for the exam, we suggest that you NOT use these assessments for grades in your gradebook. If you’re looking to assess students using SAQs, we recommend using the released SAQs available in AP®Classroom.