Unit 6: The First Global Age
1200 to 1750 CE
Teacher Resources
Unit 6 Vocab Guide
Key Unit 6 vocabulary words.
Reading Overview
Reading strategies to help students dig into a variety of texts.
OER Teaching Sensitive Topics in Social Studies Guide
Support for having discussions that are difficult, but meaningful.
Historical Thinking Skills Guide
Develop the skills needed to analyze history and think like a historian.
How did the first ongoing connections between the hemispheres promote change both globally and regionally?
The first global age featured prosperity and tragedy, and it forever altered the course of human history. Massive land empires and new oceanic empires linked the two hemispheres into an increasingly global system, both ecological and economic.
Regional Webs Before 1492
Before Columbus, the Americas, Afro-Eurasia, and Oceania each featured large, long-distance networks of exchange and interaction. In these lessons, you’ll explore these networks and some of the beneficial and devastating consequences they produced.
Lesson 6.2
The Mongol Empire
How did the Mongols manage to build and maintain history’s largest land-based empire?
Lesson 6.3
Afro-Eurasian Networks
How did Afro-Eurasian networks of exchange impact the economics, culture, and well-being of communities across this region?
Lesson 6.4
The Black Death
How did the Black Death spread so far and so quickly across Afro-Eurasia?
Lesson 6.5
Cultural Exchange in Afro-Eurasia
What were the causes and consequences of scientific and cultural exchange?
Lesson 6.6
Communities in West Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
What commonalities linked societies in diverse and different regions during this period?
Lesson 6.7
Networks in the Americas
How did environment and geography shape networks of exchange?
Connecting the World
The world in 1500 was a world on the move. People crossed oceans and continents, linking societies from Japan to the Americas. The Columbian Exchange moved plants, animals, diseases, and people to new places, blending cultures, and forging a global economy.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The enslavement and forced transport of over 15 million people from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations enriched European empires and reshaped global demographics. Enslaved people resisted this system at every stage of its 400-year history.
Lesson 6.10
The Middle Passage
What were the causes and effects of the Atlantic slaving system?
Lesson 6.11
The Plantation System
How was slavery in the Atlantic plantation system different from earlier forms of slavery?
Lesson 6.12
Unit 6 Writing Wrap Up
How did the first ongoing connections among the hemispheres promote change both globally and regionally?