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Home > Sample Syllabus from the AP Teacher's Guide in World History
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Sample Syllabus from the AP Teacher's Guide in World History
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Part II of the Syllabus...
Tim Connell
The Laurel Hill School
Shaker Heights, Ohio
School Profile
Name: Laurel School.
School Location and Environment: Shaker Heights is a suburb of
Cleveland, Ohio.
Grades: Pre-K through 12; all girls except for the co-ed preschool; grades 9 through 12 in upper school.
Total Enrollment: 620 students; 190 in upper school.
College Record: With rare exceptions, all students go directly to
four-year colleges and universities.
Overview of AP World History
Program: Laurel offers a two-year course in world history at the ninth and tenth
grades. The ninth grade course is taught to all students without an honors or AP option.
AP World History will be offered to sophomores, with departmental approval. Students with
a B average or above are likely to be accepted. All students (AP and regular) meet five
times in a six-day rotation. AP students have an additional meeting in each rotation.
These are small groups of about five to eight students. (The department is requesting
administrative approval to add an additional meeting beyond this to focus on writing in
preparation for the AP Exam.)
AP Class Size: about 15 students.
Course Design: World History I (the ninth grade course) covers the period from
Prehistory to c. 1200 C.E. Several distinct civilizations are treated in-depth rather than
as an encyclopedic survey. World History II (the sophomore course) covers the period from
about 1300 to the present.
The two main threads of the course are:
- how humans became organized into complex societies and what the different forms those
societies took: human evolution; simple societies; early civilization in Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India; the Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome; European
Middle Ages; and
- the historical roots and values of five major religious traditions: Judaism; Hinduism;
Buddhism; Christianity; Islam.
No single textbook is used. Instead, students read a series of serious, but popular,
history texts such as The Human Dawn; What Life Was Like on the Nile; Great People
from the Bible and How They Lived; These Were the Greeks; Classical India; These Were the
Romans; The World of Islam; and The Life of the Buddha. These are
supplemented by many selections from primary sources.
Texts:
McNeill, William. A History of the Human Community. Volume 2. New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1996.
(Note: the sections on the non-European world are enhanced with references to Anthony
Esler's, The Human Venture: A World History from Prehistory to Present 4th
ed., combined ed.Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Andrea, Alfred and James Overfield. The Human Record: Sources of Global History.
3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Supplementary Books:
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. (A look at
life in Africa on the eve of European domination.)
Gies, Frances and Joseph Gies. Women in the Middle Ages. New York: Perennial,
1991. (Portraits of several famous and not so famous women in Medieval Europe.)
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Fawcett
Books, 1996. (A soldier's view of the horror of World War I.)
Spence, Jonathan. The Death of Woman Wang. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
(A look at the life of women in seventeenth-century rural China.)
Tec, Nechama. Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984. (A young Jewish girl's struggle to survive during the time of the
Nazi control of Poland.)
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