Course Description

Welcome! This site is for students, parents, teachers and anyone else interested in the tenth-grade World History 2 Course at Santa Fe Prep.

The overall course covers the history of the world from roughly 1500 to the present. The first quarter opens with the time when Asia was the center of world affairs, then traces European encounters with Asia and the Americas, and the complex interactions and consequences of the so-called "Columbian Exchange" between Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. The first quarter ends with a survey of the European Renaissance and Reformation, in both its local and global dimensions. The second quarter will focus on the rise of absolute monarchies and new ideas and practices, especially with the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. The second quarter ends with assessments of the legacies of the French Revolution, Napoleon and the emergence of the British Empire. The third quarter starts with the implications of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, i.e., the discourse on rights, reaction, revolution and reform, the rise of new ideologies, in particular, Classical Liberalism, nationalism, and romanticism, and conservative reactions to the changes wrought by the American and French Revolutions. The course then examines the rise of industrialization and social change in 19th-century Europe, and the emergence of middle and working class cultures, followed by new iterations of liberalism and conservatism, the proliferation of more ideologies, e.g., socialism, communism, ultranationalism, social Darwinism, and antisemitism. Then the course examines the unification of the Italian and German nation states, and the creation of the modern welfare state. From there the course traces the rise of a new wave of Western imperialism, followed by the rest of the world's reactions to the rise of European empires and ideas, and in particular, the emergence of industrial Japan and their surprising victory over Russia. The third quarter ends with the outbreak of the First World War. The fourth and final quarter surveys the effects of the First World War, followed by the brief peak of classical liberal nation states and promises for peace, and the rapid rise of authoritarianism, in both communist and fascist variations, with a special focus on the rise of Nazism, the Nazi racial transformation of Germany and the Holocaust and Shoah of modern Europe. The fourth quarter concludes by looking at the causes and effects of the Second World War, the Cold War, the end of European empires in Asia and Africa, the emergence of the Modern Middle East and China, the end of the Cold War, history since 1989, all the way to the present, including current events.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Week One Reading Questions: Introductions to Pomeranz/Topik & Mann


Santa Fe Prep
Modern World History
Reading Questions

I.      Questions for the Prologue to Charles Mann, 1493, xxi-xxx.
            1. Where do tomatoes come from (xxi)?

            2. Does it require an explanation that Europeans and their descendants are all
            over the place (xxii)? Does it even matter?


            3. How do historians typically explain Europe's spread across the globe?


            4. How did Alfred W. Crosby explain it?


            5. What is meant by the "Columbian Exchange" and what are the implications of
            this idea for how we study the history of the modern world, or how history
            happens?

                       


            6. What does "transculturation" mean?

            7. What has been the impact of globalization (xxv)? Is there, as Charles Mann
            concludes, "grandeur"?





II. Questions for the Prologue to Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World the Trade Created, xi-xv.
            1. How did China affect the world in the 15th century through its monetary policy?


            2. How did different peoples and cultures respond (xi)?



            3. What is the object of their book (xii)?

           

            4. What do the authors mean about a "Eurocentric teleology", and is it something
            to reject? Why?
           


            5. Are things like markets or history itself inevitable?



            6. What do the authors mean when they say they believe that markets are
            "socially constructed and socially embedded"?



            7. What do they mean that goods have "social lives"(xiii)?



            8. What do they mean when they say they want to avoid a "simple-minded anti-
            imperialism"?
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