The whole world,
told well.
Nine units, seventy-two CED-aligned topics, six themes, four exam skills, and an FRQ Lab that scores like the real thing — built from years of teaching APWH.
The whole CED, topic by topic.
Each unit opens to a list of CollegeBoard topics — every one with a study guide, key terms, a video, and a five-question quiz. Topic-level pages ship over the year as I teach the units.
The Global Tapestry
East Asia, Dar al-Islam, South & Southeast Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe before the great convergence.
Networks of Exchange
Silk Roads, the Mongol Empire, Indian Ocean trade, trans-Saharan routes, and the cultural consequences of contact.
Land-Based Empires
The “gunpowder empires” — Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Russian, Ming/Qing — and the bureaucracies they ran on.
Transoceanic Interconnections
Atlantic exploration, the Columbian Exchange, the Atlantic slave trade, mercantilism, and the world’s first global economy.
Revolutions
Enlightenment, American, French, Haitian, Latin American — and the Industrial Revolution that transformed everything that followed.
Consequences of Industrialization
Imperialism, scramble for Africa, economic imperialism in Asia, and the resistance — and complicity — of those it touched.
Global Conflict
Two world wars, the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the end of the European-dominated world order.
Cold War & Decolonization
A bipolar world, proxy wars, anti-colonial movements, and the long, uneven process of nation-building after empire.
Globalization
Economic integration, climate, migration, technology, and the question students keep asking — what comes next?
The threads that run through it all.
CollegeBoard organizes APWH around six themes. Topic pages tag every claim to the relevant themes — useful when you’re studying for the LEQ.
Humans & the Environment
How geography, climate, and disease shape human life — and how humans push back.
ENV
Cultural Developments & Interactions
Religions, philosophies, art, and the cross-pollination that happens when worlds meet.
CDI
Governance
Empires, states, and the strategies they use to legitimize and sustain themselves.
GOV
Economic Systems
Trade networks, labor systems, and the rise (and limits) of global capitalism.
ECN
Social Interactions & Organization
Family, gender, class, ethnicity — and how power is distributed (or contested) along those lines.
SIO
Technology & Innovation
From gunpowder and steam to the internet — and the unforeseen consequences each time.
TEC
Four skills, in order of pain.
Each skill has a rubric, an annotated exemplar, a “common mistakes” callout, and a writeable practice prompt that hands off to the AP Tutor for feedback.
Stimulus MCQ
How to read a passage like a historian, fast.
SAQ
Three quick parts. The art of saying enough — and no more.
LEQ
One big argument, three paragraphs, all the evidence you can muster.
DBQ
Seven documents, a thesis, contextualization, and the patience to do all of it under time.
