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Dear readers of AP^® World History:

A warm greeting to all of you about to embark on the AP^® World History course from the two of us (Robert Strayer and Eric Nelson) who have written this book to guide you through this journey.

We hope that you open this book with a sense of anticipation and even excitement. You are embarking on a remarkable excursion through the history of our species, a history that you are part of and destined to contribute to in the years ahead. It is hard to imagine a more interesting or relevant subject to study than world history.

At the same time, world history can be intimidating—to students, teachers, and textbook writers alike. You may feel that you know little enough of U.S. history, let alone the history of China, India, Africa, the Islamic world, Europe, and Latin America. How are you supposed to take in the mass of information about all of the peoples and places contained in a world history course? If you’ve thought about it, you may well feel a bit overwhelmed by what awaits you.

If it is any comfort, you might want to know that the authors of your textbook also feel some anxiety about the daunting task of world history. We are aware that every sentence we write rests on an enormous body of historical research and that historians disagree about almost everything important. So we worry about getting it right. That’s why the creation of this book has involved input from dozens of teachers, professors, and scholars who are real experts in particular areas of world history. We have benefited greatly from their criticisms and suggestions.

Beyond accurate information and reasonable interpretations of that information, we also struggle with the even greater problem of putting it all together in some coherent fashion. After all, the potential subject matter of world history is nothing less than everything human, as well as the natural environment in which human beings have made their history. This inclusive scope of world history gives it a certain grandeur, for we seek to tell the story of humankind as a whole from the beginning to the present. Such a story allows you to see yourself, your aspirations, your difficulties, your values, your time and place—in short, your life—in the largest possible setting. In a word, it offers a grand perspective.

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But this appealing feature of world history is also the source of its greatest difficulty—-telling a story that makes sense and hangs together. How can we meaningfully present the planet’s many and distinct peoples and their intersections with one another within a single book? How can you possibly embrace the entirety of the human journey in a single course in a single year, while keeping up with the rest of your life as well? What prevents world history from bogging down in unending facts about various civilizations or cultures, from losing the forest for the trees, from suggesting that history is just “one thing after another”?

We have sought to cope with this fundamental dilemma of world history—the tension between inclusion and coherence—in several ways. First, we have kept our discussions brief. Despite the seemingly hefty size of this book, its story line or narrative is succinct and straightforward, and the book also includes a large number of documents and images. If you think there’s a lot here, you should see what we left out. Whole libraries have been written about the American Revolution, for example, while we summarize its global significance in about two pages. The benefit of such brevity is that Ways of the World will not overwhelm you or dominate the course. It also allows for more creativity from your teachers, giving them the opportunity to mix and match textbook, primary sources, and other materials in their own unique ways.

Furthermore, a “themes and cases” approach also contributes to telling a meaningful story. You will find that most chapters are organized in terms of broad themes that are illustrated with a limited number of specific examples. This keeps you focused on the big pictures of world history without drowning you in endless detail. In practice, world history is NOT the history of everything; rather, it is highly selective.

This selectivity favors context over mere information. Every historical character, event, process, culture, or civilization takes on richer significance when it finds a place in some larger framework or context. Thus the American Revolution takes on new meaning when it is viewed in the context of other revolutions in France, Latin America, Russia, and China. Those of us who practice world history as teachers or textbook authors are seldom specialists in the particulars of what we study and teach. Neither we nor your teachers have really mastered the history of the world. Rather, we are “specialists of the whole” and your guide in contextual thinking. In short, for students and teachers of world history, nothing stands alone; context is everything. That is the perspective which Ways of the World seeks to convey.

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In doing so, we have chosen to highlight three such contexts. We call them the “three Cs” of world history: change/continuity, comparison, and connection. They occur repeatedly throughout the book.

The first “C” emphasizes large-scale change, both within and especially across major regions of the world. Examples include:

The flip side of change, of course, is continuity, implying a focus on what has persisted over long periods of time. While civilizations have changed dramatically during many centuries, some of their essential features—cities, states, patriarchy, and class inequality, for example—have long endured.

The second “C” involves frequent comparison in which we bring several regions or cultures into our field of vision at the same time. It encourages reflection both on the common elements of the human experience and on their many variations. Such comparisons are pervasive throughout the book, informing both the chapter discussions and many of the book’s features. For example, we examine the difference between:

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Many of the primary source features are also broadly comparative or cross-cultural. For example, a document-based feature in Chapter 11 explores understandings of the Mongols from the perspective of Persians, Russians, Europeans, and the Mongols themselves. Likewise, an image-based feature in Chapter 15 uses art and architecture to examine various expressions of Christianity in Reformation Europe, colonial Bolivia, seventeenth-century China, and Mughal India. World history is relentlessly comparative.

The final “C” emphasizes connections, networks of communication and exchange that linked neighboring and more distant peoples to one another. For world historians, “no man [and no culture] is an island, entire of itself” as the English poet John Donne put it. And so cross-cultural interactions assume a prominent place in this text and are treated as one of the major motors of historical transformation. Such connections are addressed in nearly every chapter and in many Ways of the World features. Examples include:

So can you do it, this daunting enterprise that is world history? Absolutely yes—but not easily. Like all AP^® courses, this one asks you to undertake college-level work. This, you might know, is a college-level textbook, widely used in many colleges and universities across the country. You will be required not only to read it, but to question it, to argue with it, and certainly not to regard it as the last word. You will, of course, assimilate a fair amount of new information, but, of far greater importance, you will be asked to make use of that information—to answer provocative questions, to explain why changes occur, to make frequent comparisons, to assess the impact of encounters with strangers, to evaluate documents and images for how they illuminate the past.

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You are embarking on a challenging and rewarding journey that many students of your age and grade level have completed successfully before you. Our book is designed to help and guide you on this journey with a wide array of tools:

Your teacher will also provide important guidance throughout the process, and working collaboratively with your fellow students can greatly enhance your learning.

Finally, we expect that your encounter with world history can be engaging, absorbing, exhilarating, and, yes, fun. Really, you’d have to work very hard to make world history boring and mere drudgery. You will encounter much that is new; you will listen in, or perhaps eavesdrop, on conversations from the past; you will be witness to the triumphs and the tragedies of the human journey; you will hopefully gain some sense of your own kinship with people of long ago as well as an awareness of how you differ from them; you will gain some perspective on your own moment in history and your own life. In all of this, your mind will surely be stretched, and if you are willing, your heart will be touched as well. What more might you ask from an AP^® course?

With all good wishes for the adventure that awaits you,

La Selva Beach, California, Summer 201

Springfield, Missouri, Summer 2015